2009 Remembered: Top Three Customer Service Technology Trends

We all seem to be breathing a collective sigh of relief that 2009 is over. Thank goodness.  2009 started in a very dark place, with budgets in question, technology projects on hold, and a laser focus on ROI.  I remember advising our partners in January that, “2009 is not the year anyone wants to hear your Web 2.0 vision.” What a difference 12 months can make. As a buzz term, “Web 2.0″  certainly died, but it was replaced by the almost interchangeable “social media,” another generic term meaning whatever you want it to mean. Delayed projects seemed to mostly revive and continue by mid-2009, and judging by my inquiry volume from companies building RFPs for CRM and KM tools, 2010 will be a big year for updating infrastructure and building out some innovative technology areas.

As I look over 2009, with an eye toward what’s coming in 2010, here are the three technology trends I think most impacted the service and support industry this year:

Gartner and AMR: Shrinking Demand for IT Advisory Services

After I get a question for the third time, I usually try to write about it in my blog. I’ve had more than three inquiries from TSIA partners asking my thoughts on the continued consolidation among IT advisory firms as Gartner announced last week they were acquiring AMR, so here goes.

As a former analyst from one of the big IT advisory firms, I certainly have a perspective on this.  And here it is:  the demand for IT advisory services has been shrinking as:

• Large IT outsourcing projects means fewer companies are making IT decisions internally.
• Cloud computing/OnDemand/SaaS minimizes demand for IT as well as minimizes IT’s role in a larger percentage of corporate infrastructure.
• Business users become driving force behind product purchases as OnDemand and Web services put end users in the drivers seat.

Add to that the economy and tighter budgets, and there simply weren’t enough IT budget dollars to keep Gartner, Forrester, AMR, Meta Group and Jupiter Research (et al) afloat. Consolidation is the logical step.

I made the move in 2006 from IT research to business user focused research, and in hindsight, my timing was pretty good.  Business users continue to gain more clout (particularly in services, with our climbing revenues and strong margins), and personally, I find working closely with business users on functionality to meet unique business problems much more rewarding than discussing Linux versions with IT admins.

I do worry about the impact on IT, with fewer voices analyzing the market and giving advice, particularly when the focus from the largest analyst firms is always the big companies. Fewer voices talking about niche areas–like AMR’s expertise in supply chain–means less coverage for smaller and more innovative solutions, fewer options, and no alternative views to the bully pulpit sermons. But that just allows business users to assume even more control–they can look to industry groups such as TSIA for highly tailored advice based on the success (or lack of success) of peer companies.

The big losers are ‘best of breed’ and smaller vendors, who have to compete with Oracle, SAP, IBM and HP for analyst time and mind share. I’ve had complaints from partners for years now that they can’t even get a briefing with the big name analysts unless consulting dollars are attached, and the cost to buy your way in for inclusion in a Magic Quadrant or Wave is too high, with too much risk:  the small companies don’t have the lobby power the big companies do to influence findings or ask for edits.

And that’s my 2 cents! I hope there is a smooth transition for some excellent AMR analysts, like my friend Noha Tohamy. Thanks for reading!

Social Media Meets Tech Support: By the Numbers

The top attended session at October’s Technology Services World Conference was from Shawn Santos, TSIA’s Director of Programs & Community, entitled “Change is the Only Constant: How Social Media is Transforming Customer Service.” The content for the presentation was from the first TSIA member survey on social media, and I will be highlighting some of those results in Thursday’s Webcast, “Join the Conversation: How to Integrate the Social Web into Customer Service & Support.”

I plan to provide data to give insight on the top questions I receive regarding online communities and social media:

• Who should own social media initiatives?
• How do we staff social media projects?
• What social media channels should we use/leverage?
• What is the ROI story for social media?
• How to select which social media channels to pay attention to, or provide service to customers via?

We will also hear from Kyle Christensen, Director, Product Marketing, Salesforce.com, about the Service Cloud. The Service Cloud 2 announcement from Salesforce included knowledge management, crowd sourcing, Twitter integrations, contact center integrations, and other features, along with core CRM capabilities, allowing companies to bring social media channels into the 360 degree view of the customer automatically.

The ROI issue continues to thwart member companies. In fact, when asked what the barriers are for industry adoption of social media to support customers, the number one answer was “unable to measure ROI.”

 

Barriers to Social Media Adoption

There are a lot of opinions on this subject, from those clinging to call deflection as a means of cost justifying communities to those who say embracing social media shouldn’t be viewed in terms of ROI. I think everything should be viewed in terms of ROI, but that doesn’t mean anything without 100% ROI is a bad investment. We are beginning to see success stories about communities and adoption of social media channels from members, particularly in STAR Award applications, and I look forward to bringing you more case studies on measuring cost and effectiveness of social media in the months to come.

Thanks for reading, and please join in for Thursday webcast!

Trends Impacting Technology Services: Please Weigh In!

My boss, Thomas Lah, executive director of TSIA, is doing some interesting work on trends. His latest blog post discusses 9 key trends impacting technology services in three areas:

• Performance Trends: These are trends that will impact the performance metrics and results of a technology services business
• Practice Trends: These are trends related to the business practices employed by technology service organizations to optimize their businesses.
• Preference Trends: These trends related to buying preferences of customers consuming technology services.

His blog post includes a poll, asking which of these trends do you personally feel will have the greatest impact on technology service organizations over the next five years, as well as asking for input on other trends to watch. This information will help us build out and prioritize our 2010 research calendar, so your input is requested! Please take a quick read and weigh in on the poll:

http://thomaslah.wordpress.com/2009/11/17/nine-key-trend-in-technology-services/

Thanks for participating!

The Economics of Customer Service Excellence

I’m preparing for tomorrow’s Webcast, “The Economics of Customer Service Excellence: Critical Improvements for Tier 1 and First Contact Resolution,” and wanted to share some of the data I’ve come across in my research.  Obviously in a down economy (and for all the talk about recovery I’ve yet to hear any service execs getting budget increases) there is a big focus on servicing customers as cost effectively as possible. But in this case, reducing support costs is a win:win–not only does resolving more issues at Level 1 lower operating costs, but customers are much happier when issues are resolved more quickly, and by the first person they speak to.

The economics are simple:  the longer a support incident is open, the more it costs.  If you escalate an issue from Level 1 to Level 2, the cost doubles.  Everyone asks about incident costs, and based on member surveys, here is the data I quote:

Five WORST Practices of Customer Service

A few years ago I was speaking at a conference and committed a cardinal sin: I used a company as an example of poor customer service, and that company, an electric utility, was in the audience. I tried to mea culpa my way out of it, and apologized profusely to the company’s support manager at the conference. A couple of weeks later I received a call at my office from the head of support for the utility company, who informed me they had made major investments to their support operations, including 100% call recording, and he had listened to every one of my phone interactions over the last couple of years and I had zero reason to think they gave poor support.

Worst Practice #1: Never tell a customer their feelings about poor treatment are unjustified. You are basically calling them a liar, and putting the customer immediately on the defensive.

The folly of all of this is that the account I had had so many problems with was a rental property I owned at the time, and the electric account wasn’t even in my name. Using call recording as a bully club to argue with customers is ridiculous, as you can’t possibly tie me personally to account problems my name and phone number aren’t associated with.

Fast forward a few years. A few weeks ago, Northern California received a record breaking storm, the remnants of a typhoon from Asia. I live in the Santa Cruz mountains, and I received 10 inches of rain in one day. We had sustained winds at 40mph, with gusts up to 70mph. My power was out for 4 days, and if that wasn’t bad enough, my encounters with that same utility company left me so frustrated, that weeks later I am still angry. This blog post is my attempt at catharsis.

Meeting the needs of remote and mobile workers

I am preparing for tomorrow’s webcast, “Developing a Support Strategy that Embraces Change in Today’s Increasingly Remote Workforce,” and though we don’t have a tremendous amount of data on the topic–YET–in the TSIA benchmark, I have found lots of interesting data from the US Department of Labor and various research groups who graciously shared their findings.  This is an interesting topic because it impacts support in multiple ways:

• Technical support and call centers have growing percentages of employees working from home, and old approaches to training, coaching and monitoring don’t work.
• Our customers are becoming more mobile, and assumptions about devices and support processes don’t meet the needs of these customers.
• IT support is also struggling, as more complex applications are available on mobile devices, meaning your IT help desk needs new skills and tools to support the mobile workforce.

There are lots of benefits to remote workers, and during the webcast I’ll give some survey data on this, covering everything from cost savings (no facilities costs) to increased employee satisfaction to support of Green initiatives.  But what I hear from TSIA members is the pool of possible employees is much larger and better when remote is an option: According to Gartner Inc., 70-80% of home-based agents have college degrees, compared with 30-40% of workers in conventional call centers.

I’ve done a number of webcasts in the past on mobile applications  (including Increasing Field Service Productivity and Profits With Mobile Automation Tools and Take the Mobile Field Service Challenge), and last week I blogged about how SAP is seeing wide adoption of their CRM tools on multiple mobile devices and platforms. Just check out the iPhone AppStore and see the growing number of enterprise application vendors offering iPhone apps to access your corporate data: Oracle, SAP and Salesforce are just three examples.

Clearly customers expect seamless support regardless of what device or platform they are using, and that is putting pressure on support teams when their tools and processes only address applications running on a desktop.  We don’t have all the answers yet, but I hope you will make time for this webcast to learn what to expect and some tips to setting up your mobile and remote strategy. Register here: http://webcasts.tsia.com/event/gtcprwkckb If you aren’t able to attend the live event, go ahead and register–we’ll send you a link to the OnDemand version later this week.

Cheers, and thanks for reading!

SAP CRM: Momentum followed by innovation

Today I attended the SAP CRM Virtual Influencer Summit to get an update on SAP’s CRM practice. I love the virtual approach for analyst summits as I have access to all the content without having to lose a day flying somewhere.  Here are some updates:

• Twitter integration. SAP unveiled a CRM Twitter Solution that pulls in Tweets and performs sentiment analysis, so you can take action on negative comments automatically.

SAP Twitter integration with sentiment analysis

Final Day of TSW: Top Attended Sessions

I am back home after our 3 day Technology Services World Conference in Las Vegas, and starting to process all that I heard into some trend ‘buckets.’ For now, I wanted to highlight the top attended sessions from yesterday. Very interesting. The first day of breakout sessions showed that the basic challenges of support (talent management, KM, partner enablement) have not changed greatly over the last decade. But as we will see in yesterday’s highlights, Web 2.0 is an equal, if not even greater, concern.

• Change is the Only Constant: How Social Media is Transforming Customer Service; Shawn Santos, Director of Programs & Community, TSIA

With 124 attendees, this was the #1 attended session at our entire event.  Thank to all of you who responded to our Social Media survey in the last 3 weeks–we had over 400 completed surveys.  In this session, Shawn revealed some survey results, our very first look at company attitudes toward social media, staffing, ROI, and lots of other data.  We’ll be publishing multiple reports based on this data in the months to come.

FTEs Dedicated to Social Media Efforts

Announcing TSIA STAR Award Winners

Today at the closing ceremony of our Technology Services World Conference, we announced the winners of the Fall 2009 TSIA STAR Awards. These awards are presented to outstanding service and support operations, and let me tell you, winning ain’t easy. There is a required deck of 50+ PowerPoint slides including business and customer impacts, a minimum of 3 quarters of customer satisfaction data must be presented, as well as different criteria in each category. The applications are judged by our executive board, and a call is held to discuss (and sometimes loudly debate–or maybe that’s only the calls I’m on…) applicants and to select winners.

The 2009 STAR Awards for Service Excellence winners by category are:

Service Excellence in Complex Application Support – Enterprise: EMC Corporation.
Service Excellence in Complex Application Support – SMB: Netezza Corporation.
Service Excellence in Consumer Support: McAfee, Inc.
Service Excellence in Continual Improvement: Aruba Networks.
Service Excellence in Emerging Business Support: Taleo Corporation.
Service Excellence in Innovative Support: Hewlett-Packard.
Service Excellence in Integrated Services: Oracle Corporation.
Service Excellence in Mission Critical Support – Hardware: Juniper Networks, Inc.
Service Excellence in Mission Critical Support – Software – Enterprise: Symantec Corporation.
Service Excellence in Mission Critical Support – Software – SMB: Invensys-Wonderware.
Service Excellence in Outstanding Improvement: Schlumberger Information Solutions.
Service Excellence in Partner Management: SAP AG.

In a few weeks I will be publishing a research report with the case studies behind each of these wins. These are very impressive stories, showing the very best of our industry. For more information on the award categories and past winners, see http://www.thesspa.com/starawards/index.asp.

Congratulations to all the winners!