Social Dynamx Launches: Social Customer Service Designed for Large Enterprises

I was lucky to get a pre-brief of one of the most exciting new company launches I’ve seen for some time, Social Dynamx. Based in Austin, with leadership whose background includes executive roles at Siebel/OracleCRM  and Sigma Dynamics (one of the best offer management platforms ever invented, acquired by Oracle in 2006), this company has built a social customer service platform designed for large enterprises. The company officially launched this week! Here’s a link to the press release.

There are some very innovative features in the Social Dynamx platform, including:

• Role-Based User Interface. Role-specific UIs designed for agents, supervisors and managers, giving each the features and access levels they need for their individual responsibilities.
• Automated Prioritization and Matching. Social Dynamx’s proprietary algorithms score posts for relevancy and actionability. Then posts are matched in real time and auto-assigned to the most appropriate skill group. Agents can quickly identify and respond to high-priority issues first and fast.
• 100% cloud based. The platform’s open architecture means it’s easy to integrate with your existing investments in CRM, knowledge management, social listeners, peer-to-peer support communities and business intelligence systems.
• Advanced Conversation Management. Go beyond posts and start having conversations. Social Dynamx supports advanced conversation management so agents can respond, thread, split, de-dupe and unify conversations so customers receive the attention they deserve and expect.
• SLA-Based Metrics. Stop treating social media interactions lack second class conversations. Social Dynamx delivers comprehensive real-time metrics across agent and workgroups so managers and supervisors have immediate insight into KPIs. Use out-of-the-box metrics, or export and build your owns.
• Enterprise-Grade Workflow. TSIA members are very process oriented, and I was thrilled to see that the platform delivers customized workflows so you can assign, re-prioritize, flush, re-assign, audit and report on every post and conversation.
• And more…

Congratulations to Social Dynamx on the launch! The company is already engaged with multiple TSIA members, and I look forward to sharing customer case study examples as they emerge.

For those of you attending Technology Services World, I’m pleased to announce that Social Dynamx will be participating in our Service Revolutions showcase on May 9th, in which the audience watches live demos of bleeding-edge tools for service and votes for their favorite. I’m looking forward to everyone seeing Social Dynamx in action!

Thanks for reading!

Becoming Social Inside and Out: The Value of Collaboration in Customer Service

This Thursday, I will be moderating a webcast with longtime TSIA partner Moxie Software on “Becoming Social Inside and Out: The Value of Collaboration in Customer Service.” Over the last 5 years, adoption of online customer communities has skyrocketed, with three quarters of TSIA members now offering an online discussion forum for customers. While communities to engage customers and encourage peer-to-peer support have been all the rage, and front and center in analyst and press reports about service, this is not the only advancement made in regards to using communities to enable collaboration. While everyone has been focusing on customer communities, other service divisions have been busy launching employee communities to better enable sharing of ideas across the enterprise. In fact, according to the 2012 TSIA Services Technology Survey, all service disciplines now have high adoption of community tools:

Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean that all of these companies have a full, robust, community platform for community; smaller companies likely have a less robust approach to collaboration. But clearly, the community concept applies to more than customers. Other service divisions use communities to:

• Education: 71% of education services teams are using communities to share tips and tricks for education customers, FAQs from students, strategies to improve learning comprehension, etc.
• Professional Services: 63% of professional services teams are using communities to share custom code created for application customizations and integrations, lessons learned on customer projects, etc.
• Field Service: 74% of field service teams are using communities to share information on how to repair unusual problems, or older versions of equipment, sharing other insights gleaned from customer appointments, etc.

The nirvana, however, is to began merging the dynamic customer communities with the dynamic employee communities, allowing customer issues to be resolved even faster by collaborating with experts across your enterprise, even development, QA and product management. However, there are a few obstacles to work out prior to successfully bridging customer and employee communities, and in Thursday’s webcast, I will discuss each of these “opportunities:”

• Create a path towards expertise management
• Enable real-time collaboration among community members
• Leverage expertise and collaboration to improve service levels
• Better capture knowledge from experts for reuse

Regardless where you are in your community journey, join us Thursday to learn more about enterprise collaboration and creating more customer-centric organizations. If you don’t have time to attend Thursday’s webcast, register anyway! We’ll send you a link to watch a recorded version of the webcast at your leisure, as well as a copy of all the slides from the webcast.

And as always, thanks for reading!

2012 Services Technology Survey: NOW OPEN!

TSIA’s 7^th annual Services Technology Survey is the only available source of actual industry data for adoption, planned spending and satisfaction across 24 categories of technology used by service organizations, including:

• Support Services: All the tools used to support customers, including incident management, knowledgebases, multi-channel tools and web collaboration.
• Field Services: Technology used to automate the field service process, including mobility, scheduling and dispatch, and parts logistics and warehousing.
• Professional Services: Professional Services Automation (PSA) platforms to manage PS resources, projects and performance.
• Education Services: The various tools used to deliver customer training, including Learning Management Systems (LMS) and Learning Content Development (LCD).

In addition to these technology categories, the survey also tracks tools used across service lines, including Customer Relationship Management (CRM), social media and online communities, and reporting and analytic platforms. The survey also includes questions regarding the use of third party service providers/outsourcers and c0nsultants.

The results of this survey are usually available only to members of the TSIA, but for this 2012 survey, everyone who completes the survey will receive a complimentary copy of the survey results. Armed with this information, companies can benchmark their rate of technology adoption compared to industry peers, illustrating where you may be losing a competitive edge due to lack of automation or technology sophistication. Additionally, by identifying the top installed products in each technology area, you can shortcut your next search for a tool or platform by starting with a list of “best fit” solutions.  For the first time, the 2012 survey will also track responses by geography, identifying top installed products and planned spending for the Americas, Europe and the Middle East, and Asia Pacific.

The survey will take less than 15 minutes of your time, and your answers are completely confidential and will only be reported in aggregate. The first 50 people to complete the survey will receive a US $5 Starbucks gift card. Again, everyone who completes the survey will be sent a copy of the resulting research when it is released in May.

Please follow this link and complete the survey at your earliest convenience: https://survey.vovici.com/se.ashx?s=7E212C5912872E80

Thank you so much for your support!

Interview with Partner Advisory Board Member Ryan Hollenbeck, Verint: EFM/Voice of the Customer

TSIA has recently launched our very first Partner Advisory Board, consisting of technology, service provider and consulting partners in the TSIA partner network. This is a great opportunity for us to stay current on marketing and spending trends in other industries, as well as track emerging best practices in our own industry. We have an impressive list of partners on the board; here is a link to view the complete list.

Over the next few weeks, I will be bringing you interviews with our Partner Advisory Board members. This week’s interview is with Ryan Hollenbeck from Verint Systems, the leading provider of Actionable Intelligence^® solutions and services for enterprise workforce optimization and security intelligence.

John Ragsdale: I’m very pleased to share an interview with one of our new Partner Advisory Board members, Ryan Hollenbeck, Senior Vice President, Global Marketing, Verint. I’ve known Ryan since the late 90s, when he was with Witness Systems, the original workforce optimization provider for call centers. I’ve seen the organization grow over the years, with mergers and acquisitions including Blue Pumpkin, the merger with Verint, Vovici, and most recently, Global Management Technologies (GMT).

Ryan, welcome.  My CEO has just published a book, Consumption Economics, that explains how the rush to the cloud is changing everything about the economics of servicing customers. A very central part of the story is the need to better mine customer data for business intelligence. I’d like to start by asking about voice and text analytics. Verint has won multiple TSIA Recognized Innovator Awards for your capabilities in this area. Could you talk about how companies can mine existing customer conversations for insight?

Ryan Hollenbeck:  Customer service has changed dramatically since you and I first started working together the late 90s. Back then, customers typically interacted with companies by calling into contact centers.  Today, consumers expect to conduct business using a combination of email, Web chat, text messaging, telephone, and social media postings. At the same time, competitive pressures are really pushing companies to do a much better job of tapping into the “voice of the customer” to make informed decisions and avoid costly missteps that can cost them business.

This ups the ante in customer service, since companies not only have to capture the “voice of the customer” across multiple channels, but also need to analyze it and use it for strategic and tactical decision making.  It necessitates a very different approach to customer service—one that involves the entire organization, rather than just the contact center.  So there has to be a way to capture, analyze, and share customer comments and sentiments across the enterprise.

Voice of the customer analytics solutions do exactly that by providing a platform for detecting, gathering, analyzing, and acting on insights across multiple communications channels.  They include speech analytics, social media analytics, email and Web chat analytics, and feedback analytics. They can even be integrated with workforce optimization software and strategies for a truly holistic approach to customer experience management. Voice of the customer analytics solutions offer a practical way for organizations to mine customer comments and sentiments, identify rising trends, determine root cause, and take action quickly.

John:  Another hot topic from Consumption Economics is how customers are more active in driving company and product direction. Clearly another Verint strong point is enabling enterprise feedback management. Can you talk about EFM, and explain why this is a bigger effort than just post-interaction surveys?

Ryan: Let’s start with post-interaction surveys, which are surveys that are delivered by the contact center, usually over the IVR, after the conclusion of interactions with agents. They’re almost always focused on the transaction that has just taken place.

Enterprise feedback management solutions expand upon this. They collect data across the entire enterprise, including the contact center, and centralize it so that it can be analyzed and tailored for various internal users.  Although EFM solutions can certainly include transactional surveys, they’re also used for relationship surveys, or to recruit survey panel members via social media. The surveys can be delivered over the Web, email, social media, and mobile devices, and text analytics can be applied to them to analyze open-ended questions. EFM solutions offer a practical way for operationalizing a voice of the customer program.

John:  While we are on the topic of surveys, could you talk about the Vovici acquisition? The timing of the acquisition was interesting, because we at TSIA had just evaluated multiple EFM vendors and selected Vovici, which we now use for all our member surveys. You picked a fantastic company, amazing user interface, sophisticated reporting, and as a TSIA member, a great service operation! How did Vovici fit into Verint’s strategy?

Ryan: The Vovici acquisition fits very well into Verint’s strategy. By adding Vovici’s enterprise feedback solutions to the Verint Voice of the Customer Analytics platform,  we’ve created a single solution set to support voice of the customer initiatives across voice recordings, surveys, email, chat, and social media. We’re also filling a void in the market by enabling organizations to extract tremendous value from this emerging toolset for their chief customer officers. Enterprises can benefit from Verint’s proven speech and text analytics solutions and workforce optimization suite, as well as Vovici’s advanced functionality, including sophisticated survey management, customer profile management, interactive dashboards, and ad-hoc analysis across any customer touch point.  Verint can now correlate this information and offer a single-vendor solution for collecting, analyzing, and acting on customer insights, and that’s a compelling value proposition.

John:  You and I have talked about a few topics for years now, and one of those topics is looking at productivity in the back office and how it impacts customers. I remember first discussing this with you a decade ago during my Forrester years, when I was getting complaints from support organizations that so many  customer issues (account discrepancies, refunds, shipping problems, etc.) disappeared into the back office and never returned, leaving the support agent on the hook for an answer, but no way to get one. Clearly, the customer experience encompasses a lot of back office activity. How does Verint help improve customer-facing processes across the enterprise…including the back office?

Ryan: I remember those early conversations and scratching our heads!  The industry has come a long way since then, and Verint remains laser-focused on this issue.  Verint solutions offer visibility into the entire customer service chain, from contact centers to branch and remote offices to back-office operations.  And in the back office, one of the greatest challenges is capturing activity and performance information across a diverse set of tasks, functions, and teams.

Unlike the contact center, there’s no ACD to provide this critical information. Instead, Verint’s back-office software collects data from any available electronic sources, such as workflow engines, CRM, email, people queue management, imaging, and business process management systems. Since the penetration of those applications is still relatively low, our solution also provides a manual data entry interface and electronically logs volumes and activities into the system as work is processed. This enables managers to predict their ability to meet processing deadlines given resource availability, skills, and equipment/deadline constraints.  They can take corrective action proactively, which in turn can help companies avoid a flood of calls or emails into their contact centers.

John:  Your most recent acquisition, GMT, expands your customer experience message into banking. It seems that retail banking has a lot of the same challenges as workforce management for call centers:  you have customers waiting, limited staffing dollars, and if you don’t have the scheduling right, customers walk out the door, taking loans and deposits with them.

Ryan:  Yes, those are all significant challenges in retail banking, along with very  intense competition. Banks are under heavy pressure to drive sales, service quality, and customer satisfaction while lowering their costs, enhancing productivity, and retaining staff.

Verint addresses those concerns on a variety of levels.  Our retail financial services solutions automate forecasting, scheduling, and quality analysis across branches while enabling banks to predict customer demand accurately, which helps reduce wait times.  Our solutions also provide real-time customer and productivity information to regional and store managers for enhanced cost management, customer service, and sales. Managers can track how well employees are performing against their goals and even assign eLearning automatically to staff at their desktops during times when customer volume is low.

Verint has offered solutions designed for retail financial services for years.  Yet through our acquisition of GMT, a huge domain expertise in financial services, along with key differentiating functionality, such as robust technology value optimization and sales effectiveness tools, as well as a comprehensive set of consulting services and methodologies.

John:  Clearly companies need help getting EFM programs off the ground. In fact, nearly half of TSIA members said they had budget for consulting partners in 2011-2012. I believe the GMT acquisition also expanded Verint’s partner network. Could you talk about your partner ecosystem?

Ryan: Verint has its own highly successful consulting operations, offered by our own industry experts.  We have also long maintained partnerships with leading companies to extend the reach of our solutions.  From large, distributed consulting organizations with dedicated practices to smaller boutique firms, our customers have many options for ensuring the success of their WFo and VoC initiatives.

As you pointed out, the GMT acquisition has augmented our partner portfolio by adding strong partnerships with leading financial services organizations, including Talaris and Q-matic. It’s all part of our commitment to offering customers superior solutions and outstanding business value.

John: Thanks for taking the time to talk to me today.

Ryan: It’s always my pleasure, thanks John.  I appreciate the opportunity and look forward to serving on the TSIA partner advisory board.

 

 

From “Channel Chaos” to “Channel Harmony:” Five Steps to Future Proof Your Multi-Channel Strategy

Tomorrow at 11am PT I am speaking on a webcast entitled, “Multichannel, Mobile, and Social Customer Support: How Consumer Electronics & Technology Companies Can Go from Chaos to Harmony.” Please click on the link to register. Even if you aren’t available for the live event, by registering you will receive a link to download all presentation materials and view the recorded version of the webcast.

Multi-channel has always been a hot button issue with TSIA members: what channels do customer want, how to build adoption for one channel over another, what is the cost and satisfaction per channel, etc. A few years ago I did a lot of writing and speaking on “channel islands,” meaning companies tended to add one channel at a time from different technology providers without the required integration work. As a result, most companies have knowledge, interaction history and customer data stored in a dozen or more systems, one for phone, email, chat, self-service, etc.

I’m sorry to say we have not made a lot of progress in fixing that problem, and from where I sit, the situation seems to be going downhill fast. There are hot new interaction channels emerging, such as intelligent agents; mobility and video are forcing companies to develop additional self-service sites and content optimized for smart phones and tablets; and social media and online communities are adding even more avenues for customer interactions. And none of it is integrated.

The last time I surveyed members, there was an average of 13 separate systems routinely accessed by front-line support techs to support customers. That’s a heck of a lot of “alt-tab” to move from screen to screen, and you know exactly what that means:

• With so many applications to navigate, some data and functionality are just overlooked or underutilized, preventing ROI for the technology and negatively impacting productivity.
• Without customer data integration, there is no true “360 degree view of the customer,” so no one really has a handle on “the big picture view” of customer attitudes, consumption or loyalty.
• Customers have a disjointed experience, with agents from one channel not having visibility for incidents in another channel, and duplicate and conflicting knowledge depending on channel used.
• Entitlement is inconsistent across channels, meaning expired customers receive support for free, and priority customers don’t receive the service levels they are paying for.

In tomorrow’s webcast, I’m going to build out the actual picture of a multi-channel environment and talk about the missed integration points. I’ll also give a simple five step plan to begin consolidating channels, and discuss how to add new channels thoughtfully so as not to exacerbate the problem. The webcast is sponsored by eGain, and you’ll also hear from Don Muchow, eGain’s Product Marketing Manager, about the advantages of consolidating channels to a single–or at least fewer–platforms. eGain has done a lot of work building out their channel strategy, now with ‘best of breed’ offerings for enterprise/federated search, social media channels and monitoring, as well as phone, email, chat, virtual agents, and a single knowledge management platform across every channel.

See you tomorrow, and thanks for reading!

Video’s Impact on Service’s Future: KM, Education, and Customer Interactions

Today at TSIA’s Technology Services World Conference in Las Vegas, I held my “Power Hour” session entitled, “The Impacts of Video on Service’s Future,” a panel discussion with Jennifer MacIntosh, Global Director, Knowledge Management, Yahoo; Radha Penekelapati, Director, Global Support Operations, Salesforce.com; and Phil Verghis, Founder and President, The Verghis Group. Also today my paper on the topic was published to the TSIA website.

Video is an incredibly powerful medium that is already changing the face of service operations, but the impact will be even greater in the future, as video becomes even more widely adopted, including the enablement of face-to-face customer service interactions. By combining rich information with a visual demonstration, videos are able to more clearly illustrate information and processes so viewers instantly understand a concept or can follow along to complete a complex process.

The massive popularity of online video sites such as YouTube have helped drive down the cost of video production. While in years past videos required expensive equipment and a production team, today you can create a video using your built-in webcam and free video software, or using screen capture software already installed on many corporate desktops. The YouTube generation knows that content is more important than high production values. Video is impacting service in three primary areas.

• Knowledge management. Video content to augment or replace knowledgebase articles has already emerged as a best practice, with TSIA members adding video libraries to self-service sites as well as creating dedicated YouTube channels for technology “how to” videos.
• Education. Video content for employee and customer education is available, but so far without large-scale adoption. Not only is creating an online video training library that can be streamed to an employee or customer desktop less expensive than traditional classroom training, it is also proving more effective, especially with younger demographics.
• Service interactions. While there are only early examples, the future of customer service interactions will radically change with the introduction of video interactions between customer and support technician, not only streamlining problem resolution but also boosting the relationship factor with accounts.

Service organizations need to evaluate how early adopters are leveraging video effectively for knowledge management, education, and support interactions, and create a roadmap for the use of video in their operations. For conference attendees, you will recieve an email t0night with a link to rate the sessions you attended today, and to download all presentation materials–including video examples from Salesforce and Yahoo.

Thanks for reading!

IT Shoves Content Management Down Services’ Throat–How to Prepare for Battle

CIOs are on alert: Beginning January 1st, 2011, more than 10,000 Baby Boomers will reach the age of 65 every single day. That will happen every single day for the next 19 years. The “brain drain” this will cause technology companies is worrying–that is lots of knowledge walking out the door. As a result, most CIOs are on a warpath to capture more tacit knowledge to protect against the brain drain.

It is no surprise then that spending on knowledge management tools is up. As seen in this chart from my 2011 Member Technology Survey, planned spending on knowledge tools is high across all service disciplines, with 50% of support services and field service organizations having budget for additional KM tools this year. Even PS–our most technology-phobic group of members–has high spending, with 28% of PS groups planning KM purchases to help document customizations and integrations and other best practices for onsite engagements.

Percent of members with budget for KM tools in 2011-2012

But here comes the challenge: with CIOs focusing on content management systems (CMSs) for the enterprise, I’m hearing from more service leaders that their search for specialist KM tools for service is being thwarted by IT, who is pushing everyone to adopt their generic enterprise tools. In fact, according to my technology survey, 21% of service organizations are now stuck with an enterprise content management tool (SharePoint, Lotus Notes, Documentum, etc.) instead of a specialized tool for capturing problem/resolution scenarios.

On this Thursday’s webcast, “Can’t We Just Use SharePoint? A Knowledge Manager’s Guide to Productive Conversations with IT,” we are going to discuss why these generic tools do not fit the needs of support. As one TSIA member said to me, “SharePoint is a black hole of content. We keep entering information, but we can’t retrieve it.” Examples include:

• Workflow. Generic CMSs are not Knowledge Centered Support certified and are missing the workflow rules for capturing and sharing content KCS mandates.
• Search. CMSs use very generic keyword search, not intelligent search. The difference? Try asking Google a question–you don’t get the answer, you get websites with the same words. Support specialists need search tools specifically designed to understand the intent of the question and offer an answer.
• Analytics. Specialist KM tools include analytics for duplicate and missing content, actually flagging you for content being searched that doesn’t exist, as well as consumption reporting on hot trends and topics for creating dynamic FAQ lists.
• Self-service. Even if employees can be trained to use CMS tools, they will never be intuitive enough for customers attempting self-service. This is one of the reasons we are seeing self-service success continually trending down.

Someone who battles this every day is Tim Hines, Vice President of Product Management for Consona, whose Knova knowledge management platform is highly adopted by TSIA members. On the webcast, I’ll have a conversation with Tim about the differences between service-specific KM tools and generic content and document management. We’ll also talk about how to present your case to IT for the tools you need, including making the business case with ROI.

With 2012 looking like a tight budget year, attend this important webcast so when IT comes calling with tool recommendations that will dumb down your project, you are prepared!

Announcing Categories for Spring 2011 Recognized Innovator Awards

The TSIA Recognized Innovator Awards are presented at our Spring and Fall conferences to our TSIA partners, who submit applications and are judged by a group of TSIA members, expert alliance partners, and industry experts. Finalists are selected, and I lead Innovation Tours of the finalists booths at the conference Expo. Tour attendees also vote on Best Innovation Demo. I announced the winners today at the closing TSW Awards Ceremony. The Spring 2011 awards will be the first time we have included our new discipline, Education Services, as a focus area for the awards.

The categories for the Spring 2011 Recognized Innovator Awards are:

Innovation in Knowledge Management (KM). Creating, maintaining and leveraging content to speed issue resolution and project success is not only a core process within every technical support operation, but increasingly other services divisions are launching KM initiatives to share learnings from the field across a global operation. The Recognized Innovator in this category will provide documented case studies of how their technology and/or services are enabling service organizations to more easily publish knowledge and effectively use that knowledge to improve business results. Examples could include:

• Field Service. Delivering knowledge to field agents through mobile enablement, as well as tools to capture information gleaned from field experiences to share with the field support and/or customer community.
• Professional Services. Enabling services teams to easily capture libraries of lessons learned and best practices for reuse, as well as centralizing resources such as customization and integration templates to streamline future projects.
• Support Services. Automating the process of capturing and publishing content, enabling customer collaboration for knowledge, and tools to enable support techs, as well as customers performing self-service, to easily find the answer to a question or help diagnose a problem.
• Education Services. Capturing information to share with customers regarding the use and administration of technology, best practice libraries, FAQs and lessons learned.

Innovation in Value-Added Services. As documented in “Complexity Avalanche,” Value-Added Services (VAS) programs enable customers to fully consume purchased products and services, helping them quickly receive full business value and speed the repurchase cycle. In addition, VAS programs are providing new revenue sources for budget-strapped service operations. The Recognized Innovator in this category will have documented case studies showing how their technology or services are being leveraged to boost service and support revenues through delivery of Value-Added Services. Examples could include:

• Field Service. Tools to allow repairs or preventative maintenance to be completed less expensively, such as remote diagnostic and administration tools.
• Professional Services. Cost effectively delivering services projects to improve margins, or remote administration tools to allow customer projects to be delivered without travel.
• Support Services. Services to improve marketing and sales efforts for premiere service offerings, as well as technology that enables premiere support programs such as proactive support and remote administration.
• Education Services. Upsell potential with targeted classes for experts or for specific industries or types of companies, improving margins through use of tools such as computer based, online or remotely delivered training classes.

Innovation in Social Collaboration. When evaluating the impact of social media and communities on service organization, it is important to separate the hype from business value. While customer social media strategies continue to struggle for staffing and a credible ROI story, leveraging social media tools and processes to enable enterprise collaboration—between employees AND between employees and customers—has emerged as way to effectively share information across the enterprise, identifying experts on any given topic and making their expertise available to others. The Recognized Innovator in this category will have documented case studies showing how their technology or services are being used to improve the capture, sharing and consumption of ideas and expertise across employee, partner and customer communities.

• Field Service. Tools that allow field service techs to post questions and share expertise on diagnostics and repair procedures with other techs around the globe, cutting resolution time for onsite repairs.
• Professional Services. Technology or services that encourage PS consultants to share best practices and tips and tricks for implementing, customizing and integration products; also enabling collaboration between consultants and development for technology issues.
• Support Services. Collaboration tools and processes to better enable global support teams to communicate emerging trends or newly discovered bugs, as well as improve communications with other groups within the company—such as development and QA.
• Education Services. Enabling customers to collaborate on best practices for using technology can generate useful content for education, as well as internal collaboration to share information about training content and techniques that prove effective with a global audience.

Lydia Zaffini, our director of partner programs, and myself will give a webcast for all TSIA partners on February 4th at 9:30am to discuss the awards, explain the categories, talk about tips for applications, and answer any questions you may have. If you are interested in being a judge for the awards, please send me an email (john.ragsdale@tsia.com). Thanks for reading!

A Conversation with Sharon Pettigrew: Support Center 101–Back to Basics

In our last public webcast, we surveyed members asking with what topics they most needed assistance, and the answers surprised me. No mentions of what TSIA views as ‘strategic’ issues like support margins and Value Added Service; the list was very tactical, with the top issues being how to better train support techs and what organizational structures work the best. This is yet another reminder to me that while looking at the ‘big picture’ is important, you can’t overlook the basic blocking and tackling that can make or break a support organization. And with rising complexity, shorter product cycles, global customers and a myriad of other factors, companies are constantly re-evaluating what ‘best practices’ are and making adjustments to core operations.

To learn more about core operational best practices and how they are changing, I sat down with industry guru Sharon Pettitgrew, founder of The Call Center Group, with over 25 years of experience in reengineering sales, support, and service operations at Apple, Sprint, and multiple start-ups. Sharon will be presenting a professional development workshop on Monday, October 18th as part of our TSW Conference in Las Vegas, “Support Center 101: Back to Basics Bootcamp.”

John Ragsdale: Sharon, I’m glad we were able to schedule time to talk about your workshop and what you see going on in the industry.

Sharon Pettigrew: John, it’s great to be here.  Thanks for the opportunity to share my perspective on the rapidly changing landscape in the support industry.  The members of TSIA are at the forefront of a massive change in the role, delivery and measurement of support organizations.  Support managers are being asked to expand their channels, reduce costs of support and improve Customer Satisfaction.  With these competing demands, the array of technology promising to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the support organization can be  confusing and intimidating.  With many failed massive CRM initiatives in the recent past, executives want to identify the few key initiatives and enabling technologies which will actually produce improved outcomes for their customers.

Tom Minick and I have a combined experience of over 50 years, mostly with high growth, high tech clients.  We always have our eye on  emerging technology which can change the support model.  Our focus on design and implementation trends toward the “industrial strength” solutions that will provide real results and enable organizations to achieve specific, measurable goals in support.   Due to the shift to Software as a Service (SaaS) Solutions, many vendors now offer an on demand model which reduces both the risk and the cost of innovative technology for Support Operations.

The industry trends that we believe offer the greatest benefit for Support Organizations center around the Cloud Based Computing Models and shared infrastructure.  If the support team is able to focus on People, Process and Technology as the cornerstones of their operation, they can assess their issues and opportunities to create a road-map for achieving specific outcomes.   The good news in the industry is that Support is getting greater visibility in the corporation as Customer Retention and Loyalty are critical in a tough economic climate.  The limelight is on Support to deliver an experience that meets or exceeds the customer’s expectations.  How can we as Support Professionals achieve these goals?  How can we align our People, Process and Technology to deliver an excellent customer experience across multiple channels?  What is the role of Social Media and Communities in delivering the support message to our customers and creating meaningful dialogues?

John: I’m thrilled you are offering a Support Center Bootcamp at our upcoming conference. Considering call centers and support operations have been active now for a couple of decades or more, why do you think there is still such a struggle to successfully manage tactical operations? Why is there so much ongoing interest in blocking and tackling?

Sharon: You are right, John, that designing and managing support operations has become increasingly complex.  

2010: Dollars pouring into Social Service

Yesterday I participated in a TSIA webcast with Lithium and Baynote, with an amazing presentation by Brooke Molinaroli, Head of Digital Care Design with BT (British Telecom) Retail Customer Service. This was our third social service focused webcast this year, and another record crowd–this is the topic of the year. And, viewing my preliminary 2010 spending data (which I will release at TSW next month!), companies are putting their wallets on the table–BIG spending planned on social service and other areas. If you missed yesterday’s webcast you can register to view the OnDemand version here: http://webcasts.tsia.com/event/pe30e09f8q57m9

At lunch today I’m making a presentation to the Bay Area Business Executives Meetup Group entitled, “Effectively Leveraging Social Media as a Support Channel.” (If you’d like to come, here’s the link to register.) Why are so many people interested in this topic? Here’s what I think.

It took a dozen years for CRM to become established, highly adopted, with lots of documented best practices. Social media, which includes customer communities, micro-blogs and social networks, have reached high adoption in just a couple of years, so now everyone has their toes in the water but no one knows how to swim…and there appears to be a tidal wave coming. Customers continue to jump on the social bandwagon, the younger folks who crave online social interaction continue to age into the target demographic of more companies.

So this time the thirst for information isn’t about, “Should we do this?”  They are already doing it, and want to be successful The cost to engage in Twitter, for example, seems desperately cheap compared to starting up, say, a Web chat support team–little technology, few specialized skills needed (or are there?), and a more ‘devil may care’ attitude than with traditional support channels.  The issue, in the eyes of enterprise customers and forward-looking consumer companies, is this: today customers view these channels as a fun way to interact with the company and other customers. But with each use, relying on these channels becomes ingrained to customers.  It is very worrisome then, that according to our 2009 TSIA Member Social Media Survey:

• Only 17% of members have integrated social media channels into the corporate website. Accessing an online community requires a different logon and password, and uses a different UI than the corporate website.
• Only 8% of members have integrated the new channels into their CRM/incident management system. After a decade of trying to build the “360 degree view of the customer,” none of the social media interactions are being tracked.
• Only 8% of members include social media channels in performance dashboards. So if you suddenly start neglecting a social media channel, no alarms or notifications exist.
• Only 3% of members address social media channels in SLAs. If you aren’t setting customer expectations for service levels, achieving high customer satisfaction will be challenging as traffic via these channels increases.

We will continue to write on this topic and share best practices as they emerge. Luckily we have members with hugely successful social service practices who are willing to share their lessons learned…and judging from the STAR Award applications for Best Online Community, there are lots of great stories to share. Hope to see some of you in Mountain View today for my lunch talk! Thanks for reading.