Many of you say you need a “social CRM” strategy. However, much like the evolution of eService as just another way of doing customer service, to be successful in the long run, you should look at social channels as part of your overall service strategy, and make sure that your brand remains consistent across all the communication that you have with your customers. This means that you should look to provide similar experiences on Twitter, as you do on the phone.

How do you go about determining what social channels you want to engage in? It’s best to take a two-pronged approach that involves both monitoring and moderating.

From company to company, the social channels to monitor vary. Loosely defined, these should be any communities where your customers express emotions and opinions about brands, products and their service experiences – like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter; rating and review sites like Amazon and Yelp; open source communities; and/or popular industry publications and blogs that solicit reader input. Ask your customers where they engage on-line. You can learn a lot about customer perception of your brand, products and services from monitoring these communities. And, you can translate these learnings into, for example product/service capabilities that are better aligned with your customer base or organizational changes to better service your customers. Monitoring activities do have a real ROI.

In addition to monitoring activities, you should also decide what social channels you want to moderate in order to engage with your customer base – like company-sponored forums/blogs. Successes include ComcastCares Twitter profile as a viable customer service channel. Dell’s Idea Storm discussion board helps the company gauge which product ideas are most important and most relevant to their customers. After registering, users are able to add, promote, demote and comment on product innovation ideas.

Whichever route you choose, you will need to realign your people, processes and technology to ensure that the experience across all your touchpoints – traditional or social, remain consistent and in alignment with your brand.

What if your every agent, could be your best agent?

What if your agents didn’t need to ALT_TAB through 15 applications on the desktop?

What if your agents didn’t have to “copy and paste” between applications?

What if any agent could handle any call?

What if your agents did no need to search for answers?

What if quality and compliance was a natural part of agents work and not an afterthought?

What if your agents could follow the right process, just as you had envisioned it?

What if you could translate your ideas, adapt to change, in a short period of time?

What if you could measure and achieve your Cost, Satisfaction and Revenue goals?

What if you didn’t have to spend months and months on agent training?

After every answer, ask:

Why Not?

Jeff Bezos says that Amazon’s customer experience is to deliver goods at the lowest price, fastest delivery, in a self-service mode that is simple and easy. Save customer service for when things go wrong.

And, in times when customer service is needed, it needs to be fast, simple, easy – that is aligned with the experience that customers have when using Amazon, and reinforcing its brand.

The reverse also applies. Bruce Temkin says that “Good customer experience management is about consistently delivering on brand promises that resonate with customers. You can’t rate a firm’s customer experience management efforts without fully understanding its brand strategy.”

If your brand is low-cost self-service, then your customer service offering can reflect that with simple, self-help Web service and limited assisted-channel support. If you brand is expensive products delivered with the utmost care, then your service offering will likely require multiple high-touch channels including the phone and live chat.

What is your customer experience? Is it aligned with your customer service experience? 

The crocodile Dundee school of management says that you just have to move fast enough to outrun your competitors.

How do you know how you and your competitors are doing in offering a good service experience? One easy way is use a customer service maturity model, and benchmark you and your adversaries against it.

Maturity models are industry-standard models that focus on organizational and process maturity instead of actual technology used.

They let you rank your service offering on many different dimensions which include the efficacy of communication channels used, the self-service experience, the agent experience, the management of content across channels, and governance programs in place that allow you to coordinate and roll out new initiatives. Each of these dimensions has a list of capabilities that you use to benchmark yourself against a scale of 1 (ad-hoc capabilities) to 5 (mature, adaptive).

Here’s a snapshot of part of a maturity model. The green boxes indicate the maturity of the customer service organization.

If you benchmark yourself against this maturity model, you will see your points of failure, and will give you a very clear list of projects that will help you improve your service experience

You should also do this with your competitors. You will only be able to benchmark them on visible dimensions (for example their self service offering vs their agent experience). Yet, you will be able to easily see if and how you are outrunning your competition.

Who are your heroes in your customer service organization? Can you name them? Are they the ones who get the most difficult problems to troubleshoot, or who know everything about your business? Are they the ones that you route troublesome customers to?

It is not a good thing to be able to identify your heroes. Because, it means that your agents offer a different service experience based on the agent – probably ranging from less than adequate to heroic.

What a contact center needs to be able to offer the same experience across all customer touch points which is independent of agent, seniority level, or method of communication (think phone, email, chat). Bruce Temkin from Forrester says it like this: “It’s not about Disneyesque moments of truth – Its about consistently delivering on brand promises that resonate with customers”

If you break this down further, you need (1) consistency of process and (2) consistency of information that your agents use.

You need agents to be guided through discovery processes, and be pushed the right data and knowledge at the right point in the service interaction. That way all agents are doing and saying the same thing. We need to take the BPM tools that made the back office so efficient, and bring them to the front office. Meld multichannel customer service best practices with BPM, and we would no longer need heroes.

Is anyone actually doing this in their contact centers?

If we care so much about controlling customer service costs, why don’t we just shut down call centers? Asking ridiculous questions often forces you to deeply consider why you engage in certain activities.

Customer service is not just about cost. It’s about a tight balance of four key performance indicators — the customer satisfaction with each interaction; the revenue that’s generated through the interaction; the cost of the interaction; and the level of compliance with company and governmental policies (think HIPAA).

Each company has their own KPIs that they drive towards. For a retail company whose brand is “do-it-yourself”, the most important KPI may be cost of an interaction which can be kept low with good self-service tools. For a high-touch brand who is focused on repeat purchases, the most important KPI may be customer satisfaction which can be kept high with personalized phone or in-store service. However, it still cannot be cost at any price – cost does come into the equation at some point.

What is important is that you understand what your KPI drivers are, and which one is the most important to you. You must also be able to measure your KPIs, and react if they are out of whack so that you keep your customer service objectives aligned with your customer’s expectations and company’s business goals.

So, what ridiculous statement can you make about your business? What does it make you think through?

Today’s voice navigation systems help you get to where you need to be and let you focus your attention on what’s important: driving.

Think back to life in the old days, before GPS. You’re lost with a map open on your lap, looking for the right street to turn into and driving more slowly than rest of the traffic. Angry are drivers honking loudly behind you!

This can’t be too different than how call center agents feel about their current tools and technology. Their typical desktop applications open up to reveal an ALT-TAB nightmare — 20 tabs with 10 tabs under each of those tabs. It’s not uncommon for an agent to have 15 of these applications open at once. Their desktop search function, if it works, returns a long list of possible solutions. Their knowledge solutions, if available, come in the form of long documents. And, they’re expected to figure how to navigate all this while trying to help a customer on the phone. Pretty grim environment to work in, eh?!

Now imagine the equivalent of a voice navigation system for call center agents. A  system that presents the agents with an intuitive and interactive experience to lead them to the right resolutions quickly. By delivering the ideal blend of process, screens, and contextual knowledge, a service experience management system can act just like voice navigation system, letting agents focus on what’s important: the customer.

This paraphrase from Steven Covey’s 7 Habits summarizes the beginning and end of the KM game plan itself.  Knowledge Management practices are fundamentally all means to one end:  the right person finding the best information to meet their need at the right time.  “Knowledge” in KM  refers to information tailored for use as well – specific to the task or inquiry, formatting the key elements in readily consumable fashion. So the  activities, tools and resources used to enable KM drive to this one objective.  Success = access to knowledge, whether it’s a customer readily self-serving, engaging in effective online chat or mail, or a customer service rep finding everything they need just in time to drive a quick, quality service interaction.

It stands to reason, then, that the first thing one needs to know to build towards the goal of meeting user requests is to know precisely what that demand IS.   Furthermore, within that demand it is imperative to know what combinations of information, in what forms, will meet those needs.  So to start thinking about any form of KM a few basic but critical questions need to be answered:

1. Who are my USERS?  What are their expectations, level of understanding and expertise, ability to engage your tools, processes and data?
2. What is the amount and distribution of the types of QUESTIONS they ask, what needs are there to satisfy?  This must be understood at more granular level than simple topics or questions – it’s key to define as rich a taxonomy of issue types and classes as possible.
3. What types of INFORMATION do they require?  What’s going to satisfy the common requests?  Again, the further you can define the full spectrum of content types, interactions, and information aggregations the tighter the fit wil be.
4. How can they best CONSUME the information on each channel, given the constraints and opportunities of that channel?

Sound basic?  It is.  Sound easy?  It’s not – not if you want to profile and respond to the full slate of potential issues.  It takes good reporting & data analysis skills to develop deep insights into users and questions, and a relentless focus on reviewing information and how it’s used to keep it aligned with evolving data and tools.

But here’s where the wisdom of ‘begin with the end in mind’ comes in – it can keep us on track, bring us back into focus again and again as we get distracted by all the moving parts in our environment.  If we examine WHAT our users want, HOW they want to consume it, and WHEN it is presented in relation to each service channel, we’ll always come back to first principles.  Simple as this adage is, faithful adherence to it forms the cornerstone of KM best practice. It assures that:

• The right content is created and maintained
• Tools are focused on optimal user interactions for each channel
• Presentation and structure of information fits usage
• Resources are aligned and prioritized to the top issues and demand drivers

To paraphrase Covey one more time, all the Saw Sharpening in KM flows from this “First Principle of KM”.

It’s so easy to get focused on technology issues, content challenges, business changes in themselves and over time fade away from a laser focus on what KM is actually doing for users.  But if you find yourself in a situation where it’s not clear how well any part of your knowledge program is working, start at the end and work backward.  You may find that by just profiling and examining user demand the path forward will become clear, once you have the ‘end in mind’!

John Chmaj
“The Knowledge Advocate”

To effectively optimize your decisions, you first need to define your customer service processes and ensure that your agents are following them. Next, you need to add a decision step in your service processes that allow the agent to offer a cross-sell. Then you must carefully measure the success of each cross-sell with individual customers and correlate their relative success with the data that you have gathered about these particular individuals. With this information, you’re better equipped to recognize new situations where a cross-sell will work and those where it won’t.

All this may sound difficult, but mathematical models do exist that make this data collection and analysis easy. They’re part of a scientific area of study known as symbolic regression. Symbolic regression allows you to build models based on lots of data and lots of variables whose correlation to the decision may be unknown initially. For more info about building models, check out Evolved Analytics.

The way I envision this entire process working is as follows:

1. Design customer service business processes with a decision node in place (like offering a cross-sell)
2. Collect a couple hundred outcomes as well as the customer/persona information of each customer who accepts or rejects the offer
3. Build a mathematical model to explain the patterns of outcomes
4. Deploy the analytics model at the decision point in the process

Those decisions that are measured and analyzed in this manner are going to be more successful than those that aren’t.

IT and business simply do not speak the same language. Collaboration between the two groups is difficult. Often perceived as ‘lack of alignment’, it results in frustration for both sides. The problem has existed for ages. However, in today’s hyper-competitive world, where agility is one of the most important differentiators, poor collaboration between IT and Business holds huge repercussions.

So much so, that in the recent 2010 State of the CIO Survey, two of the top three imperatives for CIO were identified as:

1. Aligning IT initiatives with business goals

2. Improving IT operations and systems performance

3. Cultivating a better IT partnership with line of business operations

Clearly, the world demands a better collaboration, and that means aligning the goals of IT and Business. But can IT really build the kinds of systems businesses need? Can leaders anticipate and work strategically to help the business make the best possible use of the IT departments’ resources? The software industry has not done its part to date in helping to facilitating this communication, and to answer these questions.

With advances in technology, including service-oriented architecture (SOA), one commonly proposed technical solution for improving IT-business collaboration has been visual business process modeling (BPM). BPM technology is intended to easily enable business analysts to model processes through a visual interface. But in reality, it seems, visual modeling of complex processes is a high-wire balancing act and existing tools have not been able to bridge the gap between managing back-end complexity and usability. On one end of the spectrum, modeling interfaces are easy-to-use but not robust enough to manage the level of complexity. On the other end, modeling interfaces are too difficult to use without in-depth technical training, leaving business people feeling defeated and dependent on IT to help. In both cases, the modeling tools available are incomplete, bringing the cycle of collaboration and change to a halt.

Instead, companies need a tool that provides business leaders with control over the design and implementation of service processes — one that doesn’t rely on extensive IT programming. This means a simplistic user interface with powerful back-end programming capabilities. Business leaders must also be able to use this tool to create connections among legacy systems so that, if necessary, their new and updated processes will automatically leverage existing data. Putting this level of technical capability into the hands of business leaders takes pressure off IT as well as mid-level managers, whose front-line expertise is often used as a substitute for access to legacy data. Such technology truly allows business and IT to collaborate on building and rolling out efficient business processes with the agility necessary to keep up with real-time market demands. It enables them to communicate effectively.