ServiceUnplugged

I’ve had two “great” (you’ll understand the use of quotation marks later) this week.

The first was whilst my dentist was finishing up a lengthy treatment - in fact he still had his fingers in my mouth - he asked when they should schedule the rest of my treatment.  I suggested we schedule it in January next year when the insurance will pay most of the treatment, instead of me having to pay it out of my own pocket.  That didn’t stop him and went on to tell me all about the financing options they can offer me - I told him politely that its not about the money, but about the principle of not spending money that I don’t have to spend.  He tried again, in vein to convince me that I really should have this treatment in the next few weeks.  Until I told him that I would see him next January, unless something in my mouth changed beforehand.  My dentist wasn’t really paying attention to me and what I said, I can give him the benefit of the doubt whilst he was finishing my treatment.

Someone else that wasn’t paying attention was the agent at the HSBC Credit Card call centre that I talked to yesterday.  I called with a simple request - please can you tell me how I can reduce my interest rate.  I’ve been a customer since 1999 when I first moved the US and I’m still paying the same rate of interest for someone that doesn’t have any registered credit scores - a penalty that I wasn’t paying attention to until I realised there were much better offers to be had.  I was told there was no way to reduce the interest rate, so I asked another way, do you have a credit card facility with a better interest rate? No.  So everyone that banks with HSBC is on the same rate?  I cannot comment on that.  So customers have different rates?  I cannot comment on that.

Next came the classic scripted end of call wrap-up - “Have I answered all of your questions today?” - well technically, yes, although I’m not very happy with the answers you gave me.  “I would like to offer you a really great deal on identity theft protection” - followed by a couple of minutes of script with me trying to interrupt.  Eventually I managed to shut the agent up when I asked why would I want another product from the same company that hasn’t given me a satisfactory answer to my question earlier?  This lead the agent down a decision path in the script and they tried to give me the reasons why - they still hadn’t heard/understood what I was asking.  In the end I had to talk loudly over the agent and inform them that I wouldn’t be buying any new services from them and I may close my account.  My frustration was only doubled during the call - I can take the negative answer to my original question, I understand they don’t have to reduce the interest rate.  But to follow this up with a sales pitch was at best, misjudged.

There is both broken business process and a mis-guided use of technology at work here.  If the agent had been aware of my level of frustration and had been trained with when to position new products then I’m sure that they wouldn’t have tried to sell me identity theft protection and whilst I would’ve been frustrated that I didn’t get the answer I wanted, at least I wouldn’t have been blogging about it and telling all of my friends for the next week.  There is a right time to upsell and its after answering the customers questions and delighting them - answering their questions isn’t enough - if they aren’t delighted then no amount of up-selling is going to be successful.

Technorati Tags: Customer Service, Genesys, HSBC, Credit Card

Press “#”, press “000″, say “operator”, do nothing … all these are examples mentioned on the gethuman website to bypass that pesky computerized system. Where has the world gone to, when we need a manual to reach a human? Or maybe we could also ask ourselves: “Do we really need to speak to that human?”

I know that cost saving efforts and deploying self-service applications go hand-in-hand. But if it is not balanced out with good customer service, the business is in trouble. Unfortunately there are some badly designed self-service applications out there, for discussion’s sake lets call them labyrinths. In Europe, a lot of contact centers have 0900 numbers. The consumer pays to be frustrated. In North America these labyrinths cost twice as much, the company is paying for the call, and … they are frustrating customers. Should look like a slam-dunk right?

A good thing that for North America gethuman does not give advice like this: “Get into a comfortable chair, put the phone on speaker, try to stay in the system as long as possible. Make ‘em pay!”

A good customer experience starts at your front door, and if people rush in to get to the counter, they miss all the advantages offered on the way there. A bad voice application (or a bad DTMF … you know: “the tones”) is a loss for both the customer and the company.

It is a no-brainer (and many, many studies prove it) that better customer satisfaction translates in higher business value. So either make it easy for customers to reach a human, or build a self-service application that knocks their socks off. Or, do both.

Dave Sneyders

Technorati Tags: Customer Service, DTMF, Genesys, IVR, Self Service

My teams preparation for our G-Force involvement got underway this week with a significant jolt!   We’ve started outlining some very innovative interactions using a combination of web, mobility and analytics to infuence the overall outcome in favour of the customer and showing off how we can ensure great customer service experiences.

There is no doubt that this will also lead to a great win for members of the eco-system that are participating with us.  Its also going to be a great example of “social entrepeurship” where eco-system companies come together, rely on each other and all grow in value through a combined outcome.  I’m excited about the process as much as the expected outcome.

Watch this space for more updates coming soon…

Technorati Tags: Genesys, Customer Service, G-Force

I’ve taken my eye of the ball recently with my public persona, sorry if you’ve been expecting a couple of posts each week, I’ve let you down.

However, in my defence I’ve been too busy with some internal activities that have kept my attention way too long.

I’m back and I feel better for getting this off my chest!

Technorati Tags: Genesys, Customer Service

When I first heard of the adoption of Avatars in customer service environments, the vision of a yellow bubble appeared in my mind saying, “It looks like you’re trying to write a letter, would you like some help?” Yes, I was thinking of the most annoying entity to ever cross the screen of my computer, the Microsoft Office Assistant, “Clippy the Paperclip”. I wondered how contact centers could tread down that dark road that we all didn’t want to be on between Office 97 and Office XP. Yes, Avatars are flashier, look more human (but Clippy also had the Puppy and Einstein as alternatives), and you can change their clothes, but I thought my tolerance of Avatars would essentially follow the same path.

…that was until I read the article, Avatars, the Future of Customer Service, written by my friend Paul Roberts. This article talks about Sylvia, the attractive, hip, customer Service Avatar from the self help website of CartaSi, an Italian credit card issuer. After reading this, I realized that maybe an Avatar-based customer service user-interface agent maybe something completely different and may indeed hold merit. It got me thinking - what is it that makes Sylvia different from the Paperclip that would make it a viable user interface agent? After all, they are both there to try and help me in an environment where I may be looking for information. Let’s see…

• The Paperclip offered help when I didn’t need it and it gave suggestions in an intrusive way. When a customer contacts a company’s web page (equipped with a customer service Avatar), they are purposely seeking help and are already in the mindset to hear what help comes their way.
• With The Paperclip, it was an effort to turn it off. Avatars? I guess it would depend on their implementation.
• Avatars can possess a multitude of looks, from an attractive female sporting her midriff, to my favorite hockey player wearing a Canucks jersey; the details, look and voice determined by my customer preference and triggered by identification and segmentation.
• Avatars can speak dynamic information through text-to-speech and correlates the expressions based on what is being said. The Paperclip was limited to pre-defined, scripted information via text in a cartoon-like bubble.
• Avatars are becoming a form of branding that have the potential of pleasantly projecting a positive consistent image that as a consumer, I would be accustomed to seeing for each contact center that I deal with. The Paperclip? It’s a paperclip (or Einstein or a Dog – but definitely not a young female with short blond hair in stylish disarray)
• Companies are moving their product lines and service descriptions to services such as SecondLife where Avatars flourish and mimic the real world furthering and enhancing my ability to understand what the companies I deal with do and offer. Functionality that is well beyond the Paperclip’s capabilities.

It seems that the user-interface agent’s (as it’s officially called) time has come - maybe the Paperclip was around before its day (a misunderstood poet?) Maybe we didn’t give him a chance. With Web 2.0, video (and animations) moving to the web and the enhanced capability that IP communications and the visually rich interactions that broadband bring us, I think that this new technology will be (and already is) able to get customer service to a differentiated presentation scheme where it can actually make my interactions more pleasant.

Like all world events, I can remember where I was when Clippy got the pink slip, I am happy that the days of me saying “die, Clippy, die” are over and I am confident that I won’t relive this again with Avatars. I am convinced that Avatars in customer service environments will be a positive interaction… but then again… who knows; maybe Bill Gates is searching the alleys of Redmond to find the unemployed homeless Clippy to rehire him and upgrade his capability… Clippy Vista?

Remembering Clippy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Obra67O8RY8

Gustavo Garcia

Technorati Tags: Genesys, Customer Service, Avatar, CartaSi, Microsoft

There is a growing momentum by vendors and analysts to consolidate around a concept called workforce optimization.  The notion, if you believe the hype, is that by managing workforce schedules through forecasts and scheduling you can improve the performance of the agent by scheduling training courses, get customers feedback via surveys (arghhh) and use these surveys to find out which training agents need, then you can use KPI and SLA measurements to see if you’re really performing or not.  If that seemingly closed loop system fails you can also listen to the recording of the call.  This is a simple sounding concept, is too simple and has many deficiencies, and has as many problems as benefits.  The principles behind Workforce Optimisation are deterministic patterns based on historical trends, but as traffic planners know, there is no such thing as a deterministic traffic pattern.  Call volumes are only one factor, and if you’re only interested in keeping average queue time service level agreement and it doesn’t matter if the right agent answers the customer then you can probably get close to the number of agents you’ll need to answer calls and keep the SLA masters happy.  But…

Let me digress a little, in 1993 I was project managing a LAN implementation, LAN’s were new in the business world, and I wanted guarantees from the vendor that a 10mb pipe was big enough to transport all of our traffic within milliseconds.  I wanted the vendor to commit to repairing the system and improve it if these guarantees weren’t met.  Of course, no vendor likes these commitments, and they squirmed over them, eventually though they presented a very interesting article on the non-deterministic nature of LANs based on Ethernet and that our alternative was Token Ring.  We were faced with Hobson’s choice and came to agree with the vendor.  The point of the story is that you can never predict traffic patterns accurately enough to enable valuable micro decisions.  Sure you can make macro decisions… 10mb Ethernet or having 150 agents between 8am and 10am will be enough to cope with the expected demand.

Back to workforce optimisation, these systems all rely on several underlying principles:

1. some information is better than no information
2. deterministic rules can be applied to non-deterministic environments, it doesn’t matter if the objects are customers, agents, calls, emails, web-site hits, customer survey responses
3. controlling agents to perform at their very best all of the time is necessary
4. SLA and KPI are Kings walking together in the very heart of contact centre management
5. training courses and customer feedback are intrinsically linked

I’m going to unravel some of these concepts in future blog posts, but I would like to leave you with the thought that although I’m down on customer surveys and workforce optimisation as it is known now, there are alternatives and they are much, much better.  Hobson’s Choice doesn’t exist when it comes to delighting customers, managing agents and giving contact centre managers meaningful and insightful analytics.

Technorati Tags: Genesys, Customer Service, workforce optimization,

If you’re a follower of contact centre news then you’ll have noticed this weeks Verint/Witness acquisition, er, merger of equals, …I’m not sure which.  When companies of similar size decide to merge the “synergies” (that’s business development language for what will be cut) take a lot of careful discussions and often result in hybrid architectures and somewhat confusing solutions for a period of time. 

It’s not only technology that is cut, but people, this is surely the most worrying of all for customers of Verint and Witness as you see what changes will be made to the organisations, in product development, sales, technical support, and so on.  Sometimes these changes provide a bigger impact than the technology changes, and certainly will happen much quicker than the technology changes. 

Obviously business culture is another fatality on the road to extracting maximum synergies, this also impacts customers and their perceptions of how well the merged companies perform.

I wait to see what these changes will bring and how much impact to customers there will be.

Technorati Tags: Genesys, Customer Service, Verint, Witness

I’ve recently spotted a number of web-sites that offer consumers the chance to tell companies they deal with exactly what they think of them.  Of course, the internet is littered with examples of individuals impacting company policies and how companies perceive their customers.  I was recently reading The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness written by Steven Levy, and he gives a great example of how Apple were influenced to change their battery replacement policy after a video called iPod’s Dirty Secret by Casey & Van Niestat.  However, not everyone can create a video that has viral downloads followed by a major shift in policy by a company the size of Apple. 

Two of these sites (I’m sure there are more, please tell me if you know of any) are dotherightthing.com and sutori.com.  Both claim to rate news and opinions using social techniques, i.e. enabling users to provide ratings and rationale.  I took the time to post to dotherightthing.com about Dell and my customer survey post last week.  Already 4 others have rated this and the negative impact (-0.9) that I gave initially has been increased (-2.2). 

I think these web-sites have a lot of potential to help customers get their message across to companies they deal with.  If one person with either a negative or positive experience posts their opinion and someone else reads the message soon spreads both by word of mouth, and more importantly by word of web, and as we’ve seen with MySpace and other social networking trends suddenly the audience is much bigger than your 10 closest friends.  The more negative the posts the bigger the impact to the company involved.  Where both these sites fail at the moment is the navigation, both need improvements to make it easy to find entries that are similar, they have a typical categorisation problem that many web-sites suffer from.  However, the principle behind the idea is good and I’m sure it will be a matter of time before the execution is perfected and the impact to companies will be much larger then.

As their message gets out and traditional news sources pick them up, like the New York Times did this weekend many of your customers will have the opportunity to rate their experience of you without the boundaries of your customer survey questions.  This will challenge you and your common wisdom approaches to difficult subjects that you try to gloss over with customer surveys.  How will you adapt to this new paradigm of customer surveys?  

Technorati Tags: Genesys, customer service, customer surveys, dotherightthing.com, sutori.com

I’ve been working with a new company called Lekane for the past 12 months. A group of smart people in Finland, plus the brains behind the operation: a British guy, got together to develop a mobile client for Genesys.

Using this client on a mobile device remote workers can now become part of the contact center receiving both inbound interactions from Genesys along with the data that accompanies the call. Remote agents using this solution have the ability to preview on their mobile phone who is calling and why before choosing to accept the call. Once the call is complete any new data attached at the mobile device can be sent back to Genesys reporting for further business analysis.

There has already been great interest in this application and a first customer has been piloting the solution. A mobile phone network provider has equipped the network operators that maintain the 2G & 3G networks with this solution. They are on the move, constantly visiting operations and ensuring the network is running, they also provide technical support to field maintenance staff. Until this point, being mobile and answering the support calls has been an exercise in juggling between running the network and sitting at the desk.

Now they can be available for support calls while they do their “real” job of running the network. Less stress for them and better support availability for their customers.

At a recent training event the users of the system gate these fantastic quotes:

“Finally we have the tools that let us do our job with minimal hassle”
“Customers are going to get SO much better service now”

Of course, once people start using a new system there are plenty of suggestions with group managers wanting information from CC Pulse on a mobile device!

During the training with the users an actual production call request overflowed to our training queue, making this call the first production mobile contact center call.   Apparently the expression on the guy’s face who answered the call should’ve been captured for history!  It’s a pity someone didn’t think to take a photo with their camera phone.

There have been many people involved in this from Genesys and Lekane, this team together has created a unique and very interesting solution.  Congratulations to the team!

Technorati Tags: Genesys, Lekane, customer service, mobility

According to the BBC a security flaw has been found in Windows Vista… I know, I know that is surprising news.   But unlike other security flaws this uses the speech recognition components.  Users have already been testing this:

“Some Vista users have already tested the exploit and were able to delete files and empty the trash can so that the documents were not retrievable.” 

There are some amazing quotes in the news item, such as:

“Microsoft has said that even if the machine was primed to accept voice commands it would be unlikely the user would not be in the room to hear the file with malicious instructions being played.” 

Do Microsoft not think that we leave our computers on whilst we’re out of the room?  I bet I could walk around your offices and see computers left on… for those of you wondering, I’m going to have my dinner, and my computer will be left on, but its a Mac so don’t even try it!

Technorati Tags: Genesys, Microsoft, ASR