The Role of Technology in a Company

So, on this beautiful Monday morning in New Jersey, it's time we started to think about the role of technology in a company.

Let me start out by giving a little history as to why I feel so strongly about this topic. When I was a "young pup" in the industry, just starting out, I thought technology was the be all and end all. It was so cool what you could do with it, especially on the Call Center side. OK, so that was 30 years ago in telephony, and 20 years ago in Call Center history . . . but still, at the time the functionality seemed pretty advanced.

I used to spend hours talking to engineers about how to work around functionality gaps in their feature set. I never thought outside the "technology box". I was just concerned about how to make something work the way I wanted it to work.

In the early 90’s, I ran head long into the Call Center world. It was like getting smacked in the face . . . quite simply, the epiphany was startling. No matter how incredible technology is, unless you have other factors lined up, a Call Center is not going to succeed in its objectives.

It was then that I discovered all of those seemingly insignificant points that I had not bothered to address . . . things like:

1. What is my client trying to achieve with technology deployments? What problems are they addressing? What benefits are they looking to gain?

2. How will their customers benefit from the implementation of technology? Will its utilization actually improve or inhibit the customer interaction with the firm?

3. How ready was my client to adopt technology? Did they have the requisite processes established in the background? Was support in place? Did the deployment have buy in from the key stakeholders of the organization?

4. What changes had to be made in the customer contact strategy to promote the use of the new technology? Did customer touchpoints need to be updated? Was training required? How could the use of technology be communicated internally and externally?

How did I realize that these things were important? Well, quite honestly, it was completely by accident. One of my clients called us to “fix” their Call Center programming. In the course of the engagement, we realized that changes had to be made to the programming, and the routing of calls, but there were other, much bigger problems, in the organization.

Thankfully, our Needs Assessment methodology flushed the problems out, but going in, we had no idea of their impact on this client. What we uncovered was startling. Because the client was living day-to-day, dealing with exponential growth, they had never stepped back to view the big picture – to understand why their customer interactions were less than stellar. Our findings set them on a road to recovery, and amazingly, transformed our approach to all future Call Center engagements.

Over the next few weeks, I am going to ask you to come on a journey with me. During the journey, we will examine the role of technology in an organization. More importantly, we will delve into the methodology that will help the client effectively deploy that technology, ensuring the objectives are actually met, and hopefully, exceeded.

Discovering this methodology has taken the level of my engagements far beyond what I ever dreamed of. Thanks in advance for taking the ride with me.

Communications Enabling Business Process - Buzz or Reality?

Good morning, and on this cloudy, rainy May day, I first want to thank Gary Wirth for his series on Contact Center trends. I also want to thank a reader for his comments regarding the third installment of that series.

The next series of posts that I will be writing over the next few weeks will take the Contact Center trends to the design and implementation phase. We will address whether technology enhancements make sense for your firm, and for your customers. If they do, what benefits will they bring, what problems will they solve, and how will they better position your firm to be successful in a difficult economy. Lastly, we will dive into the effective deployment of technology, and the steps that must be taken to ensure that the goals that you have defined are actually achieved.

Today, though, I just want to veer off and talk about a subject that I have heard being stressed at every vendor conference, trade show, briefing, etc. The new "buzz" technology today deals with how can you take your existing business processes and communications enable them to make them more effective, and to enhance your customer's experience.

So, here are the past buzz words that come to mind . . .

CRM
ERP
BPM

What do they all have in common? . . . OK, so there is NO prize for the answer, so here goes. IN THEIR OWN WAY, THEY HAVE ALL FAILED . . . and they have proven less than readily available to all but the largest firms with money to spend on their implementation. So, let's take a look at how we can avoid the same pitfall with CEBP, or whatever other acronym is out there for communications enabling business processes.

There are many reasons for the general failure to date of CRM, ERP, and BPM, but here are some of the major ones:
1. Goals and objectives are not clearly defined for using the technology, or for measuring its success.
2. Buy in is not firmly established from the key stakeholders of the organization.
3. Proper integration is not done to other systems/applications in the environment.
4. AND THE MAIN REASON FOR FAILURE: Businesses don't step back, take a look at their existing processes, and fix them before applying technology.

How to Avoid The Same Mistakes with Communications Enablement
So, how can we avoid the same mistakes with the latest buzz? Here are some basic measures. Again, I will build on these over the course of the next few weeks.

1. Establish a task force of individuals in the firm who can identify the major pain points in internal operations, and in customer communication.
2. Document the pain points, and prioritize the ones that you want to address first. Prioritization could be "let's attack the simplest first", or it could be "which ones will return the greatest benefit if we fix them".
3. Take each of the processes that contribute to that pain point, and document the current workflow, step by step.
4. With the appropriate stakeholders, evaluate the efficiency of that process, and determine ways to improve the process.
5. Document the new workflow, with the "fixes", including:
a. SLAs for achieving each step in the process.
b. Escalations that are necessary if the steps are not achieved within the defined SLA.
c. Reports necessary to monitor success, and to enable workflow tracking.
6. Work with business partners to review the workflows, and to determine areas where communication can be embedded to enhance the flow.
7. Make sure the workflow, with the communication elements, is documented.
8. Ensure that the organizational structure within your firm will support the process, and modify as necessary before it is implemented. This includes potentially redefining priorities for those individuals involved in the process.
9. COMMUNICATE AND TRAIN.
10. Enable a mechanism to tweak the process based on feedback, reports, or changing business needs.

Obviously, these steps are summarized, and there is much more behind them. It is not a small undertaking, and it will take some time. But think about it . . . it is kind of like a diet . . .

What is she talking about? Well, you didn't put all that weight on overnight, and it isn't going to all come off overnight either. It takes effort and time and commitment. BUT, if you never start to address it, you'll never reach your goal. IT IS THE SAME CONCEPT!

SO WHAT IS THE BOTTOM LINE? The promise of technology is amazing . . . the percentage of times that firms actually realize the promise is minimal. The why is that it doesn't happen magically.

Trends in the Contact Center (part 3)

Welcome back to the Touchpoint Blog. In this installment, we’re going to continue discussing Trends in the Contact Center. In the first installment we discussed the drivers. The second installment covered the first three trends. To continue with the next three trends, we’re going to discuss:

All in One Solutions
Business Knowledge
Multi-Media (including Presence)


All in One Solutions
This can be defined as a single vendor with a suite of Contact Center functions within a single platform with a common management interface. In the past, many customers preferred to deploy “best of breed” solutions, meaning the highest rated individual components were connected together to create a single contact center solution. A customer may have had one brand of PBX, a second brand of Contact Center software, a third vendor for IVR, etc. This was typically done to get the best features from each of the vendor solutions. In the not too distant past, you had to sacrifice features and functionality to get a single vendor solution. Today, we are seeing All in One vendors with increased functionality across the breadth of their product line, and this has made this option more attractive.

A major driver for customers buying into these products is a reduction in the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by:
-Reducing the management costs via the single management and administration interface tool.
-Providing an easy point of entry into advanced applications that would be difficult to cost justify if buying the solutions independently


Business Knowledge
Some have called this “one to one marketing”, or the ability to tailor a customer’s experience to a customer’s desire. The most common way of doing this in a contact center is to utilize a CRM package that allows a firm to make intelligent decisions about a customer interaction based on their past experiences. A simple example of this is routing callers to the same representative so that there is continuity in service. While we haven’t yet seen a large deployment in technology on the routing side, we have seen firms desire to merge the Contact Center statistics with the Business statistics so that they have a better understanding of the customer experience. This trend is moving tracking of interactions from traditional statistics (average speed of answer, average handle time, etc.) to measuring the actual customer experience that establishes a relationship between an individual call and the business outcome of that call.

Multi-Media (including Presence)
In the past, this terminology referred to the addition of email contacts, changing a “Call” Center to a “Contact” Center. Many firms accomplished this by leveraging the voice routing software, and creating separate queues for voice calls and emails. As firms search for ways to streamline and create operational efficiencies, that the trend will move more towards creating single, or “virtual”, queues that allow multi-media (voice, email, and web chat) into the Contact Center.

A new form of Multi-Media incorporates the use of Presence. The more common term for this technology is Instant Messaging (or IM), but it’s also known as SIP (Session Initiation Protocol). With all of the acronyms used in the last sentence, I can see how this can be a confusing topic!

Even if your Contact Center is not using an official Instant Messaging product (such as Microsoft Office Communicator) I can almost guarantee you that your agents are using some version of an Instant Messaging Client (such as AIM or Yahoo Instant Messenger). The main issue with these rogue IM Clients is a lack of corporate security. In addition, using this capability outside the Contact Center reporting does not capture the full customer experience, which is clearly a goal of management.

One of the main values of SIP, or "presence”, is in locating “expert” resources that are available, and contacting them via their preferred mode or channel of communications. That means that some resources may be available to email or chat, but are not available to accept a phone call. The goal is to increase First Call Resolution.

The efficiency and productivity enhancements for implementing presence can be dramatic. It should be noted, however, that in order for this technology to be effective, it must be properly managed. Establishing the proper priorities and chains of command for expert resources will be critical. In addition, the ability to measure the total customer experience, including the use of experts in the interaction, will also be a determinant as to the success of SIP in the Contact Center.

This wraps up my guest blog (for now). Thanks for following along with me!

Diane will return next week to start talking about the proper deployment of technology. Overcoming the pitfalls in installing technology is doable, but requires dedication to a defined methodology.