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.