Bottom Line – Customer Service as we know it is going to change.
“Customer service as we know it is often frustrating because it’s run for the convenience of the servicing organization, not the customer.” – Don Brown
Today, control is shifting to the consumer and it’s turning the way we serve our customers inside out.

Technology innovations that he predicts are on the horizon that will help contact centers meet those increased expectations.

The ACD, 2.0
One of the most exciting aspects of his talk was on one of the most fundamental elements of a contact center. The ACD. He quipped, “Here we give you 2300 dials and levers for you to tune how your ACD delivers customer interactions to the correct agent. And when it doesn’t work correctly, we as vendors point our finger at you and say, you didn’t have your ACD dialed in correctly.” The future ACD will use software driven artificial intelligence techniques to do the heavy lifting for you. “That’s going to happen” and it will raise the level of customer service.

Customer Intent
On the horizon, he mentioned the importance of recognizing customer inten … He also mentioned some of the breakthrough work that Interactive Intelligence has been doing in the realm of speech analytics, which includes intent and customized word spotting, on both the customer and the agent side. Beyond speech analytics, he predicts that in the future, software will be more automated and will further be able to recognize patterns based on demographic information…

Business Efficiency
Another point that Dr. Brown made was that people in charge of the contact center were in the perfect position to impact the rest of the organization. He said that by taking the elements that work well in the contact center and applying those best practices to the rest of the business have the potential to make a big impact. He jokingly said, “we know how many times a day that a $20/hour contact center agent goes to the bathroom but have no visibility into tasks that business people perform such as corporate Lawyers or the HR department.” Dr. Brown said that organizations need to apply the same level of rigor to other business functions. He also gave a short demo on how Interactive Intelligence’s Interaction Process Automation can route “work” throughout the organization, beyond the typical boundaries of the contact center.

So, is the goal of your contact center to drive organizational efficiency or serve your customer in the way they want to be served?

As a self-proclaimed food connoisseur I expert certain things when entering a restaurant that says they serve “fine” food.

Those things don’t include:

1) Being in a pole barn

2) Racing signs in the window that says “grab some buds”

It is easy to say that you serve fine food… it’s a completely different thing to deliver it.

What is your customer service promise?

Only 3% of companies are customer-centric according to the Temkin Group.

What does that mean for the 97% of companies who have corporate vision statements similar to these?

“Our strategic vision is to achieve total customer satisfaction”
“Our Promise is to deliver exemplary customer service”
“We will treat customers as they wish to be treated”
“We measure our success by the satisfaction of our clients”
You get the idea…

Most organizations proudly promise that they deliver exemplary customer service.

- Few measure the things that drive customer satisfaction.

- Few build customer service into their culture.

- Only 3% are truly customer centric.

If you truly want to be customer centric, here are a few questions that will begin to build customer service into your culture.

1) How many of our 4053 customers would recommend our products/services?
2) What is the incremental profit increase caused by a 1% increase in customer satisfaction?
3) What is your level of customer satisfaction by department?
4) What is your customer level of satisfaction by communication channel, i.e. phone, email, Twitter, self service?

What’s your action plan to improve those numbers?

Organizational priority is placed on things that are measured, discussed, and improved.

Is your organization customer centric?

So, I pulled up their web page, there in black and white it stated that they were open for business. In the back of my mind I wondered why they hadn’t answered their phone but I figured that they must have been helping someone else at that moment…

Without a second thought, I hopped into my car and made the trek to the store. When I arrived, after an hour of driving, I discovered that the store had changed their hours and were closed…

THEY FORGOT TO UPDATE THEIR WEBSITE with their stores “new” hours.

It cost me two hours of my time, and… it cost them too.

The problem was that their organization was not consistent in the way they communicated with me (their customer) across their different communication mediums.

There are a new set of challenges that have emerged that are making it much more difficult for businesses to deliver exceptional customer service. What are the financial implications of delivering award winning customer service? According to Frederick and W. Earl Sasser, “a 5% improvement in customer retention can cause an increase in profitability between 25% and 85%.”

So, what new challenges does your business face?

1. Customer contact across your organization’s functional silos

2. The disintegration of communication channels

#1 is an age-old problem. However, #2 is exponentially magnifying #1.

Let me explain.

When all we had was a phone, life was simple(r). If you called with a billing question, you would be transferred to the accounting department. Then, they would (hopefully) resolve your issue. The challenge that your business faced back then was continuity on information between those departments (silos).

For example, if you received a special marketing promotion, and the accounting team didn’t know about that promotion, then there would obviously be a breakdown in customer service.

Now, let’s take a look at this problem in today’s context.

Businesses are communicating with their customers via phone….

And…

• Email

• SMS

• Web Chat

• Social Media

• Web Portals

• Corporate Websites

• Social Media

• Facebook

• Twitter

• Communities

So let’s add today’s twist with yesteryear’s example. If your marketing department sends out a promotion, and your customer decides to ask your company about it… will they get the same response on Facebook as they would by calling?

If this is a challenge that your organization is facing today, here are a four tips to get you started.

What you need to start doing today.

1) Get the leaders from your main functional (i.e. marketing, sales, accounting, service, etc) areas of your business in the same room and get them on the same page about providing seamless service and communication to your customers across departments and communication channels (phone, email, web chat, Facebook, Twitter, etc).

2) Begin mapping your inter-department communication processes and channels.

3) If you have a technology gap that is preventing you from effectively delivering your communications across departments and channels, begin building a business case.

4) Begin consolidating your organizational information into a searchable central location that allows your employees to access consistent answers across functional areas and communication channels

Don’t leave your customer’s experience to chance.

Our team was briefed by ININ product management the other day on some of the major components coming in CIC 4.0 which is slated to be released sometime around the end of June… We won’t be able to cover everything we learned; however, here are some of our key takeaways:

Things that we like:

1) CIC servers will finally be able to be virtualized along with some of the other ancillary sub systems and components with the exception of media servers, which can’t be virtualized

2) ININ adds Real-time speech analytics capabilities to Interaction Recorder

3) Upgraded multi-media handling for chat and email

4) New Report Structure – should alleviate some of the reporting/analytics challenges and will be more flexible. In addition, it will collapse 171 reports into more useable sets

5) ININ will now be offering a concurrent licensing model, providing more flexibility for you

Good news / Bad News

1) While we applaud the support of Windows server 2008, (good) it does present some upgrade challenges. You will not be able to just lay 4.0 on the same servers currently running 3.0. This could affect your budget requirements for 4.0 (bad)

2) (Bad) Not all customers are going to have the ability to upgrade soon because of the delayed release of additional products in the early SU’s i.e. Interaction Dialer, possibly Optimizer and other add-on products.

3) (Good) HMP is being eliminated from the IC servers. (Bad) However, for large conferencing environments, you will still require an HMP media conferencing server.

Things that we were hoping to learn more about that were left out of our presentation

1) Evolution of media servers and localization

2) Bulls eye routing

3) New licensing cost model

4) 4.0 Release Plan/Schedule; we were led to believe that the initial release may be limited to a few customers and true GA to come later

As we continue to learn more, we will continue to keep you updated.

The ability to provide effective customer support is a significant contributor to customer satisfaction and a major part of the Avaya Certification process. Avaya substantiated support capabilities by surveying a list of our customers, who responded extremely favorably, rating CPI at 100% on the Customer Satisfaction scale. In addition, Avaya performed a comprehensive evaluation of CPI’s internal support capabilities, systems, and processes.

The result, “CPI demonstrated great proficiency and effective management of their resources to meet customer demands as well as embracing a continuous improvement ideology.”

We are excited to be acknowledged for high standards of excellence and competency in delivering quality solutions and providing quick and helpful customer support. It is our commitment to continue providing value added technologies and partnerships that ensure our customers achieve their vision.

Every call center has a buzz…you can feel the energy from the people in the air. Keeping track of those people is an essential part of every contact center leader’s day. Here’s the tool that gives you detailed insight into the work your agents are doing. See where to find this critical information.

See the ONE queue view you can’t live without:

You know there is always work “simmering” in your queues. In this video, we show you THE view that allows you to monitor the real-time performance of the work. Here’s where you’ll find number of interactions, service level, abandonment and other essential statistics. Learn how.

With this video training series, it’s our goal to make you a power user of Interaction Supervisor and have a bit of fun while you are doing it.

Become an Interaction Supervisor power user.

What you’ll get:

We will mail the video-series guide as well as a disk that includes copies of the entire 7-part video series. In addition, you are more than welcome to upload these videos to your company’s private intranet to share with your colleagues.

Topics covered in the Interaction Supervisor Video Training Series

* A tour of Interaction Supervisor
* A quick overview and steps for creating views
* Learn what’s cooking in your queues
* Learn how to track your most essential resource – your people
* Learn how to check the health of your Interaction server
* Learn how to set alerts, send messages, and answer assistance requests
* Learn how to run reports
* Learn some of the advanced features of Interaction Supervisor

Become an Interactive Intelligence Interaction Supervisor power user today.

This statewide survey and awards program was designed to identify, recognize and honor the best places of employment in Indiana, benefiting the state’s economy, its workforce and businesses. The 2011 Best Places to Work in Indiana list is made up of 34 companies in the small/medium-sized list (15-249 employees in the United States) and 36 companies in the large-sized list (250+ employees in the United States). CPI has been named one of the Best Places to Work in Indiana for 2011.

Cliff Arellano - CPI President and Founder Receiving an Award for one of Indiana's 2010 Best Places to Work.

- Have at least 15 employees working in Indiana;
- Be a for-profit or not-for-profit business or government entity;
- Be a publicly or privately held business;
- Have a facility in the state of Indiana; and
- Must be in business a minimum of 1 year.

Companies from across the state entered the two-part process to determine the Best Places to Work in Indiana. The first part consisted of evaluating each nominated company’s workplace policies, practices, and demographics. This part of the process was worth approximately 25% of the total evaluation. The second part consisted of an employee survey to measure the employee experience. This part of the process was worth approximately 75% of the total evaluation. The combined scores determined the top companies and the final ranking. Best Companies Group managed the overall registration and survey process in Indiana and also analyzed the data and used their expertise to determine the final rankings.

CPI will be recognized and honored at the 2011 Best Places to Work in Indiana Awards Dinner coordinated by the Indiana Chamber of Commerce on Thursday, May 5th. The final rankings will be announced at the event. In addition, all ranked companies will be featured in the May-June issue of the award-winning BizVoice® magazine.

Up to now, most organizations are working toward “unifying” their own internal communications to take advantage of a number of strategic benefits (increased efficiency, higher customer satisfaction, etc.) However, in my opinion, one of the biggest communication innovations on the horizon is unifying communications up and down our value chains (suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, and eventually consumers themselves).

You are probably asking why? Let me explain:

Lessons learned from another discipline:

Many years ago, built on the concepts of Six Sigma and Lean process improvement, manufacturers began realizing the value of JIT (just in time) principles.

What is JIT?

Imagine that you ran an assembly line that puts together computers. A JIT process would deliver a new hard drive from your supplier to your person on the assembly line at the precise moment that it needed to be installed on the new computer.

Think about the implications of JIT… First, it completely eliminates the need to keep any inventory of hard drives (envision the cost of purchasing and storing 100,000 hard drives). Second, if there is a change in customer demand (bigger hard drives for instance) you are stuck with the inventory that then has to be sold at clearance prices.

You can only imagine the amount of coordination it takes between suppliers, manufacturers, and resellers to achieve JIT processes. In some cases it actually led to the suppliers and manufacturers building their factories right next to each other.

Ok, enough about JIT… What is the corollary for unifying communications throughout your value chain?

In just the same way that JIT principles eliminate “waste” in the manufacturing process, unifying communications throughout the value chain could eliminate a lot of the wasted communication delays that impede projects, anger customers, and cost organizations tons of money.

In today’s age, collaboration, coordination, and speed (on a global scale) make up the foundation for building a competitive advantage in the marketplace… and… as the complexity surrounding your products and services rise – the ability to quickly mobilize all of your resources up and down your value chains (suppliers, manufacturers, resellers) quickly and efficiently could be the difference between success or the logo graveyard.

Still not making the connection?

Here are two examples to spark your creativity on potential ways that unifying communications throughout your value chain could revolutionize the way you do business.

1. Pretend that you are a software reseller that sold a complex accounting program to one of your customers. And… after installing the latest software update you completely shut your customer’s entire accounting system down. You can’t figure out what the problem is and none of your employees can solve the customer’s problem.

Traditionally you would have to call the software developers support number and file a request for help, which will then go through several layers of management and eventually be assigned to a tier 3 developer who can actually resolve your customer’s problem. Throughout this time consuming process, the customer is “down” and both yours and the software development company’s brands have been tarnished.

Now imagine unified communications throughout the value chain.

Once you realized that the software problem was beyond your ability to solve you looked at the “presence” of all of the software developer’s available tier 3 support personnel and then instantly placed the call to the exact person who was available and who could solve your customer’s problem. No trading voicemails, no communication delays, no mile-long email strings… just in time access to the person who can solve the problem right then and there.

2. Suppose you manufacture bulldozers and as a result of a recent marketing campaign learn of a construction company who needs 7 new bulldozers. Typically what would happen is that your regional sales person would call the first local distributor that came to mind and the send the lead to the distributor’s sales manager who then passes it to a rep in rotation… you get the idea. It might take hours, or in some cases, days for the lead to be followed up on by the distributor.

Marketers will tell you that the quicker a lead is followed up (in some cases as fast as 2 minutes) the higher the chance of winning the business

Now imagine unified communications throughout the value chain.

As soon as the lead comes in, your company can see the “presence” of all of your local distributor’s bulldozer sales people and instantly assign that lead to a rep who is available to follow up almost instantly. Imagine the effect on sales…

I don’t know of vary many organizations that have actually unified their communications throughout their value chain. Why? Because it is hard, costly and time consuming. However, just like the organizations that solved the JIT problem by building factories next to each other… the day is on the horizon.

Will you be ready?

At the event, 20 high-school women from around the state were honored for their achievements in technology. They were selected for their computing and IT aptitude, leadership ability, academic history, and plans for post-secondary education.

I was completely awestruck at the achievement and drive of these young ladies.

Lindsey, one of the recipients of the NCWIT award.

Among these 20 young ladies were:

• Valedictorians
• National Science Olympiads
• Computer programmers
• Our next generation IT innovators

We have a lot to learn from these young women… The drive, determination, and energy that they approach life with is a model for us all to follow.

If you would like to support NCWIT’s work, click here.

That change completely re-engineered the skill sets employees needed to be successful during that time period. Multi-year apprenticeships quickly reached obsolescence (with the exception of very high-end offerings) to other in-demand skills such as cost accounting, management expertise, etc.

I believe there is a similar disruption coming to the IT profession.

That disruption is being driven by organization’s changing views of technology. In the early mainframe days, technology was having such a revolutionary impact that organizations were spending lots of money into technology projects. Today, businesses are approaching technology investments and the people that support them much more strategically… ROI, KPIs, etc.

If you are in IT, What is going to be the impact on your job?

My recommendations for the next-generation IT person:

1) The next generation IT person is going to need as much EQ (emotional quotient) as they do IQ. Realize that your skills are going to include more than writing code or supporting software. I’m not talking about more certifications… I’m talking about the soft skills such as emotional intelligence and empathy.

2) Customer Service Skills – internal and external

3) Business knowledge – the next generation IT person isn’t going to have the luxury of just knowing how to make technology work. They are going to have to be able to understand and translate technology strategy into business terms including: finance, marketing, strategy, and supply chain.

Are you ready for the change?

In the IT realm, change is one of the few constants that we can count on. It doesn’t matter if you are a CIO looking to launch a high-stakes business process improvement initiative or a network administrator who needs to pilot the latest virtualization technologies you have to secure buy-in for your project to succeed.

Understanding how ideas get killed and Kotter’s method for successfully leading change initiatives could help you secure the buy-in necessary for you great ideas to succeed.

Kotter’s Method for Leading Change

1) Gain attention by allowing the attackers in and letting them attack.

2) Win the minds of the relevant audience with simple, commonsense responses.

3) Win their hearts by showing respect.

4) Constantly monitor the people whose hearts and minds you need.

5) Prepare in advance.

The Four Strategies People Will Use to kill Great Ideas

1) Fear Mongering

2) Death by Delay

3) Confusion

4) Character Assassinations

Consider yourself prepared… Go be the change.

If you would like to see John Kotter’s webinar on securing buy-in, here is a link.

Today we will be talking about CPI’s True Queue – an enhancement that ensures that ACD queues have agents that are ready and available, before distributing calls to it (saving call center managers from a potential nightmare). Take a look at the video below to get a better understanding of how the enhancement can help your customers.

If you would like more information on this Interactive Intelligence enhancement, please let me know – cdellen@commprod.com.

We’ll continue to keep you updated as we learn more about SU10.

What is significant about SU 10 is that it’s a “New Patch Target.”

A patch target simply means that all future Interaction Center Service updates will be built on SU10 and require that it be applied first. In addition, Service Update 10 is a “fix only” SU which means that it should be a very stable.

What does this mean for your company?