Business Process

Customer Service Agent Collaboration Helps Move The Needle On FCR and Customer Satisfaction

Kate Leggett — Sat, 12 May 2012 05:03:53 +0000

In customer service organizations, collaboration should take place around cases and content, and should involve not only collaboration between customers and customer service agents, but internal collaboration within the enterprise. Internal collaboration has quantifiable benefits as measured by increased organizational productivity and efficiency. For cases, collaboration helps increase first contact resolution, decrease handle times and increase customer satisfaction. For content, collaboration helps evolve content to be more relevant, accurate, complete, and in line with customer demand. Some of the technologies that help foster collaboration around cases and content include:

For cases:

Presence indicators, instant messaging, and video chat. These allow customer service agents to connect in real time with subject-matter experts, supervisors, managers, or other agents having the necessary skills to help resolve a question.
Collaborative workspaces. These allow agents and subject-matter experts to share documents and logs about the customer issue, the troubleshooting process, and the results in real time.
Activity streams. These allow agents and subject-matter experts to subscribe to a case and receive notifications of all changes and additions to a case.
Remote support. This allows customer service agents to invite subject-matter experts and specialty agents to troubleshoot software or hardware with a customer.

For content:

The Future Is Sweet For SugarCRM

Kate Leggett — Mon, 07 May 2012 17:21:47 +0000

SugarCRM was kind enough to invite me to its analyst day and conference -- a three-day event packed with product, strategy, customer, and partner information. The firm's focus was clearly on its momentum into the enterprise. Here are my thoughts:

Why Don't Agents Collaborate More Often? It's Been Shown To Increase Call Resolution And Satisfaction Scores

Kate Leggett — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 20:55:58 +0000

Empowering customer service agents with relevant, complete, and accurate answers to customer questions remains one of the major challenges in contact centers today. The past 10 years have seen efficiency and productivity gains squeezed out of the mechanics of routing and queueing a call to the right agent pool, screen-popping the customer information to the agent's desktop, case management, and workforce optimization. Less attention has been placed on allowing agents to access information and informally collaborate with one another. Its no wonder that more than 70% of the time of an average call is spent locating the right information for the customer.

In many contact centers, content is created by groups of authors who are disconnected from the day-to-day conversations that agents are having with customers and who are unfamiliar with the language and terms that customers use. All content follows the same basic create-edit-publish cycle, irrespective of its usefulness in answering customer questions.

How To Partner With Data Quality Pros To Deliver Better Customer Service Experiences

Kate Leggett — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 22:47:13 +0000

Customer service leaders know that a good customer experience has a quantifiable impact on revenue, as measured by increased rates of repurchase, increased recommendations, and decreased willingness to defect from a brand. They also conceptually understand that clean data is important, but many can't make the connection between how master data management and data quality investments directly improve customer service metrics. This means that IT initiates data projects more than two-thirds of the time, while data projects that directly affect customer service processes rarely get funded.

What needs to happen is that customer service leaders have to partner with data management pros -- often working within IT -- to reframe the conversation. Historically, IT organizations would attempt to drive technology investments with the ambiguous goal of "cleaning dirty customer data" within CRM, customer service, and other applications. Instead of this approach, this team must articulate the impact that poor-quality data has on critical business and customer-facing processes.

To do this, start by taking an inventory of the quality of data that is currently available:

Big Data Ain't Worth Diddly Without Big Process

Clay Richardson — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 14:01:24 +0000

Nowadays, there are two topics that I'm very passionate about. The first is the fact that spring is finally here and it's time to dust off my clubs to take in my few first few rounds of golf. The second topic that I'm currently passionate about is the research I've been doing around the connection between big data and big process.

While most enterprise architects are familiar with the promise -- and, unfortunately, the hype -- of big data, very few are familiar with the newer concept of "big process." Forrester first coined this term back in August of 2011 to describe the shift we see in organizations moving from siloed approaches to BPM and process improvement to more holistic approaches that stitch all the pieces together to drive business transformation.

Our working definition for big process is:

"Methods and techniques that provide a more holistic approach to process improvement and process transformation initiatives."

As we pushed deeper into our big process research, we found that the relationship between big data and big process is crucial to driving real business value and improved business outcomes. Specifically, we found that the connection between big data and big process revolved around the "Four Cs" of:

Is "Good Enough" Customer Service Good Enough?

Kate Leggett — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 20:40:03 +0000

Eighty-six percent of customer service decision-makers say that a good customer experience is one of their top strategic priorities. Sixty-three percent say that they want their customer experience to be the best in their industry. Yet few companies deliver a good customer experience.

In our recent survey, just over one-third of the 160 large North American brands questioned were found to provide a positive customer experience -- a number that hasn't significantly moved for the past five years.

We know that a bad service experience has quantifiable negative impacts, as measured by monitoring the wallet share of each customer over their engagement lifetime with a brand. But when is a service experience good enough? A recent Harvard Business Review blog says that delighting your customers is a waste of time and energy, and exceeding customer expectations has a negligible impact on customer loyalty -- that customers just want simple, quick solutions to their problems.

What customers also want is a consistent, reproducible experience across all touchpoints.

What this means is that a customer wants to receive the same data, the same information, over any voice, electronic, or social communication channel used. Customer service agents supporting customers across these channels should follow the same business processes. And channels should be linked -- either from a technology perspective or a business process perspective -- so that customers can start a conversation on one channel and move it to the next without having to restart the conversation.

CRM; customer service

Forrester's 10-Step Program On Mastering The Service Experience: A Quick Recap

Kate Leggett — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 22:42:57 +0000

Today, the gap between a customer's expectations and the customer experience they receive is huge. In our latest customer experience survey, we found that just over one-third of US brands deliver a good experience. What is even more surprising is that, in the five years that Forrester has been collecting this data, this number has not significantly changed.

Delivering good customer service is a cornerstone to delivering a good end-to-end customer experience. Yet few companies undertake efforts to follow best practices. This lack of attention to customer service has significant impacts for companies: escalating service costs, customer satisfaction numbers at rock-bottom levels, and anecdotes of poor service experiences amplified over social channels that can lead to brand erosion.

Mastering the customer service experience is hard to do. Here is a recap of my 10-step program. I've reordered the steps a little, but the message is still the same:

Master your strategy

Plan and run your operations

customer service; contact center; CRM; SCRM

Choosing A Contact Center Outsourcer Is Hard; Evaluate Candidates Over 8 Dimensions

Kate Leggett — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 00:31:01 +0000

Outsourcing contact center operations helps organizations deliver better customer service. In Forrester's recent survey of 304 North American and European network and telecommunications decision-makers, we found that nearly 20% have already outsourced some or all of their contact center seats or are very interested in doing so. Choosing to outsource should not be based on cost considerations alone. Select an outsourcer carefully. Outsourcers need to provide an environment that delivers quality customer service in a cost-effective manner. When looking for providers, evaluate their capability to:

BPM; customer service; contact center; crm; scrm; email; hosted contact center; outsourcing

Getting The Mix Right

Derek Miers — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 09:05:56 +0000

Many business people still struggle to see the role of business processes in building better performance (i.e., business results). So I thought I would share this little hook that I developed within one of my consulting engagements. It is based around preparing bread: Mixing the components of the bread -- the flour, yeast, and water -- and then baking it all together for an effective result.

In your business, it is the dough rising that equates to achieving its performance objectives -- however those performance objectives are defined.

Whether they're aware of it or not, in most businesses the different ingredients are not well aligned or working together as well as they could be. Mixing the metaphors for a moment, the roles and actors are not rowing together in a coordinated fashion. Business process management (BPM) brings together a range of techniques and approaches -- the BPM tool box. The components of this tool box help change agents in the business (the bakers) create their own special sort of dough. At the heart of that is an ongoing inquiry into business processes -- if you like, the water that binds the flour (your people) with the yeast (the technology).

There may be other ingredients involved that add their own subtle contribution to flavor and texture. But cooking is not only about mixing the right quantity of ingredients; it is also how you mix them and how long you bake the mixture. You might think it is just a question of getting the right measure of ingredients. But first, it is necessary to decide on the sort of bread you want to make, how it is going to be delivered, and to whom. Alongside the choice of people (flour), the most critical element is the water (processes) -- the ingredient that binds it all together.

Don't Outsource Your Customer Service Operations To Cut Costs

Kate Leggett — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 20:14:31 +0000

Outsourcing contact center operations helps organizations deliver better customer service. In Forrester's recent survey of 304 North American and European network and telecommunications decision-makers, we found that nearly 20% have already outsourced some or all of their contact center seats or are very interested in doing so. Outsourcing doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing proposition -- organizations can leverage outsourcers to fill language gaps or react quickly to seasonal volume changes. Organizations can also choose to outsource only a subset of non-mission-critical customer service processes.

In all cases, outsourcing is major decision which carries a significant amount of management overhead, and should not be pursued solely as a cost-control strategy. Look to outsource if you want to:

Don't Let CRM Pitfalls Trip You Up

William Band — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 16:14:45 +0000

My Twitter feed is going wild with #social, #mobile, #CX, and #bigdata hype. But Forrester clients want practical advice for today, in addition to spotting changes on the horizon.

One of the most common questions I get is: "What are the CRM pitfalls I need to watch out for?" I surveyed nearly 150 companies to find out the problems they faced with their CRM initiatives. Here is what you need to pay attention to:

Crafting a customer relationship management strategy. Eighteen percent of the problems at the companies I surveyed pertain to CRM strategy. Within the CRM strategy category, specific pitfalls identified include: inadequate deployment methodologies (40%), poorly defined business requirements (25%), and not achieving organizational alignment on objectives (18%).

"Reaching a consensus between IT's objectives and those of the business unit was a problem." (Marketing manager, manufacturing company)

"Internal disagreements on how to implement were the cause of our problems." (Senior director, customer support, media, entertainment, and leisure company)

Rearchitecting critical customer-facing processes. CRM processes consist of the work practices associated with major customer-facing business functions within an organization. Twenty-seven percent of the problems reported center on difficulties with business process management. Within the business process category, specific pitfalls to watch out for include: technical/integration difficulties in supporting company processes (48%), poor business process design (31%), and the need to customize solutions to fit unique organizational requirements (21%).

"Changes in business processes comprised almost all of our implementation challenges." (Service management program manager, retail and wholesale trade company)

Amazon's New Simple Workflow Service

Derek Miers — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 13:32:04 +0000

Yesterday, Amazon launched an adjunct to its successful Amazon Web Service (AWS) elastic cloud offering. While we don't normally comment on every product release, this one is significant -- primarily because of who is doing it. The Simple Workflow service (SWF) clearly has nothing to do with Adobe's Flash offering (although techno-nerds may initially think so, given the acronym).

So what was this all about? The business model is certainly interesting: an elastic, configurable workflow capability that's distributed across any number of access points. Essentially, this will allow an organization to orchestrate processes in the cloud, linking participants up and down the value chain.

"Amazon Simple Workflow Service (Amazon SWF) is a workflow service for building scalable, resilient applications. Whether automating business processes for finance or insurance applications, building sophisticated data analytics applications, or managing cloud infrastructure services, Amazon SWF reliably coordinates all of the processing steps within an application."

Pricing is initially free and then transitions into a blended, low-cost consumption model, with charges oriented around execution steps, bandwidth usage, how long the task is active, and signals/markers, etc. With usage charges at around $0.0001 per execution step, this gives you an idea of how small the operating overhead might be.

Thoughts On Customer Service Solutions For The SMB Market

Kate Leggett — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 07:18:05 +0000

In a conversation with Alex Bard, CEO of Assistly (now desk.com, part of salesforce.com), I learned a few interesting things about customer service solutions for small to medium-size businesses (SMBs): (1) Companies can be too small to have customer service organizations; (2) the main competition of vendors of SMB customer service solutions is not each other, but Post-It notes and Gmail; and (3) the service that SMB customers demand is exactly like the service that enterprise customers demand.

So what do each of these points mean?

Which Contact Center Technologies For Customer Service Deliver The Most Business Value?

Kate Leggett — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 21:19:17 +0000

We know that the contact center solution ecosystem that customer service organizations use is made up lots of complex technologies, as highlighted in our latest TechRadar™report. So how do you know what technologies are the right ones to invest in -- the ones that will deliver real business value?

To figure this out, Forrester partnered with CustomerThink to survey customer service organizations to understand the adoption rate of 18 contact center technologies. We also looked at the business value that these technologies deliver as defined by three questions: 1) How critical is each to business success? 2) What is the technology's market reputation for value? and 3) How difficult is it to implement and use? Here are our highlights, and you can find actual statistics in our report:

customer service; custserv; CRM; SCRM; BPM; user experience; agent experience

To Be (To Cloud) Or Not To Be (Not To Cloud) BI

Boris Evelson — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 16:08:05 +0000

My colleagues and I have just completed yet another engagement with a large client -- one of dozens recently -- who was facing a to be or not to be decision: whether to move its BI platform and applications to the cloud. It's a very typical question that our clients are asking these days, mainly for the following two reasons:

In many cases, their current on-premises BI solutions are too inflexible to support the business now, much less in the future.
The relative success of cloud-based CRM (SFDC and others) solutions may indicate that cloud offers a better alternative.

These clients put these two statements together and make the reasonable assumption that cloud BI will solve many of the current BI challenges that cloud-based CRM solved. Reasonable? Yes. Correct? Not so fast -- the only correct answer is "It depends."

Let's take a couple of steps back. First, let's define applications or packaged solutions vs. platforms (because BI requires both).

Packaged solutions

Subscribe to a solution-like CRM
Provide standard business functions to all customers (which makes it different from "hosting;" see below)
Difficult to tailor to specific needs
Usually are used synonymously (but incorrectly, see below) with software-as-a-service (SaaS)

Platforms for building solutions

Business Process

Customer Service Agent Collaboration Helps Move The Needle On FCR and Customer Satisfaction

Categories:

The Future Is Sweet For SugarCRM

Categories:

Why Don't Agents Collaborate More Often? It's Been Shown To Increase Call Resolution And Satisfaction Scores

Categories:

How To Partner With Data Quality Pros To Deliver Better Customer Service Experiences

Categories:

Big Data Ain't Worth Diddly Without Big Process

Categories:

Is "Good Enough" Customer Service Good Enough?

Categories:

Forrester's 10-Step Program On Mastering The Service Experience: A Quick Recap

Categories:

Choosing A Contact Center Outsourcer Is Hard; Evaluate Candidates Over 8 Dimensions

Categories:

Getting The Mix Right

Categories:

Don't Outsource Your Customer Service Operations To Cut Costs

Categories:

Don't Let CRM Pitfalls Trip You Up

Categories:

Amazon's New Simple Workflow Service

Categories:

Thoughts On Customer Service Solutions For The SMB Market

Categories:

Which Contact Center Technologies For Customer Service Deliver The Most Business Value?

Categories:

To Be (To Cloud) Or Not To Be (Not To Cloud) BI

Categories: