LAGAN Enterprise 13R1 enables you, the Public Sector, to save money whilst continuing to deliver services to everyone.

Released on May 31st, LAGAN Enterprise 13R1 represents a major new release that:

• Maximizes the savings to be gained from reducing the cost of handling information requests which typically account for approximately 70 percent of all contacts, with a significantly-enhanced Knowledge Management capability
• Supports mobile working strategies, a key part of many organization’s cost saving strategies , with the release of a brand new employee mobile capability
• Lowers the cost of integration, a critical success factor in any Digital First strategy, with the introduction of exciting new omni-channel integration capabilities
• Reduces the cost of managing a LAGAN Enterprise deployment, whether it is deployed in the cloud and or deployed on premises
• And finally, introduces KANA open services, making your services available to your customers in a way that is convenient to them, with the introduction of LAGAN OpenCEM (Customer Experience Management)

If you are an existing LAGAN customer, I hope you share my excitement in the significant potential this release offers you and your customers.  And if you’re not, I hope you’re intrigued by what the LAGAN Enterprise product could offer you.  I believe that the Digital Customer provides a relatively untapped opportunity for the Public Sector to save money whilst continuing to deliver services to everyone and that LAGAN Enterprise 13R1 enables that opportunity to be exploited.

LAGAN Enterprise 13R1 is “Designed for the Digital Customer in the Age of Austerity”.

Recent research from Gartner advises that “self-service customer support strategies must include proper planning for many channels and functions coming together to deliver the same great customer experience irrespective of the customer touch points.” ⁱ

We couldn’t agree more. As a strategic advisor and technology provider for many of the best-known brands and government agencies worldwide, KANA understands the expectations customers and citizens have of service organizations in the 24/7 global marketplace and how these demands are leading—and sometimes pressuring—organizations to modernize their service offerings.

Customers today want to help themselves yet also have someone at hand who can be held accountable for a resolution—and even jump in to assist at any step along the way. Implementing self-service capabilities is an effective approach for achieving this and, over time, can become a binding element that helps join up what once were one-purpose processes or informational silos within organizations.

Many organizations are finding that Web self-service capabilities can advance their ability to provide end-to-end brand experiences, supported by a single knowledgebase or multiple data sources as required. This often generates a domino effect that favorably impacts multiple key performance indicators such as call volumes, first resolutions, cross sales and customer lifetime value, among others.

Here are some examples from KANA customers:

• Carphone Warehouse, the world’s largest independent mobile phone retailer, leverages its knowledge management and email management capabilities with online self-help tools. One knowledge source supports all audiences with contextual data and segmentation so customers see just what they need when they need it. Help Site page visits have increased 70 percent while inbound calls measured by five common drivers have decreased nearly 40 percent.
• Priceline.com, a pioneer in the online travel industry, extended its knowledge management system to provide customer self-service support options that have reduced queue times and freed up customer service agents to focus on escalated calls. An approach Priceline says “has paid for itself many times over.”
• The City of Amsterdam leverages Web self-service integration with the same knowledge base its call center agents use to ensure that answers for its 750,000 citizens are consistent across phone, email and Web support channels. Web self-service use has increased by 400 percent, while citizen calls have been reduced 50 percent.

As organizations build upon their multichannel support processes, they can more efficiently provide customers consistent experiences across and between different channels, all supported with complete case histories and relevant context. What they deliver are personalized customer experiences that 1) reduce costs, 2) improve revenue and 3) minimize customer effort. A perfect customer service trifecta.

^I Gartner RAS Core Research Investment in Web customer Self-Service Reaps Time-Saving and Cost Rewards, G00249716, Johan Jacobs, 8 March 2013

One of the interesting things about having teenage children is seeing the ease and flexibility with which they embrace and adapt to new technology. (This is not without its challenges but that is another thought for another space ! ). They are quite comfortable not only with new channels and capabilities but also to seamlessly move between them and integrate them, particularly the social and message based channels. Multi-screen is now a normal phenomenon in my house, let alone multi-channel.

I was reflecting on this in the light of some recent research we had carried out into how consumers use channels and how organizations are responding. The summary of the research is here, but I was fascinated to see that the average consumer has used 7 channels of contact in the last 6 months. I was surprised until I did my own inventory and found 7 without having to blink, let alone think.

I then reflected a bit more as to why I used those channels, and in every case it was because I (that is as in me) chose to. Based on what I wanted, how I was feeling and the nature of my enquiry. So, for example, I did use my mobile flight tracking app to realize a flight would be late even though the airline boards were not saying anything yet, and I did phone a contact center to book last minute theatre seats that the website would not give me.

The research indicates that there is no preferred channel but lots of primary ones. Self service and assisted service across several channels are expected and valued when available. The key is to support the channels customers want to chose, not the ones that are easy, cheap or flashy.

On the reverse side, we see that roughly half the organizations surveyed thought that their current technology could not embrace the multi-channel demands of the customer base. This is not a shock to me, it has been interesting in this age of rich internet applications to see how slowly corporate technology is refreshed compared to that of the consumer, whether this be browser versions or user interface paradigms.

Organizations need to embrace the multi-channel world their customers are now in. This needs to be done not by ticking the box on each new channel but by having a holistic, omni-channel view that is able to deliver an integrated customer experience with consistency and convenience. How many online chat conversations end with ‘please call this number’ or how much hold time is spent listening to the “please try our website” message (maybe there should be a special number to call for those who already have!  – why is a ‘call me now’ button in any way hard to implement).

As well as embracing the channels, organisations need to increase their agility. Channels will keep expanding, consumers will keep changing, expectations will only rise, and the benchmark is not your own industry alone but in the richness of customer experience that is now considered ‘normal’.

In order to change more rapidly, an engagement platform is needed rather than silo based point channel capabilities. Communication, knowledge and business processes need to be woven together to deliver an effective, easy to use and engaging experience.

Knowledge management is something KANA is famous for.  Some of the largest organizations in the world, both private and public sector, use the KANA Knowledge Management applications to support hundreds, sometimes thousands, of customer service agents, not to mention millions of customers on the Web.

In almost every situation, at the start of the project implementation, the question of how the knowledge should be authored and managed gets asked, and we present a variety of options, including:

• In the online content management system
• In the KANA application
• A combination of the two

The result will depend on a number of things, including:

• Politics.  We sometimes find conflict between the department that manages the online content management system and the department that is leading the customer service effort.
• Content Volatility.  Sometimes, certain types of content change too often for the existing online content management system’s working practices, so a hybrid model is supported.

During the past six months, I’ve presented the KANA Statement of Direction for the Public Sector to our customers in North America, the United Kingdom and Australia.  One of its key themes is ‘Digital First,’ of which knowledge management is a critical technology enabler.  One of these presentations took place in early 2013 with a partnership of eight local authority customers in a council chamber in the UK.  Halfway through my presentation, I was interrupted by a member of the audience who asked: “So, if you can do all of this, why would we need our content management system?”

I quickly realized that his question was serious and had an excited tone to it.  In my response, I told him that I’d been asked a similar question by a US customer about a year earlier, so I had thought about it a little since then and so was able to pose the following questions to the group:

• Isn’t the online content management system just another customer service channel?
• Shouldn’t the sort of processes that govern online content (via the content management system) also govern the content that is used by customer service agents that use it to respond to calls, emails, tweets and Facebook posts?
• Shouldn’t all content be omni-channel?  In other words, shouldn’t all content be managed with the intent for it to be consumed across multiple channels (e.g. Web, contact center, tweet, Facebook post, email) and by different types of consumers (e.g. customer service agent vs. customer vs. partner) as a single entity?

Somewhat surprisingly, I heard a number of “yes” answers and saw a few nodding heads from the group. So I promised to progress the idea further after the meeting, which leads me to this blog.

Whilst I am not saying that KANA should enter the content management system market, I am saying that the content on the Web is an important part of customer service, and customer service is core to what KANA does.  I am also saying that KANA already manages content across multiple channels using its Knowledge Management product.  Therefore, we will work with our customers to develop these ideas further.

If any of the issues raised above resonate with you and you have any views on the correct approach, I’d love to hear from you.

I do my fair share of conference speaking engagements and usually find them an opportunity to learn from suppliers and customers.  I say ‘usually’ because, sometimes, it is the speaker that needs to learn.

At a conference late in 2012, I watched a supplier present on the importance of the customer’s preferred channel and then proceed to back this up with a slide that showed the results of a ‘preferred channel’ survey.  I almost heckled him.  Instinctively, we all know that no one has a preferred channel and that these surveys are, in fact, asking the wrong question.

In fact, there are two simple truths regarding channel preference:

• We all prefer to use different channels to access different services.  For example, I prefer to order movies online but I prefer to buy my shoes in the store because I prefer to try them on first.
• We often prefer to engage with different channels as part of accessing the same service.  For example, if I order a movie online, I expect an email confirmation within 60 seconds, otherwise I get worried and call them.  And I’ll also call them if I don’t get the item by the expected delivery date.

I point this out because I believe many organizations have built their customer service strategy around this false assumption of the preferred channel and are now paying the price.

Retail analysts recently acknowledged these truths, heralding the need for omni-channel customer service solutions.  These solutions would liberate customer engagement and enable:

• Customers to use whatever channel is convenient to them at a particular point in time and appropriate to the service being accessed
• Organizations to use a selection of channels to support more effective customer engagement across different services and within the same service
• The customer to be known to the organization across all channels and all services

But omni-channel is not restricted to the retail industry.  The same people who buy stuff online, for example, also use airlines and government services.  And so they expect the same type of service from all industries.

Many view omni-channel as the ‘emperor in new clothes,’ a re-branding of ‘multichannel’ if you will.  And, in some respect, it is.  Multichannel is now viewed by many as being thefirst phase of an organization servicing its customers via the multiplication of channels during the past decade, including in-store, phone, mobile device and Web browser.  However, customer experience often varies widely from channel to channel, a problem that has led to the inception of omni-channel, which puts the customer at the center of the relationship and makes all interactions consistent, regardless of channel.

With the increasing number of channels and the increasing sophistication of services being made available via digital channels, all organizations, both private and public, must adopt omni-channel customer engagement strategies to make them more effective.

It was just another day in the summer of 2012 when my then 7-year-old son Mark ran into my study and excitedly insisted I come to see what he was watching on the TV.  Not wishing to dampen his enthusiasm, I obliged, and found myself sitting in our lounge with my son watching one of his favorite YouTube clips by the “Annoying Orange” on our TV.  Despite the clip being very annoying (look it up if you don’t believe me), I realized that something very interesting was taking place here.  We were accessing the Internet, not from my study or from the family iPad, but from the TV in our lounge. And my 7-year-old son had accessed it. The Internet had just become even more accessible in our house.

You see, we’d just moved to this house earlier that summer and I’d treated the family to a brand new TV that just so happened to be “smart” in that it could connect to the Internet.

Effectively computers, smart TVs come pre-installed with apps, such as those found on your tablet or smart phone albeit typically with a visual dimension to them like YouTube and LoveFiLM.  These are typically very easy to use, as my then 7-year-old son demonstrated to me.  But smart TVs also come with a Web browser that enables you to access essentially anything you can access with the browser on your PC.

So just as private and public sector organizations are getting used to social channels and think there couldn’t be possibly any more, another one is just around the corner.  Potentially offering yet more opportunities for such organizations to engage with their customers in the comfort of their own home, smart TVs haven’t entered the mainstream yet because they are relatively new (2012) and, of those that have them,  few have them connected to the Internet via the necessary broadband connection.  But this will change.

Imagine a not-too-distant future of an integrated TV and Internet experience, allowing:

• Private sector organizations to not only promote goods and services to their audiences via television programs, but also allow consumers to buy them immediately via their smart TV, and
• Government to get more feedback from the public into their live debates via smart TV engagement

Some of you will know that these types of experiences are not new ideas and that the UK public sector previously attempted to make services available via what was then the not-so-smart TV back in the early part of the 2000s.  The “Annoying Orange,” however, suggests that it will be more successful this time.

The best part of my job is that I get to talk to people; lots and lots of people.  I talk to so many people about the same subjects (in this case Customer Service) that I start to see patterns and trends emerge (I was told when I first started working at Gartner that two data points make a pattern and three make a trend – I’d like to think that it takes more than that, but you get the overall idea of how it works).

I want to cover in this blog post the basic trends and patterns that I am seeing emerge and paint a picture of where we are and where we are going with Customer Service.

In the past two to three years you rushed to social channels for customer service (Twitter, Facebook, Communities and more) only to find out the answer was not there (at least not as you expected).  You also worked to build a multi-channel contact center that can anticipate and deliver answers to your customers’ needs over time, but you are stuck somewhere on the road to achieving the customer satisfaction you sought as proof of that model.

Today you are trying to understand how the new social channels and communities, the existing channels, and the shift to effective customer service works all together.

I know all this because you told me when we conducted our research study and you continue to tell me in inquiries, conversations, and when we meet at conferences and events.  This is the state of customer service today.

Now as for the future of customer service (as evidenced by those wonderful data points that make patterns and trends happen), the future of customer service is evolving over time – there is no set model against which you have to build a similar solution.  Not only that, but it changes from company to company, industry to industry, even for specific functions.  This is what makes Customer Service interesting (and as the famous Chinese philosopher said – may you live in interesting times; to which I add – but not so interesting that they are absolutely crazy).

Within this “craziness” I’m starting to see emerging models for the future of customer service.  This is the timeline and projects that matter per my observations and conversations:

1. Short term (next two years – all about understanding value, fixing what’s not working)
   1. Communities and social – the questions I hear most are: what it is, how to use it, what to do to make it work, how to take it from reactive (last 2 years) to strategic, how to derive value from using it.  In other words, how to leverage social channels and communities and their promise to deliver strategic value to the customer service organization.
   2. Cross channel – questions that I hear the most: how to move from multi-channel to tracking inquiries across channels and time; how to identify what is one inquiry and the resolution for the same.  In other words, First Time Resolution in a complex multi-channel environment and how to ensure accurate metrics that both justify the work and the investment.
   3. Fixing – the topics I discussed the most about this: budgets were cut, innovation did not happen, and social and collaboration / communities was thrust onto customer service to figure it out; how can all this be made to work while improving what we had? In other words, now is the time to figure out how build a better customer service model that works properly.  Let’s start by fixing what we could not fix the past 4-5 years and then add to it.
   4. Cloud – As controversial as the use of cloud for customer service is in certain environments, the conversations about how to ensure security and performance in the cloud, how the advent of cloud-based communications and leveraging new vendors and models to replace the hardware and technology that has been there forever (IVR, ACD, etc.).  We also have a lot of chats about the emergence of cloud-based contact centers that can be outsourced and how current vendors and new vendors are deploying cloud-based software for Customer Service.  Overarching question: what shall I do?
2. Mid-term (2-5 years – all about building the model for the future of Customer Service)
   1. Knowledge – once we figure out what we are supposed to do with social and communications, then we can figure out how to adapt to the new Knowledge Management paradigm (been writing about this for the last couple of months in the stone cobra blog).  How to use knowledge in the new world where problems are becoming more complex, answers are always changing, and the reach to “cheap” resources that provide excellence with virtually no lag (read: subject matter experts all over the world and in disparate communities) are becoming the norm, not the exception.  Add automation as a driving force and you have the recipe for disruption.
   2. Automation – These are the questions you ask the most: how to take the value of automating partly online inquiries and move them to other areas; how to focus on reducing the number of inquiries to handle forty percent or more of the inquiries; how to provide automation via all channels from a central framework that allows to leverage automation across channels (while, of course, properly measuring interactions and solutions to justify the investment).  In other words, how to make automation a key part of solutions that will reduce cost and focus on providing effective answers.
   3. Cloud – More cloud evolution (few finished internal and external infrastructure); more cross-channel (beginning to see first solutions implemented and showing results).

It is almost impossible to predict customer service ten years out (last time I did there was more visibility into the future, today the pace of evolution makes it almost impossible to see past the next five to seven years – too much is changing too rapidly in a business world sitting on a balance between organization and chaos; more on that some other time).

In addition to the above trends and topics, elements like “Big” data, integration, security, privacy and associated themes that are affecting cloud and technology deployment will continue to exist.  Buildup of the cloud infrastructure within the organization, adoption of automation and remote services across the enterprise, and further “flattening” of the world will continue to affect all these projects.  I will not cover these as single elements in this vision but rather part of a complex infrastructure that can serve customer service as well as the rest of the organization.  This is what is happening to social channels as well as other items I wrote about above.

I can seemingly write about this forever – and I will (not today, don’t worry… almost done).

In the coming months I will repeat the research study we conducted last year, create a more detailed version of this post with examples, best practices, lessons learned, case studies and more details of how it works and how you can make it work for your organization and deliver more information via this blog from my good friends at KANA about the future of Customer Service.

Is there anything else I did not mention above that you would like to see covered?

Any data point, pattern, or trend you’d like to explore further?

Let me know – happy to add it to the list…

Stay with me through the next few months and you won’t be disappointed – I promise.

Disclaimer: KANA is a customer (they have been for a long time) and they are generous enough to sponsor the research I am doing on the topic of the future of customer service; while I will get paid for doing this work, I retain editorial control and the final word on what is said here and in future deliveries and KANA retains the interest of expanding conversations about customer service. Win-win-win (you are the third winner, since you get to read all this at no cost and with no obligation or commitment).

Recently Annette Obermeier and I had the pleasure of working with Fiona Keough, CEO of the ATA, on a brief study of trends in Australian local government service centers. Thirty-four local government service center professionals participated in a survey that allowed us to better understand how Australian local government service centers are changing and compare this information with trends in other markets.

Australia has Evaded Significant Austerity Measures So Far

In addition to the culture and natural beauty of Australia, the world continues to be envious of the Australian economy. As noted in the Pacific Standard, Australia has completed its twenty-first consecutive year of economic growth. As a result, local government service centers in Australia have been able to focus more on improving quality of service than struggling with severe budget cuts. However, there are trends in local government customer service from Europe and North America that may be applicable to the future of Australian local government service centers.

Three and a half years into its government-debt crisis, the European Union is struggling with a lack of economic growth and rising unemployment. EU austerity measures have inflicted severe economic pain in places like Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy.  While not as severe, markets where KANA has a strong public sector presence, like the United Kingdom and Benelux region, have also implemented levels of austerity measures that are redefining local government customer service. Historically, the approach taken in local governments was one of “we are a call center first and we will need to add other channels of service, like web self-service, in order to keep our budgets reasonable.” In the past year, austerity measures are completely flipping this philosophy for some municipalities. The new strategy is one of ”we can’t afford the people; we need to redesign our self-service channels to allow citizens access all services through the web, mobile or social media without the need of human assistance.”

The economies of the United States, and to some degree Canada, have struggled as well. We have seen continued interest in the breadth and depth of self-services that are available on the web, mobile and through social media.

Toronto, a recognized thought leader in local government customer service, is using speech analytics to analyze areas for cost reduction and improving service levels (Government Technology News, Speech Technology Helps Toronto Analyze 311 Calls). At the 2012 MSDO (Municipal Service Delivery Officials) Conference, Toronto explained how speech analysis yielded $300,000 in immediate cost savings through process changes and identified potentially up to $1.6M in cost savings.

We have also seen more interest in cooperative agreements between local governments in order to reduce costs. In Canada, the Region of Waterloo and its regional seat, the City of Kitchener, have entered into a partnership for a joint Service First Call Centre (Regional Meeting Minutes) where Waterloo will provide Lagan Enterprise and Kitchener will provide 2,500 square feet of call center space.

Continued Ascension of the Digital Customer

There is a possibility that you are reading this article on a smart phone or tablet. In Frost & Sullivan’s August 2012 report, Australian Mobile Device Usage Trends, the industry research firm believes that over two-thirds of Australians (68%) aged between 15 and 65 currently own a smartphone. Frost & Sullivan also estimates that smartphone ownership amongst the entire population is at 41% and predicts this to increase to 65% within five years. Frost & Sullivan also reports that 20% of Australians aged between 15 and 65 currently own a tablet and 33% of all Australian households have at least one member who owns a tablet.

In parallel with the increased adoption of smart phones and tablets, the acceptance of social media remains strong. According to Australian ad agency Adcorp’s blog Social Media Statistics February 2013, Australia and New Zealand, over 50% of Australia and New Zealand’s population uses Facebook and over 40% use YouTube.

Social media has grown as a communication channel for local governments almost as rapidly as it has in commercial markets. The City of San Francisco, an early adopter of self-service (case study), has 39 departments using Twitter, 35 departments using Facebook and 16 departments using YouTube. San Francisco uses Open311 to integrate Facebook with Lagan Enterprise. While many of us love the Grumpy Cat video on YouTube, I believe that video, in the form of videos or chat, will increase in use by public sector service organizations over the next few years.

Survey Results

The survey results provided us with an important snapshot of direction of Australian local government service centers.

Rising importance of multi-channel

53% of survey respondents believe that improving customer service through multi-channel delivery is their top priority in the next 18 months. At KANA we strongly believe that a successful multi-channel strategy is more than adding new channels like web and mobile to your local government call center. Instead, we have designed Lagan Enterprise for the omni-channel experience. Omni-channel is an approach developed by online retailers where the customer can receive consistent quality of services regardless of the channel the customer prefers to use.

Online self-service – a game changer

48% of survey respondents believe that online self-service is the technology that is most likely to be a game changer within the next year. As discussed earlier, this is consistent with the trends we see in Europe and North America. For many local governments, some services are difficult to move online as they require some level of customer authentication. To address this, the next version of the Lagan Enterprise Self-Service that we will release later this year, is designed to provide secure portal capabilities. Not only will functionality for customer accounts exist, but the product will also ship with a set of configurable out-of-the box process workflows for a variety of transactions.

Consistent information for improved quality of service

26% of survey respondents stated that consistent and visible information is of most value to customers. The only way to achieve this goal is through contextually aware knowledge base system.  This allows relevant information, in the form of knowledge base articles, to be delivered as the person needs it while completing a process. While traditionally thought of as important for a service center agent, contextually aware knowledge is central to self-service adoption.

Social media is here to stay

26% of survey respondents stated that Facebook their fastest growing social media channel. This result is consistent with the market data provided earlier in this article that over 50% of Australia and New Zealand’s population uses Facebook. According to Alexa, people spend on average 28 minutes per Facebook site visit.

And of course, the smart phone

66% of survey respondents said that they already have or plan to implement a mobile channel within the next year. An Australian local government that has successful done this is the City of South Perth, who deployed Lagan Mobile as part of their Report It self-service initiative. South Perth has approximately 45,000 residents, approximately 1M tourists and annually manages over 100,000 customer requests.

Report It allows people to report issues such as potholes, graffiti, damaged signs or fallen street trees directly to their local government organization using the web or their smart phone. The reported incident is logged in the City’s Lagan Enterprise system and is forwarded automatically to the correct team for response. Once the incident has been logged, a notification is directed back to the reporter advising that the incident has been created and a unique reference number is provided. This reference number can be used by the reporter to track the progress of the incident as it moves towards resolution. Reports of incidents that are located outside the local government’s physical service areas will not be created in Lagan Enterprise. When the incident has been completed, another notification advises the reporter that the underlying problem has been fixed.

Download the survey infographic

We have created an infographic of the results of our survey that provides additional information beyond those covered in this article. You can download the infographic from HERE.

Also, if you would like to listen to our webinar on this topic delivered with Fiona Keough, CEO of the ATA, you can access the recording from HERE.

Thank you!

Like the entire KANA team, I appreciate your feedback and welcome any thoughts that can spark a conversation. Please comment!

Earlier this month, KANA and Utilligent delivered a compelling webinar (Lessons learned from Superstorm Sandy) related to the challenges faced by utility organizations during natural disasters. I believe that one of the most important challenges—I think you’ll agree—is how to maintain a consistently good customer experience during and immediately after a disaster until things get back to a steady state.

This is far from being an easy challenge for any organization. Let’s think about some of the difficulties organizations must face. Examples include: a substantial part of the workforce can’t come to work, the organization needs to use emergency workers, customer calls increase exponentially and there are long queues of call-backs, upset customers,  customer cases and issues are delayed or unresolved and  service level agreements are not met.  If you’re a utilities provider, these probably sound familiar and set you on edge just a bit.

What are customers looking for during these challenging times?  Different reports and assessments after Hurricane Sandy in the Northeastern US found out that customers want fast access to consistent and relevant information across multiple channels (web, mobile, social and contact center). They also want information/updates on their cases and alerts to be proactively sent to them via their channel of choice (not the organization’s channel of choice). Also, they want to interact with knowledgeable contact center agents.

How are these needs to be met by the utility providers? Utility organizations need to provide information to their clients via a variety of channels (contact center, web, mobile and social channels) in a consistent and seamless way.  They can benefit from using knowledge management to provide personalized services to their clients across the different channels.  The contact center agents can be empowered by having swift access to a 360 degree view of the customer to enable them to provide personalized services to customers. Agents can be equipped with tools to enable them to create, update and monitor customers’ cases swiftly.  Through automated real-time monitoring and reporting, updates to clients’ cases can be sent out to customers on the channel of their choice.

With the right omni-channel strategy deployed in solutions that utilize technologies such as contextual knowledge management, business process management, and case management it is possible to prepare the organization to maintain a good level of interaction with the customers at such times.

Polling of the audience during the webinar showed that only 30% use the data generated on social media as a source of insight to enhance their customer experience and develop new products and services. The channel strategy of any organization needs to include social media.  Organizations will gain from implementing the technology that enables them to listen to  social media interactions and act swiftly on the messages of high importance that indicate certain customers are unhappy with their experiences.

Listen to the webinar recording of “Riding out the Storm with your Customers: Lessons Learned from Superstorm Sandy,” to further explore the enhanced customer experience offerings that could have made a meaningful difference throughout the lifecycle of Hurricane Sandy. Also learn about the critical technology upgrades and business changes that could have made the difference between creating a disgruntled customer vs. a loyal advocate.

KANA solutions have reduced handling time, increased resolution rates and improved Net Promoter Score (NPS) at more than 850 organizations globally including: ScottishPower, Eskom, Pacific Corp, SDG&E.

Firstly thank you to the kind participants that responded to the KANA/ IBM Poll (see infographic in the original post), it provided some very interesting insights into current industry thinking within Financial Services around prioritising customer engagement trends in 2013. Perhaps the result I personally found most surprising was that only 41% of respondents deemed the ‘Quality of Service’ as important to their customers (very low in my opinion), I expected this to be the key focus and true differentiator for any organisations success regardless of sector…maybe not?

Having been fortunate enough to have worked for a global bank myself as well as being a long term customer of a few I feel I have gained some interesting and sometimes conflicting perspectives into these interesting organisations and so have my own personal view to share (please don’t shoot me!).

For me, the new battleground for financial institutions is to be seen as the organisation that can leverage ‘empowered’ staff, ‘empathise’ and ‘consistently’ interact with increasingly technically savvy and informed customers regardless of channel used. I therefore personally believe ‘Quality of Service’ should actually remain a priority focus for all organisations as this is perhaps the biggest area for differentiation and battle for the customer (word of mouth does work, see various social media and blog sites for good and bad customer experience examples). Can you monitor and respond to what customers are saying about your organisation online easily and positively enhance the conversation?

Furthering the discussion from the previous interesting post, I also believe technology is only part of the answer to improving the Customer Experience.  Big Data and Customer Experience Management (Social scrapping, Channel layering etc) are still relatively new industry terms, but the relating issues around understanding the customer and analysing existing data have always been present.  The challenge I regularly see actually stems mostly from the organisational culture in terms of whether the business is set up to compete internally (siloed) or actually share data (collaborate).  This sounds simple but the organisational focus has a profound affect on any resulting initiatives and processes around improving Customer Experience Management, or not.  To illustrate this point I have seen first-hand experience of a customer not being transferred to a higher profile and more beneficial credit card product because the existing credit card team didn’t want to lose the customer from their own portfolio. This may just be an isolated case but hopefully shows that no amount of transformative technology would solve this challenge alone as it’s also cultural.  Does your organisational culture and your goals complement the technology you have or are planning to implement?  If not you could be wasting your time, money and opportunity to do something that fits your business better.

As technology becomes more powerful and prevalent in the hands of the financial services customer, it is understandable that they will expect more from the organisations they interact with and particularly those on a daily basis such as Financial Institutions. It is easy for Financial Institutions to feel they need to become more like Apple stores to compete in this increasingly retail focused world, but does the customer really care? Personally, I care mostly about whether my money is safe, it’s easy to access, and that I can achieve a fair return on the money invested.  For me this is what constitutes ‘Quality of Service’ and the resulting trust I place in the brand and organisation. This is obviously different for each customer. Do you have the ability to build a true profile of your customer and add value to each interaction? Can you seamlessly drive workflow and case management across your organisation and improve knowledge management in the process? Are you making customers part of your processes as opposed to serving them efficiently?

It’s not easy to build an effective customer service strategy, balancing cost, revenue, risk, culture and customer sentiment but the organisation that can ready itself for dynamic change maintaining ‘Quality of Service’ will prevail. The future of customer service is that everyone serves whether front office or back office and even whether you speak to a customer. Everyone eventually assists the customer to evaluate, buy, use and advocate your service and brand.  Are you ready for this dynamic change?