A Worthy Goal
Some argue you cannot cut costs and keep customers happy at the same time. I say that's just a lazy attitude. Resolve to reinvent your customer service in the coming year. There's many ways to optimize your customer service operation to cut costs. You can also do many things to make customers happy. Some initiatives will do both at the same time. Here's a few examples to get you started.
Call the Telecom Plumber
I am amazed by the number of businesses that continue to shell out millions of dollars in 800 so-called toll-free service and continue to hemorrhage money by tying together disparate sites with PSTN trunks.
Now let me explain a dirty little secret. Some LD carriers talk about the reliability and tradition of legacy PSTN connections, but in fact their long-haul backbone is in reality VoIP, not PSTN. What does this mean? It means some of you are still paying too much and the economies of IP backbones are not being passed on to you. I am not referring to voice over the internet. I am referring to digitizing voice and sending it over IP on managed backbones. After all, who do you think owns the backbones that make up the internet?
Practically speaking, there are three simple things you can do to re-assess your basic telecom plumbing: 1) Get competitive bids for inbound and outbound traffic; 2) Find ways to migrate traffic from toll-free to less expensive channels; 3) Consider a merged voice and data network to eliminate expensive tie trunks and LD backhauling.
Regarding competitive bids, you can do that yourself with the help of your procurement department, or you can hire a third party to negotiate for you. Take, for example, ProfitLine of San Diego. They can help you to sort through all the telecom options and save you a ton of money in the process. There's even software that helps you to save money on your voice and data infrastructure from companies like Amtel and TeleManagement Technologies.
The idea of merging your voice and data networks is an old one, but strangely a lot of larger companies have yet to step up. Companies like Nokia and Oracle have done it, saving untold millions each year. The idea is to overlay your voice network on top of your IT data network. You can use VoIP gateways to convert calls into data. You can get gateways from Cisco, Sangoma, and Audiocodes for example. Add to that some call management such as Cisco Call Manager and you're ready to go. I have designed some very sophisticated multi-site IP-based ACDs based on these technologies as an overlay network. Most recently, I was part of a team at Oracle that created a global ACD overlay spanning ten data centers where distributed gateways pump calls to thousands of agents worldwide. The savings are incredible. Commit to understanding more about this and you can be a hero in your company.
What does all of this have to do with re-inventing customer service? Simple. A more flexible telecom infrastructure leads to better and easier ways to serve customers.
For example, migrating traffic from inbound toll-free to other channels can be done in a variety of ways. For example, you can use web call-back to convert inbound calls to outbound calls. Consider speaking to your ACD, IVR vendors to see what they have in this area. You will be pleasantly surprised how a small investment in callback technology can make a big difference. Or you can go off-channel and use the ANI from callers to send them an SMS or provide an IVR equivalent of SMS. Companies like Agent511 in Chicago are producing excellent results for utilities and local government in this area. You can offer scheduled callbacks and notifications much cheaper than handling expensive inbound 800 calls.
A converged voice and data network makes it easier and cheaper to virtualize your contact centers and provide access to home-based agents. This enables more economical follow-the-sun type service so it may be feasible to provide around-the-clock service.
Get an Interactive Voice Response Tune-Up
Let's Face It. There are not too many fans of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) or Speech Systems. And the growing sentiment of consumers is discontent. With all of the other channels available (i.e. twitter, YouTube, email, SMS, web sites) you'd think IVR would be a thing of the past. Think again. People still use the phone and the enterprises' first line of defense against "junk" calls is IVR. The trouble is, some communications absolutely require human intervention while others are in fact well suited to automation.
So what's the problem? Simply put, most IVR systems were and are designed poorly, with horribly long menus and too many choices, combined with poorly constructed dialog. The remedy is not as radical as you might think. There are professional consulting firms specializing in IVR tune-ups. Take, for example, Enterprise Integration Group or Vocalabs. These folks will help you streamline your menus, eliminate unnecessary or annoying prompts, and improve error recovery. A lot of improvements can be made in scripting alone and may not require any logic changes to the system.
Be aware that I am not talking about the mainstream IVR makers and providers here. They have little incentive to first of all admit their design is sub-optimal or to work with you on tweaking the system. Most of them have made their killing and just want to collect maintenance revenue. You need an objective third party to really optimize your IVR. Have Speech Recognition already? Who cares. That has nothing to do with scripting a decent logic flow. And as you've already found out, sprinkling speech on top of your IVR is no panacea.
A tune-up can cost anywhere from $25,000 to $100,000 depending on the number of IVR applications you have and your willingness to cooperate with the "IVR doctors" in the tune-up process. Your savings this coming year could be in the millions. Take my word for it and do this.
Consider SaaS and CaaS-based Services
Let's say you've got a decent web site, but you don't have much of a customer service function on it besides an email form. You don't have a knowledge base, a threaded discussion board, or a feedback mechanism. You've looked into the cost of creating all this stuff and adding staff to maintain, improve and staff it... and your head is spinning.
Maybe you should consider using services from Get Satisfaction or Bazaarvoice then. These companies have created a raft of customer feedback and rating widgets that can link to your web site and provide all of the interactive infrastructure to do a fine job of on-line customer service.
In essence, you can re-invent your web presence and the level of customer service you provide by simply subscribing to one or more of these services. And the good news is there is no capital equipment outlay or development outlay. You can dabble in modern, web-based customer service as a subscriber. Consider carving off some web site traffic maybe for one constituency or customer profile and trying this technology on for size.
Embrace Social Networking
Social Networking is relevant. Now, customers have a loud voice and can post their sentiment to the world. Take the famous YouTube post "Comcast Guy Fell Asleep on My Couch" as an example. So please don't bury your head in the sand and hope that user sentiment broadcast is going to go away. It isn't. And your customers are probably tapping their collective feet waiting for you to "get with it" and fully embrace the reality of their concerns and feedback.
It's not hard to establish and maintain a social networking presence. All you need to do is take a few hours and get yourself a free Twitter, FaceBook or MySpace account. Upload your corporate logo, steal some text from your web site for the corporate blurb, post some photos, start some discussion threads and let it happen. You can post links on your web site and even use the free widgets that stream mentions from the social site.
You can staff these social networking outlets with the same people who do your marketing communications and public relations functions. Or, just like many people do with call center agents, you can outsource them. Clearly you must lay down the basic rules, protocols and guidance for your staff to avoid problems. Of course, you will want to consult with legal to make sure there are no missteps along the way. But don't be afraid. Look at it this way: If Ford Motor Company and Wachovia Bank can send out corporate-sanctioned tweets, your company can probably figure it out.
Ride the Smart Phone Wave
The number of applications available for iPhone is about 80,000. Analysts are saying that number will easily top 100,000 within months. Google says Android is at 16,000 apps and growing quickly; and BlackBerry has about 2,500. Smart Phone users account for no less than 15% of the adult U.S. population, and that number is growing.
Besides silly beer drinking games, flashlights and card games, there are dozens of productivity applications. Bank of America, FedEx, Bloomberg, Salesforce.com, Oracle and other mainstream companies have already taken the plunge. They are providing useful, easy-to-use alternatives to their web sites and IVR by providing cool iPhone apps. What's nice is you can build iPhone apps for much less than it takes to build a web site. And they don't take that long to develop. Take a hint from the social networking companies and ride the wave. Your customers will love you for it.
A Promise to Yourself
In conclusion, there are no less than five easy ways to reinvent your customer service as a new years resolution. Go ahead and call in the experts to overhaul that expensive telecom infrastructure. You can provide some new services to your customers in the process. It takes little investment to call in the IVR doctor to do some quick fixes on your IVR. You can dip your toe into the Web 2.0 Customer Service space by trying out new widgets and services as SaaS and CaaS-based offerings. You can take advantage of the phenomenon we call Social Networking and ride the Smart Phone wave. Sure, this is just a start. Now that you're on your way, you and your colleagues can probably come up with a dozen more.
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