HarborOne Earns Award for Comprehensive Customer Service Strategy
by Chris O'Brien on February 21st, 2012
In the drive to deliver excellent customer experience, companies face two competing timelines. On one hand, emerging technologies and communications channels are raising customer expectations, requiring more coordinated, nimble efforts in the short term. On the other, companies need to lay a solid foundation that will also allow for flexibility as needs evolve in the coming years.
When companies are able to balance both priorities, the results can be truly impressive. Aspect client HarborOne, the largest state-chartered community credit union in New England and one of the top 100 in the country, offers a blueprint for how it can be done. On top of achieving substantial costs savings and improved performance, the company is
gaining recognition for its vision: Ventana Research, a business and IT research and advisory services firm, awarded HarborOne its 2011 Business Collaboration Leadership Award.
The accomplishments are the culmination of efforts that began several years ago. At the time, HarborOne’s executives evaluated their operations and identified the contact center as a priority for strengthening customer relationships and increasing revenues. The team developed a multiyear vision for how it could transform the company to deliver better customer service and support business growth.
As Wayne F. Dunn, senior vice president and chief technology officer of HarborOne, noted, “We knew we needed a future-proof platform that could take us there.” As a foundation, the company selected Microsoft Lync and SharePoint to enable collaboration. HarborOne then added solutions from Aspect to unify elemental contact center functions, give agents greater access to information and experts, and track interactions through enhanced transparency, metrics, and reporting.
HarborOne’s success offers four lessons for other companies seeking to achieve improved contact center performance.
Develop a long-term vision. Technological advances will only accelerate going forward, so companies must ensure that their investments in the contact center support flexibility and customization. Considering how the iPad has transformed the business environment in just two years, being able to adapt to changing conditions is imperative.
Take advantage of existing IT investments. Providing the contact center doesn’t have to mean starting from scratch. In addition, companies that have already implemented in Microsoft unified communications solutions are already well positioned to tap products that can integrate seamlessly with their existing platforms.
Understand what customers expect. HarborOne recognized that its consumers were looking for a higher level of engagement across a number of channels, such as IM, social, and potentially video. Across industries, companies are recognizing that customer service can be not only a competitive advantage but also a revenue generator.
Empower management to optimize the workforce. Contact center managers and supervisors need the information and ability to respond to spikes in volume and emerging issues in real time. Enhanced metrics and reporting deliver the latest information, while the best solutions enable quick and easy alterations to business rules.
Most companies can achieve improvements by adding the right functionality to their contact center operations. But as HarborOne demonstrates, the benefits of a comprehensive strategy for customer service are substantial.
FIRST: A “Fair, Innovative, Respectful, Sincere and Trustworthy” Solution
by Chris O'Brien on February 17th, 2012
So rarely in business are we given the opportunity to build anything from scratch. In fact, the luxury of a blank slate is almost nonexistent in the IT world, where legacy systems are regularly retrofitted, adapted, and coaxed into to accepting new technologies. The far more likely scenario – you can call it a challenge, or an opportunity, depending on your outlook – is to be given a new strategy or business direction that must be met using existing systems and materials, with minimal additional outlay.
Leaders with the right creativity and vision will immediately seize upon the inspiration that no matter what systems exist within an organization, the opportunity is always there to restart and rebuild as long as there is a better, more effective way to approach it.
This was the climate of innovation we encountered when we began
consulting with Newport City Homes in 2009.
Now recognized as the UK’s leading not-for-profit Registered Social Landlord, Newport City Homes approached Aspect as a newly established government agency that was facing the difficult task of migrating existing systems and developing an entirely new technology infrastructure. Its Board, executives and staff were determined to introduce a culture of excellent resident services and to develop a solution that would conform to its organization’s FIRST values: “Fair, Innovative, Respectful, Sincere and Trustworthy.”
Microsoft® Infrastructure
At a network level, Newport City Homes adopted a 100MB meshed network to link its three main sites, with broadband serving smaller offices and other sites; while in the front and back office, it invested in a range of Microsoft solutions including Microsoft Office®, Service Manager, Microsoft SharePoint® 2010 and Windows 7 on the desktop. In order to improve the quality of customer interactions, it also developed a sophisticated Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system based on the Microsoft Dynamics® 4.0 platform. Microsoft OCS (Office Communication System) system, now known as Microsoft® Lync™, provided its high-quality VOIP telephony solution.
By December of 2010, with its contact center handling an increasing volume of customer calls, Newport City Homes began seeking a specialized contact center solution that could integrate with and complement its Lync and Microsoft Dynamics platforms. According to Nigel Ward, Newport City Homes’ Information Services Developer, Aspect Unified IP was the right choice:
“We looked at many different solutions, but Aspect was the only one that gave us confidence to integrate with our existing Microsoft infrastructure and enable us to fully execute our unified communications strategy. We anticipate the platform will play an important role in improving our contact center efficiency and effectiveness.”
Awards and Recognition
Without a doubt, the Newport City Homes implementation team had a clear vision for exceptional customer experience that helped Aspect develop and build their successful, next-generation solution.
Newport City Homes has since been recognized for its success in creating a world-class computing and communications infrastructure. At the 2010 UK IT Industry Awards, it was named “Small IT Department of the Year.” It also won the “Delivering Customer Driven Services” and “People’s Choice” awards at the 2010 Welsh Housing Awards.
Are there opportunities for rebuilding within your organization? What stands in your way? Were you successful in integrating new technology with legacy systems, applications or processes? We’d love to hear your story.
The Art-of-the-Possible Comes to the Contact Center
by Mike Butts on February 10th, 2012
Business leaders make decisions based on past experiences. Even when we think we are being innovative, we are still innovating from what we know and what we’ve seen succeed.
To illustrate this point, CIOs have jumped on the opportunity to increase organizational productivity by deploying one-stop SharePoint portals. SharePoint portals have migrated from simple document repositories to internal communications sites and external corporate web sites. Some businesses, such as mine – a former Microsoft consulting agency – ran its entire operation using SharePoint. Research shows that businesses that once viewed SharePoint as the “go to” place for content are extending its role into “the place where business gets done”. SharePoint makes it easy to envision the art-of-the-possible and perhaps even remove the word “impossible” from our vocabulary.
Given SharePoint’s ubiquitous presence in corporate IT environments, and the drive for customer intimacy, it’s time to bring the art-of-the-possible to the contact
center and tackle productivity and efficiency in an entirely new way.
All too often, contact center productivity is hampered by departmental silos, lack of enterprise knowledge, little to no access to subject matter experts, no real-time metrics, untracked manual processes, limited training and much more. Let’s envision a day where your contact center agents and management teams have a single, “one-stop” interface they use to begin and end their work day, that easily manages all of the different technologies they tap into throughout the day. SharePoint is that key enabling platform that allows everyone within the contact center to stay focused on the task at hand: delivering business value to customers and the enterprise.
Let’s explore some of the possibilities.
- Agent and Supervisor Communication and Collaboration – Create a My Workspace page where agents can access what they need from the corporate CRM database, access their Outlook email messages and assigned tasks, and readily see who’s available for IM chats, voice calls, screen shares and more using Microsoft Lync unified communications capabilities without ever needing to switch screens or open all of those applications individually. Now, consider getting more creative with this My Workspace page – integrate real-time agent metrics, company announcements, team statistics, employee and team recognition, work and vacation schedules, contact center and project schedules, and so much more. The beauty of SharePoint is that it can consolidate all of the information and process needed, and expose the right piece and the right bits of information to the right user. No longer are you hindered by disconnects between agents and supervisors – every player sees what they need when they need it.
- Knowledgebase – How many times are agents and supervisors looking through stacks of notes or hunting around shared drives and desktops for that one document they need? With a centralized knowledgebase, you can turn all this information – including documents, videos, and the notes that pass between the people within the contact center – into a centralized source for both information and collaboration. SharePoint’s powerful search engine allows employees to search information using visual search clues such as meta-driven navigation, thumb nails, previews and click-through relevancy to quickly find and refine search results. And the beauty of SharePoint is that the capabilities you use in-house can quickly be turned on for external consumption. Imagine the same powerful search and collaboration driving a customer self-help portal.
- Analytics – Without knowing where you are, it is difficult – if not impossible – to know where you need to go next. Putting analytics front and center – and putting them into the hands of those who make changes– can transform the culture from one of guessing to one of knowing. Within SharePoint, analytics can be integrated such that they are always visible and always available. For example, display agent and team performance metrics like upsell revenue and average handle time directly on the My Workspace page to align behaviors with strategic objectives. Provide holistic interactive dashboards and scorecards to front-line supervisors and management personnel so they are equipped with the best information to make the best decisions.
- Workflow Automation – Prevent process delays (and lost revenue and customers) while reducing human latency and errors by automating mundane, manual and complex business processes. Business processes such as opening new accounts, credit approvals, accounts receivables, policy management, etc. can involve a number of different workflows, employees with different skill sets, and several different departments. Use SharePoint’s workflow automation capabilities to move business steps through a series of logical and repeatable steps to ensure that business processes do not get bogged down or lost in the shuffle of everyday work. Use SharePoint to push tasks to agents while supervisors use a dashboard to watch service requests move through the system. Workflow automation is great for connecting the contact center to back office operations. It can help ensure that the organization is managing the customer experience holistically – from the initial inquiry through fulfillment – with full visibility along the way.
- Training – Turnover within the contact center remains a pain point even in this challenging economic environment. As new agents come on-board, few can afford the productivity delays that are common. In-person training and reinforcement is hard to manage and sending out document after document is impractical for both the trainer as well as the trainee. With SharePoint, you can reduce the time it takes to onboard new agents and increase effectiveness of existing staff by assigning short training videos to watch and you can easily test understanding with integrated testing. This entire process can be done through SharePoint. Videos can educate staff on new products, offers, campaigns, contact center etiquette, best practices and more. Create a personalized list of recommended videos to supplement training efforts. Make these training videos part of employee performance records and review cycles.
Chances are, your company already has a SharePoint deployment and the possibilities we have outlined have you thinking about the art-of-the-possible for your contact center and maybe even your organization. Possibly the greatest benefit of SharePoint is that you can design and deploy a strategy at a pace that works for you.
I would love to hear your ideas on how SharePoint is being used or could be used in your contact center. Drop me a note.
Till next time.
Mike
Want Deeper Customer Engagement? Let’s Talk Speech Analytics
by Jane Hendricks on January 19th, 2012
What you can learn through your recordings is a huge, untapped amount of customer understanding. When you can integrate that data with your overall analytical plan, you get deeper, holistic view into how you’re engaging with your customers.
Speech analytics looks at call recordings and is able to extract relevant concepts and convert them into usable data. The data can then be integrated with customer records (CRM), attached to transaction history, and persisted in any number of ways. The advantage of applying speech analytics to customer interactions that occur within the
contact center is that you are also able to preserve the context of the interaction as part of that data record. This gives you the knowledge of who the agent was, who the customer was, when they called, and what their inquiry was. You can also get metrics around the non-verbal pieces of the recording – how much silence was there? What kind of tempo? And even metrics that correspond to sentiment such as agitation or confusion can be captured.
A comprehensive analytical plan will encompass the many ways data is used within an organization to understand customers: who they are, what they do, what they prefer, and even predict what they are likely to do next. This is why it’s important that a contact center isn’t silo-ed, especially the data that the contact center is capturing. This is vital because when the data that speech analytics creates is integrated with broader enterprise data analysis, your customers’ behavior can be shared within the broader service department. This sharing creates deeper customer comprehension but it can also improve future customer outcomes and anticipate emerging customer needs.
More and more the contact center is becoming the hub of customer engagement. As speech analytics can provide richer data to that engagement, it can augment and even drive a deeper understanding on what enterprise knows about its customers as a whole creating a more proactive, predictive customer experience.
See more on Aspect’s speech analytics here.
2012 is the Year Lync Will Enjoy Widespread Adoption
by Mike Butts on December 12th, 2011
This time of year calls for reflection and looking ahead to the New Year. In my last blog, I took time to wish Microsoft Lync a happy first birthday by reviewing the key Microsoft Lync developments that occurred over the past 12 months. And now it’s time to look forward.
So in keeping with holiday tradition, I want to make one prediction for 2012. The next twelve months will be the time when shrewd CIOs from organizations of all sizes, shapes, and across nearly all industries begin seriously considering adding Microsoft unified communications (UC) to their organization.
In reality, all CIOs should have been thinking unified communications before now. The Microsoft Lync unified communications platform grew at a 25 percent clip this year, and Microsoft executives are projecting this product platform to follow SharePoint as their next billion-dollar business.
So what changed this past year that should spur CIOs into action in 2012? I can pinpoint five primary drivers:
- Industry recognition for the value it delivers. Microsoft Lync is generating excellent reviews from the analyst community from firms such as Gartner, who recently placed Lync into the leadership ranking within their Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications, surpassing incumbent UC vendors such as Avaya and Cisco. Savvy CIOs are starting to prepare their infrastructures for the Microsoft IP-based system so their organizations can reap significant cost and productivity benefits.
- Hard savings that fall directly to the bottom line. The opportunity to generate extreme cost savings is simply too tempting to pass. Aspect, using the Microsoft Lync platform, is saving more than $2 million dollars per year on external conferencing, eliminating T1 lines for local and long-distance calling, PBX maintenance, and reduced mobile phone charges. If your company’s experience is anything like Aspect’s, you’ll be able to recoup your investment within nine months.
- Evolving employee work preferences—While the potential cost savings are staggering, there are significant productivity, communication, collaboration, and cultural improvements to be reaped as well. Employees are changing and becoming more mobile: they want to feel valued, focused, and connected in a manner that empowers them to collaborate with coworkers, customers, vendors, and partners to solve business challenges and get work done. Microsoft Lync provides a single client interface that connects your organization using IM, presence, video and Web conferencing, and enterprise voice across a wide variety of platforms (laptops, tablets, smartphones, Xbox, etc). This functionality fundamentally changes how employees collaborate to achieve business objectives.
- Microsoft-Skype deal—The recently closed Microsoft-Skype deal will revolutionize the unified communications industry within a short time frame. Personally, I am keenly interested in seeing how Microsoft integrates Skype into their product stack with particular emphasis on Lync, Windows Phone, and Xbox. Skype brings Microsoft more than 170 million users that use Skype technology for their voice and video calls on a monthly basis. Integrating Skype across the Microsoft product platform should allow Microsoft to dominate the consumer and B2B voice and video market for years to come. No other vendor will be able to touch Microsoft.
- Contact center potential—Unified communications in the contact center is an untapped opportunity to generate productivity gains and use customer experience as a key competitive differentiator. There are an estimated eight million contact center agents across the globe that would relish using Lync’s many capabilities such as IM, presence, screen sharing, video conferencing, and more to resolve customer service demands during the first interaction. Aspect’s contact center solutions built for Lync provide a natural “plug-in” into unified communications deployments for any size contact center operation ranging from multisite, mission-critical operations to internal help desks. Adding a UC-based contact center solution to your UC strategy is many times a no-brainer that allows you to make the most of your Microsoft technology investment.
Attention CIOs. This is your time (and opportunity) to put your mark on your organization, build your career, and maybe even increase your bonus at this time next year. The path forward is simple. The time is now to deploy a Microsoft unified communications strategy to generate considerable costs savings, organizational productivity, and use customer contact as a key differentiator.
Til next time.
Happy Holidays and best wishes for a healthy and productive 2012.
Unified Messaging Platforms
by Jamie Ryan on December 2nd, 2011
It’s been said that technology can only be as effective as the business strategy it supports. Before you can formulate an effective strategy, however, you need to understand what a particular technology can deliver. That sentiment definitely applies to unified communications. Too often, companies get caught up in the technical aspects and lose focus on how it can make the end user more productive.
So when companies evaluate unified communications, it’s important for them to define what they hope to accomplish. I’d urge people to ask three basic questions:
- How can this technology affect the way people do their daily jobs and improve customer value?
- How does it streamline processes such as collaboration, scheduling, and other activities?
- What level of IT support is necessary to provide people with this added functionality?
What’s truly transformational about unified communications is that it gives users a single interface to manage and manipulate their interactions. When Aspect was preparing to implement Lync’s predecessor, OCS, our strategy was to unify our disparate messaging platforms—that is, voice, voicemail, e-mail, instant messaging, video, online meetings and conferencing, and calendar.
Think about the how you use different communications platforms throughout the course of a workday: voice conversations are pretty easy and spontaneous; email tends to me more formal and planned; instant messaging is short and immediate; and calendars should reflect and integrate these interactions.
When people are dealing with day-to-day tasks, they tend to stay in their communications environment. The ability to manage all of these different platforms without switching screens or devices is a tremendous time saver and delivers significant benefits.
A platform that accommodates individual tastes. With unified messaging platforms individuals have the flexibility to adapt the technology to their work style—something that’s critical for user adoption. Similarly, with the intuitive interface, users can jump in without extensive training.
Voice commands across messaging platforms. With Lync, people can use Outlook voice activation to respond to both e-mail and voicemail by phone. For example, say I’m in the car running 15 minutes late to a meeting. To notify people, I can simply click on the meeting invite and say that I’m running 15 minutes late. Lync automatically sends a message to all attendees and adjusts the meeting time on everyone’s schedule. While some smartphones are now adopting this same idea, we have been using it for the past three years on a global basis.
A unified view of messages. Lync also features such as voice-to-text translation, which allows individuals to prioritize voicemail and e-mail messages at the same time by using preview screens in e-mail. You can get an idea very quickly of what people want. In separate environments, you can’t do that.
The right messaging platform every time. With rich presence, your colleagues quickly understand the best communications channel to use based on your availability. If someone sees that I’m not available, they aren’t going to leave me a long voicemail. I’ve found that people intuitively understand how to select from their messaging options to get the best response. It’s why I’ve received just a handful of internal voicemails since we implemented unified messaging.
Recognizing what unified communications can deliver to your organization is the first step. Next, companies need to devise an implementation strategy to achieve these benefits. In my next blog, I’ll share a basic framework that can enable every organization to begin to integrate unified communications into their daily operations.
How government can deliver better customer service with unified communications
by Mike Butts on November 7th, 2011
Aspect is starting to see an increase in the number of municipalities and local government organizations interested in leveraging unified communications and collaboration technologies to help them connect with citizens and provide higher levels of service.
Just like the private sector, local government offices are faced with the challenges of increased service demands in an era of budget cuts and reduced resources and thus are looking for tools to increase employee communications and productivity.
According to my wife, who has been working as a city director for nearly ten years, city management teams are constantly striving to create a customer experience that strengthens connections with citizens. After all, these residents are continuously influencing day-to-day service activities and longer-term decisions such as elections and tax proposals.
To make these challenges even more difficult, residents want to communicate with city employees using traditional and emerging mediums including their home phone, home computer, laptop, tablet, and smartphone.
Using UC&C to boost productivity and service levels
Here are some ideas how cities can leverage unified communications and collaboration technologies to enhance citizen relationships while maximizing their Microsoft technology platform investment and increasing employee and workflow productivity.
Web chat. A city can implement a “click for assistance” web chat on its website that routes instant messages to designated employees, who can answer questions or re-route inquiries to subject matter experts.
Web forms. The opportunities to streamline and automate business processes are endless. Think about it―a city can connect its website to a backend SharePoint portal to service a multitude of inquiries:
- How do I get an occupancy permit?
- How do I pay my utility bill?
- How do I get a permit to build a deck or a pool or add a room to my house?
- How do I report a power outage, broken water main, or street problem?
- How can I schedule a special trash pick-up?
- How do I register my child for an upcoming event or activity?
The list goes on and on, but the main point is that city officials can create communications-enabled business processes (CEBP) using Web forms to speed response times, remove human latency, and capture key details.
Key opportunities for government organizations
Unified communications and collaboration can provide government organizations with the added functionality to take advantage of improvement opportunities in the following areas:
Contact center. Recently, a number of municipalities have been inquiring about our Aspect Contact solution for small contact centers (up to 100 seats). It makes sense: cities want to maximize their investment in their Microsoft platform, and upgrading to a Lync-based contact center solution can empower the whole enterprise. Aspect Contact enables city employees to resolve citizen inquiries more efficiently by using multichannel inbound routing, IM, presence, voice, and conferencing to answer more inquiries during the initial conversation with the option to engage subject matter experts if an inquiry needs to be escalated.
CRM integration. Once a city has a contact center platform, the next step is connecting its CRM application to the contact center solution. Connecting the CRM application to the contact center can provide employees with screen pops that automatically identify callers while enabling employees to track citizen inquiries, enter service requests, handle event registrations, process payments, distribute outbound email communications, manage vendors, and much more.
Smartphone apps. City management teams have lagged far behind the private sector in deploying smartphone apps. However, progressive cities such as San Francisco and San Jose are building apps that allow citizens to learn more about their city and report needed services such as pothole repairs, graffiti removal, handicap parking violations, and more simply by snapping a photo, entering the needed details, and recording the exact location via GPS using their smartphone.
Social media. Most cities now encourage citizens to follow their Facebook page and Twitter feeds, but few city officials are monitoring and participating in social conversations. There is so much to be learned and gained from monitoring and participating in social conversations that city public information directors are now communicating (connecting) with citizens through social media to protect and enhance the city’s brand while communicating service requirements to city employees who are best equipped to respond.
I don’t know about you, but I’m looking forward to the day when I can interact more effectively with city employees to make my town a better place to live, work, and play.
Til next time; thanks for reading.
Why companies are considering UC-based contact center solutions
by Mike Butts on September 29th, 2011
Microsoft’s unified communications technology, Microsoft Lync, is maturing and gaining excellent analyst and media reviews: it was recently recognized as a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant. Microsoft’s senior executives were proclaiming at the recent Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) that Lync would be their next billion-dollar business, following the same aggressive growth pattern of SharePoint.
If these projections are accurate, many, many Microsoft-centric organizations will be deploying this technology within the next few years. It only makes sense if you think about it. Microsoft Lync naturally plugs into your existing Microsoft platforms including Outlook, SharePoint, Dynamics CRM, and others. And take it from someone who uses Lync on a daily basis, the user experience and stability are simply outstanding.
At WPC, a Microsoft Lync product manager shared that “four of every five unified communications deployments contain a contact center requirement.” It doesn’t matter whether this contact center requirement is for multi-thousand seat contact centers or a 20-seat local branch office, 80 percent of all of unified communications deployments need a contact center solution.
So why are many organizations looking to deploy Microsoft unified communications technology in their contact center and across the enterprise?
- Capitalizing before competition. Unified communications capabilities in the contact center is an emerging application that can create competitive differentiation for progressive companies. How long this window stays open is anyone’s guess, but I anticipate it will begin to close within the next 12-18 months. The time to start planning strategy is now.
- Replacing older technology maximizes cost savings. We’re finding that more and more companies are turning to Microsoft unified communications technology for their contact centers because they are frustrated with rising continual and functionality costs associated with updating their older PBX technology. The costs to continue doing business the same way are becoming cost-prohibitive.
- Increasing customer loyalty. Companies are increasing customer satisfaction, first-call resolution, and loyalty with UC-based contact center solutions that enable them to route and answer multichannel (traditional voice, IM, email, chat, etc.) service requests based on business rules that follow specific agent and/or customer criteria.
- Engaging enterprise subject matter experts. Some advanced UC-based customer contact solutions such as Aspect Unified IP and Aspect Contact leverage SharePoint portals to enable contact center agents to search for and engage enterprise subject matter experts when they are confronted with service requests that need escalation. (Best practice: many companies are starting to segment and schedule subject matter experts to ensure a resource is available when needed.)
- Empowering customer experience managers. A simplified administrator tool centralizes system administration across one or more systems while on-demand, real-time, and historical reports help contact center managers make more informed decisions to help drive agent productivity, efficiency, and cost savings.
- Working together. While I’m not sure this last point is a driver, it may be the most important piece of the puzzle. To design a unified deployment that maximizes organizational productivity and cost savings while creating competitive advantages, contact center and IT leaders must work together. No discussions about deploying a unified communications strategy should happen without IT and the contact center being joined at the hip, since the contact center is the spot where thousands and thousands (sometimes millions) of customer transactions and conversations occur on an annual basis
This is a fascinating time for unified communications with contact center functionality. The growth of unified communications will undoubtedly increase over the coming years, and it’s going to be interesting to watch which progressive companies grab market share and customer loyalty by adopting unified communications solutions in their contact centers.
Till next time.
Mike
Microsoft Lync: If you build it, they will come; they will most definitely come
by Mike Butts on July 8th, 2011
James Earl Jones, playing Terence Mann in the 1989 blockbuster movie Field of Dreams, echoed the famous words “People will come, Ray. People will most definitely come.” Obviously, this famous line convinced Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) to destroy much of his corn field in favor of a baseball field.
Like Kevin Costner, every IT decision maker wrestles with user adoption when faced with a key decision on whether or not to add a new “crop” to their technology farm. Deploying technology can often be much easier than getting employees to use the new application, technology, or tools.
I have personally witnessed (and been part of) companies that have spent significant hours and money on end user awareness and training in an effort to get employees to embrace new software tools only to come up short in realizing the solution’s full impact.
There has also been a lot of recent banter, such as this recent UC Strategies roundtable discussion, on whether or not intensive training and interaction policies are needed to achieve desired unified communications productivity gains.
Luckily for IT decision makers, Microsoft’s unified communication platform (known as Lync) virtually makes these worries disappear.
Let’s face it: today’s business climate requires companies to ask more and more from their employees, which leaves their most valuable resource feeling frazzled, annoyed, stressed, underappreciated, and more. What employees want is to feel valued, connected, and empowered to perform their varied functions. It’s not about communicating or delivering a message; it’s about creating deeper connections and collaborating with coworkers and customers.
Every day I witness the power and productivity that Microsoft Lync delivers to our organization, and we do it with very little end user training or guidance. Microsoft Lync defines our organization’s work culture because the platform allows our 1,900 employees across nearly 20 countries to collaborate using a state-of-the-art tool set that incorporates one-click instant messaging, online conferencing, and voice communications.
Nowhere is this more evident than when new employees start at Aspect. New employees, at least in the departments I interact with, typically get a informal 15 minute overview on Lync’s various features such as instant messaging, scheduling, participating in online conferences, and some of the other cool features such as contact tagging, organization charts, status bar updates, and using the Lync Communicator as their soft phone.
Within an hour or two of their employment, new hires are sending and responding to instant messages and participating in online conferences complete with screen sharing. Of course, they uncover other capability gems later, but the new employees I talk with are astounded and stunned that Microsoft Lync isn’t deployed as a standard desktop tool at all companies.
But please allow me to repeat. This is all accomplished without formal training and guidance policies. Our employees quickly gravitate to the tool because they find value and it’s easy to use.
Also lucky for IT decision makers is that Microsoft unified communications technology has emerged as the global leader in unified communications outpacing rivals Cisco and IBM, as noted in this recent ABI Research study.
Let me wrap up by saying “If you build they will come; they will most definitely come. And don’t be surprised if there isn’t some sort of revolt if you ever try to remove Lync from your organization.”
Til next time.
How the contact center can support collaboration and brand building
by Nancy Dobrozdravic on June 15th, 2011
I came across an interesting post on the HBR blog by David Aaker, “How CMOs build brands by collaborating across silos.” The first thing that struck me was how long we have been talking about organizational silos. The second was that, for once, the author did not advocate the need to break down the silos. After all, the perennial recommendation to tear down these walls (Mr. Gorbachev) overlooks the fact that they are a necessary organizational element of corporate life.
Instead, Aaker recommended replacing competition and isolation with collaboration and communication across these silos, with the CMO acting as the facilitator. He offered five suggestions to achieve this goal:
- Define the role of the CMO team as facilitator, consultant, or service provider
- Use teams
- Develop and exploit silo-spanning programs
- Identify and leverage great ideas
- Get a common planning and information system
This approach seems eminently more reasonable to me. For a real-world example, see what’s happening now with the U.S. Senate, House of Representatives and Office of the President on the budget deficit talks.
So when it comes to strategy and idea development, this decentralized model is a good one. However, to integrate some of these ideas and recommendations in marketing operations, organizations must come together around a common, centralized set of processes, best practices, and knowledge resources.
For example, marketing might come up with this great product promotion after conferring with various internal stakeholders―but to make that promotion successful, there has to be a heck of a lot of coordination across demand generation in marketing, internal sales reps, order fulfillment, billing, product and brand management, among others. Execution is as essential to maintaining brand equity as are the strategies themselves.
Aaker highlights the need for better knowledge sharing in his fifth recommendation. The reason silos are counterproductive is that they result in a lack of transparency. Without engagement and information from each marketing-related function, executives don’t have the comprehensive perspective to make good strategic decisions.
And that is where the contact center, especially those resting on and bolstered by Unified Communications (UC) infrastructures such as Microsoft Lync, becomes so critical. Tools such as rich presence, IM, screen sharing, and back-office integration enable collaboration within the contact center and across the organization.
Since the contact center has the most direct interaction with customers, this function is a crucial component of any coordinated marketing effort. On a daily basis, customer service reps reinforce the core brand of the company as well as collect feedback on how its products and marketing are being perceived.
So, yes, decentralize in idea generation but centralize the execution of those ideas to your customer base around the contact center. The CMO can facilitate the formulation of go-to-market strategies and campaigns―and the contact center can facilitate their successful operational rollout to the market.
Improving the way companies communicate internally and externally with their customers is an important objective for all organizations. This blog is focused on levaraging the collective knowledge withing Aspect.