Here’s an example. It’s actually an update to the dismal customer experience I had with an online retailer a few weeks ago. Would you believe that after all the pushback Company A gave me about cancelling a backordered item, I found myself in another customer service snafu with Company B?

Company B shipped the birthday gift I’d ordered for my husband in two pieces. (Some assembly required.) That was fine, but my “box 2 of 2” shipment never arrived. Instead, they sent me a duplicate of Piece #1. (This is where my smokescreen about it being a “watch” kind of falls apart, doesn’t it? Props to those of you who are paying attention.)

I wasn’t thrilled, but I was not yet irritated. Mistakes happen. I dialed Company B’s customer service number and explained the situation. I had two of the same thing, Piece #1, which was useless without Piece #2.

The agent thought about this for a minute. “We don’t sell Piece #2 separately.”

“But you apparently ship them separately,” I offered. “Can you just send me the box that contains Piece #2?”

“I can give you the phone number for the manufacturer. I think you’ll have to get it from them.”

Ergh. Now I had to call another business and explain the whole situation, and then hope they’d just take my word for it that I was entitled to a shipment of this random part. I bet you can guess what the manufacturer told me:

“We suggest you contact the dealer.”

ERGH! I went back and for the with Company B for some time, over e-mail, again over the phone, never quite getting a resolution. Then a few days later, a customer satisfaction survey conveniently landed in my inbox. I unloaded all of my frustration on that little form, but I assumed nothing would come of it. I didn’t expect an answer. It was just an opportunity to vent.

Within 24 hours, something magical happened. Company B won me back. Here’s how:

1.  They apologized and admitted their error.
2. They outlined the steps they would take to make things right: resend the item immediately and provide a shipping label for the return of their botched shipment.
3. They followed through. I had a shipping label in my inbox, as well as tracking numbers for the replacement.
4. They followed up. A subsequent e-mail again apologized for the error and assured me they would do everything possible to make things right.

Their fast, thorough response to my survey answers actually exceeded my expectations. I finally felt as though someone at the company not only cared about my problem, but was willing to bend over backwards to solve it.

They successfully reset the delicate balance.

Because mistakes will happen, organizations should be prepared to respond in a way that will overcorrect, to mend the damaged relationship and impress their customers with their eagerness to do so.

Reinventing company-customer relationships
As communication channels expand to include the latest digital mediums, customers are raising their expectations of businesses and calling for more direct, intelligent interaction and easier, customized communication. There is a growing consumer demand for companies to establish a deeper knowledge about their habits and histories in order to better engage them at an individual level at specific points of interaction. Not only does this require companies to record preferences, habits, complaints and problems across multiple platforms, it also necessitates the consolidation and contextualization of that data into a comprehensive and usable customer profile.

Establish next-generation customer contact
Let’s get historical for a second. First generation call centers were a one-to-one model. A customer called and they got an agent. Through evolution, the contact center created an opportunity for a one-to-several solution where customers could be transferred to other agents in other parts of the enterprise. And now most recently, contact centers have added email and chat, maybe even SMS. But in order to achieve true next generation experiences, organizations need to evolve to create a one-to-all model that can reach the entire enterprise.

By connecting the customer and the company in multiple ways and more importantly the ways the customers want to connect and removing internal barriers and silos between the enterprise and the contact center, unified communications becomes a central pillar of the next-generation organization. By unifying multiple channels into a singular platform while maintaining and optimizing access to a database full of knowledge, businesses can incorporate things like social networking or self-service applications within and not ‘next to’ a customer-centric communications model.

As a result, the contact center, and the enterprise as a whole, experiences greater efficiency and real-time agility. This model streamlines the processing of unstructured data (e.g. social) that is acquired from interactions within the contact center. The large volumes of data are sorted and structured into business intelligence, providing the organization with critical knowledge in real time. The information will then be readily available to service customers beyond the contact center and throughout the entire organization.

However, this doesn’t mean that small contact centers (those with 100 agents or fewer) are exempt from their own unique set of challenges, in addition to many of the obstacles that frequently plague large corporations. Small contact center may often face: 

1. Limited workflow. Larger operations may have the luxury of managing call volume by transferring callers to available agents. In a small contact center with a limited number of agents, call handling and efficiency are key. Being able to quickly identify and route service requests to available agents is essential.
2. Cost of technology. For centers with limited resources, many technology platforms can be cost-prohibitive, or the deployment and implementation may be excessively time-consuming and disruptive to workflows. Fortunately, an effective solution doesn’t need to be overly cumbersome and expensive to provide callers with an exceptional customer experience.
3. Lack of support. Scaled-down platforms designed for larger contact centers might seem like the right choice, but they may still be complicated to deploy and fail to provide full 24/7 technical support. Bringing all agents up to speed on new technology quickly to avoid downtime can also be a challenge without the benefit of on-site or computer-based training.

In addition to these considerations, agents need to be prepared to expertly handle service requests from multiple channels. For a smaller organization, this likely means that every agent must have the capabilities to effectively respond to voice calls, e-mail, web chat and instant messaging.

One way to achieve streamlined customer contact practices and operations is by taking advantage of the capabilities found in Microsoft Lync. Organizations with enterprise-wide Lync deployments now have the opportunity to boost their ROI by deploying a low-cost contact center application that runs on top of the Microsoft Lync network.

We’ll talk more about this Lync-based solution in the upcoming webinar on May 31, Transforming Your Small Contact Center or Help Desk into a Strategic Weapon. 

By maintaining a sharp focus on the individual customer’s experience, small contact centers and internal help desks can provide levels of service and satisfaction that rival their larger counterparts.

An ITWorld piece published this week on BYOD cited some very interesting stats from a recent Juniper Networks survey of 4,000 or so mobile-using IT professionals and several points jumped out at me.  Many of the mobile users who responded to the survey said that they depend on their network provider for their device and content security. And when they use those devices within their employer’s enterprise, they have the same expectation. In fact 90% of those surveyed felt that their employer should provide personal device security when they use on the company network. The problem is many of these employees go around their company’s device security policy anyway. So there should be no surprise then that about a third of the companies in the survey encountered some level of security issue from non-approved personal mobile devised accessing enterprise data.

Cleary BYOD is not going away so learning how to balance the benefits with the security issues is the task at hand. IT needs to adapt in order to keep up with IT consumerization in order to accommodate the skills and technologies that make employees productive and allow them to leverage enterprise resources. Intelligent, measured management that balances IT device consumerization and the security needs of legacy systems is a big and growing challenge for IT. Meeting in the middle ground is key. It is nearly impossible to construct a policy to allow every personal device onto the network so if departments can identify the phones and tablets they are able to support and employees restrict their personal device usage to conform to those policies, both security and productivity can remain high.

Proper measurement is key to the justification and future success of social CRM but how is this best done?

In order for companies to truly see the ROI on Social CRM investment, better analytics are essential. Acquired customer data from the contact center must be easily obtained and visible throughout the enterprise. Of course the data alone is not enough. It must include context and interaction history in order to get a holistic and reportable view not only of the customer but of the Social CRM as well. When the silos in the enterprise are taken down and a culture of customer data collaboration exists, companies will be better able to measure the impact of their Social CRM investment.

The convergence here is really setting the stage for social business. Extending order status, customer service, and the like to where customers are is innovative. However, this model could still end up just being another push of information if customers aren’t offered an opportunity to also engage with the company if they should so choose.

As I covered on my previous post, Social Business is not just social technology in the enterprise. It is primarily connecting the enterprise by providing employees the tools like information acquisition in real time, crowdsourcing, contextual intelligence, and knowledge sharing that they use in their personal lives, in ways that creates deeper customer engagement.

This offers opportunity for CIOs to connect these enterprise applications with the social platforms customers are using to engage the companies they do business with. Because of the growing use of social as a customer service medium and the data and engagement opportunities it presents, it is clear that social media can no longer stand alone in marketing and with the help of the CIO, it needs to be a cultural and technological part of the entire enterprise.

Pew issued a survey report, “The Future of Money in a Mobile Age,” that studied emerging trends in mobile payment technology. The prevalence of smart phones and mobile commerce offerings such as Google Wallet are enabling consumers to dispense with their cash and credit cards and make purchases with their phones. Anyone who’s been to Starbucks lately will recognize that mobile payments aren’t part of some wild-eyed science fiction. So mass adoption is more a matter of when, not if.

To that end, Pew’s survey asked respondents whether they agreed with the following statement: “By 2020, most people will have embraced and fully adopted the use of smart-device swiping for purchases they make, nearly eliminating the need for cash or credit cards.” Nearly two-thirds believe that’s a realistic time frame.

While there are a number of factors that must be addressed—competing platforms, security, the role of banks and credit card companies, to name a few—don’t assume that these will slow progress significantly. One only needs to look to Kenya, where 18 million consumers use M-PESA, a mobile banking platform that went live in 2007, to make payments equal to 20 percent of the country’s GDP via text message.

So what should the contact center be doing in 2012 to prepare for the coming mobile storm? A few things jump to mind:

• Implement a robust platform that can evolve to accommodate changing technology
• Develop a multichannel customer experience strategy that emphasizes mobile
• Empower service agents with the tools and capabilities to resolve issues efficiently

With the accelerating pace of technology advances over the past couple of years—remember that the iPad was introduced in January 2010—eight years from now is a relative eternity. Companies that embrace this challenge and make moves now will be in a position to thrive in 2020; those that bury their heads in the sand are going to be in for a rude awakening.

Image courtesy of Maas360 www.maas360.com

This consumerization of IT is also further enabling an increasingly mobile workforce. In order to strategically embrace this trend, CIOs must understand how these changes have and will continue to impact the enterprise. Rather than work to block these technologies, CIO’s must find ways to   leverage them while maximizing employee efficiency and helping to streamline business processes.

The question is what do organizations gain from allowing employee devices with the walls of enterprise IT?  One of the biggest challenges now is keeping a balance between consumerization and the security needs of legacy systems. Since our employees are also consumers, when we understand them we’ll better understand our customers. So while IT needs to adapt in order to keep up with IT consumerization, they also need adopt a “manage the middle” attitude in order to bridge the gap between the consumer and the corporation. It’s a challenge granted but doing so will allow employees to leverage enterprise technologies without sacrificing security while using the tools and techniques that best engage customers.

Photo courtesy of Likeable Media www.likeable.com

The abundance of social media platforms has empowered users to provide feedback in new many ways. Because of this, we’re seeing a widening of the gap in a company’s ability to provide a satisfactory customer experience. Turning on social as a part of a customer service component can unleash a flood of information that organizations are simply not prepared to handle much less process.

However, companies can harness this social media feedback through the use of new monitoring platforms that better connect the consumer to the business. But having an infrastructure that brings multichannel visibility to the enterprise is essential to make sure the customers send out a Tweet or post a comment are promptly and seamlessly directed to the right person. Companies can no longer just react, they need to act on — and in many cases anticipate – issues at the speed their customers have them in order to turn socially-aired issued into opportunities.

Earlier this week, InformationWeek came out with an article on 5 Tips for Handling Complaints on Social Media. The first tip they offered was to use listening tools to monitor but more importantly, better manage the huge amount of information you can create trying to get a hold of how and what people are saying about you in the socialsphere. So while it’s an important step, it’s essential that the data collected is not just usable but contextual and referencable as well. Full integration into the CRM is key to making social a channel addition to existing customer service strategy.

You can read up here on how you can extend your contact center to include social.

That’s as big a question as any right now in customer service circles. In the Web-driven world, data is everywhere, and it promises to be one of the foremost tools in helping companies match rising consumer expectations.

Forrester’s Kate Leggett says there are four keys to good customer service: good technology, good customer service processes, a well-managed organization that values its employees, and good data. While companies often account for these first three elements, too many overlook the importance of data. As customers use smartphones, PCs, social media and landlines to contact your customer service department with their questions and concerns, companies can compile data from all of these channels to create a more uniform and well-informed service experience.

By working with data management professionals, customer service can sift through the mountain of data to pinpoint the most effective solutions based on past customer inquiries. That way, when a customer reaches out to your contact center, you have not only all their past interaction data at your disposal but also the data-sourced solutions from other customers with similar issues, allowing for a faster resolution.

Ultimately, better use of data means greater efficiency, higher customer satisfaction, and a better customer experience—and in today’s world, customer service and customer experience go hand in hand. And when this information is shared across channels and across the enterprise, companies can create a world-class customer experience and satisfy the expectations of Consumer 2.0.