Uncovering the networked customer

In a world of total corporate transparency and competition so fierce that customers are able to demand high value services for free, organisations that can live up to these exacting customer service standards are among those destined to succeed.

A new level of corporate transparency has taken hold and customers are increasingly demanding to have access to skilled customer service experts wherever and whenever they choose. For vendors, this is a new world not for the faint-hearted. But for those prepared to embrace advanced unified communications, and break down the barriers between their customers and the experts within their corporation, it offers an opportunity to establish a competitive difference based on the empowerment of the ‘networked expert’.

The networked expert could potentially be anyone within an organisation who could help solve a customer’s issue – the product development lead, data protection manager, or chief operating officer – customer contact is moving decisively away from simple transactional enquiries, toward technical, complex and specific questions that demand expert responses delivered seamlessly through the organisational network.

This shift has accelerated in the past few years and has now become an imperative thanks to a perfect storm of individual factors – from the onset of a global recession, to the simple fact that so many customer contact organisations have failed to live up to customer expectations for so long. From the customer perspective, everything is about to change.

Right first time, first time

According to a study from the Call Centre Managers’ Forum , first contact resolution has been found to be the single most important challenge to improving customer satisfaction. In fact, failing to achieve first call resolution accounts for a minimum of 30 per cent of a contact centres’ operating cost, due to repeat calls and the extra time that is then spent trying to find the right person to help the customer .

Industry experts are predicting that major improvements to first contact resolution could be made over the next five years thanks to presence technologies. The convergence of IP telephony, multichannel contact through SIP and the use of instant messaging (IM), presence technologies and collaboration tools within the contact centre will enable networked organisations to put experts into direct customer engagement, providing better, faster and more satisfactory advice or solutions. In essence, the barriers between back and front office will begin to disappear.

This new ‘networked expert’ can be anywhere, connected via a network that spans office, home and mobile devices, and delivered via a single, simple interface that is as easy to use on the desktop as on the move. These experts may work anywhere – and for anyone – and requests will be routed intelligently, based on expertise, appropriateness and availability.

Voice tracking and accountability technology will need to be fundamentally embedded across the enterprise, to ensure compliance and workflow management are maintained in this decentralised system. Smart tags with time, customer and expert stamps will ensure that conversations can be conducted between customer and a person with the right area of expertise for the lifetime of the issue, providing heightened customer satisfaction.

But what will really make the networked expert become a reality is a cultural shift within the organisation that takes account the impact customer engagement will have on knowledge workers, to manage them effectively as a prized resource.

In practical terms, this could involve creating rotas of experts in an ‘expert pool’ who are effectively ‘on call’ to solve customer problems, protecting the identity of experts so that the same people don’t always get pulled in and even building in additional routing criteria relating to media preference, language skills, geography or estimated time to availability.

Ensuring these experts can deliver the level of customer experience and brand consistency that customers expect may require investment in cross-enterprise customer and brand awareness training. There may also be a requirement to incorporate multi-person conferencing into the process, with the primary customer facing person mediating the customer conversation with experts who are less skilled in managing the customer relationship.

But the final step in releasing embedded expertise is to unleash the hidden knowledge within the customer community itself. BT’s Fragvergence research found that a staggering 82% of UK and 85% of US customers use social networking sites to check out the quality of products and services, using ratings systems and reviews from fellow customers. Customers prove to be remarkably willing to help one another.

BT’s Hubbub forum (developed as an experimental trial by BT researchers Simon Thompson, Cefn Hoile and Duong Nguyen) is a good example of this. Hubbub was a forum for users of BT’s HomeHub and Soft Phone products and was responsible for deflecting a significant number of calls away from the contact centres whilst raising BT’s awareness of what people were doing with the product as well as what the problems and, most significantly, what the solutions to those problems were. This started to pull in networked expertise from BT’s own customer base.

Similar stories are true for customer forums set up by Dell and Tivo. In Dell’s case, one customer had contributed the equivalent of 123 working days on the community for no reward other than that he ‘enjoys helping people’. It is estimated that 20—50 per cent of Dell’s customers leave the Dell Community site with an answer to their question. That’s a significant proportion of calls diverted from their contact centre. And even when networked experts from within the organisation engage in these forums, by their nature their solutions remain public and searchable, cutting down significantly on repeat requests.

Losing customers has never been as painful; never been so critical to mitigate against. It’s also never been so unnecessary. All the communications tools that can genuinely create an environment conducive to customer service are ready and available now, today. In all of the examples above, there is one clear common factor: the core philosophy that losing a customer has become more expensive than investing in the equipment and processes necessary to introduce the networked expert – and, through them, a better customer experience – to the enterprise.

Loudhouse Research/ RightNow Technologies cited in Davey, N. (2009), How to Engage with the Credit Crunched Customer, MyCustomer.com, 16 January
Hickman, M. (2008), Fragvergence: Changing Consumer Attitudes to Diverse Contact Channels, BT White Paper
Millard, N. (2007), From Agent to Expert: The Future of the Contact Centre Advisor, BT White Paper
Ashgrove, N.K. (2003), First Call Resolutiona href="http://callcentres.com.au/first_call_resolution.htm#1" target="_blank">introduction to Quality Management, September 2003
Landoline, K. (2008), First Contact Resolution: The Antidote for Costly Rework in the Contact Center, May 30, 2008, Yankee Group