Sometimes working in and around customer service environments gives you an opportunity to stand back from a situation and just see it from above, and most importantly, from “outside”. Seeing first hand how failures in notification, communication and co-ordination effectively destroyed customer trust really brought home to me, again, how much value there is in CEBP coupled with service design and a customer experience focus.

Recently I was in the United Kingdom and hired a car to get from A to B for an important family event. The short version of the story is that car was malfunctioning badly, and only barely got me to my destination, shaken and stirred. This is where my customer experience journey began. First of all let me outline how that proceeded.

(1) When I phoned the hire company they told me to phone the breakdown service.

(2) The breakdown service gave me an ETA of within an hour, and turned up 3 hours later.

(3) They didn’t actually fix the car, and next day it didn’t work, so I was late form my family event. I had to get cabs, back and forth and pretty much I lost half my day.

(4) I phone the breakdown service and am told I can’t book ahead for a mechanic, I have to call from my hotel and wait until one shows.

(5) I phone the car hire company and am told that unless the car it toable I won’t be able to get a replacement, or/ and could I bring it back to the airport to get a new one today, because they are understaffed and can’t get out to me.

(6) Mechanic arrives but didn’t know the car type, my phone number, or any other details, that made it hard for him to find me on site. I had given them to the customer care people fronting the breakdown service, who were representing the car hire company and were “there employees” Anyway, the guy fixes the car.

(7) I call the car hire company, and front desk apologizes for the bad experience I’ve had, and she says obviously we won’t be charging you.

(8) Next day I get back to the airport and the staff at front desk have no record of my interactions and my experience to date, they can’t refund me because of some technical issues, and I’m given the name and email address of the location manager.

(9) I email the location manager with a full, and detailed description of my experience on the next working day, Tuesday morning. I don’t receive any notification that my email has been received or read. Nobody contacts me on the next business day (Wed) to tell me they are on top of this etc so I phone them. As a part of this telephone conversation I am assured a cheque will be issued, and that the systems did have my details, and that the notes on my experience were on the system.

(10) Today, still no cheque. Still no notification from the company as to where it is in process: is it sent, is it in the mail, when can I expect it to arrive? Still no trust in the company. Real and significant Brand Damage potential.

Some Take Away Points:

(1)  ”My experience” was what I lived, and what lives with me. That’s just how human memory works. You may have many good reasons why things just didn’t work out, but that’s not how the customer will view it;

(2) Although “Company” are not “crazy bad” the cumulative effect of all the mis-matches, mis-communications, and un-ordinations is that I lost Trust. Once my Trust was gone, no amount of reason would bring it back. Customer experience is almost an “emergent quality”, a culmination of all the little things you get right.

(3) It could have been all very different. Let me hypothesize another scenario.

Using CEBP to Delivery Customer Care Experience

(1) You take my phone number and make it a unique identification. When I ring you, you should know who I am. You tell me who to ring if there are any problems and you send two numbers to my phone (via sms/ email/ or as a contact) so that I have those numbers at point of need.

(2) You ask do I have a map to get me to my location; have I been on this journey before; you ascertain if there are any special contexts to my journey that might enable you to understand my total journey (going to a wedding, important meeting, holiday etc.). You figure out what kind of traveller type I am.

(3) When the car breaks down, I call the number I have been given and the person I was last speaking to answers at the front desk. She greets me by name and listens to my problem. While on the call she locates the AA service, ascertains where I am, and directs them to my location. She assures me that they will be there in under 20 minutes, and informs me that if the mechanic thinks it will be more than 20 minutes to fix when he gets there, they can arrange a cab back to the hotel, and the car will be delivered to the hotel car park for me. Basically don’t worry, we’ve got your back.

(4) At 20 minutes after our call, the AA is running late due to traffic. An automated call is generated by the AA (reading the van location and the traffic flow) calling me, and telling me that my AA mechanic John, is approximately 20 minutes behind time. If I’d like to activate a call to a local cab company to get a taxi sent to my location, just press 1) and you will be connected to the nearest taxi cab provider.

(5) The AA mechanic receives an email with all my relevant details: my name, the make of car, the hotel I need to go to, and the name of the person to contact in the hire company if anything more needs to be arranged. This is all a part of their Service Breakdown InterAct. The mechanic fixes the car and signs off on his mobile device that the car is fixed and the job is closed out. This triggers a call to the car hire front desk and to the customer. The AA mechanic drives it to the local hotel, and gets a cab back to his own van.

(6) Because the Car Fix event has been closed out the car hire people are prompted to phone the customer to ensure that they made it to their event on time, and also to ascertain how they felt about how the Car Hire Company has responded to the situation. Would you use us again? recommend this service to a friend etc.? OK. Push button 1 to activate your credit card repayment. Thank you for your continued custom.

(7) I receive a full report from the car hire company detailing the days events, the times and reports from all parties, and a total due balance of zero on my statement.

So Finally, Finally.

I saw a lot of comparisons with my Ashcloud experience. In this instance it was the car company that was impacting on my wider life, on my connections, on my commitments. The car hire company needed to co-ordinate with other service providers such as the car repair service providers, potentially with taxi cab companies, with airports, and with other car hire providers. They were part of a network of service providers and being able to Pull on the Resources of these other providers in a real time, synchronized fashion was the key to delivery. Of course, getting your own systems, processes, and people lined up properly in the first place is stage one.

In at least 4 recent articles Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP) messaging was being used to push renewed enthusiasm for non CEBP product offerings. Several articles or posts in NetworkWorld and UC strategies provided a recap of the Unified Communications Summit which focused on CEBP messaging as a way to sell the value of UC solutions. Reduxonline also referenced CEBP messaging relative to needed BPM (business process management) product iterations.

Now, VoiceSage as a world class CEBP hosted application has been evangelizing the CEBP message, improving our enterprise clients’ business processes, and focusing on creating hard and fast ROIs for many years.

Given the new interest in CEBP by UC, BPM and other solutions it is important to take a deeper look at how VoiceSage can be used by our clients or partners as an ” over the top” application to provide the equivalent of glue or a lever for these other applications.

There are lots of ways the VoiceSage application can make up for current limitations in the standard UC and BPM suite of solutions. Here are two big examples.

1. SILOS
Interoperability between vendor specific UC solutions is a big problem that is dampening down the CIO enthusiasm needed to drive UC purchases. Interestingly, there is a new protocol being presented by Cisco and other vendors refered to as Viper or Verification involving PSTN Reachability. The purpose of this protocol is to find a simple, realtime method of recognizing if/when phone numbers within different UC systems can be recognized, authorized and reached. This would help to bring competing UC installations beyond the silo of the enterprise.

One of the hidden assets of CEBP solutions is, like Telcos, they have enormous amounts of data that come attached to telephone numbers. The vital, real time requirement to identify whether a phone number is working and attached to the right party is what the VIPER protocol requires. In its simplest terms the Viper protocol would act as a shared database that can be accessed by varied and competing UC solutions to authenticate numbers. CEBP solutions like VoiceSage already have this functionality and often possess a realtime database that rivals anything easily leveraged within even a single telco.

In the BPM world, if a human is required within a particular process, email tends to be the only notification option. CEBP moves BPM beyond the walls of the enterprise by leveraging voice and sms functionality while providing simple ways to pull consumers around the world into a process too.

VoiceSage’s ability to quickly glue together or leverage other solutions in our work with the National Health Service or the world’s largest business database firm provides just two examples of how our CEBP tool can strengthen other solutions.

2. SCALE
UC and BPM solutions are frequently limited in their scalability by being attached to standard server license or hardware focused business models as opposed to cloud applications. Furthermore, UC solutions can be limited by the IP or PSTN infrastructure of the enterprise they are serving. VoiceSage as a SaaS or Cloud Communications service provides a platform for our clients and vendor partners to overcome these real time scale issues. A spectacular example of the power of CEBP scalability is VoiceSage’s work in bringing American Airlines on board within 4 hours to help respond to the volcanic ash cloud disruptions.

Our experience shows the vast majority of important business process improvements required by the world’s largest industries involve communicating beyond the walls of the enterprise to thousands or millions of customers. BPM and UC solutions have a distinct disadvantage when the requirement is consumer scale at a truly domestic or international level. VoiceSage clients and vendor partners can scale up,down, or around the world to meet the real time needs of their customers.

UC, BPM, and other application vendors are certainly beginning to come to terms with their Silo and Scale challenges. In a world driven by the ubiquitous mobile device using sms or voice as the preferred method of consumer transaction, CEBP solutions can be used to glue other applications and leverage business processes immediately.

VoiceSage allows our clients and partners to improve their own business processes and at the same time better utilize existing software investments. When we talk about this internally we talk about “edge processes”. It means we strive to understand how we can deliver improved business performance by using our transactional business model. This allows us to eliminate the capital expenses, eliminate large integration project costs, and eliminate the long wait to achieve ROI. In essence, we strive for Win/Win/Win business models that are by definition unbeatable!

Patrick Murphy
May 13, 2010
USA

Explore Tags: BPMS, CEBP, Cisco, Unified Communications, Viper, voicesage

We have made good progress over the past few weeks with VoiceSage’s launch into America. Mark Oppermann, VoiceSage’s Sales Director, spent a week with me in and around Boston talking with partners and potential clients.

One of the highlights of this visit was our chance to provide a keynote presentation called Social Media meets the Contact Center for the NECCF Spring event. This is a slightly edited version of the presentation that we gave to the folks in attendance. I am confident we will be seeing lots more of the NECCF community. Our practical message that VoiceSage helps enterprises move their business metrics using a variety of phone and web tool sets was very well received. The questions about great business cases were fantastic. The business challenges seem to be the same regardless of where we are in  the world.

A second highlight was our meeting with members of the Dialogic team. VoiceSage has been a long time Dialogic customer and is now a member of their partner program. Dialogic has been an early advocate and enthusiastic supporter of the CEBP space. We look forward to working with them.

We enjoy providing a bit of a promotion to the April ECOMM conference being held in San Francisco. I will be attending with colleague Paul Sweeney. VoiceSage sponsored the ECOMM European event last Fall. This is always a fantastic gathering of thought leaders in the Telco industry. For those not able to attend in person, I would encourage following the event via several virtual back channels that are available.

Sincerely

Patrick Murphy

VoiceSage USA

April, 2010

Explore Tags: CEBP, Dialogic, ECOMM, NECCF, voicesage

Thomas Howe gives VoiceSage some airtime on his respected Industry Blog www.thomashowe.com The only picture of me poor Thomas could dig up is a few years old now and before the arrival of my two daughters, so if you meet me, no I am not ill

Thomas is a leading light in the next generation of Telco services, particularly in the area of Cloud Communications technologies and an advisor and service provider to some of the leading Telecommunications companies, vendors, and new entrants.

Explore Tags: ThomasHowe VoiceSage

This week the Operations Division of VoiceSage announced the second phase of their strategic rollout of Service Management processes.

Four new jobs are envisioned for the service desk, incident management and problem management processes. The investment has taken the form of hardware, software, new accommodation, as well as increased staffing levels within the department. The first of the new members of staff have already been recruited and will be joining the team for on-boarding and training in mid April

Commenting on the increased capacity Hugh O’Malley, Operations Manager said “the investment from the board will allow the service management function to improve effectiveness and drive efficiencies through the service deliver processes. The money also confirms VoiceSage’s commitment to providing our customers with the best customer experience.”

In tandem with service support investment this week has also seen a huge investment in the form of new infrastructure. The infrastructure is an integral part of VoiceSage’s commitment to IT Service Continuity. The new hardware with multiple node and element redundancy builds upon the ‘always on’ nature of VoiceSage.

Explore Tags: Jobs Ireland investment ITIL ITSM

One of the VoiceSage company goals entering 2010 was to launch across the USA. So, I was excited to join VoiceSage a few months ago after seeing its fantastic success with the largest enterprise clients across the UK and Ireland.

In this CEBP, Cloud Communications or Telco 2.0 industry (pick your definition), that I’ve worked to grow and written about here in the US since it’s inception, we have seen years of talk, research, and pointing towards a future filled with opportunities.

However, VoiceSage stands out as unique within the industry simply because it has been able to create real value for the largest and most demanding clients across Retail, Utilities, Government, Healthcare, Banking,Insurance, and the Telco markets. For a company of any size, anywhere, the VoiceSage client base in the UK and Ireland is impressive.

Over these first few months, our “soft” launch into America has been recognized by thought leaders across the industry. Here are a few mentions.

During the Telco 2.0, Orlando Executive Brainstorm conference in December, Thomas Howe’s CEBP presentation to the crowd of Telco executives identified VoiceSage and Ifbyphone as the two leading examples of CEBP solutions in the world.

In January, VoiceSage was invited to join two CEBP panels as part of the ITEXPO’s Cloud Communications Summit in Miami Beach. Here is a video link to one of our panel discussions.

In February, VoiceSage was mentioned as an industry leader in an interesting article about the difference between CEBP and Unified Communications by UC-Edge.

VoiceSage was invited to add our thoughts on improving customer experiences using CEBP with an essay in the Cloud Communications 2010 ebook being published later in March. This book has a stellar cast of industry participants and will certainly be required reading throughout the telecommunications industry.

The NorthEast Contact Center Forum asked VoiceSage to offer a keynote presentation during its March 23rd Summit near Boston. The theme is Social Media meets the Contact Center. We are excited to share client uses cases from a wide variety of our customers’ experiences.

Finally, we will be attending and supporting the Spring ECOMM event in San Francisco in April. This event is certainly where the future of Telco gets talked about and launched. VoiceSage sponsored the Fall ECOMM conference in Europe.

With this progress, VoiceSage’s launch across the US is just getting started. Be sure to look for regular VoiceSage announcements and updates coming soon.

Sincerely
Patrick Murphy
VoiceSage
March, 2010

Explore Tags: CEBP, Cloud Communications, ECOMM, NECCF, voicesage

eComm Amsterdam

VoiceSage are Platinum Sponsors of eComm Europe this Oct 28-30 in Amsterdam. We are going there as part of our commitment to bringing the CEBP message to the Telecommunications ecosystem and to hopefully find new and useful ways to make life easier and more productive for everyone. As such we won’t be “plugging our products and services” but speaking about the broader vision for CEBP.

Lee Dryburg the founder of eComm was reflecting on the San Francisco even in March of this year and it occurred to him that you didn’t really need to theme threads and modules. What you needed to do was have consistently high value engaging speakers and then let the eclectic knowledge bases “bang off each other” to create new connections and new conversations.

There are a number of different speakers at the event which might not only bring a spark to the conversation, but bring the kerosene as well:

Michael Jackson, former COO of Skype and currently a partner at Mangrove-VC, will speak about “Investing in Disruption”. As someone who has done it themselves, and who reviews and invests in opportunities, Michael is going to put forward some thoughts on common attributes of successful disrupters. There will follow a panel discussion with top Investment people who have also been entrepreneurs (CEO & President of Rebtel, Hjalamr Winbladh); and another high profile investor with extensive disruption experience (TBA) and also, Mr. Umair Haque who will hopefully discuss why current investor models are mostly broken.

Umair Haque will also bring his “New Capitalism” model to the current Telecommunications incumbents. I don’t know exactly what he will say here but it would be interesting to see what lessons can be learned from the Financial Services value meltdown.

Thomas Howe will speak about how he sees the CEBP market evolving, and he should have some great insights here as he is an advisor to the Telco2 guys, and has worked with nearly all the parties in the relevant ecosystem. The Title alone is intriguing.

Graham Brierton, VocieSage CTO will speak about “Edge as Value/ Value as Edge” where he will explore how there is a universe of “dark data” that could be repurposed to open up flows, and create new value. This will tie in to some of Umair’s research on Creating New Value, not just shifting old value along the value chain.

eComm is born out of a community and is looking to develop along those community values.  To get the best deals on flights and hotels etc. I would advise you to start booking now. The event itself is relatively inexpensive as far as these things go. Have a look at the full list of speakers. I think its pretty impressive.

This is a test to see if I can update from MSFT Live Writer.

Explore Tags: test

And Welcome back.

The New, New Thing & The Old, Old Problem.

Werner, Amazon CIO, said an interesting thing at the last Telco2 in London: "we only look for old problems, and innovate to solve them". Getting your latest newest thing to integrate with the slightly older newer thing, isn’t going to deliver you any meaningful innovation. JP has an interesting point to make on one of his recent post on Confused of Calcutta: "The customer is the scarce resource". JP goes into an examination of peoples response to companies that create "artificial barriers" that create "artificial scarcity". Citing a study that indicates that those pirating games do so largely because the "free route" has less "friction to adoption" (i.e. less passwords, less pin numbers, less reconfirms, less etc. etc.), means that it is just easier to go free (if still, illegal). In a way these ties in with something Norman Lewis of Telco2 was saying; his kids made an estimate as to how much the artist themselves would make from any particular delivery channel, and chose the route that compensated them the most. I think both points are related: People Like Fair.

What stinks of "not fair"? Ummm, banning Google Voice from Apple for one. Me not being able to get my LastFm on my iphone (both of which I pay for by the way). If you ask a kid, they can mostly tell you what the definition of Not Fair is, and here’s another thing: in psychological experiments children will reject an unfair deal even if it means getting nothing at the end of the day. The child would rather not have anything, than have an unfair deal. And this kind of Fair Deal imperative seems to be in all cultures, it is embedded in our human design.

So when I start thinking about Innovation, and Products, and Services, "what’s fair" is not a bad place to start. What’s fair will have an audience. What’s fair gets a market. So perhaps the "Old Problem" is "How do we create and deliver a business model that is more fair than the solutions we see around us?".

And Speaking of Fair: VoiceSage

The people at Telco2 are lining up more sessions to progress the ideas of the two sided business model for Telcos. They are also releasing a report on Beyond Voice and Messaging which goes into some detail as to how CEBP (Communications Enabled Business Processes) can deliver significant business value. I am delighted to say that one of VoiceSage’s customers is the focus of one of the 8 detailed case studies on the use of CEBP and the customer in question has gone from strength to strength as they continue to use the VoiceSage service and business approach to enable process after process.

There are many other companies now starting to say that Unified Communications is really just a bunch of CEBP’s tied together. I’ve spoken directly to a senior analyst at a top firm about this, and we are of one opinion on that particular "marketing approach".

Real thought leaders are asked to speak at places like eComm uh hum …. and we use these forums not to speak about what we do, but what can be done. I am particularly thrilled that we will be on just before The Umair (Umair Haque) of the most consistently thought provoking, passionate, and genuinely "Disruptive" thinkers out there.

The Good, The Bad, and Just Being Able to Breath

I found this piece on an IBM Forum and thought it worth sharing. It basically says that many CFO’s, in even the largest companies, need to have a look at what is tying up cash. Incorrect billing information, incorrect buying policy, or poor compliance with already agreed "blanket purchasing deals" result in millions going uncollected. In the IBM example it was $250m, for one company. GULP.  Not giving credit where credit is not due; not allowing your late payments to age and turn into bad debt; not being rigorous about removing all points of payment friction, will cost you a fortune.

(Disclosure: I am an the Advisory Board to eComm).

A brief hiatus dear reader(s). Just putting together a new blog structure. Meanwhile, why not jump over to @paulsweeney to follow my inane updates.

technorati tags: customer, interaction, voice, messaging, customer, contact