Technology As Innovator

Abstract

This article gives a guide on how to make profits from an enterprise’s Customer Supports function. Two advanced business opportunities are discussed. It also describes the impact of technology, process and strategy in the business renovation.

Customer Support: From the traditionally cost sector…

Customer Support function has long been considered a cost to business, as it rarely brings more values.

Well, is it the case? If it is accused to not bring values, is it possible that they did not attempt to get value from it?

…To getting golds back from the star-fruits quezacotl

“Vietnamese folklore goes that once upon a time, a man was very annoyed by a strange large bird eating the star-fruits in his garden. He tried to trap the creature and when he succeeded, the bird offered to carry him to a gold island to be released. The man became prosperous with the gold he picked from the isle after then.”

You can get a high Return on your Investment into Customer Support.

Many entrepreneurs know that good customer support is what makes customer happy and thus more willing to buy more and/or spread the good words. Customer Support has been recognized as a PR tool rather than.

Customer Support can be exploited to:

• Increase customer satisfaction
• Develop customer loyalty
• Make the current customers spread the good word: the famous word-of-mouth marketing technique
• Build a community of customers
• Enhance the brand of the enterprise

Now, let’s push it further than that.

(1) Customer Support to increase employee satisfaction

Employee satisfaction is an intangible value of any enterprise. In real life, business development and employee growth is generally mutual exclusive. A way to solve the dilemma will be discussed.

(2) Customer Support as competing Strategy

Becoming the first in the industry requires good Strategies. Maintaining the position requires better Strategies. With the rapid flourishment of the knowledge economy, technology has come in place to revolutionize strategic planning. More on strategies coming next…

How? The five steps

1. Just read

Before actually doing it, it’s advisable that you explore what need done in order to achieve your goal. This article’s got it all for you from a very high level view.

2. Automate it

Employees who do the Customer Supports are agents with specific customer management and troubleshooting skills.

Agents’ tasks are repetitive and require a high level of concentration and accuracy. On the other side, managers want to be updated periodically and recurrently without having to micro-manage. This can put a lot of pressure both employees and team leaders.

Ultimately, now that we are setting the business objective very high (remember all the items covered above?), it would be next to chaos if all things are done manually.

The work must be automated. It is then agents are provided with tools to complete their works, checklists so as not to miss any item and instant support when they need it. Managers receive reports, statistics and figures to analyze and make decisions. Furthermore, automation saves man-hours so the firm may concentrate on developing the most talented workers. Eventually, automation frees all levels from tedious and repetitive works to spend more time on thinking how to improve the process.

A system should be in place to do the harder works so that people can work smarter.

3. Establish a process to support it

For any system or workflow to work properly, the process must be modified to support it.

Process has to be defined so as to gradually switching from paper works to entering and obtaining information from the systems installed.

Re-defining the process is the next investment an enterprise has to spend. However, the Return on Investment shall be well worth it. With automation in place, costs of some processes themselves will be cut down significantly.

For example, it used to take at least 15 minutes to search for a file of a customer in a heap of documents. Now it takes maximum 15 seconds to get all information of that customer by searching in database. That makes it 32 times faster!

So far, Statement (2) has been explained.

4. Mean to really support it

When the system and the process has been in place is the time for training and changing the habit of users. Training effectively has been difficult enough, making a change is even more.

It requires high commitment and strong confidence from Board of Management to request, encourage and motivate employees into the new environment.

Eventually, only if the change is seen as the key strategy to compete will all of its potentials be unlocked. Nothing is more powerful than union between all attending parties, strategies, processes and the product.

5. Let the whole world know

Just what are you waiting for? Let the whole world know
that you’re different,
that you have leaped ahead of all your competitors,
that your customers will be served the best way possible.

Life Business prospect has never been as bright.

Case Study

Suppose you’re the owner of an electronics retailing chain.

You may want to know the level of satisfaction of your customer. You will conduct a survey using Customer Relationship Management System (CRM). Since most of your market segments use the Internet regularly, it is easier to release the survey in electronic format.

To ensure that the survey is done correctly, you may want to arrange your agents to help/guide your (potential) customers through the survey. How do you know if your agents are doing well? Start the Quality Monitoring (QM) System. It will track the interaction between you agents and customers, be the media text chats, audio or video. After saving the interaction, you can always review and remark the performance of any specific agents.

Oh! Some agents are not doing as well as you expected. What will you do? It’s suggested that you review their skill set and portfolio in the Human Resource Management System (HRMS) to make judgment on how to grow them to the required level.

After obtaining the information on the agents, you may want to send them to Training. Today, training doesn’t have to be formal classes with costly instructors from outside. For your information, thousands - I mean hundreds of thousands - training courses, from business to technical, from soft skills to customer management, have been packaged in the form of e-Learning, delivered to your PC, and always ready to launch.

After the training, expect “Wow!” expressions from your beloved customers!

Now that your employees receive adequate feedback of their performance and personalized training addressing their gaps. Their productivity and loyalty will increase proportionally. Happier agents, happier customers too. By the way, has this solved the problem (1) listed above?

The whole process covered above should always be put under supervision. Thank goodness, software can do the micro-tracking for you. With information collected, it is time for Information Analytics power to shine. You can ‘teach’ the software to ‘know’ your Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and it will compare the actual performance against your goals to produce conclusion, warnings and predictions.

At the very end of the process, Reports only need to be generated for You to know everything you want, with as few key hits as you want.

Notes

Please note that while I described this scenario for Customer Support only, similar approach can be used on a wide range of business functions: sales to production management, delivery to marketing. Software can be much more powerful if you know how to exploit them.

The case above involves several systems/modules. Theoretically, CRM and HRM systems are typical of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Systems; Quality Monitoring, Training, KPI are typical of Workforce Optimization Systems.

Conclusion

It can be concluded that from my analysis, Customer Support should no longer be considered a cost. Instead, it brings more opportunities if it is used the right way, is supported with functional systems and appropriate processes and is lead by a clear strategy.

Acknowledgment

with special thanks to:

Gideon Schipper, Business Analyst Manager, First Consulting Group Vietnam

Minh Nguyen, Business Analyst, First Consulting Group Vietnam

Phuc Nguyen, ASEAN System Manager, Procter & Gamble

The idea of Semantic Web is to bring Artificial Intelligence to the World Wide Web.

Basing on the current achievements of Web 2.0, including social networks, B2C and C2C e-commerce, new Web robots will be able to crawl the web and collect information: profiles, photographs, calendars, retail information and process it into a coherent picture of a person, place or thing.

Paradise…

It will enable service providers to give you more precise recommendations. For example, e-commerce websites recommend a list of items that you probably will buy, travel agents offer tours that would match your preferences, social networks introduce people you may want to know.

Sounds superb cool right?

…Or is it?

You may want to think twice.
Imagine. The web robots will know, then analysts of that website will know, then very soon the whole world will know, your name, your house, occupation, habits, romance history. They will analyze your data even more carefully than do you, and treasure and publish the information for a longer time than you might expect it to. Worse, your sun-bathe photo or even video may be open for the whole world to view and comment.

To make it worse, cri.me never leaves any new advance untouched. Imagine what will be done on you when you are revealed all over?

I call it Nightmare.

It’s high time we re-thought Privacy and considered the information we publish on the internet, before the next decade when what I described come in place.

More articles will be written in the “re-thinking” process.

“I’m above average!”

Definition

The Lake Wobegon effect is the human tendency to overestimate one’s achievements and capabilities in relation to others.

It is named for the fictional town of Lake Wobegon from the radio series A Prairie Home Companion, where, according to Garrison Keillor, “all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average”.

In a similar way, a large majority of people claim to be above average. Experiments and surveys conducted to hundred thousands people from a variety of classes and from many background, have repeatedly shown that most people believe that they possess attributes that are better or more desirable than average.

Statistics

In achivement-driven societies like the US, the percentage of people showing Lake Wobegon effect is 80%. In other countries where people are taught to be humble, the rate is 70%.

The effect is socially conditioned

The effect reflects ingroup bias and wishful thinking. In contrast, people who admit that they are worse than average are considered self-handicapped and their behavior is treated as socially false consensus.

Logical reasoning

Mean of a series

If the GDP per capita of one country is X, anyone who make more than X are above average.

Binary series

10 students take the examination which result is either 1 (pass) or 0 (fail). Assuming 1 student fails, all other 9 are automatically above average.

System contained in a system

It is possible that all MIT students are above the average of a collection of universities.

Attitude

It is easier for people to spot others’ mistakes than their own, and when the experience becomes a reflex, it creates a tendency to perceive one’s self as superior to others.

Lake Wobegon effect shows human attitude toward survival: the stronger live.

Parents can treat their children as “above average” in order to boost their self-esteem.

Last word

Dare to be Wobegonally different by admitting that you’re not above average?