A recently published white paper urged the industry to build “high performance customer contact centers,” and offered three questions to enable managers to assess whether or not their centers would qualify as such. “Does your operation work in tandem with the rest of the enterprise on key operational and performance metrics such as cost controls and service quality?” “Are individual workers aware of clear performance goals aligned with business objectives, and do workers have timely and accurate access to their progress towards those goals?” “Is the flow of information into and out of the center controlled and channeled so that appropriate managers and analysts can interpret the raw data and use it to create specific prescriptions for change that improve performance?” A contact center that was recently shut down and its entire staff laid off could have answered all three questions affirmatively. They’re still just as unemployed as if the answers had been No.
Customers will always have questions about the products that they buy, both before and after the sale. Every complex tool inherently has a support burden; the user must make an investment in learning how to use it in order to gain the promised productivity benefits from the purchase. Most traditional software (and far too many SaaS ones, too) company senior managers, knowing this basic reality, ask themselves “how can we provide the answers to customer questions as cheaply as possible?” The question alone is very revealing, and those who consider themselves support professionals need to understand the meaning in it. A company that only talks about the importance of cutting costs in the contact center sees no real value in the support function; it’s an unfortunately necessary evil. When it can be gotten rid of; it will be. Nor does such a company truly consider its support employees to be professionals making a valued contribution. When they can be gotten rid of, or replaced by volunteer “community support;” they will be.
The questions asked by the white paper are not themselves inherently bad. The problem is that absent an appropriate vision, they inevitably lead in the wrong direction. Failing to look past the immediate performance and cost questions being asked by Senior Management to see what prompted them can be expensive. The price can include derailed careers and economic hardship for a lot of people — one of whom may be you. If cutting costs is the only acceptable answer, it’s likely that the wrong question is being asked. Shuttered centers and laid-off support staff members lie at the end of that road. If you don’t want your center and staff to be another example, it’s time to turn back and to rewrite the questions.
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For over thirty years, we’ve been helping technology companies to more effectively address their customer lifecycle management issues. We bring a focus on customer retention and increasing per-customer profitability to our work that is built upon a solid foundation of industry-wide experience, research and hands-on expertise. While the specific tools and services we apply will depend upon the needs of the particular project, the overall process remains consistent: Assess, Design, and Build.
Assess
Successful and effective decision-making relies on a cornerstone of accurate and up-to-date knowledge. Mikael Blaisdell & Associates have been doing successful assessment projects for all sizes and types of companies all over the world for decades, giving senior management teams access to actionable information and specific recommendations.
Design
What service products could be added to your company’s portfolio to significantly increase revenue and encourage customer retention? What organizational resources would be required, and at what level of investment? If the decision was made to proceed, what would the project plan look like? The future-state blueprint pulls all of the pieces together and serves as the basis for implementation.
Build
As seasoned senior managers know all too well, designing a better approach is only the beginning of the real work. To be effective, the team has to be brought to adopt the new approach company-wide as their own. The hands-on experience of Mikael Blaisdell & Associates, combined with our reputation and standing in the SaaS, contact center and services sectors, is a significant asset that can be deployed to reduce the time required for the project and improve the chances for success.
In addition to direct engagements with corporations, we’ve also worked with CRM and contact center management technology companies to design tools and products, served as founders and directors of professional associations, developed training courses for service & support representatives and their managers, spoken at industry conferences on a wide range of topics, and written hundreds of columns and articles.
That’s who we are. What we’d really like to talk about, however, is what we can do for you.
More Information
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“It’s what you don’t know about your customer relationships that can cause you to lose them.”
–The SaaS Customer Retention QuickStat
Revised: October 9, 2012