A Rant On Social Support: If You Are Doing This - Stop!

  I am going to make this a brief one today.  Just venting really.  In my very first blog post on Multi-Channel CX (see it here) I talked about how companies can leverage multi-channel CX as a kind of force-multiplier; especially important if you are an underdog in your market and do not have deep pockets for a large contact center or a loyal user base willing to do half the work for you (crowd sourcing).

 Without naming names I would like to talk about one company that is violating the first rule of CX:  Do Not Make It Difficult For Your Customers To Get Support!

  Making it difficult to find your phone number is a bad practice.  Do not do it.  Sure if you have a phone number people will call you and that costs money.  You know what is worse?  When no one is calling you!  And that is the exact situation you will find yourself in if you force your customers down a prescribed support path not of their choosing - especially when that support path is ill-suited for their contact type.

  Take, for example, a technical trouble shooting call.  This kind of call is a dynamic human-to-human interaction with intense two-way communication.  "Please power the device off and back on.  Did you do it?  Great!  On to step two" etc. It should come as no surprise that this interaction would be best handled on a telephone call (I am excluding software support from this example where there is a well-established mode of handling technical support via email).  Forcing a customer to do this kind of trouble-shooting over chat is less than ideal.  Some may choose to take this path but it should not be your only available channel.  Making this your only option is also a bad practice.

  Why then would this company offer support (including technical troubleshooting) over Twitter where character limitations make for an even more disjointed customer experience?  Perhaps I am showing my age but when I use Twitter I do not expect rapid responses - at least not fast enough to handle a troubleshooting interaction.  I have observed the absolute worst use of social media for technical support with an average response time of 4 DAYS per tweet!  What should have been a 10 minute call has dragged on for more than 3 weeks.  Needless to say I have given up on this product and moved to a competitor.  This support experience tells me everything I need to know about where this company is focused - and it's not on the customer.

  In my earlier blog post I talked briefly about the Enterprise-as-Contact-Center concept which is a fantastic idea for the right companies.  This concept works well with the Social Channel as long as the requests are not as time sensitive as technical support.  By allowing your best and brightest to check-in to social queues one or two hours per day to share their energy and passion with your customers your company could truly differentiate themselves.  But using Twitter to deflect calls from a grossly understaffed support group is a recipe for disaster, lost customers, and lost revenue.

SMS: The Forgotten Channel or Ready for Rebirth?

  Everyone is writing about upcoming trends in the contact center for 2014.  There's nothing truly new but there is notable growth and increased interest in things like customer journey mapping (I really like Leisa Reichelt's description) and mobile self-service.  We continue to hear voice biometrics/authentication bandied about but outside of insurance and financial services, I have seen almost no adoption (which to me says more about our lack of imagination than it does the capabilities of the solution).

  Maybe what I am noticing is the gap between trendy solutions that analysts love to write about (remember Nina and Lexee) and practical solutions that customers actually use.  Voice is still by far the most dominant channel in the contact center but web self-service, virtual assistants, chat, social media, and email all have their place.  The reason these channels dominate is simple: there is no technical or experiential  barrier to their use.  Yes, most anyone could download a mobile virtual assistant, but when to use it?  I think most of us would still feel awkward using a mobile virtual assistant in public to do anything other than play a song in iTunes or set a quick reminder.  I personally cringe at the idea of speaking my credit card number or credentials into my phone in public.  I could do these things in the privacy of my home but then the convenience of speech is only marginally better than using my iPad.  For a customer contact solution to take hold it needs to be easy to access, available when the customer wants to use it, quick, and effective.

  I can think of one technology that fits these criteria, has been around for more than twenty years, and yet is still underutilized: SMS.

  In May of this year I participated in a roundtable for contact center managers and what I heard really surprised me.  Of all of the channels they were supporting or deploying, SMS was receiving the most interest from customers and many of them were planning to deploy it in 2014.

  Why had I not heard this before?  I started thinking about my own experiences with SMS as a support channel.  My power utility allows me to submit outage notifications via SMS (something I had to do this morning!).  My mobile carrier conducts satisfaction surveys via SMS.  Submitting the power outage could not have been easier (much faster than calling an IVR) and I completed the satisfaction survey over several hours when it was convenient for me to answer each question (I rarely have the time or patience for a telephone survey).  Some people still pay per SMS (my Dad hates it when I send him a text) but for many of us, it is the perfect channel for certain (obviously not all) types of support inquiries. 

  Here are just a few great uses of SMS:

• Order Confirmation
• Multi-Factor Authentication
• Trouble ticket creation
• Resolution notification
• Brief surveys
• Field Service Dispatch
• Field Service ticket updates / close-out

  If you are reading this and thinking, this is old news, then please ask yourself, why have we not seen wider adoption in the contact center - especially when customers seem to be asking for it?  Maybe it is precisely because it is not sexy or new and maybe there is doubt in the C-Suite about whether customers want or need another channel.  Or maybe it is because few CRMs or contact center platforms support it (I have worked on several of these deployments and they required some custom work but nowhere near the level of effort of a Natural Language application). Despite these challenges at least some of the leaders I have spoken with plan on adding SMS to the channels they support.

  There is a lot of life left in SMS and a lot of potential to serve customers quickly and conveniently.  Hopefully some creative CX designers will pick it up and bring us some new and exciting uses for this old, but hardly irrelevant, technology.

Multi-Channel CX Gets You In The Fight: A Word of Encouragement for Underdogs

In my inaugural blog post I wanted to write about a subject with which I am currently wrestling.

  How do small companies, upstarts, or those with less market share, compete with their larger rivals when it comes to the customer journey?

Since you cannot compete on price, brand recognition, media saturation, or anything else it would seem the only answer is to offer a better customer experience - one that is more personal (I'm excluding the other obvious answer of higher quality because without that what's the point?).  But what if you do not own the point of sale?  What if every direct customer interaction is with a distributor or big box retailer?  It takes an army of channel sales reps to reign in that beast, often with poor results (I say that as a former retail sales person who had constant interaction with channel managers).

  If a brand finds itself in this predicament the only option left to them are traditional channels (voice, email) and social channels.  But even with social channels, the big guy has the advantage because they have an army of enthusiasts who are more than willing to answer each and every question about your product - FOR FREE!

This is an opportunity for the underdog to leverage multi-channel CX technology and one that I think is overlooked.

  When we think about companies with great customer experiences we tend to gravitate to big logos who have spent years refining their image and experience.  Many of these big brands had the luxury of defining that experience prior to the emergence of technologies that level the playing field like Twitter and Facebook.  I know, I know - I just said that big brand evangelists are legion - this is true.  There is no silver bullet for the underdog.  The reason that multi-channel CX favors the underdog is that it costs less for them to deploy it, without the albatross of old, inflexible legacy systems weighing them down.  With cloud technology it is even faster and easier.  In a matter of weeks or months, the underdog can be directly engaged with their new customers and building that next generation of evangelists for themselves.

  One last thing that occurred to me as I debated this in my head (something I do a lot) is the cost of human capital associated with this strategy.  Let's face it, big brands take advantage of the fact that their crowd-sourced support strategy is nearly free.  The underdog has to carry the burden of a costly contact center to compete, right?  I suppose it depends on their culture.  As evidenced by last week's epic Twitter battle between T-Mobile and AT&T even CEOs are willing to login and join the fight.  With the flexibility of cloud-based multi-channel CX anyone can be an agent - anywhere.  CXOs can create a fun and rewarding culture by encouraging staff to check-in to a social queue for a couple of hours per day to respond to customer inquiries.  Bonuses or rewards like an extra day off might just be enough to get those employees who are already passionate about their product to share that passion via Twitter or Facebook.  That's one way for an underdog to kick start a multi-channel initiative.


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