Saturday, January 30, 2010

We have moved!!

Thanks for stopping by -- we have moved our blog to www.attachmenttheoryblog.com please take a moment and visit.

Jonathan

Friday, January 29, 2010

Using Process and Content to Deepen and Control your Client Relationships

If your customer service process includes inflicting your customers with the task of entering data over and over again, your playing Russian roulette -- with the gun pointed at you, and the customer clicking away when they become frustrated. At some point your customer is going to hang up, walk away or worse bad mouth your organization. Nonetheless, the frustration you have inflicted on your customers’ tarnishes their positive buying emotional memory. This memory is quickly and surely replaced with the latest frustrating contact, manifesting itself into a desire to seek relief or at best, a better solution, and there you have it --- the reasons to leave are piling up.

However, for the customer centric organization, there is a simple answer, engage technology to assist and manage your customer service process. Process and content-focused technologies, such as BPM (Business Process Management) and ECM (Enterprise Content Management) or WCM (Web Content Management) provide a means to protect the customer relationship process, streamline your interactions, and allow for enterprise wide collaboration and to identify, fix and redirect broken processes in a flash.

I am not selling these technologies – I just pray that companies I do business with will implement the technology and save me the frustration of their technological laziness. Nevertheless, why are so many companies not using this proven technology to retain their customers? Well I guess they are either living in 1960, or perhaps they have not figured out that the installation of BPM or ECM is painless, priced right and in fact in some cases its FREE – yes my favorite “F” word – free through Open Source, which provides very sophisticated and robust packages. However, if you’re concerned with implementation cost, license cost, training, etc., … just remember the cost to acquire new customers alone far exceeds any retention cost of current customers, and the cost to win customers back, -- well your guess is as good as mine, but I am sure its not pretty. Do us all a favor check out the application of automated and dynamic processes, and content-focused technologies such as ECM or WCM and save a customer or two – what else do you have to lose…?


(click, click, click, boom!)

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

New or Existing Clients -- Which are better?

In my opinion 2010, will be the year of the come back, I think companies will start to look at their current client base and try to secure those relationships. There is automatic revenue potential if the relationship is intact.

Both selling organizations and clients recognize that it is more cost effective to expand relationships, than it is to acquire new ones. The complexities lay in understanding the strength and challenges faced by both organizations and how to exploit them for combined relationship advancement.

However, over the last year most selling organizations have had their eyes on new client acquisition, which, is indeed a necessity, but has overlooked current customers, and thus the overlooked customer has been acquired by another organization.

So there lays the rub – new or existing business, I say both. Get new business first from your existing clients then from new client acquisitions, creating a self-fulfilling cycle of revenue. Nevertheless, the selling organization must, bear in mind that the current client relationship is indeed the golden goose, and squeezing it will only kill it; so tread easy to reap the rewards of loyal, expanding, revenue generating clients.

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

During an economic downturn a graceful customer recovery is key to profitable and growing organizations.

Yesterday, I had the experience of bearing witness to two extremes in customer service, and ironically it was with AT&T, which just got voted the worst in customer service.


It all started when AT&T told me I could change a rate plan. So, I called the customer service center and told the representative what I wanted to achieve. She was very nice and said “No problem”; I could hear her typing away, as I thought to myself Wow, she is actually documenting my call.


I was told all was done, so I went on my way to a client meeting. All of a sudden, I noticed I had not received any e-mails since 10:00 am, which was 4 hours ago. During my commute I called AT&T back to explain what I believed had happened, which was that the customer service representative must have made a MISTAKE yes, an error. That is, she had switched off my plan versus downgrading the pricing. Long story short as this still makes me twitch; I spent a total of 70 minutes on the phone trying to get my problem resolved with no such luck.


Later, I spent another hour on the phone with two other customer service representatives trying to fix my dead Blackberry. My experience with these two customer service reps was like rubbing bleach into an open wound. During these calls it was no longer a MISTAKE—it was my phone’s fault—it must have broken down and thus I needed to call technical support. Fat chance I was dialing another AT&T call center to go through triage again for the fourth time—seems that the first customer service representative must have been IM-ing instead of documenting my call. Lucky for AT&T and my blood pressure, I hit one of the white areas on their blue map and lost the call.


That afternoon, I thought I would call again, and got James from their Little Rock, Arkansas call center. After I explained the entire fiasco to him and demanded to speak to a manager, he said “Absolutely” and then kindly put me on hold. I think during the hold time we both must have counted to 100; he then told me that he was awaiting a manager to pick up the call and appreciated my patience. He then said, “Since we both are on hold, tell me again what happened,” in a friendly voice—you know, the kind that says, “I am on your side.” I took a deep breath and off we went down memory lane. He said, “Hold on, let me look at this, OK let me check this and that…” and all of a sudden my lifeline to the technology highway was working. He did what so many customer service professionals, never mind organizations, do not do, and that is care. James took pride in the job he was doing and made me feel that I was the only customer he had today.

James, if you’re reading this, I want to say thank you! Thank you for doing what most organizations don’t or can’t do in the best of times, that is having the ability to pull off a graceful recovery, and save the relationship. I have been an AT&T customer for at least 8 or 9 years, and you and your recovery methods will keep me coming back.


Today, more than ever we must protect our current customer resources. Sure, we will drop the ball now and then and yes customers will be angry, but they will be the happiest when we can recover from our mistakes with grace, and remind them that they are the reason we are in business.


In downturns, customer sometimes feel stuck with a vendor and will tolerate much more than in an up economy—but do not be fooled, they will leave you as soon as economic storm clouds have drifted away.


Companies today have lost sight of their current customers, and this is directly related to the people they hire. Organizations are hiring cheaply, not taking in to consideration the customer impact when hiring employees. Companies use one section of the company for hiring which must meet the needs of another section, and in some cases the two different parts don’t ever meet. Further, a majority of companies today use software to screen would be applicants, however the relationship between your organization and your customers is human and therefore, should be selected by humans. Your associates are not calculating rates of return, or processing batches of transactions, whereby their hard skills need to be validated through experience screening. I don’t know of any software on the market today that can better determine the soft skills of an applicant better than a human.


The answer in my opinion is be innovative and think holistically when hiring, use social media to paint a picture of the applicant, have actual sales/service departments screen via social media as well as resumes, try to find an applicant that matches your sales/service guru, better yet have your guru screen and chat with the applicant, they know what works. It’s a cut-cut world out there, but the companies that take the risks now will reap the rewards later.

Saturday, October 17, 2009

Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling

Wordle: Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling
I found this and thought it was very interesting, great work Bruce!

Thursday, October 1, 2009

The Morning After

Sifting through all of the tweets and blog entries yesterday from #ODSC -- found the information compelling and fresh! The ideas were creative and innovative -- the new expanded life of ECM is about to take hold.

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