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!)