The relationship between IT and customer service organizations can be an uneasy one in many organizations. With customer service becoming a critical business differentiator, contact centers and e-business organizations need to deliver innovative and memorable customer experiences, while controlling costs at the same time. On the other hand, IT organizations are known to be risk-averse and often get backlogged with projects. This divide can result in a sluggish response to market changes, resulting in lost opportunities for the business and driving up service costs.
To bridge the gap, a new breed of contact center and web customer service software has emerged to deliver the right mix of agility, usability, reliability and security to satisfy the needs of both business and IT stakeholders. But, when choosing a solution, look for the following IT-friendly traits that can minimize risk, speed up time to benefit and maximize ROI:
• Unsiloed: The explosion in customer interaction channels has created a dire need for multichannel customer service. However, channel silos create poor and inconsistent service experiences and reduce contact center productivity. Delivering superior and consistent cross-channel customer experiences therefore calls for a hub-style approach, where applications to support individual channels are built on a common customer interaction hub platform. Such a foundation shares data, knowledgebase, workflow, analytics and integrations across channels. Not only does this approach enable consistent service across multiple media, but also the ability to support multiple business units and languages from a single deployment, reducing system Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).
• Architected Right: An IT-friendly solution is based on a modular, multi-tier, standards-based (e.g. J2EE) architecture that also includes support for emerging approaches such as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) for application development and interoperability; reliability, availability, and scalability (RAS); security; and integration. This approach allows you to reuse existing server infrastructure and application assets and services, and mix and match components to rapidly configure and reconfigure business processes. Benefits include increased ROI, reduced TCO and increased business agility.
• Deployed “my way”: Software vendors often push the deployment model that best suits their business model rather than what the customer needs. IT-friendly solutions offer deployment flexibility – cloud, on-site, managed service or hybrid, and the ability to switch seamlessly from one mode to another, based on evolving requirements.
• Reliable, Available and Scalable (RAS): An important factor, yet seldom accounted for in TCO and ROI analyses, RAS is critical to the success of any enterprise-class deployment. One can easily make the case that customer interaction management systems are the most mission-critical of all CRM applications because of the potential direct impact on customer experience and the overall business. Look for solutions that provide RAS features such as distributed server support, self-monitoring, fault tolerance and hardware redundancy. For cloud-based solutions, ask about up-time guarantees as well.
• Usable: While user training costs are typically included in TCO calculations, the hidden cost of user resistance to adopting complex user interfaces and running multiple applications during the course of a customer interaction is almost always ignored. A related issue is “findability” -- what use is the knowledgebase content if users cannot intuitively, quickly and easily find the information they need during the course of customer interactions? If agents or customers cannot find knowledgebase information easily, they will stop using the system, a major hidden cost that is not captured in traditional ROI models.
Furthermore, software usability is a major cost driver that cannot be covered up by over-investing in training. Ask vendors about their design and testing processes for usability. Ask your agents to compare usability across vendors and assess if the user interface has been evolved and modernized. Ask questions. Over how many releases has it been refined? How many clicks does it take to accomplish the most common tasks? Does the UI provide ways to increase content findability and relieve agents and end-customers of their information search burden?
• Secure and compliant: IT-friendly solutions support robust security with ongoing penetration testing, client-side and server-side authentication and encrypted data storage, as well as compliance with key industry regulations (HIPAA, PCI, etc.).
Customer interaction management software is behind mission-critical, high-visibility systems. Failure is not an option in the era of viral publicity for system downtime or malfunction. On the upside, IT professionals can become a hero to their organization by picking and implementing the right solution that seamlessly marries the business demands of CRM customer service with the deployment flexibility, risk mitigation, RAS, TCO and security needs of IT. With this careful balance, organizations can avoid putting their most important assets—their customers and their reputation—at risk.