Better Customer Service through Collaboration

I had the pleasure to meet with a customer this week whose primary objective over the next year is to increase their ability to serve their customers. In this customer's market, services are quickly becoming commoditized and margins are being squeezed. Therefore, the only way to maintain their margins and their premium relationships with their customers is to integrate themselves more fully with the customer's business and build a world class organization of coordinated people to service the customer.

I am sure that this customer's problem is not unique. The same statement, about commoditization of products and squeezed margins, could probably be said about several industries. But the answer, or at least this solution (there may be many approaches) seems to be consistent. Knowing your customer is always going to help you build better products for that customer. And providing a more cohesive and coordinated front to that customer will always lead to them wanting to utilize more services from your business.

Due to the last decade of M & A activity, many organizations have become large in order to offer a vast, diversified set of products to customers. But many of these organizations are quickly feeling the pains of the customer I mentioned above. This pain is that there is always a relationship or account manager that will interact regularly with the customer. However at some point the account manager will need to delegate customer requests to people within the organization who provide the products. Yet in many organizations these various product teams were built inorganically, and therefore they are not sitting right next to each other. The result is a lack of coordination on the customer's behalf across product lines. Furthermore, it is nearly impossible for the account manager to constantly stay on top of requests for the customer.

In this particular use case, our customer will solve this problem through better collaboration. The idea is that more people within the organization should know intimate details about the customer, and that each product team should coordinate their efforts in order to better service the customer. For some, collaboration comes in many forms. For example, collaboration may utilize portals and indexed data. But the key problem with using these solutions alone is that data must first be created in a place where it can be indexed. This requires people to end their conference calls and/or meetings and then write up notes or action items for other people to see. In many cases this does not happen.

This is where we have seen Persistent Group Chat make a huge difference. While Persistent Chat is not a workflow tool for managing discrete actions, it is the perfect solution for capturing the dialog between teams. The reason it works so well is that the teams communicate within the same tool that is also logging the content and information. As a result, there is no need to retrospectively write meeting notes or action items. The conversation is instantly logged and others on the team can read the archives at any time (assuming they have the correct permissions).

In the use case of the account manager, they can share persistent chat rooms with the product teams and discuss requests specific to the customer. In the communication with the customer, the account manager will have better knowledge and provide better answers. In cases where the customer needs to interact with a team, this interaction can also take place in Persistent Chat rooms (we call them channels). Not only will the customer have the impression that they are being serviced by an army of people, but the dialog will be automatically persisted so that both sides of the conversation can read through archives when necessary.

This is the type of simple solution that can be employed to improve customer service and ultimately allow companies to maintain their competitive edge and margins.

Comments

[steve M]

That's really a smart and quick sloution for video conferencing, without much efforts and time.
http://www.sony-conferencing.com

[Mike P]

You are absolutely right. Once the text of a collaborative conversation is logged, the art of indexing is simple but only as long as the search engine or search facility exposes accurate results.

With the unstructured information, especially when captured during a persistent chat session, it is more beneficial to find the person or people that discussed a topic. The route to tacit knowledge for an account manager (in your scenario) can be faster. This is where I believe presence or identification comes into play. If an account manager requires a statement or concept expanded, finding the person who discussed it can lead to a more accurate response and ultimately improved knowledge of the customer, rather than reading the information and acting purely on post research.