How do we leverage and better share organizational know-how? What can we do to make our support initiatives more relevant – to our customers and our executives?
From our research and studies looking at the state of multi-channel customer service, user preferences and vendor roadmaps, the future of support seems to be all about the “three C’s”: content, collaboration and customer insight. Of course, defining the scope of specific initiatives and determining which ones of these efforts will take root, result in “interesting projects” or be nothing more than one-time fads is the tough part!
Most people I have meet at various SSPA events really do want to help users and provide a good experience. But they are also practical about how much they can do, where they need to practice selective neglect, and how difficult it can be to convince upper management that optimizing support is more than deflecting as many incoming calls as possible.
The Big Picture
As a long-time observer of the enterprise software industry and specifically “front-office” applications and best practices, it’s surprising how trends run in cycles. Integrated, all-in-one approaches were once all the rage, then came best-of-breed, then integrated, on-demand solutions were the rage. And of course on-demand is hardly a new idea if you recall time-sharing, and the original ASP wave of the dot-com boom. Looking at these trends, understanding how new disruptive technologies impact the status quo, and coming up with the right approach is a key focus of the new strategy and advisory services group at eVergance.
As a one-time artificial intelligence and knowledge-based systems researcher, I can also personally attest to the boom-and-bust cycles which have characterized the development and adoption of knowledge management tools and approaches. Yet as a core foundation for automating and streamlining service delivery, KM has made a real comeback, and is once again becoming the centerpiece for many new self-service and multi-channel customer support initiatives (reference “Looking Beyond Knowledge Management,” Allen Bonde, SSPA News, July 2005).
This role, along with the supporting cast of customer analytics and reporting, intelligent search and content management, and lots of foundation technologies, can make creating a strategy and action plan for next-generation customer service a challenge. Then there is the effort involved with adapting existing processes and tools, and finding the right resources and outside support to turn this vision into action.
For these reasons, we are seeing a growing demand for “turn-key” solutions and professional services providers that can deliver end-to-end strategy, process transformation, and design and deployment capabilities. This is a key reason why my prior firm, ABG, Inc. and eVergance joined forces recently – a merger we announced in Las Vegas.
Trends to Watch
In looking across the sessions I attended in Las Vegas and the excellent dialog we had among the participants in our latest Customer Self-Service Training Day, our “three C’s” are certainly top of mind for many who are planning, deploying and looking to improve their support solutions. Consistently, we hear that “driving user adoption,” “integrating all the building blocks,” and “measuring results” are top challenges. With this in mind, it’s no surprise that these requirements also map to some of the top trends we are seeing within the SSPA community and the marketplace overall.
As self-service continues to go mainstream, we see the demand for targeted, personalized content continuing to grow. In addition, the distinctions between documentation, training materials, support content, and packaged knowledge continue to blur with advances in content authoring and management tools and search technology. To feed this demand, and harness the knowledge of employees and customers outside of the support organization, we see the need for next-generation knowledge solutions which support all forms of ad hoc and structured information, and potentially adapt to all levels of user expertise and their preferred interaction channel.
At the same time, accessing, codifying and sharing “tribal knowledge” from across the extended enterprise offers to turn the idea of knowledge management inside out, with expertise distributed instead of centralized, and users getting information at the point of interaction or transaction, rather than by dialing-in to a central repository. As a first step, the integration of support forums, eLearning and other collaboration tools is clearly a major trend. This development is certain to benefit pure-play vendors like Jive Software and OutStart, as well as platform providers like Knova and ATG who have made their built-in forums and KM capabilities a key part of their current message to the marketplace.
With all these potential knowledge sources – coupled with multiple electronic interaction channels – the potential to track information flow, consumption of content, utilization of support resources, and even customer behavior becomes enormous. This is why the domain of customer analytics has and will continue to be a major focus for organizations and vendors alike.
The payoff is simple, get greater insight into customer needs, fix content holes, and even track customer behavior to understand the effectiveness of online or other automated support solutions. This trend is already apparent within the CRM community as vendors like Siebel and SAP invest heavily in their business intelligence capabilities, and specialists like ClickFox and Coremetrics target the need to get better insight into both the “what” and “why” of customer behavior.
Who Will Win
If the next big thing is one part old and one part new, vendors and service providers who have both the expertise in traditional disciplines like call center operations and CRM and newer approaches like Web self-service and predictive analytics are likely to find eager audiences. Among tool providers, as the market for platforms consolidates, specialty providers will need to align with larger players, and make sure their solutions are “open” and able to play nicely with others.
Good examples of this trend are a vendor like RightAnswers who provides packaged support content, and partners with nearly all the help desk, KM and customer support vendors, and more recently the announced relationship between content optimization specialist SafeHarbor and Knova.
With all the market consolidation, emergence of new models like open source and RSS, and innovation coming out of the traditional enterprise software community, one can argue that there is as much uncertainly and opportunity as there was 10 years ago when the Internet wave hit. But if you walk through the SSPA Conference exhibit hall, it is quickly clear that the core tools for automating, coordination, tracking and optimizing service delivery have improved tremendously in just the past few years – if not the past 6 months. Of course, harnessing these capabilities with the right processes and know-how is critical to making the next big thing more than just a fad.
Allen Bonde is the Senior Vice President of Strategy & Marketing at eVergance, a management consulting and systems integration firm focused on CRM optimization and Web self-service. Prior to joining eVergance, Allen was the founder of strategic advisory firm ABG, Inc., a practice expert at McKinsey, the director of management consulting at Extraprise, and an analyst at the Yankee Group. An authority on self-service and KM best practices, he started his career in corporate R&D at a leading telecommunications company.
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