Here’s an exercise I often assign during the initial work up on a project. At the point I do this, I have a company team together with front-line people and at least one supervisor or manager. I don’t allow programmers or techies in until we’ve spent some time getting people thinking clearly about what they need.

The exercise came about because I was frustrated with people who could say the words about good customer service, but weren’t doing it themselves. As the saying goes, they could ‘talk the talk, but they couldn’t walk the walk’! In most cases, they didn’t even realize what they were doing.

FIRST … everyone goes to lunch or some other non-company activity like stopping at a book store, visiting a gym, or whatever they do with their break time (when I did this in England, it was often stopping at the Pub)

SECOND … everyone records an outline of their experience, capturing not only WHAT happened, but also how they FEEL about what happened.

THIRD … everyone reports to the group on their experience focusing especially on their feelings about what happened, both good and bad and discussing how the good and bad things that happened are happening or not happening in their own jobs.

It doesn’t really work well without a team, because you really have to hear other people discuss THEIR experiences to get the most benefit from it, but try it yourself anyway. You could even do this exercise over the phone. Try calling your PC Manufacturer for service, or Microsoft, or Apple. Record what happened and how you felt about it. For example …

———————– Phone Service Experience ——————-
I’ve been waiting here for 30 minutes and all I hear is elevator music
I keep hearing that my call is important to them, but no one comes and there’s no way out without losing my place.
OOPS … finally got someone … they’re taking down a ton of information that isn’t related to my problem … what’s this all about … I just want to know why my service isn’t working!
OK … they’re happy, now on to the problem …
D#$N … the person who answered is transferring me to technical service because they can’t help … I’m off on a ringing phone again!
Double D#$N … the phone stopped everything and I got nothing, no sound, nothing …
I GOT THE DIAL TONE BACK! The transfer didn’t work and the person I talked to doesn’t know! I’ll have to start all over again.
I’m FRUSTRATED, MAD, and I’ll take this out on anyone who answers the phone!
———————————————————————-

Sounds bad … that was a real call … I won’t say to what vendor, but the names have been changed, hidden, and otherwise deleted to protect the guilty! Could this happen in YOUR service center with YOUR Customer Facing System?

One of the things I found in using this exercise was that agents became far more aware of how important feelings are in judging the success or failure of a transaction. They learn that you can solve the problem the customer has handed you, but still fail the transaction if the customer isn’t satisfied in some way with the effort. Managers and Supervisors learned the importance of providing a continuous process that smoothly moves the customer through from initial contact to resolution. … AND … I learned where the holes are in their systems so I can think about how best to plug them.

For many people, it introduces a whole new perspective on what they REALLY need to do on the phone or face-to-face with a customer.

Categories: Call/Contact Centers, Customer Service
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Customer Facing Systems are important to any business, no matter how large or small. Unfortunately, they are often poorly implemented even by large companies with enormous resources. Why?

The answer is simple, interactions with customers APPEAR simple, but when you wrap up many interactions in many forms over a long period of time and you involve many people in doing it, then even a small mistake can have large consequences. My services are available to assist in reviewing, designing, or analyzing customer facing systems. If you like what you’re reading here, then you know I can help achieve what you want.

I’ve added a link to my Services on the blog menu at the right side. I’ve summarized what I can do for you there. To get a start, I offer a free phone interview where we can map out the problems you’re facing and discuss how I can help. We can extend that with an online meeting where we can share overviews of systems, plans, and designs if that will help. Write to me with your contact information to setup a meeting

Contact me now for a free consultation by phone or online

Fill out the form with your contact information. Include a phone number and I’ll contact you within the next several business days.

Categories: General
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I recently ran across a reference to a software package called ‘MarsEdit‘ which is an offline editor for blogs. I’ve downloaded it and I’m going to try it for the 30-day trial. I’ll be tracking it on my Writing blog, so if you’re interested, drop by to follow along on what I’m finding.

NOTE: MarsEdit is for MAC OSX only, it won’t work on Windows. But this is about more than just using a Mac version of something, I’m interested in the good and bad of using an offline editor overall. If I find something for Windows or Linux that appears as good, I’ll probably setup a trial of that software as well.

Categories: General
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I was reviewing some old magazines today, and was struck by two with implications for CFS construction. The first, in the July 2006 issue of Communications of the ACM (Avison, et. al, “Managerial IT Unconsciousness”, Comm ACM 49:7, July 2006, pp89-93) was in a special issue about Service Systems. It reviewed three studies done in Australia about service system implementations, all of which were failures. Because failures are a great way to learn, I always find them fascinating.

The whole point of the article was that these projects effectively ran with at best limited managerial involvement. Some of the work was outsourced and there were regular project meetings, but everything was actually in the hands of people with little or no experience and no insight into the actual requirements of the business. The working relationship with upper management was minimal at best with upper management not really understanding or paying attention. It wasn’t just because they were stodgy old companies either since one was a large scale telcom front-runner ramping up with lots of highly committed, educated people involved. The essential problem was lack of management understanding and an inability of the people directly involved to have an impact with decision makers.

This is where the other article comes in because it considers optimizing innovation (Robert L. Glass, “Practical Programmer: Managing for Innovation”, Comm ACM 51:3 Mar 2008 pp17-19). Glass is looking at the work of Watts Humphreys who started the Software Engineering Institute and considering two of his lesser known books on Managing Technical people. His point is that People Matter. How a manager gets the optimum out of his people depends on his understanding and involvement. Managers who don’t know and don’t attempt to understand, as in the first article, are doomed to failure. So are those who are too tight and work in a ‘My Way or the Highway’ mode all the time. Optimum is when management becomes involved directly, reviewing and inputting to plans and development, bringing the business perspective to major projects to make sure they serve the needs of the company.

I’ve seen this kind of thing over and over again, and to combat it, for major projects, I’ve insisted on having representatives on the team that range from the front-line to the highest levels within the company. If more senior managers can’t participate directly, then we work out some way to involve them as much as possible.

Why all this emphasis? Because Customer Facing Systems are critical and can make or break a company. Of the three companies studied in the first article, all three WOULD have been out of business, but two of them had public funding and could write it off. The third did fail completely. A successful customer facing system can mean a significant improvement in working with customers and lead to enhanced long-term profits. A poorly developed one can lead to company failure.

It’s not enough to commit to a system, you need to commit your time and energy to the implementation, to making it work and work right.

Categories: Call/Contact Centers, System Development, Systems Analysis & Design
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Most of what I see written about ‘Customer Facing Systems’ is about technology. Most writers are talking about telephone call centers or web sites or CRM systems or whatever. When you dig in a little, what you find in many cases is that their perspective is shaped by the company they’re working for and the products their company is selling.

Think about it for a minute, the customer interacts with the company through a variety of channels. They might receive letters with marketing materials (’A guaranteed credit card just for you’), they might pick up the phone to call about the letter (’You call is important to us, the first available agent will take your call as soon as possible’), frustrated, the customer goes online and starts searching through the company’s web site to find some information (sorry, but it takes 2 weeks to get an update to the web site), finally, the customer might just drop by your company’s store front to see if they know anything (’Thank you for coming in sir, we have this brochure …’). EVERY one of these channels contributes to the customer’s mental image of the company. They all are part of the ‘face’ of the company. All of them are part of a single ‘Customer Facing System’. Problem is, they’ve all been put together in isolation, so it’s unlikely that the messages in each channel match up.

A customer facing system is not a technology, though technology is part of it. It is not a process, though processes are part of it. A customer facing system is a combination of many aspects including people, technology, processes, and organization. It’s a ‘Human Activity System’ and making it work right is a challenge even in the best circumstances.

Categories: Human Activity Systems
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I’ve added spam processing to the comment module and opened comments to anyone who’d like to join in the conversation. I hope to hear from people once I’ve collected enough material to be interesting.

Categories: General
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For anyone who runs across this blog, this is a new blog. I’m just starting it up, so while it’s getting it’s legs, I’m restricting posting to people who are willing to sign up and log in. This is primarily for me to get some time to get used to new software and to get some history into the bog. I intend to open it up for everyone to comment, but I will be posting some guidelines for what postings will be acceptable. For example:

• I won’t edit comments except to cut out flames or obscenity.
• I will block anyone who tries to use this blog for advertising something not related to the blogs topics
• I won’t allow posts that link to sites that I don’t personally recommend. If anyone puts a link in a post, I’ll visit it first to confirm that I support it

Terry

Categories: General
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When I’m working with a group of people on a Customer Facing System, one of the things we talk about is how ‘The System’ is the business’ FACE for the customer. Customers see the company personified in their interfaces to the company, so it’s important to be consistent.

Think about people you know. What do you think about someone who acts differently to you at different times? When you’re alone over a beer, you see one face, when you’re in a meeting you see another. If a person is acting inconsistently in different situations, we call that person ‘two-faced’. If your company is acting inconsistently, you’re at least TWO faced, and maybe more. If each telephone operator in your call center responds differently with different rules, rules THEY made up for interacting with a customer, what’s a customer going to think?

A good example occurred in England on a project where I was able to monitor telephone calls coming in to agent’s desks as I studied the system. I found it was common that a customer would call and if they didn’t get the answer they wanted, they’d call again, and again until an agent told them what they wanted to hear. The agents weren’t working together, they were each working independently. Consequently the ‘face’ the the customer saw was inconsistent. Customers took advantage of that to get what they wanted. No wonder they needed help.

Categories: General
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I’ve spent most of my life designing, implementing, working on, finding problems with, evaluating, and improving Customer Facing Systems. The purpose of this blog is to take some of what I’ve learned and what I’m still learning and spread it around. I’m looking to start a dialogue on the concept and talk about systems I’ve worked on

Let me make an initial point … Customer Facing Systems are not necessarily computer systems. They might be

• Web Sites
• Store fronts
• Telephone Call Centers
• Interactive Voice Response Systems
• A Greeter at a Customer Event

Any or all of these and more are ‘Customer Facing Systems’. These are Human Activity Systems which integrate technology ranging from 3X5 cards to sophisticated CRM systems on large scale computers. This point of contact between the company and the customer is a complex system that too often is over-simplified in people’s minds. I hope to shed some light on this interface and how it really works

Categories: General
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