I read with interest a post at the Wrapt in Web blog titled “Business Survival needs good IT People”. Certainly a very important point that businesses need to understand. The writer, Alistair Nicholson, makes some outstanding points which taken out of the context of his specific discussion are important for anyone making decisions about Customer Facing Systems (CFSs) in these times of economic downturn.

“One lesson that is common from all our previous experiences is that strategic shortcomings are punished hard in downturns.”

What a terrific insight and one that is all too often forgotten by decisions makers with their eyes on the immediate future. Customer Facing Systems fare badly because they’re seen as overhead with no return in and of themselves. Over and over again, decisions are made about CFS systems with a short-term horizon based solely on the immediate cost savings from cutting back on people engaged in providing direct customer services. In fact, I’m seeing it now in companies I’m speaking to. A moment’s thought about the strategic implications shows this is a bad move. Why? Because it throws sand in the gears that drive revenue.

We’re trained in business school, whether at the bachelor or master’s level, that products or marketing or something similar drive revenue. To some extent that’s true, but realistically, you have to realize that your customer facing system is what makes everything else possible, including revenue.

Cutting back your CFS is a short-sighted move to save money that has the potential to drive customers away and cut revenue even more than it already is.

“What has fundamentally changed is the way customers interact with businesses and each other. There’s good news in this because transforming technology gives us future growth. There’s bad news in this because managing by, and measuring the wrong things will kill a business stone dead.”

Customer Facing systems have taken on a new level of importance in business, but many decisions makers don’t see it yet and don’t understand the importance to their success. In good economic times, it’s easy to ignore the Customer Facing System. You can be successful even with a poor CFS. However, the habits you establish in good economic times will come back to bite you as the economy goes down hill as it’s doing now. A most important part of that is measuring the right things to show just what the connection is between your customer facing system and your success.

In a post several days ago, I talked about the importance of understanding your systems and what variables are important to measure. This is so important that it’s worth repeating. You’ve got to measure the things that are actually linked in some way to your success. When asked what you can do NOW to impact profit 3 months from now, you need to KNOW what variables are important.

“The toxic effects …” of poor measurement are felt during a downturn when you make the wrong decisions. “The toxic effects …” of poor learning cause us to see the wrong relationships and measure the wrong things and hence make the wrong decisions.

Too many businesses run by chance, decisions made by people who don’t understand, but who are lucky to make the right choice. Don’t let this kind of decision making affect your decisions about Customer Facing Systems. Learn how to identify and measure the important variables and make decisions based on facts and NOT on luck.

Categories: General, Web Sites
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Over and over again it’s been proved, but apparently the lesson is never learned, good decisions come from understanding. If you don’t understand, you’re gambling. I don’t know if anyone is following this, but you need to think about YOUR customer facing system (CFS) now and what you plan to do to respond to the economic crisis now underway.

During a down economy, one of the first things that gets dropped is the Customer Facing System. In Call Centers, the largest cost in the center is payroll. Cutting people saves money. Even on Web Sites and for automated system support, the people who care for the automated systems tend to get dropped. Is this a good idea? What will this cost your business now and in the future? You need to think about the fact that customers have options and they’ll not forgive those who make service difficult to get.

Whether you like it or not, your customer facing system is critical to the success of your company. How you deal with customers determines how willingly your customers pay your price and how willing they are to switch to someone else. Can you afford to lose customers? You’re already losing them because of the economy, but cutting back your customer facing systems will cause you to lose even more. Cutting back also makes you more vulnerable. Worse, if you cut back in the wrong way, you destroy morale inside the company and impact your customers, even your most loyal ones. If you’ve earned an MBA, you know the case histories. You’ve read about it happening in other companies. You need to translate those case histories to your own customer facing system.

All too often, the decision to down-size is made purely on the basis of cost without any thought to the impact on your success. Unfortunately, you really should have done that when you first created your system so you could make good decisions now. It’s never too late though. Take some time now, get some people together, and think carefully through the impact of your CFS as part of your overall success.

Do you understand the variables that are important to your success? As many people as I’ve interviewed from the front-line to the board room, I haven’t found many who really understood how to determine which variables were actually predictors of eventual success. They mistake numbers for understanding and an ability to quote thumb-rules with an ability to act wisely. In most cases, people making decisions to cut back have never really thought about critical relationships in a way that helps make decisions at critical times.

One interesting question I usually ask when interviewing people in a CFS is “what change could be made RIGHT NOW that would increase their performance bonus at the end of the current bonus period”. Most people with responsibility for a CFS don’t have an answer. In fact, they don’t even know what the important parameters are.

You ought to be thinking about the impact of one variable on another and eventually which of them impact your profit. Could you show how the different variables you can measure now affect your profit, your costs, and your bonus at some point in the future?

This is an overly simplified and incomplete model of just some of the variables that MIGHT be important in your Customer Facing System. If you were modeling your system, you would investigate whether these are even the appropriate variables whether each variable has a positive or negative effect on profit. If you are running a web based CFS, your diagram might start like this:

The diagram itself isn’t important. What’s important is the time you put into working it out. Any plan, any diagram of causes and effects, is not valuable because situations change and none of us has a crystal ball that accurately tells us about the future. The value lies in the thinking you put into the plan or causal diagram.

It’s worth the time right now to think through how things relate to your success, whether you measure it in profit for a company or in some other measure for a non-profit organization. Get some people together and set up a facilitated modeling exercise. Get someone who understands the process and who knows how to guide you through thinking about systemic effects which lead to your objectives.

• What affects profit?
• What affects cost & sales?
• When the number of employees goes down, how does that impact both Sales and Cost?
• How delayed are these effects?
• Are there any loops created by the impact of one thing on another?
• How does morale impact service effectiveness and sales?
• What is the impact on morale of a staff cutback?
• How does the morale of your service staff affect the number of returning customers?
  How does the morale of your sales staff affect new business?

You won’t predict exact numbers. That’s not the point. What you’ll be doing is thinking about how different changes relate to your profit. Just thinking about how things relate creates insight into how things really work.

When you have some idea of the cause-effect relationships, try them out using scenarios. Think about a specific situation and come up with strategies for handling it. Think through how your response to the situation would impact your company and your profit. Thinking through concrete scenarios helps you learn how the situation develops dynamically and how you can or cannot have an impact on the direction of events. You’ll probably change your cause-effect diagram to incorporate new insights. If you have a skilled facilitator with good modeling software, you can even run a simulation showing how things will change over time as a result of different decisions.

Try out different scenarios and different responses to build a set of strategies covering both expected and unexpected events. Real life will go different from any scenario you choose to examine, but the process of examining them will get you ready to handle whatever does occur.

A great example I’ve played through with clients is known as the Beer Game. A very simple setup involves a brewer, a distributor, and customers. This deceptively simple setup involving orders and delivery timing can be remarkably difficult to do well because most of us don’t really understand the system well enough to predict how it will react when changes are made. Does your business have similar delay loops that can cause non-intuitive changes in your operation? Taking the time to work through these effects will help you see them.

Responding to simple situations like the beer game can be remarkably like handling a big ship like an aircraft carrier. When a command is given to turn, there are delays in the reaction of the ship that you need to take into account. If you give the command to stop, it may take miles to come to a stop no matter what you do to try to stop the ship. There are also side effects that must be considered. For example, if you turn too hard, you’ll tilt the flight deck and cause planes to roll off the ship. How does that relate to your knowing what to do? Very simply, any system is complicated by delays and side effects. In some cases, the side effects (airplanes rolling off the ship in a tight turn) can be more important than the reason you took action in the first place.

Each and every business or organization is different and what works for one company will destroy another. Some things can be done within your organization and some things can’t be. For example, you want to cut costs, so you plan to eliminate employees. However, your shop is unionized, so the union will fight it. This can lead to worsening relationships, more fighting, strikes, and even worse times than if you’d done nothing.

If you’re running a consulting firm, you might find that your system generates loops of interactions like this one where delay times in contracting impact when clients become active and marketing and billable effort all have to be dealt with within the total available hours of effort.

This diagram like is an example from the Vensim system modeling software. It’s a starting point, not a complete model of the system, but using the software, you can assign values to the variables and run a simulation to see how the business evolves over time.

No matter what else you have to do, you need to understand how what you can measure relates to what you want to achieve (profit, people helped, whatever) in order to make good decisions. If you don’t understand, than any decision you make is no better than gambling. You ‘pays ur money ‘nd takes ur chances’. You may like the risk, but winning is always better. How do you win? By understanding. We’ll talk more later.

Categories: Customer Service, General
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Is there anyone who doubts the importance of your home page on your web site. The real estate there is critical and shouldn’t be wasted. I found a quite good discussion I wanted to share about High Value Content. It’s worth reading.

Categories: Web Sites
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I found a wonderful visualization of the collapse of the economy when I went to the Spirituality, Science, and Technology blog today.

The post talked about a paper on the Epidemiology of the Credit Crises which was found while reading Chemoton § Vitorino Ramos’ research notebook. I tracked it back to the original paper which you can download and read as a PDF.

The paper also refers to a page with a video of the collapse that you can download and review. The paper was written by Reginald Smith of the Bouchet-Franklin Institute in Rochester. This is very impressive and very interesting to look at. However, you also need to look at his cautions:

• This is not ‘market contagion’
• This shows correlations, it’s nor about causation
• While this uses the word ‘Epidemiology’, it’s not about a mechanism

At the start of the simulation, the individual companies (small circles) are mostly doing well. This starts in 2007.

At the beginning, 2007

A year later, these companies are doing poorly as indicated by yellow and red. Consult the paper for a detailed explanation of the color coding and how this was done.

At the end, 2008

As an educational piece, it’s an interesting insight into the progressive collapse we’re all now experiencing, but why is this of interest for Customer Facing Systems? The point of this is that most Customer Facing Systems generate enormous amounts of information, but it’s often hard to make sense out of it. One of the banks I worked with some years ago gave each manager a printout every morning of all the statistics generated in the previous 24 hours. It was a printout that stacked 6″ high on their desk on standard line printer output paper. I questions some of the managers about what they got out of it, and mostly it was nothing useful.

If you’re running a Customer Facing System, you need to find an analysis that makes some sense and shows you what’s happening. This collapse simulation is very instructive and illustrates how a good analysis can help us make sense of a complicated situation. It also makes the point that you can’t press it too far. You need to understand not only what you can do, but also the limits of what you can do.

Categories: Human Activity Systems
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So, what have we learned or what can we take away from the experience with HP?

• Even large companies make mistakes
• No matter how well you think you’re doing, that might not be a customer’s perspective
• Live connections demand responsiveness
• Organize web knowledge bases to making finding answers to unexpected questions easy
• Watch the Internet - Blogs, message board posts, and other comments will focus on problems
• Admit it when you don’t have the answer and make it easy to identify and correct the problem

Categories: Call/Contact Centers, Customer Service, Human Activity Systems, Web Sites
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Continuing on with the discussion I started in the last posting about the OfficeJet 6310, the problem I was researching had the following specific issues:

1. Scanning - when connected through a network to my Mac, attempts to scan failed 9 times out of 10. I’d start a scan, and an error message would come back saying approximately ‘the program is unstable, restart’, or it would just sit there and do nothing, or it would do the initial scan, and then when I tried to accept it, it would do nothing
2. Installation - taking the installation disks to Windows PCs on my network, it would install, but never find the printer, not even to print.

Sounds simple enough … I’d always been happy with HP, so I expected to solve the problems easily.

FIRST … I worked through the manual and followed it’s instructions for trouble shooting … no luck

SECOND … I went online to the HP web site and asked their knowledge-base, followed any instructions that seemed to apply … no luck

THIRD … I tried to send email, no reply

FOURTH … I tried online chat. First attempt kept failing. I got an email from HP asking me to try again. Second attempt, I got someone, but if he was a real person, I don’t know what he was doing. Replies were slow. I thought I’d lost the connection more than once. At one point, he indicated that he didn’t know anything but Windows. I don’t know whether I was speaking with a man, woman, or computer, but whichever it was it was frustrating in the extreme.

FIFTH … I tried searching the Internet. I found lots of reports of scanning problems and began to wish I’d done that search before purchasing the printer.

In each case where I was searching for a solution to the problem, it was hard to determine what was applicable. Having built service centers and trained service agents, I know how hard it can be to figure out a problem when someone calls in. I also know how hard it can be to build a knowledge-base that’s useful for a customer to troubleshoot themselves. These are tough jobs that very few companies do well. Many companies act as if they have the expertise available. When they fail, it’s even more frustrating.

Remember, this is a problem which I found many postings about on the Internet. The postings on message boards talked about frustration getting help from HP. HP also creates the impression that installation is simple and automated. All of this leads to some important insights for customer facing systems:

1. Many companies collectively create the impression that things will go smoothly. Marketing wants it to be smooth and promises ease of installation and no problems. Caveats aren’t mentioned. We find ourselves in the old ‘Over-Promise/Under-Deliver’ dilemma where we create an impression, intentionally or not, that something will be easy when it may not be. Hence documentation and support services are under-prepared to deal with problems.
2. Many companies don’t seem to pay enough attention to what’s going on around the Internet. When there are many postings indicating problems, those problems should be addressed directly. The cynic in me suggests that these companies are simply saying “No problem, they’ve already paid the money, bought the hardware or software, so nothing lost if there’s a minor problem”. I don’t honestly believe anyone feels that way, but it FEELS like it when you’re frustrated by something that was supposed to be easy.
3. Test suites for hardware and software too often seem to be limited and don’t search for problems aggressively enough. On products like this where the system itself is a multi-product (Scanner, Printer, Copier, Fax Machine), it’s easy to under-test. Thorough testing should be fundamental, but companies all too often appear to tradeoff testing up-front for service after the sale. Not intentionally perhaps, but that’s the effect.

It’s no mystery why companies act like this. There are lots of reasons, but many of them come down to competition for niches in the marketplace. Get something out there, get it out quick, don’t do anything to discourage people from buying. There’s never enough money for a thorough job on testing and troubleshooting and all too often, there’s a self-reinforcing loop in the process where the developers believe they’ve done everything and the marketers don’t push enough to make sure that’s true.

I’ve worked for several people whose great talent was doing things that caused software or systems to fail in unusual ways. Every development staff needs someone like that, someone who sees the unusual or tries things that other people will try. Many developers are hampered by their own knowledge of their products and they inadvertently don’t test things that they should.

Next time, we’ll go further into implications and lessons learned for Customer Facing Systems.

Categories: Call/Contact Centers, Customer Service
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Let’s face it, I LOVE Hewlett-Packard equipment. I fell in love years ago with their calculators and their test equipment. My experiences were all positive. My HP45 was not my first calculator, but it was the first calculator that I LOVED as a tool.

During years of working in science and engineering, I encountered a number of stories about HP calculators and their quality that convinced me that HP knew what it was doing. The HP trademark was a powerful influence when I started selecting printers. All of the printers have been quality products, but lately, I’ve been having more problems with HP printers and I’ve had to call on their service organization and their web site. This gives me an interesting, ongoing case study in Customer Relationship Management and Customer Facing Systems that I plan to spend some time studying.

Over the next several entries, I plan to review a recent problem and assess what it tells me about HP’s Customer Facing System and the implications for Customer Relationship Management.

Let me make something clear … I’m not searching HERE for a solution to the problem. My interest on this blog is using this as a case study in Customer Facing Systems. Does this experience say anything important about such systems? If it does, then it will have met my objectives.

It’s going to take more space than I want to spend in a single post, so I’ve tentatively split the discussion like this:

The problem - I purchased an Officejet 6310 Printer/Copier/Fax/Scanner combination and I’m having problems with it, particularly with scanning and getting multiple networked computers to access it.

The search - I looked on the HP web site and on the web for answers to my problem and was appalled by the number of hits I got on people who also posted about similar problems

The chat - I tried to connect with HP through their chat line. I don’t know whether it was a real person or a computer I was talking to, but no matter which it was, it failed the Turing Test for demonstrated intelligence on the other end.

The email - I tried to email HP for assistance, even that caused problems. They’ve put enough roadblocks in the way of getting help that it’s hard to resolve the problem.

The future - where to go from here. What the implications are for Customer Facing Systems in general

Let me point out that FIRST - one bad experience doesn’t mean a Customer Facing System is bad. A case study is about a single, particular case and NOT a comprehensive study of the effectiveness of the system. I’m sure that HP can present data showing how satisfied their customers are, but something is missing when searching for solutions to the problem finds so many posts on the Internet about the same problem. Obviously, if HPs metrics say they’re doing well, then there is a blind-spot somewhere.

SECOND - the people I know at HP are dedicated, good people trying their best to provide good service. This seems to be more a case of good people trapped in a bad system, yet one that superficially looks good by some measures. It may only be a glitch in a specific portion of their support services and not a systemic problem at all. Without considerable study internally, I have no way to tell.

THIRD - I’m not focused on this instance because I dislike HP, rather because I think HP is a strong company. It’s important to understand that problems in Customer Facing Systems are not limited to bad companies, ANY company, even one committed to good service, can have problems. Even when they are monitoring the situation carefully, they can make mistakes.

FOURTH - I could do this same type of case study on many experiences with many different companies. I plan to do other case studies in the future, but we need to start somewhere. I’m starting with HP. It’s important to note here that similar problems have occurred with other companies in trying to access service information. Many company web sites are complex mazes of information, so confusing that it’s a miracle that you can find anything useful at all. Instead of taking the load of real people in service centers, it aggravates the problem and causes more frustration on the part of customers.

Let me emphasize again that the focus here in the Customer Facing System and it’s implications for Customer Relationship Management. I’m not looking for a solution to the problem in these posts, but rather insights into more general principles applicable to Customer Facing Systems.

Categories: Call/Contact Centers, Customer Service, Web Sites
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Whether you’re running a Call Center, a Web Store, or just talking to customers across a counter, efficiency needs to be an important part of what you’re doing. The problem is, very few advisers give you the full story about efficiency when proposing changes to processes, technology, or anything else.

Efficiency is often looked down on by some and worshipped by others. Both go too far. Efficiency needs to be part of your planning and it needs to be part of your system, but not all efficiency is good. What could NOT be good about efficiency? The most obvious is when you can’t afford it.

Efficiency has to be cost effective and has to have the right sort of impact. If I could save you a penny per transaction at a cost of a Million Dollars, would that be good efficiency? Maybe, maybe not. If you do a million transactions a day and have a billion dollar business, that’s probably good efficiency. If you do one transaction a day and have a business that nets fifty-thousand dollars a year, it’s bad.

Even the first case where it looks like you can afford it and would have a quick payback on your investment, it could still be bad if that 1-penny change alienated customers or caused other problems that wound up either causing problems for your business or costing more than the penny per transaction you saved.

Figuring out what efficiencies are good or bad is not just a question of immediate effects, it also involves systemic effects. Unforeseen 2nd tier effects often cause problems. Anyone who has ever studied business strategy will have read cases where something that the business organization SHOULD have seen but didn’t, eventually came back to cause problems.

So this leads to the obvious question. How well do YOU understand YOUR Customer Facing System?

Categories: Call/Contact Centers, Customer Service, General
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Was your system implemented by one of the major consulting firms? Never having been part of one, I can’t speak to their policies or procedures and I can only judge by the projects I’ve come into AFTER a major consulting company has left. Maybe the perception is biased because I often see poor implementations or failed projects, but I’ve seen some that are considered successful as well and frankly I’m not impressed.

In talking with people involved in projects, it seems to be the pattern that very senior consultants deal with executives at the company and sell them on the project. They’re followed by more junior people who come in and actually do the work. Like anything else, the quality varies. Unfortunately, in some cases I’ve come into, it’s been clear that the understanding of the underlying problems was lacking.

Thick reports and polished presentations don’t mean that they understand you. Look carefully to see if what you’re getting is a solution looking for twist your problem into the right form to fit it. If you start to get the feeling that you’re being overwhelmed with high level talk and it isn’t being made clear to you in your own terms what the problem really is, then maybe you’re not getting what you need.

1. Are the presentations clear and understandable, phrased in terms you would use?
2. Are you and your people involved in gathering data and the follow up analysis?
3. Are the people doing the analysis going to be there for the implementation?

If ANY of these answers are NO, you need to think carefully before you sign on the dotted line.

Let me point out, sometimes it happens that you’ll get just the right thing and everything will work as it’s supposed to. Often enough to be of concern though, it doesn’t. Slick presentations and executive presence doesn’t make for a good customer facing system. Only a systemic understanding will provide a basis for that.

Categories: System Development
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