Digital Era Customer Contact and Experience

In the 1980s, The theory of Customer Care was propogated widely at the same time that call centres started to evolve into contact centres. The subtle difference between a call centre and a contact centre being that a contact centre is supposed to deal with customers through all media of communication: letters, telephone calls, and direct contact in person if somone knocked on your door. With the '90s, email was added and then websites and latterly mobile apps have started to grow traction.

In parallel with this we have seen all sorts of mechanised and automated technologies arrise to help improve productivity and efficiency. IVR or Interactive Voice Response (which really is not that interactive), Power diallers to fuel direct telemarketing campaigns, backed up with scripting to ensure consistency of message were also introduced followed by features such as distributd call centres, off shoring, workflow based load balancing etc.

The touble with all these approaches has often been that they focus on work load balancing, limited levels of scalability and cost efficiency rather than personal experience. Offshoring also intorduced problems with culture and language, as well as greater possibilities of fraud and exposure of customer data to theft and exploitation, as "solid legal contracts" have proven to be paper tigers in protecting confidentiality. In fact in some countries, such as Singapore, which have reutations for innovation and fast moving companies, customer experience is terrible.

This just does not cut it in the modern digital age, when customer experience and reputation will make or break a company. We now have people pondering the future of the contact center and whether there will be any people in them to take calls with the advent of AI and chatbots as well as the use of IoT to collect customer behaviour information and change the model by which companies interact with customers.

The real issue is that many of these advances can be uselfull exploited in situations which suit "self serve" activities such as "how can I fix my thermostat or change my account settings". They don't particularly work well when there has been a service failure or a billing mix up. Assumptions that Generation Next Letter in the Alphabet will always want to contact you via a certain technical chanel are also wrong. Peoples contact method decisions are often affected by context. If they are not allowed to use mobiles at work for instance, or they are in an airport and have lost their mobile phone or iPad and urgently need help with a travel problem, then other contact options are needed.

The new technologies offer opportunities, but greater effort needs to be put into creatively exploiting them and designing a great customer experience. So it is interesting to see that a company like Creston is establsihing a global network of Customer Experience Centres to show exactly what it can do for people. It will also be interesting to see how Creston exploits this interaction chanel to improve its customer offerings as well.

Digital Experience (DX) And the Re-invention of Marketing

The Post War World of the '50s and '60s saw a massive explosion in marketing as companies tried to force feed Baby Boomers mass produced electro mechanical goods, encased in plastic. They did this by trying to create desire and brainwash people into needing their brands. This was the last hurrah for the Henry ford approach, "they can have any colour they like, so long as it is black" and the Taylorist School of management which focused on productivity and costs, whilst paying lip service to quality.

It took the massive economic melt down of the late seventies and early eighties for the Quality led management, pioneered largely by Japanese companies to gain acceptance in Europe and America, which at the same time was accompanied by the angst of Punk, as Generation X turned on mass consumerism and the break down of "A Job for Life". Customer Care, based on the concept of listening to and delighting customers, came to the forefront. New technologies like CADCAM and philosophies like Flexible Manufacturing made it possible to design, prototype and evolve products to meet customer needs and gradually Design Thinking came into being.

At the same time, the '80s saw the birth of the PC and take up of lower cost client server technology, which usurped proprietary mainframes whilst Rapid Application Development (the forerunner to Agile) sparked the first steps to evolving the Digital Ecosystem that we see today. This has pushed marketing evolution to the extent that the modern marketing function is digitally obsessed with Customer Behaviour Data, Customer Experience and Agile Marketing. So much so, that most digital conversations inevitable involve talking about Customer Experience and the Customer Journey.

So it was great to see Nimbus Ninety publish "The CX Manifesto" which sets out over 30 recommendations under the 5 headings of Personalisation, Experimentation, Trust, Data and Loyalty in its latest  quarterly publication of the Chief Disruptor magazine. This is well worth a read as it has been compiled by practitioners from London's vibrant digital scene over the first 6 months of 2018 and is based on sound experience.

Digital Reputation Is All

In some of my early posts, I likened Digital Disrupters to Vikings, in terms of being fast moving, launching asymmetrical market attacks and continuously changing their angle of attack to pursue value, whilst using light weight tools, agility and simple instrumentation to facilitate this. 

Latterly, I have been stressing reputation, which was important to vikings too. In fact some people would say that a Viking's name and reputation were more important to him (or her) than gold and land. As they wanted their reputations to last for ever and reputation was a strong means for recruiting a band of warriors for the next viking voyage or raid.

In the digital world, reputation is important to digital enterprises, becasue customer loyalty is much more volatile than with traditional businesses and a whole new set of organisations are embracing Customer Care (CC) as well as Customer Experience (CX) in what could be termed C2X. I touch on this in my book ( The Way of DAU ). If culture eats strategy for breakfast, then loss of reputation destroys company value for lunch. A strong digital brand should have a positive and engaging reputation based on positive values.

A recent story about Cloudflare in Wired, is a salutary lesson about reputation and proactive reputation management. For those of you who don't know about Cloudflare, it provides a cloud service for intermediating and absorbing DDoS attacks. It does this by sitting between a cloud service and its users and sampling traffic to detect patterns associated with DDoS attacks and filtering out any DDoS transactions against the service.

The founder & CEO, Mathew Prince, takes a strong stand on Freedom of Speech so is happy to provide services to some organisations which many may find distasteful. Interestingly enough early experience with escort services in Turkey showed that learning to protect a service which many people attack, actually improved the overall capability of the DDoS service to defend against similar attacks against more innocent targets.

Cloudflare relied on simply stating its position and liberal principles which are enshrined in the American Constitution. Unfortunately this was not enough and providing services one particular Neo Nazi organisation began to lead to a snow ball of assaults on Cloudflare's reputation, until the CEO felt compelled to take action and modify their stance on what protecting free speech actually meant for the company, leading to the banning of this particular customer.

This goes to show that reputations have to be actively managed and part of this is continuing review of an organisation's ethical stance as well as actual customer experience is essential; something which might be termed Ethics Sustainability, Customer Care and Experience (ESC2X), with the accronym pronounced Essex, redefining the old joke about someone with a lisping estuary accent saying that "Ethics isn't a place East of London".

At the same time, many other people and organisations are beginning to question what free speech should mean on the web. To my mind, with freedom comes responsibility, as I define freedom as the right to make your own decisions and mistakes, and not to have them imposed upon you. This is a two way deal. In the Cloudflare example, the Neo Nazi organisation appears to have gone beyond free speech to threaten and bully people, as well as slander the leadership of Cloudflare by implying that they were sympathisers to their ideology. So they broke the free speech contract and deserved to be kicked off Cloudflare's service. Cloudflare probably needed to encourage more debate about their stance and code, as part of their overall leadership practices.