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Where Will Customers Take You Next?
“You can undo good work so quickly if you don’t balance your channels.”
Mark Selcow pointed out this unfortunate truth yesterday when we were discussing the importance of having a consistent customer experience across channels. Selcow is president of Merced Systems, a performance management vendor focused on the contact center—for now. Merced has begun expanding into other areas of its customers’ organizations (field service and installation, back office, retail channel), courtesy of those customers. It’s not alone. Witness Systems is another contact center vendor whose customers are using its applications to improve service in other areas of their businesses (watch for our upcoming article on Banco Popular in the Jan/Feb issue of 1to1 magazine).
What makes this interesting to me is twofold: First, it shows that companies are increasingly recognizing the need to create a consistent multichannel service experience. Many are doing so by sharing common service processes across channels, in some cases supported by technologies that can help guide those processes. Second, it demonstrates the positive impact customers can have on a company that listens to and acts on their feedback.
In the case of Witness and Merced, customers are helping to guide them down a path they were planning to explore – both recognizing that growth opportunities lay not just inside the contact center, but also outside it as well, as organizations place an increasing emphasis on the service experience across their enterprise. The vendors benefit by capitalizing on an important trend; their customers benefit by either partnering with them along that path, or by learning from the customers that have gone before them, as well as from the expertise the vendors develop as they move along their new path.
Unipress (recently acquired by Numara Software) is another example of this. Years ago Unipress focused solely on the help desk. But some customers that experienced great success in using its Footprints product decided to see what else they could do with it. Customer service was one natural fit. Unipress took the cue and added functionality specific to customer support – and experienced steady growth in that area as a result.
There are plenty of examples of this outside the CRM world as well. So I’m interested to know, where have customers taken your organization?
I also have had bad experiences with companies who didn't have their CRM software up to speed. Get on the ball everyone!
POS, and CRM software should all encourage customer service. I had a bad experience with Sears recently with their phone support continued to tell me they couldn't help me find the product I needed because their software wouldn't let them.