Traffic Jammed Customer Service

How many of us have endured endless wait times when calling customer service numbers? Or suffered through long lines at a POS counter? Or even waiting for a website to load and log you in for online self service. All of these are cases of "traffic jams" in the customer services of an organization.

Customer Experience Innovation: Does Innovation Require a Framework?

Recently, I shared an interesting article, on one of the social network sites, that I had read about Customer Experience Innovation. Among the comments that I got, one was regarding organizations going about customer experience innovation by requiring employees to simply "do it". Without a framework or a business plan or strategy behind it.

Do Business Processes Strangle Creativity?

When discussing business strategies, whether these be for CRM, CEM, or just plain BPM, organizations try to understand and plan for every eventuality using processes. Flowcharts and call scripts are the answer to all conversations with the customers.

Lets look at the some basic customer conversations. Starting with product design and development, we rely on surveys and focus groups working on a scripted and finite set of questions. Marketing, sets up automated campaigns to generate leads. Sales scripts have always been infamous for stereotyping customers. Customer services and support processes are optimized using scripted IVRs.