Chris Crosby

Seth Godin has an interesting post about why your last impression with a customer is more important than the first (you know the old adage “you never get a second chance to make a first impression”).

He’s right, and I thinks its really about making every interaction count across your organization. When you consistently deliver you build credibility with your customers that leads to repeat business and the word of mouth marketing that Seth talks about. You may have a “great” sales team that wows your prospect on the first sales call, but if the rest of your team can’t deliver on these expectations then it doesn’t really matter.

This theory applies in mass when you look at a contact center where a customer may be calling (or emailing or chatting) with an agent about anything from placing a new order to questioning a billing issue. Its important to focus on every aspect of this interaction, from how long the customer sat in queue, to how long the agent left them on hold, to how professional and knowledgeable the agent was.

Sometimes you never know when the current interaction will be the last.

One of the most effective, and ineffective, ways to increase the value of a customer is by upselling additional products or services at the time of a sale. Effectively this can increase your items/revenue per sale and raise your gross margin, ineffectively you can frustrate your customer and send them somewhere else. Here’s an example of the latter:

Amy and I went to open a new checking account a couple weeks ago and over the course of 15 minutes we were offered: a Home Equity Line of Credit on our home that we had owned for two weeks, we were pre-approved for a credit card we didn’t ask for, and we were pitched overdraft protection (apparently incase we somehow forget how to balance our checkbook). At this point it became blatantly apparent that the woman helping us was just reading prompts on her screen vs. actually identifying what services Amy and I might find useful based on our needs (interestingly enough we were dealing with the branch manager). 

By the end of the conversation I was almost frustrated enough to walk out and skip the whole deal, but the idea of going through the exact same scenario at another bank was nauseating.

Ironically, the only offer I did accept was the option to have my monthly statements sent via email vs. the old fashion printed/snail-mail way. In my opinion this offer was actually backwards, “eStatements” should be the standard offer and paper statements being the downsell.

The moral of the story is this:

Are you qualifying your customers’ needs and offering appropriate services and products, or are you taking a shotgun offer approach just to try and hit a monthly quota? How are you really impacting your bottom line and your customers’ experience? Are you training and empowering your employees to discern the difference, or just populating scripts for them?

The blogoshere and news headlines are a blaze lately with articles on “Politics 2.0” and candidates harnessing the Internet and social networks to gain wider exposure and raise money.

But what if you’re not a candidate or PAC and you want to influence a campaign? Or make your voice heard to other voters about an issue or a politician that you love or hate?

Traditionally this was a difficult task. You used to have print flyers and knock on doors or pass them out on street corners. In today’s world, you just start a blog. Think blogs don’t matter? Do a Google search on “Pete Roskam”, the Congressman for IL-06.

The fifth result down is Dump Roskam, a blog “Dedicated to tracking Roskam in DC. This blog will show his policies and votes that are way too conservative for Illinois.” A little more poking around Google gets you to The Roskam Record, a blog “Committed to monitoring Rookie Congressman Roskam’s words and actions.”

In a world where, if you don’t appear on the first couple pages of a Google search you don’t exist, this type of publicity can be very damaging for a candidate’s image.

As a congressman, Roskam is up for reelection in 2008. Now, as much as I wish that traditional big media and 30 second sound bites on TV won’t be an influence in 2008, they will. However, as the Internet takes on a more influential component of campaigning its going to be tough for candidates to protect their online identity. (Just ask Hillary Clinton after the famous YouTube video that kicked off the 2008 political season).

Surely it won’t be long before a web savvy campaign manager creates a smear campaign by helping supporters to optimize their blogs and web sites for search engines and Google page rank. However, in the meantime, here’s to the Internet helping individuals get their voices and opinions heard!!

Ok, while most everyone else is busy puking on Cisco’s parade for their two recent acquisitions of Social Networking Companies, and wasting otherwise productive time by ranting about why this is such a bad idea. Let’s take a look at what’s really going on here.

Unlike the News Corp-MySpace acquisition, Cisco clearly isn’t after these companies for their customer or user base. Cisco could careless about ad generated revenue. What they’re really after here is the technology. Granted, just about any high school kid could code one of these things, but why reinvent the wheel if its only going to cost you a couple million bucks to buy it?

So the question becomes, why would a router & switch company want “social networking” software? The answer is actually pretty simple.

The Contact Center.

In 1999, Cisco bought a company called Geotel that provided CTI and Enterprise Call Center Routing functionality. Over the years that followed they’ve acquired companies that provide other contact center functionality such as email, chat, web collaboration, and self-service IVR. They’ve integrated these technologies into what we in the contact center world call Multi-Channel Communications, or to be more specific Cisco Unified Contact Center Solutions.

Ok, so why social networking? Let’s start by taking a look at a still relatively unintegrated form of customer contact; the online user group forum.

A traditional customer forum site, like Roxio/Sonic for example, can divert thousands of calls into the call center by allowing customers to leverage this as a form of self-service.

Now, enter the “intelligent user group forum” a la social networks into the equation and what you have is a mechanism by which customers can actually interact with your brand online (need I mention my.barackobama.com?). To put it bluntly, Social Networks are really nothing more than online user forums that will enable companies to further extend their customer interactions on the web.

So, now you’re Cisco and you take this new software and integrate it in with the rest of the suite. What you get here is pretty damn powerful stuff.

Imagine for a minute that you’re a customer on a company’s website surfing for boxer shorts. Now let’s say you’ve been on one page for several minutes and for whatever reason you can’t find your size so you haven’t placed your order yet. 

Also keep in mind that the boxer shorts company knows your size because of previous orders, it also knows that you’re looking for the yellow polka-dot kind because you belong to the yellow-polka dot customer forum. All of a sudden your cell phone rings and its your personal shopper on the line ready to help you find those special undies in your size and color.

This does two things for the boxer shorts company:

1. Reduce cost by deflecting self service calls
2. Increase Revenue Opportunities by customer profiling and an integrated communication strategy

 

“Welcome to the Human Network”

In case you missed it, Verint made an unexpected play last week to acquire Witness. It’s safe to say that when most of us heard the news we paused for a moment and thought to ourselves,  “HUH?”

Over the course of the last week I’ve had no less than a dozen conversations with industry analysts and vets speculating the why’s and motives behind this unexpected buy.

Although, despite of all the useless speculation, what really matters is how this merger impacts you, me, and this industry we love so much.

So here’s how I see it:

The biggest sector that will be impacted is call recording. As little as two years ago there were a ton of options to choose from when purchasing or replacing these types of solutions, now Verint WILL dominate the field.

How the ‘Verint/Witness’ product integration and end-of-life strategies play out is yet to be told and will certainly cause a great deal of short term customer (and prospect) confusion. My hope is that the rival companies will put the swords away and take a true “best of breed” approach. I can’t tell you which recording product is better, but what I can tell you is that they need to:

• figure out how to take the best of both
• create a new best-of-breed
• offer both sets of legacy customers a smooth migration path

Many other merger kings have fallen short in this arena and lost in the end. (need we mention Aspect with RightForce and eWFM)

My advice to the new combined customer base is to pay close attention to the new product roadmap. Witness spent a great deal of time building the Blue Pumpkin integration into their Impact 360 line, so if you’re being sold this solution today make damn well sure you know what its going to look like 24 months from now. Start asking questions about where and how all the moving parts will integrate. You won’t get answers to all of them now, but get them on your sales reps’ radar screen. And be relentless before you start writing checks.

By all means, if you are in the market for call recording make sure you understand the new landscape prior to purchasing either legacy application. There are other non-monolithic vendors out there that may prove to be more agile alternatives.

On a side and often overlooked note, vendor consolidation has downstream effects on the entire industry. For example, call center exhibit halls are shrinking. Eighteen months ago a demo hall would have had Verint, Opus Group, Mercom, Blue Pumpkin, Witness and Amae Software (and I’m sure I’m missing a couple others). Today these six vendors all fall under the Verint booth. AND this is just one company’s consolidation, for more carnage you only have to look at the Concerto/Aspect acquisition binges, or Cisco or… This impacts everything from conference agendas to the often watered down magazine “articles” you read…

 -Chris

Ok pardon the bad pun in the title, but I couldn’t resist…

As I mentioned in my first post about politics 2.0, this is not a political blog, however I have taken a certain fascination with how the Internet and the “web 2.0 phenomenon” is going to shape the 2008 elections. As such, I will be discussing the non-partisan/platform aspects here:

I was almost finished wrapping-up the 2nd post in this series “from grassroots to netroots” when I received an email from Barack Obama’s PAC that I thought warranted discussion.

The blast was presumably sent to his email base with the goal to build awareness and excitement about his announcement tomorrow to run for the big house in 08. Beyond the “come join us for the rallies” there was a link to a 2 minute video clip (not uncommon for his campaign strategy).

What I find fascinating is that the clip didn’t mention ANY POLITICAL AGENDAS!!! It is merely a discussion about how his campaign will engage the constituent base, many aspects of which I touched on in my last post. It’s arguable whether or not the first 49 seconds of the clip stand for a platform in-and-of-itself, but we’ll save that discussion for another time and place.

I don’t have time to write about it here, but ponder just for a second what Barack’s cost per voter impression (I just made that metric up) is vs. traditional media (compared to say, Rudy Giuliani)… 

-Chris

Yesterday’s post about MyWorkLight and unlocking enterprise content via RSS generated a great deal of interest. A couple of the emails I received made me take a step back and look at the Latigent product offering with a fresh set of goggles.

As I’ve mentioned before, BlueVue has an integrated RSS Reader in it, not a very good one, but its functional. To be completely honest, it’s actually just more of a way to stick an XSLT on top of an RSS feed’s XML. For obvious reasons we never emphasized this as a core part of our suite.

However about a year ago, at a customer’s request, we stuffed in the ability for our scheduled reports to be syndicated as RSS feeds. No one ever really figured out anything clever to do with this feature (even the customer) because most of the world still doesn’t understand what to do with RSS.

So fast forward to today and let me paint a new picture for you. BlueVue is a Business Intelligence Suite. Which by definition means we consolidate and normalize data from across the enterprise; then push that out to consumers as customized reports, scorecards and dashboards. As I mentioned, these reports can be scheduled to either update dashboards, email HTML, or update an RSS feed.

“Business Intelligence is no longer just data warehouses, reporting, analytics and dashboards; it’s the art of harvesting information from a mass array of sources and distributing what’s relevant to the right people at the right time and in a way that’s tailored to each consumer”

– Chris Crosby,
President/CEO Latigent International

This is a quote from the press release we did in December 2005 when BlueVue II was first released. However, the full magnitude of that vision didn’t hit me until about 1:00 PM yesterday afternoon… This was one of those “aha” moments for me.

All a customer would need to do is take those RSS feeds and plug them into a real Enterprise RSS tool and… wallah! the power of business Intelligence and RSS converge.

Forget “Web 2.0″, we’ve just introduced the next generation of Enterprise Information Distribution. So 18 months from now when the industry analysts and pundits catch-up remember you read it here first…

Ironically enough, the entire time I’ve been ranting about enterprise content needing to be available via RSS it was right under my nose in my own product. Talk about a giant smack to the forehead… doh!

-Chris

I’ve seen a lot of discussion lately around the likes of Coghead and other Do-It-Yourself (DIY) coding apps. To date most of it has been the developer community dismissing the idea that anyone outside the ivory tower could possibly have the mastery skill sets required to create a software application on their own. Well guess what guys, the party’s over.

So far this whole thing has been analyzed from the wrong angle. Developers are thinking that non-programmers are going to set-out and build the next generation killer app. Which, as has been pointed out is simply ridiculous. Even if the software could support it, the average Joe doesn’t understand architecture and design. But this doesn’t mean that we throw the baby out with the bath water.

Let’s step back and look at this from the consumer level-up vs. the developer level-down. Personally, I have been waiting for something that’s a notch above FrontPage but not as developer centric as say Visual Studio.

New technology creates new niches.The advent of affordable, super mega-pixel cameras created a niche for the ”prosumer photographer”. These cameras function right above point-and-shoot, but just below what would be required by a professional that wants to make money at his trade. I don’t recall seeing any headlines that mentioned any Professional Photographers loosing their jobs or their market shrinking due to the entry of the Prosumer. In fact, those that understood the market capitalized on it by offering tutorials, classes and equipment sales to this new class of users.

Another example of this prosumer market entry is Legal Zoom and other DYI law services. A great deal of attorneys view the services offered on that site as low lying fruit that they don’t want to deal with anyway. This frees them up to charge more for higher-end and specialized services.

So back to DIY Coding. Coghead claims 13,000 in their beta program. Certainly not Google-plex beta numbers, but nothing to scoff at either. What it tells me is that they have people’s interest and attention. If they execute this correctly, they could create an entirely new market here.

So, my message here is ”Mr. Developer, tear down this wall!”  Your jobs aren’t going anywhere. But, if I were in your shoes, here’s what I would do:

• Instead of emphasizing the rules and limitations to what can’t be done with DIY tools, evangelize what CAN be done that would make your day easier (all developers like their day to be easier). 
• Offer services and consulting around that. Prepackaged, vertical templates will be a hit. You only have to look to Salesforce.com appexchange to see that.

What Coghead essentially has done here is create the prosumer developer.