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Licensed to Kill Boundaries... Silos, customer care, and the case of the DMV

 

             “The declining effectiveness of traditional marketing tactics, consumer privacy legislation, and the desire to use every interaction to deepen the customerrelationship are driving marketing and service together. Contact centersshould relinquish control over the customer interaction — via phone, email, chat, direct mail, or self-service — to a marketing executive who owns and manages the overall customer experience.”

 

Forrester Research’s report, “Why Marketing Should Own the Contact Center,” illustrates, albeit polemically, the current tension and the tug of war for customer experience ownership.  Traditional models of marketing and care do not meet the expectations of mobile, savvy end-customers. 

That report’s publication date:  April 2004.  Fast-forward to 2011 and the fundamental underpinnings that prompted Forrester in 2004 still hold true. But marketers and contact centers face far more complex systems and interactions and new channels including mobile applications and social media. Did anyone predict in 2004 that we’d face relatively new fields of CRM study and measurement entirely with Social Media becoming so influential on consumer behavior and brand awareness? 

 The ever-increasing adoption of socially connected content combined with search engine generated content demands that marketers reconsider their knowledge management strategy.  Search Engine Optimization and standard online ROI models, e.g. Net Promoter scores, work for “produced” content in a widely adopted model of commercialization.  We’ve yet to agree on new standards of measurement and there’s no good way to derive the return on listening to the conversations of the unpredictable “social” voice of the customer.

The value of marketing jumped significantly when enterprises recognized their investments in the web, hadn't only increased their customer's vocal power but also their buying power.  In most cases corporate marketing and marketing communications departments set the strategy and spent the budget for social efforts. As a precipitant, Social CRM applications developed as a way to harness the power of the voice of the customer as it moved from controlled programs to the wilds of the Twitter-sphere.  Forrester, “ CMO’s Must Connect the Dots of the Online Brand,” April 2010

It was consumers who dragged marketers into the contact center.  However, it wasn't social media that began the call to action into the contact center. Retail provides us a blueprint into the new consumer ecosystem.  Consumers’ retail buying habits evolved for the convenience of ecommerce and mobile/ Smartphone applications and the new channels secured a place in nearly every market and every buying cycle.

Contact with companies is more intimate: I am walking the aisles of a store WITH a company in hand. Real-time conversations begin well before a customer makes that ever-important decision to choose a particular brand in a specific location. At home or anywhere for that matter a consumer is connected and collecting information, price shopping, interacting in conversations about product and service benefits and complaints.  The lifecycle reaches far beyond our traditional notions of customer interactions. (See Forrester’s Online Branding orchestration table.

Consequently, customer service has taken on an additional role in the information gathering and purchase stages of the buying cycle. Agents now shop with their newly found mobile friends in both virtual and brick and mortar outlets using chat, multi-browse, and intelligent content delivery. For the most part, marketing does not participate in this part of the conversation.  Stove-piped from operational decisions in the past, the costs associated with marketing became the opportunities lost in the new value chain, created by the web and reinforced by mobility.

 No company can risk having their data and their customer satisfaction degenerated when smarter cross-functional decisions.  Increasingly organizations require robust knowledge management platforms to help guide self-service and to personalize the customer experience for consumers who are very eager to have a conversation.  And for employees to have the voice and training required to meet the new demands.

 Real time data comes from many channels and when in the hands of customer care departments increases the value of cross channel marketing activities and can exponentially improve the ROI of Social CRM. Data collection and interactions throughout all the customer touch points have the value of becoming increasingly more personal and more relevant.  Extensive customer inputs can give a company the power to have dialogues using dynamic, continually evolving content repositories supported by robust knowledge management foundations. 

All the events, conscious and sometimes unconscious, equate to what’s widely known in both marketing and CRM circles as Customer Experience.  Customer Experience doesn’t simply occur at the point of sale.  It happens before and after, as we have seen time and again. We can all think of times when, for instance, our expectations weren’t met.  We’re used to not getting great care from government agencies, therefore it’s not uncommon for a consumer of a state’s services to have low expectation.

At the government level we do expect great Knowledge Management.  Although invisible to the customer, great KM in action creates excellent experiences.  Integrated across organizations, at it’s best Knowledge Management can facilitate cross-functional communications because customer expectations and thus experience should transcend traditional barriers between internal departments. 

These same investments in customer satisfaction and intimacy can be leveraged to support measurement tools used by Customer Experience and Contact Centers to deliver insight to their end users.  So you can measure the conversations that transpire in any channel if the approach becomes holistic rather than stove piped - the same corporate tactics that kept marketing and customer care at the other side of the building for years.

The Case of the DMV

 When KM doesn’t work or works poorly, the visible effects to customers include frustration and worse the decision to not only abandon the notion of doing business with a company but also to speak out and have their complaints heard via word of mouth and social channels. The associated costs to any organization far exceed the loss of the transaction.  An unlikely candidate for illustrative purposes is the state DMV.

Renewing our auto registrations is something we can all relate to and very few of us will retell stories of delight.  Typically the experience is described as either a bad or neutral at best.  Traditionally marketing hasn’t participated in state initiatives and most CRM practitioners can relate this experience to KPIs like first call resolution and cost per call.

We can even derive the basic tenants of KM, CRM, SCRM, cross channel integration and brand through the DMV of any given state. 

Several underlying assumptions to keep in mind:

-       Even the DMV delivers on a brand promise and exhibits brand values.

-       Twitter and Facebook (as well as YouTube and other social media channels) provide DMV customers with a variety of educational and customer service tools.

-       DMV’s typically have extremely well documented individual data therefore customers have very high expectations of identification and verification processes.

-       Mandates from the US state government as well as state level initiative require that agencies reduce customer paperwork, improve green initiative metrics, and reduce cost per transaction and require higher customer satisfaction for each department as a result.

In the last several years the broad adoption of electronic payments changed the expectations of most consumers and reflecting this behavior shift the letter that arrives for auto renewal from our state DMV broadcasts in bold letters how easy it is for us to PAY BY INTERNET OR PHONE and provides a corresponding web address and toll-free number to call. 

Several failed attempts at using the DMV’s ecommerce portal prompt a call to the toll free number in order to process the renewal. The IVR presents an option for Virtual Hold, a proven way to improve customer experience and customer satisfaction.  However, the optimal experience might have obfuscated the more costly and less efficient phone channel if a combination of easy to use knowledge based tools were available.  Dynamic search/ FAQ as well as live chat or virtual chatbot online to drive up usage of the web site and increase customer satisfaction for a less frustrating overall experience.

Furthermore, the customer may have several possible IDs at this point in the transaction: web site error code and case number, the renewal notice transaction number, their state ID (driver’s license in this case), the automobile’s tag number, or even the auto registration number.

The IVR does not present options that mirror the most recent web ecommerce experience nor does it give prompts for renewal options, as the original notice advertised.  Finally, the CSR informs the customer he’s unable not able to process a payment over the phone and mail would be the final option.

For some, this meets expectations.  However, experience tells us that corresponding measurements and the tools available likely as anything have disparate oversight departments and suffer from lack of collaboration.  No mandate changes culture.  The end result is fragmentation, lower ROI and higher customer frustration. The implications of the ID conundrum speak to a back office nightmare that no one would dream of untangling.

Make your wealth of knowledge relevant, dynamic, and available anywhere, anytime.  At the very least you’ll deliver better content and learn something about what our customers want to know about us if we do.

 

 

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