Jacada Blog

Salesforce.com Outage – >Insert Pithy Storm Cloud Joke Here<

The Twitter-sphere is buzzing (or maybe the right term is tweezing) with news and commentary on yesterday's service outage which left their North American customers without service for 30 minutes or so. Salesforce.com has experienced several outages in recent years. The major outages happened two months ago, as well as in December 2005 and January 2009, with separate minor outages recorded in January 2006.

Major disruptions also occured in April 2006, while several Cloud platforms, including Salesforce.com and Amazon's EC2 and S3 environments, together with major ecommerce sites like Walmart.com, were also affected by a DoS attack. The attack affected users of NeuStar's ultraDNS service, which translates web addresses into Internet Protocol (IP) addresses.

While supporters of SaaS and the Service Cloud have mobilized to defend Salesforce.com, and the supports of premise-based solutions have fired back, most of the conversation reads like a group of 3rd graders talking about whose Dad is stronger. You're either all right or all wrong – and this time it's personal. And while there are many zealous opinions, there is very little substance. 

To borrow from the parlance of our times, I have no bird in this particular cloud. Jacada's WorkSpace Agent Desktop, by design, can be deployed both on-premise and, when called upon, in an Enterprise Cloud architecture. And, in fact, our Fusion products are often a powerful bridge integrating SaaS / Cloud-based applications with legacy and premise based systems. Flexibility and choice has been our focus, not necessarily ideology.

To that end, I would propose an end to the ideological rant for and against “the Cloud”.  Put simply:

• Vendors should stop the nonsensical corporate sloganry and get real.
• Analysts should no longer portray any approach as all right or all wrong and admit that the reality is somewhere in between.
• Customers should hold us all accountable, by demanding transparency and a real dialogue about where and when these kinds of technologies make sense.

There are things SaaS does very well, and others it doesn't. Under the right circumstances, businesses can save money and operational resources. For mission critical productivity applications, though, such as those used in call centers, they may not deliver the control and performance an enterprise needs.  Less rhetoric and more transparency is the only way to ensure customers understand the complete picture and make choices that will deliver the results their businesses demand.

Richard Stern - Senior Vice President, Global Marketing

How Does Generation Y View Customer Service?

On 19 May 1986 TIME magazine published an article entitled "Growing pains at 40".  The article announced the coming of age of the Baby Boomers, who had reached 'middle age'. In the article Al Gore said "We wanted to change it all, to do it our way."

Today we baby boomers complain about how Generation Y are shouting out loud about their independence and the fact that they will "change it all and like to do things their own way".   The fact of the matter is that way back when the baby boomers started we were challenging the status quo and finding new ways to communicate and influence the world – think of fax machines, mobile telephony, the birth of the internet and 24 hour news channels... were we any different than today's generation?

Generation Y are the true mobile internet generation; they live and breathe social media and instant communications.  Research shows (from Morgan Stanley's mobile Internet report 2010) that more than 10 billion mobile internet devices have been created in the world compared to 100 million PC units.  830 million people globally use social networking sites and the average time spent on these sites is up by 25% in the last year alone.  Many believe that these sites, such as Facebook, are fast becoming the main communications platform for the majority in the future – especially for Generation Y.

Emarketer reports that teens today are spending as much as 13 hours per day online, many of them transitioning from the traditional PC on a desk to netbook and smart phone technologies. Mobile internet usage is 3 times higher on iPhones than any other mobile device (Morgan Stanley) and emerging markets are once again skipping a technological generation and moving straight to the mobile internet as the preferred platform.

So what does this all mean from a customer service perspective?  Generation Y is the growing sector in the consumer market today; we baby boomers are on the way out and so are the preferences we have for real conversations with real people. These are still needed as the ultimate in resolving issues but the "instant gratification generation" want to be able to solve their issues quickly and cheaply using the channels they know and understand.  If we get it right they are happy and sometimes they tell their friends; if we get it wrong then the whole planet knows 5 minutes later as the viral messages bloom across the networks. Companies must seriously address these customer service challenges with this generation; it's not a choice of whether to address it, it's a question of when.

Guy Tweedale – Senior Vice President, European Operations

I Just Left My Mobile Phone Provider... Because of Lousy - and Inconsistent - Customer Experience

I just changed mobile phone providers.  Not the most convenient thing to do, and this company actually had less expensive plans than the company to whom I transferred my service.  But I had one rotten experience too many, and as you all know by now, customer experience is the name of the game.

Let's call them "Company X".  There are a number of customer service incidents I could tell you about, because I had been a customer for about 5 years.  But in the interest of brevity,  the overall issue is this:  whenever I talked with the call center, the agents were helpful, friendly and efficient.   Whenever I walked into a retail store, I was ignored, given attitude when the staff had to get off the phone to help me and charged fees that were not disclosed to me on the phone.   Things like this happened a few times during the past year.  It was like dealing with two different companies. 

And the funny thing is, they didn't care when I left and didn't care when I told them why.  Now, I don't have all of Company X's numbers or metrics so maybe my LTV as a customer wasn't off the charts, but I have to think that I'm a customer they would want to keep as I consistently go over my minutes and pay my bills on time.  Maybe they'd feel differently if they knew that I blog about customer experience.  Or that I have 300 friends on Facebook that I can tell this story to... or that I work for a company that specializes in customer experience solutions.  Maybe they would have fought harder to keep me if they realized I that all of those things make me a potential promoter within their customer base.  But instead, their lousy service made me a detractor.    A blogging, loud-mouthed, well-networked detractor.

Last month, I happily called up the call center and dramatically announced "I'm leaving!"  I couldn't wait for the agent to ask why... transfer me to the retentions group... start pouring on the sugar.  So you can imagine my surprise when the agent said "yes ma'am, we'll inform billing right away.  I see your number is in the process of being ported.  Can I do anything else?"   I was shocked at first and then realized I shouldn't be.  Company X just doesn't get it.  It should be common sense by now to businesses that customer experience is THE critical issue for 2010.  Companies cannot expect to build up any positive brand loyalty when they're offering such disconnected experiences to their customers.  

Cindy Knezevich - Director, Global Product Marketing & Communications, Jacada

Customer Service Effectiveness or Efficiency... which is more important?

In my years here at Jacada, I've been to dozens of our customers' contact centers and studied their metrics and how they are calculated.  These companies all have the same goals of serving the customer and increasing customer satisfaction... but of course they must also reduce costs. 
 
Traditional contact center metrics, such as AHT, ASA, Hold-time, Queue-time, etc., were developed with those goals in mind and focus on the length of time it takes to serve a customer's needs and the associated cost.  It makes sense to use these metrics when the primary focus is efficiency.  However, that doesn't provide any sense of whether the customer's issue is actually being resolved… and that is what concerns the customers.
 
To better understand whether the customer is being  served properly, you have to measure effectiveness.  The one most popular effectiveness metric is First Call Resolution (FCR).  Many contact center managers have heard of this and in some cases, already attempt to measure it.  Note the word "attempt".  The converse of FCR is a metric coined "CSR solve-rate", which measures how effective an individual CSR is at serving the customers they have had contact with.  These metrics focus on the same challenge from different perspectives.  Ultimately, accurate measures of both are necessary to really understand the effectiveness of contact center operations.
 
Once you have a good understanding of FCR by contact type and reason, plus a clear view of which CSRs are most effective and where they face challenges, you can easily implement action to improve performance and re-engineer processes.  FCR is the root metric that drives everything else.  
 
So, back to my question... is effectiveness or efficiency more important? The easiest way to answer that question is to consider that if you begin to focus on CSR Solve-rate for understanding the effectiveness of CSR performance and FCR for understanding the effectiveness of contact types or processes, you will have a firm foundation for not only improving customer satisfaction, but significantly driving down cost by eliminating callbacks and repeat calls. 
 
Given the root nature of FCR and Solve-rate as effectiveness measures, I believe effectiveness should become the driving force behind customer service improvement efforts.  Do you agree? 

Scott Norteman - Product Management Director, Jacada
 

Is application complexity an impediment to successful CRM adoption and excellent customer service?

CRM systems are pervasive in the call center, residing on every agent desktop with the tantalizing promise of shortening call handle times, increasing customer service and turbo charging agent productivity. Yet, as every call center manager who's adopted CRM knows, the allure of this Promised Land quickly fades when the agents are faced with powerful yet incredibly complicated application interfaces. You've given your agents enough rope to hang themselves with, and, instead of the benefits you hope to have yielded, you found your average handle time on the increase, and your agents spending more time fighting the system than listening to your customer. After all, CRM was built to manage the customer, not to interact with the customer.

Shifting your operational view from customer management to customer interaction management will likely yield the results you were after in the first place, yet the question remains how to turn a monolithic big name CRM system into a customer interaction focal point, all the while preserving your appreciably large investment price tag associated with a typical CRM implementation.  After all, your CRM system serves a valuable purpose throughout your organization, without which you would lack core business functionality such as sales pipeline tracking, marketing campaigns and support ticketing to name a few. The core issue then becomes its suitability, or ill-suitability, to be used 'in front' of a customer in a live, interactive manner. The user interfaces were never designed for this, and, quite frankly, it shows.

Our new product, Jacada Advisor, is designed to solve this problem by reducing application complexity and turning hard-to-manage systems into dynamic, powerful and compelling customer interactions. By providing information at the right time, at the right place, in the right context, your agents are guided as to the 'next best action', whether that is instructional usage on the system, richer customer information at the fingertips of the agent or a guided interaction with the customer. When the agent is guided through a customer interaction on a CRM system, suddenly, the application becomes less daunting, training times are reduced and complexity is removed, all while preserving your initial investment. Indeed, a key principle underlying the design of Jacada Advisor is to work with your existing systems, enhancing rather than replacing, enriching rather than changing, improving rather than upgrading and hoping.

When you free up your agent to allow them to focus on the customer rather than the system, you will shorten your call handle times, increase your customer service and improve your agent productivity... Everything you had hoped to get when you adopted CRM in the first place!

Chris du Toit - Product Management, Jacada

Why Are The Olympics Dominating TV Ratings?

Are you glued to your TV every night watching the Olympics like I have been?   I can remember watching the "Miracle on Ice" hockey game with my father in 1980 when I was 7 years old.  I also remember watching Mary Lou Retton's perfect 10 vault four years later.  And while I don't know if any single performance from these Vancouver Olympics will go down in history like those did, the overall games have been very exciting.  And, at least in the U.S., I'm not the only one who thinks so:  the Olympics have consistently beaten TV heavy weights airing new episodes, such as "24", "Grey's Anatomy" and "Lost" in the ratings.   The Olympics even beat "American Idol" in its time slot, becoming the first show to do so in 6 years.

The Vancouver Olympics are averaging 6 million more viewers per night than the winter games in Torino and Nogano... why do we think that is?  At least from the American perspective, we have an impressive roster of athletes (Apolo! Lindsay! Bode!) and have seen some very dramatic wins (USA beat Canada in hockey!).  Like most other things, though, I think it comes down to experience.  The Olympics are providing a great customer experience for all of us viewers and the better the experience, the higher the ratings.

Cindy Knezevich - Director, Global Product Marketing & Communications, Jacada

How social is your business?

It's no secret that social media is causing an interaction explosion by knitting more and more people together every day. So what does this mean to your business? Do you have to market your brand differently? Can you co-invent products & services with your customers? Can you serve your customers better? These are the questions many companies are trying to answer. Here's my take on how businesses should leverage social media to improve customer service and convert negative experiences into positive experiences.

We know that bad news travels faster than good news, and that word of mouse is faster than word of mouth. This is why a customer's negative experience has the potential of going viral in the social web. Many companies now have employees monitoring popular social networking sites to address customers' concerns. I'm sure you'd get excited if your mobile service provider responded to your tweets about their poor service. What's great about this approach is that your experience is personalized and they show that they're listening. This is an awesome way to convert negatives into positives.

The challenge, however, is that this is not scalable and leaves room for error. The social web will soon emerge as a contact channel through which businesses serve their customers. Unless companies build enterprise-scale solutions to cater to this new social channel, they'll have to deal with diminishing returns. As customers get used to tweets from their service providers, they'll no longer get excited by them. They'll expect first contact resolution, as with other contact channels. It's critical that the agent/employee has the right tools to fulfill the customer's needs on first contact.

So, here are some questions to ask yourself:

1. Are you working on a social strategy that will keep the customer experience personal & real?
2. Do you have scalable ways of conversing with your customers over the social web?
3. Are you providing your agents/employees with the right tools to that help them focus on the customer's experience rather than on the tools themselves?

Kumaran Shanmuhan - Solution Architect, Jacada

Jacada Reports Improved Fourth Quarter Financial Results - Q4 Revenues Grow 48% Sequentially to $5.7 Million

This morning, Jacada reported financial results, and we are pleased to again report improved results in the fourth quarter. Jacada showed considerable progress towards our objectives in 2009. In almost every metric, we've achieved or exceeded where we thought we'd be by year end, and we believe that the momentum we experienced during our third quarter continued and accelerated during the fourth quarter. The efforts we have made to improve our customer value proposition and services delivery are starting to pay off in the form of improved financial results.

The progress we made in a tough 2009 is encouraging and we are energized as an organization to continue to build on this foundation. We anticipate that our revitalized operating fundamentals along with new product launches and product upgrades will resonate with our customers and help us maintain the momentum we have begun to generate. We look forward to updating you on our results as we progress throughout 2010 and to an exciting year of growth for Jacada.

You can read more here. http://www.jacada.com/news/PR320.htm

Tom Clear – Chief Executive Officer, Jacada Inc.

Forrester Analyst, Bruce Temkin Joins Jacada for Webcast on Feb. 24th

We are so thrilled to have our long-time friend, Bruce Temkin of Forrester Research, join us on Feb 24th to discuss his recently-released Forrester Customer Experience Index 2010 and share his opinions on factors that affect the bottom line in call centers. Bruce is a leading researcher on Customer Experience and the approaches and alternatives large organizations have when trying to deliver a positive and consistent customer experience. This webcast will highlight the opportunities for improvement revealed in the Index and the correlation between customer experience and the call center. Jacada will also explore and discuss unified desktop solutions for the contact center, including case studies of leading companies that demonstrate how this cost-effective alternative can be implemented quickly and deliver a rapid return-on-investment.  Register today!

Ann Conrad - Manager, Corporate Marketing, Jacada Inc.

Conference Report: Public Utilities and Customer Experience

I just attended the Marcus Evans "Utility Customer Experience Management" conference. Very insightful. Many of the nation's top gas, electric and water utilities companies were there, as were a large number of customer service vendors. I thought it interesting that the focus of the conference was "moving toward a more self-sufficient customer experience."

There was a lot of discussion around the role of technology in improving customer service. American Water discussed the ongoing changes in the infrastructure of the utility's two large call centers, which were consolidated a few years ago, and their recent implementation of a continuing customer survey system. I was surprised to hear that AW has yet to make any significant investments to the technologies that run their service operations. Other companies talked about their CRM systems, but expressed marginal satisfaction, which wasn't surprising. The keynote address from the VP of customer service at NICOR talked at length about employee engagement and an application of theirs that "builds morale and teamwork in their call center," but I didn't get the impression that the app was integrated into their business systems. I heard a good bit of chatter about training and "customer service skills," although I was left wondering if some of these utilities are just barely missing the mark when it comes to customer experience. Yeah, strengthen your people and your service deliverables, but how about also simplifying the process and providing a better data interface?

Mike Drexler - Utilities Practice Leader, Jacada Inc.