[June 25, 2004]
Q
Intelligence Saves Cents, Using More Than Common Sense
BY DAVID R. BUTCHER
"Ah! That is
clearly a metaphysical speculation, and like most metaphysical speculation
has very little reference at all to the actual facts of real life, as we
know them," Gwendolen glibly said in Oscar Wilde�s The Importance of
Being Earnest, and oddly enough, such thinking can pertain to customer
satisfaction and employee productivity in the telecommunications industry.
Most customers remain loyal patrons when their most recent experience with
frontline employees was a good one, but many companies still rely on
marketing gimmicks and incentives to bring customers back. Attention to
customer satisfaction is contingent on the employees of these same
businesses, but these employees frequently do not uphold to their
distinction, and therefore do not attain the loyalty of their customers.
Here Wilde works, as gut instinct on the part of management is unreliable
and simply theoretical as presumed customer satisfaction and employee
productivity are often based also on limited observations and limited
customer feedback. Many businesses don�t know exactly what the customers
think about the company or product, as they also frequently don�t know the
precise numbers involved in employee productivity, aside from occasional
unorganized voice messages, �mystery shoppers� or letters of circumvention.
Often, they simply speculate:
�I suppose our clients aren�t completely satisfied with being put on
hold for 17 hours��
�Well, I guess Assistant Manager Peter Papadopoulos over in the
Elephant Butte office
may be calling customers �half-witted harlots� on the phone
and going to the bathroom every 3 � minutes for who the hell knows (Smoke
breaks? Irritable Bowel Syndrome?), when he should be doing...�
(And there is such a town in New Mexico, I swear.)
So how can customer-minded companies make Herculean business decisions if
they don�t know their employee productivity or what the customers want, need
or feel?
Don�t bother�it was rhetorical.
One option among others is Q Intelligence, San Diego-based Qualistics� new
Web-hosted software solution that is meant to abet companies improve
customer loyalty and increase profitability�through the performance of
businesses� people. Q Intelligence is offered as a fully Web-hosted solution
or as a licensable, resalable software platform. The Web-hosted solution is
highly flexible and offers fast implementation across your enterprise.
This solution, called by its creators �the oracle of human insight,� is able
to be used for a range of industries, from telecommunications to retail. It
is now being determinedly pushed by its people for use within the
telecommunications industry. Its raison d'etre is to enable large
companies to monitor employee performance and customer satisfaction on an
hourly continuance.
Q Intelligence offers in real time which customers are dissatisfied,
why they are dissatisfied and which representative was involved in the
transaction. This hour-to-hour tracking affords companies to learn
immediately from the customer, rather than wait until the end of the year or
every couple of months for potential brainstorming of effective actions for
desired results.
When used in the retail industry, Q Intelligence can collect customer
feedback (about the company, product, service, etc) from virtually any touch
point, but the two primary feedback collection channels are an invitation to
take a survey, offered through the inbound call screener, and an invitation
to take a survey offered through an automated outbound call to the customer
following his or her interaction. The responses are organized and quickly
acquiesced so as management may rapidly and efficiently acquire the
information and take action.
The premise, when executed for telecom, is facile. The software uploads the
data collection daily via outbound IDR with the telephone number being the
common data point, tracking customers individually in real time. Then the
information is turned over to the company for deployment of action. And the
phone numbers are kept secure and confidential, according to John Potenza,
Qualistics founder and CEO, when asked out of fearful skepticism (and
possible paranoia) after having recently re-watched Francis Ford Coppola�s
1974 gem, The Conversation.
To stay on track, however, the key word here is �action.� Using an Oracle
database platform and Web portals to provide services, Q Intelligence can
deliver specific and actionable business intelligence across organizations
for proactive alterations or plenary changes. The solution integrates
database, IDR and Internet in replacing technology for capital, without the
need for hardware or software. It can effectively recover dissatisfied
customers and categorize incoming voice messages of complaints, track
performance trends on every organizational level down to individual
employees, determine competitive advantages and disadvantages of
products/services and focus on the service issues that have the greatest
impact on profitability. It daily allows management to know the faults of
managing branches. Along with the data Q Intelligence gathers, it
incorporates a sophisticated business intelligence engine to ensure the
right information is sent to the people who need it most. Based on user
defined thresholds, the system will automatically send the appropriate:
Domino�s Pizza
uses Q Intelligence to monitor the customer service provided by its
frontline people at 7,300 locations around the world. And BellSouth monitors
and improves its customer service provided by more than 25,000 field service
technicians and call center representatives everyday.
According to
Qualistics, using its solutions will benefit company users with:
-
Long-lasting customer loyalty;
-
Performance thresholds identify
opportunities;
-
Persistent customer interaction;
-
Web-based global accessibility;
-
Instant reporting capabilities;
-
Immediate return on investment (ROI);
-
Nothing to setup, no waiting for IT;
-
No "shrink wrap" software to install;
-
No special hardware required and
-
Convenient central data storage.
Qualistics, a
private company formerly known as Survey Express, has been providing
products and services to help companies improve customer loyalty through its
people since 1997, employing between 40 and 45 in San Diego. Presently, it
ameliorates between 70 and 75 mid- to large-sized company clients. With Q
Intelligence, the company offers to management a substantial and concrete
solution, which is more than metaphysical speculation.
David R. Butcher is the Assistant
Editor for TMC's Customer Inter@ction
Solutions Magazine.
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