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As I write this column, the Republicans and Democrats are deadlocked and
Dell computer has just announced that its profits going forward will be 33
percent less than expected next year. These two events have resulted in
the stock market plummeting once again. If there is one thing to which the
stock market does not react well, it is uncertainty -- especially, it
seems, political uncertainty and lower-than-expected corporate earnings.
It is in times like these when many people are afraid to watch TV, read
the newspaper or listen to the radio. There just doesn't seem to be any
good news in sight.
The current political and economic environment reminds me of a
conversation I had with Joe Jackson from Alliance
Systems during a recent trip to Texas. Alliance Systems, a rapidly
growing company that specializes in manufacturing industrial computers,
has made a great business out of supplying open communications systems to
resellers and OEMs that in turn supply to other industries, including the
contact center and customer interaction markets.
My conversation with Joe was extremely enlightening. I found it
especially important in light of the renewed focus on profitability we are
currently facing. I'd like to share the results of this talk.
Joe began with a hypothetical situation. It is 5:30 on a Friday
afternoon and a friend calls you and invites you out to shoot a game of
pool. You accept. You had a rough week and think it's a great idea. A few
minutes after you leave your office, your most important customer calls --
a customer who is responsible for 30 percent of your income. Of course,
this customer is in a different time zone and expects you to be available
to take the call. After all, this person is responsible for millions of
dollars of business for your company each year.
As you would expect, the phone rang three times and was picked up by
your voice mail. The message the customer leaves is happy and positive,
and informs you that they had just won the largest deal in their company's
history, and thanks you for all your support. The customer stated he was
thrilled to be working together with you and your company on the RFP.
That's the good news. The bad news is that all the products must be
delivered by Monday. The customer is calling you to make sure that your
company will keep its team there over the weekend, as agreed to
previously. The customer asks that you please call and reassure him that
you will be on schedule.
Thirty minutes later, another call comes in and goes directly into your
voice mail. This message is in a slightly different tone...a cross between
worried and stressed out. The message begins, "I am really worried. I
haven't heard from you. This is a major deal and I need your help. Please
call."
Another thirty minutes goes by and once again, the call goes into voice
mail. This time, the customer is exasperated. The message says, "It's
been an hour and a half and you haven't called me." The customer now
punches zero, but due to the time zone difference, everyone in your
organization is gone for the weekend. The customer redirects his call into
your voice mail. The message says, "I am running out of time. Please
call or I will have to find someone else to help us."
The final call comes is and says, "I am sorry, but we will not be
using your products anymore. We found someone here in our home state who
can provide us with the technology we need. We're going to give them this
business and all future business as well."
Imagine now that you arrive at your office Monday morning and listen to
the chronology of events that took place. Your mouth drops as you listen
to voice mail after voice mail. You feel like the sky is falling and you
can imagine finding it necessary to initiate some layoffs from your staff.
This, Jackson insists, is how closed communications operates. So with
this in mind, what is open communications? How does it work?
Jackson does not disappoint. He proceeds to tell a different story.
Once again, you are playing pool on a Friday afternoon. The same call
comes in and is automatically compared with the caller I.D. information in
your CRM database. The system recognizes the call as your most important
customer. Once the customer's call is recognized, it is subjected to a set
of routing rules based on time of day and day of week for that customer.
In this case, the phone on your desk does not ring; the call is
directly routed to your cell phone. It rings your cell phone four times
and then pulls the call back and plays a recording in your voice that
might say, "Hello. I'm sorry I can't answer my cell phone right now.
Please hold on and this call will be transferred to someone who can assist
you and will find me in a short period of time."
At this point, the system checks to see who is still logged into the
phone system in the office. It might find, perhaps, that 12 people are
still connected to the office phone system. The phone system then
automatically rings all 12 phones simultaneously. The first individual to
answer the phone hears a message in your voice saying, "You are about
to receive a call from our most important customer. You are fully
authorized to do whatever it takes to make this customer happy. Please
speak to this person and then find me." The person taking the call
can then say, "Hello, I am sorry that your regular contact is
temporarily unavailable. Please tell me how we can help you and I'll track
him down in the next few minutes."
The beauty of this type of open communications scenario is that the
customer was never required to press a single button or reply to a speech
recognition command. All he or she did was place a call and was
immediately connected with the best re-source available. The net effect is
that there is a huge barrier between this relationship with the customer
and any other competitor that can steal them away.
The moral of the story is that you can use open communications
technology as a competitive weapon; you are no longer limited by your
phone system. To those of you who are long-time readers, it is obvious
that many of these technologies do exist in the ACD products that many
contact centers are equipped with today. What about the rest of the
enterprise? The informal call center, if you will? My guess is that over
99 percent of offices don't have the functionality required to handle the
above scenario properly. That's a major problem.
As I have noted before, the communications market closely follows the
datacom market. Fifteen years ago, mainframes and minis were extremely
inflexible closed systems consisting of proprietary hardware and
applications. Three things happened that changed the entire computer
industry: standards-based hardware such as desktops and file servers,
standards-based networking such as LANs and standards-based operating
systems with open APIs for application developers.
If we put aside the cost argument, the key reason that client/server
technology was superior to mainframes was that the mainframe could not
accommodate the business. The business had to accommodate the technology.
You could not easily design custom applications on your mini or mainframe.
The pool of available programmers was extremely limited and the cost for
customization was prohibitively high.
As a result, mainframes didn't let you strategically differentiate your
business. Mainframes and minis were not competitive weapons; they were
tactical tools that, at best, made your company more efficient.
Contrast this to client/server, where you can easily find an MS Access
programmer to write any application you need. The resulting information
can be merged with word processors or spreadsheets and products including,
but not limited to, Microsoft. For the first time, technology can
accommodate the business and not the other way around.
Jackson believes, and I agree, that we now have the ability to raise
the telephone to the level of a tool that can accommodate our business.
The communications infrastructure of any organization is critical to its
success and the ability to take advantage of open communications is
crucial to companies' growth, yet the majority of organizations doing
business today are unaware that these technologies exist. But they do
exist and they will help separate you from your competition. If you would
like more details on the technologies you can implement in your
organization to keep you ahead of your competition, please contact Joe
Jackson at [email protected].
Sincerely,
Rich Tehrani
Group Publisher
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