Despite a 10 year struggle with technology being flung in users faces, some of us still think that if we can just get to the right technology, all problems get better. It just ain't so!
So, here's the latest entry Service with a Smile. Besides being just a tad self-contradictory, it just simply misses the fact that there is a right approach to create the right experience BEFORE you select a technology. To think that the solution to customer problems caused by technology is more technology and an interesting business model is just more insanity.
The difficulty is that while all three companies take needed approaches, none solve the problem directly. Upfront good design is what’s needed. Having that would have meant that ClickFox didn’t have to find out for the client (who spent a lot of money) that callers were confused between which ZIP code. It would show that not every caller or company needs rotating, customized menus from Angel; many just need the right menu first. It would show what to do with all the wonderful data that Austin Logic collects and correlates.
The right design approach addresses all these things at the right place: The start! In fact, Forrester, while handing out all those awful grades, singled out one design for a special case study and referenced that in the white paper as an example of what should be done. And it wasn't the promise of a new technology, rather the promise of the right approach. One that’s been proven multiple times in the past few years for large and small clients.
There really is no paradox involved in automation. Studies show that many people like automation. They’re just picky about liking automation that works! Privacy, convenience, and speed all drive people to automation, but bad design drives them right back out. It doesn’t have to be that way. The days of bad design should have been over years ago, but too many times IT departments, bottom-line-only focused customer service managers, and the “we’ve always done it this way” crowd refuse to consider that all the goals can be balanced to make a greater portion of all stakeholders happy.
See, we can please the folks that want good automation. We can please those who know that their reason for calling isn’t handled in automation. We can clarify for the confused. We can achieve savings goals. We can help cross-sell. But only if we focus on all those things in design. It all comes down to creating the right experience for the callers. That’s a focus that does NOT start with technology. It starts with goals. Individuals are treated as such with the right process of finding out who they are. The failure of turning to technology as a starting point is to sell great school busses to people who want to ride bicycles. If we find out first that people want low-impact, low-density, quiet transportation, then we might go find a really good bicycle maker. The right technology selected by the right design.
Now, I’m not slamming any of these companies. Actually, I think all three offer critical components of successful business solutions: usage tracking, scalability, and knowledge manipulation. But, they still cannot overcome bad design. Even in the ClickFox example, how many callers were turned off by doing it wrong the first time? Finding out later is too late. Designing right, from the beginning, is the missing leg of the stool, and really the most important.
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