I recently had the pleasure of attending the ACUTA (Association of Information Communications Technology Professionals in Higher Education), conference recently held in Denver, Colorado. ACUTA focused this conference on the topic of adopting unified communications (UC) across academia. A survey of ACUTA membership prior to the conference indicated that the campus constituencies most likely to benefit from UC include IT, help desks, and teleworkers. Benefits most often cited from deploying UC include enhanced collaboration, increased productivity and operational efficiency. So  how does this relate to customer service management?

UC tools help customer service personnel become more effective and efficient in performing their duties. Academia has become a competitive industry, and student retention is a key strategic metric followed by institutional leaders. Retention is greatly influenced by student satisfaction on every aspect of college life … IT systems, facilities, financial aid, course enrollment, and other student services. Combining the imperative of student satisfaction with the necessity to reduce costs, many institutions are consolidating student services into a single contact center for assisting students in addressing questions and concerns. SpiceCSM is specifically designed to accommodate organizational efforts to bring efficiency and effectiveness into the customer service management function.

SpiceCSM has targeted higher education as a key vertical for adoption of the company’s platform. We are also encouraging the development of an industry-wide open knowledge library of customer service issue resolutions. All higher education institutions have a similar set of departments and associated services, thus making the sharing of such a knowledge library a very feasible idea. To learn more about open knowledge projects in higher education, click here.

Best regards,

Mark Cornett, COO

SpiceCSM

Judging the quality of customer service can be a hard thing to do. There are almost an unlimited number of factors that go in a customer service score and the score alone can mean many things to many different people.

In an effort to find out what piece of the customer service pie is the most influential for providing the best customer service, we have created this very short and simple poll below. There are obviously a lot of other factors that come into play, but to keep the list from becoming 5 pages long, we have kept it to the following answers.

If you are interested in finding out the results of the poll, please click on the link above in the Poll widget. (Thanks to PollDaddy for providing such a great service and tool) Also, please feel free to send this to friends and colleagues. More responses only result in better data analysis.

The following is the slideshow I used for my presentation at the 2009 ATA NY Metro Tech Forum. Though the event was small there were a lot of great speakers and we were glad to be there. The official title was, “Utilizing a Multi-tenancy and a Shared Agent Environment to Reduce Operating Expenses.” Quite the mouth full, huh.

SpiceCSM has been chosen… to be a speaker that is, at the upcoming ATA NY Metro Technology Forum.  It will be my pleasure to give a short talk on “Utilizing Mutli-tenancy and a Shared Agent Environment to Reduce Operating Expenses.” The event is taking place at the DialAmerica building in  Mahwah, NJ on April 2nd.

If you are an ATA member and are planning to attend the show, I look forward to seeing you there. If you are not a memeber, you can still come down and enjoy the day. Either way, please visit the registration page to get started.

Hope to see you there.

Cheers,
Justin

I was reading Donna Fluss’s post, Seven Trends Driving Contact Center Innovation, and couldn’t agree more with her assessment.  I especially agree with her second trend…

2.Customer churn plagues most industries in good times, running between 5 percent and 30 percent, and is a greater issue during recessionary times It is more challenging to find and more costly to acquire new customers when fewer people are spending money. The contact center plays a crucial role in retaining customers throughout the customer lifecycle, particularly at the pivotal point when a customer is reconsidering the value proposition of the company’s products and services. If agents are well trained, empowered to act, and have the necessary systems and data to determine the right actions, they are able to retain at-risk customers by meeting or exceeding their expectations.

Even if times are not tough, it is always important to retain the customers you have, because its cheaper to sell/retain a current customer than it is to bring on a new one.  And using the right tools can make all the difference. Gone are the days of replacing poor customer service with a low price.  Newsflash, everyone has lowered their price, so it comes down to value for retaining customers, and the best way of doing that is by satisfying your customer.

If you gain a reputation for exceptional service and support, it will translate into good PR and buzz which will actually help to increase the number of new customers. Each new customer becomes an advocate for your service, driving home more and more value to your bottom line. Managing the customer service experience may be considered a cost center, but if you do your homework and establish a system like the one in Donna’s post, it quickly becomes a revenue center. Now what manager can argue with that.