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

Welcome to the first installment of Meet the Team. Friday, I had the chance to sit down with our beloved COO, Mark Cornett, and we discussed everything from his current work here at SpiceCSM to his family life. Below are the interview questions that we discussed.

Besides what’s implied by your prestigious title, what do you do here?

In short, I spend a majority of my time formulating and implementing the organizational strategy for SpiceCSM.  This includes everything from the product roadmap, focused target market research, overseeing the customer care for SpiceCSM, and much more.

Where are you from?

Owego, NY. Not Oswego. It’s a very small town near Binghamton, and everyone always assumes that when you say Owego, you just mis-pronounced Oswego.

Where were you before SpiceCSM

From 2000-2008 I managed Fused Solutions, an outsourced technical support and customer service contact center, the parent company of SpiceCSM. From 1988-2000 I was a faculty and admin for the Clarkson University School of Business. And from 1977-1988 I worked for Hewlett Packard in a few sales and sales management roles.

When you are not diligently working on making SpiceCSM the best CSM platform, what are you doing?

Well as you know, the life of a start-up doesn’t generally leave much time for anything else, but in my spare time I like to tend to my vegetable garden, I am an amateur arborist, and of course I attend and follow all my kids sporting activities. (Mark is the proud father of 6 children)

What excites you most about the current customer service market and the position of SpiceCSM?

There is a very interesting opportunity to transform the customer service function, and I think Spice can improve it and enhance it in two major ways. The first area is in the user and agent experience.  SpiceCSM’s goal and mission is to make the overall process not only more intuitive, but more efficient as well.  This is mainly done through our ability to integrate our unique guided process workflows with our ticketing system and with our self-service module. The second big transformation in customer service will come with our introduction of the Open Knowledge Community. The SpiceCSM open knowledge community will transform high level subject matter expertise onto our intuitive guided process workflow platform. It will be a true fundamental change in how organizations access and create knowledgebases.

Where do you see the customer service market in 10 years?

1. Convenient access to knowledge: any place, device, medium
2. Highly intuitive tools for resolving problems
3. Seamless process of engaging  a variety associated resources to resolve problems: self-service, mobile devices, video, chat, etc.
4. Geographic independence of resources: i.e. at home agents
5. Customer service apps actually embedded right in products and services.

What is your vision for the SpiceCSM community?

My vision is to have the open knowledge community really expand to cover all customer service and support areas, free up domain expertise to focus on the next new and exciting products and services, and to have all our customers plan out and act upon a customer service management strategy.

Thanks to Mark for being the guinea pig for our weekly team interviews. Next up on the chopping block is Pete Blackmer, lead software developer and creator of Spice HelpDesk.