Zealously protecting customer data and personalizing the customer experience are only two ways to ensure top notch customer service. Cisco's Jimmy Ray Purser offers three more tips.
One of things we all have in common is that we are all customers. What is it that makes you want to return to a store and purchase again? It has been said that happy customers are repeat customers who tell their family and friends.
How do we get there? Looking at our business from the point of view of the customers eyes is crucial. For example, consider Green Mountain Coffee. How easy is it to just toss a bag of coffee beans into our grocery cart while we are out doing the weekly shopping? Besides having high-quality coffee, Green Mountain Coffee adds a personalized touch for its customers. The employees know the customers by name and their order history. Customers return because they feel welcome. They want to return: the old "people buy from people" analogy.
So how do we get there? Using technology to solve any problem is never the right answer without understanding the real issue. I have helped design many customer service networks, and here are five things to keep in mind when getting ready to architect your network for customer service.
Five ideas to keep in mind when planning for a customer service network:
- Hire consultants wisely. First, ask potential consultants what they know about your business. Not your industry segment, but your business. We have the power of more information available to us than ever before. Consultants should show the initiative to learn about you before they ever meet you. Interview them like you are hiring them for a job on your team, because you are. Many projects have failed because of personality conflicts between the employees and the consultant. The employees will protect their territory if personality conflicts arise. Remember that consultants tend to recommend what they know, so ask potential consultants to compare and contrast your situation with other similar ones.
After you agree on the right person or team, then agree on common terms. Deliverables such as status reports, knowledge transfer, and documentation mean different things to different people. To avoid any problems, specify, for example, that documentation means a log of all patches installed, deviation from the default settings, or quarks discovered during installation.
- Avoid the "one size fits all" method. It does not work for clothes or hats, and it certainly does not work for networking equipment, which is sized and designed for a very specific entry point into the network. Do not believe anyone who states that you can use the same piece of equipment at all places in the network from the core to the edge. Doing so can lead to either overdesign or underdesign. Neither one will lead to a successful or reliable customer service-based network. First define with your team what you want the customer experience to actually be. Maybe it is a neighborhood-friendly design like that of Green Mountain Coffee or five-star hospitality like Hotel 1000. Whatever you want the customer experience to be, write it out. I mean that literally. Write it out and flow chart the ideal customer experience. Then, with your team and consultants, add products to your flow chart. Make sure that your equipment can scale and that you can get five to seven years of service from it. Remember that Ethernet networking has been around for over 20 years, so there are probably some very innovative products available that can help your company achieve its dream.
- Remember to consider overall cost, not just initial investment. Well-meaning decision makers often consider the initial cost of something and ask questions like "can it do what we need," then buy the lower cost solution. Often, however, the lower cost is just up-front pricing. Additional later costs often come from interoperability issues, poor tech support, lack of manageability, low flexibility, difficult troubleshooting, and frequent hardware/firmware updates. Each one of these issues can cause network downtime. The surest way to lose customers is to ignore them. When the network is down, our customers only know that nobody is answering the phone or their e-mail requests. They have no idea that this is because the network is down. When designing the network, consider each piece of equipment and then ask:
- Why was this chosen over another model?
- How long has this equipment been in service?
- Can this gear be upgraded in place?
- How often are firmware patches released?
- Protect your customers' data zealously. I heard someone say the other day, "Information is the only commodity with having." How true that statement really is. Today a driver's license number, social security number, and birth certificate data are selling illegally for as much as $200 each. The FBI estimates that cybercrime is a $67 billion business annually. Many states have laws that require you to alert your customers if your network has been compromised. That alone is a devastating blow to your customers' confidence. It used to be the case that backing up and testing your backup were the biggest concerns of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). These concerns still exist but have moved down in priority when it comes to data security. When securing your data, keep in mind a few things:
- Train your staff not to be too helpful. Requests for customer data of any kind must be handled very carefully.
- Change passwords often and check workspaces to make sure that passwords are not posted anywhere (for example, on monitors, lap drawers, or ceiling tiles). Hackers have been known to pose as cleaning crew members in order to gather data. Remember that data is worth much money: an estimated $67 billion per year.
- Disable USB ports. It is simple to connect a 40-GB iPod to a USB port and download a copy of every item of data on a machine or server.
- Encrypt your data, so if it is accessed, you can be assured that without the proper decryption key, the data is useless.
- Conduct customer satisfaction evaluations. How often do you get requests for information to improve service or rate satisfaction and never answer them? I get them often, and yes, most of them go unanswered, except that ones that pay me something. Now I am not suggesting that you bribe your customers, but remember that data has value. This is where a loyalty program can be effective. Just like the punch cards you get at some stores for a discount after a certain number of purchases, you could create a frequent buyer club in which your customers can earn points. Then send your customers a postservice evaluation form and offer points to be added to their frequent buyer account. This will help your customers recognize that you value their time to create valuable data for you. It is a win-win situation. The evaluation data gives you a customer metric that you can use to fine tune your processes.
In this world of 10 Gigabit Ethernet, with the IEEE already discussing the next step to either 40 Gigabit Ethernet or 100 Gigabit Ethernet, it is easy to get caught up in the endless stream of hardware upgrades for speed, when actually a dependable quality-of-service (QoS) plan can easily keep gear in service for a long time. There is a huge difference between speed and performance. Speed is the numbers and packets that look good on paper. The costs are speed is flexibility and longevity. Performance is the way the device CPU and memory are loaded with line cards and features enabled. Vendors that sell to you based upon speed and not a blend of both features and performance will be back around every three years to upgrade the hardware. 4.
These ideas are not all inclusive; they are just the ones that I have observed that work for the most successful SMBs that I have dealt with over the last 16 years. Looking at your business with the point of view of your customers is critical to success.
Questions or comments? Please contact the author: Jimmy Ray Purser, Network Solutions Expert, Cisco Systems. Email: jipurser@cisco.com
