Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
Customer Service – Turning Negatives into Positives
- Over the span of just a few days I had occasion to call two government contact centers and two industry contact centers for service. Since these interactions occurred over a short period of time they provided a unique opportunity to compare and contrast government vs. industry customer contact center service. Too often government customer service centers lack knowledge of basic contact center practices and protocols and indicate an inattention to the details that make for a less than satisfactory customer experience (See If You Can’t Beat ‘Em). Here are a few examples to illustrate the point. I would allow that they are merely anecdotal if they weren’t so typical of other experiences I have had with government customer service centers through the years. Ironically, the things that would transform these experiences from negatives to positives do not cost anything to implement and would even in some cases actually save time and money. What things?
No CommentsKey Performance Indicators (KPI’s)
Strategic use of performance metrics is a distinguishing feature of world class government shared services organizations. Cost and service are the sine qua non for shared services. Strategic use of performance metrics means identifying and making use of key performance indicators (KPI’s) for each of these elements of the shared services model. Putting cost aside for the moment my focus in this post is on service metrics. First timeliness, then quality and customer service.
No CommentsWeb Analytics
A shared services organization’s web site is their primary customer service interface. Far more customers will visit your web site than will call your contact center, email you, or send you correspondence. This means your customer service web or portal is your most important interface with customers. Notwithstanding, shared services organizations and government shared service organizations in particular put a lot more emphasis on the quality of their phone interface than they do on the quality of their web site. Sometimes even neglecting their web site altogether. Of the SSO’s that understand the importance of the web to customer service, many do not evolve beyond the basics. The web is no place for amateurs. Hire a usability expert to evaluate your web site and recommend improvements. But beyond just hiring a usability expert, you need a protocol for continuously improving your web presence. You need metrics to measure your web’s utility and relevance. You need business intelligence. Web business intelligence is referred to as web analytics and companies who sell over the web spend millions on web analytics. Fortunately you do not need to spend millions for a good customer service web. You do however need web analytics software to collect and analyze the metrics that give you a road map for improvements. Google ® web analytics software and you’ll find software to fit every budget. In choosing web analytics software make sure that it allows you to capture and report the key web analytics in this table.
| Category | Features | |
|---|---|---|
| Visitors | unique visitors, returning visitors, average visitors per day | |
| Pages | pages viewed, most popular pages, least popular pages, average pages viewed per visitor | |
| Search | search phrases that landed visitors on your web site, in-site search phrases | |
| Trends | traffic or drill down patterns that tell you how a visitor interacts with your site. Click rates for important links | |
| Stickiness | Bounce rate, visit duration, etc. | |
| Performance | load time by page, error messages generated | |
| Platform | Browsers, browser versions, mobile platforms, type of connection, IP addresses that tell how many customers visit from home vs work | |
| Social Analytics | Web analytics has evolved with the increasing popularity of social media sites like YouTube®, Twitter® and Facebook®. If your web analytics software includes social analytics you can track, correlate and overlay data from your web site with analytics from your social media sites | |
| Alerts | Receive email alerts when specified parameters are met | |
It goes without saying that the web analytics software you use must provide real time data in a way that you can easily understand. This means charts and graphs that lets you drill down to the underlying data. Your web analytics software should also be flexible enough to let you put the data together in ways that make sense to you and create customized reports.
No CommentsGovernment sues software company alleging fraud
The Department of Justice’s complaint against Oracle alleges that the government was overcharged for software licenses despite the company’s agreement to discount prices to the government at a level equal to or greater than the discount given commercial customers. DOJ alleges that the practice continued for almost a decade and cost taxpayers hundreds of millions.
Software licensing is a good fit for shared services. Purchasing and managing software licenses is high volume depending on the software, contracting processes for software and even contract language can be standardized from one vendor to the next, it is not high touch – from the customer’s perspective, there is no ambiguity about the scope of the activity and the cost of negotiating enterprise software licenses can be determined with precision. Most importantly, enterprise licenses means leveraged buying. Negotiating a government wide contract vehicle for software agencies commonly use is better than leaving each agency to negotiate (possibly better but more likely worse) terms of sale. GSA acted in much the same way a shared services center would act if enterprise licensing was one of its services. We got this part right.
The Federal Government is the elephant in the room when it comes to office, business and information software. If the US Government was a company it would be one of the largest if not the largest in the world. GSA in including “most favored” terms in the agreement with the software company, was spot on in insisting that the federal government as one of the largest users of the company’s software should get the best rate. Why? Because size matters when it translates into sales volume. Wal-mart knows this. So do their suppliers. But the vendor will likely not offer a volume discount, since, after all, the discount cuts into profit. So it falls to the high volume buyer to insist on it. We got this part right.
So far, so good. But where did we get off track?
No CommentsWhy Government IT Projects Fail
The latest IT trend is to vest responsibility for scouting out and vetting new technology in a Chief Technology Officer. Although this is a good idea, equal if not more attention should be given to execution. Deciding what technology to invest in is not the hardest thing. Implementing the technology or execution is where things break down. In years of working with the government I have seen a lot of technology initiatives start up with great fan fare and much promise only to falter and eventually grind to a halt. Why do some initiatives soar while others never get off the runway? What are the management practices that successful IT projects have in common? Conversely what do IT projects that fail have in common? I do not come at this as a certified project manager or someone with a strong technical background but from leading a fair amount of IT projects and having observed the success or failure of many more. Let’s start by agreeing on what is a successful IT project. An IT project that comes in on schedule, at or under budget and meets the expectations of the targeted users is a success. Stickiness is a factor in determining whether the project met the expectations of the users. By stickiness I mean that the application is used for its intended purpose by a large number of its intended users over a long period of time. Without stickiness a seemingly successful IT project can be a failure.
2 Comments