RightNow Summit 2010 Day Two

Yesterday I wrote about the customer experience imperative and why we all need to take immediate action to address this pressing business issue. In follow up, I’d like to share some suggestions for how you can do this.

I do hundreds of client visits each year and the number one request I get is that clients want us to lead them and provide more suggestions. So here is the list I shared with the 800 attendees of our North America Summit today:

Go Mobile
You need to provide your customers with service capabilities designed specifically for mobile devices.  You can’t just use the same interface you’re using to deliver self-service via a browser on a PC – it doesn’t fit. Mobile devices are rapidly becoming the preferred way for consumers to access the Internet; mobile traffic will surpass PC traffic by 2013. Your customers are going mobile and you need to too.

Get on Facebook
With more than 500 million consumers on Facebook, every organization needs a robust Facebook presence. And not just a marketing page, customers want support there too. RightNow CX for Facebook, just announced and available in November, gives you a way to engage with your customers and deliver our entire CX suite – self-service, crowd service and agent-assisted service – directly in Facebook. You need to be where your customers are, and they are on Facebook.

Tweet Your Customers
Your customers are talking on twitter and other social channels. Are you listening? Responding? The critical factor here is you must treat social venues as new inbound channels and connect them to the appropriate workflows in your contact center. Do not create another silo. When I talk to clients about social, I’m often reminded of my conversations about email management 10 years ago, where so many people were thinking of this new channel in isolation, only to wake up and realize those people who email also call you on the phone. Don’t make that same mistake with social.

Create Community
Your customers are your customers for a reason. They like your brand. They want to connect with you. There is a great opportunity for you to build your own social destination on your web site where your customers can connect, help each other, and give you feedback. Better engaged customers buy more from you. In addition, this helps you reduce service costs when consumers help each other, gives you better insights to drive product and service development, and gives you user-generated content to augment your corporate-authored content.

Innovate
You need to automate the business processes specific to your business. RightNow’s new platform capabilities, available in November, help you do just that. They allow you to extend our data model and build unique applications, workflows and processes. I encourage you to pick an experience that would benefit from additional configuration and innovate on our platform. The result will be better experiences for your customers and lower costs for you.

Pull the Plug on Your Legacy Agent Desktops
As I mentioned, I’m out in the field meeting with clients a lot, and I know the pain organizations experience with outdated agent desktops and how ineffective some of these systems are. I urge you to pull the plug. We’ve replaced these systems numerous times and the benefits are massive: agent productivity goes up, training costs go down, alternate agent strategies and new workflows are possible. If you are still using legacy agent desktop technology, you are paying too much, don’t have the flexibility you need, and don’t have phone, email, social and web experiences integrated for full multi- and cross -channel experiences.  We’d be happy to do a Contact Center Assessment and help you build the business case, like we have for many clients. It is time to pull the plug.

I view it as my job to help our clients fully leverage our solution to grow their top and bottom lines, and stay ahead of the change in the industry. These suggestions are designed to help you get in front of the customer experience imperative and make you a hero in your organization. Let me know how I can help.