I consider myself a pretty positive person, but once in awhile the old cynical Maria slips through... like when I read this at the CRM Blog:
"...for this kind of service [ self-help, chat, remote diagnosis, and email management ] to be effective and increase customer satisfaction, organizations should invest sufficient time and money to create and maintain knowledge bases, support search engines, integrate channels, track incidents, and use workflow tools...."
Companies nowadays are trying all that they can to save time and money - I do often wonder if they're truly willing to invest the money to better their customer service initiatives. They say they are, but are they really walking the walk?
You're comments are welcome here...
SSince it is CRM, and it is an IT (Technology driven company) driven site that is designed by IT designers that use there site to perpetuate the IT mentality spectrum why would that surprise you? Remember the article I had you read on my site a while back http://customerdevelopmentcenter.com/articles/crm/Prt_1_what_Biz_o_Shld_no.htm. You featured it in one of your blogs. Although it addresses the problem of CRM for companies it also addresses an attitude that is pervasive through out the IT community and especially those associated with online IT driven ventures.
The idea of customer, customer service and the customer experience are some what remote theoretical concepts to them. They design and operate with IT for IT sake as the central focus and not the user, nor do they understand business processes and their relation to good customer service and the perplexities of customer supported services in relationship to the customer experience. As a result most IT driven companies have very short life spans, which from my perspective would be expected, considering their ineptitude toward customers and the business continuum that surrounds them.
I say this because of my continued experience in consulting for the Technology industry and the customer service challenged in our society. So when I followed your link to the referenced site and found the above explanation abounding on every page I was not surprised.
Just don’t be surprised to find the lack of planning and customer driven efficiencies not their central theme.
Posted by: Tim Whelan | April 22, 2006 7:01 AM | Permalink to Comment