Improving Customer Service by Differentiating “What I Meant”, “What I Said” and “What I Need”
Would you be interested in a new technology that
could save you, the call center rep, from a rambling 30-minute call with an
old cat lady from the Fens about how picturemail of her tabbies isn’t
getting to her dear-old-auntie in Bedfordshire? Would you prefer a single
click fix to explaining to this cat lady how to configure Internet access on
her mobile? A new technology called Mobile Device Management may have some
of the answers you are looking for.
The faster you can figure this out, the faster you can resolve the call….
“What I Need”
Some customer service personnel have a sixth sense: a way of understanding
what customers mean sometimes in spite of what they said. These reps are
able to soothe ruffled feathers by delivering on what customers need, not
necessarily what they say they want. We all know someone like this, but not
everyone is born with this sixth sense. Fortunately, a new technology
increasingly in use in wireless call centers, Mobile Device Management, is
helping take the ESP and other magic out of customer care, making it a
science that can be applied by just about anyone.
Customers can’t always articulate what they need… “What I Said”
Resolving a customer’s real problem is most readily achieved by a thorough
and accurate assessment of the situation. However, accurately describing
product problems often requires a level of product knowledge that most
consumers don’t have. Our cat lady from the Fens, for example, is unlikely
to be able to articulate Internet access settings, much less MMS APN (Access
Point Network configuration for Multimedia Messaging Service), leaving the
customer care representative in the dark as to what to do, or how to
proceed.This is especially true in product-related support centers, where
getting a clear picture of what exactly is wrong is critical. Being able to
reach out over the air and see into the problem device would certainly help.
Misidentifying the issue leads to miscommunication…“What I Meant”
…Which leads to lengthy sessions of question and answer, and trips up and
down troubleshooting trees. Mobile phones, for instance, could be “broken”
in a variety of ways. There could be a hardware issue where the phone
doesn’t start, but it is more likely that there is some sort of
configuration issue and perhaps MMS is misconfigured or APNs are not set
right. Our Fenland cat lady, for example, is likely to launch into a
longwinded story of her tabbies and travels and said auntie in Bedfordshire,
which takes time and often provides more misdirection and noise than useful
diagnostic information.
If the CSR is able to work directly with the device, over the air, long Q&A
sessions to figure out the real problem are eliminated, and in many cases
the problem will be a fairly obvious configuration issue that can often be
fixed over the air with a single click.
Bypass the Tabbies, go for The Fix
Mobile Device Management (MDM), directly connects CSRs to the problem at
hand, skipping the cat stories. Already deployed and in use in some of the
largest wireless networks in the world, MDM is one way successful mobile
network operators are taking the human abstraction layer out of the customer
care equation.
In the past, CSRs could only fix things that customers could successfully
characterize, but now, with MDM, the CSR can see if the subscriber’s email
settings are wrong – and fix them with a single click. MDM remotely
pinpoints “What I Need”, and then fixes it. And did we mention it skips the
cat stories?
By removing the ambiguity of customer interpretation, MDM helps CSRs close
more tickets, faster. Good for the CSR, good for the customer, good for the
bottom line. In the future, MDM and similar technologies are likely to
spread to other wired or networked electronic devices, such as televisions,
but for now this powerful support resource is for mobile phones. As for
those in other call centers, you may still have to listen to those cat
stories.
About the Authors
Jason Lackey and Anna Yong of InnoPath Software. Their e-mails are jlackey@innopath.com
and ayong@innopath.com.