Earlier this year, in a previous post, I noted that change is the one constant in business and in life. Change is good as long as it ultimately carries a person and a business forward with new insight, knowledge and skills. Without change, a person can stagnate and an organization can lose its edge.

Look at the Yankees. Over the past 15 years, the team has changed managers, stadiums, and nearly every position player on the field. These changes might have been too much for another team. But the DNA of champions is deeply embedded within the Yankees organization. Ultimately, it was a combination of their winning DNA and the changes made during rebuilding years that lead the team back to the top – after nearly a decade without a Series ring.

Like the Yankees, KANA’s got winning DNA. The changes we’ve made at KANA to date this year are intended to have the same end game: getting us back on top. While these changes haven’t been easy and much hard work remains ahead of us, we continue making steady progress on all fronts.

Just last month, on the business side, we announced Accel-KKR’s plans to acquire our company and take it private. KANA has been a strong leader in customer service for more than a decade. This is attributed to the depth of our customer base, the talent of our employees, and the investment in innovation technology, like KANA 10. Accel-KKR recognized these winning attributes, and they played a significant role in bringing about this corporate shift.

Accel-KKR’s financial strength and expertise make it the ideal partner to help us fortify our operation – from providing strong, responsive customer support to ongoing product enhancements to adding to the innovation of our new service experience management (SEM) solution, to which we just integrated new social capabilities.

This month, we’re making yet another change, on the communications front. We are folding KANA’s executive management blog, Speak Out, into the Company’s Evolved Thinking blog, which was established years ago by our service division and has built a strong following. KANA’s Speak Out contributors (myself included) will now post on Evolved Thinking.

As many of you may know, Evolved Thinking is a place for KANA’s thought leaders to share their perspectives on trends in customer service and support, self-service, knowledge management, social CRM and other topics central to improving the service experience. This focus won’t change. Rather, we’ll be posting more often and offering a broader spectrum of contributor voices to sound off on these pertinent topics, share best practices and, of course, to continue providing insight into changes in our industry and at KANA.

Recently, Seth Godin posted on how we are moving into an era of “hyper-measurement.” As he explains, a journalist being fired because his or her web content isn’t drawing a lot of traffic is not going to be a newsroom novelty for much longer. In a world where, more and more, success can be measured in quantifiable metrics, why wouldn’t a publisher base business decisions on newly available evidence? It just makes sense.

The customer service industry is no different. As my fellow blogger, Kate Leggett, points out, to truly maximize the value of their contact centers, customer service mangers must take an experimental approach towards service processes.

For every end-to-end service process they design and deploy, managers must define a testing period during which they play around with different aspects of it and measure results against business objectives. These metrics can then be used to determine the relative effectiveness of the process – what worked and what didn’t – and update the service process, or eliminate it entirely. To ensuring ongoing optimization, no process should ever be viewed as final. Rather, managers must consider each and every service process as a prototype and resign themselves to always retesting and tweaking them.

Delivering “evidence-based service” in this manner will help consumer-facing companies break bad habits, discover new tricks and cope with the constant shifts going on in their marketplace.

For instance, a business introduces a new tool that captures and analyzes customer interactions in various community forums – essentially, pooling the collective input of the crowd at given time. The customer service manager applies that insight in real time to change, reprioritize and improve information presented to a customer on the self-help portion of a website or educate agents on a shift in incoming questions (depending on the level of service the company provides). Over time, they begin to see patterns in terms of what information is just chatter and what type of information is important to meeting their business objectives and their customers’ brand expectations. And, the way they use the tool – and incorporate the customer voice – becomes a highly sophisticated and beneficial to their service processes.

The “hyper-measurement” trend, as Mr. Godin puts it, shouldn’t be ignored. It should be embraced. It offers a way for service departments, as well as publishers, to be more precise and pragmatic with their decision-making – to remain in control and one step ahead of the customer.

If ants have to choose between two unequal length paths from a source of food back to their colony, they ultimately always choose the shortest, easiest one. Here’s how it works:

1. Ants run around the colony, more or less randomly, looking for food.
2. If an ant finds food, it returns back to the colony, and leaves on the ground a scent trail.
3. This scent trail attract nearby ants, which will follow this path and strengthen the scent of the trail, attracting more ants, strengthening the trail…

Ant colony optimization can be analogous to customer service. Think of how customer service agents answer customers’ questions. They each have their own style of interacting with the information at hand. Typically, they hunt and peck through disparate, unintegrated data, knowledge and back-end systems in a way that is unique to each of them. This often results in inconsistent, inefficient or, worse, incorrect service.

To avoid such consequences, companies must leverage technology to create process flows that guide agents through the same method of discovery. Think back to how ants find food – no single ant finds the best route back to the colony alone, yet a collection of ants are successful in doing so. And positive (stronger scent trail) and negative (weaker scent trail) feedback throughout this quest is used to guide this optimization.

Imagine if you had the ability to design not only a single customer service process that led agents to the correct answer to a customer question, but several variations of this process. Take, for example, varying the step in a service process in which the identity of a customer is verified, or when a specific knowledge article is presented to the agent.

Ideally, companies measure KPIs at each leg of this process. These steps are akin to the resistance that ants experience at each leg of their journey. By uncovering the strongest segments of each process, companies essentially rely on basic ant colony optimization techniques to determine the best customer service processes.

In 1971, when the first email was sent, a future of unimagined potential was born. Today, email is everywhere with studies estimating that there are over 1.3 billion email users worldwide sending about 210 billion emails every day. 

In addition to widespread use for personal communication and collaboration at work, consumers rely heavily on email to interact with businesses. Email as a customer service channel now represents 19 percent of all customer interactions, according to Aberdeen Group analyst Sumair Dutta. Particularly for non-urgent requests, consumers prefer using email because it’s more convenient, accessible and timely than phone service.

While email management solutions can offer an opportunity to transform the quality and efficiency of customer service, too often organizations perpetuate the inadequacy of service processes and policy that they’ve adopted for phone support and apply them to email. The result is huge backlogs of unanswered inquiries, missed service levels and unhappy customers. Rather than replicating these inefficiencies, organizations must look for solutions that enable changes in the process and policies, that lend themselves better to email customer service. Businesses need to more effectively leverage email management system so that the technology — not the agent — handles the bulk of the time-consuming work.

In the typical company, the delivery process for phone support involves three technologies, usually offered by disparate vendors:

• Route: Routing calls to the appropriate agents is the domain of traditional ACD/CTI vendors, which accounts for about 5 percent of a call’s total handling time. 
• Capture: Agents manually log calls using a CRM system, which accounts for about 15 percent of the call’s cost. They spend an additional 5 percent of their time in phone “wrap up” activities. 
• Resolve: Agents often rely on a knowledge management tool to help them resolve inquiries. Despite this tool, agents usually spend a lot of time understanding the customers’ questions, hunting around for possible answers and (we hope) finally delivering useful responses. 

The total handling time for an average phone call is in the range of 6-8 minutes. More than six additional minutes are devoted to the resolution process.

When the time it takes to complete these steps are compared to an optimized email service implementation, the difference in terms of time for interaction and resolution are staggering:

• Route: No email agent says “please hold, while I transfer you to the right department.” An optimized email management system automates this process, automatically analyzing emails and route them to the right departments or the right agents, who are skilled to answer the inquiries. 
• Capture: Email is self-documenting. An optimized email management system automatically categorizes emails and attaches the solutions used to resolve the issues so that agents don’t have to spend extra time in wrap-up activities like they do in the phone world. 
• Resolve: An optimized email system intelligently analyzes email content and uses that interpretation to automatically present agents with the most likely answer, including information from other, desperate enterprise systems. Agents only need to clarify the inquiry, evaluate the suggestion and send the answer on its way. 

With a side-by-side comparison, it’s easy to see how businesses can significantly reduce both interaction and resolutions times with an optimized email management solution. Individual inquiry times can drop by as much as four minutes while resolution times can be contained to only two minutes. This enables agents to manage approximately twice the number of emails per day as phone calls, dramatically reducing contact center overhead. With email management that re-engineers the inquiry process, businesses can deliver a level of high-performance customer service that exceeds customer expectations at significantly lower cost.

Bottom line: If you are implementing email as a customer service tool, don’t perpetuate the status quo.

Today’s customers have high expectations. They want personalized, consistent, accurate and timely service. If your company fails to deliver — an increasingly common problem — they’ll take to the social Web to let you and the rest of the world know about it.

To better manage expectations, companies need to take a closer look at how they’re aligning their service offerings with their brand images. After all, your brand is only as strong as your customers’ perception of the company’s value proposition.

IKEA gets this. The company’s service matches its brand image.

Customers who shop at IKEA understand that they will be serving themselves. The company’s multi-lingual Website offers comprehensive information about self-service – everything from assembly instructions to service support to interior design tools. The site also offers a chat bot but stops short of providing robust email and phone support.

Similarly, the company’s stores don’t have staff waiting to help walk customers through the buying process. The showroom floor is set up like a series of already-designed rooms. If you have a question about an item, you write down the item number, visit one of the help kiosks and then go collect it yourself from the check out station.

IKEA customers are not disappointed with this lack of “white-glove service,” as my colleague Kate Leggett pointed out a recent post. They’re not disappointed because it’s not IKEA’s business model.

All companies should clearly align their services with their brand as IKEA does. Companies must give customers channels for communicating with support staff – whether it’s a chat bot or a live service agent – that correspond with their respective brands and meet customers’ expectations. Once they’ve determined the appropriate modes of support, a consistent service experience must be deployed across all supported communications channels. To achieve this, companies must break down silos among service databases and applications and ensure that all service activities are driven by a single knowledge base.

Well-known blogger Seth Godin recently noted that the best marketing strategy is to destroy your industry before your competition does. He’s absolutely right. Especially in today’s economic climate, you must out-innovate your competitors, or they will out-innovate you.

Many companies are tiptoeing around innovation. They are opting to maintain the status quo, rather than expand. They continue to make small improvements to their existing product suites instead of developing new, revolutionary solutions. These companies are at risk. Like Singer (the sewing machine manufacturer that Godin references in his blog), many once-proud industry leaders will find themselves stuck in the also-ran column.

The need for new, improved products hasn’t dissipated. The downturn in the economy is causing customers to get introspective, to examine their internal processes. More than ever before, customers are looking to improve themselves and are hungry for better solutions. With the economy speeding up, this need will only intensify. Those industry leaders that had the courage to dedicate resources towards new product development and are ready to sell right now have eager customers waiting, looking for new solutions to improve upon existing investments.

At KANA, we want to remain an innovator. We took a bold, provocative step forward with the recent introduction of KANA 10. We chose to harness what we had developed and learned in the past, and apply it in a completely new direction.

As Bob Thompson of CustomerThink wrote, “[KANA CEO Michael] Fields and his team have done an amazing job to stabilize the company while continuing to build for a brighter future.” Forrester’s Chip Gliedman completed his thought, “This is exactly the direction that the industry is heading and [KANA is] the first company to deliver it.”

With the release of KANA 10, we’re hoping to redefine the customer service market and ring in a new era of enhanced flexibility and control. We’re not going to become another Singer.

Recently, noted economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett wrote in the Harvard Business Review about ways in which high ranking executives can successfully motivate their employees. She cites examples like Time Warner CEO Jeffrey Bewkes, who held skip-level lunches with top performers, and Lynn Utter, president and COO of furniture designer Knoll, who makes four thank-you calls each week to acknowledge strong lower level performers.

John Caddell, a CRM consultant, responded to Hewlett’s piece on his blog, criticizing her top-down approach. He believes the best way to motivate employees — especially customer service representatives (CSRs) — is to give them far more freedom and input.

Both approaches have merit when used at the right time.
To Hewlett’s point, when higher-ups acknowledge the good work of employees far down the organizational chart, it has a significant effect. Positive reinforcement can make them feel more valued.

Caddell is also right, in that motivation and leadership can’t merely be a top-down trickle. It must be an organization-wide pursuit. In many respects, CSRs hold the keys to the customer kingdom. They’re on the frontlines and know what customers are saying, what’s working and what’s not. The knowledge these people have should be used to unlock greater insight into customers – ultimately, to improve growth and profitability.

To effectively institute both a top-down approach (like the one Hewlett suggests) and to best integrate CSR feedback with overall business objectives (as Caddell suggests), companies require technology that gives them visibility, flexibility and control. VPs of customer service and contact center managers need reliable ways of reviewing data from customer-CSR interactions and making on-the-fly changes to workflows. This needs to be a two-way process that allows information to flow from the top down and from the bottom up. Executives can then use this same information to stay connected to the employees providing this valuable insight and keeping customers on board.

During this economic downturn cycle, we’ve all been asked to do more with less, using the tools and technologies that we currently have instead of investing in new solutions. We’ve heard this message from you, and we offer you ways to do just that with the following programs.

New Product Releases
Our product release train is in full gear – with new product releases coming out on a regular schedule. The theme of these releases is to enhance the reliability, security and availability of these products, i.e. bulletproofing them as much as possible. If you are not on a current version of these products, we urge you to contact support@kana.com to download the latest release notes which will give you a good product overview. You will find that the new products work faster and better than older ones, and they also include many new capabilities that let you be more productive at delivering great service to your customers.

Best Practice Webinars
Product Marketing hosts a series of best practice webinars, communicating industry best practices around email management, knowledge management and multichannel customer service. These webinars show you how to squeeze better productivity out of your current implementation by making small changes to your setups. If you are a KANA customer, you will receive email notifications alerting you to these events.
In addition, KANA Global Consulting Services’ blog contains great recommendations on how to maximize the investments in your current customer service tools.

Benchmarking
Do you know how effective your organization is at using your customer service tools? We can benchmark you against industry-standard customer service maturity models. Your scorecard will show you the strengths and weaknesses of your current setup and give you actionable advice on how you can elevate your offering to the next level of service.

Knowledge Sharing Days
Meet with your peers at our knowledge sharing days across the US and EMEA. We bring our customers together in an informal setting to exchange ideas, best practices, implementation and tuning strategies on how to maximize the usage of your products. We also keep you apprised of customer service trends and new technology. Contact marketing@kana.com for a list of knowledge sharing days near you.

With all these activities, we hope that you can put this information to use to get the most out of your current setups without investing in new projects. Let us know what else we can do for you.

If there’s one constant in business, and life, it’s change. And, that’s never been more true than today. Being able to adapt to it is the hallmark of a strong organization. But as critical as it is to an organization’s success, it’s not easy. Leaders of institutions and companies often find employees and customers are resistant to—even afraid of—change.

Leaders must help them understand that shifts in services provided as well as organizational policy, procedures and practices provide strategic advantage in a changing marketplace. Leaders need to demonstrate that change stimulates innovation. It’s this innovation that will bring success, sustained growth, and satisfaction among employees and customers.

So, how exactly can leaders help their employees and customers embrace change? They must be transparent, consistent, and above all, they must be clear on where they are going.

Leaders must communicate changes openly and honestly with employees across the organization and to customers as these changes affect the type of services the company provides. Everyone responds to various types of communication differently, some preferring a formal presentation while others embrace the informal dialogue of a community forum, for example. Leveraging many channels helps to ensure that everyone is listening.

Leaders must be able to ensure that these changes—no matter how large or small they might be—are consistently realized throughout the organization. Employees must know how to deliver on these changes in a uniform fashion. This makes shifting initiatives more manageable and less scary. It also ensures that the customers receive new services correctly and consistently and reinforces the brand image in the customers’ eyes because the company is doing what it said it would do.

Finally, leaders need to be clear on the organization’s mission and their plan for realizing it. Clarity of mission inspires people. Alignment with the right plan puts the wood behind the arrow, providing purpose and setting expectations. It’s this alignment that places change in proper context and truly drives an organization of any size.

At KANA, we have undergone such change in earnest to transform ourselves from an early provider of customer service solutions to innovators in the broader field of service experience management (SEM). Our latest product release, KANA 10, is the embodiment of how to successfully embrace change.

In a recent post, Paul Greenberg of ZDNET characterized social CRM as “a company’s response to the customer’s control of the conversation.” He called for the industry to move away from tedious discussions on how to define the term, and he also tried to end speculation regarding social CRM’s relevance to business objectives. He suggested, instead, that people accept that social CRM is important and here to stay. He urged the industry to turn its focus towards how to effectively respond to social CRM.

To that end, he noted that while the customer controls the conversation, “they do not control the business, company or enterprise itself.” Greenberg is dead on. It’s the business that needs to remain in control of service, product development, and so on—not the customer.

This is a formidable challenge in today’s world of high customer demand and diverse conversation channels. Today’s customer landscape is changing faster than customer service teams, executives and IT staffs can enact effective processes to meet those challenges efficiently and inexpensively.

To rise above the noise and to provide truly great service, companies must be able to measure the success of their customer service policies and processes in real time. This data, or evidence, lets brands determine what’s effective, and when.

This sort of evidence proves invaluable in three ways:

1) As opposed to relying exclusively on assumptions or anecdotal information, tangible evidence (i.e., metrics like customer satisfaction, hold time, upsell rates, etc.) should be the primary driver in shaping customer policies, processes and all other outbound customer activities.
2) It also provides the ability to gauge the buzz and improve on these activities quickly, through real-time management of customer conversations and feedback.
3) Finally, it helps the company engage with customers in a more transparent way. Service agents, marketing folks, and all other key stakeholders are able to rely on the evidence to paint a global picture of what the customer landscape looks like. This informs their responses, makes them more relevant to the customer and gives them the confidence to move quickly—to really take part in the conversation.

The customer feels like they’re in control, but it’s the business that remains in the driver seat thanks to quality evidence and tracking tools.