Telecom customer support 2.0

Salesforce released desk.com very recently:

Operators should be looking at how disruptive dotcoms are offering disruptive customer support. After years of investments in help desk automation, most operators are still showing basic problems. How often are you asked to introduce your phone number and when the agent picks up the first thing they ask is “What is your phone number?”. SaaS help desk solutions might change the way support can be delivered.

How many operators are linking conversations with customers in Twitter, Facebook, life chat, email and phone? Not a lot. Disruptive telecom competitors are just doing that. They go even further by given control to customers about roadmaps, service extensions, priorities on problem resolutions, etc. via Social CRM.

Siebel, Clarify, etc. have a solid base but “ease of use” and “quickly rolling out changes” are no key features. Customer support should work more like an iPhone. Each group of services should get its support app. Both an app for the customer as well as for the helpdesk agent. Customers should be able to follow the 80-20 rule. The most frequent support activities are done via self-service. Helpdesk agents get apps for the other 20-80 parts as well.

When marketing launches a new service, integration into the CRM should no longer mean support agents get an upgrade. Instead it should mean customers and support agents get another support app. Isolate the complexity of service support on the service level. Do not try to create one CRM that solves all possible scenarios. Instead have each support app customize the basic operations that are valid for the service. Service experts will get a lot less support requests if they empower others to resolve support problems. Agents and customers will enjoy the straight forward support approach. Service developers will think of support from the start and not as an add-on…