Guest Blog Posting
By Gary Yurkovich

- the perception is price
- the reality is service

You lost a customer.  Why?  
The answer may surprise you.

According to a survey by Marketing Sherpa, vendors think that customers primarily leave because of price. However that same survey shows that the primary reason customers leave a vendor is due to Customer Service.

Customers and Vendors Disagree:

Source: Marketing Sherpa

The disparity underscores an essential point in this age of commoditization: superior customer service can bolster loyalty and provide a basis to charging a price premium.

Customer service is rapidly becoming the primary differentiator for organizations competing for marketplace success. Customers have increasing expectations of extraordinary service from their vendors and suppliers. Service differentiation is increasingly difficult when everyone is chanting “We are driven by customer service”. Customer loyalty is key and every call a customer makes is another opportunity to either impress them or lose them to a competitor. Driving their expectations is a convenience centered economy where consumers are highly valued and unaccustomed to waiting for answers.

Real time scheduling of customer service with firm dates and times is now expected as part of good customer service. This is easy to do when running a small dental practice, but very difficult to achieve in large global enterprises where thousands of people and resources must be coordinated. Advanced real time workforce scheduling platforms like those provided by eOptimize are designed to be integrated into larger enterprises and existing systems that can provide the tools to allow you to take customer service to the next level.

It’s easy for the sales person to say we lost the customer because of price. It’s hard for an organization to see that they are really losing customers because of poor customer service. Don’t let your existing systems and processes hold you back. There are solutions available today to enable the best in customer service scheduling. See our white paper Real Time Scheduling in Workforce Management to learn about the advantages of real time workforce scheduling over traditional scheduling.

Gary Yurkovich

As managed services become the norm in the corporate business environment, telecommunication companies have to move away from networks and connectivity to customer service.  The challenge for individuals providing the various discrete parts of the service is to understand that they are part of a much larger ecosystem.

For each managed service, all of the constituent parts must be understood.  The customer doesn’t care if the network is working fine, but the email server is down and they can’t access their email.  There needs to be a shift in thinking so that the people supplying the service understand service delivery from the customer’s point of view.

This is a big change.  Traditionally, individuals are responsible for keeping individual pieces of equipment running.  Today there needs to be people and systems that can see the entire ecosystem for delivering a service.  New quality of service and key productivity indicators need to be created and monitored for all parts of service deliver. Equally important the interaction of those parts has to be measured. One or two missing pieces of the puzzle mean that the customer isn’t getting the service that was promised.

The TM Forum’s Service Framework calls each sub-service a service component. Individual service components need to be managed as they form the building blocks of the entire service being delivered to the customer (just as pieces of a puzzle join together to make a complete picture).  In some cases, individual sub-services may be provided by third-parties.  It’s critical that each component be indentified and the organization responsible for the components delivery need to be managed.

As a modern web service, it’s easy to make our scheduling platform be a component in the service offering.  Whether it’s invoked via a web browser where customers do self-scheduling or by a manager reacting to a service outage, we’re there to schedule the people that keep all the services running.

David Greer

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has become a hot topic over the last decade.  It should be as attracting and retaining customers is more challenging today than it ever has been.  In many organizations CRM sits at the heart of the enterprise, spanning marketing, sales, and service as noted in the diagram below:

When working with customers we find that there is continuous interaction between CRM and scheduling.  For example, when companies have a workflow that needs to be executed for every new customer, schedules have to be created.  In cases where people need to be scheduled in a coordinated workflow, providing scheduling answers is hard. 

For example, suppose that these steps have to be executed before a new customer can be setup:

1. One hour introductory meeting with an implementer.
2. After the introductory meeting, a project manager has to spend a half hour creating the project plan for the customer.
3. The account manager has to be scheduled to do a follow up call after the project manager has the plan.

In many companies this scheduling problem is solved by manual processes and numerous email messages back and forth between teams and the customer.  It is prone to all sorts of errors.  By automating this scheduling the customer experience completely changes:

1. They get the scheduling answers they need when they place their order.
2. Things are delivered when they said they would be.

This level of customer delivery is what people expect today.  Is your company making it easy and accurate for your customer’s first customer relationship with you to be an outstanding one?  With automated people and resource scheduling, you can.

David Greer

Bill Price of Driva Systems and David Jaffee of Limebridge Australia recently published the book “The Best Service Is No Service“. The book advocates seven steps to eliminate the need for customer service:

1. Reengineer your products and processes so that customers never need to contact you in the first place.
2. Create self-service mechanisms (they suggest Web and IVR) with high success rates.
3. It’s much cheaper to be proactive rather than reactive.  If there’s a problem, tell the customer about it before they contact you.
4. Make it easy to contact you (e.g., web sites make contact information prominent and accessible).
5. The entire company has to “own” the problem.  Customer problems are rarely the result of customer service, but rather the result of poor design or execution by many parts of the organization.
6. Listen to the customer and communicate with them from their point of view.
7. Measure great customer experience by focusing on metrics such as number of contacts per order.

In my early days at Robelle Solutions Technology, we tripled the number of customers without increasing staff.  As a software company, we spent a tremendous amount of time reengineering our products to eliminate technical support calls.  A lot of that effort went into the installation of the software.  Many software companies figure you’re only going to install a software product once, so why put a lot of effort into the installer.  The truth is that the installation process is often one of the earliest customer experiences.  Having to call technical support to get a software product installed, even if technical support is excellent, is not the best way to make a first impression.

At eOptimize, we similarly put a lot of engineering effort into both our installer and our product to eliminate technical support calls.  Our software runs in highly complex environments and interacts deeply with Microsoft Windows, Active Directory Services, and Exchange.  These are challenging products to work with in all of their combinations, but we rise to that challenge to both reduce our support costs and to insure that our customers have a great first experience.

Last week, I wrote about how automated scheduling can save your customers a lot of time by self-service scheduling via a web portal.  Our customers and their customers can save people years of time by letting our scheduling engine automate scheduling of customer appointments, exactly as Bill and David advocate in their second step. If you are passionate about customer service, I highly recommend “The Best Service Is No Service”.

David Greer

We’ve written about how expensive scheduling can be for an organization. What often gets lost in the discussion is the amount of the customer’s time that can be wasted by poor scheduling.

When dealing with Fortune 500 clients, we are amazed at the staggering amount of lost time that organizations cost their customers.  We know of a large financial services company that manually schedules time for their financial advisors to provide education to the employees of their corporate clients.  For just one of their corporate clients, the call center took 17,500 calls to schedule an appointment with an advisor in 2007.  The average length of each call was 12 minutes.  That works out to 438 days.  If we assume approximately 200 working days a year, that’s more than two people’s full-time effort for a year.

Imagine what the client of our financial services firm would feel about wasting two people-years worth of their employees’ time just to schedule appointments with an advisor. With our software, the employees of the corporate client could self-schedule their appointments through a customer web portal.  Since we provide solutions in seconds, employees could schedule themselves in under a minute (even with login time and multiple choices for dates and times). If I was one of those employees, I’d like to have that time back so that I could spend more time on the beach with my family.

David Greer

We are constantly amazed at the hidden costs that organizations spend on scheduling.  Rather than automate their scheduling with software platforms such as our About Time for Exchange Server, organizations defer scheduling to line managers.  It’s like being in a sailboat and constantly trying to fight your way into the wind. Thousands of managers around the world do it every day.

Many telecommunication and utility companies use the concept of bucket or slot scheduling.  They allocate so many “buckets” or “time slots” in each geographic region.  Work orders are assigned to each “bucket” or “time slot” until it is full for a given day.  It is common for the time period to be a half day, thus customers can only be told that someone will show up in the morning or the afternoon.

Ignoring the lack of customer service in this approach, consider what happens each day.  Every morning the manager in each region has to do the final scheduling, assigning the work from each “bucket” or “time slot” to individual technicians. A mid-sized telecommunications company with offices throughout the US might have a thousand field service technicians and back office engineers who have to be scheduled every day.  If we assume twenty people being scheduled per manager, there would be fifty managers.  If they each take twenty minutes to do the scheduling, that’s 2,500 minutes or almost 42 hours of management time per day.

While automated scheduling will not eliminate all this management time, it can eliminate 70-80% of it.  Because each individual technician is scheduled ahead of time, managers can focus on exceptions.  These range from someone calling in sick to emergency break and repair issues.  The net result is management being more focused on customer service and less on day-to-day operations.  As a bonus, customers are told a precise time when a technician will show up, rather than having to wait around for an entire morning or afternoon.  Automated scheduling let’s you go with the wind, giving you and your customers a smooth ride to scheduling answers.

David Greer

Those of you with children may recall the book “The Little Engine That Could.”  The story is about how a little engine that is personified as someone who tries hard and succeeds, gets a train load of toys and food over the mountain for the children in the next town by repeating “I think I can, I think I can.”

While the analogy is a stretch, our scheduling engine is the core platform that let’s people perform on time.  Like “The Little Engine That Could”, our scheduling platform has the intelligence and scale to always get over the mountain of complex scheduling problems.

Rather than pull from the front of the train, we sit in the middle of all important IT systems, coordinating the complex information that let’s us automate individual schedules and workflow.  James Taylor at Smart (enough) Systems calls us an Enterprise Decision Management system. EDMs operate in real-time to make operational decisions for organizations from moment to moment.  The advantage of EDMs is that they are operating on up-to-date information, resulting in faster and better decisions.

In many organizations information silos make it difficult to automate decisions such as people’s schedules.  Calendar information is stored in MS Exchange.  For telecommunication companies, customer information is in their OSS or BSS. Provisioning inventory might be in another application.  Individual skills for engineers are in the HR database.  Because we are a service oriented architecture (SOA) web service, we can sit in between all of these applications.  By combining all of the data, we are able to make intelligent scheduling decisions faster and better than human beings can.

If a financial services call center is taking calls to book appointments for advisors to make customer visits across the US, we again have to deal with multiple information silos.  The customer application has the address, information we can use to compute travel times, physical location, and time zones.  Each advisor is licensed to operate in specific states, so the HR database needs to be interrogated to verify license information.  Individual calendars are stored in MS Exchange.  No individual call center person can keep all the variables straight in their head.  If there’s no automated solution, our experience is that there is an entire team of managers who take every request and then manually match all the information to find scheduling solutions.  Not only is this labor intensive, there are so many manual steps that it is error prone.

At eOptimize we have the enterprise decision management platform that can scale to take all these complex information silos and produce correct scheduling answers in real-time.  Our scheduling engine solves your people and resource scheduling challenges, just like “The Little Engine That Could.”

David Greer

One of the ways that companies keep customers happy is by doing what they say they would do when they said they would do it.  While simple in principle it is difficult to achieve this in practice.  Companies that focus on high customer retention and high revenue per customer look for ways to automate their interactions with their customers, front-line service people, and back office employees.  That’s were we come in.

People in companies can sometimes lose sight of the customer, which is nicely illustrated by the cartoon above (used with permission from Budd Life).  For telecommunication companies we take the complex process of activating new service activations and automate the scheduling of all of the people involved in the process.  What used to look like a multi-level flow chart with unending arrows and boxes now becomes a single step process.  It’s true that there is significant setup that has to be done initially (to map those arrows and boxes into our application), but after that everything is automatic.  When people see our AboutTime for Exchange Server product in action for the first time, there is often an amazed look on their faces and we here comments like “do you mean that we really can schedule the entire process all at once?”  To which we answer, “yes you can, that’s what we do.”

Financial service companies with large institutional 401(k) retirement plans face a challenge.  The employees of their institutional customers need to schedule time with a financial planner to review or ask questions about their 401(k) retirement plan with the company. Financial service companies would like for employees with their plans to be able to self-service appointment bookings through a customized web portal.  This is a complex problem.  You need to coordinate free/busy time, match the right skill set and knowledge of the individual retirement products, often across multiple time zones and geographies, with the individual financial advisors, who could number in the hundreds or thousands.

Once again, AboutTime for Exchange Server rises to the challenge.  Around the planet we automatically schedule such complex customer appointments every day. The customer is able to get the service they need, while we insure that the individual financial planner’s time is booked appropriately.  The customer gets the call when they expect it.  That’s what customer service should be.

David Greer

Scheduling of people is often a hidden cost in an organization.  The scheduling function is pushed down the management chain or delegated to regional offices.  Because there have been few solutions to automated scheduling, managers have just accepted the cost of scheduling people as a cost of doing business.

Our customers realize cost savings in two ways:

1. By repurposing full-time scheduling people
2. By improving the schedules of the people being scheduled

For example, our customers have realized a 20% savings in the number of full-time people doing the scheduling.  Let’s assume that full-time scheduler costs $70,000/year (all prices are in US dollars). If we further assume that are an average of one scheduling person for every fifteen people being scheduled (which is typical) and you are scheduling 150 people.  By using an automated scheduling solution you would realize a cost savings of $140,000 per year.

A second advantage of automated scheduling is that it can make the schedules of the people being scheduled tighter. The result is better utilization of the people resources you are scheduling.  Obtaining accurate percentages of before and after schedules is challenging, but anecdotal evidence suggests increases from 2-10%.  If we assume that the 150 people we were scheduling in the example above are paid an average of $100,000/year and only a 2% productivity increase, that’s still a cost savings of $300,000/year.

Below is a screen shot of our ROI Calculator showing the examples we’ve just described showing a total cost savings of $400,000 per year:

Three of the major markets we serve are telecommunications, healthcare, and financial services and insurance. Do these numbers make sense?  For telecommunication companies, we automate the scheduling of service activations.  This includes the field service engineers, network engineers, network operation managers, and account managers.  All of these people are highly trained, so our assumption of all-in costs of $100,000 per person per year is reasonable.  Tighter schedules for service activations lowers costs by doing more service activations per person deployed in the process.

In healthcare, we schedule even bigger teams of people.  They are more highly trained and paid, so our ROI numbers are on the low side.  There are additional savings in healthcare, because we also automate the scheduling of expensive clinical equipment, from rooms to specialized testing devices. By making better use of people and other resources, we are able to help clinics see more patients.  In the US environment, this increases revenue for the clinics.

For financial services and insurance companies, we automate the scheduling of national sales teams.  Due to the complexity of today’s financial products and regulations around the sale of both financial and insurance products, these sales individuals are highly trained and specialized.  An individual sales person will cost at least $100,000 a year.  Improving the scheduling of customer appointments (either by telephone or in person) means that each sales person spends more time with clients and prospects. There is a cost savings and there is real potential for increased revenue.

Automated people scheduling is a highly effective way to realize cost savings and productivity gains.  Do you know what it’s costing your company to schedule your people?

David Greer

Both Outlook and our AboutTime for Exchange Server product use free/busy time published by Microsoft Exchange to find available times in user’s calendars.  It’s great to be able to automatically find available time, but is the free/busy time published by Exchange always accurate?  If you are using Outlook 2007 or earlier with MS Exchange 2003 or earlier, the answer is “not all the time.”

Free/busy times in Exchange 2003 and earlier versions are created by having Outlook publish free/busy times to a special public folder.  By default, this information is published every fifteen minutes for the next two months.  In Outlook 2003, you can change these defaults by going into the Tools menu, selecting Options, clicking on the Calendar Options button, and then selecting Free/Busy Options.  You should see a dialog that looks like this:

You can increase the frequency that information is published and the number of months of free/busy information you want to publish.  Increasing either the frequency or the number of months, puts more load on the network and your Exchange servers, but increases the accuracy and availability of free/busy time.

There are other factors that can impact both the availability and the accuracy of Exchange free/busy time:

1. The special public folder is replicated to other Exchange servers at an interval defined by the Exchange system administrator.
2. The free/busy folder can get corrupted.
3. Outlook may be prevented from sending the free/busy messages (e.g., your VPN connection is not available).

In Exchange 2007, web services are used to get the free/busy data in real time.  Public folders are not used, so that issues with inaccurate free/busy data disappear.  For more information on Exchange free/busy time, see:

http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/FreeBusy-Folders-Exchange-Server-2003-Depth.html

David Greer