Scheduling and Customer Service
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