We talk about our products being designed as a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).  They are, but why should you care?  This posting attempts to explain why you might.

Historically, software applications were written with few if any open interfaces. These systems were huge, monolithic, and difficult to interface to. The challenge is that these legacy systems contain business logic that implements key decisions about business processes.  Without an easy set of interfaces, these highly valuable units of business logic are locked away, difficult to reuse, and costly to maintain.

The concept of SOA was introduced so that those involved in business processes and information technology could design software and business rules as a service. The goal was to make it much easier for companies to reuse software and to interface to SOA applications.

This was helped along by development platforms, like Microsoft’s .NET or Java’s J2EE, which make it easier to both create SOA applications and to interface to an SOA software implementation.  We estimate that it takes 50-75% less implementation work (measured as hours of work) to integrate our scheduling platform into a customer’s IT infrastructure then with comparable non-SOA scheduling solutions.  We achieve these cost savings, even if the customer’s infrastructure is based on legacy mainframe or UNIX platforms.

By being a SOA web service, we also provide customers with leverage to solve multiple business problems. Customers typically purchase and deploy one of our scheduling solutions for a particular business problem such as automating the people and workflow in telecommunication service activations.  This only involves a percentage of all of the employees in the organization. If there are scheduling challenges with another section of the business, our implementation can be used to solve those challenges with a small amount of incremental work.  Traditional business applications can sometimes be applied to new business problems, but rarely can they do so with little work effort.

When SOA is well done it brings greatly reduced integration costs and higher reusability of business logic and application solutions.  That’s why you could care about Service Oriented Architectures.

David Greer

Cartoon courtesy of Geek and Poke

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