August 24
CEO Blog: Losing Sight of Creating the Right Customer Experience
I have been in the conferencing industry almost 20 years and it never fails to amaze me how companies in my industry seem to lose sight of the fact that creating the right customer experience is the differentiator in staying competitive. 20 years ago, AT&T had 95% market share in conferencing. Customers paid as high as $.65 a minute for the privilege of having an operator place a dial out to participants on a conference call, make them wait about 20 minutes while the call was being set up, and then kick them off the conferencing bridge if they exceeded their reserved time.
When I co-founded InterCall in 1991, I was sure that this call experience wouldn’t work for most of the people we wanted to sell to – those with a mobile sales force. We looked at the technology and saw no reason why people couldn’t dial in vs. being dialed out to. What a difference that simple concept made! You didn’t have to change the reservation, worry if someone was by their phone, or be put on hold forever.
Well, how could it get any better than that? Again, the answer was simple. Instead of making people wait for an operator to answer the phone and enter you into the call, what about using a passcode? Improving the customer experience by removing the operator intercept sped up the call set up time and reduced mistakes at the operations center when people would invariably be dropped into the wrong call.
Full automation, right? Not really. There was still that pesky reservation you had to make so the center would expect your call. But then the technology improved and the conferencing bridges got larger. With a little capacity planning, taking the need to make a reservation away made life get better again. This time, it wasn’t just the call leader that benefitted, it was the administrative assistant who got chained to the call process when that VP of Sales changed his mind about the call time and number of people.
Don’t think it could get any better? Stay tuned for the next blog post. And oh by the way, AT&T’s market share has crashed through the floor. Goes to show you that the customer experience makes all the difference.
