Communications are back to front

A piece on unified communications caught my attention today. Findings from research commissioned by Siemens Communications Inc. was reported byTMCnet, its focus was on the techie side of unified systems, workflows, and communication process in customer-facing enterprises. Unsurprisingly, the findings show that large organisations waste a huge amount of money compensating for poor communications between staff. Eg enterprise of 1,000 people with average 62% in customer service and sales could be losing as much as $13million every year in lost productivity and avoidable expenses. Whilst all this is relevant and measurable, there is another waste going on in customer-facing organisations which often goes completely unnoticed. Namely, great nuggets of wisdom piling up on the frontline - I’m talking all those bits of realtime, qualitative feedback from customers via front line agents that if consistently collected, analysed - and then something done about them by the business - would enable companies to truly begin delighting their customers and bringing in revenues - not just plugging the leaks. Of course, you need a process and tools in place to do that - but often that’s not as complex as you think. Sometimes, it just requires managers to reassess what ‘thinking customer’ means in terms of sustaining feedback from the frontline - and start panning for gold. That way companies will get to hear what customers are really telling them, not just findings of a post call IVR survey - which rarely ask the type of questions that fundamentally make the difference to us, the customers.