From a customer’s perspective, the big business option will usually win on price by a small margin, but once you factor in the headaches and the generally useless service, then the small business always wins. Probably there’s some exceptions to that rule, for banking I go with someone big (hoping to get safety, not service).

When you stumble into a mom-and-pop shop that can’t cut it (and it happens all the time), don’t panic, just go to the one next door, easy.

Big enterprise companies will hire new people (at low wage) and put them into the “lowest rank” position in the business. It used to be the mail room, but these days inevitably that “low ranked” position is the helpdesk or the customer service center. Employees work hard to get OUT of customer service and into a real job at a “higher ranked” position in the business.

The result is that the entire public impression of the business is based on the most junior employees who don’t enjoy the work they are doing and are getting low wages. Thus, management give these people strict scripts to work from and fire them at the drop of a hat, resulting in low morale and absolutely no incentive to attempt any real problem-solving.

It makes you wonder why the employees most critical to customer loyalty are also the worst treated, least experienced and least respected people in the business?

I have been in the Call Centre industry for the past 12 years and I
believe major changes are coming based on similar theories you have
outlined in Wikinomics. I’ve had a variety of analytical to Director
roles, specializing in how Call Centres are planned (based on customer
calling patterns, marketing plans, etc.), scheduling agents, and
managing to an expect service leve( eg. 80% of calls answered within
20 seconds.)

In having many conversation with others in the retail and Call Centre
industy, I would appreciate your thoughts…

I wonder if there should be a word for the specific anxiety you feel when you have recorded a sports event and want to make it home to view it before you hear anything about the score.

J27srl, I agree this is difficult for the TV industry, but the fact is consumers are driving this change. By downloading only what they want online (via torrents and other services), consumers are bypassing the cable networks and getting very customizable experiences (see David Cameron’s post “Online piracy’s value is not that it’s free, but it’s flexible” http://www.wikinomics.com/blog/index.php/2007/12/18/online-piracys-value-is-not-that-it-is-free/). It’s an on-demand world. I guess where they’ve got me is with sports, because that is one of the few content pieces where downloading isn’t really an option – you have to watch it live, in real-time.

Jenn, great point about incentives. For commissioned sales reps, you’re right; time is money. Creating incentives around collaboration is always difficult, (but not impossible). I’m thinking something along the lines of ratings and points for contributions, relationship-building, and team performance. You run into the problem facing communities like the SAP Developer Network, where contributors are incented towards quantity of responses over quality, but I think this can be mitigated. Or maybe the model is broken. Perhaps the traditional notion of sales commissions is inappropriate in a world where contact center employees move up into the realm of knowledge workers.

I see your point…but I’m still not going to watch those other channels, even if I am forced to buy them.

This is an extremely interesting article and I strongly agree that customer service agents are a vastly untapped resource in most companies. I do think customer surveys are still important, since they hopefully capture feedback from both satisfied and unsatisfied customers.

Creating a wiki tool that CSR’s will use to capture ad hoc feedback from customers presents a challenge, since my experience is that selling agents in particular are very resistant to activities they see as “time sucks”. Anything that reduces their time available to sell, and therefore commissions, is unwelcomed. Something like the incident resolution wiki tool that Tony mentions would be a boon to many call centers, I’m sure!

Having previously worked as a call centre data analyst for a company that has not yet adopted the wiki toolset and where front line call centre employees had to wait for formal reports to diagnose an issue instead of simply working together and sharing new knowledge effectively, I could see first hand the potential time savings and increased customer satisfaction that such collaboration would provide.

Some of our customers use our wiki to capture the “voice of the customer” from front line agents and provide this feedback to product management. Others use the tool to capture new incidents and enable agents and others to collaborate to define resolutions quickly and efficiently to solve problems not yet known or resident in back-end knowledge bases. This assists greatly in reducing call handling times and increases the capacity of the call center since incidents are readily available for the agents to view and provide for their customers. This is a form of Knowledge Centered Support, capturing knowledge JIT.

We have also seen support groups embracing the concept of opening up the wiki to external customers to leverage the collective wisdom of their end users to contribute knowledge and help solve problems for the community.

Unfortunately, service and support groups tend to not be very open and guard their knowledge closely. This mind set needs to change as consumers today are more open and willing to be part of the solution!