Relationships

When organizations deal with people, relationships may occur. And that may be good, if no major wrong doings are done. In social, commerce and government context, relationships are the bonds that connect people and organizations and, so, create the networks that keep us together. Having good relationships is something so good that I won’t spend time praising it.

Relationships result from continued interaction processes and they imply some fundamental rules and attributes: there must be a clear purpose and the two parties involved must recognize and remember each other. There is no such thing as an amnesic relationship!

Relationships lifecycle are deeply rooted into the people and organizations own lifecycle: you buy a house in particular moments of your life so you then deal with real estate; so does your cataracts surgery, and perhaps, when that happen you will no longer buy a new motorbike for your own pleasure. And each relationship people start with a particular organization will flow differently.

First attempts to model and capture data from people relationships with organizations started modestly by looking at contact lists, with clients vaguely described by little more than names and addresses, used for all sorts of tasks such as database marketing and follow-up calls. Those records started being complemented with interaction information (the client popped-up at store, client did this then sent email…) and relationship information (people and organizations the client is related with). After the early boom of ERP adoption, many organization needed to improve their sales, marketing and services processes. So they became much more People Centric and CRM took that approach to new dimensions and embraced the challenge of capturing and sharing people and relationships knowledge.

Relationships are complex and fuzzy: there is no universal way to capture, represent and retrieve relationship knowledge in a structured simple way and this is starting to smell Big Data. Nevertheless, CRM is extremely capable of doing it when a comprehensive relationship model is defined (a simplification, I know, that’s what models are about), with a correct understanding of the value chain impacts of relationships management. In this way, it is possible to define effective, simple and structured relationships processes that can help the organization in sales, marketing and services activities. In a way, to capture relationships information we capture the interaction and business processes key data and cross it with the client description and activities. Each client profile flow differently through those processes and this is the power of CRM. This intelligence is achieved with effective analytics that segments clients correctly and do the right thing with each type of client.

For instance, the relationship you maintain with your Telco started someday with an appealing campaign they targeted at you and you started to use their networks the day you subscribed, you get billed monthly and pay punctually, sometimes you need support, one day you may feel seduced by a competitor and relationship ends, or not. Perhaps your brother has a totally different story to tell about this same Telco. This is an overtly simplified view of those processes and how they apply to people, but it illustrates how we can create a narrative with the key moments of a particular type of relationships model from which we dig in and detail to define a CRM model.

The Channel Mix

A view on touchpoints of people and organizations

People interact with organizations through channels. So channels have a major impact on those interactions and may strengthen or destroy relationships. Personal liking, choice, convenience, effectiveness, experience, proximity, are all reasons for people to like many different interaction channels when they deal with a particular organization. That is because each kind has its own attributes and features that are only adequate so tome particular sets of requirements and profiles. Technology opened wide the spectrum of new channels cutting distances and profoundly changing concepts we took for granted a few years ago such as presence, immediacy, exposure, mobility, autonomy, self-service, dematerialization.

Not so long ago, when people wanted to interact with any company or government agency, most probably that was done in person, in their offices. Correspondence, phone calls, faxes and telexes complemented the presential channel in a heavily manual way. New networks, new devices, new concepts and new behaviors forced the change of all that. First we’ve seen call centers pop-up all over the planet, then the Web exploded into our lives and smartphones took it everywhere, with cameras, GPS, social media and nice apps. Today’s channels are so diverse that it is difficult to put on the same stage, a department store and an ecommerce operation, the first with its buildings and departments, its staff and style, smells and sounds, and the latter with its portals made for promoting and selling their catalogs and with its support from contact centers with emails, text, IMs and VoIP calls. Two very different beasts but they can both sell the same products.

Organizations can access today a whole range of channels that span from the traditional high street stores, malls, service desks, nomad salespeople, call centers, IVRs, web portals, mobile apps, kiosks, ATMs and vending machines, toll systems, messaging systems (email, text, IM, fax), social media and many others. To make sense out of this and simplify our approach to channels, we must cluster them in to some categories: Some are Self-service oriented (a web portal is basically self-service, although human agents can participate in a customer process) others are attended by human agents (a call center tends to be attended by human agents, although some calls or parts of calls can be processed by IVR or other voice processing gear); some sit waiting for people to come in, the Inbound kind (stores are inbound, even if they grab customers from the street and sell them stuff) others make lists of clients and then reach them actively to sell, promote, inform, poll… this is the Outbound kind (telemarketing rings bells); some are clearly service channels, others are sales channels and others marketing channels.

The big problem with channels is to sort out the big matrixes that we obtain if we rank channels against client profiles, or against product and services (offer, catalog), or against function (some channels are totally inadequate to deal with simple functions such as payments, or complaints). Things can be even worse, as during a business process the appropriate channel can vary. Remember those situations when you had to go first to the shop to enroll or get some gear and then all your relationship was done online.

Let’s identify the primary high level functions that happen in a channel, independently of the media used by the channel for the interaction between people and the organization (physical store/office, telephony, web, messaging, and others).

When you get, for instance, in a local store or in the passport issuing agency, interaction starts immediately as you enter, with all the flashed information you get from them: scenery, layout, visual impact, billboards, sounds, screens, smell, lights, textures, colors, uniforms. This is the “Welcome” phase that all channels (physical or online, self-service or human attended) go through. Then you may find the reception desk and get directions to the department you want. In this “Routing” phase, sometimes other activities may happen, such as check-in and identity verification, subject identification (to decide where should you go), queueing and contention (to direct you to specialized service or to optimize capacity and flow), information preparation (to make sure that the correct info is there when you get to attended). If in this phase you find out that you ran out of patience to wait in the queue, you can go instead to the self-service booth and help yourself, if that is ok for you. But most people prefer to be attended by a human. So, after Routing we go to the store’s counter or to the service desk. This is the “Interaction” phase all channels are made for, that is, when the traditional sales, services and marketing business processes get into play and the customer or citizen is served: the store sells you and promotes their products and the passport agency issues and delivers your passport and informs you of the new security features. Interaction may include other activities, as well, such as payments, enrolment, digitalization, document issuance, complaints, and many others. Interactions, campaigns, client knowledge and trust are the key ingredients for the “Relation” processes, sometimes neglected in some channels but fundamental to all organizations.

Channel flow 

So the panorama of having the correct mix of channels, with the correct bandwidth and functionality can be daunting. And experience has shown that, sooner than later, multiple channels need to be integrated either to improve the client experience (isn’t it nice to start something at the store and be able to finish it online without having to start all over again? Let’s call this “Interaction Integration”) or to improve the consistency and comprehensive view of the client by the organization, independently of the channel used (remember, this is a people centric approach and organizations need to know their clients. I call this “Relationship Integration”). So, channels can be integrated upstream, at the Relational level, where CRM platforms play the key role of aggregating, for each client, its interactions done in different channels triggering the appropriate transactions and business processes in the organization’s core platforms and keeping an end-to-end registry. When channels are integrated downstream, at the Interaction level, a universal queue of client interaction is processed and routed to the correct agent (human or automated) with the correct context (client, process, activity, status). This is the approach followed by some contact centers and other business process management platforms and can coexist with the upstream relational integration.

Channels deal with lots of supporting information: marketing information, catalog information, product and service description, pricing, procedures, conditions and rules, service levels, contracts, FAQs, support information, etc. Lots of content that need to be managed and maintained updated and synchronous among all channels. This is one of the critical failure causes for many multichannel approaches: what you read in the store does not match what is on the portal and what the call center agent is spelling… Business content is critical and demands to be addressed by a serious editorial process, typically performed by the marketing department, with the content management tools and processes on board.

Measuring and analyzing all key activities in a channel is fundamental to improve quality, performance and efficiency in any channel used by the organization. Waiting time, resolution time, perceived quality, perceived client experience, cost per interaction, and many other indicators are collected all the time and compared to benchmarks. This is where most of wrong doings are done: organizations compare themselves with other organizations and differentiation slowly dilutes. The main reason for that lays on the fact that all that “Interaction Measure” needs to be cross with “Relational Measurement”. The latter captures all the key indicators of the relational processes (what’s the nature and strength of the relationship, its key attributes, its frequencies and intensities, the people and profiles involved), which is a much more difficult analytic exercise that implies a great knowledge of the business model involved. When not done well, channel governance is only tied to capacity planning and interaction efficiency… and client relationship is simply ignored.

People and Organizations

Foundations for a people centric view on organizations

Organizations exist because there are people out there to deal with, and staff to do it. People, people and more people, this is all it is about: people dealing with organizations (people in a particular framework) and people dealing with other people.

People expect respect, fairness, commitment and value from their dealings with organizations. But this is double edged knife. Organizations need to organize themselves in another fashion: they need to know how to identify the people and how tune the way to interact correctly and build reliable relationships. 

Keeping good demographics and biometrics record practices have allowed secure identification of people, either public or private, with reliable credentiation in the digital and in the “bricks” realms. But people identity is a much broader issue and cover a much fuzzier world: your multiple accounts in multiple organizations all contribute to your identity, giving you access to different layers of service and trust is something that needs to be validated all the time.

People are connected by heterogeneous and asymmetric networks which impacts each person in different but effective ways. Can a company not protect its brands in the social networks? So, when someone reaches a portal or a store in the mall he may bring with him all that gossip, recommendations and prejudice he digested. Informed clients are good tough ones.

Clients, Citizens, Individuals, Agents, Associates, you name it, all well-known hats, are roles that define the way organizations “deal” with people. Getting a driving license tends to be a very different thing to buying a book online so the government organization involved don’t have the same approach as the retailer.

In a people centric approach, it only makes sense to focus on the “people dealing” of a particular organization if we understand correctly the roles people play, their motivations, expectations, practices, capabilities and resources. You have to know your clients. A hard task, particularly if you want to register and share it correctly.

People react very differently to an organization if they have to deal with it or if they want to deal with it. How different it is to deal with the Tax authorities or deal with a video streaming company! I will call the first type “hard” and the second “soft”. The cognitive and emotional resources involved in “hard” and “soft” situations are so different that the interactions have to be different (the channel mix), the relationship establishment is made with diverse bonds (trust, integrity, urbanity, law, compliance, value, citizenship…) and the resulting business processes are dramatically different.

The funny thing is that sometimes a “soft” situation gets into a “hard” one. You buy a nice gadget and two weeks later it gets broken and customer service comes into play. Then you witness the traditional schizophrenia: one company two different personalities. Not nice.

Failing to recognize the “soft”/”hard” nature of the people organizations has been in the deep root cause of multiple well intentioned disasters we have seen, such as expensive CRM initiatives that under deliver and inappropriate channel mix that destroy value.

When organizations deal with people sometimes they collect a lot of data. Demographics and other structured and unstructured data and metadata describing each particular person are basic. This “client file” is one of the most abused objects in all organizations. I’ve seen “client files” so rich that included coding all sorts of client behaviors, attributes and traits, offering an immense field for analysis and prediction about their customers.

People are related/connected to other people and to other organizations. Family ties, employment ties, citizenship ties, membership, and many others reflect a network that is sometimes social, other times contractual, sometimes public, sometimes intimate. So, for each role a person plays with an organization, there is a complex tree reflecting the hierarchy of people and organizations, that when exists and is reliable gives a tremendous power to the “client file”. Intelligent analysis can show amazing hidden knowledge about people.

Sometimes organizations also register the business process and transactions data that are consequence of people dealing with the organization. So, for each person in the records they’ve got the resulting processes/transactions. Let’s call it the “deal file”.

But between the “client file” and “deal file” something tends to be missing: they know something of the person (the “client file”) and something he/she wants (the “deal file”) but they don’t know much about what was done by the person, actions that, at the end of the day, resulted in the process/transaction. What emails did the organization sent and received on that context, did the person showed on the store/office, did it logged in the portal and what was done. So, if they register the way people interact with the organization (on the many available channels) we obtain a behavioral record which contains much knowledge about how people do business with the organization. This is the “interaction file” that, although often neglected and a hard nut to crack, is one of the richest datasets an organization can access.

Intelligent analysis of that data is a whole industry in itself. One of the first approaches have been to look at people data and put them in pots: those that do this, those that own that, those that want this, those that buy that… Clustering, segmenting, evaluating, scoring, filtering, mining for patterns and trends and many other algorithms in an attempt to predict behaviors and act accordingly. For instance, financial organizations that may benefit from couple divorce (doubling the number of mortgages, for instance) may put you in the “potential divorcee pot” because you are married and reaching a critical anniversary; then they can inspect regularly your banking activities with them until they are sure you are finally divorced: in that moment they may suddenly propose you the “Just divorced package”.

Orchestrating the processes (People Management, Interaction Management, Relationship Management) that own those 3 files have been called CRM, a business philosophy that soon became incorporated into software applications. Implementing those platforms is prone to failure due to resistance to change and to the immense impacts it has on most of other processes and platforms. But it pays to do it right!

A People Centric view for the way Organizations deal with their clients

A Social, Business and Technical approach

Most of my career evolved around improving the way organizations deal with their clients. Sometimes those clients were citizens with no option than deal with the government, but most of times it was about willing-to-pay customers. For all sorts of reasons, organizations feel compelled to spend precious resources improving the way they relate to people, external people most of the times, but internal people as well.

I want to share with you a journey that starts with the motivations to improve People-Organizations relationships and goes all the way from there: the goals, the structures and operations to change or create, the resources and infrastructure to make available, the efforts and governance involved.

This is about a People Centric view of the world and so it has to be established on an ethical background that stands still in the widest ranges of applications, cultures and jurisdictions. But dealing with people means above all dealing with a connected diversity and uniqueness: no single shoes fit those feet.

Nurturing a real-world view, a model of existing realities of People-Organization relationships, we can then focus on how to improve it, from conception, to execution, to evaluation. Clearly coming from a business perspective, sooner or later technology will pop-up and I’ll make the best to save you from unnecessary jargon and fashionable acronyms.