It used to be so simple. Guy walks into your store, asks for customer service. You point. Next?
But customer service is no longer a department. It’s more like a semi-pervasive meme that is executed with varying degrees of enthusiasm throughout a company. In fact, it’s too big still to be called customer service. We now speak of the customer experience, an ethereal metric and subjective state that goes beyond service providers’ ability to completely control. However, they can affect it.
Steps can be taken to improve the customer experience, or at least, improve the odds that customers will experience their experience positively. Where to begin?
Customer service used to begin when the next customer service rep in the queue answered your call or when the technician, failing at the demark, gave in and rang your doorbell. Today, it begins before you’ve even ordered your service. In fact, said Curt Champion, senior director of product and market strategy at Convergys, customer service ideally starts the day the product or service you are about to purchase is conceived, then designed, then packaged, then bundled, then priced, then inventoried, then made available, then displayed online or in a store, then put in your shopping cart. It goes back before you sign up for service and your credit is checked and your profile is built and the first page in your purchasing and behavior history is begun. It goes back to the day they target your neighborhood, your demographic.
“That’s why it is critical to be able to look at the full 360 degrees of this process,” Champion said. “If you don’t look at the whole process, the whole customer experience, you will never solve the complexity or get to a more iron-clad process.”
And when the customer decides to buy, the real fun begins. It’s called the ordering and provisioning process and it extends from the time of purchase to service delivery. This process has always been a ride through the fun house for service providers. It’s been the source of much customer dissatisfaction. Up to a quarter of the orders that start this ride never see the other end — unless someone picks them up off the floor and completes the journey for them.
However, extending the ordering process closer to Champion’s ideal, with a process the industry calls order orchestration, could have a significant, positive impact on an industry-wide order management environment that has yet to reach its full potential.
“You can’t separate order orchestration from the customer experience. Regardless of the channel a customer comes through, regardless of the product or service they are ordering, there needs to be a commonality across the shopping and ordering experience,” Champion said.
So what is order orchestration? It is a process defined in the TM Forum’s eTOM standard, but Champion said it is the processes and systems that support the customer from the time they initiate shopping through the activation of their services and includes all the activities that ensure every system component is updated to reflect the new services that either have been activated or deactivated — including billing.
While Champion believes the whole process goes back as far as product design — “because it is at this point that you are setting the groundwork for what the customer experience will look like” — we’ll start with the first element of order orchestration as Convergys defines it: the shopping experience.
