Relationship Management

Executive summary

Relationship Management

Following 20 years of AT&T/ Bell Labs experience in development of very large business systems, forecasting and producing interactive video discs for training/ marketing, other common carrier facility requirements, providing quality management services and producing interactive video discs for training/ marketing, about 1988 began providing solutions for AT&T customers’ integrated call center solutions. From there, (about 1991), migrated to product management of AT&T’s (later Lucent, then Avaya )line of speech enabled self-service (IVR) products and together with channel management of a select group of integrators who provided self, and assisted service solutions. From there, evolved into solutions and technology planning for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) where I performed market research in every corner and aspect of the call center/ CRM global markets to ascertain the market potential of my concept leading to an Avaya CRM Central product which connected the event driven enterprise front end to responsible process oriented functional enterprise areas, even extending into the extended enterprise (supply chain) itself.

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Service Methodology

For customer-centric enterprises including Healthcare, Government, Finance, Manufacturing, Retail and others, located in the major Northeast USA metropolises of New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington DC and others such as Chicago, San Francisco and Houston, facilitate client organization’s creation, design, development and improvement of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) processes and technology deployments of contact centers, voice self-service, speech recognition, web services and mobility applications to optimize their Key Corporate Objectives in presenting their brand, providing an exemplary customer experience, extending marketplace reach and positively impacting their financials and Key Performance Indicators. For each client, produce an agreed-upon framework report that will serve as one of the needed resources for customer implementation of a world–class CRM inbound / outbound contact center (voice, speech recognition and verification, web, video, email or sms texting) agent assisted or automated self-service capability for customers/ citizens/ clients/ employees of commercial, healthcare or governmental enterprises. Methodology uses the scientific process of observation, interpretation, analysis, clarification and prediction and control, working with the customer CRM and other enterprise departmental staff at multiple levels to collect input. This input will then be synthesized into a framework report which addresses proposed organization structure, processes and interfaces: Review and study workgroup processes, tools, data, systems and complaints; Review key documents, observe and Interview customer facing staff, observe workflow/ processes procedures/ interfaces and contact transfers within and between groups, agencies and stake holders. Facilitate meetings and interviews of managers and supervisors to identify and discuss issues, organization, work routing, staffing/ training, reports expectations of CRM services.

For each client, develop key program objectives. Vision: Apply business practices and principles to establish a vision; Use business management principles to plan implementation; Perform ‘cost justification’ analysis of indicated projects; Identify and leverage risk/opportunity trade-offs; Provide financial projections to evaluate and prioritize projects and Forecast an annual operating budget for the venture. Customer Relationship Management: Apply Customer Relationship Management techniques to improve customer relationships; Identify the dynamics and economics of customer acquisition, retention, value, and access; Align customer contacts and experience with the organization’s customer segmentation strategy; Identify and quantify customer expectations and related business drivers; Identify the fundamental components of delivering a positive customer experience; Evaluate the effectiveness of service delivery and the impact on customer satisfaction; Propose tools and methods for measurement of user satisfaction; Use root cause analysis to Identify key contributors to areas of customer dis-satisfaction; Establish contact center mechanisms for capturing and leveraging customer feedback; Develop strategies to manage and improve the customer experience; Contribute to the organization’s customer service strategies and business planning process; Propose the best suited operational model for meeting customer needs; Optimize user experience by aligning resources, processes, and technologies

Establish an S Corporation for the consulting business, Establish funding sources and banking relationships and Setup an Office with appropriate computer tools to administer the business including accounting system and customer relationship management system: Define the services being offered; Determine and employ channels of distribution; Generate a marketing plan; Develop collateral; Develop orderly business processes, including QMS; Only as needed, hire admin help and Nail down quarterly revenue objectives.

Quarterly review of business’s performance against metrics: Existing clients – evaluate satisfaction with services [based on channel input or quality surveys]; Existing clients – current CRM projects – based on rendered services; Existing clients – completed CRM projects – success against their selected CRM project goals; Number of new clients; Number of new Prospects and Leads; Quarterly revenue of business; Quarterly profit of business; Number of complaints about services rendered; Number of resolved complaints and Number of new products or services being offered

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Service Options

Companies can elect whether they just require Appleton Greene for advice and support with the Bronze Client Service, for research and performance analysis with the Silver Client Service, for facilitating departmental workshops with the Gold Client Service, or for complete process planning, development, implementation, management and review, with the Platinum Client Service. Ultimately, there is a service to suit every situation and every budget and clients can elect to either upgrade or downgrade from one service to another as and when required, providing complete flexibility in order to ensure that the right level of support is available over a sustainable period of time, enabling the organization to compensate for any prescriptive or emergent changes relating to: Customer Service; E-business; Finance; Globalization; Human Resources; Information Technology; Legal; Management; Marketing; or Production.

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Service Mission

The drivers of an ongoing and ever increasing global requirement for automated and assisted CRM services include great population growth, aging of most of the world’s populations together with skyrocketing demand and costs for healthcare delivery, rapidly increasing scarcity of all resources around the globe, heightened and burgeoning competition from globalization, exploding efficiencies and requirements to reduce costs and to do more with less, and so forth. All humanity would like one on one interactions. No one can afford to continue that way, inevitably new ways of conducting business are, and will continue to be deployed while the necessity of engaging loyal constituents continues. CRM technology is a strong contributor, part of the Solution for these challenges. I envision where CRM is further enabled by the marriage of more intelligence with evermore sophisticated, elegant and convenient delivery mechanisms to do an increasingly better job of Customer Relationship Management – no matter what the enterprise or mission or services delivery entails.

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Service objectives

The following list represents the Key Service Objectives (KSO) for the Appleton Greene Relationship Management service.

1. Strategic Visioning
   Multilevel strategic visioning is a planned, structured interview process using proprietary tools customized to the Client’s unique circumstances. Depending on the complexity of the situation, this may be accomplished in short-duration telephone interviews on up to multiday, multi-group onsite sessions. Regardless of the interview(s) media, the goal is to elicit the Client’s desirous direction whether that be for maximizing their customers’ experience, integrating their organizations and systems to better support the customer experience, modernizing an existing call center, or deploying a new call center, transforming their customers interactions into some self-service modality or normalizing their customers experience across organization, channel, customer lifecycle or process. Interview content is recorded, analyzed and shaped into the strategy that will best satisfy the Client’s vision, mission and goals as regards their customers’ needs and desires.
2. Solution Discovery
   Once the vision is in place, and agreed-upon, then organizational, process, environment, technology and application solutions will be explored as they would support the strategy. This is a multidimensional effort in that it would be usual for many supportive solutions to become apparent to the Executive – Client – Consultant team. These would need to be described, evaluated and prioritized so that the most valuable solutions are selected in their order of timely benefit to the client organization.
3. Solution Justification
   Part of the above mentioned selection process usually involves business planning and/ or justification analysis to reasonably arrive at the ‘last and best’ selection and phases for bringing the strategy to life via the selected solutions. The metrics for justification include how well the solution fits the strategy, financial and non-financial benefit for the Client and their customers, employees and stakeholders. Besides involving considerable calculations, this involves suitable expression to achieve buy-in from all the key players whether that be through executive summary narratives, presentations, graphical projections and so forth. The goal is to attain a ‘green light’ from the client for going to the next step.
4. Solution Design
   Solution Design answers the questions of how do we want to put this together, how can we overcome technical integration challenges, how can we make it work, what pieces are required, which of those do we already have, do we make or buy the other parts, how do we get it serviced and what are the costs, particularly our internal resource costs and total cost of ownership [of the solution] over the projected lifetime? This is a team effort which requires the knowledge and experience of many different kinds of people. Engineering, Marketing, Business, Sales, Legal people must work together and across boundaries and learn to understand each other’s language and business rules. Having been part of such teams since assembling content/ applications for interactive video disks in the 80s, large business systems in the 70s and secret military systems in the 60s, my role would be as a guide and a resource, wherein your team can leverage my knowledge and experience.
5. Implementation Planning
   OK, so there is an accepted, signed Statement of Work and Design Document for the solution(s) that support the strategy. Now what about all the moving parts for the Solution(s)? And very important, what about the surround, warranty, service level commitments (SLAs), customers’ deadlines, project schedules and plans, testing plans, quality control, business reports, equipment platforms – not just the building of the solution itself. This needs to be outlined at a high level before the next step of identifying and engaging the internal and external resources needed to build the total solution(s).

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Achievements

AT&T

My pre-divestiture AT&T experiences included: IT support of the AT&T Long Lines, Business Information Systems network modelling; Other Common Carrier (e.g. MCI, Sprint) facility forecasting; Data Center planning spinoff of a Yellow Pages subsidiary; Defined 1st Automated Fingerprint Identification System [AFIS]; Produced multimedia Interactive Video Discs; Sales of manufacturing Quality Management Services and Selling support for large integrated call center solutions. To gain hands on selling experience during this period, took second jobs selling direct to consumers [Cable TV, Wedding Services, Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning]. Business software intellectual property and contract sub-specialty expertise grew from a college business law course together with an AT&T contract management course combined with 20 years of earlier software development experience and many hours working together with AT&T Corporate Law and Intellectual Property staff. Recent post-divestiture projects included: Marketing & contract work for an AT&T self-service system sale to State of Oklahoma and Business Development work for AT&T system sale to City of Chicago, water services

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Avaya

As a Member of Technical Staff (MTS) at Bell Laboratories, I worked in a variety of technical and managerial roles, for over a decade, on the largest non-military application development to that date. The project involved over a thousand people working on an integrated application to serve the Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs) need for real time assignment of facilities to satisfy orders from residential and business Customers of all the RBOCs. This effort involved significant people and technical challenges as each of the many RBOCs did this business their own way. The underlying design and development work of this effort, known as BISCUS/ FACS [Business Information Systems Facilities Assignment and Customer Service] underlies even today’s processes for accomplishing this task which is needed to be performed by any communications services company. Lucent Technologies, Inc. work efforts included: Channel Management of a new Lucent ISV channel; Innovation of new voice self-service application products; Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Product Management Team [new release/ features]; Financial/ Banking specific IVR products [using emerging industry standard interfaces]; Call/ Contact Center apps. e.g. Speaker Verification for Authentication/ Entitlement and Solution and Technology Planning e.g. multimedia IVR/ precursor to multimedia web. At Avaya Inc., contributions included: . Solutions and Technology Planning of Contact Center products e.g. demo of multimedia Real Estate walk-throughs – circa 1993; Research/ synthesis of global demand for Call Center products; Definition and prototype product called CRM Central, an event driven process integration of contacts to the center combined with workflow throughout the enterprise and supply chain; Patent US7177316, Methods and Devices for providing Links to Experts and Business Development large partnering development for CRM Central Avaya product

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Accuvoice Inc.

At Accuvoice Inc., serving as Marketing and Alliances Director and Senior Consultant, I worked as a team member to facilitate and bring to closure, many dozens of Contact Center, Self-Service, Inbound and Outbound, Voice or Speech, Application Solutions for Avaya, AT&T and other Business Partners’ customers. These team efforts, most-often directed by the CEO, Ms. Maralee Pope, resulted in millions of dollars of sales over fifteen years. Addressed markets included Healthcare, Government, Finance, Manufacturing, Retail, Utilities, Insurance Entertainment, Hospitality, Transportation and others. As the Senior User Interface Consultant, lead and participated in consultative Client – Accuvoice team efforts to define client applications, persona and speech and/ or touch tone interfaces. Over those years, served as primary originator of thousands of marketing and selling documents such as RFI/ RFP responses, Statements of Work (SOWs), Contracts, Pricing Calculations, Presentations, Brochures, White Papers and Trade Show Booth Promotions.

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City and County of San Francisco

The City and County of San Francisco-Department of Telecommunication and Information Systems (CCSF-DTIS) and their client, the San Francisco Public Utility Commission – Customer Service Bureau (SFPUC-CSB) commissioned Avaya and Accuvoice Inc. to improve customer service by developing/ deploying a Directed- Dialog, Natural Language IVR Application for operation on their Avaya interactive response self-service system. Working closely with the SFPUC-CSB staff script design team, created U.S. English, professional speech Natural Language applications including Call Routing, Account Inquiry, Account Status, Copy of Last Bill Request, Credit Card Payment, and custom Reports. Upon completion of the design, development, project management, tuning, testing, and documentation, the system was successfully deployed, without any failure events. Subsequently, CCSF was awarded recognition for this work at a national SpeechTek event in NYC. The application has operated without failure over a number of years and is currently being upgraded to a later version Avaya self-service platform

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Centers for Medicare & Medicaid

About ten years ago, one of the Intermediary Medicare Part B processors [now called MACs], together with Accuvoice Inc., submitted an unsolicited proposal to CMS for An 18 month pilot project to examine the positive effects of a guided dialog, speech recognition self-service claims processing system to provide: (1) Responses to Provider Inquiries and (2) Improvement in the automated/ self-service call handle rate. At that time, this MAC was processing 10 percent of all Part B claims via six dedicated call centers. In the functional area that was handling Part B provider calls, they were experiencing a pervasive, systemic problem wherein the number of incoming calls were increasing while the number of calls handled through traditional touch tone automation were declining resulting in an ever-increasing workload shift to the customer service representative. The proposed, and later CMS approved, pilot program English and Spanish language solution was to address the input part of the self-service provider/ B claims processing problem by substituting guided dialog, speech recognition technology for CSR-hours and exhibit high-order economies of scale. Together with this MACs script team, I created and refined the required multilingual speech recognition script and associated high level application design. Accuvoice Engineering designed and unit tested the speech application. When this MACs script team initially received the application for system/ user-acceptance testing, there were numerous troubles and the automation handle rate was only slightly better than the original touch tone. At that juncture, the CEO assembled an internal Accuvoice team, including myself, to perform multiple tuning exercises to improve the application. One key challenge of speech recognition is that it doesn’t handle alphanumeric identifiers well and the recognition decreases substantially with the length of the identifier. Another challenge is that the vendor’s recognizer was not tuned to the specific Spanish speaking female po