[This is the first “guest post” from Mike Bergelson, former director of strategy of Cisco’s enterprise collaboration business and co-founder and CEO of Audium Software. In the contact center, speech processing and customer care world, Mike’s played an important role in defining tools of the trade and agents of change. Today, as a founding partner at the investment and management company, Serve Lab, Mike continues to focus his analytical lens on the social, mobile and practical elements of customer care.]

The spirit of the popular uprising – so much in the zeitgeist that Time Magazine named the Protester as its person of the year for 2011 – is, in its own way, also affecting customer service.

There’s certainly no shortage of technological revolution affecting the way organizations serve their customers. For example, much of the industry buzz in 2010 and 2011 revolved around the impact of social customer care (net: low volume, high brand impact) and the continued adoption of SaaS-based customer service (net: still gaining momentum but migration taking longer than most thought).

Looking forward, we will see product announcements, articles and analyst coverage galore around the impact of mobility on customer care as a growing majority of users seek assistance using their smart, connected phones and tablets.

A less obvious revolution has also been gaining momentum that may, in the long run, have a profound impact on customer care strategies.

For the first time, consumers are taking service into their own hands, applying the “over the top” strategies that we’ve seen threaten industries such as telecom (Skype, Google Voice), cable (Hulu, Roku, Boxee) and even book publishing (Lulu).

Building on years of pent up consumer frustration, a new class of organization has emerged, offering consumers a DIY solution to the pain that they often (rightly or wrongly) associate with calling toll free numbers.

It’s not news that many consumers simply want to talk to an agent when they call a service line. This is especially true today, given the rising number of self-service options available online. Of course phone self-service is, and will continue to be, a very useful offering; it can be frustrating, though, when speaking with an agent feels like the right answer to a particular problem.

The popular GetHuman initiative, created by Kayak CTO Paul English in 2005, was one of the first well-known services to provide consumers an end-run around frustrating aspects of customer service, in this case the IVR.

As you probably know, GetHuman provides shortcuts for getting to an agent for most major toll-free numbers. The site rocketed to 40,000 daily page views within a year of its launch. While this represents less than one tenth of one percent of the people calling for customer service each day, it clearly shows that the site touched a nerve.

Naturally, others followed suit. DialAHuman (2008) and Get2Human (2008) sprung up to provide similar live agent short-cut compendia.

Around the same time, a few companies started to attack a related consumer frustration – waiting on hold. Fonolo (2007), Lucy Phone (2009) and Fast Customer (2011) allow consumers to connect directly with agents by actually waiting on hold for them. In their case, they spoof IVRs by emulating user input and then connect callers when an agent comes on the line.

Evidently enterprise adoption of courtesy callback solutions from vendors such as Virtual Hold is taking too long.

At the leading edge of a new wave, Insidr (2011) attempts to connect consumers to people who have “worked in big companies and are willing to help when the company can’t or won’t.” They’re targeting the frustration associated with what sometimes feels like rigid policy enforcement and empowering by reducing information asymmetry (most consumers don’t know what companies are willing to do to retain them).

Interestingly, the average bounty paid by consumers for Insidr tips is around $8, roughly the cost to the enterprise of the call that might have just been averted. This is mostly a coincidence but shows that some consumers are actually willing to dig into their pockets to resolve service issues.

These are just three examples of organizations that have emerged to allow consumers to start to take matters into their own hands to reduce customer service frustrations.

It’s worth spending time revisiting each of these organizations a few years into their existence to see if they’re delivering on their consumer empowerment missions or have lost steam or shifted focus / tactics.

Additionally, we should consider how these services are changing the way enterprises think about serving their customers – are they shining a light on weaknesses and forcing a re-prioritization of investment decisions or are they largely being ignored or stone-walled?

Finally, we should explore ways in which the tactics employed by these companies could be leveraged inside large organizations to accomplish their goals.

Alas, these are subjects of future posts. Meanwhile, let me know what you think and, obviously, which other organizations and related “over the top” trends should be included here.

* I couldn’t resist using this title because it invokes a reasonable metaphor and, frankly, sounds pretty catchy. I certainly don’t intend to suggest that consumers’ frustrations with customer service are in any way correlated to the general outrage with financial inequality, etc., being protested by the OWS movement.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Contact Center, CRM, mobile customer care