Now, I have been thinking of getting my own hosted blog. So this Monday, I picked one ISP and decided that I will get a hosted Wordpress blog up. Now this is what happened!

1. Monday -> Sign up at the Dreamhost’s website, provide a domain name, make payment, and fax my credit card details over to the company.
2. The Advertised account activation time by the ISP is 1 Business day
3. Tuesday -> Nothing happens. So I log a support request.
4. I get a response that the ISP is handling a lot of pending activations, and that they are sorry for the delay. The usual boilerplate!
5. Wednesday , Thursday nothing happens! No email, no news, nothing
6. Friday -> I am completely pissed off, and send them an angry mail, asking them to refund the payment. I am not interested in these guys anymore
7. I get a defiant response from the ISP that they never got the FAX, and that they are closing my account, and making the refund
8. 2 hours later, I get an automated email from their system saying that my email account is activated, and that I can start using it.
9. Then the account was closed!

Now, the ISP, is operating online. You would have expected that all the virtues of automation would lead to a far more satisfying customer experience. If Dreamhost could instead had done the following, I would have been a far more happy customer.

1. Payment received. Record detail & send welcome email with instructions for faxing credit-card information
2. One day later, fax not received, then send an automatic reminder. Continue sending reminders until the customer responds
3. Customer Support staff have visibility into the status of the customer before thay respond to him.

All that they needed to be was to be a little sensitive, or at-least had some intelligence & sensitivity built into their systems.

Now, against this backdrop, check this report in Computerworld.

Survey: High-tech firms dissing online customers
As many as 28% of customer e-mails go unanswered

To quote from the report:

The (Hi Tech)industry as a whole scored just 4.5 on a 10-point scale in terms of how it handles online communications, according to the firm’s Online Customer Respect Study. By comparison, retail companies did better, scoring a 6.6, while telecommunications companies scored 5.9.

1. So, what are these hi tech companies doing about their customer contact & service delivery infrastructure?
2. For organizations that provide custom services around SLA’s, how will they effectively monitor, and enforce, and pro-actively deliver a superior and humane service?

The need of the hour is to be able to externalize & manage the Intelligence built into the System (The Enterprise) . This intelligence(the Business rules) is best managed not by IT, but by the Business itself.

The take here is that Process Automation Technologies by themselves cannot deliver superior operational efficiencies, by themselves. You need a BRMS to get there !

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