Enterprise Apps

Netflix customer service? Almost, but not quite.

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For a few days I’ve been struggling to cast Netflix from my iPad to the Chromecast device attached to my TV. Being reasonably techie I made sure I was running the latest SW releases on both Netflix and Chromecast. I also tried using an iPhone and a different iPad but with no success. Last night I had enough (I’m in the middle of a “Making a Murderer” binge) so I decided to contact customer service.

To my pleasant surprise I found out that it was possible to call the Netflix help centre directly from their app using a VoIP call. The response time by the agent was quick as netflixwell, less than 30 seconds. So far, so good. However as I had made some initial attempts to correct the problem myself the tier one agent was unable to provide a fix and said that she would have to escalate the issue. This however is where the customer service journey fell apart. Instead of transitioning me to another service representative online she provided be with a landline number. A US based landline number. The problem is I’m located in the UK.

In the multichannel or omnichannel business environment of today organizations must consider the end to end customer service journey and the transitions or escalations between channels that are sometimes necessary in order to resolve a problem. These transitions should be as frictionless or effortless for the customer as possible. In my case Netflix dropped the ball. Their sterling efforts to make it easy for customers to contact them, their in-app customer service channel and their excellent customer response times were in vain because they hadn’t considered or optimized how they handle customer escalations.

So when it comes to Netflix customer service it’s almost, but not quite. I still haven’t made that call and I’m still having Chromecast problems.

Intelligent Process Applications

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Peter Whibley
14.00

Intelligent Process Applications

Intelligent Process Applications

This blog will be about the future of business process, what I refer to as Intelligent Process Applications.

Both Gartner and Forrester have different opinions about the future of BPM and Case Management. Gartner have proposed iBPMS (intelligent Business Process Management Suites) while Forrester have proposed Smart Process Applications. So who’s right? Well in my opinion both are half right. It’s obviously true, as Gartner propose that future business processes will be deployed with more intelligence built-in. It’s also true however that as a consequence of mobility and the consumerization of IT we are moving businesses to an era of on demand business process applications as envisaged by Forrester.

However, as you would expect, both Gartner and Forrester have played a bit to their customer base and in my opinion have given emphasis to features and functionality that while important are really only a subset of greater industry themes. Rather than iBPMS or Smart Process Applications I think the term Intelligent Process Applications is a better description of where the business process management and case management market is headed.

Future Intelligent Process Applications will have four key components (I’ll discuss these in more detail in future posts):

1.    BPM and Case Management

They’ll be underpinned by a BPM and Case Management applications that act as the engine for process automation and employee empowerment. While some business process apps will be rigid and inflexible others will exhibit flexibility with more case management like characteristics and empower participants to adjust processes rapidly in response to changing business and market demands.

2.    Intelligence and Awareness

They’ll possess intelligence. By intelligence however we are really talking about awareness.  Using business intelligence, data, content, social and predictive analytics as well as integration with smart devices intelligence and awareness functionality will be used to alert businesses and employees to key changes in their environment.

3.     Customer Experience

Yes mobility is a crucial capability but it is only a subset of a more important theme, customer experience.  Our personal technology experience has changed our business IT expectations. The app. internet model we have become familiar with in our personal lives is starting to take hold in business, changing not only how enterprises acquire business applications but also how they design and execute their business processes. Mobile capabilities will be crucial to the success of future process apps but only if they are designed with customer experience in mind.

4.    Cloud

The delivery vehicle for intelligent process applications will be via a multi-tenant cloud architecture. The greatest challenge for process app vendors will be to bring the speed and simplicity of the app experience to multi-application process solutions. 

Is this too simplistic? Have I missed something? Will social play a bigger role? I’d love to get your opinion.