Virtual customer care is more than just remote contact center agents. Virtual care includes the entire relationship life cycle from initial product or service consideration to collaborating on future products, features and even new market opportunities.
The evolution of life cycles went from product to customer to relationship cycles. The product life cycle is vendor-centric, focused on promoting and selling a given product and feature set until a new product is developed to take its place. An example of this would be manual push lawn mower, push electric mower, push gas mower and now riding mowers.
The customer life cycle places the customer at king. The emphasis is on repeat orders, customer service and product development based on key customer feature requirements. Moving the emphasis from vendor-centric to customer-centric is good, but it also has drawbacks. Specifically, new products and new markets are not developed because all of the firm’s resources are spent treating the existing customer base as kings. Clayton Christensen’s book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, speaks eloquently to this challenge. A very good read if you haven’t read the book already.
For a win-win strategy, firms need to focus on relationship life cycles. Like all good relationships, communication is key to both parties growing literally and figuratively. The benefits of a targeted relationship life cycle include:
Digital economy Information based
Disruptive Competitive advantage
Game changing Re-defining
Future products/services Future needs
Virtualizing customer care moves the relationship from only one party benefiting from the relationship, to one of mutual benefits. When both parties benefit from the relationship, then the desire to continue engaging with each other becomes the natural outcome.
The business impacts of virtual relationship management are highly compelling. It takes the best of both product life cycle and customer life cycle and accelerates the outcomes. Acceleration occurs because of the bi-directional communication and collaboration. A firm knows when a given product has reached its end because customers point to preferred new technologies. The guessing game of which features to add next is removed.
Customers will continue to buy an embedded brand or service as long as it is available. A customer will migrate to new products or services when they are designed to meet their evolving business needs. When firms emphasis relationship life cycles they move the entire value chain to a 21st century business model.
Virtualizing the relationship life cycles involves bi-directional communication and collaboration. Virtualization, then, would include most or all of the components of social computing including communities of common interest, social networks, wikis, blogs, email and RSS feeds.
Virtualizing through social computing technologies allows firms to see and hear how their customers are using existing technologies, and what they need and want out of future technologies. Virtualizing through social computing also allows customers to support each other in technology implementations. As firms see how customers are using their technologies in unconventional ways, new market opportunities are readily identified. Finally, virtualizing through social computing technologies provides customers visibility and input into vendor product and service development.
Virtual customer care through social networking technologies is a solid business value proposition. It leverages the digital economy and re-defines business models to one of strategic competitive advantage.
The next post will address the topic of green business practices and profitability. Yes, it can be done. For a sneak peek into firms that are successfully green and profitable, visit the Naturally Boulder Products conference web site at:
http://www.naturallyboulderproducts.com/days/program-and-events.html.
Martha Young is the founder of Nova Amber, LLC, a business consulting firm specializing in virtual business strategies. She has worked in the technology sector for more than 14 years, working and consulting with Fortune 500 companies including Cisco Systems, IBM, Intel Corporation and Lockheed Martin. She is a widely recognized industry expert on hosted, managed and outsourced services, and virtual business strategy.
This blog is a business strategy discussion aimed at firms seeking to build and retain a competitive advantage by taking advantage of virtual business processes. It covers the topic of organizational readiness for virtual business. We explore many of the components of determining organizational readiness including executive leadership readiness, IT readiness, IT governance and how to develop and execute a readiness plan. We will examine the common hurdles to readiness and how to overcome them.
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