Happy 2014! It has been a very long time since we posted here, and I feel a little guilty because we have quite a few new subscribers. Instead of blogging, we’ve been working on a video, The Disconnect, which we’re premiering at the bottom of this post.
I hope the video speaks for itself (and at eight minutes long, you might think it speaks plenty.) Still, I wanted to give you a little bit of the backstory.
This video represents our attempt to answer two seemingly unrelated questions:
- Strategically, where is our industry going, and how do we get there?
- Tactically, why isn’t everyone equally successful with KCS?
Let’s start with the tactical one first. We’ve been doing KCS for well over a decade. While we learn things every time we work with a company, I think we’re more than solid on the practices.
So…why aren’t 100% of our clients successful?
Don’t get me wrong. Essentially all of our clients get benefits from KCS. Many are spectacularly successful. But some fall short of the kind of transformation that we know is possible, and a few barely get off the ground. Since we get paid to help people with this stuff, it’s our job to figure out how to get more clients “spectacularly successful” and fewer “meh.”
At the same time, strategically, we’re seeing support organizations expand their mission beyond just break-fix, to customer success and value. Signs of this are everywhere: the rise of Customer Success organizations; TSIA’s “B4B” focus; Customer Effort and Net Promoter scores; Customer Experience (CX) VPsdb; Support teams adopting CX techniques like Journey Mapping.
Yet, as William Gibson said, “the future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.” For every customer success-focused organization we work with, we see others stuck in the old, reactive, “our job is closing cases” model of Support. And, reflecting on our experiences, these old-school orgs are the ones that have the hardest time with KCS. In other words, ironically, if you want to get more internal benefit from KCS, focus on your customers first, not your internal measures.
So, The Disconnect is what happens when the way you measure yourself isn’t aligned with how customers perceive you. If you’re more focused on your own business (e.g., case / incident closure statistics) than your customers’ (how effectively they use your products), then you’re going to have a hard time doing anything good, really, starting with KCS.
So, enjoy the video. We start with a scenario illustrating what The Disconnect looks like in the real world, and then provide three approaches to resolving it.
Nicely done!