April 12, 2011
Frequently, we hear from the CEO that ensuring a positive Customer Experience is one of their most important goals. We read about it on their websites, in letters to their shareholders, and in their policies. Roger Shaeshaft, the CEO of Dairy Queen, wrote to his employees and started the letter with, “As team members, we’re all aware of the importance of superior customer service.” On his company’s website, Charlie Lathrop, the CEO of CompuPay, wrote a Letter from the CEO. I would say half of the letter was devoted to the positive impact superior customer service has had on his business, and how it allowed CompuPay to differentiate themselves against others. Charlie said, “In addition to our superior customer service, we provide flexible payroll solutions for employees.” On many levels this is smart business. It is well documented that…
February 11, 2011
Case Management enables the deployment of a tiered service delivery model. Strictly speaking, it pertains to the circled tiers in this illustration; if the employee finds the desired answer or resolution in the Self Service Portal, no Case is created. But Case Management has everything to do with the deployment of a successful Portal, as the knowledge required to make it effective is developed in the context of casework. Workflow here is generally from left to right: the Generalist Advisor may “escalate” to a Subject Matter Expert, who may in turn hand off to a Business Partner where a key service is outsourced. But Knowledge flows from right to left: expertise is made available in the form of Solutions, initially to Generalist Advisors but eventually to the Self Service Portal for direct employee access. In this way the Portal remains relevant, the HR organization has time…
February 4, 2011
Reading Josh’s post on helpful Date/Time/TimeZone handling methods inspired me to write about how we deal with the complexities of internationalization and localization in our app. When we started, we set out some principles for our framework, application, and any related code: Data flowing into our system from external sources (human users, integrations, import, etc) will be normalized into a single unit to the maximum extent possible. External recipients receiving data from our system will have the option of receiving the normalized or localized data (for example, export = normalized, web app = localized). Raw unstructured input (such as the contents of text input fields) will not be normalized and will be treated as raw data (we won’t try to parse through text fields looking for dates, for example). That first point requires a little bit of clarification because you…