The focus and direction of the work of the Consortium at the highest level, is set by the Consortium's Board of Directors. Our goal is to develop new ways to think about and manage the business that will improve both the customer experience and business efficiency and effectiveness.
The work and results of the program teams are reported at the annual member conference held each year in October. See Events.
Observations on Innovation
Our Work
Looking over the edge
Our work seeks to link the latest academic thinking from thought leaders across a variety of disciplines with the operational challenges and experiences of the members. The outcome is innovative service models, strategies, practices and standards that are operational.
To accomplish this, the Consortium hosts a number of activities the core of which are the Team Meetings. The Team Meetings are working sessions on specific topics. The speed with which the Consortium's work progresses is a function of the member's courage to try new and un-proven ideas. The Team Meetings are the place where we discuss these emerging ideas and learn from the members experiences.
The Customer Experience
We have developed a framework or model for thinking about the customer experience - The Funnel and the Cloud. It looks at support from the customer's point of view.
This model is documented in the Consortium paper "A Demand-Based View of Support" (pdf). The Funnel and the Cloud Model proposes a customer view of support which is much broader perspective than the traditional assisted support model. An integrated view of the various customer interaction channels and realization that support is network are key elements in the scope of the Adaptive Organization. This represents a profound shift in thinking about service and support and proposes that the vast majority of the customer experience for support is not an interaction with the support center (the assisted model) but is through self-service and online communities. The Adaptive Organization seeks to improve the customer experience supporting and learning from customer interactions across the entire customer experience.
KCS is a set of practices that integrates the creation and maintenance of knowledge into a set of clearly defined customer interactions. As a result, these practices specify a powerful process for continuous learning and improvement that is driven by the customer experience.
Our current focus can be organized into three areas:
1. Knowledge-Centered Support (KCSsm)
A set of practices that efficiently captures the collective experience of the support organization in interacting with customers and introduces a process of persistent learning and continuous improvement. KCS is a rich, well defined set of practices that continues to evolve.
2. Adaptive Organization (AOsm)
Transforming support from a marginalized, command and control, hierarchical organization focused on cost reduction to a highly leveraged, knowledge enabled, unbounded network focused on customer success and cost management. The Adaptive Organization is a work in progress, many of the practices are yet to be defined and validated with operational experience.
3. Leadership Framework for Service Excellence
As service and support organizations shift from a transaction based support model to a value based support model new leadership principles and practices are required. Linear processes, hierarchical silos and activity based measurement systems are not effective in organizing and optimizing a knowledge enable network.