Thoughts & musings from a Microsoft Business Applications Ninja!
Finding out about Mark getting Jon Levesque dressed in a kilt at Scottish Summit, and how that went. Also discussing how Mark’s first foray into consulting occurred, and how he learned all about project time projects for clients.
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Finding out how Sara decided to get a dog (no, she didn’t dog-nap someone else’s!), starting out as a Dynamics 365 customer, actually getting involved in customising the solution, and why things went so wrong when updates were released.
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I originally had a different article planned for today, but with the current situation that’s happening over the world, I decided to change what I was going to talk about.
The world has gone crazy, in so many ways. There’s plenty of information out there around what’s happening, and with best advice to people as to how to deal with things, cope, etc. I’m not going to cover that (besides, it’s likely that things will change over time, which means that anything I write could be out of date soon).
Instead, I’m going to address one of the specific issues that I’m seeing again and again. This is the bottleneck that people are facing when trying to contact companies, whether the company is their bank, their utility provider, their health provider, or even travel companies.
Regardless of whether people are trying to cancel an existing holiday & get a refund, speak to their bank to get a mortgage holiday, or get medical advice, they’re facing the same major issue – they’re not the only ones trying to get through. Phone lines are jammed (assuming that they’ve not been stopped due to agents being sick), static forms where you fill in information aren’t liked (as you don’t know what the actual status of things are), and online chat takes an absolute age. I had an online chat session with Amazon two days ago, and it took over an hour for one of their associates to join my session to help me.
Go to any major company website, and you’ll probably see something like the following (this is from British Airways):
I’d like to be clear – companies couldn’t really have forecast all of this happening, if you’d go back several months.
But what companies can, and should have in place, are clear communication protocols that actually enable them to handle a massive scale-up of customers contacting them. It’s not going to be perfect, but can help mitigate the bottleneck to certain degrees.
Having an efficient system can allow a single agent to handle multiple communication streams at the same time. Indeed, it’s not just about handling multiple web-chat sessions concurrently – it’s also about handling communication across different mediums. So agents can handle webchat, Facebook messages, Twitter DM’s, etc.
This is, I believe, where products such as Omnichannel for Dynamics 365 can really come into their own, and shine through. Using it, companies can ensure that their workforce (which is likely to be impacted as well by the situation) can be as best empowered as possible, and assist customers as speedily as they are able to.
Hopefully the current situation will resolve itself as soon as possible, and coming out from it, we should look to carry out any efficiencies that we are able to. This will allow companies to better serve their customers moving forward, and streamline communication channels.
I hope & pray that everyone stays safe & healthy through this crisis, and that we help each other out (to the best of our abilities) to get through it.
Exploring how Malin got into micro-brewing, her fondness for the product formerly known as ‘Talent’, and the family love for beer. Also finding out how she switched into consulting in the first place (spoiler: she didn’t start out in consulting!)
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Discussing how LEGO is of vital importance in teaching & business applications, and what happens when Scrum isn’t performed properly on a client project. Neil also runs a Scrum for Business Applications course – https://customery.academy/courses/foundations
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Chatting about the importance of stickers, swag, and the amazing Microsoft community that we’re part of. Covering a major project that was going to use Unified Service Desk (USD), and what happened when trying to deploy the configuration data between environments!
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Talking about Tomasz’s love of photography, which camera brand he actually uses, windsurfing, & how projects shouldn’t be pushed by IT into the business, but rather be project led/project driven. Also briefly touching on why gamification & swag can be so useful with user adoption!
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Discovering what Mary actually uses her time at (American) football game practices for, as well as finding out about her professional background. We chat about how she kept going when working at an end-user, and what happened when major accounting errors in the system were discovered!
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Finding out from Linn Zaw Win about his hobby of online RPG gaming marathons (mostly using PS4 and Nintendo Switch), iterating on projects with minimum viable product sprints, & the need to have people familiar with the actual way to use low code in the Power Platform as well as having code reviews carried out within the team!
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Andrew brings a personal halo to the discussion, where we covered wine, book writing, and his first job involving pulling cabling through ceiling spaces! We may have also discussed fires – watch the episode to find out more!
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Click here to take a look at the other videos that are available to watch.