Contact Management Magazine Issue 2 2019

THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MAGAZINE ISSUE 2 • 2019

The

Operations

Issue

❯❯ The growing business case for video ❯❯ Unlocking the value of contact centre data ❯❯ Boosting customer support with AI ❯❯ How brands can get it right ❯❯ Your front is different than your back

Operations

Advanced video systems like the Jabra PanaCast offers improved customer experiences through enabling impactful face-to-face conversations.

By Aurangzeb Khan

Y

ou would perhaps be challenged to draw out memories of calling a number to access information or standing in line to deal with a bank query.

The customer experience (CX) might have progressed with the enablement of technology solutions, but we’ve carried with us one paradox I’m still aware of each day.

While we might be able to solve certain customer queries with relative simplicity in comparison to a decade ago, consider what is happening today on the experiences we still have as customers. Dimension Data found that 90% of businesses perceive customer satisfaction as a key competitive differentiator1 and information we have gathered indicate that most companies believe they deliver excellent customer service. But how come, according to the mass media, social media and from our own experiences and that of our family, friends and colleagues, that most of us believe the opposite is true?

When you investigate it, the causes become evident, but the good news is that solutions are becoming increasingly available to address the issues. Digital contact centres and the CX have grown more complex following the changing nature of customer interactions and access to information.

They’ve also grown more relevant to brands and businesses that realize that every touchpoint is significant. However, though the CX is delivered via a multitude of channels, with the simpler queries being handled by chatbots, the flip side is that it is more challenging and costly to handle the types of queries people make contact for today.

Why video Video is at the leading edge in addressing both the complexity of interactions and the resulting costs. Here are two things I’ve noticed. One, that human-to-human interaction is key to delivering exceptional customer service. And two, that video is critical to solving a plethora of issues for which the responses are currently limited by traditional technology solutions: which often lack visual or 2 | Contact management

physical presences.

Though we’re seeing a CX landscape in which needs are changing and touchpoints are adapting, this increasing trend back towards human-to-human customer experiences is because the types of issues we can’t solve ourselves hold complexities that call for subject matter experts.

About a year ago, I was talking with an Indian services company and they were describing a typical sales situation with a client in the U.K.. Their salesperson would visit the customer’s site, and then dial in one or more subject matter experts from India for the “double click” conversation. But all too often, these calls were not as impactful as they had hoped and they would end up losing the deal, or at best delay the business win, while ramping up an expense sheet by flying out those experts to claw it back.

Naturally the solution wasn’t scalable or time effective and ended up costing quite a bit more than budgeted for. The services company’s client said this was because, over an audio-only bridge, their remote person could not read the customer’s body language or understand if they were following along, or they were stuck or were distracted by other things around them. And when a customer did engage and try to ask a question there was often difficulty in doing so.

Courtesy GN Jabra.

The growing business case for video

Technology and experience enablement Though audio is a much richer dialogue than asynchronous communication like chat or e-mail, video collaboration is becoming much easier to implement. Consider the shift of video from analog to digital.

Consider also the advent of cloud across all unified communications, and the cloud-delivered video conferencing services which work ubiquitously over existing infrastructure and bandwidth.

These services are further leveraging advances in the near-universal availability of high-bandwidth networks and automatic rate adaptation for video over available bandwidth, which is contributing to the growth of services like Microsoft Office365 and Zoom2.

Our individual familiarly and trust in video has grown thanks to its ubiquity since the introduction of VoIP on popular messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Facetime, as well as the mass consumption and sharing of video content on social platforms. This individual utilization of the medium has further spurred its adoption in business uses, along with improvements in the accompanying camera technology. The PanaCast cameras we developed use Intelligent Vision to detect and count people in a room and include everyone in the discussion, with the ability to find and present whiteboards as a virtual Issue 2 • 2019

Operations video camera stream. These features further improve the collaboration experience, automate workflows and provide real-time information for businesses to run better and faster.

Market availability, cloud infrastructure and individual interest, driven by employee and customer how-to knowledge with these tools, has brought us to an implementation point where the pros of this digital video shift are beginning to surface. What if I didn’t have to organize an insurance survey on-site or get myself to a hospital for a follow-up? Imagine if you could seek legal counsel with a practitioner halfway around the world? But a lot of this isn’t instinctual because of our sense of trust.

Good video creates trust and increases business velocity via exceptional customer experiences. It also increases one’s sense of connection during a CX interaction.

Along with these psychological aspects, video allows us to solve complex issues far more efficiently than we’re used to doing without a visual component in the solution.

As our latest study revealed, and many contact centre managers will be aware, the length of calls and relative costs are increasing by around 40%. This links back to the complexity of issues being solved by contact centre agents, and further necessitates a need for video to simplify and accelerate the customer satisfaction around efficiently dealing with issues.

New next steps Managing customers on video allows us to focus on people, read a room and use the visual information to decide what to say, when to say it and how to say it. And when video is coupled with audio it is further poised to offer an arsenal of customer service tools through developments in artificial intelligence (AI). Jabra’s partnership with audEERING is developing AI applications that can monitor call sentiment analysis, and when you couple this with the AI from PanaCast’s digital video, the potential of digital video starts to become more apparent. GN Audio’s purchase of Altia Systems in February 2019 indicates the growing value of video in collaborative environments. The resulting technology likely to come from the acquisition sets a vision of powerful tools to come as we enter a period of augmented audio and video deployment in the CX fields.

2019 will set a new high for video conferencing, with USB conference cameras playing a pivotal role in this space, having recorded 48% revenue growth year-overyear in 2018, according to an IHS Markit report3. Data and technology point towards the increasing importance in video solutions across three layers of CX. Firstly, we see a huge need to be able to offer easy-to-deploy end-solutions for buyers. Secondly, the products need to be agnostic and easy for agents to adopt. Lastly, it needs to offer an enriched CX to legitimately deliver a powerful return on investment (ROI).

As video and audio combine moving forward, businesses can adapt their contact centres or decentralize them off-site with video and deliver a higher-value CX with great cost savings. It’s a shift I’m excited to be a part of, with video at the forefront of this evolving landscape.

Aurangzeb Khan is senior vice president, intelligent vision systems, GN Jabra (www.jabra.com).

1 Dimension Data, “Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report”, 2016.

2 Frost & Sullivan, “Global Video Conferencing Endpoints and Infrastructure Market Forecast to 2022”, 2018.

3 Matthias Machowinski, Prachi Nema, “Enterprise Telepresence & Video Conferencing Equipment Market Tracker”, IHS Markit, March 7, 2019.

Issue 2 • 2019

Unlocking the value of contact centre data

By Anthony Gadient

I

n today’s competitive business environment, companies need accurate business intelligence to predict events, identify threats and improve the customer experience (CX). The customer’s voice is the best source for this information through the many contact centre conversations.

Historically there have been obstacles to accessing this information, including the high cost some legacy recording systems charge to their customers to access their own data.

But with the advent of open speech-to-text (STT) systems and faster processors, companies can economically convert 100% of their voice data to text. This technology can power advanced speech analytics to obtain valuable insights that elevate customer service, increase sales and market share, reduce operating costs and meet compliance requirements.

Changing the face of contact centres Using advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning technologies, speech analytics solutions can find patterns in the large volumes of call centre data to identify trends and uncover opportunities. Product development and support teams can find out which product features are in greatest demand or are causing issues and marketing can hear how the competition is viewed or how customers are reacting to new pricing.

Some of these advanced solutions can provide prescriptive and predictive analytics to provide greater insights into customer calls. These capabilities can be coupled with realtime STT to provide even greater value by delivering the right information to the right place at the right time.

Prescriptive analytics identifies issues and suggests how to address them. Consider a software company that has a product feature with a high customer effort score and receives a disproportionate number of support calls questioning how to use that feature. By using AI capabilities to perform sentiment and emotion analysis, the speech analytics software can “discern” the gravity of the problem, “understand” the root cause(s) of why customers are unhappy and provide suggested solutions to the problems.

Predictive analytics is built on a history of customer interactions and applies the knowledge from this historical data to current, correlated interactions with individuals.

Advanced speech analytics platforms capable of delivering predictive analytics apply AI and machine learning to identify patterns and trends from the compiled data, enabling companies to spot opportunities or predict what will cause a customer to choose a particular product or service. These Contact management | 3

Operations platforms can also be used to acquire and retain customers through “understanding” the drivers that apply to specific individuals. Performing predictive analytics requires all calls to be monitored with state-of-the-art STT solutions that can economically convert 100% of the audio for analysis.

Transforming the CX The availability of graphic processing units or GPUs also has opened up new possibilities for contact centres by allowing STT systems to cost-effectively process large volumes of voice data in real time. This ability, coupled with running prescriptive and predictive analytics, means that actionable business insights can now be available in real time as agents are talking with customers.

The ability to understand and respond to individual customers in real time elevates the customer experience to the next level. For example, real-time speech analytics platforms can be integrated with CRM systems so agents can have insight into customers’ histories during the calls and be able to respond more effectively to their needs.

By delivering the right data at the right time, real-time analytics helps agents improve first call resolution (FCR) and the CX.

Enhancing operations, agent effectiveness In addition, speech analytics plays a critical role in improving agent monitoring and coaching, thereby improving agent performance. In contrast to post-call reviews that might occur days or more following the calls, real-time analytics can be used as a powerful training tool by enabling contact centre supervisors to provide immediate feedback to agents when coaching issues arise and simultaneously ensure compliance.

Also, by using speech analytics to analyze 100% of calls, contact centres can identify top agents and determine which of their communication techniques are most successful with customers. That information can be incorporated into training to boost the effectiveness of new agents. For example, underperforming agents can learn how greater empathy on their part can create a more satisfying CX and improve their success rates.

Moreover, contact centres can use predictive analytics for operational purposes. By analyzing past call volumes from different times of the day or on weekends and holidays, centres can adjust staffing levels to reduce costs when call volumes are predicted to be lower. And, they will know exactly how many additional agents to schedule to meet call demand during new product rollouts.

By using advanced speech analytics to route calls to the best-matched agents, mitigate customer dissatisfaction and provide incentives and preferred service to customers, contact centres can greatly improve the CX and agent effectiveness. When customer experience improves, FCR tends to as well. That means higher customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores and Net Promoter Score (NPS) increases, too.

Ultimately, speech analytics gives contact centres the ability to identify and leverage valuable customer insights.

This provides significant advantage, enabling centres to seize previously unrealized opportunities and increase their competitiveness, while improving operations. It’s the way of the future, which forward-thinking contact centres are embracing today. It’s the way of the future.

Anthony Gadient is executive vice chairman, chief strategy officer and co-founder of Voci Technologies, (www.vocitec.com).

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Boosting customer support with AI

By Chandrashekar LSP

C

ultivating long-term customer loyalty is the raison d’être of any sales and marketing team. It contributes significantly to the underlying health of every business.

For this reason, companies are employing artificial intelligence (AI) to measure and manage the effectiveness of their customer experience (CX) strategies against their competition. According to a recent report, poor customer service costs businesses more than $75 billion a year, up from $13 billion since its last report in 20161. Clearly, the stakes are high. Creating the right environment for customer happiness—a sticky, somewhat nebulous goal—is critical to providing an excellent CX. Advancements in AI for customer support and retention offer a significant opportunity to businesses across industries.

Several forward-looking businesses have already incorporated AI into their CX platforms. However, most companies have yet to take the plunge. According to a Deloitte survey of Canadian companies, in 2018 only 16% of all businesses reported using AI technologies over the past year, a number that has stayed constant since its last survey in 20142. With such a low adoption rate, incorporating AI can be a prime differentiator for willing businesses.

Today, AI technology can be deployed across all functions and levels of a customer support team—from support agents and managers—to the customers themselves. And AI isn’t just for large companies: small midsized businesses can also take advantage of this technology.

Here’s how AI is taking customer engagement to the next level.

Managers Managers must build and constantly adjust their customer service operations to help them stay ahead of their day-today tasks and equip sales agents with the tools they need to be successful. Incorporating AI can provide significant advantages for managers in the following ways: • Tracking anomalies in real time. By tracking the flow and content of incoming and outgoing ticket traffic, AI can identify anomalies in the amount and types of customer issues over a 24-hour period. Managers receive instant notifications about these anomalies and can quickly click through for information on probable causes. This helps decision-makers fix problems immediately; and • Identifying your customers’ most common pain points.

Improving the CX starts by understanding what customers care about or are most dissatisfied with. By instantly identifying, collecting and analyzing this information, AI helps managers better plan and manage resources to fuel growth and customer satisfaction.

Issue 2 • 2019

Operations Support agents

Customers

Customer support agents have many responsibilities, including helping sales teams with customer requests, responding to questions, documenting and flagging customer feedback and generally fighting (figuratively) fires. Juggling all these tasks can slow agent productivity.

AI can help support agents focus on what’s most important and improve the CX. Here’s how: • Predicting sentiment to drive more meaningful conversations. AI can help determine the sentiment of every incoming response, giving agents the ability to determine whether individual customers are happy or not and how best to respond to tickets. If a new agent is assigned an existing ticket, they can see how the sentiment of the conversation has progressed over time and tailor their responses accordingly; • Organizing and managing tickets through keyword tagging. As each ticket comes in, AI can read the conversations and highlight key terms so that agents can quickly review the issues and prioritize accordingly; and • Responding faster with a reply assistant. AI can help determine your best response to a given ticket or customer inquiry by first analyzing the conversation and then suggesting paragraphs or sentences. AI can also align company policies related to refunds, for example, and determine if a specific ticket qualifies for a discount or replacement, saving agents time.

Customer interaction is what matters most to brands. Customers expect a personalized experience that resolves issues quickly, catered to their specific needs. AI provides businesses with solutions to adapt and thrive in this landscape.

Customers benefit from AI by having it answer for them. Advances in voice commands have increased significantly with the adoption of AI solutions. Customers can connect with customer support via phone or e-mail and receive detailed steps to resolve their issues automatically: before engaging with customer support agents. For example, by analyzing a problem based on direct customer interaction, AI can retrieve relevant articles, or other documentation, and provide them to customers. If the information isn’t helpful, customer support agents can be notified to step in and provide assistance: without customers having to wait too long on hold or for call-backs.

AI can adapt to any business

needs by learning the skills that help customers. Beyond just figuring out resolutions to customers’ issues, AI can be programmed to handle placing orders for products, updates on shipping and/or for specific customer dialogues related to business. AI won’t replace an organization’s customer service team, but it will make them smarter and more efficient. In today’s hyper-competitive landscape, these are big advantages to delivering high customer satisfaction and achieving long-term customer loyalty. Companies like Zoho are creating solutions that make it easier for businesses to incorporate AI into their customer support strategy.

Chandrashekar LSP is the product evangelist for Zoho Corporation Canada.

To learn more about Zoho’s AI offering, Zia, please visit: https://www.zoho.com/zia/.

1 Shep Hyken, “Businesses Lose $75 Billion Due To Poor Customer Service”, Forbes, May 17, 2018.

2 Deloitte, “Canada’s AI imperative: From predictions to prosperity,” 2019.

How brands can get it right

By Michelle Burrows

C

ustomer experience (CX) is now the great brand differentiator— more than product or price— making the stakes for getting it right more critical than ever. There are sky-high expectations for exceptional or even good CX in an always-on, social-mediadriven world where bad reviews are easy to share and quick to do lasting damage.

That’s why the data in a recently released report on the CX by Vanson Bourne is troubling: for reputations and bottom lines. Contact Centers: The Moment of Truth for Your Brand (https://bit.ly/2WgbkgP), commissioned by Serenova, finds most brands are getting the CX wrong.

In simplest terms the research takeaway is this: most consumers use multiple channels to interact with multiple brands. But their experiences are often less than ideal because of inconsistent service across interactions and channels. And that matters, as survey respondents report that these experiences affect their future buying behaviours and how they talk about brands, online and off.

More choices + higher expectations = big opportunity Due to today’s digital transformation, people have more options when choosing the brands that get their trust and their money. Rising expectations make CX a powerful (and winning) differentiator.

Good customer experiences build loyalty, which can mean recommendations, referrals and new business. In the Issue 2 • 2019

age of social media, a single positive post or online recommendation can equal a promotional juggernaut with far-reaching effects on shaping brand reputation. Getting it wrong, though, should keep executives up a night because there are serious consequences, ranging from increased service costs to loss of customers to damage to the company’s bottom-line.

The lesson is this. As consumers interact with brands across channels, brands must deliver consistent and seamless experiences across (and regardless of) channels.

So how are brands doing?

According to the research, not very well. The vast majority of respondents (80%) indicate that when they interact with brands across channels, they often have less-than-seamless—and usually inconsistent—experiences. In fact, 39% say they encounter varying levels of service and unpredictable speed of service, depending on the channel. This suggests the employees interacting with customers to try to

solve their issues may lack the tools and information to deliver good, cross-channel service.

That’s a serious problem. But it is also a big, game-changing opportunity.

73% of survey respondents say they believe a seamless experience across channels is crucial or very important.

Not delivering on that expectation can be damaging: reputationally and financially. But the brands that do deliver will stand out.

Knowledgeable staff the heart At the heart of seamless customer interactions and good experiences is the contact centre. When a contact centre agent has the knowledge and tools to effectively and quickly help resolve a customer’s issue, brands are on their way to happier customers.

But what does good customer service look like? According to the survey, knowledgeable staff is key.

More than 70% of respondents say they associate knowledgeable staff with good customer service. In fact, it’s the greatest measure of good service, according to the survey.

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Operations

Source: Contact Centers: The Moment of Truth for Your Brand.

Source: Contact Centers: The Moment of Truth for Your Brand.

And the pitfalls of getting it wrong

Successful contact centres ensure customers interact with the employees who have the most relevant knowledge.

That requires they have access to—and can easily and effectively use—tools that provide that information.

It takes contact centres with intelligent omnichannel routing that directs every customer interaction to the right location or person quickly, then provides full context on the customer, purchases, previous contact and issues raised.

Real-time scripting to guide interactions enable agents to focus on quick resolution and empowers them to offer the experience customers want. Supervisors also need insights relating to the knowledge, competency and satisfaction of their agents, thus ensuring alignment with the contact centres’ and customers’ needs.

A good experience depends on staff not only having the knowledge to resolve an issue, but also doing it quickly. In fact, 72% of respondents say speed of issue resolution affects whether a brand experience is considered good or bad.

When making a complaint by phone, respondents report that waiting seven minutes or longer, on average, is too long. For online complaints, they expect a response within a day (under 20 hours).

What’s clear is that speed counts. But consumers say they’re not getting the quick resolution they want. In the last 12 months alone, 69% of respondents say they have had to wait on hold for too long when contacting a brand by phone, and a similar proportion (64%), say they have had to wait too long for a response when contacting a brand online.

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But knowledge and speed are not the whole equation. Consumers also want the option to contact brands through multiple channels: 34% say this is important to a positive experience.

Brands that can quickly equip staff with relevant information and offer multi-channel contact options will win hearts, minds and wallets.

The difference between happy, loyal customers who stick around and those who are easy targets for competitors is largely dependent on the efficiency and effectiveness of the contact centre.

The rewards of getting CX right Consumers say a good CX means they would return to purchase (73%) and/ or recommend the brand to friends and family (70%). Meanwhile 43% say they would be more likely to buy from a brand that delivers a positive CX. About a quarter (23%) would share their positive experience on social media.

Unfortunately, nearly 80% of consumers surveyed say they have received bad customer service in the last 12 months. And they want to talk about it.

More damaging, 77% say they are more likely to share and remember bad customer experiences over good ones.

And 96% say they would take some kind of action after receiving what they consider bad customer service. Almost two-thirds (62%) say they wouldn’t purchase from a brand again if they had a bad experience and over half (56%) would recommend that their family and friends do the same. That creates a damaging negative ripple effect because 73% of those surveyed say they are less likely to purchase from a brand if they know a friend or family member had a bad experience.

Then there’s the other side of the power of social media. More than a quarter of respondents say that they would share their negative experience on social channels. You don’t have to look far for examples of how that can gain momentum and hurt a brand.

The warning is clear: if brands can’t improve the CX, then they face a serious, uphill battle to get those customers back: and acquire necessary new ones So, what does bad customer service look like to consumers?

Here, too, contact centre staff is central. About two in three (64%) of respondents consider it bad customer service when staff lacks knowledge.

Good or bad, contact centres directly influence whether brand interactions leave customers satisfied: and they can significantly influence overall brand perception.

Turning the tide The vast majority of respondents (94%) say customer service affects brand loyalty. That’s why investment in better customer experiences is a strong bet. For when brands don’t invest the necessary time, money and effort to ensure they can deliver optimal experiences, the repercussions are clear: both in the short- and long-term.

Given the current state of the CX, getting it right by making the investment now to deliver on expectations means leaping over the competition that’s still trying to figure it out.

Michelle Burrows is chief marketing officer, Serenova (www.serenova.com).

Issue 2 • 2019

Operations

Your front is different than your back Matthew Storm

A

s business leaders contemplate the promise of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation on digital transformation, many are quickly realizing that a customer’s experience is the sum of each moment: good and bad, direct and indirect, automated and manual and digital and face-to-face.

Given the significant impact that notably back-office automation has made on productivity over the last five years, it’s natural for you to gather your management and broadly find AI and robotic process automation (RPA) applicability across operations, finance, sales, service, bricks-and-mortar and beyond. But will the RPA of old, that supports back-office processes well today, stand up to serve a customer-facing employee dealing with the angry mom, the stranded traveler or the confused claimant?

A word of caution: your front is different than your back.

Let’s take a restaurant as an example. The front of the restaurant is about making someone feel welcome, delivering the finished product, selling in the moment and offering a patron a clean and fun environment. But if you’ve ever walked around to the back of a restaurant, you’d see the reality of all: the food going in and the garbage going out.

But doesn’t the real magic happen in the kitchen? The chef would say yes; the host would say no. Both the “front of the house” and “back of the house” of a restaurant are important, but each has a different set of challenges to deliver an amazing experience.

applications on a contact centre agent desktop, you’re not alone. There is plenty of digital debt on the desktop of your average agent, and most applications can’t be or aren’t ready for replacement. The same is true for VAs: dozens of systems are often required to make a great experience.

The time for attended RPA to step in and collaborate is now! Yes, now, and not after we migrate to “insert new CRM vendor here” or “rip out that old tool Larry made last year”. Digital debt will live on in some cases and because the front is different than the back, look to use well-designed contact centre automation to drive quick wins and increase agent engagement.

Why the differences

Second, back-office systems rarely and truly speak. But customers and agents speak all day long. Creating automation with conversational flow, grounded on natural language processing, is often more than what traditional RPA can handle. Instead, delight customers by creating good conversations in digital selfservice that will transition to agents seamlessly, as often these systems cannot provide the emotions needed for the front-office, like empathy. For customers interacting with the VAs expect faster transaction handling, satisfaction via one step resolution and most importantly a pleasant customer service experience.

The same is true today for customer-facing automation used to drive digital self-service and serve employees in the contact centre. These tools enable agents to find answers, solve problems and complete sales quickly and accurately and to the customers’ satisfaction. But the back office handles the processing of customers’ issues, such as inquiry forms, service and sales orders and documentation, like loan and mortgage applications that take longer and are more involved to handle.

Typically integrating a few systems to solve a workflow or automating a task in the back-office won’t make your agents happier or more productive, just like a new oven or dishwasher will not help the waitstaff. The same is true for poorly designed virtual assistants or VAs, (euphemistically referred to as chatbots), which the equivalent in restaurants may be the point of sale terminals. These VAs often plague customer journeys with dead-ends and are certainly NOT a path to front-office employees. Now isn’t the time to open the back-office RPA toolkit and automate like before?

There are two main reasons why your front is different than your back. Firstly, at Jacada we often see a dozen or more systems for integration while engaging in a backoffice project. But if you have 10, 20, 30 or even 40 running Issue 2 • 2019

connected to provide an excellent customer experience. Do so and your customers and your staff will thank you.

Regardless of your digital debt, keep your customer dialogues conversational, guide your agents and create seamless self-service journeys.

Savvy contact centres are reaping the benefits of AI and automation tools designed specifically for them to transform complex desktop environments into intelligent solutions for their employees.

Remember that traditional backoffice RPA is powerful; however, attended RPA in the front-office should provide design-once, endto-end and low-code for both agent-

Always keep your customer and agent-facing experiences a high priority.

Connecting the front and back The human body will not work unless the front and back function as one.

The same with business operations, whether restaurants or contact centres. They must be seamlessly

assisted interactions and self-service.

So, the next time you visit your favourite restaurant, think of all the automation that makes the entire establishment run smoothly. And just like a restaurant, you will have systems and processes that span the front and back of your organization.

Always keep your customer and agent-facing experiences a high priority. These experiences are the faces and “front doors of your brand”.

Protect them. Serve them up well.

Deliver them on a silver platter if you need to. Because in many cases, it’s our people who save us when the fish is bad, the wine is too warm or the table is wobbly. Remember to tip your waiter and always remember that your front is different than your back.

Matthew Storm is vice president, marketing, Jacada (www.jacada.com).

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