Tit-for-Tat: Meeting Customer Expectations

By Wedge Greene & Barbara Lancaster

NOCs, SOCs, & Contact Centers: To make the transition successfully to customer-centric operations, we need to reexamine the processes, behaviors, and scope of responsibility of Operations with an eye fixed firmly on customer, customer, and customer. We examine this problem from two perspectives: first, mechanical: the applications and integration technology and second, humanistic: the people and behaviors conducive to satisfied customers.

These approaches are unified by the long-duration coordinated process flow contained in Collaborative Applications technology. Collaborative applications enable both kinds of agents (autonomic software agents and customer service people) to enact strategies in response to triggering events in the evolution of a negotiation game. This game is solvable with known strategies like tit-for-tat; but the important takeaway is ‘defining and implementing processes’ is not as effective and realistic as enabling agents in a game.

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This is Part 2 of a 3-part series on Customer Lifecycle Management: Service and the Reintegration of the Contact Center, OSS and business lines in Telecom.

See Part 1: Customer Service in the Enhanced Contact Center.

A version of this article was published in Pipeline Magazine, July 2007

Wedge Greene is a consultant for LTC International.