I am often asked by clients “how do I know if I am valuable in this new cloud based economy”?  The best answer I can come up with is that if you are more than 2 degrees separated from touching your customer, than you are on the path of being irrelevant.  

As enterprises move from a business infrastructure that have traditionally been transactional to ones that are more collaborative, a very interesting thing is occurring.  Customers are becoming more independent; they have at their disposal the use of portals, web searches, social networks, mobile apps etc. This is allowing them to become more self-sufficient and thus making the time they actually spend with a person from a vendor more critical.  If the time is wasted on referring the client to another person in the company then the value of the interaction with the first person is diminished.  This has always been the case but in this continually connected economy we live, it is hyper magnified.  

What can you do to stay relevant?

• Recognize this change, embrace it and enable it.  Don’t stay at your desk hoping “this too will pass”, because it will not.  
• Participate, don’t be a spectator. Understand the value that you bring is only going to be relevant if it is part of the discussion.  No one is waiting for you tell them the answer to their questions; in fact the most relevant customer services organizations pro-actively manage that process.  Part of your brand should a pro-active approach of communication, If you wait for your customer to ask questions, you run the risk of them asking someone else.
• Be adaptable; realize that is not just good enough to have the right answer. You need to have the right answer at the right time.    Customers no longer need to ask the same question a second time.   If you are not there to answer the problem, someone else will.  You need to leverage real time measures and indexes to anticipate your customer’s next move.
• Collaborate don’t Isolate.  This is where the service cloud can help. Once you have your customer’s attention, make sure to surround them with other colleagues that may hold answers to other questions the customer may have.  Realize that it not usually the first question the client asks that is most important but rather the last.  Dialogue will drive more opportunities for finding success with your client.  

This migration to the collaborative economy is one that is filled with opportunity for those who embrace its foundation.  There is an old expresson about the definition of insanity being doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome.  In these times the saying should be “doing the same thing and expecting the same outcome is insane.

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