With the introduction of one spectacular new feature in its Kindle Fire HDX tablet, Amazon has fired a shot across the bow of every other high end consumer products company: the Mayday button. It may sound innocuous enough, but it’s the idea behind it that likely has companies such as Apple quaking in their boots: with a single click, users of the Fire HDX will be able to summon live customer support via videoconference to help them with their devices, 24 hours per day, and within 15 seconds. No packing up and schlepping to the Genius Bar. No sitting on hold in a call center. It’s a direct link to a knowledgeable, warm body, right in the palm of your hands (so to speak).
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has called the feature the company’s new "Wow" factor, and describes it as the intersection of "customer delight" and "deep integration through the entire stack." At the customer end, that’s so, but at the back end, the feature represents a very different kind of dynamic in the call center.
The Mayday button is only possible if Amazon ensures that its contact center, ERP and CRM infrastructure is highly integrated and optimized so that the information is instantly available and at the Amazon employee's fingertips. This degree of customer service is simply not possible with the vast majority of contact centers today.
But, as the presenters of an upcoming ContactCenterSolutions Webinar ask, who would bet against Amazon?
On Monday, November 11 at 2pm ET, Neal Shact, CEO of CommuniTech Services will team up with well-known telecom analyst Jon Arnold of Jon Arnold & Associates and Dennis Goodhart of IP Network Consulting together with ContactCenterSolutions, to discuss what it takes to run the kind of contact center that can make a promise to customers like the Mayday button. Whether a company wants to offer a 15 second response time like Amazon, 30 seconds, or 45 seconds, the experts will be talking about what it takes to accomplish this using blended analytics and other techniques.
Attendees of, “What Does Amazon's "Mayday" Button Mean to the Future of Customer Service and Your Contact Center?” will receive an annual report: The US Contact Center Decision-Makers' Guide 2013.