Basic HTML Version
W
hat do customers want, anyway? From my
experience, most customer complaints are the result
of poorly communicated expectations on the part of
the company and poor or non-existent follow up. In
other words, customers expected something and it
was not provided when they expected it or it was not
what they expected.
Meeting, let alone exceeding, customer expectations
always poses a challenge because expectations are
constantly in flux. They change easily, they change
rapidly, and they are based upon the individual
customer.
So how do you meet, let alone exceed,
customer expectations? You can’t,
because every customer
is different. There are,
however, 10 universal
customer service
principles that should
be put into practice.
How satisfied your
customers are will
be determined by
your performance in
these
10 areas
.
Be accessible
Slow response and long
waits are equated with
an attitude of indifference
toward customers. Fast
response and brief waits are
equated with concern for customers.
This means always ensuring agents are doing
what they are supposed to be doing and when they
are supposed to be doing it. This may seem like
babysitting, but you have to stress the importance of
the power of one and how one person has an impact
on how quickly customer inquiries are answered.
All too often this explanation is not enough. To
illustrate this concept in a more concrete way,
incorporate the following exercise into training.
When it is completed, the importance of accessibility
becomes very clear.
Give each agent a ball. Each ball represents a
customer. Then ask all agents to stand in a circle and
start passing around the balls. Ask the agents to pass
quickly and efficiently. Suddenly, remove one agent
from the circle and explain that the agent has just
made himself or herself unavailable. Then pull out
another agent, explaining that this person stayed on
break longer than allowed. Then remove another who
was taking a long time making notes on a customer’s
account.
During this time, the other agents are
working harder to keep the balls
flowing at the same speed without
dropping them out of the
queue.
Then pull out another agent,
explaining that this person
went to lunch at the wrong
time. By now the balls are
probably starting to drop.
Explain that this exercise
illustrates how much
impact each agent’s actions
can have on your customers.
Most people think their actions
will not matter, but they truly do!
Treat customers with
courtesy
When working with customers, always focus
on the situation or issue, not on the person. Focus
on courtesy, because the issues that customers are
contacting you about may not seem like a big deal to
you, but to the customer the issue means a great deal.
Courtesy is the most visible way to convey respect.
Excellent customer service cannot happen without a
courteous environment. It is imperative that agents
understand that courtesy begins with each of them!
Kevin M Plankey
Page 4
Page 5
The best approach to security in a cloud computing
solution is to focus on securing each layer of the
solution, at minimum the software layer, platform
layer, and the infrastructure layer. In practice, a
cloud solution in each of these layers will ensure
that the solution itself is secure: it may exploit the
security mechanisms of the supporting layer but not
rely fully on those mechanisms to ensure a secure
environment. Performed effectively, any security
breaches within one layer will have minimal impact
on the other layers.
From a physical datacenter perspective, the first
point of vulnerability is the physical perimeter of the
data center. Traditional defense-in-depth models
for physical security can be applied at this level. The
design of the datacenter can also provide some
protection in mitigating problems in security or
unexpected failures in the system, by establishing
multiple fault domains. A fault domain is a set of
hardware components that
share a single point of failure.
Cloud computing solutions
can use fault domains to
spread application instances
across the physical topology.
If a single fault domain fails,
the virtualization layer can
search and identify application instances within
other fault domains and maintain the availability and
performance of the application.
The virtualization provided by the hypervisor of the
infrastructure provides a crucial layer of protection
between the physical infrastructure and the work
performed on the abstracted infrastructure. This
layer is not without its security concerns and one of
the greatest concerns in securing multi-tenant cloud
solutions is the possible event that a tenant working
within an instance on the same physical infrastructure
can impact the data and performance of another
instance or the infrastructure core. The prevention of
this type of breach is highly dependent on the ability
to isolate individual virtual machines running on the
infrastructure. This ability increases as the activities
within the virtualized environment are understood
clearly and controlled, specifically how instances are
managed and resources are allocated.
In an environment where a number of abstracted
components are greatly multiplied and changes to
those components can be made in mere seconds,
the level of automated management and monitoring
required intensifies. The most secure environments
will monitor and manage appropriately each
event that occurs within the physical and virtual
environments. Earlier, it was suggested that security
must be considered at each layer of the solution:
recalling the layers of a virtualized environment, this
can include the shared hardware, host operating
system, the abstraction layer, and the guest operating
system. Each of these layers should be monitored and
managed. One key activity is ensuring that the proper
security updates are made to each layer.
Mechanisms for authenticating, authorizing,
and auditing access to systems are not new to
IT organizations; however it is possible for many
organizations to handle these mechanisms
independently on systems within a traditional
deployment. For cloud deployments where these
systems will be utilizing the same infrastructure, the
IT organization may have to
create a shared framework
that works for all systems.
Added difficulties occur
when using multiple cloud
solutions from several
cloud providers, each with
different authentication
mechanisms. This may force the IT organization to
create some single-sign-on solution that manages the
authentication requirements of multiple clouds.
The greatest threat to security for a business is
ignorance, combined with the attractiveness of
public cloud solutions can be highly dangerous:
specifically when a business manager bypasses
established provisioning processes to utilize cloud
services without understanding they are using
public cloud resources. The ability to access cloud
services through a web browser can be convenient,
but it also provides a portal for accessing unsecure
resources and creating a potential vulnerability in the
security perimeter. While web servers can be used
to block specific websites, complete blocking the
ability to access public cloud resources may not be
advantageous to the business. Security governance
must make decisions regarding how accessibility to
public cloud solutions will be monitored, managed,
and authorized.
Principles That Meet
Customer Expectations
The greatest threat
to security for a
business is ignorance