Customer Satisfaction Software

I took a vacation day Friday because after a very busy couple of months at work, I just needed some free time outside to clear my head, think, and to not do the day-to-day stuff.  I went for an easy run in the morning, took my wife out to lunch and then played music, worked on a few projects and just relaxed.  It was a very satisfying day.

The reason I've been so busy lately is that at Gold Systems our newest product, Vonetix 7, is starting to get a LOT of attention, both from customers and partners.  I've been traveling and doing demos, working with sales people on new opportunities, and spending a lot of time at my white-board-wall sketching out how all the pieces fit together.   The product is already deployed at some very, very large enterprises and is continuing to evolve.  It's different from anything in use today, though it is replacing old systems and architectures that have been in place for a long time.  My challenge has been to describe what the product is as simply as possible.

Saturday morning, I woke up at 6:00 AM, wide awake, with the words "Customer Satisfaction Software" rolling around in my head.   I couldn't stop thinking about it, so I got up and decided to write it down.

My career has been about helping people communicate, and generally it has been about helping large companies or government organizations communicate with their customers.  In the beginning it was people calling companies on the telephone, and I remember when "improving customer service" meant eliminating busy signals and answering calls twenty-four hours a day.  It meant reducing the amount of  time a customer had to spend listing to bad music while being told over and over again how important they were. 

Call Centers became Contact Centers as they started handling emails and then web chats.  TLA's (Three Letter Acronyms)  were everywhere - ACD, IVR, CRM, SEO, PBX, TXT, ICR.  Some of the technology worked together, but most didn't, and what started out as a customer service initiative became an exercise in customer annoyance. 

As I woke up this morning the thought was running through my head that we DON'T need more customer contact software, or worse, customer management software, we need customer SATISFACTION software.  Even that's not quite right, because we are always going to need people in the equation, but it's a start.  Vonetix 7 is customer satisfaction software.  I like it!