“I am the customer, why is customer service making me do so much of the work for them?”

That’s the question our friend Joyce was moved to ask after her latest frustrating interaction with her bank. Joyce told us the story of how she received an email, ostensibly from her bank, urgently requesting that she call the number provided to discuss “issues related to the credit card ending in the digits xxxx.” Understandably concerned, she moved quickly to call the number provided.

The people Joyce reached offered no information, but repeatedly insisted that she give them her social security number so they could clear everything up. Joyce refused; it just seemed fishy to her. She ended the call and logged on to her account on the bank’s website. There she initiated a new message to customer service in which she pasted the text of the email she had received and asked if she was being scammed.

The response from customer service arrived the next morning and confirmed her suspicions: “It does appear that you’ve been a victim of an attempted identity theft. Please call 1-800-xyz-zzxy at your earliest convenience to discuss responses to this matter.”

Joyce called the number provided to follow up and what followed was a frustrating day of dead ends and blind alleys:

1. Bank personnel had no record of either Joyce’s email to customer service or customer service’s response to her. She had to recount all the details over the phone.
2. After recounting the details over the phone, Joyce was told she was talking to the wrong department (even though she was talking to the department at the number provided by customer service) and was transferred to another representative
3. When she was connected with the correct department, they, like the first department she’d spoken with, had no record of Joyce or her email and she, again, had to recount all the details over the phone.

No one Joyce talked to seemed to know she had just talked to someone else. Conversations did not build on previous conversations; each new person’s work on Joyce’s case started from square one.

By no means is this lack of information integration unique to Joyce’s bank, though it is an instructive example of the inefficiencies that can ensue and the impact to customer confidence that can result when records exist in silos.

But what if Joyce’s bank treated their records of her customer service transactions as part of their communication strategy by keeping Joyce informed of the status of her issue and keeping track of the broader context in which her customer service issue existed? Let’s assume for a minute that the customer relationship was so important to them that service transactions became records, the same as other financial and legal records:

1. The bank would define a data lifecycle to foster the aggregation of customer service data. There would also be excellent discoverability of transactions both for individual customers as well as patterns of transactions across the entire customer base.
2. Joyce’s bank would provide signals to their customers about the actions they’re taking as part of the service transaction. Think of FedEx’s original Web-based tools to track packages: the tools gave their customers indicators of where a package was on its way from the shipping origin to their doorstep. Even if the package had not yet arrived, customers could see where it was last scanned. That information alone greatly increased the confidence of FedEx customers. In the case of Joyce’s bank, they could push out indicators to her that acknowledge receipt of her issue about the fraudulent email, add a note to ask a clarifying question, or let her know that the issues has been referred to the electronic fraud department.
3. The bank would create processes and tools to help filter out noise from signals, retaining the information most important to the customer relationship. An organization like a bank will need to decide what information is not important, and should be discarded.

By changing the way the bank thinks of and values its customer service transactions—and by thinking of Customer Relationship Management as records management—Joyce’s bank could greatly improve its ability to serve its customers. Joyce would no longer have to recount her story to each service rep because they’d already have a quickly retrievable record of the issue and would be able to find other customers who’d received the same phishing email. Individual customer service records could take on an organization-wide importance, both for how they improve the communication with the customer and how they inform the organization.

Kendrick Efta (follow on Twitter, www.twitter.com/kenefta ) is Principal Consultant and Co-Founder, Allyis. Ken has spent over a decade conceptualizing, designing and building enterprise solutions for clients.

Ethan Yarbrough (follow on Twitter, ethany) is President and Co-Founder, Allyis. Ethan is a social computing thought leader and active participant in the Enterprise 2.0 conversation. He blogs at Allyis http://blog.allyis.com/ .