Jeffrey F. Rayport

In the face of increasingly demanding customers and a shortage of skilled workers to serve them, companies are facing a crisis in customer interaction and relationship management. At the same time, networked technologies–from Web sites to kiosks to interactive voice response units–are enabling managers to “recruit” machines into front-office roles that drive down the costs of consumer interactions and deliver satisfying customer experiences. Successfully integrating technology into the work force requires a wholesale reengineering of the front-office to determine the appropriate division of labor between humans and machines. Here we examine the origins of what we call the “front-office revolution” and the need for businesses to manage coordinated interface systems. We suggest that companies do an audit of their interfaces and optimize them over three phases, which we call separate, relate, and integrate phases. We argue that these interface systems, and the more efficient and effect customer relationship management they enable, represent the next frontier of competitive advantage for many businesses.

Most companies serve customers through a broad array of interfaces, from retail sales clerks to Web sites to voice-response telephone systems. But while the typical company has an impressive interface collection, it doesn't have an interface system. That is, the whole set does not add up to the sum of its parts in its ability to provide service and build customer relationships. Too many people and too many machines operating with insufficient coordination (and often at cross-purposes) mean rising complexity, costs, and customer dissatisfaction. In a world where companies compete not on what they sell but on how they sell it, turning that liability into an asset is what separates winners from losers. In this adaptation of their forthcoming book by the same title, Jeffrey Rayport and Bernard Jaworski explain how companies must reengineer their customer interface systems for optimal efficiency and effectiveness. Part of that transformation, they observe, will involve a steady encroachment by machine interfaces into areas that have long been the sacred province of humans. Managers now have opportunities unprecedented in the history of business to use machines, not just people, to credibly manage their interactions with customers. Because people and machines each have their strengths and weaknesses, company executives must identify what people do best, what machines do best, and how to deploy them separately and together. Front-office reengineering subjects every current and potential service interface to an analysis of opportunities for substitution (using machines instead of people), complementarity (using a mix of machines and people), and displacement (using networks to shift physical locations of people and machines), with the twin objectives of compressing costs and driving top-line growth through increased customer value.