I was speaking at a conference this past week making a point suggesting that todays era of consumer demands immediacy. I was holding up my Blackberry to prove my point while taking a survey of the delegates in the room(about 200 in total all raised their hands stating they had a form of mobile device) when I was challenged by someone that felt I was wrong. I quickly responded stating that this is the age where RIM had a 3 hour outage affecting users in North America 2 weeks ago and it makes the front page news worldwide. I had visions of Wall Street Execs roaming around aimlessly as they were trying to reset, and shut down their blackberry’s attempting to figure out why they weren’t getting messages instantly.

Less than 10 years ago we wore pagers remember?!

The reality of the situation companies face today is the following: To build Customer Excellence is to engage near immediately. The faster an issue can be addressed and rectified will undoubtedly assist any organization in retaining that individual. (I’m thinking about doing an actual study about this and releasing it to the media)

Recently to prove this point there has been an emergence in true “real time” communication channels which organizations are putting in place. We currently use live chat technology (actually we have been using it for over a year) that connects our clients directly to our support team instantly and of the thousands of cases they field weekly over half are via live chat technology. If we were like others maybe even our competitors those clients that wanted to speak with someone would have faced phone ques, please hold’s and maybe even gave up on us. Instead they received near immediate engagement and like most of the support requests we receive they were able to receive a simple answer quickly and move on with their day. What’s most important is this shows that both Nationally and Internationally customers are overwhelmingly choosing to reach out via real time technologies.