January 23rd, 2012 by Tracey Mustacchio
Our businesses are relentlessly becoming more complex. We are engaging with an expanding network of contractors and partners to get our work done. We are utilizing more diverse channels to reach more customers. We are operating in more countries and in more languages, while we wrestle with more regulations and market variables.
In one sense, this complexity is a dangerous enemy. Complexity can increase the probability that some process somewhere will break or that somebody will do something wrong. Orders get screwed up. Customers get ticked off. Revenue goes out the window.
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Tags: collaboration, competitive advantage, complexity, information organization, information socialization, information technology, ROI, search, Velocity
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January 9th, 2012 by John Porter
Effective search is a difficult problem to solve for most organizations. The challenge of tackling complex interdependencies between source systems and trying to satisfy stakeholders with different search needs can be daunting. Unfortunately, poor search isn’t just an inconvenience, it’s a liability. The inability to find critical information when it’s needed most diminishes trust in systems impedes employee learning and leads to less than optimal decisions.
The good news is, these problems can be solved.
Search-based applications enter the findability fray promising to shape enterprise search in a manner uniquely suited to tame the information explosion challenge. These applications have the inherent ability to aggregate information from multiple systems while applying contextually relevant domain knowledge, allowing them to answer questions not readily available from any single source system.
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Tags: clustering, concept searching, contextual intelligence, dynamic adaptability, enterprise search, entity extraction, information connectivity, Information Optimization, relevance, relevancy ranking, social interaction, text analytics
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January 3rd, 2012 by Stacy Leidwinger
Recently, I came across a great quote by Kerry Bodine of Forrester Research, Inc. where she said, “Companies need to start treating customer experience as a business discipline—not a bumper sticker.” It made me wonder if companies, as they start planning their strategy for 2012, are truly embracing what it means to build a customer-centric culture.
Working in the customer experience industry, weekly I meet with numerous Fortune 500 organizations. I am always surprised to hear comments like, “this year we are focusing on our customers first and foremost” or “we have just hired a new senior director to really lead our customer experience initiative.” For many of these companies, they are just starting to embark on the customer experience improvement journey. A 2011 study from the Temkin Group shows only 7% of companies think they are customer experience leaders while 61% of them want to be at the top in their industry in three years. The question I ask then is, “Why now?” Haven’t you always been concerned about your customers?
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Tags: customer experience, customer knowledge, customer satisfaction, customer-centric culture, empowering employees, increase revenue
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December 27th, 2011 by Tracey Mustacchio
Innovation often feels risky. Typically, it entails committing significant resources to something that may not bring about the needed outcome. This uncertainty often causes decision-makers to shy away from innovation.
But as the rules governing business performance continue to mutate, it may be reasonable to look at innovation from the opposite direction: Why are we committing significant resources to something—in this case, the status quo—that will certainly not deliver the needed outcome?
And there is no doubt that our present IT solutions cannot deliver needed outcomes. As Andy McAfee, Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management’s Center for Digital Business, recently explained, “We have collaboration tools that are not social, and social tools that are not collaborative.”
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Tags: collaboration, data repositories, information socialization, innovation, IT solutions, knowledge management
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December 20th, 2011 by Mark Myers
There is remarkable unanimity among industry analysts and thought-leaders on the nature of big data. Rather than a phenomenon of volume alone, big data is almost universally described as having the dimensions of velocity and variety as well. The term velocity recognizes the speed with which many types of big data, such as sensor output or social network interactions, are generated. Variety recognizes the many forms that big data can take, from very compact “blips” from sensors or clickstreams to text documents to multi-gigabyte geospatial images.
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Tags: Big Data
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December 12th, 2011 by Tracey Mustacchio
One of the most unfortunate casualties of the current economic downturn is the diminished ability and willingness of business leaders to think seriously and practically about the future. When you’re facing crises in revenue and margins today, there is a natural disinclination to think much about tomorrow. After all, if you don’t survive the present, it doesn’t much matter what’s going to happen in the long term.
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Tags: Big Data, business performance, collaboration, competitive advantage, customer satisfaction, data growth, economic value, Information Optimization, knowledge management, social media
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December 6th, 2011 by Stacy Leidwinger
[Excerpt from Vineet Nayar, vice chairman and CEO of India-based HCL Technologies] “The conventional wisdom, of course, says that companies must always put the customer first. In any services business, however, the true value is created in the interface between the employee and the customer. So, by putting employees first, you can bring about fundamental change in the way a company creates and delivers unique value for its customers and differentiates itself from its competitors.”
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Tags: #CXO tweet chats, collaboration, company strategy, company vision, competitive advantage, customer knowledge, customer service, customer-centric culture, employee engagement
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November 21st, 2011 by Stacy Leidwinger
When asked to identify the greatest barriers to improving multichannel customer experience, “Thirty-four percent of respondents identified difficulty unifying different sources of customer data.” This would indeed be a barrier as understanding your customers’ needs is intrinsic to delivering an exceptional customer experience. To understand the customer, organizations must take each morsel of information left at touch-points across the organization and weave them together to create the customer’s story. The need for information optimization and big data applications then becomes vital. I had the honor of being in the hot seat as we explored this topic at one of our tweet chats. Here is a glimpse into our discussion:
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Tags: Big Data, CRM, customer experience, Customer Facing Professionals (CFPs), customer insight, customer knowledge, ERP, Information Optimization, leverage information, WCMS
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November 14th, 2011 by Stacy Leidwinger
Recently I heard a sales representative say, “We use a CRM and I didn’t visit it once to prepare for my sales meeting.” Interesting, yes? The sales rep went on to say that he would probably enter details about the meeting later in the CRM system—not to improve how he interacted with the customer but so that his manager could view the outcome of the meeting. Unfortunately, many organizations have Customer Facing Professionals (CFPs) with this mindset. A big piece in this equation is understanding what creates this mindset and solving it.
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Tags: business culture, business intelligence, CRM, Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA), Customer Facing Professionals (CFPs), customer insight, customer interaction, Information Optimization, information organization, sales representatives
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November 7th, 2011 by Tracey Mustacchio
Continuing the “Big Data” discussion Stacy started last week, I would like to touch on the area of monetizing customer-relevant big data.
Businesses of all sorts are accumulating data that does not easily lend itself to conventional database/data warehousing models. What they do and don’t do with this data can have a significant impact on their bottom-line business performance.
But it’s good to clarify two points about big data. First point: big data doesn’t just mean lots of data. According to the definition originally put forth by Gartner analyst Doug Laney in 2001, big data involves three attributes: volume, velocity (i.e. the speed at which it is accumulated and/or loses its freshness), and diversity of sources.
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Tags: Big Data, business intelligence, CRM, customer data, ERP, information overload, monetization, vertical market
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