Her problem, my friend explained, was not the extra $1.25. If she wanted economical fast food she was clearly at the wrong restaurant. She was simply pointing out the pricing error. In fact, she would have preferred if the sales associate had said, “Ma’am the item you requested just had a price change, is that okay?” One moment of thoughtfulness would have changed the outcome of that interaction instead a shouting match ensued on FaceBook and Twitter, resulting in apologies, refunds, and freebies. Despite the steps taken to rectify the situation, it was a little too late for the company to restore loyalty and their tarnished reputation. More people took note of the poor experience than any of the beneficial follow up activity.

Research indicates that 49% of customers don’t tell a company about their bad experiences—they just leave. The other 51% however, tells the company and the world at large. Social media has redefined and magnified customer complaints, making it even more imperative for organizations to monitor and manage customer interactions. Marketer’s have always known word-of-mouth is the most powerful form of advertisement. With social, everyone’s voices just got a whole lot louder! Customers shouldn’t have to define the service they receive and complain to be heard. Companies must reclaim ownership of the customer experiences they deliver.

It may sound cliché but culture is at the epicenter of the equation. Yet I think it goes deeper than culture. To be on their game 24/7 for all 365 days of the year, companies must eat, sleep and breathe customer-centricity. And every employee must follow this same customer-centric creed.

If you are in management at an organization you might be asking, “But how can I get my employees to live the customer-centric creed?” I do workshops and have memos, but all efforts fall short. I believe the best way to live the creed is to empower employees with the knowledge they need to be customer-centric. Knowledge is power in the world of customer service. It is critical that on any given day customer service agents can find relevant information about each of their customers, products, and services, ensuring they understand the holistic view around each. When empowered with this knowledge, they will automatically be driven to greater customer-centricity.

If that clerk knew that the price change happened as a result of more eco-friendly packaging and that the price change would be reflected tomorrow at the drive-thru, they could have created a better experience by sharing the reason for the change. My friend who is always looking to add more green to her life would have been thrilled and her tweets would have had a very different tone!

This was a story of a bad experience but does anyone have an example of a great customer experience where they felt a more knowledgeable customer service agent made all the difference?

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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.

Complexity, however, complexity can also be a powerful ally. After all, everybody’s business is getting more complex—including our competitors’. So if we become innately better at handling complexity than those competitors, complexity will actually create a substantial competitive advantage for us.

If, on the other hand, we fail to make our companies more complexity-friendly, just the opposite occurs. Every new relationship, new channel, new product and new market makes it harder for our people to pinpoint information and expertise they need, when they need it. It takes longer and longer for knowledge inputs to make their way across our companies’ increasingly labyrinthine nervous systems—rendering us slower to sense and react to  customer needs and market opportunities.

The imperative is therefore obvious. Either we proactively take steps now to make our companies more complexity-friendly, or we eventually become complexity’s victim.

Effective socialization, collaboration and search are particularly powerful solutions for handling organizational complexity. With socialization, it doesn’t matter if the information you need is in your personal documents folder or in the brain of an overseas partner. You’re going to be able to find it quickly and easily. Socialization therefore neutralizes complexity—rendering it powerless to prevent us from knowing what we need to know, when we need to know it.

This understanding of the relationship between socialization and complexity recasts the decision to embrace technologies such as Vivisimo’s Velocity Platform. Sure, no one wants to spend time and money on a technology solution without having some sense of the concrete ROI they’re going to achieve. But the stakes of the game are more than just improving sales staff productivity or reducing call-resolution times in the contact center—as worthwhile as those objectives may be. The ability to rapidly and effortlessly socialize information across and beyond the enterprise fundamentally transforms a company from one for which complexity is an enemy to one for which complexity is a competitive advantage.

Which one do you want your company to be?

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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.

This new breed of application is made possible by the evolution of search technology beyond basic keyword search to include relevancy ranking, concept searching, text analytics, clustering, entity extraction and social interaction. While a traditional, well-implemented search engine is critical in helping employees make better use of corporate resources, in many cases benefits can be markedly improved by layering a domain specific search-based application on top of the core search infrastructure.

The Lone Search Box

One of the central challenges with traditional search is that the keywords a user picks to search on, the very question that is being asked, shapes the form of the answer. That’s fine if users know exactly what they are looking for, however, in many instances they may not have all of the information necessary to ask the right question. Ask too narrow of a question and the results resemble tunnel vision, ask too broad of a question and the results loose focus. In addition to keyword search, users need a mechanism that enables relevant discovery when the question isn’t quite so clear.

The trouble with the ever-present search box tucked away in the corner of a traditional web or desktop application is that it typically provides little or no context. Search that includes the context of who a user is and what they are doing at the time of search greatly enhances the relevancy of returned results. For example, say a user is currently viewing a web page describing the details of a car they are considering purchasing. The web page doesn’t explicitly mention warranty information so the user enters the term “warranty” in the “contextually unaware” search box on the page. Because the user wasn’t very specific in selecting their search terms and because the underlying search engine wasn’t aware of what car the user was viewing at the time of the search, chances are that the search results won’t be very targeted or relevant. However if the search infrastructure enriched the query with contextually relevant information about the year, make and model of the car being researched the search results are likely to be much more relevant.

A Dynamic, Adaptive Model

But why stop there? What if you never had to ask the question in the first place! What if the web page had all of the relevant information the user wanted right from the start? That’s a difficult promise to fulfill if the page has been built by hand or with a traditional content management solution. Building and maintaining links to all relevant related pages and documents can be a maintenance nightmare. However a search-based application has the intelligence to make both the end-user experience more productive and the job of maintaining the application much more tenable. That’s because by using search as the underlying platform for the application, links and relationships are discovered and maintained automatically. Search results can iteratively feed other searches behind the scenes and the whole system can adapt to the user’s changing environment in real-time. This approach is a fundamental move away from statically built applications into adaptive systems. Dynamic adaptability is critical to enhanced findability because the truth of the matter is that search is not a one size fits all solution. It should adapt to both the profile of the user and the context of the domain.

In the final analysis, a well designed, search-based application combines these critical factors into a single application, the ability to perform targeted keyword searches when you know exactly what you are looking for and dynamic exploratory search presenting serendipitous relevant information or paths to information when you aren’t. Automatically enrich these search options with contextual domain information and your users will begin to see search in a new light.

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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?

I believe the answer is really a two-fold. Yes, organizations have always been concerned about their customers but increasing revenue has been the driving force. It didn’t matter if it grew from net new clients or existing–they just had to hit the numbers. This is becoming increasingly more challenging in today’s economy. Organizations are looking internally to see where they can make changes. The obvious answer is that they need to keep existing clients and leverage them both as referrals as well as upsell opportunities.

The second answer is there are now tools in place to help achieve these goals. Companies no longer are just paying lip service to focusing on the customer but investing in tools that help their employees become customer advocates. They empower them to focus on the customer and to have more personalized and intelligent interactions.

As Kerry Bodine states, if driving customer satisfaction is a focus for 2012 then you need to do much more than add it to your corporate mission statement. You need to:

• Dedicate resources to exploring, analyzing and solving the challenges that hinder customer centricity.
• Listen and watch your customers in their setting to experience the service and value they are receiving from you as an organization.
• Build a long-term strategy to address all issues related to improving the customer experience–this includes acquiring tools, adapting the corporate culture, empowering employees, etc.
• Monitor changes and results over time. The key to keeping a customer experience program active is proving its success throughout the organization.

We all must rally together and make 2012, 2013, 2014 and beyond, the year of the customer. Bumper stickers fade with wear and tear and may even peel off. When customer experience becomes a discipline, however, it’s not just a sticker, but a birthmark.

Does your organization already have plans in place for building out a customer-centric culture in 2012? If so, what are your first steps to ensure you are treating it as a discipline and not just another bumper sticker?

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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.”

Knowledge management repositories, for example, are collaborative (because they make content accessible to everyone)—but they’re not social (because all you do is check content in and out of the repository). Email, on the other hand, is very social (because it allows people to interact on an ad hoc basis)—but not collaborative at all (because email exchanges are not inherently visible to anyone else).

Without a way of working that is both collaborative and social, knowledge workers waste time and miss opportunities. IDC once estimated that that the typical Fortune 1000 company loses $2.5 billion per year just because knowledge workers spend so much time every day hunting down information. And an AIIM study found that knowledge workers spend 15-25% of their time unproductively because of the time it takes to find the information they need.

In other words, companies that don’t commit to the socialization of information are essentially committing to wasting time.

This is not spin or hype. It’s documented fact. And it’s supported by the first-hand experience of every knowledge worker in every organization around the world. Unless we’re in denial, we all know exactly what it’s like to have a task take much longer to complete than it should because we just couldn’t put our finger on the information we needed. And, at precisely those times, we all fantasize about how much more we could accomplish if we could eliminate those delays.

But we don’t have to fantasize. The technology exists today to radically change how we search for and share information. We can find the documents and data—and, sometimes even more critically, the people behind those documents and data—with a few keystrokes and mouse-clicks. And we can do it without having to sift through layer and layer of irrelevant search results.

To make the fantasy real, however, we have to innovate. We have to be willing to adopt new technologies—and we have to do so before everyone else already has. That’s what innovation means.

Of course, we can also decide to continue to waste time, just like our competitors are—because as long as they’re still doing it, it feels safe for us to keep doing it too.

But it’s not safe at all. Seemingly, successful companies are getting disrupted out of existence left and right as business becomes increasingly competitive and as customers become more disposed to shift their loyalty en masse as soon as someone else offers them a better experience and a better deal.

Perhaps then, we shouldn’t be so afraid of innovating when it comes to socializing information. Perhaps what we should be afraid of is not innovating.

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A fourth “v” that many analysts also recognize is “variability.” The variability dimension is a somewhat subtle concept that recognizes that data not only takes different forms, but also varies according to where it is managed, whether its use and distribution is restricted or public, who owns it, whether or not it is time-sensitive, and many other factors. Variability is especially important in large enterprises with information in many different applications. It is less important when all of your data comes from a single source, such as a social network, web clicks or sensors.

So big data is neither uniform nor homogenous, and “lives” in different places. And of course the questions we want to answer using big data differ radically. This theme came to the forefront earlier this month when Vivisimo held a “Tech Day” gathering of customers, partners and technologists from around the Washington DC area to focus on a number of topics, including big data. As part of the Tech Day exercise, we took a close look at the ecosystem tools that are available to manage and extract value from big data. It turns out that, just as it took a while for most people to recognize that big data can’t be measured by volume alone, most are still coming to grips with the array of tools and techniques available to exploit big data and learning when and how to use them. These tools need to be selected and applied differently depending on each organization’s big data and what they hope to gain from it. It helps to evaluate an organization’s requirements along the four dimensions volume, velocity, variety and variability.

Today any discussion of big data inevitably centers on Hadoop, the open source project named after a loveable elephant from children’s fiction. While Hadoop does seem to occupy the center of the big data universe, it’s not a panacea. There are many pieces of the puzzle, including some within the Apache Hadoop project and some from the commercial world that handle varied demands of big data.

Getting back to our Tech Day discussion, we looked at how a number of different tools—some open source and some commercial—address the four Vs. As part of the exercise we mapped those on a set of diagrams to show how each tool measures up against each of the four dimensions. This is covered in detail in an upcoming Vivisimo white paper, but here’s a preview based on our Tech Day exercise.

For starters, take Hadoop, and throw into the mix its complementary components MapReduce and the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). The Hadoop/MapReduce/HDFS triumvirate scores high on handling volume and variety, but low on velocity and variability. In other words, while Hadoop provides the capability to distribute and process large amounts of heterogeneous data, as a batch-oriented system it is not designed to handle velocity in the form of rapid ingest of data or interactive analysis. It also lacks connectors or interfaces to various enterprise systems and security models, and as a result is not strong when it comes to variability.

On the other hand, traditional relational database management systems are designed to rapidly process transactions involving structured data in neat rows and columns, joined by keys that associate different tables of data, so they address the need for speed for certain types of data. However traditional RDBMS essentially “break” when called upon to process data sets with many columns in a single row, no fixed schema, and varying data types. This is where the so-called NoSQL (a contraction of “not only SQL”) databases such as HBase (another Apache project in the Hadoop family) come into play. By their nature, databases fall short on the variability axis, since they are designed to process data stored inside the database, or in similar databases in a network or distributed configuration.

Now suppose you need fast answers from an assortment of distributed data sets, some representing high volume and variety, some with high variability and velocity, such as a company’s supply chain and e-mail systems. This situation calls for a search platform that can access and process data from many different back-end systems, in addition to data you may have processed using Hadoop and stored in HDFS. The ability to maintain and manage indices of content across all of these systems and to query and fuse data from all of them without regard for schemas and formal data structures opens many options for exploiting big data. In short, it allows us to quickly answer some of the most difficult questions and discover relationships that would otherwise be difficult, if not impossible, to detect.

Looking at the ecosystem of tools available for addressing big data from the perspective of the four Vs can help to make sense of the big data ecosystem, and it is the first step toward tapping the enormous value that lies in big data. This is definitely a topic for further exploration and discussion.

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This is a major mistake, because one can just as easily argue that the opposite is true. Who cares if you manage to make your numbers for this quarter, if in the process you consign yourself to extended competitive disadvantage?

Nowhere is the short-sightedeness that is endemic to tough times more blatant than in the reticence of many companies to invest in better tools for sharing and socializing knowledge resources. Sure, a lot of companies are taking a cursory look at technologies and processes that help employees optimally utilize enterprise data. But many are holding off on true social business innovation, because they view it as a nice-to-have rather than need-it-now.

The empirical evidence, however, indicates that this is exactly the wrong position to take right now. For one thing, companies are experiencing an overwhelming deluge of data. One report from IBM, for example, says that we are creating 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day—and that 90% of the data in the world was created just within the past two years. Companies that don’t figure out how to deal with this deluge are going to spend years playing catch-up with competitors who have already prepared themselves for it with the right collaboration tools, the right storage architecture and the right data management policies.

For another, quantified results from early adopters plainly show that effective socialization of institutional knowledge pays big dividends exactly where they’re most needed in today’s hyper-connected markets—including higher customer satisfaction scores and more rapid completion of collaborative tasks. These are exactly the kinds of results companies need to survive in today’s tough times and to thrive as we cycle back into growth.

Now is not the time to ignore the future. A lot of new opportunities and new problems are headed our way. Wise investments today will substantially differentiate your company’s business performance tomorrow. And that future performance is what good management is all about.

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When customers come first, the organization is always moving, thinking and acting customer-centric. Product development, sales, customer service and every facet of the organization is driven by the customer’s needs. On the flip side, research shows that engaged, knowledgeable employees deliver a better customer experience and close 33% more deals. Yet this is only one part of the equation. Customers still need a personalized experience and solutions that meet their specific need. This made for an interesting discussion at one of our TweetChats:

How does an organization benefit from putting customers first in the customer experience equation?

@berkshire_ideas: There should not be a hierarchical approach to the customer experience but a balanced one. Nothing comes first without sacrificing something else.

@clearaction: Organizations need to know the customer priorities in order to hire and train and reward employees accordingly.

@thehealthmaven: Customers are the vehicle for companies to showcase their brand promise—the benefit is sustainability. The goal should be for the company to become more of a “hub” where two-way communication, empathy and exchange moves the co-vision.

@d_gammon: Customers drive your product. They should always come first if you intend to make any type of profit.

@Marcio_Saito: Putting customers first gives you a chance to be the customer’s first choice. In a competitive and open marketplace, loyalty is a mutual exchange.

@Michael_Ludwig: When organizations put customers first, the customer feels appreciated, valued and welcomed. In return, they get a word-of-mouth advertisement.

Would putting employees first in the customer experience equation provide greater benefits? Explain.

@clearaction: Excited employees won’t fix misaligned customer strategy.

@Marcio_Saito: Company->Employee->Customer is a value delivery chain. Every link in the chain is important.

@Michael_Ludwig: When you have an employee that really cares about the product and the customer experience, you have a #Winning equation.

@ErikaLAndersen: If employees get how customer service fits company vision and the company shows appreciation for good customer service, you’ll have happier employees.

Why should an organization pursue one strategy over the other?

@Marcio_Saito: Employees and customers are links in the same strategy. Value delivery chain “employees first” is not something you say, it is something you do.

@Michael_Ludwig: It’s important to have a hiring team that is passionate about the customer experience and a company that is equally devoted to their employee.

@ThinDifference: Strategy delivers the direction. Culture delivers the results. Both need to be intertwined tightly to deliver for customers.

@thehealthmaven: Strategy is what helps your company respond, stay ahead and weather market forces. And importantly, empower customers and employees.

How can choosing one approach over the other backfire?

@berkshire_ideas: Any strategy will fall apart if all the components aren’t balanced.

@ThinDifference: Misalignment creates frustration, internally and externally. Frustration leads to stalemate, or worse.

@LovelyLu: It backfires when you won’t budge from your strategy even though your customers aren’t benefitting. You need to empower your employees with knowledge and support and value your customers. Strategy needs to be strong for both customers and employees!

@Marcio_Saito: It is impossible to choose. There is no happy employee with unhappy customers.

@stephaniethum: I do think it’s employees first. Unhappy, un-empowered employees are an impediment to great customer service. Employee cultures can collapse beneath the pressure of restrictive management. Clients then suffer.

How would an organization create a balance between both strategies?

@thehealthmaven: Integrating both employee and customer strategies is an exercise in value creation for the company.

@ErikaLAndersen: Letting employees see vision and know customer strategy, so they can see how their actions help customers and the organization.

@clearaction: Know the customer world by using observation research: ethnography. Then hire and reward employees and suppliers accordingly. Scrutinize policies, processes, systems to truly empower employees to do a great job for customer experience.

@d_gammon: Teach employees what your overall customer experience goal is. Then show them the power their work has on your customers.

@ThinDifference: Have your team ask customers three questions: What do you need? What are you going to do with what I deliver? How will you measure my results?

At the end of the day, organizations need to find the strategy that works best for their enterprise. The organization that breaks down its silos to foster employee engagement and balances it with customer centricity, wins.

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According to research, “Fifty-seven percent (57%) of respondents indicated that pulling together information from multiple sources is tough” (CEMM-Customer Experience Maturity Monitor). The burning question then is, “How can companies unify the different sources of customer information from all channels?” Organizations need to implement a solution that pulls all relevant information from all enterprise systems in a unified view on-demand. They need to create a consolidated view of information from all repositories across the organization into one interface and integrate pertinent information from CRMs (Customer Relationship Management), WCMS (Web Content Management Systems), ERPs (Enterprise Resource Planning), support systems, etc. making them quickly accessible.

One key question we discussed was how can an organization maximize customer data to derive meaningful insights from data?

Data needs to be actionable and go beyond listening to the Voice of Customer to pro-actively reacting to customer needs. Data is only actionable when it is accurate and available at the moment of truth: on customer call, chat, email, etc. Visibility into information such as blocked orders, out of stock parts, etc. allows employees to have intelligent conversations. Data access and visibility then promotes efficiency at each touch-point and empowers employees to create a customer centric organization. By taking all customer data and connecting nuggets from across touch-points to paint a complete customer story, employees can address customer concerns and needs more effectively.

@clearaction: Organize it from CUSTOMER view, not company’s money.

@Michael_Ludwig: Many times knowledge centers and customer information tools are often developed by one group and used by another. Working together in development is key.

@berkshire_ideas: Empowering those that are at the frontline to have a say in what is considered meaningful. The organizing of this said “data” also needs to be intuitive to those needing access to it.

@BarryBirkett: Organizations can use customer data to develop value rankings for customers and use that to prioritize service.

What can an organization do to leverage information to identify which product/service to sell or features to add?

If handled right, organizations can harness quality, insightful information to fuel innovation within their product and solution portfolios. Making relevant information accessible helps organizations understand consumer and market demands and improve responsiveness. By providing employees with quick relevant information, the front-line employees can have intelligent targeted conversations and ANTICIPATE customer needs. Employees can leverage existing information to help classify customers and recommend products based on other like-customers.

@stevemassi: Use integrated data to develop deep audience segments—look at risk vs. reward related to segments and investment.

@Marcio_Saito: Transparency will bring insight for people making decisions. It’s not about data analysis in my opinion.

@DelphiUSA: This “knowledge” (context/actionable) enables specific, relevant improvements—innovation.

@Michael_Ludwig: Having an organized, detailed and powerful database that can be accessed by stakeholders allows for an organization to deliver on customer needs.

@Ken_Rosen: Organizations need integration on system-delivered data with qualitative feedback.

Forty-four percent (44%) of customers say reps give them wrong information—optimizing information access eliminates this as reps will have accurate information. With a holistic view of customer and product information, reps can interact with customers knowledgeably and easily. Leveraging existing customer information enables organizations to align brand message to brand promise and customer expectations. Customer knowledge turns Customer Facing Professionals (CFPs) into trusted advisors offering personal insights directly to the customer.

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There are two key variables at play—organizational structure and culture. Customers interact with organizations at several different points along the customer journey. These interactions may or may not be with the same sales rep and invariably they’re not with the same department. Added to this, companies have data scattered across the organization: product information, customer data, support notes, accounts payable information, expert knowledge and the like.  How this information is integrated and shared then becomes very critical. Companies need to chip away at the silos and use the right applications and tools to transform and flatten their organizational structure—applications that connect data from not just CRM, but silos across the organization to glean intelligence. By doing so, sales reps then have a single view to synthesize data and derive insights for their customer meetings.

Integrating data and providing CFPs with tools is simply a nudge in the right direction. Making these applications integral to daily business processes requires a culture shift. This is when the real movement occurs—employee empowerment. Now CFPs have the information they need on-demand AND use it daily. It’s counter-productive to invest in CRM systems that lay dormant or become mere reporting tools because CFPs don’t see them as useful. CRM systems is great for management to track sales progress and run forecasts, but just because it is useful for managing the predicting financials doesn’t mean it provides value to the sales rep in their day to day lives. Executives need to ensure that the tools in place give the sales reps a complete picture of the customer and insight to interact intelligently. Moreover, they need to ensure that CFPs are compelled, incented and rewarded for making the shift to improve their sales approach. I was at the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) conference in October, and heard how one organization is changing their comp structure to promote improved customer interaction with the sales team. Now that is making a culture shift!

According to IDC, “Thirty-three percent of unsuccessful deals could have been won if the salesperson had been better informed or acted more client-oriented.” How are you optimizing your CRM strategy?

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