Good Article

As a follow up to my last post a few weeks back, there was a post that was found on the TechCrunch site yesterday that continues to back up my learnings in the comms space. I titled the post Push vs Pull but this link talks about the same concepts.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/16/the-future-will-be-personalized/

Well worth a few minutes of time to read and ponder. Personalization or context are the next big thing, not only in consumer services, but also in the enterprise customer service space.

Push vs Pull

As I have been going about my days in the past few months, I have been continuing to hear, at different times, the same idea being talked about. I listened to a speech that Mark Benioff made a month or so ago. I listened to a presentation from TED. I heard an interview with the top guy at IBM for analytics and many more. What they were all talking about in some form though is a very similar thing that I have been talking about in customer service for some time now. It is not about having the data. It is not even about making sure the data is presented nicely against a bunch of other data on a fancy dashboard.

Nope. The real next step in technology that I have been talking about, specifically with comms companies in customer service, is that it is about presenting the data, to the right person, at the right time, IN CONTEXT. And it is this IN CONTEXT piece that is consistently been missing from the conversation in the past. Yeah it's great that my billing system gives me 1000 points of data about the customer in 5 different screens. But can it intelligently give me the 10 pieces of data that are most relevant to me based on what the customer has called in about at that moment in time?

Think about it. In 1999, Amazon was lighting the world on fire and to get information you needed to go to their site and start searching around for the info that you wanted. The experience was you going out and finding what you wanted and then taking action with that information. As we have moved further and further into the future, we have started to expect that information becomes more and more intelligent and starts coming to us. Think how different Facebook is now then Amazon was. We have moved forward in the sense that information is more and more coming to us without us needing to find it, but most of it is still out of context. As an example, my wife today has something like 1300 friends on Facebook. But her challenge is that Facebook is not intelligent enough to know the most common Friends she clicks on or messages or reads info from. If it did, it would likely start to order the info she received in a way that was relevant and important to her instead of just blindly putting up everything that her friends post.

This is the same in the world of customer service. Yes, agents can use Knowledge Management Systems to find info. Yes, the billing system or the CRM system has everything you need to know about the customer in their somewhere. Yes, the notes about the last call live somewhere in a system. But the problem I still am seeing is the lack of context that is being used to deliver THE RIGHT information at a time that is most appropriate for someone to consume and then use. And it is not about putting up more links that seem to be relevant for an agent in a KM portal. It is about making the content come to the agent in a useable and actionable way.

I heard this analogy and thought it was worth passing along. Today we are looking at data as discrete chunks of information, trying to analyze against other discrete pieces and then producing summarized reports/knowledge that will help to make better decisions. What we should be viewing data as is more of a puzzle that we played with as kids. Instead of comparing two pieces of data against each other, lets start using the picture that has already been created as a way of figuring out where the puzzle piece fits. In the context of a call center agent, lets take the burden off of them to understand the whole puzzle and bring to them only the puzzle pieces/data/knowledge that helps them complete the puzzle for the picture the business wants to create. It's about putting the right information, in front of the right person, in context to bring to life a truly authentic customer experience.

What I am Hearing Part 5

So this is the final official post in the series that I had laid out about a month ago and it has to do with social media and what I am hearing in the communication provider space about social media.

Over the last two or three years, social media has been a confusing space for most communications companies but also a space that represents a huge opportunity for them. All of the most popular companies have their LinkedIn sites, their Facebook pages and their Twitter accounts that they use in a variety of different ways. But when you ask an SVP or VP of Strategic IT in a communications company how they are using technology to take advantage of the social space, there is usually a deer in headlights blank stare that shortly follows the question. The reality is that there are so many different ways to use social media today for a company that it has become a challenge for IT groups to get their arms around how they harness technology intelligently to enable the business user groups. It is a bit of the wild west right now in companies and with that confusion and chaos, comes opportunity. The challenge becomes where do you focus that opportunity.

What I am hearing right now is that IT groups are just trying to get their arms around the blocking and tackling bits of social media and lay the foundation for the future. This is incredibly complex for them as they have various groups of business users that are looking at different ideas to leverage social media. Marketing wants to use social media to raise awareness and promote conversations. Customer service wants to use social media to find ways to identify issues with customers and provide solutions to problems. Product teams want to use social media for input into new products or services. And from what I am hearing, executives are trying to figure out a way to promote the use of social media without really understanding it themselves. So, IT execs end up working tirelessly to satisfy the needs of the business while at the same time making sure that the technology fits their roadmap for the future.

So, with that all being said, where does this impact customer service and how are companies starting to use social media in communication companies? Most are starting with basic building blocks that just get them listening as best they can and responding to customers as if social is just another channel of communication for dealing with issues. Comcast does this today, DirecTV does this today, Cox does this and many others. They monitor the conversation and respond to people to make sure their issues are resolved. As they start to grow that part of their communication with customers, there will be a natural extension from the call center business to ensure that these communications are handled in a way that is consistent with the rest of the channels. I am sure many vendors are already addressing this need and we will see more and more products in the near future to help que and order the responses to social media.

Once you have the basics in place, then I think the most interesting thing I am hearing lately is that many companies are searching for a way to help bring the social world into their business. Because social media is changing the way that companies communicate and interact with the customer, companies need to become more of a social organization or social company. That means they need to change the way their processes work, change the way they engage, change the way they escalate and change the SLA's that they manage to for customer issue resolution. The social world is forcing this change and companies are thinking about how they address this with technology. They need to start thinking about how they address the social customer but how they do it within the context of a process so that it becomes integrated tightly into what the core direction of the company is and not just a side project that creates more chaos.

So to wrap up this post for now, social media is being discussed and argued about almost daily at most communications companies. Where I am seeing most companies focus right now is on getting the basics down first and then building their capabilities out from there. Addressing the needs of the social customer is important and integral to companies succeeding going forward. But only if companies integrate it in a way that allows them to become a social business while at the same time putting process around the space to ensure the company is meeting the needs of the customer and not merely encouraging chaos.