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.