In the great march towards
perfect customer service – and thus perfect customer loyalty and
retention – companies find that there is much they don’t know about
their customer. Software and systems attempt to fill the knowledge gap,
tracking and analyzing customer actions and preferences.
Some
of the task reverts back to the old-fashioned method of simply asking
customers what they want, combining Web, email and interactive voice
response (IVR) surveys with call-center management software.
”’This is one of the nascent areas of CRM,’
said Liz Roche, managing partner with Stamford, Conn.-based Customers
Inc. ‘Enterprises are still trying to figure out what they want to
know. Capturing the feedback and information is something they know
they should be doing, and they get the concept of multi-channel, but
the hard part is rationalizing that and injecting it back into a
business process.’” – CRM - CDC adds customer feedback
It has never been simple for the enterprise
to emulate the small shopkeeper in terms of knowing its customers
intimately, each one individually. But this is the goal, and it takes a
lot of development to get it right, and then scale it up. In the
meantime, customer loyalty is at risk, simply because the enterprise
cannot afford to take the leaps in human gregariousness that real
people can – too much is at stake. Customers, and their advocates, are
not impressed.
“Three strategies that address winning customers are
product enhancement, product line extension, and good old marketing.
They all have one thing in common with the customer experience: None of
them can be done particularly well without first asking customers what
they think, feel, like – and hate. Using the phrase customer experience
is just a ploy in an ever-escalating gambit to win customers and their
money, and it’s not even the only good one. – From Community Activism
In the current environment of customer relationships, and the CRM
systems that partially embrace these relationships, every appearance of
authentic human or even system competence and knowledge is a gift to
the customer, sealing loyalty – through the near future at least – to
some degree.
This is why software like Dovetail CRM
has such a powerful effect on its users. To ordinary humans, it doesn’t
seem too much to ask, that customers calling for help from their
vendors should talk to an insider who knows what’s going on. In the age
of knowledge, lack of knowledge is very apparent to customers. And the
knowledge exists, of course, within the enterprise, within the database
– in the case of Dovetail within the Clarify database. For the support
call, it’s a matter of retrieving the information in a view that helps
the immediate situation in real time, and enabling agents to perform
pertinent actions. Dovetail software does all this, with its vast
extensibility through APIs and web services, its open standards, and
its seamless integration into the existing Clarify system.
The task of discovery continues, with much analysis.
“The analysis of operational customer data alone
explores only one of several dimensions and can lead to incorrect
conclusions. Other data sources need to be included, such as informal
interaction data (that is, what was said and how it was said during
customer-agent conversations) and more-formal survey data, both of
which collate data directly from the customer (with or without their
knowledge) for analysis.” – Most Companies Like to Analyze Data
It’s tempting to dismiss the enterprise
thirst for analysis as a blinder that shields it from the real customer
experience, but this is too simplistic. In fact the complexity of the
task that companies face is daunting. Daily business generates massive
amounts of data, and executives are struggling to make sense of it all.
Wrong conclusions can have huge leverage that may not show until
several financial quarters later.
One thing becoming clear
to summary-centric executives is that two dimensions aren’t enough
anymore. Graphical is good, 3-D is better. Three dimensional reporting
brings sharp clarity to the wash of cross-enterprise data, in a
zoomable picture of the whole system.
“The power of service-oriented architectures (SOA) is
apparent in a new field, enterprise ecosystem visualization. Innovative
mash-ups allow users to visualize business information, such as
regional sales for a particular product, on a map in three dimensions.”
How to Visualize a Business Ecosystem
The ongoing executive struggle – performed
through the evolving business intelligence infrastructure – is to see
the enterprise clearly, in real time, across all of its operations, and
to act with accuracy and agility. To accomplish this, companies need to
grasp current data as it is being generated, and prepare this data for
ad hoc analysis in multiple views, while simultaneously archiving it
according to some kind of library structure, into the enterprise
knowledge base.
In addition to knowledge collection simply
in order to know, a concurrent knowledge retrieval infrastructure has
to exist, in order to act. So the enterprise needs to join all of its
workers into a communal knowledge management system that empowers
agents, and that also supplies perfect and individualized customer
service. Furthermore it needs to harvest undiscovered process knowledge
from its workers, while at the same time providing impromptu training
to workforce subgroups at specific need.
