The enterprise has two main
streams of data that it can capture and turn into wealth: data from the
specific open case with a customer, and data in the aggregate, from the
conversation occurring between the customer base and the company.
The
retailer Best Buy is widely studied for its development path with
customer analytics. It is now aggressively merging data streams across
all its channels, online and offline. Matt Smith, Best Buy’s Senior
Director of Customer Insight, explains that, while most business
intelligence (BI) tools reflect the state of the company itself, Best
Buy’s customer insight team “is focused on beginning that analysis from
the perspective of an individual consumer.”
Smith says
Best Buy is now combining non-transactional data into the mix. This
includes clickstream data from the website – part of the
“conversation.” And the company is now beginning to merge call-center
data as well.
It will be interesting to see what data from the Forgotten Space
of support adds to the value of the customer in hard dollar terms over
time. Best Buy may become one of the first large corporations to move
support from a cost center to a profit center classification; it makes
sense that it would be a retailer: see Retail Discovers Customer Service Improves Bottom Line
Now
Smith is seeing the convergence of the individual-customer capture
systems into one unified view that provides meaningful knowledge about
the customers in the aggregate.
“You’re seeing the tools sets begin to come together.
When I think about individual customer experiences, each of our
channels represents a listening post. Whether it’s a call center or a
store or a Web page, I’m listening to the customer tell me something.
Ultimately, as these relationships with the customer deepen and as the
game changes from acquiring customers to building relationships with
customers, you have to figure out how to be relevant to millions of
customers at a time.” – Crossing Channels: Q&A With Best Buy’s Matt Smith
Yesterday we looked at Dell and its approach to gathering aggregate data straight from the crowd, using its Idea Storm
online capture. Idea Storm is a web-fronted discussion and voting
module designed to poll opinion in the mass. The information presented
is being dashboarded to upper management, directly resulting in actions
such as Dell’s decision to sell PCs with Linux installed.
As
we explained yesterday, the Dell move is bred from very strong
leadership, stemming actually from one man, Michael Dell, who had the
power to call the change.
Most companies have to rely less
on individual vision and more on group consensus. How do they manage to
exhibit the kind of bravery that Dell is showing by attempting to
engage its customers in true conversation?
There are two
forces at work. At the “bottom end” is analytics and the software
offered by vendors and developed by IT departments that emulate the
Best Buy approach of data mining the entire customer base by individual.
At
the “top end” there is the demonstration effect of major corporations
beginning to change. Xerox has taken a plunge into learning from its
customers, taking the radical step of asking customers what they want, and then changing its development path accordingly.
And
Sun as we noted yesterday is reaching outside of its own base for
information from users, and feeding this data into its service culture.
So
there are the aggregations of data about
customers, dashboarded up from the floor, and there is also the peer influence on C-level executives
from companies turning an increasingly brave face towards their
customers. From these two forces eventually a system of knowledge
management may be brought into being that enables granular
decision-making at every touchpoint backed up enterprise-wide by a true
culture of customer service.
