Michael MaozI recently published two pieces of research that discuss the use of analytics for customer service operations. I’ve wanted to see these published for years, and I had half hoped that if I wished hard enough that they would materialize on their own. They didn’t, and I spent quite a bit of time listening to clients, looking at software products, and watching some of the projects that were going on. Pretty exciting stuff: matching customer personality to service rep personality, predicting the most likely reason a customer was calling, accurately presenting the correct marketing message that would induce a customer to ask more about an offer or service, or analyzing the efficacy of customer interaction flows – each of these delivered measurable benefit.
Yet despite the compelling case for a focus on analytics at every level of customer interaction, there is less emphasis on projects such as these than there is on Social Media projects. Maybe that is just the way it is – there are so many confidence men (and women!) and shills talking about the amazing benefits of Social Media – who can resist? It’s like a Shell Game played on the IT side-walk. You lay your money down and bet you know under which cup the pea, or nut, or whatever, comes to rest. But you are somehow always wrong, because the people around you are in on the con, and the shell holder is palming the pea to begin with – it’s a no-win.
I am interested in Social CRM and Social Media projects, and we are committed to helping clients build strategies. Hand in hand with these projects is our advice that other, vital, projects such as embedded analytics and knowledge management, not be left to languish. True: no one is hooting and goading you into these high-value projects, but your customers will reward your attention to their needs. Isn’t a part of ‘social’ acting on behalf of the customer?
What do you think?
Category: Analytics for Social CRM Innovation and Customer Experience Leadership Social CRM Social Networking Social Software Strategic Planning Tags:
2 responses so far ↓
1 Ron Hoffman May 12, 2011 at 1:14 am
I don’t think it’s a matter of business value from social vs yet another shell game.
We all know the decision making process that’s behind every time one has to allocate his (or her) efforts between creating a proper analytics infrastructure vs creating yet another feature that could be a winning feature (it never is).
The sad thing is that companies think they could come up with a killing feature, instead of realizing it’s a marathon, you need to score points as you go, while the proper way to do so, is really knowing what you’re doing.
Knowing what you’re doing, comes out of setting the proper metrics (just a couple, no more) that would measure the financial impact, while AB testing everything you do in order to be able to quantify the effect of everything you do.
AB testing is the key, and although just about everyone knows it, it’s not being done properly, it’s not part of the regular business flow, there’s no empowerment for business/marketing people to do so self reliantly and there’s no automation in it. (according to the pre-set metrics)
2 Jon Victor May 14, 2011 at 3:46 pm
I thought the medium was the message. If so, there is as much – or more – customer intelligence inherent in social media as media than there is in the message, no matter how effectively analyzed.