During the preparation for the Webcast there was a deep discussion about the role of data, and how it is refined into information, which in turn is further distilled into true knowledge, served in a form useful to a customer or someone in sales, marketing, logistics and/or customer support. It took me back to something that Isaiah Berlin said in his definition of ‘judgment,’ and in his case he was speaking of political judgment. But it applies more broadly to the challenge for the enterprise:

Judgment is ‘a capacity for integrating, multicolored, evanescent perpetually overlapping data.’

And whether you are a CIO or the head of Customer Care, you can feel this in your bones. Data is flowing in from QR codes and embedded devices and NFC and mobile phones and the website and from community and from internal sources. How do we create sense out of what can feel inchoate and chaotic? How do we filter out the extraneous bits from the vital bytes that could mean business insight? How do we neutralise for bias? How do we achieve understanding on a semantic level and a business-outcome level?

At Gartner we continue to focus on the Intent Driven Enterprise, or building a business (or university, or government!) where antennae are always listening, contextually, for meaning and opportunity and intent. And then that is mapped to the enterprise intent for that group, segment, or individual. From there we build out knowledge. Gathering the data that is required to get to insight is only possible when there is a sense of what outcomes we want. How do those DNA strands sequence themselves just so A-C-T-C, dideoxynucleotides lining up and forming that perfect you? We kind of know now, but it was a mystery for a long time.

Václav Havel, who left us one month ago today, was once asked how did a group of students and dissidents manage to achieve what they had in the Velvet Revolution. What he said was, “The more we did, the more we were able to do, and the more we were able to do, the more we did.” That perfectly heuristic approach of thinking, taking action, repairing and improving, and moving forward, is what every CIO wants to happen in the enterprise. It is what each of us wants as a human being. It makes sense.

Turning these ideas on data – information – knowledge – action is what it is all about. If you happen to be a Gartner client and want to see what the team I am a part of is writing about in this area, you can check out what I published this morning: http://bit.ly/yj6w1I. We’ll be drilling into all of the issues around customer engagement and experience from every relevant angle.

See you soon in Orlando, and as always: thanks for the kind emails.

How do businesses work through the dense layers of negativity in the Tweets about them, and how do they foster broader participation in communities? One key lies in handing over some of the responsibility that Marketing now bears to Customer Service and Support, or to whoever is in charge of Customer Experience.

Companies are stuck right now, their bows sand-barred on the shoals of Social Media Monitoring and siloed “Social” initiatives. Just as businesses took 15 years to consider hiring a Director of Customer Experience who looks across the holistic picture of what happens to the customer during a marketing, sales and service interaction, it is time to bring on someone to lead a comprehensive view of the ‘social interactions. Do it now, because mobile channels, Facebook communities, Twitter groups, Fan Pages, and your own Web site are all bubbling away with customer chatter. It’s like when a Supernova blasted the ingredients of future life at earth out there now: chaotic but pregnant with possibility. Seize the opportunity and learn to re-think the way that the enterprise engages the customer.

Symposium is filled with presentations on this topic this week, so if you’ve made it down there, attend a session or two tomorrow! Check http://bit.ly/nAbDfw.

Weird coincidence, eh, that this morning I blogged about Big Data and an hour later Oracle announces it has bought Endeca Technologies?

Why Big Data? Maybe start with “What is Big Data?” Essentially, it is big when standard, stand alone relational databases are inadaquate to search, gather, analyze and operationalize data. That can happen because it is coming from multiple sources and in multiple forms: Facebook posts, Tweets, YouTube video, QR codes, phone logs, IVR feeds, customer and product data.

Even when you capture the data, it is still a long way from becoming “information.” Think about it: 01010100011011110110010001100001011110010010000001101001011100110010000001100001
001000000110001001100101011000010111010101110100011010010110011001110101011011
0000100000011001000110000101111001001011100000110100001010  
Sure, any binary brain knows that means “Today is a beautiful day.” But I’d rather have it in five words – subject, predicate, object: thought and meaning. This is a big problem for almost all existing CRM systems, and beyond any Social CRM tool. There are software companies working on the problem, and trends in in-line memory and pattern based systems are all accelerating the creation of new forms of business process in sales, marketing and customer service.

The issues are as big as the data. Consider the case of making an offer during a sales or service engagement. Old school: make the pitch and maybe it will work. Big Data: Run sentiment analysis on the customer, match with ‘best agent.’ Run profitability analysis in real time, look at a statistical analysis of the customer’s psychographic profile. Cross reference with their “Social Graph” position for influence and clout. Determine offer. Yikes is that a lot of computing, and it needs to happen in real time.

So: if you are down in Orlando, whether one of the 1700+ CIOs or a line of business manager or BI guru, let’s talk about how you are going to respond to the opportunity of Big Data to Insightful Information for your customer initiatives.

Enjoy the show.

Then we take this well intentioned CSR and reduce their ranks. Winnowing them like the ranks of soldiers in La Bataille de Verdun – the Verdun campaign in WWI, wiping out over 300,000 soldiers in under a year. How is that for a morale dampener? Yet that is what is happening in banking, and in insurance, and media, retail services – cadres of CSRs are being ‘outplaced.’ In the 1990′s there was half as much work per agent. Now they have twice the work, and it is more difficult. Compensation has not kept pace with stress levels. How would you perform at your job knowing that the creeping forces of business process optimization, self-healing systems, knowledge management and customer self service were eventually going to leave you out of a job?

To think that the panacea that will give the CSR new opportunities for growth and advance is true for a tiny percentage of the overall agent pool. For five times more agents than will benefit there will be a reduction in ranks. The customer service function will be 30% externalized within ten years. That’s right: you may not have much of a formal contact center, and it will not much resemble that of 2012. That is what we will be predicting, researching and publishing in our upcoming year. It is both scary (for the CSR) and rewarding (for the business), and it is this duality that will require a fine balancing act. How we manage the next eight years of transition will define many businesses – for their vision and compassion or lack thereof.

Where will you end up on the scale between a hard knocks life and business Nirvana?

Great things happen when the conversation is with the head of customer experience, or the head of social media, or the director of customer service. The big chill is when either the CEO or CIO get mentioned. It is as though Yama, Lord of Death, were there in the background. It is exceptionally rare to see one of the line of business heads who is connected tightly with the CIO with a co-commitment to customer excellence in any measurable way. Something akin to (to paraphrase the American Benjamin Franklin): they both hang together or certainly will hang separately.

The terrific news is that there is so much vibrancy between the heads of marketing and the heads of customer service. This is an area where I spend a large part of my time. Marketing is taking the great work in Social Media, listening, monitoring Twitter and Facebook, and mining customer interaction data, and extending it into the Customer Service and Support functions. This can be on the website, mobile device, kiosk, social media, peer-to-peer communities, or the telephone.

The next super development is the range of new software providers in the nascent ‘social’ and customer analytics space delivering great products. They are mostly as a service in a Cloud model, but not all. Companies and products like ExAudios, Dimelo, Attensity, Lithium, Conversocial, AddressTwo, TRG Satmap, ZenDesk, FuzeDigital, Nimble, and DoveTail – are just a few of the newer generation of products with a Social twist.

Do everyone a favor, suck up a bit to the CEO. Help her or him understand the fantastic things that Social-centric processes are doing for your department or function. Be specific and be passionate. What are they going to do – fire you for enthusiasm? Someone else will want you even more. That is a promise.

Is the prevailing wisdom that we should not focus on profit and loss if we’re a business? Happier or more content students or citizens or donors if we are a non-profit, higher ed, or utility or government? It’s funny, but I was on a client call the other day and they were telling me in an en passant way that in the social sphere I had a very low ‘clout’ score. The client suggested I engage more with the Hash Tags. Swim more in the social stream. It was hard not to think I had just boarded “Furthur” with Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. I thought that, but didn’t say that, because I knew that would date me. Heck: my client was 99.999% sure not to know what I was talking about any more than I knew what she was talking about.

Well, here is the thing: I love social media, but I love my profession even more. I’m giving as much of 100% as I can to make them successful in their businesses and government functions. Social, reputation management, communities, analytics, crowdsourcing, personalized and real time marketing offers, intent-driven systems and processes, multi-modal communication are the currency of the business economy. Commerce is commerce. Most of my clients are in their jobs to make money. They want to make and keep profitable customers, and they want the tools and processes to get it right.

We have over 500 documented examples of Social CRM success. Success is where something improved that leads to business value. But there are over 50,000,000 businesses in the world. We are just scratching the surface, and for every business deeply commited to ‘social’ processes, there are still hesitations, doubts and debates about the extent to which the business / organization can externalize processes. There is no good correlation between business success and such a ‘customer-driven’ culture.

Net: we are going deeper into social processes, and mobile delivery of information, and analysis of business value, and what drives customer loyalty and leaves them as net promoters of the business. We’ll engage with the Hash tags (mine is @mimaoz) – sure! And… we’ll be out there panning for business gold in the social streams.

So: fear, loathing, dread, anxiety, resignation, capitulation, mild nausea, frustration – just a few of the words that young people 15 – 19, female and male, from North and South America, Europe and Asia (ok, only South Korea, Singapore and Thailand) used to describe their feelings when faced with dialing a Customer Service Contact Center for help. “Those people are mean.” “They’re so old.” “They just yell at you and make you feel stupid.” “They never give you a break.” “It’s so slow.”

All the while, these tight knots of students are thumbing away on their iPhones or Blackberries. They want information fast, they want it easy, they want it right, and they want you to treat them like their peers. Their social rules keep them relatively civil. They know that you have to give a “Like” and post happy birthday and send around great pix and avoid caddiness. My daughter’s birthday was yesterday and by 7:00 AM she had 46 “Happy Birthdays” on her “Wall.” This young woman has connections with a lot of merchants – trust me - yet not ONE sent her a Happy Birthday. Not one sent an SMS or a post or a letter. Before you roll your eyes – think about it again. You are the adversary. They don’t hear from you, you hear from them. When you do contact them it is to entice them to outsource their marketing department by endorsing or commenting on a good or merchandise. Do you think they are naive? They see straight through it. It’s oldsters who are bored and lonely who are responding to you, no?

What do we do about this situation? Yes, you can get more “social” and create more ‘gives and gets.’ Just like any other social compact, but one appropriate to business. And get your Customer Service not only integrated into the community of customers / consumers and/or partners, but also get the customer service representatives into the second decade of the 21st century. They need better tools, better knowledge, better rules of engagement, and a better awareness of the real process the customer goes through.

The Customer Service Contact Center will embrace social media over the next five years until the point where there is no demarcation between the “Social Media” and the other communication media. There will be a continuum, with chat, email, live agents, collaboration, posts to Facebook, absorption of Facebook data into the customer record, the Twitter stream, and an externalization of the agent pool – to the extent that the customer can ‘know’ the agent with whom they are interacting. Mostly they will be using self service and the customer community, but when they want a human, and YOU want them to want a human, they will look forward to that ‘call.’

And then, like in the great Billy Wilder film of 1955 and starring Marilyn Monroe, along came the Seven Year Itch. The film is remembered less for its plot than it is for a single image, now a part of American cinematographic legend, of Marilyn standing atop a subway grate, struggling with a diaphanous white dress. But the heart of the film was about the sagging relationship between a couple after they are married for seven years. And so it was with most enterprise Customer Relationship Management programs.

What happened to kill CRM programs, and what can we learn in our embrace of Social Media, collaboration, and customer centricity? Painted large, CRM succumbed to Schpilkas.  Unless your grandparents are from Krakow or points further east, this will be a new term for you, and I’m inclined to let the curious discover its meaning on their own. But here’s the thing: in 1998 I was consulting on an engagement with one of the world’s largest publishers on creating lasting customer relationships. After I spoke there was a panel discussion, and one of the woman on the panel compared a CRM program to childbirth: “I thought once a child is born, the hard part is over! Boy was I mistaken!”

When faced with the AHA! moment of “Boy was I mistaken,” most companies began to lose faith in their ability to sustain a long-term program of customer process improvement. Consultants were expensive, change management is painful, software is unwieldy, and customer demands kept evolving, and so did the interaction channels. A degree of entropy creeps in, and unless that enervating forces is dissipated, you’re doomed. How? By telling good stories, by evolving in small bits, by measuring, improving, and again communicating. The greats didn’t fail, but everyone else stumbled, chasing the next shiny object.

The new kid on the block is Social CRM. Opening up business processes to the scrutiny of the customer, and listening to the myriad opinions, signs, sentiments and words that pour out, often unvarnished. To read the low-end Customer Magazines, Social CRM is a big, big hit. These articles are usually self-serving. They point to the successes without really getting beneath the outer wrappings of these programs. How are posts converted to Cases? What is the escalation process? How is an opinion / request that is captured in Twitter or Facebook transmitted to Technical Support or Customer Service so that they know what the small Social Media team knows? How do knowledge articles get created and vetted? How do we measure success for Customer Service versus Marketing? Where do we begin and where do we go next? There is magic in Social CRM and collaborative processes, but not everyone is born knowing magic.

You thought you could bury CRM and move onto Social CRM? That is like saying you couldn’t hack the 20K run so now you are training for a marathon. Before you get too far down the Social CRM path, re-visit your CRM strategy: you may find that the original concept of customer-centric business process is what drives great companies still today. Social CRM is not for the weak or the undisciplined, and neither was CRM. If CRM was a marathon, Social CRM will be your ultra-marathon – or your Achilles heel.

No one wants to hear my banal tale of failed process and service, because each of us has been bludgeoned by the airline industry to the point where we are grateful if they lighten up during a pat-down, and they bring water once reaching cruising altitude before our tongues swell.

What is so wonderfully and richly ironic is that each of these companies has a robust Marketing / Loyalty program and a Social Media function. Each spends an average of $100 million per year identifying customer segments, marketing trips, selling Credit Cards, and sending endless mailings and special Social Activities (take a picture of our logo on a fast moving city bus while standing in traffic – that could earn you points, if you survive!). They are Masters of their Domains. But the Marketing Domain is a distant island, cut off from the world.

Remember the thought experiment about a tree falls in the woods? It goes back to the 19th century in its modern form, but essentially the experiment asks: if a tree falls, and no ear is present to hear the sound, would there, in fact, be a sound at all? If you are a scientist, the technical answer is, “No,” because sound is vibration that reaches the ear where it is converted by the delicate bones and nerves in the ear into something that our brains call ‘sound.’ (I am sorry if this short-circuits any university drinking games by giving away the answer.)
Enter Social CRM Projects at said companies: Twitter, facebook, YouTube, forums, phone calls, blogs, SMS are captured. Check. Dissatisfaction registered. Check. Reports run. Check. Meetings held to debate the meaning of the nattering nabobs in our customer base. Check. And then? Then our Social Tree, gently falling from the heights of the jungle canopy of the world of the customer, crashes without sound onto the jungle floor, and nary a sound is registered. Customer Service still puts you on hold. The call still gets dropped, the Website process is still different than the phone. The Partners still have different rules. Why? Because, for most of us, despite our attempts at greatness, are forced to live on our functional islands. They are they, and we are we, and though the customer thinks that we are we, there is no we.

But for an extra $90 the British carrier just let me have the honour of pre-booking an actual seat on the plane! Not that their partner has such a policy, but let’s drop it. Now that is service.

Enter “Social Networking” and Social Media and Social CRM, on the heals of business philosophers declaring the failure of Customer Relationship Management efforts. The latter was weak analysis of business application deployments that failed to meet the promises dangled by the large consultancies that made billions of dollars selling the projects. Now businesses are dancing to the Trance music of Social. The rhythm is enticing, but there are just too many beats per minute for most business leaders: monitor, listen, poll, feeds, Tweets, posts, mobile platforms, Tablets, forums, crowd sourcing, voting, outside-in processes.  Businesses are attempting to onboard all of these new Social Media tools and processes, and keep your ongoing customer efforts for marketing, sales and customer service, while moving all of the business applications supporting the existing customer initiatives to the Cloud.

This is why I see an end, temporarily, to the CRM that was in place for 12 years. Organizations have come to the tacit (not stated, not explicit) conclusion that they cannot accomplish the goal of managing the customer relationship centrally. The resources cannot be rallied because there are too many parallel initiatives under way, and decision making has devolved on departments and geographies to meet the onslaught.

The end of CRM classic does not mean the beginning of another clear trend. It is more likely that organizations will re-focus on an expanded definition of CRM that includes the Social dimension. The need for the corporation or business or organization to think holistically about the customer will not go away. The current fascination with myriad departmental initiatives to meet changing customer demand at the expense of ownership at the top level comes at a cost. Without a roadmap you won’t get there unless you are lucky. And ‘there’ is a state of customer satisfaction with your business.

Are you seeing something similar? I’ll expand on some of these points next month, but it has been coming up with IT planners on client calls and meetings.