Michael Maoz
VP Distinguished Analyst
13 years at Gartner
26 years IT industry
Michael Maoz is a research vice president and distinguished analyst in Gartner Research. His research focuses on CRM and customer-centric Web strategies. Mr. Maoz is the research leader for both the customer service and support strategies area and customer-centric Web… Read Full Bio
by Michael Maoz | March 23, 2012 | Comments Off
Who is a more natural ally for anyone building a customer-centric strategy than the CIO? They have budget, and they have technical knowledge, and they have a strong desire to make the business a success. Despite this, there are so many competing camps in any business working not so much at cross-purposes to the IT folks, but orthogonally. I’ve been listening and questioning the folks in ‘social’ and customer service and marketing, and the agency teams and the web developers and the innovation crew and the ‘process experts’ for signs of how they might work together more effectively. And here is something small but maybe significant: Where the CEO has said, straight out, that there will be harmony and accountability around the improvement of customer-involving processes, and no one is free to act as a lone wolf – magic happens. Magic on the level of Yazoo Street Scandal – crazy instruments, innovative arrangements, creative energy, and something that is a marked departure from anything you’ve seen before.
Don’t let the loony schismogenetics of the corporation bring you into confrontation, that will only bring you to dysfunction. But if you are the CIO, gather good stories. Give the marketing folks something they didn’t know they could get, or set up something with the customer service team that is from off-cycle budgeting – just to show that they matter.
I have been waist deep, and sometimes up to my neck, in the 2012 CRM Customer Service Contact Center MQ. I published the overview of the criteria yesterday, and if you are a client you can find it at http://www.gartner.com/resId=1959716 . The main takeaway for me has been the fragmentation in the market. I can be speaking to a client in India and be recommending someone who has never appeared on a Magic Quadrant, or to a client with a long-established Customer Service function whose main issue is building a credible customer service listening capability for Twitter and Facebook and mobile.
Not to give a spoiler alert, but the Magic Quadrant, after about 60 hours of work, mostly shows that there are few cookie-cutter answers to ‘what is the right choice.’ It is like: which house do I buy in London? emmmm.. it depends. So we will still have a lot to discuss to find the right neighborhood or mews or flat or house to match your tastes and needs and budget and location and delivery style.
Thanks to all who have participated in the reference process!!
Category: Applications CIO Contact Center CRM Customer Centric Web Innovation and Customer Experience Leadership Social Networking Twitter Tags:
by Michael Maoz | March 19, 2012 | 2 Comments
We have a terrific Canadian client who is right now embroiled in a Twitter nightmare. Like in the example of a global fast-food purveyor, and a large construction-equipment company before them, Twitter tweaked their sense of themselves before a crowd of millions. To this I’d say that, like Doug Adams’ wonderful Hitchhiker’s Guide, your Social Media project should have, “.…the words DON’T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.’
Whether you are a veteran or new at Social Media, it is likely that your competition is on equal footing. If they are not, then use their superior ability as a classroom and as a carrot to obtain greater funding. But why did I mention the NCAA Men’s team, Syracuse? Because they are just a small example of how you can overcome injuries, or even the absence of your star center, and still continue forward. I have no idea if they’ll go much further, but the point is that even with the myriad setbacks, they have used leadership, teamwork, and skill to overcome deficits that would swamp the fragile craft most teams sail upon.
Social Media projects are a bad idea unless they are in the context of a Social CRM program. The difference? In a project, we have a beginning, middle, and end. In a program we have a beginning that can start in the middle of another process, but iteratively, through small heuristic steps, we test, learn, analyze and improve. There is no end point, but instead we live Zeno’s Paradox happily. It is not the arriving from point A to point B, it is the journey, taken together with the members of your organization in concert with your partners and customers.
Suggestion: CIOs are not going to ‘own’ Social initiatives. At best you can be the conductor and lead violin. Marketing, Customer Service, Logistics, Product Development and the Customer are going to be your orchestra, and the determinants of your success or failure.
To all who came down to Orlando for the Customer360 last week: thank you so much!! I got to have 24 individual sessions with some of you, and your insights were encouraging and rewarding for us.
Category: CIO CRM Gartner Customer 360 Summit Innovation and Customer Experience Leadership Social CRM Social Networking Strategic Planning Twitter Tags:
by Michael Maoz | March 15, 2012 | 3 Comments
Down here at the Gartner Customer360 Summit we have a house full of folks struggling with the concept of blending their existing Social Media ‘strategy’ into a more holistic Enterprise Social strategy. There is a problem: IT is off to the side, more than happy to help but often not wanted at the party. Marketing is working with agencies on seductive content. Customer Service is treading water hoping for a life raft from the Social Media team that will give them, Customer Service, a way to understand what customers are saying. And what about the Social Media newbies sending in that list of keywords and sentiment from Facebook and Twitter? They think all three – IT, Customer Service, and Marketing, are tragic. So much so that they didn’t show up. They show up at groovier venues – but a conference with people with real lines of business to run? They say NO NO NO. Out in splendid isolation, free of responsibility and with no access to impact customer processes, they can make no mistakes. They are the bubble kids, whereas our conference was about putting theory into practice to solve business problems.
For 85% of participants this week who are in the world of Customer Service, a question has been asked over and over: what is our role now in the brave new world of “Social.” And I’d say, “Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed that we personally are needed. Others would meet the case equally well, if not better…. Why are we here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in this immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come.” OK, maybe it was Vladimir who said this in Act II of Samuel Beckett’s, Waiting for Godot. But both feelings are there: what is our ultimate role in this ‘social experiment,’ and ‘what do we do today?’
I have been impressed by the many initiatives under way in our customer base, making Customer Service more collaborative, more social, better leveraging crowd-sourced knowledge. In my 24 one-on-one customer interviews this week, the true risk takers and leaders have been mostly business to business. They have figured out how to connect people to people, how to foster trust and participation and relevancy for participants in networks. They have helped identify knowledge and content gaps, helped in its creation, curation and retirement. And they have performance metrics to demonstrate success.
I am encouraged by the passion CIOs are showing in wanting to get in front of Social Media, and in the Customer Service teams and their search for guidance on how to find 1) the value of social to the customer and the value of social to the business, 2) the right way to measure risk/reward in social projects, 3) how to make the effort most relevant to customers.
Though I didn’t see a specific secret to success in on-boarding ‘social/collaboration’ into ongoing Customer Service efforts, there were definitely best practices. These usually were evident in businesses where IT, Marketing and Customer Service had stronger roles, and where senior executives sanction and watch the initiatives evolve.
I look forward to hearing from the many clients and guests who joined us this week. The summit was incredibly alive and interactive, and I learned a lot about the hard work so many of you are putting into all of your Customer Experience programs. Thanks for all who came, and for those of you who couldn’t be there – maybe I’ll see you in London in June (http://bit.ly/hYmC8y ) or Orlando in October!
Category: Applications CIO Contact Center CRM Gartner Customer 360 Summit Innovation and Customer Experience Leadership Social CRM Social Networking Social Software Strategic Planning Uncategorized Tags:
by Michael Maoz | February 29, 2012 | 1 Comment
I am in the middle of six weeks of travel. To keep my spirits bubbly I remind myself that I’m not in a bivouac and my meals don’t come in tin cans. Some of you know what I mean. Visiting clients and observing their operations first-hand is the only way to stay relevant, truly. On-site is where the day to day quotidian meetings unfold, and you get to see the expressions on folks’ faces when you raise different issues. One of the best parts of the trip, which has taken me this time to New York, Boston, San Francisco and parts of Eastern Canada, has been to interact with the emerging Social Media teams. They stand out for a number of reasons: their age, their clothing, their manners of speech, and their incessant focus on their iPhones or Androids.
Ah: and their Ageism. One look at my grey hair (which has been gathering steam since I was 30) and they go right back to their Pinterest, mid-meeting. It’s the new-new age’s Chronocentrism: if you are over 30, and you don’t spend your day on Twitter, Facebook, tumblr and Pinterest – wow. Full disclosure: until November 2011 I didn’t know what Pinterest was, and, once I saw it thanks to one of our newer associates I thought: hmmmm, Galbraith’s Wist is back, with a twist. When I said that, I might as well have asked if they’d seen the content-suppression feature – the nopin HTML metatag. Geez, this guy thinks technology matters!!
It seems that no sooner do I scratch the surface of a social media project discussion and ask about integration with CRM apps and existing process flows that I get something like, “So, like, I don’t know what you are talking about, but I could get one of our IT people up here to join us.”
Yes, Virginia, CoTweet is quaint, but now what? How and when do we generate a case? How do we engineer a Social Customer Key? What is the escalation and gamification necessary to make the social media program come alive? What do we do to incent the ‘over-30s?’ How do we show the CFO that the project leads to quantifiable business benefit. Might as well label me BUZZKILL.
I know: social media as part of a holistic customer strategy is boring. In so many words you see the social media team looking down their noses at their IT sisters and brothers and the other lines of business. Most of us are just building new silos, but in the latest colours. And talking to some of the social media folks makes me feel trapped in a re-make of Harold and Maude. There is a great line in the film where Ruth Gordon says to the young and spoiled protege:
“You know, at one time I used to break into pet shops to liberate the canaries. But I decided that was an idea way before its time. Zoos are full, prisons are overflowing… Oh my! How the world still dearly loves a cage.”
And for all of the fabulous potential emerging from Social Media projects, we are still at risk of building sleek cages for our view of the customer. But some of you are knocking it out of the park, so there is hope.
Thanks to the dozens of clients who have let me into your busy lives to discuss what is working for you in CRM and Social today! I’ll see some of you (and at last count: a LOT of you) down in Orlando at the Customer360 Summit (http://bit.ly/gLhUKZ) in two weeks.
Category: CIO CRM Gamification Gartner Customer 360 Summit Innovation and Customer Experience iPad Leadership Social CRM Social Networking Social Software Strategic Planning Twitter Tags:
by Michael Maoz | February 22, 2012 | 1 Comment
In the 1920s the wonderful science fiction writer Edgar Rice Burroughs published a pretty weird but fascinating book called The Land that Time Forgot. It reminds me quite a bit of where we are with most business application software in the CRM space. In the book the era is post-The Great War, and in the story two enemies, the British and the Germans, are marooned and brought together as strange bedfellows and allies when they come ashore on an island inhabited by a bizarre menage of tribes. Each of the clannish tribes that the Brits and Germans encounter is frozen at a different stage of human evolution, and it shows in the various weapons they carry – stones and hatchets, bows and spears and such. The castaways build a fort which they name Fort Dinosaur.
Why, one might ask, do I think of this book now? Maybe because I am working on both the 2012 Customer Service CRM Contact Center Magic Quadrant, and because I am releasing two pieces of research on the concept of the Customer Engagement Hub. Looking simultaneously at what is now and where I think things might go in the planning horizon, it is pretty clear that the newer technologies, like the aggressive innovators who adopt them, are barricaded inside of Fort Dinosaur, going out for forays against the less evolved status quo applications and innovators.
What this means is that there is tremendous power in the new generation of technologies such as Cloud CRM applications, edge technologies for social engagement, mobile interactions, embedded devices, and analytics. And there are “Type A” organizations and/or departments that are trying these out. But advances are slowed in part by the technology infrastructure into which all of these new bits must fit. The technology stacks that underpin the majority of banks, insurers, government, airlines, et al, were developed in the late 1980s and 1990s. When they were adopted it was a wonderful break from the past. Now we had relational databases, fast networks, tweaked ledgers and supply chain software. But as my uncle would have said: what have you done for us, lately? Each of these legacy bits are like those tribes, each represented by their weapons of choice: the relational database, the client-server application, the point-to-point middleware.
In real life this interesting book became a rather poor film. Let’s hope that the migration of IT resources into the fabric of the business function will help us all move our innovative projects forward. It takes a lot of resolve for a CIO to buck the status quo and say, for example, that we are entering a ‘post-relational database age’ or that the ‘top to bottom enterprise stack is not the best approach for our business.’
Thank you all for the many great stories and examples on how you are breaking down some of these barriers and getting innovation happening in your customer-engagement strategies. If you are a client and want to read my new piece on the Customer Engagement Hub, you can find it here: http://www.gartner.com/resId=1920720
I’ll see many of you in a couple of weeks down at the Gartner Customer360 Summit ( http://bit.ly/gLhUKZ). I look forward to seeing you, and also to listening to Seth Godin.
Category: Applications CIO Cloud Contact Center CRM Gartner Customer 360 Summit Innovation and Customer Experience Leadership SaaS and Cloud Computing Social CRM Social Software Strategic Planning Uncategorized Tags:
by Michael Maoz | January 31, 2012 | 6 Comments
Peer-to-peer support communities where customers solve their own support issues have been around for over 20 years, but it has only been recently that Cloud-based packaged business applications have been available, scalable, and feature rich. After a year of diving into four separate support communities made up of contributors from around the world, we’re more positive on these initiatives than ever. The cases we followed were in high tech software, consumer and business software, consumer home entertainment, and business-to-business network gear. The results have been pretty impressive. Such as:
- On average, over 40% of customers resolve their issues in the online community
- Of those 40%, 30 – 50% also solve the problem there – which means an overall reduction of 15%+ of all service cases.
- The average ROI on a peer-to-peer community has been 100% within 15 months. Try that with your ERP or SFA or HCM!
- Overall customer satisfaction grew, while time spent interacting with the Brand went up
If you want to see an in-depth case study and are a Gartner client, you can check out some new research at: http://www.gartner.com/resId=1910415 .
We will have several more of these at our Customer360 Summit this March in Orlando (http://bit.ly/gLhUKZ ).
I had a great call with a client this morning where we were discussing forums and knowledge bases and her company’s next steps. I said that now might not be the best time for her to discuss results because the program was still midstream. She laughed and said, “You know what? I don’t know if we’ll ever be out of midstream.” I am always touched by the IT folks who work hard for companies that can hardly recognize their effort, who look forward at the possible and are not handcuffed by the past.
John F. Kennedy, who was my idol by reasons of proximity temporal and physical, said, “For time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.” And it is truly a mystery and a testament to people’s dedication and commitment that they often work so long and hard for rewards that largely accrue to others. We need all be grateful that they do.
Thank you all, as always, for sharing your stories – successes and challenges.
Category: Applications Cloud CRM Gartner Customer 360 Summit Leadership SaaS and Cloud Computing Social CRM Social Software Strategic Planning Tags:
by Michael Maoz | January 24, 2012 | 2 Comments
One of the many pleasures of the role of driver in a carpool that transports high school students to-and-from school is the glaring clarity of their insight. Today’s gang-of-four conversation started with:
a) “I know, right? Who needs all of that @#%$ from Facebook. They’re only doing it to make money.”
b) “Yeah, they’re like Google. All that new stuff is such a &*$!@ waste of time. I don’t want to see your stupid dog every time I search on you.
c) “It used to be so cool at first. When are they going to do anything new that does what I want it to do? It used to be so much more fun.
The average age of these four young people is just under 16. They are jaded. I didn’t see THAT coming. They wouldn’t dream of unplugging Facebook, but they are much more cautious. They can’t search without Google (“Bing? That’s lame.” – yes, I had to ask), but neither does it have the ‘cool’ feel that they associate with Tumblr. Full disclosure: I do not really know what Tumblr is for.
Their bottom line is that social media is about companies making money off of their activity. And while you might say, in their vernacular, ‘duh!’ – you would be way, way off base: there is a fine balance, and those born into social media can smell a dead fish or phish faster than any CIO or head of Marketing. They always sensed adults out there were scooping up money. And in the same way that they don’t care that gold refining demands earth-destroying levels of cyanide or building their favourite i-device requires mountains of plastics and sweatshop- feats of labour, they ask in return only that they perceive there is something wonderful in it for them.
All of that brought me, on the ride home from the school campus, to the world of the average CIO. You could possibly spend as much (or more) time looking at the large enterprise application suites from the major software vendors. I am not calling anyone out, but none of them have Customer Engagement Platforms, or whatever you might want to call them. The core systems are boring. They are hard to change. Within them it is difficult to model a customer process and then configure for that. They lack engagement tools. You want to share the interface in real time? There’s a bolt-on app for that. Want to collaborate with a colleague? There’s an API into that. Want to view the customer community in real time? Just swivel your chair over here. Basically, it is an IT Flea Market in a technology world that demands the equivalent of Meccano. We want our Spykee mini robot kit for CRM!! Simple, graceful, engaging and affordable. (http://www.meccano.com/models/spykee_mini_robots/ - in case you have no children or nephews and think I make this stuff up!).
CIOs are on the hook for innovation, but finding the right gears to pull it together is not easy. For every writer that contacts me to remind me that ‘it is NOT about the technology’ I have to remind them that they have not witnessed fetal surgery. Go watch Hanmin Lee in action and THEN say it isn’t about the technology. His theatre of action enables physicians to perform feats of magic. So: YES – people and process – but meanwhile, for most organizations, we are supplying functions like Social and Customer Support with junk food right out of Savoy Truffle - Montelimart, Ginger Sling and a pineapple heart. If you know enough about music of a certain time period you will have already begun humming and your lips will form, despite your effort to repress them:
“You know that what you eat you are. But what is sweet now turns so sour.” From an IT perspective, it looks good: nice box, nice company, nice conferences, job security, great toolkit. But is it really addressing the emerging needs of the departments you support?
Bottom line: CIOs are going to have to work in a more public way, in a more “Social” way, to pressure big software into delivering a new generation of enterprise applications that meet the needs of the Engaged Enterprise. After 20 years of gavage, most of us have customer-facing tools that leave us more like caged geese than Usain Bolt.
Speak up – and thank you for your steady stream of responses. Your insights are very helpful to us. Are we off base? Are the major suite suppliers delivering the apps you need for this decade’s challenges?
Ah – and if you happen to be a Gartner client, I’ve laid out the research focus for our team over the next 12 months on Gartner.com - http://www.gartner.com/resId=1897114 .
Category: Analytics for Social CRM Applications CIO Cloud CRM Gartner Customer 360 Summit Innovation and Customer Experience Leadership Social CRM Social Software Strategic Planning Tags:
by Michael Maoz | January 20, 2012 | 3 Comments
During a briefing last Friday afternoon a software provider in the Social CRM space (is anyone NOT in the “Social” space?) put up a slide about their ‘social analytics’ capability. It said:
“There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don’t know.”
Ok, this is a Friday afternoon and they are quoting former US Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. This is why I generally don’t take Friday afternoon briefings. I have to resist the urge to behave like Steve Ballmer at his Sales Kickoffs back in the late ‘90s. So they went on to the next slide and the next slide, but my mind was stuck back at Rummy. What was bothering me? So I said, “Could we go back to the knowns thing?”
They couldn’t say no, so they said yes with an almost visible thought bubble over their heads that read “NO WE CANNOT GO BACK!!!” – but they did.
So, I asked, “If there are known knowns, and known unknowns, and unknown unknowns, isn’t something missing?” I wasn’t trying to do a Google Interview. I was just curious by the piece that was missing. After about 30 seconds of uncomfortable fidgeting and the clock ticking I asked, “What is missing are the unknown knowns.” It’s just math. But it is one of the biggest challenges for us as businesses.
The unknown knowns. There are WMDs! Are there? SaaS is less expensive than licensing on premise. Is it? Always? Think about the number of times we ‘know’ something to be true, when actually the truth is unknown. About the customer, or prospect, or development project, or measurements we have put in place. When the world was more Semiotics driven – we were product and texture and pricing focused, and marketing was on top – we felt in control. But it’s now all services and words and the structuralists rule. Well there are still exceptions like Steve Jobs and Marc Benioff and Keith Richards. For the rest of us in business we are looking at words, and patterns, and the sentiments and meaning: explicit, implicit and latent. Testing for the truth in our accepted view of what is out there as ‘known’ is one of the most important challenges for businesses as we splinter communications across devices and social media, and engagement channels of our own build.
Social analytics, customer analytics, business analytics will emerge as the glue that holds successful customer initiatives together and 2012 may be the year analytics really begins to touch the front office in a very direct way.
What do you think?
Category: Analytics for Social CRM CIO CRM Gartner Customer 360 Summit Innovation and Customer Experience Leadership Social Software Strategic Planning Tags:
by Michael Maoz | January 18, 2012 | Comments Off
The 18 presentations that need to be brought to editing for our upcoming conference, Gartner Customer 360 Summit (http://bit.ly/wBQyzi) are now safely behind me, as are the case studies. More immediately ahead is today’s Gartner Webcast ( http://bit.ly/zjtcIY ) that looks at “Using Insight to Create Customer Centricity.” If you have time at noon EST, listen in. We have about 600 people signed up, and we’ll be Tweeting and doing a Q/A as well.
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.
Category: CIO CRM Gartner Customer 360 Summit Innovation and Customer Experience Leadership Social CRM Strategic Planning Twitter Tags:
by Michael Maoz | January 10, 2012 | 1 Comment
Two weeks away from work. That is an anachronism that made me think of my parents. In their prime they worked a combined 100-110 hours a week, and that did not include commuting. When they did arrive home, work was gone. Work was just that – it was hard, and there may have been nobility in it, but it was a lot. They trusted their company to do the right thing on their behalf, and they believed in the products and services from the bank and insurance company and appliance store. They lived in a small town and there was no place to hide. If you lied, cheated, stole, failed to live up to your promise – well, word got around. I thought about that when I read the online edition of the Washington Post from my iPad one morning at The Brooklyn Water Bagel in Delray, FL. The writer, Vivek Wadhwa, said that Social has lost its sizzle (http://wapo.st/AdIf9p ).
What got me to laugh, aside from the restaurant’s clientele, which one of my children defined as the newlywed and nearly dead, was how much social software and concepts seemed to be (and yes, I have always wanted to say this) ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny. At school I was not a sharp enough knife in a very sharp drawer of knives to ever really get that expression, but now I think I do: the Social Endeavour is leading us in stages that have the shape of things past. Why? Because for all of the Madison Avenue advertising and carnival barking, the reality of the small town was that the local business had no choice but to engage with the customer. The customer could communicate at City Hall, and the coffee shop, and in the local paper, and at the PTA meeting – basically they could project themselves – or ‘scale’ the message.
I think this is where we are now. We are scaling globally to act ‘locally.’ Social may or may not ‘sizzle’ this year for IPOs or corporate agendas, but we are on an inexorable path to deliver tools to the employee and to the customer to help each understand the other. I have been calling this the Intent Driven Enterprise for the past ten years, mostly to deaf ears, but not entirely. The idea is that customers sometimes do and sometimes do not know their value to the enterprise, and quite often the enterprise fails to capture and make available the value of the customer to those people and channels where decisions are made during an interaction. The failure to align the customer’s intent with the business intent – and all of the corporate and social information that such an interaction entails, results in asymmetry. The engagement fails one side or the other. But when we get it right, we are returning the relationship to a form last experienced in the small town.
I hope that the ardor for ‘Social’ does not dampen in 2012. If it does it will be the Igby Goes Down of the enterprise. If you did not have teenagers in 2002 you may have missed Clare Danes and Digby as he failed to deal with the complexity of growing up, but unless our plans for Social mature, you’ll get to live it for yourself. There is still a tremendous amount of work to do. I have two presentations at our March Customer360 Summit in Orlando, http://bit.ly/AnxS5V that expand on this: one that looks at how marketing and customer service will emerge as best friends, and why, and a second looks at the future of customer service and the Contact Center/multichannel interaction. I hope that I will get to discuss this with some of you then.
Examining how your organization/business/government/utility/school will succeed in providing an engaging experience that is profitable to you and rewarding for them will eventually be seamless. It will be driven by principles of the Intent Driven Enterprise. Thanks this week to Jeff Hagen of General Mills for allowing me to look at how his global organization is advancing customer engagement – and the mutual benefit that it is yielding.
Ah – why did I say that two weeks away from work is an anachronism? For the past decade I can’t say that there is a beginning or end to work. I walk the streets of Manhattan and I’m watching customers at the Apple store or Barney’s. I’m at a restaurant waiting for a table and I’m observing consumers on their devices. I’m on a plane or in the lounge and I am meeting other IT professionals and exchanging ideas on how their businesses operate. Am I working? Am I on vacation? Does work begin or end so neatly anymore for you? Would you really want it to? That is a whole other day’s conversation.
As always, I enjoy your emails and posts.
Category: CIO Cloud CRM Gartner Customer 360 Summit Innovation and Customer Experience iPad Leadership SaaS and Cloud Computing Social CRM Social Networking Social Software Strategic Planning Tags:
