"Forrester Research's BPA and IKM Blogs" via Andrew in Google Reader

Groupthink And The Problems Of Silos

2012-05-24T10:37:40Z

I think we would all agree that BPM and business architecture set out to overcome the issues associated with silos. And I think we would also agree that the problems associated with silos derive from functional decomposition.

While strategy development usually takes a broad, organizationwide view, so many change programs still cater to the suboptimization perspectives of individual silos. Usually, these individual change programs consist of projects that deal with the latest problem to rise to the top of the political agenda -- effectively applying a band-aid to fix a broken customer-facing process or put out a fire associated with some burning platform.

Silo-based thinking is endemic to Western culture -- it's everywhere. This approach to management is very much a command-and-control mentality injected into our culture by folks like Smith, Taylor, Newton, and Descartes. Let's face it: The world has moved on, and the network is now far more important than the hierarchy.

But guess what technique about 99.9% of us use to fix the problems associated with functional decomposition? You guessed it: yet more functional decomposition . I think Einstein had something to say about using the same techniques and expecting different results. This is a serious groupthink problem!

The Eight Questions To Ask Before You Buy A CRM Solution

2012-05-22T19:52:16Z

During the last five years, the customer relationship management (CRM) solutions market has experienced considerable growth and turmoil. Quickly evolving technologies like multichannel digital customer engagement, real-time decisioning, social computing, business process management (BPM), and mobility are creating new ways for organizations to deliver differentiated customer experiences. There has been a rapid rise in the popularity of solutions deployed through the cloud, and vendors have acquired direct competitors or snapped up companies in adjacent spaces to broaden their customer management offerings. As a result, business and IT leaders are often confused about which solution to choose.

I have just finished Forrester's Wave™ evaluation of the leading CRM solutions. We evaluated 18 solutions against 411 criteria and will publish our findings in June. While every CRM solution has its strengths and weaknesses, here are the key questions you need to ask to pin down the right solution:

1. Will the solution help us deliver great customer experiences? More organizations are moving beyond empty goals like "becoming customer-obsessed" to define clear and actionable customer experience strategies. Look for solutions that will help you to break down organizational silos and support the full customer journey that traces how buyers interact with your organization.

CRM; customer service; SCRM; BPM; BI; customer experience

Customer Service Agent Collaboration Helps Move The Needle On FCR and Customer Satisfaction

2012-05-12T05:03:53Z

In customer service organizations, collaboration should take place around cases and content, and should involve not only collaboration between customers and customer service agents, but internal collaboration within the enterprise. Internal collaboration has quantifiable benefits as measured by increased organizational productivity and efficiency. For cases, collaboration helps increase first contact resolution, decrease handle times and increase customer satisfaction. For content, collaboration helps evolve content to be more relevant, accurate, complete, and in line with customer demand. Some of the technologies that help foster collaboration around cases and content include:

For cases:

Presence indicators, instant messaging, and video chat. These allow customer service agents to connect in real time with subject-matter experts, supervisors, managers, or other agents having the necessary skills to help resolve a question.
Collaborative workspaces. These allow agents and subject-matter experts to share documents and logs about the customer issue, the troubleshooting process, and the results in real time.
Activity streams. These allow agents and subject-matter experts to subscribe to a case and receive notifications of all changes and additions to a case.
Remote support. This allows customer service agents to invite subject-matter experts and specialty agents to troubleshoot software or hardware with a customer.

For content:

The Future Is Sweet For SugarCRM

2012-05-07T17:21:47Z

SugarCRM was kind enough to invite me to its analyst day and conference -- a three-day event packed with product, strategy, customer, and partner information. The firm's focus was clearly on its momentum into the enterprise. Here are my thoughts:

Why Don't Agents Collaborate More Often? It's Been Shown To Increase Call Resolution And Satisfaction Scores

2012-04-30T20:55:58Z

Empowering customer service agents with relevant, complete, and accurate answers to customer questions remains one of the major challenges in contact centers today. The past 10 years have seen efficiency and productivity gains squeezed out of the mechanics of routing and queueing a call to the right agent pool, screen-popping the customer information to the agent's desktop, case management, and workforce optimization. Less attention has been placed on allowing agents to access information and informally collaborate with one another. Its no wonder that more than 70% of the time of an average call is spent locating the right information for the customer.

In many contact centers, content is created by groups of authors who are disconnected from the day-to-day conversations that agents are having with customers and who are unfamiliar with the language and terms that customers use. All content follows the same basic create-edit-publish cycle, irrespective of its usefulness in answering customer questions.

How To Partner With Data Quality Pros To Deliver Better Customer Service Experiences

2012-04-12T22:47:13Z

Customer service leaders know that a good customer experience has a quantifiable impact on revenue, as measured by increased rates of repurchase, increased recommendations, and decreased willingness to defect from a brand. They also conceptually understand that clean data is important, but many can't make the connection between how master data management and data quality investments directly improve customer service metrics. This means that IT initiates data projects more than two-thirds of the time, while data projects that directly affect customer service processes rarely get funded.

What needs to happen is that customer service leaders have to partner with data management pros -- often working within IT -- to reframe the conversation. Historically, IT organizations would attempt to drive technology investments with the ambiguous goal of "cleaning dirty customer data" within CRM, customer service, and other applications. Instead of this approach, this team must articulate the impact that poor-quality data has on critical business and customer-facing processes.

To do this, start by taking an inventory of the quality of data that is currently available:

Big Data Ain't Worth Diddly Without Big Process

2012-04-12T14:01:24Z

Nowadays, there are two topics that I'm very passionate about. The first is the fact that spring is finally here and it's time to dust off my clubs to take in my few first few rounds of golf. The second topic that I'm currently passionate about is the research I've been doing around the connection between big data and big process.

While most enterprise architects are familiar with the promise -- and, unfortunately, the hype -- of big data, very few are familiar with the newer concept of "big process." Forrester first coined this term back in August of 2011 to describe the shift we see in organizations moving from siloed approaches to BPM and process improvement to more holistic approaches that stitch all the pieces together to drive business transformation.

Our working definition for big process is:

"Methods and techniques that provide a more holistic approach to process improvement and process transformation initiatives."

As we pushed deeper into our big process research, we found that the relationship between big data and big process is crucial to driving real business value and improved business outcomes. Specifically, we found that the connection between big data and big process revolved around the "Four Cs" of:

Is "Good Enough" Customer Service Good Enough?

2012-04-04T20:40:03Z

Eighty-six percent of customer service decision-makers say that a good customer experience is one of their top strategic priorities. Sixty-three percent say that they want their customer experience to be the best in their industry. Yet few companies deliver a good customer experience.

In our recent survey, just over one-third of the 160 large North American brands questioned were found to provide a positive customer experience -- a number that hasn't significantly moved for the past five years.

We know that a bad service experience has quantifiable negative impacts, as measured by monitoring the wallet share of each customer over their engagement lifetime with a brand. But when is a service experience good enough? A recent Harvard Business Review blog says that delighting your customers is a waste of time and energy, and exceeding customer expectations has a negligible impact on customer loyalty -- that customers just want simple, quick solutions to their problems.

What customers also want is a consistent, reproducible experience across all touchpoints.

What this means is that a customer wants to receive the same data, the same information, over any voice, electronic, or social communication channel used. Customer service agents supporting customers across these channels should follow the same business processes. And channels should be linked -- either from a technology perspective or a business process perspective -- so that customers can start a conversation on one channel and move it to the next without having to restart the conversation.

CRM; customer service

Global Optimization: Gaia Revisited

2012-03-28T12:55:27Z

Analytics are the steering wheel that humanity uses to drive the world -- or at least that portion of the planet over which we have some influence. Without the sensors, the correlators, the aggregators, the visualizers, the solvers, and the rest of what analytic applications depend on, we would be only a passenger, not a copilot, on this, our only home.

If you've spent any time around advanced mathematics and analytics, you're bound to run into the phrase "global optimization." All in all, this has little to do with optimizing the globe we live on; instead, it refers to techniques for solving a set of equations under various constraints. Nevertheless, I love the phrase's evocative ring, in that it suggests the Gaia Hypothesis, a controversial conjecture that the Earth is a sort of super-organism. Specifically, it models the Earth as a closed, self-regulating, virtuous feedback loop of organic and inorganic processes that, considered holistically, maintains life-sustaining homeostasis. This hypothesis suggests that the planet as a whole is continuously optimizing the conditions for our ongoing existence -- and that the biosphere may perish, just like any organism, if it falls into a vicious feedback loop of its own undoing.

big data

Forrester's 10-Step Program On Mastering The Service Experience: A Quick Recap

2012-03-24T22:42:57Z

Today, the gap between a customer's expectations and the customer experience they receive is huge. In our latest customer experience survey, we found that just over one-third of US brands deliver a good experience. What is even more surprising is that, in the five years that Forrester has been collecting this data, this number has not significantly changed.

Delivering good customer service is a cornerstone to delivering a good end-to-end customer experience. Yet few companies undertake efforts to follow best practices. This lack of attention to customer service has significant impacts for companies: escalating service costs, customer satisfaction numbers at rock-bottom levels, and anecdotes of poor service experiences amplified over social channels that can lead to brand erosion.

Mastering the customer service experience is hard to do. Here is a recap of my 10-step program. I've reordered the steps a little, but the message is still the same:

Master your strategy

Plan and run your operations

customer service; contact center; CRM; SCRM

Open Source Approaches Are Opening Big Data Analytics To A World Of Fresh Intelligence

2012-03-22T16:32:03Z

Big data is an ecosystem in which the open source approaches have the greatest momentum: the most widespread adoption and the most feverish innovation. Open source platforms are expanding their footprint in advanced analytics.

As the enterprise Hadoop market continues to mature and many companies deploy their clusters for the most demanding analytical challenges, data scientists will begin to migrate toward this new, open source-centric platform. At the same time, enterprise adoption of the open source R language will grow in 2012 and beyond, and we'll see greater industry convergence between Hadoop and R, especially as analytics tool vendors integrate both technologies tightly into their offerings. We will also see increasing adoption of open source data integration tools, such as those commercialized by Talend and others, and of open source BI tools from Pentaho, Jaspersoft, and others.

This is happening for the following reasons:

Big Data; Advanced analytics; business intelligence (BI); analytics; Hadoop; data mining; predictive analytics; sentiment analysis; behavioral analytics

Choosing A Contact Center Outsourcer Is Hard; Evaluate Candidates Over 8 Dimensions

2012-03-21T00:31:01Z

Outsourcing contact center operations helps organizations deliver better customer service. In Forrester's recent survey of 304 North American and European network and telecommunications decision-makers, we found that nearly 20% have already outsourced some or all of their contact center seats or are very interested in doing so. Choosing to outsource should not be based on cost considerations alone. Select an outsourcer carefully. Outsourcers need to provide an environment that delivers quality customer service in a cost-effective manner. When looking for providers, evaluate their capability to:

BPM; customer service; contact center; crm; scrm; email; hosted contact center; outsourcing

Dynamic Case Management: Where Does It Fit In A BPM World?

2012-03-19T13:40:24Z

As momentum builds for dynamic case management (DCM), confusion reigns about where it fits in the BPM landscape. It's a divisive issue, especially when a vendor has both a traditional BPM suite (BPMS) and a DCM product line (like IBM) or when the BPMS vendor hasn't moved quickly to embrace case management (like Oracle). If, as a vendor, you have an abundance of BPMS riches, you haven't seriously considered DCM, or if you are a BPMS buyer, it's time to take DCM seriously.

Dynamic case management is the future of BPMS; vendors ignore it at their peril. Why? Simply put, it is more flexible, adaptable, and people-centered than the products that have come before. Just as integration-centric BPMS vendors added human capabilities to remain competitive -- Software AG is a good example -- today's BPMS vendors must add DCM to meet the demand for new systems of engagement.

Getting The Mix Right

2012-03-14T09:05:56Z

Many business people still struggle to see the role of business processes in building better performance (i.e., business results). So I thought I would share this little hook that I developed within one of my consulting engagements. It is based around preparing bread: Mixing the components of the bread -- the flour, yeast, and water -- and then baking it all together for an effective result.

In your business, it is the dough rising that equates to achieving its performance objectives -- however those performance objectives are defined.

Whether they're aware of it or not, in most businesses the different ingredients are not well aligned or working together as well as they could be. Mixing the metaphors for a moment, the roles and actors are not rowing together in a coordinated fashion. Business process management (BPM) brings together a range of techniques and approaches -- the BPM tool box. The components of this tool box help change agents in the business (the bakers) create their own special sort of dough. At the heart of that is an ongoing inquiry into business processes -- if you like, the water that binds the flour (your people) with the yeast (the technology).

There may be other ingredients involved that add their own subtle contribution to flavor and texture. But cooking is not only about mixing the right quantity of ingredients; it is also how you mix them and how long you bake the mixture. You might think it is just a question of getting the right measure of ingredients. But first, it is necessary to decide on the sort of bread you want to make, how it is going to be delivered, and to whom. Alongside the choice of people (flour), the most critical element is the water (processes) -- the ingredient that binds it all together.

Don't Outsource Your Customer Service Operations To Cut Costs

2012-03-07T20:14:31Z

Outsourcing contact center operations helps organizations deliver better customer service. In Forrester's recent survey of 304 North American and European network and telecommunications decision-makers, we found that nearly 20% have already outsourced some or all of their contact center seats or are very interested in doing so. Outsourcing doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing proposition -- organizations can leverage outsourcers to fill language gaps or react quickly to seasonal volume changes. Organizations can also choose to outsource only a subset of non-mission-critical customer service processes.

In all cases, outsourcing is major decision which carries a significant amount of management overhead, and should not be pursued solely as a cost-control strategy. Look to outsource if you want to:

The Real-World Experiment: New Application Development Paradigm In The Age Of Big Data

2012-03-07T19:24:20Z

One of the predictions I made at the start of this year was that real-world experiments will become the new development paradigm for next best action in multichannel customer relationship management (CRM). If we consider that multichannel CRM applications are driving big data initiatives, it's clear that real-world experiments are infusing data management and advanced analytics development best practices more broadly. Increasingly, my big data customer engagements are focusing on CRM next best action, with a keen customer interest in life-cycle management of the analytic applications needed for real-world experiments in marketing campaign and customer experience optimization.

This year and beyond, we will see enterprises place greater emphasis on real-world experiments as a fundamental best practice to be cultivated and enforced within their data science centers of excellence. In a next best action program, real-world experiments involve iterative changes to the analytics, rules, orchestrations, and other process and decision logic embedded in operational applications. You should monitor the performance of these iterations to gauge which collections of business logic deliver the intended outcomes, such as improved customer retention or reduced fulfillment time on high-priority orders.

The key use case of next best action infrastructure -- aka decision automation -- is to allow companies to rapidly engage in real-world experiments in production applications and, if they're bold, in their operational business model as a whole. In a CRM context, you can implement different predictive propensity models in different channels, at different interaction points, using different call-center scripts and message contents, with different customer segments, and with other variables.

Sourcing Innovation

2012-03-02T16:15:44Z

This week I participated in a small group discussion with business and IT leaders who are focused on innovation. It was an interesting discussion that touched on these topics:

Don't Let CRM Pitfalls Trip You Up

2012-03-01T16:14:45Z

My Twitter feed is going wild with #social, #mobile, #CX, and #bigdata hype. But Forrester clients want practical advice for today, in addition to spotting changes on the horizon.

One of the most common questions I get is: "What are the CRM pitfalls I need to watch out for?" I surveyed nearly 150 companies to find out the problems they faced with their CRM initiatives. Here is what you need to pay attention to:

Crafting a customer relationship management strategy. Eighteen percent of the problems at the companies I surveyed pertain to CRM strategy. Within the CRM strategy category, specific pitfalls identified include: inadequate deployment methodologies (40%), poorly defined business requirements (25%), and not achieving organizational alignment on objectives (18%).

"Reaching a consensus between IT's objectives and those of the business unit was a problem." (Marketing manager, manufacturing company)

"Internal disagreements on how to implement were the cause of our problems." (Senior director, customer support, media, entertainment, and leisure company)

Rearchitecting critical customer-facing processes. CRM processes consist of the work practices associated with major customer-facing business functions within an organization. Twenty-seven percent of the problems reported center on difficulties with business process management. Within the business process category, specific pitfalls to watch out for include: technical/integration difficulties in supporting company processes (48%), poor business process design (31%), and the need to customize solutions to fit unique organizational requirements (21%).

"Changes in business processes comprised almost all of our implementation challenges." (Service management program manager, retail and wholesale trade company)

Selling Business Process Transformation To The C Suite

2012-02-27T20:40:46Z

My colleague, Principal Analyst Derek Miers, wrote something so significant in an email today that it gave me pause:

"It's all about helping the executive understand the causal relationship between customer (success), process (how it gets done), and business results (revenue growth, profit, and sustainability of the business model). They are all tied up together."

I could even see the picture in my mind:

Yet all too often CIOs and other business process leaders focus on getting the business process right and explaining business process methodologies to others. They use many comfortable and familiar terms, like:

Beware Of Mobile's Unintended Consequences (Part 1)

2012-02-23T20:09:47Z

[This is the second in a series of posts on our report for Forrester clients, "Mobile Is The New Face Of Engagement."]

A successful smartphone app is great, right? Especially when it fronts a system of engagement that lets people click and serve themselves in their moment of need rather than waiting until they can fire up a computer and go online. Or (gasp), dial the phone and tie up some customer service rep's time in India or Africa or Fargo. The mobile engagement is 10 times more convenient than traditional Web and one tenth the cost of a call center contact. So what could possibly go wrong?

In short, just about everything that could go wrong does go wrong when consumer brands, retailers, and B2B companies open up their mobile engagement channel. In this first of several posts on mobile's unintended consequences, we'll describe the unbelievable success that mobile can bring. In future posts, we'll expose the sheer technological ugliness that lies behind those consequences and lay the groundwork for enterprise mobile engagement.

First, the unbelievable success that a mobile app can have (see the figure below):

"Forrester Research's BPA and IKM Blogs" via Andrew in Google Reader

Groupthink And The Problems Of Silos

Categories:

The Eight Questions To Ask Before You Buy A CRM Solution

Categories:

Customer Service Agent Collaboration Helps Move The Needle On FCR and Customer Satisfaction

Categories:

The Future Is Sweet For SugarCRM

Categories:

Why Don't Agents Collaborate More Often? It's Been Shown To Increase Call Resolution And Satisfaction Scores

Categories:

How To Partner With Data Quality Pros To Deliver Better Customer Service Experiences

Categories:

Big Data Ain't Worth Diddly Without Big Process

Categories:

Is "Good Enough" Customer Service Good Enough?

Categories:

Global Optimization: Gaia Revisited

Categories:

Forrester's 10-Step Program On Mastering The Service Experience: A Quick Recap

Categories:

Open Source Approaches Are Opening Big Data Analytics To A World Of Fresh Intelligence

Categories:

Choosing A Contact Center Outsourcer Is Hard; Evaluate Candidates Over 8 Dimensions

Categories:

Dynamic Case Management: Where Does It Fit In A BPM World?

Getting The Mix Right

Categories:

Don't Outsource Your Customer Service Operations To Cut Costs

Categories:

The Real-World Experiment: New Application Development Paradigm In The Age Of Big Data

Sourcing Innovation

Don't Let CRM Pitfalls Trip You Up

Categories:

Selling Business Process Transformation To The C Suite

Beware Of Mobile's Unintended Consequences (Part 1)