From Service to Experience
The Evolution of the “You” and “Your Customer” Interaction

But the customer didn’t ‘walk in the door’ necessarily to be sold something, I suggested. "If you’re in an assisted channel, and you’re having a good interaction, I think the vendor owns the right to be able to sell to you," stated Chris bluntly. "Now, you can’t tick me off by trying to sell to me before we’ve even begun to have a relationship, but if our interaction is going well... why not open up recommendations?"

Because it pisses people off? I asked. Chris laughed. "Yeah, maybe our older generation, but the younger people have a different expectation. The ‘Y’ generation is called that because they ask a lot of ‘why’ questions," he added. "As assisted service gets more expensive, you’re gonna be sold to. Face it," he said.

"It depends on the vendor and the channel. Sometimes it’s better to go to the online support center, because you’ll get switched to a ‘retention specialist’ and you’ll get everything you want. But if you go to a kiosk in the mall, maybe not so much. They will just try to sell you something." Sticking with the telecom/cell provider example, Chris continued: "Once the telcos learn to raise the level of knowledge exchange down to the kiosk level—like Apple does—then the bar’s going to be raised. Customers will become more savvy as to which of these channels to go to. The insurance industry is similar: the independent brokers don’t carry just one kind of insurance, they have several. It behooves the insurance companies to make sure those independent brokers have a really good intranet to make sure they can answer all those customers’ questions. Because the first one where he finds the right answer is the one he’s going to recommend to his clients."

The Grassroots Effect
All this talk about the "younger generation" (besides making me feel old) led into a discussion about customer-generated content—forums, blogs, all that jazz. What, I asked Chris, are some of the best practices to approaching this phenomenon of "grassroots self-marketing?"

"You have to start the conversation. Not having the opportunity to start it is ‘lifetime-limiting.’ Customers want these interactions, and YOU want them to start during the sales cycle. Customers won’t buy anything unless they can hear from someone else who has been satisfied. That’s especially true if your product is ripe to sell and service on-line."

But how and when does that customer input become business knowledge? I wondered. "It becomes knowledge when you can understand it and manage it. Meaning, you need to understand what the user population is looking for. And the second thing: is it worthwhile information? Is it rated well enough, and can it be converted into corporate knowledge? There’s a new key-performance indicator (KPI) trend coming up that’s all around ‘social reputation.’ I can sort by name, and I can get alerts when this individual posts a discussion...it’s that important to me. This is now becoming common in the high-tech industries; I think it will break into mainstream very soon."

So how should a company expose a customer to outside discussion? "It’s our philosophy to include discussions as a possible answer," said Chris. "It has to do with intents...and there’s no way to be intentional if you don’t know what the customer is asking for. In most customer service environments, between 70% and 80% of the time you know what the customer is asking for. The other 20%, you’re dying to know what the customer is asking for. That’s what good analytics are supposed to solve."

He continued: "If you’re pretty sure of the intent of the customer’s query—80% assured—you know exactly where to go to get the information, and we’ll limit where you go to get the answer. That’s especially important in banking and insurance policies, because the answer is based on the policy you own and the regulations associated with that. But in a high-tech example, where the inquiry could be brand new, we can open it up a little bit more to discussions as a part of the ranking algorithm. Now you can’t just leave these external discussion groups open; you have to sharpen the pen a little bit more than that by applying analytics to examine these ‘better’ answers."

What’s next for companies facing this brave new world of "customer experience?" I asked Chris. "We have all the sexy technology to get content into our organizations—wikis, content management and the rest—but what’s the technology to get it out? It’s enterprise search. Plain search is just a deterministic keyword search engine that has no understanding of what you’re potentially looking for. Search can get smarter with linguistics, sentiment extraction... but it’s still just linguistics; it’s not business related.

"BUT," he continued. "You can add ‘intent libraries,’ and understand say, the top 100 questions in telecommunications." He went on: "You also need to understand where to go get the right answer, whether it’s from the ERP system, or a commerce system for pricing, or in your content management system. You don’t need to replace those systems; you just need a good access system to get it out."

Chris is an Energizer bunny about this stuff. Just turn him on, and he’ll go on and on. And that’s great. But he was able to sum it all up in a pretty succinct wrap-up, and one that I think should be engraved over the desk of every knowledge officer in the land:

"There are three things you need to understand well: People need content; people need access to content; and people need to manage that over time."

Enough said.