Coveo Insights
Category Archives: Big Data
Mining for Gold: Search Technology Finds Knowledge Amid the Data Chaos
Customer demand for high-quality support continues to grow, as customers have raised the bar for every interaction with support organizations. This comes as a result of the plethora of information available to customers on the Internet, combined with an increase in competitive choices and product complexity. Given this situation, it is imperative that support organizations at least be on a level field of knowledge, or the customer will lose trust. This means that support executives need to be armed with not only the right data, but the right insight.
These executives know there is value in all the data and metrics they collect, but identifying this value using legacy tools has proved frustrating, if not impossible. CRM, multichannel and telephony solutions typically include strong operational reporting, which is useful to determine a top performer for a certain metric, or to measure organizational performance by key performance indicators. But what is missing is the ability to consolidate, correlate, access and analyze data across multiple data sources, identifying linkages and trends, enabling root-cause analysis, and providing insight to allow better understanding for better customer engagement.
Many point solutions have attempted to solve the challenge of information access with built-in search. However, the sophistication of search embedded in many software solutions, while rising, cannot connect the dots across the increasingly social enterprise. Advanced unified indexing technology not only provides access to much-needed analytics, but it is leveraged by agents to significantly impact performance metrics. By having collective knowledge about the customer, as well as their products, support cases, and more, agents can more quickly solve customer challenges the first time, improving resolution time and customer satisfaction across phone, web and email channels.
Find advice from us and the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA) on how customer support organizations can leverage data for actionable insight in this new whitepaper.
The Customer Service Crossroads – Which road will you take?
It’s no secret that today’s customer support operations are overwhelmed by data—social media content, survey data, rising interaction volumes, recordings, chats and more. As a result, customer support leaders are facing an inflection point: either harness the tremendous wealth of data at their disposal to deliver transformational service and emerge as new leaders, or ignore the opportunity and retain the status quo at their own peril.
So which road are they taking? A recent TSIA survey of B2B support executives quantifies this. Those surveyed reported receiving 88,500 support incidents per month, each filled with critical information about products and services. The majority also said that they have adopted some form of social media, adding more critical content to the mix. Yet only a quarter of these companies said they have any capacity to mine and search across all of this data. Read more and comment…
Is Data Scientist a DIY Profession?
When popular technologies arrive, in-demand jobs follow – and no job is hotter in the technology world right now than the role of data scientist. So hot, in fact, that the Harvard Business Review coined it as the sexiest job of the 21st century. GigaOM reported earlier this year that it’s the future of IT. MIT advises that in order to fill a workplace demand for data scientists gap, organizations need to seek out professionals with a unique mix of IT, scientific and analytical skills in order to harness, correlate and act on their growing amounts of data.
In our opinion, any profession that derives insight from data is a good one. But who says that a data scientist is the only one that can do it, in all related cases? Why do you need to be the one behind the algorithm in order to obtain insight from data? Read more and comment…
The History of Knowledge Sharing: A Coveo Infographic
Sharing and connecting sources of knowledge is behind everything we do. While we like to talk about the present and future of knowledge exchange, we can also look to the past for sources of inspiration and education.
To capture this history, we created an infographic that showcases a few key milestones of knowledge access and transfer. It’s remarkable to look at how information sharing has evolved from drawings and scribes, to mass broadcasting, to ever-increasing amounts of data and digital content.
We’ve certainly come a long way, and we have a ways to go. We’re at an inflection point in history when it comes to data-driven insight. Our customers have begun to harness the power of indexing technology, and they’ve found it’s a journey that is well worth the effort. To quote Forbes, capturing and leveraging knowledge might be the next great phase of wealth creation in history.
Our timeline is below. What would you add to it?
Read and comment…
Special Series: Ask the (Social) CRM Experts
Part II: CRM in 2013
We’re a few weeks into 2013, and companies are facing a powerful confluence of overwhelming and diverse customer data, tools that provide a greater degree of insight into that data, and a customer base that demands a more personalized, real-time experience. We believe that companies ended 2012 poised to use this convergence to supercharge their customer service operations, as noted in the first installment from our esteemed panelists that posted last week.
Is 2013 the year the perfect storm is averted? Our experts weigh in with some bold predictions for CRM.
Esteban Kolsky, consultant and analyst at thinkJar, formerly with Gartner:
“From the very beginning, CRM experts have been predicting the advent of CRM 360 – being able to see everything about the client, from all angles, for all stakeholders in the organization. We have been unable to achieve those things until now – mostly due to the lackluster performance of Analytical CRM. Read and comment…
Special Series: Ask the (Social) CRM Experts
Part I: Looking Back at 2012
It’s nice to have good friends in high places, especially friends who spend their time talking to smart people from great businesses about their strategies, execution and plans, specifically related to customer experience. To begin the New Year, we spoke with a couple of our esteemed friends about the current state of CRM—in its full meaning, not just the system, but spelled out: Customer Relationship Management. In this first installment we look at the question, “What was the biggest development in the CRM space in 2012?” Here are a few standout assessments:
Paul Greenberg, president at The 56 Group, and well known as the Father of Social CRM:
There were a few developments this year that were notable but two really stood out – and surprise, surprise, they had to ultimately deal with how customers are treated. The two were the re-emergence of customer experience, now called CXM, as a core approach in dealing with customers and the rise of Big Data (and solutions for it). Read and comment…
IT Chaos: Is it simply moving to the Cloud to create “Claos?”
Today’s IT department finds itself in a precarious position: balance stakeholder demands against the need to maintain governance, compliance and control. Environments are becoming more diverse and complex while executive leadership needs CIOs and IT departments to start contributing to the bottom line through increased productivity.
As a result, many CIOs are looking at the cloud as an easier way to deliver solutions to their stakeholders without adding more chaos to their already complex internal systems. The benefits of cloud solutions are very attractive to the CIO: subscription model, no long-term commitments, easy deployment, low cost of ownership, no capital to invest, solutions that meet the individual needs of the stakeholders, etc.
But is the reduced chaos a reality? Read more and comment…
Is the Data Warehouse Dead?
Data warehousing has been around for a long time. It’s a key step that many companies took to modernize their infrastructure and house their rapidly growing stores of data. But will 2013 be the last year for the enterprise data warehouse as we know it?
Many seem to think so. When Gartner released its 2013 tech trends last month, it noted that Big Data was “leading organizations to abandon the concept of a single enterprise data warehouse containing all information needed for decisions.” The Huffington Post was a bit more decisive, as BlueKai’s CEO declared that “the age of the data warehouse is behind us. It’s gone and it’s not coming back.” Read more and comment…
Did Big Data Change the Course of History? Or was it Something More?
When it comes to hype and exposure, every week is a big week for Big Data. But rarely – if ever – has such a tool found itself directly in the middle of the mainstream media around the biggest story of the year.
In fact, the technology to analyze and leverage big data was lauded both inside and outside campaigns as a key influencer of last week’s presidential election. Read more and comment…
Access to Knowledge: A Financial Organization’s Greatest Asset
Access to organizational knowledge is important for any organization. In the financial services space, it’s a sound investment practice as well.
Take 3i Group, one of the world’s leading investment firms focused in private equity, infrastructure and debt management. Based in London, 3i has over $15 billion in total assets (around £1.5 billion) through 101 portfolio companies across Europe, Asia and the Americas. Read more and comment…