Sound strange? Just think about it…and perhaps consider your own experience. Let’s say you are an engineer or product developer for a mid-sized company. Say the company has been around for 30 years, creates complex products requiring QA testing and perhaps regulatory compliance. At the same time, the company has grown to 10,000 people with 3,000 engineers split among seven different offices in three countries.

You’ve been with the company for three years, working in the headquarters campus where there are close to 1,000 engineers. Perhaps you know 100 people with whom you’ve worked on projects during the past three years. Say you know another 100 people by reputation, but you’re not entirely sure of all of their projects (past and present). That leaves 2800 engineers you don’t know, and you have no idea what they‘ve done, or even what they are working on right now. Sure, you may have Sharepoint profiles, but that doesn’t help you understand expertise, projects worked, or interests, because it is not created from each engineer’s actual, ongoing work and interactions.

Is it any wonder that, in a recent Coveo survey of 120 executives, just 13 percent said employees can effectively tap into the collective knowledge of their organizations?

That’s just one side of the knowledge coin, because knowledge requires people + information. Where is the data that your organization has created over the past 30 years, how do you access it, create compliance reports, gather information about the best possible components for the products you are designing? Your company has grown through acquisition. How do you access information from multiple prior businesses? Scientists have run tests, QA specialists have painstakingly reviewed plans and products, customers have made comments and continue to do so, sometimes in communities and via social media such as Twitter.

All of this data exists somewhere. It may be in far-flung offices on servers, or in your PLM system, the Intranet, an issue tracking database, on desktops, in emails, shared drives, your ERP, the list is kind of endless. Now factor in the cloud and social media.

Is this a “big data” problem? Or is this a challenge associated with the accelerating fragmentation of fast-growing, unstructured data and the locations in which it exists? This is a challenge which may be solved, and elegantly so, by indexing content that is in all of these systems—in the cloud, behind the firewall, and in social media; mashing it, enriching it, and instantly assembling it to meet the immediate needs of our engineer, by knowing our engineer’s role, projects and challenges. Sort of a personal mash-up to help you do your job, better, faster, and with greater results. It includes who knows what about topics you care about. It allows you to build on past work rather than recreating it. Know who knows what—that you care about. That is Insight.

If you are an engineer or working in a product development role, we’d like to hear about your knowledge and expertise access experience. Are you able to leverage your company’s collective knowledge? Or are you among the 87 percent who cannot? We’re running a poll to find out. Please join the conversation by completing the survey, and check back in two weeks to see the results. We will also tweet the results—so follow us to see them. Or, join the conversation by commenting about your knowledge challenges in the comments section below.

This information immediacy issue is playing out every day in many industries in multiple formats – whether it’s a customer on the phone with his or her mobile phone provider trying to straighten out a bill, a product engineer working to determine the next phase of a development cycle and needing to tap into a side project for research data, or a sales force leader determining an appropriate engagement strategy for his or her organization. The problem is, as common as these scenarios are, the access to all of the information necessary to make insightful decisions is not as prevalent as one may think.

This is why Coveo and its customers are paving the way – truly leading the charge as innovators – bringing together vast amounts of data on our unified indexing platform across enterprise systems and social channels and making it available with contextual relevance to each and every user—we term this one-to-one, end-to-end. With a single, unified view of information across channels (think an information mash-up like you’d get on Yahoo! Finance), customer service teams discover information relationships within diverse data sources to better know and serve their customers and enable better decision making – all aimed at building a truly customer-centric organization.

As an example, one of Coveo’s customers has taken the need to be innovative to a whole new level. Priding itself on its customer service capabilities, the SaaS provider of talent management solutions with more than 5,000 customers has been recognized with several awards for its industry-leading customer service and support. In fact, it is the only company in its category that was recognized by the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA) for Excellence in Service Operations.

The customer boasts an impressive 94 percent customer satisfaction rating from independent studies – in part because of its innovative abilities to bring together information and analyze it in a cohesive manner, thereby better serving its customers. Within three months of its implementation of Coveo, the customer had improved its first-call resolution by 32 percent and cut case resolution time by nearly 13 percent.

As we continue to innovate alongside our customers, we are pleased to also be recognized by the TSIA for its innovation as a finalist for the 2012 Recognized Innovator Awards. Regarding our Insight Solution for Customer Service, judges have noted that:

• “Innovation is clearly seen in this excellent application. Solid business impact can clearly be seen.”
• “Excellent cases and the insight console is unique approach to providing contextual data to agents.”

As we strive to stay innovative in the solutions we offer to our customers and the community at large, we’re also exhibiting at the Technology Services World (TSW) Best Practices conference in Santa Clara, CA, this week. This event is packed with bleeding-edge organizations that are focused on providing innovative solutions to the necessities of life. It is an opportunity for us to share information with our peers and best practices to help our customers continue to bring innovative solutions to the forefront of their businesses.

Knowledge contained within systems and within people is what keeps them competitive, innovative and unique. When accessed and shared across teams, geographies, departmental silos, and even after someone has left the organization, its influence may be even farther reaching. While most organizations continue to struggle to transform disparate knowledge into a deeper level of insight, one Coveo customer is doing just that – and it’s helping them to innovate more quickly, bring new products and services to market faster, and ultimately better serve their customers.

Institut National D’Optique (INO) is a technological design and development firm specializing in optics and photonic solutions. INO is home to the largest concentration of skills in its field and serves a global client base. The company’s solutions are used in a wide range of applications, from process control to inspection, medical screening, remote sensing, quality control, and much more.

Eighty percent of INO’s workforce is highly educated and highly skilled scientists, technicians and engineers, making knowledge the main currency. From 2010 – 2011, INO was awarded 12 new patents, for a total of 134 patents held on a variety of technological innovations.

With more than 25 years of research and information contained within systems and people, INO approached Coveo to help them transform all of this information into actionable knowledge and insight. The company was also looking to improve the efficiency of its scientists and researchers so that more time could be spent developing innovative solutions to meet customer and marketplace needs and requirements.

INO Process and Compliance Manager Pierre Bergeron championed the company’s implementation of Coveo’s Insight Solutions for R&D and Engineering. As Pierre told us, “In order to accelerate our ability to innovate, we needed to provide a better way to access and share our extensive scientific and technical knowledge across the business, so that we can increase the productivity of our researchers and speed innovation, which in turn would ultimately help serve our customers better.” Prior to Coveo, INO employees were only getting a fraction of the view of knowledge that was available to them across people and systems.

The INO and Coveo team win the 2011 OCTAS award for Best Business Solution. Pictured from left to right: Laurent Simoneau, Christophe Deutsch, Frédéric Paré, Pierre Bergeron.

Today, by indexing nearly all corporate knowledge, INO employees now have consolidated views of contextually relevant knowledge across departments and people – in near real time. The company also reports a 99% adoption rate and an overall 5% increase in productivity across all employees. Given the highly skilled senior workforce that INO employs, the company’s CFO reports that this increase in productivity has resulted in pretty impressive cost savings as well. Coveo has become very pervasive across INO – employees ask each other if they’ve “Coveo’d it” when looking for knowledge.

INO has also integrated Coveo into the company’s new hire training process. New hires are immediately trained for 30 minutes on Coveo to help them get up to speed faster, understand subject matter experts and who knows what within the organization, and quickly ramp up on customer projects and requirements. With Coveo, new hires come up to speed more quickly and are able to start contributing to the success of client projects right away. This has helped improve customer service, innovation levels, and more.

INO’s work with Coveo and the results they’ve achieved have won them recognition – both internally and externally. Pierre’s team was awarded INO’s INOvation Award – given to internal teams who display innovative uses of technology to drive the business forward. INO and Coveo were also recipients of the 2011 OCTAS Award for Best Business Solution. More details about INO’s success with Insight Solutions can be found here.

We love to hear how our customers are generating value with Coveo – and how the industry overall is benefitting from Insight Solutions – to give them a better handle on the ever growing amounts of knowledge and information across channels and systems. How have you unlocked knowledge across your R&D or engineering teams? How would this help drive your business?

A good example of CA Technologies’ use of insight solutions was chronicled recently on Forbes.com. The article, written by columnist Dan Woods and posted on Forbes’s “Data Driven” blog, focuses on “How CA Technologies Uses Data to Drive Product Development.”

The article talks about how CA Technologies represents a new breed of companies that no longer run their product development operations on instinct. Instead, they use data to track various aspects of product development to facilitate the production of the best possible software solution.

CTO Don Ferguson discusses the pressures of leading a large, global R&D team and having to justify the R&D spend to the C-suite.  He describes how better insight into vast amounts of information has enabled CA Technologies to benefit from customer feedback in the early phases of each development cycle, allowing the organization to work in a more agile manner.

This approach is centered on what you’ve heard us talk about before – the concept of a customer-centric strategy – placing customers in the center of the business.  Companies need to involve customers in every aspect of their decision making, starting with product development. If they don’t gather feedback early in the development process, every time they enter a new cycle they’re putting all of their work at risk. No company can afford to put out a product that doesn’t meet customer needs after 12 months of testing.

The Forbes piece also touches on the use of social media to facilitate that customer interaction. It discusses the ways CA Technologies keeps a close eye on how customers use its self-service website and online communities to learn about products, solve problems on their own, request assistance and volunteer new ideas for features. By consolidating and correlating this data with other information, CA Technologies can inject that insight into its product development processes, detect where any issues may be occurring in the products, and understand which content is helping customers the most.

In this day and age, companies that don’t utilize information across digital channels put themselves at a severe disadvantage. They don’t know what the outside world is saying about them and they’re not putting the feedback into context with other information locked in their own enterprise systems. CA Technologies is one company that does it right. Leo Annab, Business Technology Officer at CA Technologies recently sat down with Coveo to discuss this in more detail.

Using Insight Solutions, CA Technologies engages the customer at all interaction points. CA Technologies incorporates customer information and feedback into its processes, making it a more agile business and driving improved business performance.

CA Technologies has proven itself to be a global leader in its field. Companies in every industry can learn from its use of technology to drive customer centricity and leverage data to its advantage.

Our conversation around the future of customer service touched on so many different, salient points that I was prompted to open up the discussion to a broader audience.   I am hoping you will contribute your thoughts.

At a high level and from a pure company perspective, what appears to be the driving trend across the industry is a requirement we are all very familiar with: lowering costs. The margin pressures on customer service are ever increasing and customer service executives are being asked to do more with less—however they also must either hold steady or preferably increase customer satisfaction.

At the other end of the spectrum, the customer operates in an increasingly proliferate and democratic world. Customers have access to more information, which creates a more competent customer with higher expectations around the availability of relevant information to solve issues on their own, and a much greater willingness – and ability – to turn to other providers that have better differentiation on service.

Those competing factors alone drive requirements for self-service; and although self-service has been around for a long time, contextually relevant self-service will become a major trend. The question companies need to address externally is how to make the self-service experience one that is relevant to your customer’s current situation, so that customers can gain the knowledge they need, aligned with their own situation, to solve an issue more efficiently. That is what we refer to as contextually relevant insight. Not only it drives call deflection, but it also helps increase customer satisfaction.

Internally, these factors drive a requirement for more and better accessibility to knowledge on the part of customer service agents, especially facing these increasingly competent customers. Again, the ability for agents to efficiently pull knowledge that is contextually relevant to the customer’s specific situation will drive first call resolutions up, will shrink average case resolution time, and will enable entry level agents to handle more complex issues.

I am often surprised by the disproportionate amount of investment that customer service organizations put into the call center infrastructure to route calls, transcript calls, manage workflows, standardize account pop-ups, manage traffic, etc.; relative to how little investment is made to enable customers or agents to access the knowledge needed to actually solve customer issues. Isn’t that the primary goal of customer service?

I am also surprised to see so many organizations confuse knowledge and information, and hence looking as knowledge management as an IT problem and a system of record challenge. Please open up the dictionary and you will see knowledge defined as the human capacity to take action facing an uncertain situation. Exactly what customer service agents face all day every day. Knowledge resides with people, not systems. People acquire knowledge – they gain insight – by gathering information from all sources but also by identifying and learning from other people who are experts and have prior experience about the situation at hand. Not just by logging in the knowledge base.

So for a customer service agent, knowledge resides in the collection of content sources that mine the cumulative know-how and learnings about customer and product issues history, but it also resides with the people who have worked on similar issues or products. This is why the ability to quickly identify contextually relevant experts is also critical in customer service. Failure to do so results in a suboptimal ability to solve the case, or equally bad a process where an agent wastes time recreating knowledge that already exists and often times a worse version of it.

In turn, that drives the confluence between sales, service and engineering. Enabling that triangle is critical because establishing context about a customer reaches in all three areas. Typically those departments operate in a silo. For example, engineering builds a new product and hands it over to sales. Then, the sales department hands it over to service. And there is little interaction among and between groups. Now, these three are really coming together with the consolidation of knowledge across the organization between engineering, sales and marketing, and customer service. It’s critical to solving customer issues faster and ensuring product issues get resolved faster.

At a macro level, the rate of change and the variety of information sources are increasing. Between the years 2000 and 2010, the average number of information sources a company had to deal with was multiplied by roughly two and a half times. In 2000, assume a customer service environment had five to 10 sources of information for answering customer demands and solving issues.  With the proliferation of enterprise systems and digital media, they now have 25 or more sources. That’s the reality of today, and cloud based computing fuels the fragmentation even more.

I was with the EVP of Engineering of a large consumer electronics company recently. Internally they use SAP ERP, Oracle Siebel for CRM, fileshares across the company with a recent move to SharePoint (wonders what the real advantage is since users can’t get much out of it), Jira and Parametric PLM in engineering, and databases popping everywhere… Yet when they release a new product into the market, within 24 hours he has already heard about design flaws from social sources like Twitter, completely outside of the company’s domain. That speaks volumes about the importance of distilling insights from a consolidated view of all enterprise information plus social media data, because the knowledge about customers and products is an ecosystem of information and people, and not a single system.

We don’t know what the landscape will look like three years from now, and no one can predict the next paradigm shift. All we can do is focus on the paradigm of today – adapting to change and being able to quickly reassemble the information and reach the people needed. That is opposed to the old paradigm of IT personnel sitting around the table discussing their information needs for the next five years.
What trends do you see impacting the future of customer service?

I was struck by the commitment Keith shows to helping his customers – which are, in the end, our leaders of tomorrow: the students of today. While SunGard’s technology solutions help enable school districts to do more with less – and help families to participate in their children’s education – the beneficiary of this technology is ultimately the students themselves. When the school district operates more efficiently, students benefit from additional resources dedicated to them and their education.  Ultimately we all benefit. What a great story – what a great calling.

Keith’s team recently implemented Coveo Insight Solutions to support customer service operations—helping to ensure that the K- 12 school districts SunGard serves get the guidance they need, when they need it, and to continue to use SunGard technology to help them operate effectively and efficiently.

During our meeting we chatted about the reasons behind SunGard’s Coveo implementation. I was impressed and I think you will be, too. I asked Keith about the business drivers behind his decision to  implement Coveo Insight Solutions.  Here is a synopsis of his answer:

“You can imagine the challenges our school districts are facing in light of the economy and the federal-state funding cut-backs. We at SunGard want to help our customers achieve more with less—so they can focus their resources on the students. We will be launching new products intended to help them do that and more. We want to be as efficient as possible to keep our costs down for our customers—and we knew there was technology available that could help us improve our support capability without adding the expense of additional resources.

We evaluated the insight software category and found that Coveo was the most flexible, cost effective and sophisticated solution to help us achieve our goals. Like most support operations, we have potential support resolution information spread out in many different places – our agents were switching context and having to go to several different systems, customer forums, and more, to solve customer issues, taking longer than necessary to resolve many customer support cases.

We found that Coveo would help streamline our customer service operations and provide our agents with a consolidated view of all structured and unstructured customer information—organized around whatever entity we chose—whether that was a customer, or a case, or even a product. Coveo was the most flexible, adaptable solution we saw. Even as our business continues to grow and evolve, Coveo will easily adapt. The technology helps us gain even more value from the tools we already have in place, from our CRM to our case tracking system, file shares and online customer communities.”

SunGard’s customer-centric operations allow the company to be more effective in serving its customers—who are, ultimately, our children. Again – is there a better calling?

How do you help your customers operate more effectively and efficiently, and how does that help the ultimate end user?

If you’re interested on more information on Coveo’s work with SunGard K-12 Education, click here.

It’s not due to lack of trying.  Companies are struggling to become nimble enough to first understand and then respond quickly and accurately to customer needs, across all departments, particularly customer service, sales & marketing and engineering, those which are most concerned with customer interaction. This requires placing the customer at the center of the organization.

We recently surveyed 130 executives at the 2012 Customer Care Leadership Forum, to get their thoughts on the importance of customer centricity, the value of this strategy, and specific barriers that stand in the way to achieving customer centricity. Executives report significant benefits to placing the customer in the center of the business, yet the growing number of enterprise systems and social channels, the geometric growth of data, and internal and external silos, all contribute to block the path to customer centricity.  

Here’s a closer look at some of the key survey findings:

-  63 percent of respondents believe that the biggest value of a customer-centric strategy is to drive revenue.

-  69 percent of respondents noted that the most prominent barrier to customer centricity is the inability to collaborate and share information across sales/marketing, customer service and product engineering functions.  This is in spite of organizations having implemented collaboration platforms and social communities.

-  Moreover, 42 percent of respondents estimate that their companies have visibility into less than a quarter of information across all interaction channels, including social streams.

-  65 percent noted that they do not (54 percent) combine social data with enterprise content or are not sure (11 percent) of whether their organizations combine this data in customer service and support operations.  Additional survey findings can be found in the news release.

It’s clear that information is the “make or break” ingredient to achieving customer centricity. Understanding what information is available, how to consolidate it across silos, systems, teams, geographies, and how to make sense of it all – are the keys to establishing a culture of customer centricity.

Would you classify your organization as customer centric? If so, what strategies do you have in place to ensure all customer facing groups have insight into customer information across enterprise and social channels? If not, what barriers do you face?

Clearly we all know that the customer experience runs across all channels and all front-line employees; however the website is arguably the most important channel for many organizations—and not just for ecommerce, but for complex, B2B products and services as well.

Your website is your best brand representation and should reflect your knowledge of your customers and adjust quickly to each and every customer (and it goes without saying about your own products and services, as well as how the customer is using them and whether or not he or she is satisfied). After all, as we see with my Neiman Marcus example, consumers – who are often times also B2B buyers—are beginning to experience the correlation of their actions with the information served up to them on the internet.  Customers expect the same experience on your website that they may get on the internet at large—only better, because they know you, and you should know them.  And yet, both experience and research shows that companies are struggling to provide that personalized, one-to-one experience on their website.

Luckily, Insight technology can “know” much more about your customer than the Neiman Marcus website knows about me. It can understand the customer or prospect’s history, their level of knowledge about your company’s products and services, level of satisfaction (do I like that pair of shoes I looked at?), the customer’s interactions on social media sites and communities, and their interactions with all front-line employees at your company, in customer service, sales, marketing, etc. It can also correlate this information with other similar customers and more, helping customers to learn from each other.

Why is this important? So that the technology can instantly assemble contextually relevant information from all sources, and provide it in a meaningful “conversation” with the customer or prospect via the website.   (And by the way, this is the same information, though perhaps abridged, that your sales person or customer service agent will see when interacting with the customer or prospect, providing that consistent, end-to-end brand experience which is so elusive to marketers.)

What about you? Have you been “stalked” by items you didn’t want, on the internet? How did it impact your perception of that brand? How do you provide a more contextually relevant experience for your B2B customers?

Enterprise Insight Deficit is caused primarily by hoards of information distributed among multiple IT and organizational silos and in social media, making actionable Insight challenging to attain. It’s a significant obstacle across the customer and product lifecycle—from R&D to customer service. Lack of insight negatively impacts customer service, engineering and sales teams from better serving customers, selling to their customers, and quickly innovating products and services.

In customer service, you might have noticed certain issues coming to light. Are customer service costs growing? Is customer satisfaction declining? Is customer self-service not deflecting as many issues from the call center as it should? Do your customers feel that your company doesn’t really “know” them and all their interactions with you and prior product/service purchases?

Your product development or engineering group might be struggling with different issues. Are products not making it to market fast enough? Is customer input being excluded from product development because it takes too long to access the information or isn’t shared among teams? Are engineers not leveraging the collective knowledge of your organization well?

And what about your sales and marketing teams? Are sales professionals lacking information about customers in order to better understand and upsell these accounts? Are sales cycles longer than they should be due to the amount of time it takes to discover and correlate account information? Is marketing spending money on tactics that don’t produce results?

These are symptoms of Enterprise Insight Deficit Disorder, and they can inflict significant damage on an organization.  To bring much greater Insight to your organization the best approach is to begin with the area that suffers most from Insight Deficit, make this your proving ground, and expand from there. Once you have determined which area most needs help, you can focus your efforts there.

CA Technologies provides a showcase example on how better Insight has generated significant value in its customer service operations. CA Technologies consolidates customer information from 74 systems and sources including customer communities, providing much greater insight into its customers, issues resolutions, and more. With this level of insight, CA Technologies has increased overall satisfaction by 40 basis points, decreased time to resolution by 15%, and more. You can watch the full CA Technologies success story here.

Another Coveo customer, IBM Netezza, increased Insight across its operations by creating a single-screen view of all customer support and engineering repositories. Within 30 days of implementation, the company reduced the time needed to identify known customer issues by 67% and reduced duplicate bug submissions to the development team by 50 %.  Forrester analyst Kate Leggett fully documented IBM Netezza’s success in a case study.

If you’re interested in finding out how customer service, engineering/product development and sales & marketing departments can overcome these obstacles, you may want to view an eBook we recently published on making 2012 the year of insight for your organization.  Please take a look, and share how you’re dealing with these issues. We welcome the discussion.

As a recent Fast Company interview with Coveo CEO Louis Têtu stated, people who could remember all of this information, and easily correlate it—mentally—were those who succeeded most often. However, the amount of unstructured data makes it impossible for an individual to know everything that’s occurring related to a specific topic, at any point in time. Add in social media channels which contain up to the minute data, and you have an unbelievably complex information mess.  How can an individual, much less all employees in a company, gain insight from such widespread, diverse data in disparate systems?

Well if all of these systems could be connected to each other so we could all understand, assimilate and correlate the information to make effective decisions, provide great service, help customers understand more about our products, and even build more innovative products that contained customer input – from all of our interactions with them—well, that might solve our problem.  But would it? Do integrations provide the kind of real-time information mashup that would be required? Not really.  Even so, it’s not news that the promise of system consolidation has long eluded companies and we’ve all heard the horror stories about dashboards taking a year to implement, and then they are just windows into different systems rather than actual data mashups.

Every organization wants to generate Insight from its data sources, and many probably think they’re doing a solid job in this area. However, most aren’t gleaning the level of insight they could, and it could be simply that this type of technology is new to the corporate world, though it has been used by consumers for years now – just take a look at Yahoo! Finance to see what I mean.

Until companies adopt the central, unified index approach, they may continue to suffer from what we call “Insight Deficit.” Here are some symptoms that may be familiar to you:

1. Employees are frustrated that they need to attend additional training sessions because they can’t see data in the right context.
2. Customers are dissatisfied with long response times and feel that your company doesn’t really know them.
3. Mistakes happen more than you’d care to admit because employees simply can’t find the information needed to make fast, accurate decisions.
4. Products are taking longer to get to market than they should.

If you’re interested in finding out how to think about injecting Insight into business processes from customer service to engineering/product development and sales & marketing, you may want to view an eBook we recently published on making 2012 the year of insight for your organization.   Please take a look, and share how you are leveraging today’s overload of data to gain better insight into your customers, projects, products and people. Looking forward to the conversation.