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.
Coveo + Salesforce = Unstoppable Search for Service & Support
And the winner is…Coveo! We’re pleased to announce that Coveo has just been named a 2013 Service Leader alongside salesforce.com in CRM Magazine‘s Service Leaders Awards.
These awards acknowledge the “best of the best” in customer service and support, and are chosen by a group of approximately 20 top analysts and industry experts based on a mix of weighted criteria – including depth of functionality and services, customer satisfaction, company direction, deployment costs and overall revenue.
John Ragsdale, Vice President of Technology Research at the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA), called Coveo his “top recommended search platform,” due to its “faceted search and dynamic integrations” with external systems, while Kate Leggett, principal analyst at Forrester, noted that Coveo offers “excellent search [capabilities] across structured and unstructured sources” as well as “strong visualization and dashboarding tools to present search results in very consumable ways.”
In its review of the 2013 Service Leader Award winners, CRM Magazine also referred to Coveo as “a mainstay on the CCS leaderboard,” noting that Coveo for Salesforce, introduced in 2012, gives Salesforce users the ability to search across nearly any system, directly from the Salesforce UI. Read more and comment…
Webinar: Turning Knowledge Management and Enterprise Search Upside Down
Customers have so many choices today. It’s our jobs to make their experiences as easy, relevant and engaging as possible. By delivering exceptional customer experiences, companies can acquire new customers through referrals from highly satisfied customers, retain existing customers and improve their overall efficiency.
Unfortunately, too many customer service agents, field agents and even sales and marketing team members, do not have the essential customer information and insight they need, when they need it, resulting in negative customer experiences.
Imagine this scenario instead, if your organization uses a CRM such as Salesforce: A CSR views a case, and in addition to the details of the issue, he or she is automatically shown the best and most relevant knowledge—from anywhere—to solve the case in the fastest and most accurate way possible – right into the Salesforce Case Console, into the context of the agent. Without conducting a single search query, and regardless of where the information resides. The information is pushed to the agent.
Sound like a future state? The future is now. Read more and comment…
Now Live on the AppExchange: Salesforce Service Cloud users can stop searching, and start finding
Knowledge Management will never be the same.
We’re at the start of a sea change in how employees find the information they need to do their work. Not surprisingly, the sea change begins with a combination of solutions known for leadership and innovation: Salesforce and Coveo. Together, we are turning knowledge management—and enterprise search—upside down.
Placing customers first, Coveo in September introduced the beta version of our application that pushes relevant knowledge directly into the Salesforce Case Console, into the context of the agent. We started here because we know that companies need and want to improve the customer experience. We know that agents struggle mightily to find the combination of information that will help them solve challenges for their customers faster and better. And we know the problem is only getting worse, in an age of big, unstructured and structured data, and with the continued proliferation of point systems and fragmented content sources.
So we put our enterprise-grade, Unified Indexing technology to the test. Could we push the information that would help agents help their customers faster and with more accuracy, regardless of where it resides? Could we provide a next generation federated search experience to even the most junior customer service agent? Could we make it fast and simple to configure and activate, in the cloud? Could we improve the capacity of a contact center by 10 or even 20 percent overnight by injecting better knowledge?
When we launched Coveo for Salesforce Beta version in September, we heard from many of our friends in the analyst and influencer community that it was going to be a game-changer. Our Beta Program participants proved the theory:
“Users simply find what they didn’t even know they were looking for. We need the right information at the right time to ensure our customers’ greatest success, and Coveo helps us to do that, right in Salesforce.” – Gerard Snippe, Rembrandt, a division of Rabobank (case study)
Today, we’re making this game-changing application one that turns knowledge management and enterprise search upside down, available to every company that uses Salesforce, with our listing of Coveo for Salesforce on the AppExchange. Starting today, Salesforce admins can, with a free trial, help their users stop searching, and start finding. Coveo for Salesforce, Service Cloud Edition is Generally Available on the AppExchange.
How will this turn transform your customer service and support initiatives?
A.I.M. Higher: Empower Your Service Reps to Delight Customers
On a trip to Orlando two years ago, I arrived quite late to a Hilton hotel and visited the restaurant a few minutes before closing. The server took my order, disappeared, and didn’t come back for a few minutes. It was just a touch too long, and I was beginning to wonder if my order was forgotten.
Then the server came back, apologized for the delay and gave me a free drink on the spot. I still remember that experience because it wasn’t expected. I had not complained and the delay really wasn’t a big deal. So far as I know, I didn’t send any signals via my body language that I was unhappy.
It impressed me that my server was empathetic enough to realize that their service was not quite up to par, without a complaint. And furthermore, he didn’t have to go ask permission to give me the drink.
That’s a simple but powerful example of an empowered employee. My server obviously had some latitude to make a decision on the spot in the interest of creating a memorable experience. The fact that I’ve told this story many times in speeches the past two years, and now write about it here, speaks volumes for the real impact of that simple gesture. Read more and comment…
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…
Does Your Knowledge Structure Need an Overhaul? Don’t Forget Step One
The cover story of this month’s Harvard Business Review examines the current imperfect state of knowledge exchange in the workplace. Written by several consultants at McKinsey & Company, the article states that “competitive advantage today increasingly comes from the particular, hard-to-duplicate know-how of a company’s most-skilled knowledge workers: talented (and highly paid) engineers, salespeople, scientists, physicians, and other professionals.” Noting that the situation is only getting worse, the consultants advocate for identifying skill gaps, redesigning workplace responsibilities, emphasizing professional development and outsourcing less essential work to lower-skill employees, if possible.
Those are all sound recommendations – but is the problem of knowledge transfer only an issue with structure and training? Or is it an issue of collaboration and technology as well? 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…