I presented at ActuateOne Live, a customer event for the company behind BIRT, last week. The subject of my talk was Analytics and Data Science: the breaking wave. My key argument is that cratering costs of processing, RAM and storage, combined with a new generation of data processing technologies built and open sourced by web companies (noSQL), are combining to allow enterprises unprecedented opportunities to do the things with data they always wanted to but the DBA said they couldn’t afford.
I also sat on a panel looking at mobile, cloud and “agile analytics”. Seems the panel went well. I evidently triggered some thoughts from a colleague at another analyst firm, Richard Snow at Ventana Research.
I like Richard’s use of the phrase “moments of truth” to describe the customer service experiences that traditional CRM apps do such a terrible job of capturing.
“After consumers interact with a company in some way (for example, see an advertisement, visit a website, try to use a product, call the contact center, visit social media or even talk to a friend), they are left with a perception or feeling about that company. If the feeling is good, they feel satisfied, if it is bad they are unhappy; in either case they have had a Moment of Truth. Adding up all these moments of truth, a company can gauge their overall satisfaction level, their propensity to remain loyal and buy more, and the likelihood they will say good or bad things about the company to friends or on social media.”
As Richard says
James put forward the view that companies need to focus more on customer behavior and the likely impact on customer behavior of marketing messages, sales calls, social media content, product features, an agent’s attitude, IVR menus and other sources, or as I recently wrote, how customers are likely to react to moments of truth in their contacts. Understanding this requires analysis of masses of historic and current data, both structured and unstructured. It will be interesting to see what Actuate does in this area as it develops more customer-related solutions
Tracking social media interactions can give us insight into these moments of truth. Actuate offers Twitter integration, as do many other analytics companies, while Facebook integration is also heating up fast – see for example Adobe SocialAnalytics and Microstrategy Facebook CRM.
This stuff isn’t getting any easier though. It used to be that you could track what people said on social networks. But with Facebook turning on “automated sharing“, so tracking your apps and creating implicit declarations about what you like on your behalf, the data deluge is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
We’ll need to understand that online persona may not always give us the “moments of truth“, because people online are trying to create a persona. There is a difference, for example, between what they share, and what they click on – that is, Kitteh vs Chickin.
disclosure: Actuate and Adobe are both clients.
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