Ed Shepherdson

Today’s consumers, whether B2B or B2C, are much more informed than ever before about the products and services they are buying.  This newly found awareness based on product information, industry and peer reviews, and multiple social channels, has given consumers this sense of trust that if others “like me” purchased or bought this product, and they thought it was great, then it must be great for me as well.    The impact of this is that it has set the consumer expectation at a very high level.

Most companies have not adapted to the socialization of their products and services with respect to how to conduct the full scope of business. Sales and marketing love it – they can get their name and product out to millions and millions of people, however on the reverse side of the business, the support and services group have to deal with the high expectations of customers, which has been created in part, by its own sales and marketing departments.

Thus the gap has been...

I have been in the customer service business for more than two decades and the same discussions continue to rage on and on about customer service – “Look how great Southwest Airlines is,” and “Look how poor Comcast is,” and on and on with new examples of outstanding and poor customer service evolving every few years.

So why is Southwest Airlines so well known for great customer service?  It’s because they are transparent – what you see is what you get. Because of this transparency, the people that work for Southwest are empowered to make decisions because they have insight into their customers and what they can and cannot provide to their customers.    It is quite simple; when you have information at your fingertips, you can make decisions that impact the outcome of your customer’s experience.

So why can’t everyone deliver a customer experience like Southwest?   They could, but most companies have put themselves in a position that doesn’t allow them to execute with...

If you needed further evidence that customer support operations are overwhelmed by data, look no further than the joint research paper released today by the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA) and Coveo entitled, “Enterprise Search 2.0-Powered Analytics: Transforming Data into Actionable Knowledge.” New data revealed within the report includes this eye-opening statistic: TSIA members receive, on average, 51,000 support incidents per month. These include phone, email, Web chat, and online incidents, each filled with critical information about products and services that could be mined for trends.

I was pleased to have contributed to this report. As the title suggests, the report focuses on Enterprise Search 2.0-powered customer service analytics, a topic relevant to today’s customer service organizations who are awash in oceans of data, and one...

Where does knowledge really reside in your organization?

If managing knowledge was an easy problem to solve, it would have been solved years ago. Today, however, in this age of information, organizations continue to struggle with the notion of knowledge.

Here’s the knowledge challenge: it is not really about the creation of knowledge, but about where to put it and how to access it once you have housed it somewhere.

To date, the theory of knowledge management has been around identifying the knowledge, categorizing it so we know what it is, storing it somewhere, and having a process to retrieve it again. It all sounds simple, so why has it not been done?
Here are five key reasons why this challenge exists:

Reason #1: Not all information is used or understood by everyone – therefore how can it be accurately categorized?

Reason #2: Only certain people can create the knowledge; therefore, only those people can...