Customer Interaction Software

Gartner analyst Mick MacComaschaigh recently added a blog post titled Collecting our thoughts and thoughts on the collective.  Like we at Baynote frequently do, he uses the analogy of how much ants can accomplish when they act collectively.  Many other thinkers have also used this story to illustrate collective intelligence including Brian Solis and Steven Johnson.

In his blog Mick says, "It can be argued that social software facilitates in some ways the next evolution of interaction between individuals, among groups and within a collective. Such social networks can be built upon our desires to be regarded in a context greater than our immediate surrounds."

As individuals, we frequently want to protect our individual voice and yet at the same time we desire to reach out to those most like us.  These opposing forces are constantly in play.  In this sense we are not like ants, who are all or nothing about the "collective."

By limiting the "collective" to those who are currently seeking the same thing, i.e. sharing a similar context, we can balance our need for individuality with the benefits of drawing on the strengths and wisdom of those who are the same path.

Mick concludes with the statement, "It is incumbent upon us to regard collective intelligence as the “killer application” for our social platform and establish an exciting base for the next phase of our cultural evolution."

We agree wholeheartedly.  The era of the lone and lonely web surfer is behind us.  It is now an increasingly social experience. Smart companies will realize their customers expect a social experience.  And for that social experience to work, you need to rely on others to show you the way.

As Mick said "If ants can do it, we can too."

Guest blog by Julie Hunt, blogger, consultant and software analyst.

While corporate websites are still important to the success of B2B vendors, these websites must change to better engage customers. Corporations must transform their websites from only reflecting the corporate POV to websites that customers want to use. Unfortunately over time and through multiple M&A actions, websites for large corporations can become nightmarish: fragmented, patched together, links leading to superficially rebranded acquisition websites, navigation that goes nowhere. For corporate teams, it can be overwhelming to try to figure out how to rein in the website sprawl and transform it to be customer-engaging and highly usable.

For professional research purposes, over several years, I have dipped into the older CA corporate website many times. The website epitomized much of what can go wrong when working from the company POV and when covering lots of different products, many as acquisitions. I experienced the difficulties of trying to track down information, finding that CA had duplicate sites that often had dissimilar information. Many times the same products were aligned with multiple solution tracks and initiatives, so the go-to-market thinking was fuzzy to visitors. Trying to get through the products list to find information was daunting - there truly were about 5 different ways to slice and dice what I might be looking for. Lots of M&A had transformed the CA site into a fragmented hodgepodge. But let’s be clear -- this previous CA site was no different from most of the other websites for large corporations, where “more really wasn’t better”.

At a recent Baynote webcast, I got a look at the new CA Technologies corporate website and an overview of the what, how and why for creating the new site: what comprises the new look, how CA did it -- and why - what was the strategy. After the webcast, I wandered through the new website, mentally overlaying the old version to see what had changed. 


What comprises the new look?
I’m impressed by what CA has accomplished. The new home page and many of the main section pages are visually stunning and wonderfully spare in the right way. Clear ease of navigation and clear communication of what CA does. The menu bar is simple but calls out the categories that matter; the navigation to CA communities is front and center, as well as the My CA link: all the sort of content that customers are looking for. The Products menu is to-the-point, and the products lists for each category are easy to navigate: wonderfully clean, brief, but sufficient. I see a CA that has integrated and organized its acquisitions in ways that should make sense to customers looking for solutions.


How did CA do it?
VP of Online Experiences Larry Walker talked about the tremendous amount of work and thought that went into the website redesign, including serious reviews of what had been tried previously and of many potential notions for redesign. At the core, the new design focuses on creating dynamic web experiences for each customer or visitor. As part of the overall website design, CA uses what Baynote calls Adaptive Web solutions which include personalization and social search for customer-focused relevance to help optimize engagement and retention.

Walker called out these guiding tenets for the new web design:
Simplify - Succinct messaging, intuitive layout, few components: for a single experience across all channels, from the customer POV
Identify - Single identity across all sites, common profile: access, subscriptions, interests
Engage – Communities, MyCA: customer-focused content and interaction


Why – What was the CA strategic thinking?
Beyond the obviously extensive analysis and planning that went into creating the new corporate website for CA, what really caught my attention was the strategy for working with CA internal teams. Walker’s team understood that strategy for successful web experiences not only mapped to greatly improved customer engagement, but saw that internal CA teams had to be convinced to support the new website approach as well.  A lot of effort went into enabling internal cultural change for CA teams to be able to work with the new “customer as buyer” and to better understand how to support that customer through the website (obviously with the hope that eventual purchase would result). Among methods to make the case internally, Walker utilized Baynote internal dashboards to help show the value of new website approach to CA teams.

Very importantly for corporate success, Walker states that efforts targeting internal teams led to these achievements:
− Improved, user-driven customer engagement  
− Content offerings managed by user value  
− Enriched metrics through customer behavior
– Changed perceptions of how to engage customers


The overall CA approach to the major website redesign strongly illustrates that customer experience is not just about external web presence, but is also about dynamic support from all customer-touching teams throughout the customer’s life cycle with a particular company.  An engaging website is only part of it – how a company works with customers for any need is key to customer retention.

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished software industry analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights. Her 20+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt  

Technobabble 2.0 2010 Top Analyst Tweeters: Julie Hunt ranked #78 of 1000 listed

Disclosure: I have no affiliation with either CA Technologies or Baynote.

Forrester published an interesting report this week, called “The Online Customer Engagement Software Ecosystem”.

As the title suggests, Forrester believes that information and knowledge management professionals who deal with public websites need to use a mix of different technologies from an ecosystem of providers – no single platform will meet all of their needs.

According to the report’s authors, Stephen Powers, Matthew Brown and Peter Schmidt, the shaky economy has increased pressure on companies to engage customers more efficiently online. We agree that websites offer unmatchable economies of scale when it comes to interacting with customers, enabling better lead generation, increasing engagement, conversions and customer retention rates.

What the report doesn’t say is that the emergence of the real-time Web has also accelerated the need for technologies that can dynamically personalize the online experience and keep pace with rising consumer expectations for instant gratification. We believe this trend will be an even bigger catalyst for investing in these technologies in the months and years to come.

Forrester sees investments rising too:

“Our most recent data suggests this trend will continue into the next year. Consider that in 2010, 51% of organizations plan content management implementations, more than one-third will implement or upgrade customer relationship management tools, and one in four is planning marketing automation software investments.”

While investments in online customer experience technologies are on the rise, Forrester notes that time-to-market for site changes, campaigns, and customer experiences have suffered. According to their client inquiries, “disjointed technology has become a prime factor behind time-to-market issues and the ability to achieve improved online processes.”

If companies can’t rely exclusively on WCM or enterprise marketing suites to support online customer engagement, then what does the bigger ecosystem look like?

Forrester puts several players, including Baynote, into three categories:

Content management vendors include traditional WCM players like SDL, Tridion, Autonomy as well as ECM vendors that offer the fundamentals, plus interactive delivery.

Enterprise marketing vendors include Alterian, Aprimo, Omniture, and Unica, who mainly support campaign management.

New breed engagement vendors, such as Baynote, Backbase and Kapow Technologies, support next-generation Websites.

According to the report, new breed engagement vendors fill important gaps in the overall ecosystem and will be critical pieces of next-generation, more personalized and adaptive websites in the future. We couldn’t agree more.

The central focus of Gartner’s Symposium/ITxpo this week in Orlando is all about implementing what they’ve recently dubbed as a “pattern-based strategy”.

According to Gartner, a pattern-based strategy “provides a framework to proactively seek, model and adapt to leading indicators, often-termed ‘weak’ signals that form patterns in the marketplace.”  For the past several years Baynote has been committed to helping companies identify these patterns with technology that lets them tap into the collective intelligence of customers visiting their websites. This is something that transactional based systems such as business intelligence (BI) and complex event processing (CEP) simply haven’t been able to deliver. Here’s why:

1) For years BI, CEP (more recently) and other related technologies have helped organizations become much more efficient by automating their interactions with customers. However, in the process of creating huge economies of scale, they forced companies to lose the “mom and pop” touch that consumers expect when they walk into a local hardware store or restaurant. In failing to create digital mom and pop experiences, online retailers and publishers have placed unnecessary emphasis on promoting popular products and content, thereby losing out on profits to be gained from merchandising their long tail products.

2) In addition, these so-called “predictive” applications have historically prioritized the wrong set of indicators, often identifying consumer trends weeks, if not months, after the fact. For example, e-commerce transactions lag other more relevant indicators, such as online comparison shopping, by months. Only by tapping into the power of the collective is it possible to see early signals, spot trends and develop strategies around them before your competitors catch on. This holds particularly true for long tail products. Our customer US-Appliance tapped into the implicit behaviors of its website visitors to merchandise colored washers/dryers months before Home Depot and Best Buy began promoting similar products in their stores.

In Gartner’s recent report, entitled “Introducing Pattern-Based Strategy”, they view “the collective” as being critical to developing a pattern-based strategy. We couldn’t agree more with their position:

The collective comprises individuals, groups, communities, mobs, markets and firms that shape the direction of society and business. The collective is not new but technology has made the collective more powerful — and enabled change to happen more rapidly. The explosion of social software has enabled groups and individuals to rapidly form and rally to a cause — often resulting in significant societal changes.

The result for business is a cacophony of rapidly evolving demands, expectations, inputs and transactions, as well as an opportunity to not only react, but to seek signals of change from the collective. Market trends, some subtle, others strong, are masked by noise, and many enterprises are failing to proactively detect the patterns they rely on to direct future strategy and support investment decisions. In addition to failing to detect these patterns, enterprises are not utilizing new resources to proactively seek signals of change nor do they understand their power to influence individuals and communities.

Val Sribar, group vice president of Research at Gartner, sites Amazon’s and Netflix’s use of recommendation engines as good examples of organizations leveraging collective intelligence to support their pattern-based strategies. Sribar agrees with Baynote that recommendation engines identify new patterns in behavior as customers browse and purchase. While Amazon and Netflix are highly popularized cases, we’ve helped hundreds of other well known brands tap into their collective customer networks to significantly increase revenue through cross-selling and upselling, and higher customer loyalty.

We’re excited to see Gartner take a leadership position on this important issue and look forward to working with them and our customers to bring best practices related to collective intelligence to the forefront of modern business strategy.