We’ve been talking a lot lately with our customers and partners about the transformation in customer interactions as a function of social media. Social media has radically changed the ways that customers expect companies to interact with them. Notice the word “expect.” Expectations of companies have changed. As social media has given consumers voice – it has also given them a bullhorn and that bullhorn has given them the power to chose the channel they expect companies to interact with them on, versus only using the channels that a company directs them to.
This change tracks closely to the change that has been happening to enterprises around the process of using external data, found online, as part of key business processes – whether it is customer service, customer analytics, voice of the customer, research, risk and compliance, etc.
In the 80’s and 90’s organizations were closed. External information was rarely brought into corporate systems. External reports were used and read, but they were highly focused and controlled. In the early 90’s many large companies created internal email systems or sub-nets. By the late 90’s external and internal email capability was pervasive. Business users started to gain limited access to the Internet. Still highly controlled, Internet access is now also pervasive. In the last 18-24 months social media has taken over as the new external information that organizations are trying to figure out how to handle – specifically as it relates to two areas:
1) How to engage customers using social media
2) How to interact and respond with customers in social media
And in the process of navigating through these questions, organizations are taking on an even bigger question – how do I leverage Internet data, social media, along with other Internet data (sometimes referred to as social as well – but not always)like research articles, news, etc. inside of my business processes?
Enter – The Open Enterprise.
Core to the Attensity strategy are important capabilities that enable organizations to leverage the Internet in key business processes in a secure and scalable way. The successful Enterprise now needs to leverage the treasure trove of the Internet combing it with corporate insights and making it an important decision making asset in key business processes like:
- Customer service and quality management
- Marketing
- PR/Reputation management
- Product development and innovation
- Research
- Risk and compliance
We had a whole bunch of releases this past fall that focused on enabling Enterprises to leverage the Internet to reduce research costs, improve customer satisfaction, improve product quality, reduce risks, and to overall improve competitive positioning.
- Attensity Cloud – rapid and easy social media monitoring and analysis.
- Attensity Analyze for VOC 5.2 – in-depth actionable customer analytics on issues, sentiment, competitive opportunities, product quality, and more – includes analysis of and alerts on social media and “internal” VOC data in surveys, emails, CRM notes, etc.
- Attensity Discover 6.0 -a search and collaboration based application for researchers that enables large scale discovery of insights found in documents, letters, legal papers, and the Internet.
- Attensity E-Service -an end-to-end service suite that enables companies to respond to customers conversations (social posts, emails, letters, etc.) and to deliver valuable service knowledge (created in our knowledge base or by customers online) to end customers and service agents.
A little more about how we do this is covered in this post:
Conversation as a Complex Event – James Kobielus (Senior Analyst at Forrester Research)
