Disruptive technology or simply better marketing?

Ted spoke enthusiastically about the latest and greatest from Sword-Ciboodle, and I couldn’t wait to read about it. Besides the name, Ciboodle impressed me with their online video, telling a story of a utopia customer service. Great marketing for sure!

So, what’s new? Is it Ciboodle One, a customer interaction console bolted on a Customer Interaction Hub (CIH) platform for CSRs and experts that provides a 360-degree view of customers, their preferences, their interactions and their products? Is it Ciboodle Flow, a case management workflow which manages end to end customer requests across people, process and time? Or, is it Ciboodle Live; a “do it yourself” rich web selfservice experience?  All three modules sound like polished versions of eGain, KANA and RightNow. Where is the difference? Why should I buy Ciboodle instead of KANA? Why should I replace eGain with Ciboodle? Ciboodlers, you are setting yourselves up for an uphill battle; it is tough to sell over your competitors simply because they do the same stuff.

The eService market is about $1B; it is a congested space with about a dozen players taking 82% of the market and 30-40 vendors scraping for the leftovers.  How to win? Innovate and increase your reach.

Innovations such as:  (*) social-cloud monitoring and intervention; (*) social knowledge management and collaboration; (*) social customer view and sentiment, will create the necessary competitive edge to take a bigger piece of the pie.

New modules to support post sales service lifecycle management such as: (*) field service, (*) fleet management, (*) parts management, (*) last mile logistics, will bring revenues from less congested markets with smaller less experienced s/w vendors.

Exciting times for the Ciboodlers is ahead, let’s keep an eye on them...they got my attention! 
more about the new Ciboodle products

Hire or assign? Give Growth Initiatives Full-Time Attention

Before you assign your next growth initiative to your overworked managers, think about whether you can staff one person who can make the new endeavor his or her priority. Even if resources are scarce, growth is often a high priority and focusing one person on a high-stakes venture will pay off. Interesting debate on HBR

http://blogs.hbr.org/anthony/2010/03/the_danger_of_part-time_busine.html?cm_mmc=npv-_-MANAGEMENT_TIP-_-MAY_2010-_-MTOD0513&referral=00203

HBR [March 11] Improve Customer Service with 3 Ts

Advances in technology and pressure to cut costs have changed the customer service experience. Companies now push far more function and responsibility to the consumer. Here are three ways to support and involve your customers in this new paradigm:

1. Be transparent. Show your customers your company's internal systems so they feel part of the experience, not separated from it. For example, consider how shipping companies now allow customers schedule pick-ups, print labels, and track packages on their own.
2. Convert or capitalize on tribes. There are groups of people who are going to blog, tweet, and find other ways to praise or complain about your products. Find your company's tribe and make it an ally in delivering a positive message. 
3. Open the door to new talent. Some of your customers may be so enthusiastic about your product that they can sell it better than you. Find ways to discover who these customers are and capitalize on their talents, and passions

Full Article at: 

http://blogs.hbr.org/sviokla/2009/12/better_customer_service_throug.html?cm_mmc=npv-_-MANAGEMENT_TIP-_-MAR_2010-_-MTOD0311&referral=00203

Non-linear predictions

LES GRERY commented on David Hum's exposition over the difference between deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning. Les wrote: “His work showed that, whilst we all have an unswerving belief in conclusions from the latter, we were being irrational, particularly where conclusions about natural phenomena were drawn.”

This is not new stuff! In a special issue of Organization Science journal in 1999, we’ve been introduced to the Complexity Science in the field of management literature. Complexity Science describes the NON LINEAR DYNAMICS behind customer behavior, behavior of markets, societies, firms & so on.

Weeks later, I read Gartner’s predictions for 2010 deduced from thousands of daily client interactions. IT and S/W business are essentially non linear in nature, because it includes human society and human beings who don’t exactly behave in a rational manner as the economist would have us believe.

Does Gartner understand NON LINEAR DYNAMICS?

Hats off to Mike Harris and Simon Hayward for compiling this list:

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NON- LINEAR PREDICTIONS BY GARTNER

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By 2012, 20% of businesses will own no IT assets.

By 2012, India-centric IT services companies will represent 20% of the leading cloud aggregators in the market (through cloud service offerings).

By 2012, Facebook will become the hub for social network integration and Web socialization.

By 2014, most IT business cases will include carbon remediation costs.

In 2012, 60% of a new PC's total life greenhouse gas emissions will have occurred before the user first turns the machine on.

Internet marketing will be regulated by 2015, controlling more than $250 billion in Internet marketing spending worldwide.

By 2014, over 3 billion of the world's adult population will be able to transact electronically via mobile or Internet technology.

By 2015, context will be as influential to mobile consumer services and relationships as search engines are to the Web.

By 2013, mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide

By 2013, 50% of banks will still lack a formal innovation program and budget, severely restricting growth potential.

By 2012, up to one in five government processes will rely on "crowdsourced" data.

By 2015, local education agencies will cut school construction 50% by using virtual learning environments to better utilize existing facilities.

Driven by sustainability initiatives, by 2014, electricity prices will have risen by an average of 30% in real terms across OECD countries.

By year-end 2011, manufacturers that prioritize future software investments in “Operational Technology”, instead of traditional IT and ERP, will achieve a 10-times better return on their investment.

By 2015, despite the relaxation of Stark laws and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) incentives, less than 15% of small U.S. physician practices will have implemented an electronic health record.

By 2012, U.S. health reform will cause 20% of health insurers to perish.

By 2013, Apple's iTunes store will be earning more from publishing (books, newspapers and magazines) than from any other content category.

By 2012, over 40% of Tier 1 retailers will pursue m-commerce. However, only 20% will be successful in effectively integrating these initiatives to enable cross-channel shopping.

What gets measured gets managed (Peter Drucker),...true or false?

Is the use of spreadsheets the right vehicle to satisfy our compellingly seductive need to predict the future? Can we truly predict financial performance as it was a quantifiable extrapolation from the past?

Kaidara Announces Version 4.4

Los Altos, California — October 12, 2009 — Kaidara Inc., a provider of customer service software applications for knowledge management, intelligent search, complex diagnostics, analytics and user experience, announces the general availability of Kaidara 4.4. The release includes Kaidara Crawl and Learn, a strategic addition to Kaidara’s knowledge management product suite. It features enhancements for federated search, unstructured content indexing and comprehension. “Global support organizations will appreciate the new Crawl and Learn module in Kaidara 4.4. The new release enables companies to search unstructured content within and external to the organization. The learning module of the new Kaidara crawler enables the Kaidara collaborative search engine to search the unstructured content and answer questions about it.” said Stratos Davlos, CTO of Kaidara.

http://www.kaidara.com/about/press-releases-list/120-kaidara-44

Non-traditional Knowledge Engineering for Phenomenal results

For the last decade I’ve been running Knowledge Management (KM) ventures. Yes! each KM project is a venture. Each venture has ‘aha’ moments. Accumulating ‘aha’ moments is the process of building best practices.

Four Knowledge Centric Support best practice principles:

1. Create content as a by-product of solving problems
2. Evolve content based on demand and usage
3. Develop a knowledge base of our collective experience to date
4. Reward learning, collaboration, sharing, and improving

Harness the value of knowledge as it formulates in day to day problem solving activities. Automatically capture, digitize, review and publish new knowledge. Invest in software solutions that become an integral part of day-to-day operation in support centers to monitor the way people solve problems and create knowledge as a by-product of problem solving.