Welcome Mary Wardley with this guest post. Mary is IDC's vice president of CRM and Applications research in my Software Business Solutions Group. Catch up with her on Twitter @mwardley.
First, let me say, I love being in the technology industry. I've been with IDC a long time and the primary reason is that it NEVER gets old. Sometimes I wish it would get old so that I got some down time but I think in the end that would be boring. There are new technologies being introduced daily and with these new technologies there is a waterfall impact on consumers, suppliers, organizations structures – you name it. Case in point for this blog input is the impact of new media on existing infrastructure solutions in terms of customer data. Social media technologies are generating vast amounts of new data in 140 character strings. How do you mold your business processes to include this input? How much of these streams of unstructured data do you have to save, or archive for future use?
This week, HubSpot, a Boston-based company of 'inbound marketing software' posted an interesting video interview with Brad Blake, the governor of Massachusetts' director of interactive media. The governor is using the web and social media to communicate with constituents and to build support for his agenda. What started as a combination of using RSS fees, Twitter and blogs has developed into a full commitment to go to where the constituents are to engage in dialog, and to provide accessibility and transparency. In addition to using the aforementioned technologies the office posts on YouTube and Flicker. The Governor's office realized that a lot of the information that they thought was readily available just wasn't being found by the constituents. The Twitter channel in particular has allowed them to get direct feedback from the constituents. HubSpot in particular used a Tweat to get Governor Patrick to stop by their office to see what they were doing when they learned he was going to be in the building. He did stop by. Talk about access and availability.
I followed up with Brad Blake to find out what they did with all this great input coming in from the constituents. As Brad pointed out in his interview one of the challenges is getting the information integrated into your existing processes. The office has a constituent services office that currently collects and quantifies the feedback that comes into the governor's office via phone, email etc. This group is now watching Twitter and including that in the feedback. It's all given to the governor to review in a total format but then some individual examples are provided. The office is working to integrate the same with the blog feedback but is finding it trick to quantify and qualify the information.
This to the broad challenge that organizations face. There is no denying that the engagement with the customer (or student, or constituent etc.) yields tremendous insight, however, how do you get the information to the right person, in the right format, with the correct interpretation and then what do you do with it long term? So far the governor's office has a manual process for getting the governor the insight, and the blog information is being saved and archived. Primarily because the blog software doesn't save the data over time so the office backs it up. The office is currently relying on Twitter to maintain the history.
This is not a new problem, we saw it before when we put up the Web site and customers starting sending emails and expecting a response. Thus Automated Email Response software and the contact center got another channel. Here, however, there are many more social media channels than the customer sending an email to a central inbox. This looks like an opportunity waiting to happen to me. The content management applications providers no doubt are way ahead of me on the storage element but what we need to figure out is how to leverage this information into the business process around how we handle the customer. This is going to require new skills, a passion for the technology and medium, and new resources. So, in the end it isn't just about new and old media its about old and new processes, old and new people, old and new resources. It's a general re-thinking.
Now, I'm not saying this is an overnight event. We need the organizations to get out there and experiment so they know what to push applications suppliers for in term of functionality. If you ask end-user organizations what they need, they won't really know yet. They aren't deeply into it enough yet to know. Supplier who wait to be asked and wait to be directed by customers will get left behind. Start with what the governor's office needs to fix that process. They have effectively begun to communicate and engage with their constituents. They've done the hard part, they got the ball rolling and its building up speed and data. What can applications suppliers do to help coordinate, use, store and leverage that information?
