• Growing Your Career as a Marketer
• Winning Budget Battles

Here are several example case studies that I recently led/developed.

• Invesco
• Corel
• Philips

Here are example slides from a web seminar that I led/developed on marketing resource management.

My first three years at Siebel were spent in consulting and as a technical account manager focused on sales, call center, and analytics products.  My knowledge of technology for enterprise software products went through the roof as I focused on telecommunications accounts and worked with MCI/Worldcomm, TELUS, Bellsouth, and more.  While in consulting, I played various roles from managing beta programs to leading enterprise telecommunications order management functions.

Before my time was up, I ended up playing roles in direct marketing, launching Siebel email marketing, launching Siebel online community, and running an award-winnning marketing operations department of about 14 or 15 people.  While at Siebel, I won the Siebel Circle award three times.

Here are some examples of work from Siebel:

• Presentation at CustomerWorld for Marketing Operations
• Summary of Key Marketing Operations Metrics
• Example of Email Marketing dashboards that I developed
• Internal white paper: Why Some Companies Make Poor Decisions With Good Advice
• White paper: Using Use Cases on Siebel Implementations

• Avon was a key account, and I worked closely on the deal as “solution consultant” and worked directly with multiple partners.
• The express product was an idea I had and was packaged/priced to help accelerate sales and shorten the time it took for prospects to become customers and references.
• The application overview  and positioning/messaging were areas I worked on for the next generation product.

1. Avio organized their site around the customer experience and the dialogue that customers were having with them – the main navigation was organized by customer need.  Companies today are still trying to be more customer-centric (e.g. Unica just re-launched a website with this type of navigation built in).
2. With Chase.com, the project included strategy, design, and implementation for a content management system with personalization.  This was one mid-project presentation on templates.  Templated website solutions are 100 times more common and widespread today.  The vision for personalization from 10 years ago is still going strong with very few companies executing online with full personalization.

<expert system example of customer dialogues>

About 20 years ago, at a summer job in high-school, I worked in a call center with basic (green screen) systems for troubleshooting problems.  While I had basic knowledge of the types of things people would call in for, I didn’t know how to diagnose all their specific issues or recommend appropriate solutions.  These were technically-oriented, complex problems where multiple inputs were needed to land at an answer.

The application started with a single question that I would ask the customer.  I would punch the answer into the computer, and that would lead to another question.  Again, I would punch in the answer, and that would lead to yet another question.  After a series of questions and answers, the system would spit out a final answer and recommend a solution to the problem.

This example of customer dialogue was between two humans, but it was completely supported and enabled by a software program.  These types of “question and answer” applications are referred to as “expert systems” and enable people with less expertise and experience to operate more like an expert would.  Companies who deploy expert systems receive various benefits such as lower training costs, reduce risk, improve consistency, lower personnel costs, reduce mistakes, and shorten call times.  As well, customers are happy to call and get help and answers from people who had more information than they did.

<today’s systems and customer dialogues>

Fast forward 20 years, and we see a similar customer dialogue.  These types of “knowledge management” and “expert systems” applications have evolved and cover a wide variety of complex problems inside call centers across many industries; in fact, even consultants from McKinsey use these types of systems.  Companies have also extended these applications to CD-ROM, Kiosk, and the internet to educate customers, improve customer satisfaction, and enable products and services to be used with fewer problems.

In just the past 5 years, online communities and social media have become mainstream.  Search engine results from social networks and communities such as answers.yahoo.com, LinkedIn discussions, Instructables.com, knol.google.com, getsatifcation.com, and wiki.answers.com have popped up and help people get answers to their questions and allow people to share information freely.  These systems can also provide similar benefits to those stated above – impacting training costs, risks, consistency, personnel costs, mistakes, and call times.

<comparing the two customer dialogues>

What impact do these social networks have on customer dialogues driven by expert systems?  As someone who put business cases together, launched, managed, and worked at social networks (i.e. WebMD, Siebel, and Podshow) as well as dealt with a variety of call center applications and question-answer systems, there are certain characteristics that stand out when comparing expert systems with online communities and social networks:

1. Broad versus Targeted: Online communities often generate very broad, stream-of-consciousness types of information versus very targeted and complete works of information such as a book, training program, or expert system.
2. Chaotic versus Organized:  While search engines do outstanding jobs cataloging and organizing the worlds information (including social media), they don’t come close to the organized question and answer models of an expert system much less a book or training program.  Expert systems don’t make you sift and explore in areas that aren’t relevant.
3. Term-based versus Conversation-based:  The methods for using a keyword to search and getting search results is a tremendously different problem from being able guide someone through a series of questions that look much more like a true conversation.  You aren’t looking for a variety of 10 million results, you are looking for 10 results that are “complete and on-target.”  While forums can answer a series of back and forth questions, it lacks the immediacy of an answer in real-time and often ends without full resolution.
4. Bad Versus Good Quality: Individual pages of quality content are available in online communities.  However, there are also significant amounts of information lacking credibility, proof, and correctness.  An expert system is vetted, these types of quality issues are rare or don’t exist.
5. High versus Low “Signal to Noise” Ratio: The amount of content generated and the number of people contributing to social networks has gone up.  For the consumer of information, this makes the signal-to-noise ratio a challenge.  Considerable time is spent searching versus learning.  Expert systems are focused, comprehensive, and complete.  Editors, practitioners, and years of focused research have made the tool into a honed producer of specific answers with an extremely low signal-to-noise ratio.

Besides these fundamental differences in content (which is what is ultimately consumed), there are other major differences around development costs, management approaches, personnel, control, application requirements, and intellectual property as well as the expected business outcomes.  These two types of systems are very different – while they can overlap or seem similar at a high-level, they are fundamentally very different.

If this article was helpful to you, if you have questions, or if you want to challenge it, please feel free to comment or contact us.

<expanded definition of customer dialogues>

• Customer Dialogues also represent customer interactions of any type – not just verbal conversations between company employees and customers.
• The various types of dialogues can include those that take place with company employees in-person, via the mail, on the phone, in email, over chat, or across other electronics means such as social networks.
• These interactions also occur between a customer and inanimate objects such as marketing emails, websites, retail stores, online software applications, educational information, media and entertainment, or through use of the company’s products and services such as video games, cars, and cell phones.
• When a customer interacts with any aspect of a company’s resources, they are telling the company something.
• Whatever companies do when they “touch” customers also communicates something to that customer.
• These communications and dialogues form beliefs and behaviors which lead to initial and ongoing purchases.
• Companies who excel at customer dialogues also excel and growing revenue and loyalty.

<catalog of customer dialogues – this blog’s purpose>

The purpose of this blog is to act as a catalog of intriguing customer dialogues and determining successful and innovative methods of  customer dialogue.  Just some types of customer dialogues include:

Store:  Driving by a store, walking into a store, looking at a part of the store, looking at a single product, checking your internet-enabled phone for similar products and prices, getting help from a retail sales person, getting a rebate, talking to the cashier, taking your purchase home and using it.

Website:  Searching for something you want, finding a million options, determining which options should be looked at, visiting the websites, and completing what you were doing.

Salesperson: Meeting a salesperson for the first time, having ongoing phone conversations, exchangingemails, getting educated about the salesperson’s products and services, comparing the sales person and products to other salespeople, evaluating your options, and deciding to give them your business.

Call Center: Needing support from a company for products or services you purchased, calling the number, figuring out how to navigate their phone system, speaking to an agent, getting your issue resolved, and listening to something else they want to offer you.