Esteban Kolsky

Bear with me for a second here, this is not about CRM, or about NetSuite for that matter even.  This is about enterprise computing models.

I attended NetSuite’s SuiteWorld 2011 yesterday (it goes for 3 days, I could not make all three unfortunately) as a guest.  That means they comped me on my registration, will reimburse me for my  transportation expenses (if I ever get around to doing an expense report), fed me, and took me to a magnificent event last night with some of the best food I had in ages.  I won’t bore you with details, but if I was someone to  bend my ethics for any reason, that meal would’ve done it.  Trust me.

(BTW, that was my disclaimer statement – in case the FCC is watching)

Back to my Choco Zucaritas with 1% Milk for breakfast world, I must confess I did not follow NetSuite a lot before.  I knew of them, had come across them sometimes in my days at Gartner (and since them), and followed them via Press Releases.

I knew what they do,...

I was listening to a pretty darn good (if you remove the “look at what we do” part of the presentations) webinar from CRM Magazine talking about how to do Social Media and Customer Service well.  There were some interesting discussions of different things to do, with different vendors, when I heard from Gregg McMullen from West Interactive (in case you don’t know West Interactive, they do Customer Service outsourcing) something that stopped me in my tracks .

He said, and I am paraphrasing here, that they found out that 60% of the volume of Social Media information users put in blogs, not Twitter or Facebook.  What?  60%?  That seems like a pretty darn big number.  Thankfully, I know Gregg and we exchanged emails.  I asked him for the  source and he told me it was based on research they have done for their customers, who essentially asked the same question we are all...

I was approached by my good friends at KANA (client) a few weeks ago about doing research and coming up with a better model for Customer Service.

If you know me (well, even if you don’t – but you read my blog) you know that opinions about how to improve customer service I have.  Plenty.  More than plenty, some people would say.

They asked me to come up with a model and prepare a webinar and white paper based on the concept – I liked the challenge, so I took to it.

To me, and your mileage and opinion will definitely vary, there are two aspects of self-service that need improvement: delivery of knowledge at the point-of-need (down to each device and place where it is used and necessary), and finding and providing better answers.  Both are equally interesting to explore, but the delivery of knowledge at the point of need is the one that has the longest time to deploy and be understood ( not to mention that requires the better answers to be available...

Well, I had to do it.  I had to rip off the headlines and apply it to our customer service problems.

In case you call a rock your comfortable abode (or have a life outside of the echo chamber of Twitter that does not include watching Jeopardy), the news is that IBM created a super-computer that — what’s the best way to put it… trounced, annihilated, destroyed, humiliated… I know — summarily defeated two human opponents playing Jeopardy (this is a trivia questions-and-answers game that is very popular in the United States, and quite hard for most normal human beings to master – not me, of course).  The computer played against the top two jeopardy mega champions: Ken Jennings (who won every game for almost six months straight), and Brad Rutter (who won the largest sum of money in the game’s history).  Here is a wrap-up article by Ken Jennings that explains most of what you need to k now about this event.

Why...