Oracle Throws In The Towel And Acquires A Cloud Talent Management Vendor

Claire Schooley — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 20:46:43 +0000

The rumor circulating for the past few weeks has now been confirmed: Oracle is buying Taleo, a global talent management vendor, for $1.9 billion. This is just another -- albeit important -- acquisition in the strategic talent management space. All companies must have core HR systems in place, but now it's equally important to look at the strategic part of HR: the performance, succession, career development, and learning components as a layer resting on top of the core. Companies want to retain, develop, and reward their employees and need these applications in place for efficiency and effectiveness.

With this acquisition, Oracle gets a vendor with these talent management components in a pure SaaS deployment model, which provides ultimate flexibility. However, the offerings in the suite are not equally robust. Taleo is known for its recruiting app; to become a suite vendor, it added performance, which has gotten mixed reviews, and learning, which is not best in its class. Learn.com, the vendor Taleo acquired for learning, works OK for the midmarket, but its functionality does not hold up well for large global and enterprise customers.

Oracle can't buck the SaaS tide any more. SaaS is the preferred deployment model for talent management, and the large ERP vendors like SAP (finalizing its acquisition of SuccessFactors) and Oracle are now joining the movement. Oracle offers Fusion, but a lot of work still needs to be done to develop this into a full SaaS talent suite. Once this deal closes, watch and see how Oracle positions the Taleo offerings with Fusion Talent Management.

Poor Data Quality: An Often Overlooked Cause Of Poor Customer Satisfaction Scores

Kate Leggett — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 05:42:33 +0000

Customer service managers don't often realize that data quality projects move the needle on customer satisfaction. In a recent Forrester survey of members of the Association of Business Process Management Professionals (ABPMP), of the 45% who reported that they are working on improving CRM processes, only 38% have evaluated the impact that poor-quality data has on the effectiveness of these processes. And of the 37% of respondents working on customer experience for external-facing processes, only 30% proactively monitor data quality impacts. That's no good; lack of attention to data quality leads to a set of problems:

Will Humans Make A Comeback In Customer Processes?

Craig Le Clair — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 19:33:31 +0000

We all feel the loss of human connection due to relentless automation, the emerging behavior of Digital Natives (who prefer online interaction to direct human interaction), and the inability of current systems to support "personalization at scale." So I've been wondering whether we will start to see real pushback against the straight-through and self-service procesees we endure daily -- what I am calling "faceless" processes. In short, we are starting to see inklings that the pendulum is swinging away from faceless processes and a back toward more personalized human-driven interactions.

There are a few things that seem to point in this direction, such as community banks taking customers from the big guys, or the well-documented hatred of foreign call centers and voicemail hell. An "I've had enough" shift is also advanced by more vocal consumer attitudes -- witness, for example, the recent consumer pushback on debit card fees. The question is, will we start to see companies start to differentiate based on injecting humans back into the process? Does social have a role to play here? And is there a way to measure whether this is actually happening?

Customer Service: Out With The Old . . . And In With The New

Kate Leggett — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 22:46:27 +0000

Customers dream about personalized, contextual, proactive customer service experiences -- where companies deliver an experience tailored to their persona, their past purchase history, and their past customer service history. They want each interaction to add value and build upon prior ones so that they don't have to repeat themselves and restart the discovery process. They want to be able to choose the communication channel and device they use to interact with a service center. They want to start an interaction on one channel or device and move it seamlessly to another. Check out RightNow's vision video that brings these points to life.

Most customer service organizations are still struggling with the basics -- the hygiene factors in Maslow's hierarchy of needs -- in meeting their customers' expectations. There are benchmarking tools that you can use to figure out how well your organization is doing and to get actionable recommendations on how to do better. But, as you focus on the tactical improvements that you need to make this year, it's important to keep tabs on the optimal experience that customers would like you to deliver to help shape your long-term direction for customer service. Here's my abbreviated personal list:

Out with the old . . .

. . . and in with the new

Commentary

Siloed customer service experience

CRM; customer service; SCRM; BPM; BI; MDM; customer experience

It's Time To Expand Social And Analytics In Processes

Connie Moore — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 21:46:14 +0000

Most BPM practitioners already know that social networks and analytics play an important role in today's BPM suites. Here's how:

Social BPM provides an effective way to bring more workers into process discovery. This is true both for the "as-is" phase and, more importantly, for the "to-be" effort. The result? More voices are heard and more knowledge gets captured, providing better insights into process improvement and transformation. This leads to more buy-in from workers. Plus, companies can go to social BPM sites, like IBM Blueworks Live, and share process best practices, frameworks, and code with others outside their company. In short, social BPM helps expand the inputs during process discovery.
Analytics provide performance metrics and KPIs during the optimization phase. This gives business and IT leaders more insight into operations. For example, the business can quickly spot bottlenecks and take action, monitor customer service levels, track how top-tier customers are served, and determine if SLAs are met. Using analytics to monitor performance greatly enhances the value of BPMS from the executive perspective.

But BPMS vendors and practitioners also miss the boat. Yes, they use social for discovery and analytics for optimization, but they are leaving both out of the execution phase. For example, what if organizations also did this:

Transform Business Processes For Breakthrough Customer Experiences

William Band — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 13:56:51 +0000

In talking with nearly 30 organizations, consulting companies, and solution vendors, I found that instead of deploying slow-to-change packaged applications or building difficult-to-change custom solutions, leading organizations are embracing business process methodologies -- supported by process-centric IT platforms. They are striving to drive rapid process change, increased business engagement in IT projects, and achieve dramatic improvements in worker productivity.

In my new report, I define more than 30 best practices that organizations can use to support their transition to process-centric customer CRM. Here are few of them:

Stuck In Cement: When Packaged Apps Create Barriers To Innovation

Craig Le Clair — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 21:29:07 +0000

My "Stuck in Cement" research is up on Forrester.com today. I have to say, I really wrestled with the title. It's just incorrect to say "stuck in cement," because technically cement is only the active ingredient and needs to be mixed with sand and water to make concrete. So it should be "stuck in concrete," although somehow this doesn't quite sound right. But really, who but a chemist would lose sleep over this or even catch the distinction? The real issue is whether packaged apps really are a barrier to innovation at this point -- or does our research just reflect the high level of frustration that our clients feel trying to manage technology in a world changing so quickly?

The basic idea is that industry-specific or packaged apps -- and these are currently mostly on-premises applications -- aligned with organizational silos have worked well for well-defined, highly structured processes where volume, scale, and straight-through processing dominate system design. But these apps are difficult to change, appear increasingly less relevant, and form a barrier to innovation for companies in fast-moving industries like energy, healthcare, and financial services now facing advancing consumer technologies that threaten business as usual.

The research shows that over the next five years, a new generation of processes designed from the outside in will replace the heavy packaged apps designed from the inside out that drive customer interaction today. I call these "tamed processes" to contrast with the hundreds of "untamed" processes (which I've written about extensively) that lurk in the shadows and dark corners of the more dominant packaged and industry-specific applications and struggle to cope with searching, filing, and entering data and cross-department human and organizational issues -- think invoice automation or customer onboarding.

Forrester's Top 15 Trends For Customer Service In 2012

Kate Leggett — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 18:22:15 +0000

With 2012 still bright and full of hope for most of us, what are the key trends that customer service professionals need to pay attention to as you plan for success this year? Here are the top trends that I am tracking. My full report will be published in January.

Leaders Will Empower Their Agents To Deliver Optimal Service

Trend 1: Organizations Will Internalize The Importance Of The Universal Customer History Record

Customer service agents must have access to the full history of a customer's prior interactions over all the communication channels -- voice, electronic channels like chat and email, and the newer social channels like Facebook and Twitter -- to deliver personalized service and to strengthen the relationship that customers have with companies. In 2012, vendors will continue to add the management of social channels to their customer service products. Companies will slowly continue to formalize the business processes and governance structures around managing social inquiries and move this responsibility out of marketing departments and into customer service centers.

Trend 2: The Agent Experience Will No Longer Be An Afterthought

CRM; customer service; SCRM; BPM; BI; MDM; customer experience

MDM In 2012: What Was, What Will Be . . . And What Won’t Be

Rob Karel — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 05:55:38 +0000

Happy New Year! As we kick off 2012, I'd like to reflect on what was accomplished during the past year in the "trusted data" areas of master data management (MDM), data quality (DQ), and data governance and consider what we might expect in the year to come. I also hear quite a bit of noise from vendors and analysts alike about what they want the MDM market to be in 2012, so I wanted to share my thoughts on what's real and what (in my opinion) remains hype.

I also just completed Forrester's December 2011 Global MDM Survey of 274 MDM professionals. While the majority of those results will be shared in the annual MDM Trends research that I'll be publishing later in Q1, here's a taste of some of the intriguing results.

Let's first reflect on what I've witnessed from my clients' MDM journeys throughout 2011:

The Top Thirteen Customer Management Trends For 2012

William Band — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 21:38:01 +0000

What are the key trends that CRM trends that business and IT professionals need to pay attention to in setting their plans during 2012? Here are the top trends that I am tracking. My full report that spotlights our latest research and recommendations for how to compete in The Age of the Customer will be published in late January.

1. Customer experience management will move beyond aspiration to strategy. More organizations will move beyond empty goals like becoming "customer-obsessed" to define clear and actionable customer experience strategies. The strategy must meet three tests: 1) It defines the intended experience; 2) it directs employee activities and decision-making; and 3) it guides funding decisions and project prioritization.

2. Brands will embrace the experience ecosystem. Firms will move to break free from their organizational silos, invest in understanding customer moments of truth through journey-mapping, and embrace the concept of the "customer experience ecosystem" -- one that considers the influence of every single employee and external partner on every single customer interaction.

3. Experience management will emerge as a management discipline. There is increasing acceptance of the idea that customer experience management can be thought of as a discipline -- a set of sound, repeatable practices such as those are defined in Forrester's Customer Experience Maturity Framework.

Social Media Analytics: Revolutionizing Marketing Campaign Management

James Kobielus — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 21:12:12 +0000

Social media are the intelligence powering modern marketing. Not only is the Twittersphere dominated by marketers keen on the promotional power of social channels, but it seems everybody in the marketing profession everywhere is obsessed with this new world of ubiquitous chitchat.

Everybody comments on social media analytics, so what I'm saying here isn't news to most of you. But I recently stopped to ponder what's truly disruptive about social media's role in the modern economy. And then it hit me. From the dawn of marketing, we've always hunted and gathered customer intelligence, using massive amounts of sweat equity to bag the beast. Before social media emerged, market research was almost always labor-intensive. No matter who you were -- enterprise, agency, consultant, analyst, etc. -- you had to put your nose to the proverbial research grindstone. You conducted panels, surveys, focus groups, interviews, field studies, usability testing, case studies, literature searches, and the like. Most of the intelligence-gathering burden was on you, with the subject of your studies -- the customer -- either putting in less effort or not having to lift a finger at all.

social media analytics; CRM

Which Contact Center Technologies For Customer Service Are Being Adopted?

Kate Leggett — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 19:09:35 +0000

The contact center solution ecosystem that customer service organizations use has grown more complex over time, as highlighted in our latest TechRadar™ on these solutions. Customer service executives struggle to enforce consistent processes for their agents to follow so that those agents can deliver optimal customer experiences. The amount of data and information that agents need to use to resolve customer inquiries is exploding. Vendor mergers and acquisitions as sectors consolidate are creating product and support risks. And new contact center solution delivery models, including managed services, outsourcing, and cloud-based offerings, are presenting new opportunities.

To define the context for making smart contract center strategy and technology decisions for customer service, Forrester partnered with CustomerThink to survey 75 contact center professionals to understand which technologies were being used and who was making purchasing decisions. We found that:

CRM; customer service; SCRM; BPM; BI; customer experience

A BPM Prediction For 2012: Connecting The Dots

Derek Miers — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 11:57:42 +0000

Reading the recent Harvard Business Review article from Tom Davenport et al., it occurred to me that next best offer (NBO) is actually a subset of what my colleague Jim Kobielus calls "next best action" (NBA). And when you couple that predictive thinking with advances in process mining (see Wil van der Aalst's post and the Process Mining Manifesto), it clearly becomes possible to optimize operations dynamically on the fly. First of all, the organization could mine the existing system (the transaction logs of traditional systems or a newly implemented BPM/CRM system) to identify what happens today. This then enables you to identify the outcomes that are most interesting (or those you want to achieve) and then optimize the NBA accordingly.

We take for granted a process definition where the next action is predetermined by the arc of the process definition. But if we can do NBO in 200 milliseconds, we can also do NBA in a similar time frame. Directed arcs in process models and the business rules that go with them start to become a little redundant. This sort of combination (mining and NBA) enables wide-open goal-oriented optimization for all sorts of processes, not just those related to marketing and cross-sell/upsell ideas.

The Year Ahead In Next Best Action? Here's The Next Best Thing To A Crystal Ball!

James Kobielus — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 15:18:22 +0000

Next best action is the proving ground for advanced analytics and big data; it's also the infrastructure that provides analytics- and rule-driven guidance across one or more customer-facing touchpoints. You can find next best action at the heart of multichannel customer relationship management (CRM) initiatives everywhere. It's even present in a growing range of back-office business processes such as order fulfillment and supply chain management.

Next best action will continue to develop as an overarching business technology initiative for many companies in the coming year. The market is emerging and is becoming aware of itself as a substantial new niche, in much the same way that the Hadoop market flowered in the past year.

Here are some of the highlights that Forrester anticipates in the next best action arena in 2012:

next best action; advanced analytics; business process management; business rules management; complex event processing; customer relationship management

CRM And BPM Solutions Converge To Domesticate Untamed Customer Processes

William Band — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 21:05:04 +0000

I've just finished up several months of research digging into the best practices of how leading organizations aspire to implement outside-in, customer-focused, cross-functional processes that transform the organization and set it on the path toward continuous improvement. I found that these companies are moving from isolated business process management (BPM) and/or front-office customer relationship management (CRM) projects toward broader transformation initiatives across the organization. At the core of this trend is a desire by these organizations, especially in services industries, to domesticate their "untamed" or "invisible" processes that touch customers.

My report on the best practices for process-centric CRM will be published soon. A key finding is the growing convergence of data-centric CRM, BPM, and dynamic case management (DCM) solutions. The right mix of these solutions, of course, depends on the use cases you are designing for. For example:

Business Process

Oracle Throws In The Towel And Acquires A Cloud Talent Management Vendor

Categories:

Poor Data Quality: An Often Overlooked Cause Of Poor Customer Satisfaction Scores

Categories:

Will Humans Make A Comeback In Customer Processes?

Customer Service: Out With The Old . . . And In With The New

Categories:

It's Time To Expand Social And Analytics In Processes

Transform Business Processes For Breakthrough Customer Experiences

Categories:

Stuck In Cement: When Packaged Apps Create Barriers To Innovation

Forrester's Top 15 Trends For Customer Service In 2012

Categories:

MDM In 2012: What Was, What Will Be . . . And What Won’t Be

Categories:

The Top Thirteen Customer Management Trends For 2012

Categories:

Social Media Analytics: Revolutionizing Marketing Campaign Management

Categories:

Which Contact Center Technologies For Customer Service Are Being Adopted?

Categories:

A BPM Prediction For 2012: Connecting The Dots

Categories:

The Year Ahead In Next Best Action? Here's The Next Best Thing To A Crystal Ball!

Categories:

CRM And BPM Solutions Converge To Domesticate Untamed Customer Processes

Categories: