All businesses sell products. Whatever they might be—a laptop, a phone, groceries, a trip to the Bahamas, dinner in a restaurant—anything that someone pays money for is a product.

Or so we all thought.

I am about to argue that your product is not a product. Your product is, in fact, an experience. Think about it. What is a product in isolation? Nothing! It’s the experience of the product that is the real customer takeaway. The experience is the whole package—the sum total of interactions with your product and services; with your brand.

Why am I making this distinction? Because if you think you’re in the business of selling products, your success metrics will apply to, well, …to products. When, if in actual fact you’re selling experiences, your metrics should arguably apply to experiences.

Still wondering what the heck I’m talking about?

OK – Let’s make this concrete.

You know how the same jar of spaghetti sauce can cost a lot more at an upscale grocery—and people will still buy it. That’s because it’s not about the product. If you run a grocery store, you’re not just selling stuff. You’re selling a buying experience. Is there a good selection to choose from? Was the pricing easy to figure out? Was the checkout process smooth? Was there help available when someone needed it? Did people feel welcome in your store? Did people feel like they were getting good value?

None of these experience related KPIs are discernable from the traditional metrics with their focus on products, on shelf space and basket size—on what shoppers put into their baskets—even though the real end product is the process itself, the experience.

Let’s take another example.

Say you are a software company selling the next big application. Your product team is probably measured on how fast the product was delivered, the number of bugs, whether the software organization is agile, etc. I’d argue that all of these traditional metrics are not as important as you might think—or at least not as important as they once were.

You should instead be thinking about the experience your software product provides. What is the experience like using the product? Does the product solve the problem as simply as possible? Does the product make its users productive? Does it make them feel empowered? Do the users feel happy while using the product? Would they like to experience your product again? Does the product deliver value?

If you agree with my perspective, then it’s time to rethink those legacy metrics—they apply to products, not to experiences. Start focusing on measuring the experience and improving it. How much time do your online customers spend getting help with using your products? Is the service experience a good one? And does it result in a good experience with your product? Consistently?

If you happen to be a customer experience or a customer service manager, check out KANA’s solutions. We can help improve the agent experience and the customer experience, and help your brand deliver a good experience.

(Vikas Nehru is VP, Product Marketing, KANA)

Recently I was at a conference  where former New Labour spin-doctor Alistair Campbell was speaking. He stated that the “citizen and the consumer had merged” and that people want “private sector standards and public sector values”.  I pondered on this and decided it meant that people want the efficiency of the private sector and the care of the public sector. Hold that thought.

Alison and colleagues with Alistair Campbell

A few weeks earlier I attended a Citizen to Government event “Digital by Default” where Martha Lane Fox, UK’s Digital Government champion, was asked by a local government worker, “What would someone from the private sector know about customer service? Surely all the private sector is interested in is making profits.”  To which Ms Lane Fox raised an eyebrow and said “Trust me, if the private sector delivers poor customer service, they will make no profits”.

Finally, and by this time you must think I am a professional event attendee, I was at KANA’s UK Customer Summit in September last year. Speaker Ross Shafer, spoke about how delivering good customer service would ensure customer retention and would avoid defection to the competition. One of KANA’s Local Government customers, who shall remain nameless, leaned over to me and said “Why should I care about this?  We are a Council, the citizens have to come to us. There is no competition.” She was right.  They didn’t have to worry about competition, but is it short-sighted to not care about delivering good customer service?

Here’s why Local Government must learn to care; delivering good customer service, i.e. delivering products and services in an efficient and professional way, in the private sector leads to increased profits and customer loyalty and in Local Government it leads to cost savings, citizen loyalty and the re-election of Local Government politicians. In elections where the voter turnout can be as low as 20%, relatively few disgruntled citizens can significantly influence the result.

In addition, in the UK, the Localism Bill, passed in May 2011 will establish a “community right to challenge”. This means that voluntary groups, social enterprises, parish councils and others will be able to express an interest in taking over council-run services – the local authority will have to consider it. It could prompt a bidding exercise in which the group could then compete. Therefore the lack of competition that used to exist is no longer a given,

Like Alistair Campbell, at KANA we believe there is no difference between the needs of our customers’ customers- be they “citizens” or “consumers”. They expect excellent customer service experiences. In fact we believe this so strongly that KANA, with a predominantly private sector customer base, acquired Lagan, with approaching 200 government customers worldwide, in October 2010. We recognised the benefits each organisation’s technology could bring to our joint customers.

You can find out more about what we’re doing to support Digital Government and Local Government solutions on our new web pages at www.KANA.com

Alison Palmer is Marketing Manager, UK and North America, KANA

‘I don’t remember forgetting

I don’t seem to recall

If I neglected to show you I love you

I don’t remember at all.’ Ricky Skaggs

Anyone who’s been in a relationship for more than, oh, a fortnight has learned the link between memory and caring. Forget to call: you clearly don’t care. Don’t remember that promise to run an errand: you just aren’t trying. Memory failure on anniversary: fuhgetaboutit. Truth is, in ways large and small, we remember what we care about. The science shows we lay down memories in proportion to engagement. Time stops as our car starts to skid across the road because, boy, are we ever engaged at that moment.    When danger dawns, the brain spins out new cells as fast as politicians spin excuses.

On the flip side, folks my age are frequently heard to say that ‘time is flying’. That’s a sure sign routine has taken hold, reflecting minimal memory formation. When the brain manufactures fewer memories, time appears to tunnel and collapse. If life’s a blur, we’re bored.

The link between remembering and caring is clear enough in our inter-personal relationships. Our friends and family remind us that memory loss is neglect. And, the link is front and center in our inner life, as our brain telescopes time to reflect how much we care.

So, as Experience Managers, we can’t be shocked that our customers treat failures of Institutional memory as a sign of neglect. When the enterprise appears to forget about past interactions, the customer instantly draws one conclusion: the enterprise doesn’t care.

The Experiential Memory Checklist will help you design process that remembers not to forget:

1.)    Is information elicited in the IVR process fully and logically utilized by the agent?

2.)    When an escalation occurs, does the agent receiving the hand-off require the customer to repeat information?

3.)    Are agents using and repeating the customer’s name?

4.)    Is the history of previous interactions with this customer at the agent’s finger-tips?

5.)    Do agents know about predecessor self-service interactions?

6.)    Is there a follow-on message (email, text) that summarizes the touch point or provides a reasonable wrap-up?

7.)    Do you have a way to re-open closed cases, tickets or incidents?

8.)    If you have long-running processes, can you set Service Level triggers that insure timely continuation and follow-up?

9.)    Are agents provided with information about loyalty levels or depth of relationship and adjust the interaction accordingly?

If your Experience Flows don’t forget, your customers won’t accuse you of neglect.

(Mark Angel is EVP and CTO, KANA)

Over the last few weeks, a screenshot of an iPhone Siri conversation has been circulating the internet:

This scenario has definitely been worth a few laughs online, but it also highlights how we still have a long way to go in the field of natural language processing. Decades of work have produced numerous highly touted prototypes, from Eliza to Watson, and now Siri. In every case, these avatars answer demonstration questions with ease, but fail laughably in real life. So, will we ever get there? And if so, how can we do it?

We may never see the days of Rosie the Robot from the Jetsons, but hopefully we can do better than misunderstanding a four-word call for help. While the industry has made tremendous progress from a linguistic perspective, to take artificial intelligence to the next level we must expand beyond just analyzing the words. Words, whether spoken into a phone or typed into a search engine, occur within context. The person typing the words, her location, her purchases, her previous inquiries and actions all impact the meaning of the words themselves. To truly understand human language, an artificial intelligence system must look beyond the language and text analysis and into the context.

English is an incredibly complicated language. Sometimes meaning is simply impossible to discern by simply looking at a word. Is a bat made of wood, or does is sleep in caves hanging upside down? Will an execution be a beheading or simply the completion of a task The words themselves won’t give you a clue. These examples may seem outlandish, but word ambiguity causes trouble in real world examples every day. Ask any search engine on a telecommunications site what they charge for a new battery and you will certainly get results for CHARGING the battery (adding power), rather than charging FOR the battery (paying for it). This distinction is simple for the human brain to decipher, but nearly impossible for a search engine. To help the search engine along, we can apply context. What if we knew that the user had recently purchased a new battery? We could then guess that they are not looking to buy a new battery, but probably wish to charge the one just purchased. Or if the user had NOT purchased a battery in a while, he probably already knows how to charge it and might be ready to purchase a new one. In this case, context could help disambiguate the query.

In other cases, users simply don’t type enough information for the search engine to know the right answer. For example, if I typed ‘What are your ATM fees?‘, that answer may vary based on what State (or country) I’m in, what type of ATM I’m using, and what type of customer I am at the bank. Companies cannot expect their users to type all of this information into a search box. Can you imagine going to your bank’s website and typing ‘How much are your ATM fees for premiere savings customers in California using an out of network ATM?’ No. You will probably type ‘ATM fees’. Luckily, your bank already knows you are a premiere savings customer and that you live in California. Your customer profile information stored with the bank can be integrated into the search engine to provide that much needed context. KANA’s search and browse capabilities can use the context stored in multiple customer databases to personalize the experience, whether you are using web self service, or calling into the call center. If more context is needed, the search engine will prompt the user with follow up questions. When I ask ‘ATM fees’, the KANA results page presents an initial result set about ATM fees for premiere users in California, and a follow up question asking if the ATM is in network or not. These intelligent follow up questions create a dialogue with the customer and guide him to an answer quickly and accurately. Any additional context needed can be prompted by the search engine itself.

In any case, if all of the Siri jokes on the internet are any indication, we still have a lot of work to do to truly understand human language. But perhaps we can get closer than ever before by looking beyond the words.

Kelly Koelliker is Product Marketing Manager, KANA

“I wish they would only take me as I am” – Vincent Van Gogh

Personas are essential to Customer Experience Management. It’s a given that good design begins with understanding the design target. A Persona nets-out as a “word portrait” of a customer type, distilling the essential elements of a market segment. The richer and more realistic these Persona portraits are, the better. Good experience management teams, like the one we work with at the City of Brisbane, go beyond words, actually depicting each citizen persona, hanging the resulting pictures on the wall, welcoming these prototypical “people” into the design discussion. Using Personas is, quite simply, an Service Experience Management (SEM) best practice. But, in this post, the goal is to shout out a caution, highlighting the need to pair your “Customer Personas” with matching “Brand Personas”.

‘Cause here’s the rub: when we think solely about satisfying a Customer Persona, the Brand may be left behind. SEM’s prime directive is to create experiences on brand and on budget. The challenge is to design to the diversity of our Customer Types, while preserving the integrity of our Brand.

Great artists, like hacks, return to the same images again and again. Unlike hacks, they know that their images must morph, shape-shifting to match the requirements of artistic imperative. Vincent Van Gogh’s work is the most valuable art ever made because he poured himself onto the canvas without ever repeating himself. So, what can we experience managers learn from a man who painted 37 self-portraits , each unforgettably unique but each uniquely Van Gogh?

Van Gogh: love-tormented ear-slasher; suicide; never sold a painting. As with so many legendary personas, we all know Van Gogh, even if a lot of what we know isn’t true. Naifeh’s new biography, renders a genuine Van Gogh more interesting than the Van Gogh of Hollywood. He was, in life, a bizarrely flawed man, mentally ill, pummeled via family. Terrible flaws can anneal into deep genius; Van Gogh manufactured, from his pain, a relentless life force, endowing thick dabs of paint with electric impact.

This transformational magic is front and center in his self-portraits. For me, a museum gallery containing one of Vincent’s raw, despair-coated, weirdly-colored self-images rarely seems to contain anything else.

Photo of Van Gogh

Naifeth’s biography explains that Van Gogh’s paintings are pictorial messages, pleadings to the people in his life. Hollowed and haunting eyes; prominent nose, broad forehead, Dutch beard: all the key attributes of the artist’s face are rendered realistically. Still, a glance is sufficient to see that each self-portrait chisels a different facet of the man; Naifeth shows that Van Gogh, in fact, worked like a mad-man to bend his “brand” to a desired message.

1887, Portrait with A Felt Hat

During his tenure in Paris, Van Gogh desperately wanted friends and family to see him as potentially successful and reliable. He creates, as shown above, a self-persona of the tidy business man, felt hat on head, elegant coat buttoned, ready and able as a commercial artist. The textured blue background, toned in white, delivers an impression of solidity.

1888, Self-Portrait As An Artist.

Here, Vincent abandons the bourgeouis trappings, and focuses instead on the core of the working artist. The painted man steps out of the canvas-colored background, and into the canvas on the easel. An arm becomes a palette plus hand; the body is swaddled in a traditional painter’s smock. Tightly knit red & green strokes are rendered to form a deep shadow across the face, the normally sharp features flattened. Together, these choices help mutate Van Gogh into the anonymous every-Artist.

Autumn 1887, Self Portrait

In the prototypical Self-portrait above, we feel the sadness and tight-lipped despair of the troubled man, even as we are captivated by the hyper-realistic, blue-shaded eye. The bluish-black ground matches the black eye, both reek of depression. The loose, wild brushstrokes and spiked hair give us the impression of a man on the edge. The first self-portrait is an advertisement; this is a cry for help.

1888, Self-Portrait Dedicated to Paul Gauguin

Later, Van Gogh left Paris for the South, and waged a campaign via art to persuade Paul Gauguin to join him there. Gauguin was, at the time, evangelizing a “Japonais” style. To proclaim himself a true disciple, Van Gogh transforms himself into a monk, complete with the slightly slanting eyes, balding pate and gaunt profile of the Oriental priest.

Notwithstanding all the variation, Van Gogh never surrendered the core of his brand: realistic drawing; emotive colors; impressionistic brushwork. We easily recognize Van Gogh both as the person in the paintings and as the artist behind the painting.   But, wow, he sure stretches style a long, long way in pursuit of meaning.

Do Van Gogh’s techniques for matching Persona to message translate into our world of Experience Management?  Here are three tips lifted from these examples that can illuminate our use of Citizen/Customer Personas:

1.) Create A Branded Partner

Create a partnered Brand Persona adapted, to the limits of brand integrity, for the needs and expectations of a particular Customer Partner. In other words, treat Personas as “twins”, where each Customer Persona has a pal. Van Gogh gave Gauguin an oriental version of himself, suited to Gauguin’s vision. We shouldn’t abandon our Brand to give Customers the design aesthetic they want; we should manufacture a morphed Brand Persona stretched to appeal to a particular Customer Persona.

2.) Creatively utilize Background Mood

Most enterprises have detailed style guides prescribing the use of fonts, icons, colors and brand treatment. We can’t throw away our Song Books and Style Guides to re-design for each customer segment. But, that’s no excuse for monotony. Van Gogh understood that “background” emits huge influence on the experiential mood. His backgrounds are stunning kaleidoscopes, not mere afterthoughts. Each self-portrait background sets the table for the painting’s message. The pink-tinged blue of Felt Hat is uplifting and confidence-inducing; the canvas colored Working Artist doubles down on the theme; the chaotic blue-black of 1887 swirls with anxiety; the restful, beautiful multi-shaded aqua of “dedicated to Gauguin” is a Japanese print personified. The experiential surround around required brand elements can similarly alter mood and emphasis to suit the needs of a Persona. Explicitly separating the “foreground” of our brand requirements from the “background” of our Persona-matching requirements creates a powerful model for experience-oriented design that preserves Brand integrity while allowing for Persona-specific adaptation.

3.) Use details to dress up the Brand for the occasion

A key theme of SEM is the need to attend to the details. To make his point, Van Gogh cloaks himself as needed. To make himself Gauguin’s priest, he dons a simple, almost cape-like cloak, lengthens and narrows his neck, prominently features a medallion on a pure white collar. Van Gogh adjusts detail to create a Van Gogh fit for purpose. We can do the same with our Branded Experiences.

How amazing is it that each self-portrait is a composite of hundreds and hundreds of mutually reinforcing brush strokes? In the masterwork below, Van Gogh emerges from a halo; his face somehow 3-dimensionally real from a welter of converging streaks. Every fleck of paint conforms to a desired pattern.

In oil or HTML, relentless focus on detail delivers experiential energy.

Grey Felt Hat 2

(Mark Angel is EVP and CTO, KANA)

There’s a term trending on Twitter at the moment that makes me shake my head and smile a little. Why didn’t I see that coming? It’s ‘Big Process’  (#bigprocess) and I find the tweets by Clay Richardson really interesting.

Now, I had no clue what this could mean, so my mind was running in all the directions. What could this possibly mean? It only seemed reasonable that if we have ‘Big Data’, there must be a ‘BIG Process’. But really what makes a process big?

Does it mean a very long running process that runs for months or years, like an immigration case or legal case? Or does it mean a process with a very large number of steps? I was reminded of a scary, huge process diagram I had rare privilege to witness. The process the customer showed me, when printed at 100% size, covered 10ft by 20ft wall! Yes, I know, not a best practice, process purists will say.

Does ‘BIG process’ refer to organizing a large number of participants for a social and collaborative event such as ‘American Idol’ or something similar?

As I was pondering these possibilities I read follow-up tweets that went on to list the tenets of big process:

Tenet #1: “Transform, Don’t just improve”

Tenet #2: “Give the customer control.”

Tenet #3: “Globalize, standardize and humanize.

Tenet #4: “Embrace Big Data.”

Tenet #5: “Move Beyond Process”

Armed with this new information I asked my colleagues for their thoughts. Kelly Koelliker remarked that a part of BIG process could also be to look at the entire relationship between an organization and an individual as one BIG process, made up of individual processes, or interactions. She noted that when a person is not yet a customer, but a prospect, they are at the beginning of the BIG Process. They do research and may make a purchase as next step in the BIG Process. The customer then advances to the ‘new customer’ step of the BIG process. At this point they will probably have initial setup and troubleshooting needs that process needs to resolve. The BIG process will continue to have steps for advanced users, up-sell opportunities, upgrades, renewals, etc.

This make sense and, for those of us in the business of customer service experience management, BIG Process is another name for “Customer Journey” or “Customer Experience”, which is composed of several other processes. BIG Process can be the sum of processes or steps that span pre-sale, purchase and post-sale activities and throughout the lifecycle of a customer. There is lot of data generated in direct and social networks (Big Data) that needs to be collected and analyzed. Customers are empowered to research, compare, evaluate, collaborate and purchase the product. They have all the information they need to make an intelligent decision. And it is not just efficient processes that they care about; they care about the overall experience.

We’ll see how the concept of BIG process develops in coming days and months and I’ll be watching with it great interest. Maybe the next one for process will be ‘Nano Process’ – I’ve not thought through what it means but name has a nice ring to it. Wait a minute, I just Googled it and these bio-technology guys are already all over it! There goes my shot to fame for coining a process term…

Ajay Khanna is Senior Director, Product Marketing. KANA

Hi James, thanks for taking the time to answer a few questions for our blog readers.

CMO James Norwood

Q.1 Running Marketing for a company like KANA must be a diverse job and I’m sure many people would love to know what it involves. What does a typical day consist of?

Answer: There are no typical days! The one thing I love about this industry is that it’s all about change. Every day brings a new set of challenges and opportunities. The marketing function at KANA is fairly diverse, consisting of corporate marketing, product marketing and marketing programs. Our role is to craft market and product strategy and then take our message to market effectively, communicating clearly both inside and outside of the organization. At the end of the day our mission is to conceive of and create demand for products and services that people want to both buy and use. KANA is also a growing company and is doing so through a healthy combination of organic growth and M&A activity and managing to support and develop both sides keeps me personally busy. We have a great team in marketing, spread out across the globe with a really strong set of complementary skills.

Q.2 You’ve only been with KANA for a short while. What was it about the role that persuaded you to join KANA from your previous company?

Answer: Well I’ve actually been on board now for almost six months, starting fully in July 2011. It’s been an education, something I think they call “a baptism by fire.” To be honest, I wasn’t really looking for a new opportunity; I had been at my last employer for 15 years and had seen them grow from $40m to $800m in revenues during that time. I learnt a lot about developing and growing a global business there and I think it was the idea of coming to KANA and bringing that experience to bear here that really appealed. Two other things were important to me: First, KANA has a fantastic next-generation solution that’s at the beginning of its lifecycle and has the potential to significantly benefit our customers in the years to come. Second, I had worked for KANA’s CEO, Mark Duffell in the past, and knew what he was capable of doing in terms of building a successful business, and that gave me additional comfort that coming to KANA was the right thing to do.

Q.3. Can you tell us a little about your plans for 2012? What is likely to be the most significant area of development for KANA marketing over the next 12 months?

Answer: Well I can’t give away all our secrets, but I will tell you that I’m challenging our team in two ways that I think will make a difference. First off, we are working hard to convert our programs mix from being heavily push based to more of a pull focus. More and more buyers begin their search online today and increasingly rely on online listings and resources. Effective pull based marketing can also deliver opportunities at a lower cost than more traditional programs like trade shows and email. Secondly, we’re working hard on our messaging. We have a unique offering for the market here at KANA and our product marketing teams need to work with a variety of sources to understand how best to get that across to potential customers.

Q.4 Has the current economic climate altered these plans?

Answer: Not altered as such but certainly affects how we go to market, in terms of what messages will resonate. It’s going to be another year of managing costs and budgets closely, at KANA as well, and so we need to show our customers how investments in IT can deliver a return on investment that outweighs the expense. If we are honest, many businesses, just like we’re seeing with central and local government austerity measures, will be putting in place some tough business plans for the year. Many of them see targeted IT investments as a way to bridge the gap between cost cutting and maintaining revenue and customer satisfaction goals – and that’s where KANA can help.

Q.4. On a more personal level, can you tell us what are the three most pivotal moments in your career that you either learned from and/or helped you get where you are today?

Answer: There’s really too many moments and too many people who have helped shape my career for me to do this one justice, but I will try. Running my own business for about three and a half years taught me so much, but nothing more important than the value of hard work. I was fortunate to partner up in business with a very talented person at a time when the PC revolution was just beginning. Those were great years. I learnt so much about business, and it set me up for everything since. Another career defining moment was during the post dotcom aftermath. I was running product marketing and my boss at the time summoned me into his office to tell me that they had had to let go of the entire marketing programs team bar one and it would now be my responsibility. That one lady and myself oversaw a transition from direct mail, trade shows and advertising to an almost 100% online and email marketing operation at a time when it was really in its infancy. We had no choice; it’s all we could afford. My passion is definitely product strategy, so my third pivotal moment would be the multi-year planning for and successful delivery of a modern next-generation product to market that delivers tangible benefits to customers. You don’t often get to do that, and I’ve been fortunate enough to have done it twice so far.

Q.5. Tell us a little about James Norwood, the person. What do you do to relax when you’re away from the office?

Answer: Unfortunately, these days the office always travels with you! When I do get the odd opportunity to get away so to speak, I like to spend time in the city. I’m a city boy and so I’m most relaxed and comfortable in a big, noisy, smelly city. London is my home town so that’s my favorite, but I also love Sydney, San Francisco, Singapore and Stockholm too. At weekends I ride my bicycle to keep physically and mentally fit and I also watch more sport than any person should be permitted to. On long plane journeys, which I do a lot of, I have a policy of working on the trip out and then reading a book on the return leg, it’s the only chance I get.

Q.6. Finally, James. If you could ask your customers one question what would it be?

Answer: Simple. How can KANA help you be more successful in 2012?

Confession: I believe in superstar Engineers. Nowadays, given the Agile emphasis on Team, reliance on Superstars seems to be roughly as fashionable as fat ties. Embracing inequality of production can also be perceived as naïve by the folks paying their salaries (why pay the big dollars in the Silicon Valley when engineers can be had for $8K in Malaysia?). But, while one can debate whether a great engineer is worth 100x, 10x or 5x a mediocre one, all I know is that great software requires superstars on board.

Still, for all their worth (in fact, precisely because of their disproportionate ability to create value), I’ve learned recently that superstars are poster children for the #1 problem plaguing every development team:  Queues.

At KANA, we’ve gradually been applying the theory of constraint management to manufacturing software. Lean Thinking tells us that getting better means attacking the choke points, the throttles, inhibiting Scrum team velocity. Lean’s power is founded on re-imagining the software process, leaving behind the primitive notion of development as agriculture (where every engineer is like an acre of land and the job is to drive up yield per acre), substituting a mental model of manufacturing (where shippable software is an assembled output derived from many people with discrete skills contributing a piece of the “finished” whole).

The agricultural model posits a darn good reason to hire superstars: the best engineers have high yields. The Lean Model, by contrast, tends to focus managerial energy not on strength but on weakness. By definition, a theory of constraints is a theory of the weakest link. Intuitively, focusing on shortage has managerial appeal. If we have disproportionate server-side engineers, our “schedule” becomes dependent on the capacity of front-end engineers. If we lack QA resources, our velocity is dictated by the pace of testing. If a team lacks design skills, our choke point tends to be architects. And so on…

Lean Thinking translates intuitive grasp of “scarcity” into the sterner stuff of science. Suppose we visualize each individual on the development team as a machine. Like assembly line machines, these human machines aren’t undifferentiated. Each is fit for purpose.    A Toyota line consists of stamping machines and welding stations and on and on. The completed car is touched by many devices, each possessing a “skill” and a capacity.  A Development Factory similarly manufactures working code by leveraging different talents:  DBAs, Build engineers, UX, Product Owners, black-box testers, automation engineers, documentation writers, and on and on. Lean Thinking is about organizing the assembly line of capabilities (human or machine) to take optimum advantage of the available units of production, eradicating the wastefulness of “waiting to be used” (aka queuing).

As we focus on Lean, I’m learning that this common-sense, almost simple-minded, idea shouldn’t be underestimated. When applied systematically to the factory floor, the discipline of Lean created a revolution in manufacturing, making a science of Supply Chain Management, shifting wealth.

How does Toyota identify the choke points on the factory floor?  You look for queues. Where ever “work in progress” (the unfinished Toyotas) is stacking up, waiting on a machine, you have a throttle. Re-route the line, add more of the needed machines, increase throughput at that station by adding “attendant/workers”:  the Lean manager focuses on the weakest link in the production chain, thereby unclogging the line and increasing “flow”.

How do you identify throttle points in software velocity? You look for queues. The essence of Agile Lean is queue management. User stories are the cars. The product backlog is the set of orders, waiting to be fulfilled. “Work in progress” is the user stories burning down. Scrum teams, surrounded by the complete set of engineering resources, are the production factories in our supply chain. People are code-generating engines, bringing their unique skills and talents to forging working code. In the lean model, each person has a queue, which is the work awaiting burn. To get better and go faster, you identify and assist the people with out-sized queues, just as Toyota focuses on adding capacity where the line is queued behind a particular machine.

Good stuff, for sure. But, like so many ideas that analogize machines and people, I believe a bear-trap lies hidden in the neatness of Lean.

People possess two, queue-creating drives not shared by machines. People desire successful careers, and successful careers emanate from specialization and talent development. And, people have the capacity and desire to groom their own queues, working, consciously or unconsciously, to obscure the true throttles in the software assembly line.

You probably have found that Agile exalts generalization. Agile guru after guru preaches the doctrine of fungible team members, advocating that every engineer pull backlog work indiscriminately. “Generalism” is great, and I think management should pay some price to combat over-specialization. But, pragmatic Agilists will recognize that good technical folks resist over-generalization.    Expertise matters. Applications, nowadays, stand atop a significant pyramid of other people’s software, on multiple layers of core capability, from operating systems to DBs to UI frameworks to compilers to integration standards. An engineer’s self-development requires becoming deeply knowledgeable on a select portfolio of these standards. Knowledge is another (kinder and I would claim more accurate) name for specialization. To say this in economic terms, smart engineers manage the portfolio of their expertise precisely as venture capitalists manage their portfolio of companies. No intelligent VC would scatter their money and attention across too many “bets”; failure to focus and specialize is the surest way to guarantee failure. Still, the gurus are right: specialization makes queue management hard, building the barriers that build queues. Acknowledging the value of specialized knowledge means embracing a more complex model of queue management.

The need for specialization manufactures only modest havoc compared to the ability of people to interfere with their queues. On a factory floor, when a machine can’t keep up, work queues in front of THAT machine. On a development team, when the team can’t keep up, work queues in front of your superstars. Think about it this way:  what’s the logical move for a developer under pressure?    Most seek assistance from the most knowledgeable person around. Top engineers have the broadest spectrum of expertise, a high desire to take on new challenges and superior problem-solving capacity. This troika translates into enormous demand for their involvement, and consequently, at least at KANA, we find the biggest queues in front of the biggest producers. Paradoxically, in the dynamic assembly line of the dev team, the managerial hunt for the weak link in the production chain typically detours thru the Superstar queue. Lean Thinking reveals why superstars are so incredibly valuable:  their core worth lies not in their capacity to write more code, but in their ability to attack blockages in flow, moving from trouble point to trouble point and attacking the hard, risky tasks. In so doing, they themselves become the bottleneck. The assembly line model provides cogent confirmation of our intuition that deeply knowledgeable and talented engineers are invaluable.

Lean Thinking helps us to find the waste that is blocking the flow of working code. The red flag that identifies blockage is the queue.   On development teams, in contrast to factories, the biggest queues tend to be associated with our strongest performers.

(Mark Angel is EVP and CTO, KANA)

Some questions for customer service and customer experience managers to think about…

What if:

• your agents could follow the right process, just as you had designed it?
• your agents didn’t have to ALT_TAB through 15 applications on their desktop?
• your agents didn’t have to use Post-it notes or index cards or refer to training manuals?
• you didn’t have to spend months and months on training agents?
• your agents didn’t have to “copy and paste” between applications?
• your agents no longer needed to search for answers but the answer was delivered in the context of their work process?
• you could translate your ideas, adapt to change, in a short period of time?
• every agent could be your best agent?
• any agent could handle any call?
• your customers didn’t have to be transferred from one expert to the other?
• your customers didn’t have to repeat themselves?
• your customers didn’t have to be put on hold?
• your customers completed more online transactions?
• you could listen to your all your customers and truly understand what they want?
• you could foster a relationship with your customers, between your customers?

After every question, ask: Why Not? What stopping you?

Now, imagine that you can …

(Vikas Nehru is VP, Product Marketing, KANA)

I may very possibly be the last to blog on the theme of technology trends and predictions for 2012 with every blogger worthy of a following already having done so (and before 2012 actually arrived). But in my role at KANA, this is not something I think about only at New Year. On the contrary, there’s hardly a day that goes by where I’m not on the phone talking to prospective and existing customers about KANA’s strategy for the next 12, 36, or even 60 months. Discussions that always include reference to emerging trends and how KANA plans to contribute or exploit them on behalf of our user community.

So after some debate with two of my esteemed colleagues, KANA vice presidents Vikas Nehru and David Moody, here are five areas that we believe will substantially figure in and shape the Customer Service world in 2012, plus a couple of observations.

1. 2012 will see real convergence of online revenue channels with customer service

At KANA we are calling it “Revenue + Service” and although perhaps not a new concept it’s one that will move to center stage in what is likely to be another tough year economically. It’s time for the Marketing and Online/eBusiness teams to get with and get serious about web customer service. We’ve discussed this at length with Gartner analysts Johan Jacobs and Michael Maoz, and with Forrester’s Kerry Bodine and Bill Band (whose own predictions you can find here) with a good degree of acknowledgement. We believe that prescient organizations will be making their biggest bets here in 2012.

2. 2012 will be the year that Big Data Analytics starts to deliver – because it must

The sheer amount of information now being gathered about the customer experience, such as consumer patterns and citizen activity, is approaching Orwellian levels, and just a short 30 years later than he predicted. The rise of social has exacerbated an already developing desire by both business and government to understand more about the experiences their customers have as they interact with them. Business intelligence offerings for the majority of CRM solutions were simply never intended to parse and analyze such massive amounts of often unstructured data. That’s where Big Data comes in. It should hardly be surprising that at KANA Summit 2011, the KANA Customer Advisory Board (CAB), made up of leaders in both the public and private sector, agreed on the need for a holistic analytics strategy as the number one area that KANA could help them with. Of course, vendors like SAS Institute and IBM and technologies like Hadoop are tackling this very thing already, but expect to hear a lot more about Big Data in 2012 as customer service vendors look to add these capabilities to their offerings.

3. 2012 will see the Local Government Public Sector lead the way in Mobile adoption

It took me longer than most to get my head around the power and potential of mobile technology. There I’ve said it and it’s true; I could often be heard saying “mobile is not yet ready for prime time business.” But in 2011, as far as KANA goes, I was proved absolutely wrong. Mobile devices are rapidly becoming, if not yet principle, then indispensable computing devices, and it is the Public Sector that is leading the way in terms of Government to Citizen mobile customer service. Early government adopters such as City of Boston and North Ayrshire have discovered how resident use of smartphone reporting apps are highlighting issues sooner than previously possible thereby reducing litigation costs, for example. The ability to harness willing citizens in this way will drive further adoption and further innovation in government in 2012. So expect 2012 to be the year when a proliferation of easy to build, easy to use, quick to value and low cost apps, increasingly delivered via the cloud, appear in our space.

4. 2012 will see increased investment in email management as volume continue to increase

Gartner has suggested that, despite the growth of web customer service channels, email response management is still the most widely deployed today at around 82% penetration. It remains the fastest growing channel, and will almost double over the next decade in terms of consumption. This does not surprise us and was a point we made at the “Digital by Default” conference last year. Email becomes even more important as more and more people carry out business online (see prediction #1) as the principle way in which they expect Support to be handled, including secure messaging. Expect to see email response management overhaul initiatives in 2012 as aging offerings struggle to handle the rigors of growing traffic and increasingly burdensome governance, risk and compliance initiatives.

5. 2012 will see Social CRM move from over-hyped to table stakes

The social customer relationship (SCRM) landscape continues to evolve at a pace, and has seen its fair share of consolidation and new entrants over the last twelve months. Social listening, monitoring and text analytics solutions, which once commanded a premium, are now available on-demand at a more realistic price tag. Such activities still live by and large within the realms of Marketing but (as in #1 above) increasingly listening to the voice of the customer must mean a closer relationship between Marketing and Customer Service. In 2012 we at KANA believe that social CRM suites that combine rich, collaborative community platforms and social listening and respond solutions will begin to make the journey back over to “CRM.” Social CRM is great at relationships but poor on process, and the opposite could be said about traditional CRM systems. The coming together of these two complementary areas to improve business processes will do more to deliver return on investment from CRM initiatives than most in 2012.

Observation #1: Continued industry consolidation in 2012 will benefit customers and vendors

In 2011 after a long period beneath the radar, the Customer Service sector witnessed a whole flurry of merger and acquisition activity as the emphasis businesses put on customer service and, more appropriately, service experience management heightened, in what was a tough economy. A number of KANA’s competitors disappeared as part of that process, or rather became very small parts of much larger companies. This consolidation in our space will likely continue into 2012, but why is this a good thing? Well, a focus on any sector is always positive; it results in heightened investment and new innovation. It can provide more streamlined choice and helps with clarity when it comes to investment decisions. KANA carried out some targeted M&A activity of our own in 2011 and expect the focus on our market to provide even greater opportunity for more of the same this year.

Observation #2: Predictions of another tough economic year in 2012 will do little to slow the advance of the Cloud

No ‘technology trends and predictions’ blog can be complete without mentioning the Cloud. We expect nothing less than greater choice and flexibility in deployment models for customers in 2012 as they seek to implement technology on their own terms. Many KANA customers find our SaaS based applications a great way to get started with, for example, a social listening or mobile initiative without significant capital outlay. Other KANA customers, such as those in the financial services sector, are actually moving certain Cloud applications back on premise under the rigors of GRC mandates. Without doubt the benefits of the Cloud are myriad and adoption in the Customer Service sector will continue to progress. But at the end of the day, it shouldn’t be the vendor who dictates your IT operational model, it should be you.

Of course, as is the case with all my posts, the opinions provided here are my own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, actions or planned actions of KANA Software, Inc.

Happy New Year!

(James Norwood is Chief Marketing Officer, KANA)