What’s the Most Critical Core Competency to Master in 2008 to Improve Customer Experience?

Findability should be your organization’s highest priority in 2008. We’ve learned this from watching our customer-centric “Visionaries” in action. Clients like Tim Ingoldsby at the American Institute of Physics, Phil Gibson at National Semiconductor and GreatLifeStories.com, Sean Belka at Fidelity Investments, Christer Ljungdahl at National Instruments, Mark Keyworth at Agilent, Tom Kraus at ShopNBC, and Colin Hynes at Staples are consistent leaders in prioritizing search, navigation, findability. These influential and successful practitioners are consistently way ahead of the pack in:

1. Prioritizing search, navigation, and findability as a core competency.

2. Investing in people, skills, and technology to continually improve the quality and reach of search and navigation for their company’s Web presence and cross-channel customer experience.

3. Investing personal time and energy in ensuring high-quality search and navigation results on all their companies’ Web properties and e-enabled products (software, services, content).

In January, we provide a great resource to support your resolution to improve your firm’s competencies in findability. It’s an updated, revised, and comprehensive framework that will help you assess your current search and navigation capabilities and establish priorities for improvement. In the past, Sue Aldrich has offered separate frameworks for self-service search, product search, and enterprise search. Now she has combined all of these findability tools and competencies into a single comprehensive framework. Sue focuses on the key scenarios and needs of:

1. Seekers. Customers, partners, suppliers, investors, press, and employees who use the technology to do their jobs and to find information they need.

2. Information Collection Managers or Stewards. Employees in the role of information collection stewards use search management tools to manage the contents, organization, quality, and findability of various collections (e.g., customer support knowledgebase, corporate Web pages, product documentation).

3. Audience Advocates. Managers, responsible for the quality of relationships with customers, partners, suppliers, employees, etc., who negotiate with internal service providers (such as technologists and information collection managers) for better quality of seeker experience for their audiences.

4. Marketing Managers. Corporate, brand, and product marketing, as well as merchandisers, who use search marketing tools to manage lead and revenue generation.

5. IT Architects, Information Architects, Developers, and Operations. Technologists who deploy and support the search engine indexing, retrieval, reporting, tuning, and integration.

Although this Enterprise Search Evaluation Framework will help you assess and evaluate the technologies and tools needed to improve findability, I recommend it to those of you who are not (or don’t think you are currently) in the market for new technology. You’ll find nuggets of great advice throughout Sue’s framework. Think of this as a tool you can use, like a new exercise regime or a new diet for the New Year. It provides the guidance you need to improve your customer experience. Think of this framework as a path of least resistance to help you do the right thing.

Like new diets, new technology works best when accompanied by good science. You need the advances in technology, not the simplistic capabilities of basic search engines. You still have to cope with your old habits, which might be undermining your intentions—e.g., not investing enough in improving the quality of content and metadata, or in coordinating the efforts of different groups of contributors.

The best diets also fit your lifestyle—and the best technology choices fit your requirements. You should be thinking not about the most vexing problems of today, but envisioning the ideal of what the user experience should be like. Think about your own experiences using your company’s resources. Are you travelling hither and yon to type in your search terms over and over? Or is information delivered to you when and where you need it? Are you participating in findability by scoring results, or tagging, or organizing “your” collection? Are you collaborating with others by sharing “your” collection and tags?

Thinking too narrowly about the problem will result in a fatally flawed solution. Make sure you select technology that can embrace all of the information of value—whether it’s corporate-owned or public, formally published or community commentary—and deliver search services to all audiences of value—employees, customers, partners, partners’ customers, and so on.

Comments

[Patty Seybold]

Hi Graham...
Actually we're not writing about Ambient findability in this report...We're writing about the basics of making it easy for your customers to find what they need. There are two kinds of search: In one, you know what you are looking for and want it retrieved for you: I want a ream of bright white copier paper. In the other type of search task, you don’t really know what you are looking for: I need to find a new approach to packaging this product. If you want to deliver a great customer experience, you need to ensure that you're addressing both customer needs adequately.

Thanks for the tip re: Ambient Findability.. I had missed that book, and I've been a fan of earlier books, so I'm sure I'll find it useful...

[Patty Seybold]

Adele,
Thanks for catching that.. It turns out that an annoying Amazon Widget had "added itself" to my blog and was inferring links to Amazon books from phrases in the blog.. really annoying.. It took me a while to figure out what was going on, but with the help of the Typepad folks, I finally found the source of the problem...thanks for the alert!

Patty

[Adele Revella]

Great post, Patricia. Could you check the link on the evaluation framework? I was directed to a book by Robert Burger . . .

[Graham Hill]

Patty

Ambient findability, to use the title of a recent book, is obviously very important for companies in a world where customers are drowning in data. But, making the assumption that it is the things companies do that add value to customers that is the real foundation of customer experience, I am not sure how being findable really adds value to customers. It isn't as though only the best companies, offering the best products, at the best prices, are those who will adopt ambient findability as their resolution for 2008.

CRM was too much about companies and not enough about customers. CEM is supposed to help balance this lop-sidedness. Ambient findability is a pure CRM technology play.

Graham Hill
Independent CRM Consultant
Interim CRM Manager