NICENEWS : October 2004

Home | NICE Perform | Expediting Performance

By Michael Maoz, VP and Gartner Fellow, Gartner Research

On the surface it would appear obvious that an enterprisewide coordination of customer processes would be the norm among the majority of businesses. Yet few large organizations manage to coordinate even the most basic level of customer strategy. The result is multiple and conflicting approaches tothe customer that differ by communication channel (web, email, kiosk, contact center, retail outlet) and department (sales, marketing, service, billing). This fragmented approach to the customer leads to lower levels of customer retention, reduced loyalty, an erosion of brand consistency, and higher IT costs.

For customer facing business processes to be streamlined, the focus will have to be on defining the core intentions that the business has for the customer and the most likely intentions (implicit and explicit) that the customer has for the business.
Organizations must be able to act on this information in real time during a customer interaction, regardless of whether the interaction is automated or involving a service agent. This is the core of what can be called an Intent Driven Enterprise (IDE). Interactions constitute "Moments of Truth" where the business either lives up to its promises, or fails. Without an "intent" discipline in place, business planning and execution is muddled because of the endless number of possible projects that IT, and the business, can undertake, versus the specific projects that will align enterprise and customer.

A concrete example of the need for an IDE strategy involves data. Businesses will face a growing gap between the data that is collected about the customer and the ability to analyze the data in a meaningful way that can be profitable for both the enterprise and the customer. Data does not constitute, in and of itself, business insight. For example, to sift intelligently through the massive and growing data from new electronic sources such as embedded monitoring devices and RFID tags in capital equipment, GPS, unstructured data from photographic images, video, email, and IVR logs, the enterprise will need to have defined the customer processes that it needs to support. If the processes are defined, then an analysis of even the largest and most diverse data stores can be managed based on the specific business intelligence that is required to support the specific goals that have been set up for the customer. From that point, technologies can be applied to create and support the interactions in a way that will be mutually beneficial to both par ties in the relationship.
Gartner believes that the use of a customer intent driven methodology will increase the ROI on CRM projects by 40 percent (0.7 probability).

The intent driven challenge is especially elevated in customer service because of the degree of mismatch between the expectations that customers have of the enterprise, and the ability of the enterprise to address customer needs.
The customer simply wants the business to fulfill its explicit or tacit obligation to live up to the spirit of the buyer-seller relationship and make sure that products and services are performing to their expectations.

The CRM systems now in place will be inadequate to support an IDE business strategy. For a future system to be in the mainstream of the enterprise system architecture, it will need to synchronize business functions from across the enterprise.
We anticipate that by 2010, CRM systems will evolve to share the following enterprise capabilities:

Cross channel analytics
Predictive/right time marketing
Segmentation based selling
Guided interactions
Proactive service
Automated enterprise channels

How the IDE will evolve. Businesses must identify and address the analysis and action or technology gaps that adversely affect key customer facing processes. To be an intent driven enterprise, the organization must engineer to rapidly respond to customer needs and expectations. It must be able to change processes based on these needs. This may require greater flexibility in business relationships with partners, or internally. For success to be achieved, processes and goals must be consistent, and supported with underlying technologies.

Bottom Line. The current evolution of the market is towards the idea of an Intent Driven Enterprise, though most software vendors will be followers of user need, rather than visionaries. Figuring out which IT components an organization must possess is a goal-driven (i.e., enterprise) process, not an IT or vendor driven process. That is, there is a potentially different development path than the ones seen for ERP and CRM, where users trailed vendor vision. Future intent-driven applications will be designed such that an enterprise can extend its reach beyond its physical walls and out to customers and partners with real-time interactions. They will link information from disparate applications, componentize business functions using standards-based interfaces and offer them as services that other enterprises can easily integrate into their own operations.

Users that focus on tools that assist in the cross-channel analysis of the customer experience, and that drive improvements in these interactions will be best positioned to create brand consistency and customer loyalty - elements that lead to business success.

To achieve an IDE ecosystem, the systems would need to evolve to achieve three objectives:

1.	Personalized/differentiated relationships
2.	Drive service as the true value of a product.
3.	Support intelligent automated interactions/relationships.