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Take a left on Bob hope and keep going until you get to Dinah shore.” I thanked the man behind the bulletproof glass at the gas station and followed his directions to The Westin Mission Hills Rancho Mirage. If you make a mistake out in the desert, you find out eventually. The road just stops — and with it all the carefully manicured grass, palm trees, automatic sprinklers, culverts, sidewalks, and other civil engineering marvels. A modest yellow traffic sign simply states: “End.” Beyond the sign is the real desert: the Mojave, a vast, forbidding landscape of sand, scrub, and no water, with a brightness that makes you avert your eyes and quickly turn back to the civilized comforts contained within Bob Hope Drive and Dinah Shore Drive. Of course, as lovers of these delicate ecosystems would be quick to point out, the Mojave, Sonora, and other deserts are hardly wastelands. Joshua Tree National Park, not far from the Palm Springs environs, is a spectacular garden of strange cactus trees, flowers, and rock formations. But nothing can make you feel a more willing captive of civilization’s mirage than a few steps out into the Mojave.
Strangely, the only problem with the Mission Hills Rancho Mirage was that it was bad for cellular phone communication. As I drove up, I had to beware of wanderers in business-casual polo shirts and sunglasses, ears pressed to their Nokias, drifting aimlessly out into the sizzling parking lot. It looked like a high-tech take on “Night of the Living Dead.” They needed the open desert, where they could pick up distant signals and converse free of the building’s interference.
Inside, meanwhile, the seventh annual Crossroads Conference was bubbling along smoothly. The creation of Open Systems Advisors (OSA), a research and consulting firm based in Boston, the conference is built around the Crossroads A-List awards for best new products and services. OSA bases its decisions on a major research effort led by Nina Lytton, president of OSA and its advisory board of IT executives. OSA interviews business and IT executives and chooses the A-List based on what it identifies as exemplary use of emerging technology.
The trip was worth it. While the presentations were mostly marketing moments, the event was nonetheless a stimulating watering hole for an elite group of new technology vendors and their “trophy” users, whose exploits enabled them to win the awards.
Truth About E-Commerce
Two speakers in particular woke up the audience with pointed remarks. Maggi Williams, senior consultant with the Sympatico Customer Service at Bell Actimedia, offered some perspective on e-customer relationship management. Based in Quebec, Canada, she spoke about the “dirty little secrets” of e-commerce: abandoned shopping carts, incomplete transactions, and people who would prefer to talk with a live person but “are being driven by us toward something other than direct, one-to-one contact.” Call centers and Web centers are largely “frustrating for everyone,” she observed; “we don’t know if there was real heartache and misery” that prompted a person to interact with a call or Web center. Williams recommended a “corner store” model of customer interaction, anchored by the talents of “universal agents” who are “multiskilled and multiprogrammed” to solve problems and deliver information. She predicted that demand for skilled universal agents would create a hot job opportunity as companies move to integrate their points of customer contact.
Many Crossroads attendees seemed to be pondering the failures of e-commerce: “Imagine if over 30 percent of your store’s customers filled their shopping carts and then left without buying anything,” one e-retail executive said. Most stores would fire up their salespeople to personally help them make purchases. So far, the big story has been efficiency: “We have dehumanized for efficiency,” observed Chris Veator, CEO of Artesia Technologies. “We need to use digital media as a way of reintroducing humanity.”
The other dirty little secret of e- commerce is fulfillment. Thus, it was appropriate that Colum Joyce, DHL’s electronic commerce manager of market development at its Global Coordination Center, would be the second speaker to get the audience squirming. Using a sharp Irish sense of humor to drive home his points, he blasted the “arrogance of the dot-coms” as a “dangerous illusion.” Enraptured by their belief that the new economy is unfettered by old-economy rules, he accused particularly the B2C e-retailers of “downlining” their efficiency problems to other service providers, particularly logistics, thereby creating a “cycle of increasingly unproductive activity.” Joyce declared: “Businesses operate in a social environment—you must respect that environment.” After building customers’ expectations so high, B2C e-retailers have forced DHL and other logistics providers to bear the brunt of unhappy reality when those expectations aren’t met. “Our agents are met at the door by the equivalent of Godzilla with hemorrhoids,” he exclaimed. “Your inefficiency is undermining my ability to do my business.”
Joyce said that DHL has actually begun to rip up contracts with e-retailers who are simply too inefficient. In general, he sees the role of logistics and fulfillment providers as adding value to—rather than displacing—the dot-com’s direct relationship with its customers. “It’s time to replace Darwin with Joyce,” he said, claiming that survival of the fittest should be replaced by “survival of the relationship builder.”
E-CRM: Human Dimension
Several vendors made the Crossroads’ A-List by focusing on customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing. Some, like E.piphany, Broadvision, and Art Technology Group were showing exciting methods of realtime personalization and one-to-one marketing. However, I couldn’t help but think of another dot-com remonstration from Colum Joyce: that customers demand individuality, not personalization. “Customers are telling us how they expect to be treated,” he said. In other words, a big part of personalization should involve managing expectations, rather than inflating them beyond what the business can realistically provide.
One clear way to do this is by bringing realtime human interaction back into the picture—humans, that is, who have immediate knowledge of a customer’s record of transactions and other communication with the business. FaceTime Communications, Silknet Software, and Quintus Corp. made the A-List with interactive customer assistance solutions. FaceTime augments online shopping with instant messaging and other interactive text communication in real time. Setting itself up as an application service provider to fast-growing dot-coms that are selling complex products, the company’s solution can also assign incoming messages to particular agents, who can be involved in several sessions simultaneously.
Silknet, which since going public in 1999 has rocketed into the NASDAQ stratosphere, specializes in synchronizing customer touch points to establish the “universal agent” capability that Bell Actimedia’s Maggi Williams described. The company’s eBusiness System platform, using business rules, Data- Objects, and extranet workflow, helps organizations “map customer behavior to business processes.” By integrating customer touch points, Silknet is helping companies ease the pressure on call centers and drive more interaction through the Web. Quintus showed an impressive application that in many ways combined the abilities of FaceTime and Silknet to allow e-businesses to monitor customer behavior, summon appropriate knowledge and intelligence, and interact with online customers when appropriate. The company also throws its weight behind the idea of universal WebCenter agents, “who should be treated as valuable contributors to the knowledge base and to the cyber process.”
Rollover KM
Knowledge management (KM), riding high a year ago as the next great buzzword, seems to have been “shot down in May,” to borrow a line from the late Palm Springs fixture Frank Sinatra. Perhaps because it lacks the essential “e” in front of it, KM evokes sour expressions these days. This ponderous category was always a catch-all for a number of tangentially related emerging technologies, which have now returned to more specific classifications, such as enterprise information portals, online learning, collaborative development, digital asset management, and so on. The Crossroads A-List’s KM category was called “Finding and Reusing Knowledge” and its winners included Artesia Technologies, Autonomy, Open Text, Plumtree, and Viador.
Artesia, with its TEAMS digital asset management solution, made a strong case that, as we near the bandwidth “re-volution,” audio, video, text, images, and graphics will form a critical asset that must be managed at least as carefully as traditional data resources. Once digital assets are fully in play, observed Chris Veator, “they will radically transform both business processes and customer relationships.” Content will become an extension of products themselves, and a major vehicle for extending brand. Streaming video pop-up windows will, for example, feature realtime content that “re-humanizes” e-commerce.
Rather than organizing digital assets by media type, IT organizations will be seeking a logical architecture that enables business users to query and search content more effectively. Artesia’s TEAMS solution is a metadata-driven system that is tightly integrated with Oracle 8i and derives added value through software partnerships. Having spun out of Thomson Publishing, Artesia focused its energies initially on the media industry: but it is gaining clients in government and other industries that are determined to manage digital assets more intelligently.
Technology coming into place will send us not into the age of content, KM, or CRM: instead, it will bring on the age of the e-human. E-commerce is about to become civilized.
David Stodder(dstodder@cmp.com) is editorial director of Intelligent Enterprise.
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