Reference Cycles and Human Intervention

Feature

posted 1 Oct 1999 in Volume 3 Issue 2

Reference Cycles & Human Intervention

In the first article of this month's focus on Customer Relationship Management, Patti Anklam describes the Compaq distillation process, where customer service relationships and experiences are recorded and distilled through a 'Reference Management process'. Here, the essence of knowledge underlying the babel of human dialogue can be captured. Sales reps, customer service employees etc. no longer have to keep re-inventing the wheel, and customers receive the 'just-in-time' knowledge they demand.

One of the most essential types of knowledge that a company must manage in order to be successful is its customer knowledge. Customer relationship management, or CRM systems, are pillars in most corporate knowledge management strategies, and may be designed to fulfill a variety of mission-fundamental activities:

Call centres that provide customer service and support functions while building sophisticated records of customers to ensure that all conversations between the customer and the company are seamless, happening as if everyone in the company responds to a customer as if they had personally spoken just the day (or hour, or minute) before

Marketing automation systems that identify, segment and pinpoint markets of opportunity in order to build campaigns and retain targeted customers, expand and deepen current relationships, and attract newly targeted customers

Customer intelligence systems that enable the resources of the whole company to be brought to bear in each customer interaction

Sales force automation systems providing just-in-time and just-in-context contact management, account management, opportunity management, forecasting, and client, product, marketing, and competitive information

Such systems focus on managing knowledge about the customer in order to enhance and improve the relationship with the customer. There is yet another aspect of customer information that fuels another process cycle in a systems company, and that is the reference cycle. We win new customers by being able to reference work that we have done for others. References establish credibility and enable trust for multi-billion dollar corporations just as they do for humble job applications.

Where there's a Web&

It is 1986. Over 100,000 employees of Digital Equipment Corporation, connected by one of the world s largest private networks, have desktop access to up-to-date news, corporate databases, policies and procedures, employee locators, the corporate lending library, price books, and 'among numerous departmental and group applications available worldwide' a customer database. Sales reps, technical support specialists, business development and account managers worldwide could simply log into the VTX database available from the VMS terminals and look for customer references by industry, technology, geography, solution.

Ten years later, this reference system is a web-based knowledge management system that is enabled by a process of submission, approval, refinement, and review. This corporate-level activity provides a service to all the business groups and functions in the company, and for our partners. Individual business units (such as the Professional Services division) contribute to the corporate database at the same time as augmenting and maintaining supplemental collections.

A Reference Management Process

The reference management process is shown below. The process may be initiated automatically via the sales management system, or when an account manager or sales rep fills in a simple Web-based form indicating that they have won a project. The submission forms are routed to a small number of marketing professionals who interview the key sales person to elicit the contextual detail about the customer's business, business problem, the nature of the solution, and so on, as well as data about specific product sales. Once completed, these references are catalogued and posted on the intranet sit. This is accessible to employees worldwide, usually in a matter of days.

Six months later, the system triggers a call to the account manager to 'check in' and see if the customer is satisfied and would be willing to serve as a reference. If so, then the details of the project are validated and updated, reviewed and approved by the account manager and customer, and posted on the Compaq external web site. You can imagine how important this is! We have many stories like that of the sales person who approached a first-time customer about doing a database project. The prospective customer asked if we had any experience. The sales person was able to link, on the spot, to our Web site's success stories and pull up six similar examples of successful database projects. The customer signed up for a pilot the same day!

An integral part of the process occurs when wins and references are posted in our centralized global information repository ('Web IR'). Employees who have subscribed (as part of our corporate personalized news and information delivery services called Reader's Choice) to the wins and references information service receive a weekly mailing of all the new wins and references from across the company. This includes the complete range of computer products and services we offer. Weekly mailing heightens awareness among employees, enables serendipitous connections and maintains momentum in the sales process.

Uses of references

In our business, we wouldn't think to propose a project worth millions of dollars to a customer without providing examples of how, and where we have done similar projects for others. Sales and engagement managers in our Professional Services business access stories as 'proof points' in developing pre-sales presentations, and for inclusion in actual proposals.

The internal version of the references in the Web IR contain contact information so that sales and account managers, product developers and services practice managers can locate and query the people who were involved with the project or the customer.

Our marketing department looks at references as possible testimonials. We look for customers whose public endorsement adds credibility and flavour to advertisements, brochures, press releases, analyst reports, and executive presentations. When our marketing group receives the weekly list of wins and references from Reader's Choice, they filter them by looking for wins that have professional services content. We post these on our Professional Services Knowledge Network's wins and references site, often highlighting the major wins on our division's intranet portal, to acknowledge our peers and celebrate the successes.

From references to case studies: What more do you want to know?

Despite the ease of access to customer references and the acculturation to the continuous cycle of propose, win, deliver, celebrate, there is always still more to know about the project, about the customer, about what really happened. The lessons behind and inside the projects are what make for organizational learning and growth, and they include a number of elements not normally included in the summary descriptions that suffice for sales reference. For example:

The whole story. Where did the lead come from? How did we staff the project? Did the team stay on? Did we get follow on business for that customer? Did that project lead to other customers?

Decision criteria. Technical consultants and solutions architects need to know how the technical decisions were made. In our environment, technologies and products change at a dramatic rate, and we must be able to advise customers on the appropriate technology for their needs.

Artifacts. Our knowledge network provides a structured project experience database, and we have knowledge managers in place worldwide to assist teams in submitting formal project documents, examples, proposals, and so on to this knowledge base. But what about the informal, interim documents; architecture models; summaries of decisions and actions from key meetings; the winning presentation that clinched the customer's decision? These are not easily categorized and are rarely the object of a search?

To capture the deeper learnings from the above, our technology group has instituted both case study and story projects. A central mission of our group is to support the systems integration business in identifying, researching, and applying emerging technologies that will be important to our business and then ensuring knowledge transfer to our worldwide delivery teams. We began the case study project as an extension to our internal web site, 'Web University, in mid-1997.' We were responding to the requests of our field consultants, in particular the solution architecture community for technical project documents not normally captured by the usual project review process.

To put the technical documents (architecture and design documents, customer presentations, product evaluations, and so on) on the Web, we decided to put them in context, including the following elements:

Team composition i.e.who the team members were, and what their roles were in the project. This type of information is very important to other teams who are proposing or planning projects with other customers.

Considerations in choice of technology

Problems encountered

Opportunities for follow-on business

These case studies provided a more complete context for the work, and also enabled rapid access to the project documents, in the context of the case itself

From Case studies to stories: finding the dark moments

Our case studies project provided a good starting point for a subsequent story project in late 1998. The goal was to pilot a process for the identification and collection of compelling stories that demonstrate our capabilities in solving complex system architecture problems. We wanted to be able to express the hard parts as well as the winning aspects, and we set a goal of 20 stories 'complete, tellable, interesting customer stories' within a quarter, with a minimal staff (never more than three people, none more than full time). Here's how we did it:

We asked our group Vice President (who was the project sponsor) to send a note to his worldwide management team, requesting each one to contribute a story that would provide valuable learning to colleagues in other parts of the world.

We developed a short list of questions for interviews to follow up the initial responses. We wanted to filter for projects that were mission-critical for the customer. We wanted projects that demonstrated our ability to team together in handling the inevitable crises that occur in large systems projects. We wanted to be sure we could talk to and interview the programme manager, the sales account reps, the technical architects, and other team members so that we could develop the entire story.

We managed the project from our corporate base in the US, contracting with our own field resources in Asia and Europe to develop stories in those locations.

We wanted to be sure to include stories that didn't show up in the corporate wins.

And, we asked about the 'dark moments.' We learn best from cusp points or crises; the times in a project or a sales engagement where it nearly fell apart i.e. the trouble spots, the things that took more time than anticipated. One of the stories involves two of our most senior technical architects who were asked to assist in helping a client launch a new eCommerce project. At the time, the technologies were still emerging, and our sales team understood the need to bring in consultants who could help the client understand the scope and complexity of the project. For this project, we offered the architectural services at no charge in order to establish a good relationship with the customer. The client was delighted with the results of the architecture workshop and came away with a much deeper understanding of both their real requirements and the resources required to do the project properly. We did not win this project, despite having won the admiration and respect of the client.

However disappointing the outcome in this case, the learning and understandings from this project 'a very early eCommerce project with careful attention to methodology' provided a rich set of re-usable learnings for our knowledge and experience base.

The Story about the Stories

None of these learnings would have been captured as part of the win/reference cycle described above, so it is clear that systems and cycles for capturing and mining accounts of interactions with customers and clients need are critical adjuncts. Even in the corporate reference system, human dialogue is a critical component for creating useful and usable and actionable customer knowledge systems.

Patti Anklam is Technology Group Knowledge Manager at Compaq Professional Services. She can be contacted at: patti.anklam@compaq.com