Spring 2007 SSPA Recognized Innovators
Analytics/Business Intelligence, Web 2.0, Offer Management
Author: John Ragsdale, Vice President of Research, SSPA

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FIVE SSPA PARTNERS RECOGNIZED FOR INNOVATION

Optimizing Support to Deliver Exceptional Customer Value is definitely a challenging goal for today’s support organizations, with customer expectations, complexity and interaction volumes all rising. Over the last decade, companies have invested in technology such as knowledgebases, diagnostic tools and remote support, which have revolutionized support processes and made vast improvements in agent productivity.  But with adoption of these cost saving modules already high, what technology will create the next round of margin improvements?
SSPA Research is looking to innovation as a solution, and the SSPA Recognized Innovator program identifies key technology from SSPA partners that will help you reach your goal of Value-Added Support.  For the Spring 2007 awards, the categories were:

• Analytics/Business Intelligence.  A common refrain emerged from a recent Customer Service Executive Summit:  more business intelligence is needed.  Companies are collecting massive stores of customer history and interaction data, but what is missing is strong, business user targeted analysis tools to identify strategic business intelligence from the data.  This award recognizes partners whose reporting modules including complex analytics to derive “order from chaos,” and identify key business learnings based on customer information, problem resolution statistics, or other ancillary data.
• Web 2.0.  Today’s always on, always connected internet offers a number of opportunities and challenges to customer service organizations.  This award recognizes partners whose solutions leverage the best of Web 2.0 features (communities, forums, Wikis) and/or Web 2.0 infrastructure (VOIP, proactive monitoring, extreme personalization) to meet the ever increasing demands of customers.
• Offer Management.  Leveraging service interactions to increase revenue is a key part of Value Added Support.  This award recognizes partners who enables upsell and cross-sell in a variety of customer situations (B2B and B2C) and channels (assisted and unassisted), helping support organizations increase customer wallet share and contribute to the company’s revenue goals.

SSPA Research identified a panel of judges for the Spring 2007 Recognized Innovator Awards, including industry experts and technology savvy SSPA members. Judges rated the applications using three criteria:

• Is it innovative?  SSPA Research defines ‘innovation’ as “the successful exploitation of new ideas,” and judges rated the application on how well the solution embodies this spirit.
• Is it unique?  With technology evolving within our industry at a rapid rate, every new invention has copycats very quickly, and judges rated the application on how unique and differentiating the innovation is.
• Is the innovation exemplary of the category?  Judges rated each application on how well the innovation adheres to the category description provided.

One winner and one finalist were selected for each category.

Recognized Innovators for Analytics/Business Intelligence
For more information on analytics, refer to the following SSPA Research titles:  Market Overview: Reporting and Analytics, Analytics' Role in Value-Added Support, Deriving BI from Recorded Interactions and Highly Personalized Self-Service Microsites .  There was a tie in this category; the winners are:

• InQuira. InQuira’s analytics has the ability to interact with enterprise data through an easy-to-use web interface that supports drilling in and around data, and sorting and filtering data.  The system measures the results of end-user sessions, providing the number of sessions and click-through rates on answers or responses for a specified time period.  Filter criteria such as customer segment, intent, and product or concept or activity, allow users to track and analyze sessions of specific interest.  This enables a closed-loop process of further content creation and design to address user concerns and increase conversion rates.
  
  Further reports providing detailed views of user demographics and behavior are also used to tune the escalation engine so that the right customers are provided the human help they need, when they need it.  Using content management, search, and analytics capabilities, the InQuira Intelligent Forms product drives the best possible user experience for online forms, resulting in high conversion rates and satisfied customers.

• KNOVA. The KNOVA 7 application suite is backed by analytics designed to optimize the customer support process and empower customers to find answers and information they require through self-service. KNOVA includes out of the box reports for content gaps, search traffic and terms, microsite usage and top issues.
  
  With content gap scoring analysis, a company can proactively identify and fill gaps within the knowledge base by either authoring new documents or giving existing answers a “Best Bets” status, making it the first document a customer sees. The search traffic and terms report indicates what the most popular queries are. An administrator can present this information on the main page of a microsite or forum environment making the solution easy to locate. The Top Issues report can be used to learn what your customer wants to help prioritize features and bug fixes for future releases.

• Lithium. A leader in Web 2.0 technology, Lithium is the winner in this category. With the Spring 2007 release of Lithium InterActive, software for enterprise customer support communities "grows out" and "grows up." Incorporation of new Web 2.0 features such as tagging and a REST API bring to the enterprise many of the most compelling features of today's consumer web.
  
  With tagging, users can navigate related content using tag clouds located at all levels, from the community home page to the individual message.  The REST API empowers customers or end-users to create dynamic mash-ups—likely the hottest feature in Web 2.0 today.  Lithium InterActive also includes other advanced capabilities that allow deeper integration with traditional support processes and technologies - a key characteristic of support communities that have matured into an established element of an overall customer support solution.

• eVergance. The finalist in this category, eVergance has been at the leading edge of Web 2.0 with its strategy and planning consulting services for integrated Web 2.0 models with knowledge management tools and processes to create effective, innovative KM 2.0 solutions.  The firm offers proven guidance for linking traditional support channels with peer support models, online communication, and next-generation publishing and content delivery models.
  
  In addition, eVergance Labs has developed a new solution framework for taking advantage of both Web 2.0 and Open Source Software (OSS) components.  The framework blends the best of enterprise KM and Web 2.0 within a SOA foundation, including a wiki-style content manager, universal communication manager to enable all users to participate regardless of the service channel, and interactive RSS server – all using widely-available OSS components. 

Recognized Innovators for Offer Management
For more information on this topic, refer to the following SSPA Research:  Best Practices to Increase Offer Accept Rates, Adding Upsell/Cross-Sell to Web Self-Service, and Adding Upsell/Cross-Sell to Web Self-Service.  The Recognized Innovators in this category are:

• Talisma. The winner in this category is Talisma, whose Talisma Campaign module enables multi-channel proactive service and campaign creation, management, and tracking.  While Talisma Campaign delivers many best-in-class capabilities, the recognized innovation lies in the Real-Time Offer Engine, which turns a Web site into a proactive marketplace and empowers inbound call and technical support centers to introduce upsell/cross-sell highly effectively.
  
  Businesses can establish a positive rapport with customer by delivering the most relevant messages at the point of interaction, positively influencing satisfaction and loyalty.  Whether on a Web site or interacting with contact center agents, Talisma Campaign’s real time decision making pushes relevant and timely promotions or service alerts to customers, improving service levels and creating additional revenue.

• KNOVA. The finalist in this category, KNOVA 7 leverages service interactions to increase revenue through up-sell and cross-sell with brand identity and communication, effective merchandising, and guided selling. KNOVA 7 introduces the idea of personalized Web experiences, also known as Microsites, for each audience and brand by matching user identities and preferences, also allowing you to proactively make recommendations by pushing relevant information to your customers, as well as relevant products and services that can solve their current issues.
  
  To aid in merchandising, a company can utilize the analytics to promote the products and services that will most optimally solve the issue a customer is querying. These analytics can also prompt customer support agents to recommend certain products and services, based on what issues the customer or prospect is asking about. KNOVA’s Guided Selling asks customers a series of questions that identify the features and other information that are the most important to them. It then recommends the product or products that best matches those criteria.

The SSPA Recommends
The best support operations are constantly evolving, and that includes trying new and innovative service and support technology.  Judging from the results of the SSPA 2006 Technology Survey, in which the average satisfaction rating across all areas of technology was a 2.97 (using a scale of 1 = Not Satisfied, 3 = Satisfied, and 5 = Very Satisfied), members are, on average, less than satisfied with existing solutions.¹ Making a switch to a more robust solution that better meets both today’s and tomorrow’s business problems seems a logical path.

When shopping for innovative technology, weigh your appetite for risk.  Some of the most innovative solutions may be from small vendors with questionable long term viability, or are new products with few production implementations.  Partnering with a vendor to try a new solution had advantages:  lower cost software, influence on the final released version, and usually dedicated support from the vendor.  But you will likely encounter unexpected problems and face some downtime, so limit the implementation to a small number of users as part of a pilot before committing to rolling out further.

¹ SSPA Research’s 2006 technology survey received responses from 126 companies.  880 individual product ratings across 21 categories were tabulated, and results show that with an overall satisfaction rating of 3.03, on a 5 point scale, companies are satisfied with their service and support technology, but not highly satisfied.  For more information, see the September 6, 2006 SSPA Accelerator, “Satisfied, But Not Dazzled by Technology.”

If you have any questions about this article, please contact Shawn Santos at ssantos@thesspa.com or 858.674.5491.