My research into customer analytics shows three important things: Text analytics are at the early adopter stage; companies still use spreadsheets as their main tool for analysis; and to move companies away from spreadsheets vendors must offer tools that are as easy to use as spreadsheets. That’s no easy task, given the huge volume and varied types of text data companies are generating and the complexity of analyzing unstructured text. However, the research also indicates that this challenge...
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Topics:
Predictive Analytics,
Social Media,
Customer Analytics,
Customer Experience,
Social CRM,
Speech Analytics,
Voice of the Customer,
Operational Performance,
Analytics,
Business Mobility,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Customer Service,
Call Center,
Contact Center,
Contact Center Analytics,
CRM,
Desktop Analytics,
Text Analytics
The Pitney Bowes Business Insight (PBBI) analyst summit and conference this week provided an opportunity to hear about the $5 billion technology provider’s strategy to become “the leader in customer communications.” This term makes sense when applied to a division of the company that brought the efficiency of the postal meter to mailrooms around the world. Of course a lot has changed for the company and for business since then. Today parent company Pitney Bowes envisions success in a future...
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Topics:
Social Media,
Customer Analytics,
Customer Communications,
Customer Interaction Technology,
Pitney Bowes,
Operational Performance,
Business Analytics,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Customer Service,
Location Intelligence,
Unified Communications
Predictive analytics can be valuable tools for performance management. When the term is applied to planning or forecasting, many people take it to mean the ability to automate plans or forecasts. It’s true that using predictive analytics correctly is likely to enhance their accuracy, but these techniques do not eliminate the need for judgment; in practice, many organizations may realize more value from applying predictive analytics to assess results than to forecast outcomes. Moreover, as...
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Topics:
Big Data,
Performance Management,
Planning,
Predictive Analytics,
Sales Performance,
Supply Chain Performance,
Budgeting,
Operational Performance,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
Customer & Contact Center,
Financial Performance,
Information Management,
Workforce Performance,
Financial Performance Management,
Integrated Business Planning
I think one of best epigrams attributed to Mark Twain is, “Everyone talks about the weather but nobody ever does something about it.” This also has relevance to the situation with corporate planning and budgeting. Bemoaning its lack of value and calling for some sort of change goes back a long way, but few companies have matured their process. In the 1970s something called “zero-based budgeting” was all the rage in business and accounting periodicals. It was energetically advocated by President...
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Topics:
Planning,
Predictive Analytics,
Sales,
Sales Performance,
Supply Chain Performance,
Office of Finance,
Budgeting,
contingency planning,
Operational Performance,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Performance,
Financial Performance,
CFO,
finance,
Financial Performance Management,
Integrated Business Planning
Informatica has announced version 9.1 for Big Data. I wrote previously about Informatica 9.1,the latest iteration of the company’s data integration platform, following its industry analyst summit. At that event in February, the company officials alluded to future plans regarding Hadoop and other big-data sources yet to be finalized. This announcement reveals those plans. Informatica will support three types of “big data”: big transaction data from relational databases and data warehouse system,...
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Topics:
Big Data,
MapReduce,
Social Media,
Supply Chain Performance,
Operational Performance,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Mobility,
Business Performance,
Customer & Contact Center,
Data Integration,
Informatica,
Strata+Hadoop
Over the past six years big technology corporations have been acquiring all sorts of software companies, accelerating a general consolidation of the software industry since the dot-com boom ended in 2001. The consolidation has been driven in part by the deceleration of technology innovation in the business software market. Technology evolution, however, has been steady and progressed far enough now that I think we’re about to witness a revolution in how companies use analytics in business...
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Topics:
Big Data,
Mobile,
Planning,
Sales Performance,
Supply Chain Performance,
Budgeting,
Operational Performance,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Intelligence,
Business Mobility,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Financial Performance,
IBM,
In-memory,
Workforce Performance,
Cognos,
acquisition
I have been writing quite a lot lately about the contact center in the cloud. Now it seems that more vendors are moving in this direction. One of them, inContact has evolved from a telecommunications carrier into a software vendor and now has a suite of products for a contact center in the cloud. It includes many of the necessary communications management capabilities (such as ACD, IVR, CTI and autodial) as well as key workforce optimization applications such as interaction recording, quality...
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Topics:
Predictive Analytics,
Social Media,
Customer Analytics,
Customer Experience,
Customer Feedback Management,
Social CRM,
Speech Analytics,
Voice of the Customer,
InContact,
Operational Performance,
Analytics,
Business Mobility,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Customer Service,
Workforce Performance,
Call Center,
Contact Center,
Contact Center Analytics,
Desktop Analytics,
Text Analytics,
Unified Communications,
Workforce Management
Gadgets be gone: That was one of my lighter tweetable sentiments from last week’s HRO Today Forum analyst summit, and you’ll see why below. At this gathering we industry analysts discussed the difference in perspectives on innovation, or the lack thereof, held by HR technology suppliers and the HR practitioners who buy and use their products, many of whom attended the HRO Today Forum.
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Topics:
Performance Management,
Human Capital Management,
business innovation,
Operational Performance,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Intelligence,
Business Mobility,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Workforce Performance,
Talent Management,
Workforce Planning,
HR technology