Barriers and Benefits: Gaining Actionable Insight to Increase Innovation

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1 Barriers and Benefits: Gaining Actionable Insight to Increase Innovation A Research-based Executive Brief 66% of executives say their organizations are struggling to bring together customer, product and project data from all sources and share it. Insight Drives Business Performance

2 Table of Contents Introduction...3 Actionable Insight: Who Has It, How Can You Get It, and Use It?...4 Executives Report Significant Information Barriers...5 Information from Social Channels Adds Complexity, Yet Executives Perceive Benefits When Combined with Enterprise Content...6 Lack of Collaboration and Information Silos Create Significant Barriers to Innovation...7 Conclusion: A New Model for Information Integration - The Intelligent Unified Index...8 Coveo Customer Use Cases...9 Additional Resources...10 Copyright 2012 Coveo Barriers and Benefits: Gaining Actionable Insight to Increase Innovation 2

3 Introduction Companies are struggling to deal with unprecedented levels of data fragmentation brought on by a confluence of factors: the growth of data and its diversity combined with the movement of systems to the cloud, the continued proliferation of point systems behind the firewall, and the increasing adoption of social media. As businesses rightly attempt to leverage their greatest asset knowledge this information fragmentation creates significant barriers: to knowledge sharing, to collaboration, to the speed of business. There were 1.8 trillion gigabytes of data in the world in 2011, according to IDC; 85 percent of it is unstructured, and it is growing two-fold each year. CRM, ERP, KBs, collaboration platforms, customer and employee communities all hold great promise. In fact, most deliver good value but they all fall short of their ultimate goal, which is enabling the broad-based, knowledge-rich collaboration that is required for innovation. These systems create only more silos of information and knowledge. This report outlines the results of a series of surveys of 230 senior executives conducted from Q through Q1 2012, and then presents a path to widespread knowledge access and sharing you can take by breaking down information and departmental silos through a transformational technology. A staggering number of CEOs described their organizations as data rich, but insight poor. Many voiced frustration at not being able to transform available data into feasible action plans, let alone to detect emerging opportunities. Copyright 2012 Coveo Barriers and Benefits: Gaining Actionable Insight to Increase Innovation 3

4 Actionable Insight: Who Has It, How Can You Get It, And Use It? Data is just data. Basically it s ones and zeros. On its own, data is not much use unless it s combined with other data. Even then, you need human interaction with the data to create knowledge. It is this ability to connect with information and people that drives innovation in companies. As with information, expertise and the ability to tap into it can be the differentiator between a highly innovative, highly profitably organization and one that is just surviving, and perhaps, facing the commoditization of its products. Consider product engineering in many organizations. Large, geographically dispersed groups of engineers or product developers all have tremendous amounts of knowledge and experience. And yet, most engineers know only the experience and expertise of the people geographically close to them, or those with whom they frequently interact. There may be hundreds or thousands more, who have highly valuable experience, and who may have worked on similar projects, and yet whose expertise expensive to hire and retain is hidden. You might look to collaboration platforms, HR systems, etc. as a place to start finding this information, but these systems, contain static information about employee skills, accurate on the day they were completed. Best case, these are updated once a year when annual reviews are conducted. Unfortunately, this leaves most companies without a means to meet their own day-to-day needs of finding and connecting internal experts. The ability to access and understand who knows what is the precursor to becoming more innovative through actionable insight. In May and June, 2012, Coveo conducted a social media poll to uncover the insight challenges faced by product engineering teams. Copyright 2012 Coveo Barriers and Benefits: Gaining Actionable Insight to Increase Innovation 4

5 Executives Report Significant Information Access Barriers There were 1.8 trillion gigabytes of data in the world in 2011, according to IDC; 85 percent of it is unstructured and growing more than two-fold each year. As unstructured data growth accelerates, so too do its diversity and complexity. It s siloed by systems, geographies, departments and more. Survey results underscore the difficulty organizations face trying to understand this diverse, complex and siloed information, as well as the struggle to share it across the business for actionable insights that will enable them to build products customers want as well as better serve them, and influence their buying decisions across all channels. An overwhelming majority of executives believe their organizations success managing unstructured content and sharing it across their staffs will, in the future, impact their ability to serve customers and yet few feel they re handling the job well. ``84 percent of executives said their companies management of unstructured content will determine how effectively and efficiently they ll be able to serve customers. Unstructured data cannot be logically stored in a database, and an increasing percentage of it is coming from communities and social networks outside the enterprise. ``42 percent of respondents estimate that their companies have visibility into less than a quarter of information across all interaction channels, including social streams. Copyright 2012 Coveo Barriers and Benefits: Gaining Actionable Insight to Increase Innovation 5

6 Information from Social Channels Adds Complexity, Yet Executives Perceive Benefits When Combined with Enterprise Content Social channels continue to grow in popularity as an important customer interaction and information channel. The Coveo research findings underscore the new level of complexity that social channels add to the growing amounts of information. Few organizations to date have combined social content with enterprise information to gain more insight into their customers, although initiatives to do so are increasing. ``65 percent of executives noted that they do not (54 percent) combine social data with enterprise content or are not sure (11 percent) of whether their organizations combine this data in customer service and support operations. ``However, more than 59 percent of executives said they either currently have an initiative underway to combine social media data with enterprise data and customer interactions across all channels or are planning one in It s clear that the majority of executives see the value in combining social media data with enterprise data as well as customer interactions across all channels. However, social media strategies to date have relied mainly on listening platforms purely monitoring what customers are saying about the brand, products, services and customer service. When asked to identify the biggest barrier they face in turning their organizations social strategy from listening and monitoring to taking action: ``44 percent listed the lack of internal resources and 41 percent cited a lack of technology to easily marry social and enterprise data, while making sense of it. ``Fourteen percent cited lack of support from executives about the validity of social data. Copyright 2012 Coveo Barriers and Benefits: Gaining Actionable Insight to Increase Innovation 6

7 Lack of Collaboration and Information Silos Create Significant Barriers to Innovation Sixty-six percent of executives say their organizations either can t bring together customer, product and project data from all sources and share it or are trying to do so but are facing challenges. Only 7 percent of respondents felt their organizations do very well at bringing together useful customer, product and project data from all sources and sharing it among product development, marketing and customer service staffs in order to increase innovation. Not only do organizations face challenges in bringing together information from all sources, but they also fall short in sharing critical customer information across teams, which is a high barrier to increasing innovation in product development, customer service and sales. ``87 percent of executives consider it very important to share near realtime integrated data if they had it between product management, customer service and sales in their organizations. ``69 percent of respondents listed lack of collaboration among sales/ marketing, customer service and engineering departments and internal information silos as the biggest impediments. In the next and final section, we will look at the reasons why collaboration platforms, CRM projects and traditional integrations have not solved the challenges of consolidating, correlating, understanding, and sharing customer, product, project and expertise data across silos, as well as a transformational and yet non-disruptive approach to doing so. Copyright 2012 Coveo Barriers and Benefits: Gaining Actionable Insight to Increase Innovation 7

8 Conclusion: A New Model for Customer Information Integration - The Advanced Unified Index Collaboration platforms, the perfect CRM, and IT integration projects, while important, are never enough. Many organizations have invested hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars in implementations of collaboration systems and CRMs, integrating systems and social channels, moving data into Near real-time data mashups warehouses and more, only to find that information and systems continue to proliferate. Data simply are presented in intuitive, Insight cannot be contained. The promise of collaboration platforms has fallen short of breaking down Consoles configured for specific departmental silos to better share information among distributed teams, primarily because they have roles, such as customer service created yet another silo of information. Data warehousing and Master Data Management programs, agents, sales and marketing, while in many cases important and productive, provide only an historical view of information. IT web self-service, engineers and cannot keep up with the overwhelming need to integrate the number of platforms required to gain product managers, and more. 360-degree views of products, projects, customers, and expertise. The Intelligent, Unified Index approach, which can be thought of as virtual information integration, transforms organizations ability to leverage knowledge and increase innovation and collaboration across the board. This technology allows organizations to consolidate, enrich and make sense of data from any system, without moving the data from that system, in near real time. This means, regardless of where it is located, data can become available to the entire organization, facilitating sales, marketing, customer service, and engineering all in near real-time. Coveo provides a stable of deep connectors that connect to and index, or pull information from virtually any system into the intelligent, Unified Index, where the data is enriched through text analytics, pattern matching and other actions. Near real-time data mashups are then presented in intuitive, Insight Consoles configured for specific roles, such as customer service agents, sales and marketing, web self-service, engineers and product managers, IT operations, and more. This approach eliminates silos,, and enables employees as well as customers and partners, to share information across systems and geographies, in ways that respect the underlying security and yet facilitate the users personal objectives whether that is learning more about your offerings, helping a customer solve a challenge, or bringing a new product to market quickly. Coveo is one of a breed of companies I am coming across that is ushering in a new, faster-paced, more fluid, information-based form of competition. Kaihan Krippendorf Copyright 2012 Coveo Barriers and Benefits: Gaining Actionable Insight to Increase Innovation 8

9 Coveo Customer Use Cases First-hand accounts of how customers are gaining actionable insight with Coveo. We needed a way to break down information silos and better consolidate, correlate and share critical customer information across our Technical Support team, as well as across R&D, engineering and sales and marketing essentially all CA Technologies employees. We also needed an easy to use, online customer self-service solution that would quickly connect customers with relevant information to resolve their technical questions. Coveo s unified view of customer information is extremely powerful and helps us make more informed decisions and ultimately provide a better customer experience. We ve increased customer self-service satisfaction by 10 percent. Leo Annab, Business Technology Officer We re able to pull information out that we d never dreamed of getting from any other platform. We want to be the best support organization in the world, and I think Coveo is really changing the way that we re working. Rob Silva, Customer Support Manager We ve added dashboards and deployed those on executive desktops, including our CEO. With Coveo, hot customers become very visible quickly to all executives. Trish Cotter, President Adoption is 100%. Within 30 days of implementation, we reduced the time needed to identify known problems by 67% and reduced the number of duplicate bugs submitted to Engineering by 50%. Jim Coleman, Principal Support Analyst an IBM Company Layered on top of iching and other information repositories, Coveo ensures employees have a user-friendly tool to glean insights from unstructured and structured data. In essence, the search technology effectively stitches together multiple information sources without the need for expensive data integration. Dickie Oliver, VP, Global IT as published in Computerworld The firm is able to save nearly 40,000 hours per year the equivalent of having 15 fully productive full-time employees (FTEs), due to increased productivity with Coveo. Trent Parkhill, VP of IT Coveo improves our business processes by helping us make sense of the vast amount of structured and unstructured data across disparate sources in our organization. Serge Briere, IT Coordinator In the past, new CSRs would go to training and shadow another technician for anywhere between 2-4 months. Now, they go to training and can immediately go back to their desk and start working on cases and issues for customers. Jose Irizarry, Director, Global Technical Support Copyright 2012 Coveo Barriers and Benefits: Gaining Actionable Insight to Increase Innovation 9

10 Additional Resources Coveo Insights Blog Case Study: From Knowledge to Insight to Innovation, A Science & Engineering Success Story Forbes Article Corporate America s Deficit Problem: Lack of Insight Fast Company Article Staying Competitive in a Customer-Centric World Customer Video CA Technologies: Bringing Together 70+ Systems to Improve Service Subscribe to receive the latest research from Coveo About Coveo Coveo transforms companies ability to gain insight from diverse and overwhelming amounts of unstructured and structured data, whether it exists behind the firewall or in social media. Coveo s unified indexing technology connects broadly with all systems to create a virtual integration layer, from which role-based Insight Consoles present consolidated, correlated information mashups. Greater insight enables more effective and efficient customer service, more relevant customer experiences, increased sales and shorter sales cycles, faster innovation for better product development and ultimately, increased profitability. Coveo customers range from Fortune 100 companies such as Lockheed Martin, PepsiCo and Verizon, to Global 2000 companies such as GEICO, CA Technologies and T-Mobile, to mid-sized businesses such as Terumo Medical, IBM Netezza and Children s Hospital of Boston. Contact Us (US/Canada) (outside US/Canada) info@coveo.com Copyright 2012 Coveo Barriers and Benefits: Gaining Actionable Insight to Increase Innovation 10