October 11, 2006: Without a Cluetrain

Perhaps the greatest virtue of postmodernism is that it has taught us how to combat an overly-used slogan by inverting it. Consider the Cluetrain Manifesto. It is as easy to chant "markets are conversations" as it was for Orwell's sheep to chant, "Four legs good; two legs baaad!" This is not to devalue the insight beyond all recognition. As the Wikipedia entry points out, this really boils down to a healthy historical appreciation of the marketplace. Unfortunately, cheerleading based on slogans has little time for history; which is why the cheerleads occasionally need a healthy postmodern kick in the rear.

So, consider this, conversations are markets! The lesson of history is that conversation used to be an integral part of the delivery of goods and services. While it is all very well and good to talk about the power of the Internet to enable conversations, what has actually happened is that IT has disabled conversation from the domain of customer engagement, leaving nothing behind but the linguistic deception of "customer relationship management!" Now, in fairness to the Cluetrain founders, the verb form of "engagement" does rear its head in Thesis 45. This is an appropriate and powerful Thesis, even if many of us recognize it as an "insight into the obvious." Unfortunately, in the age of the short attention span, one can only wonder how many of the cheerleaders ever get as far as Thesis 45!

The real point however is that we have become so starved for conversation that we are willing to pay more for it. We still have old-fashioned instincts that prefer dealing with a salesperson who "knows the stuff;" and that knowledge emerges from our conversations. The same goes for dealing with a service representative who can do more than read from a script. In other words the power of the Internet to enable conversations really does not signify unless we can have the conversations we need when we need them, and there is no doubt that one can build a market around satisfying that need.

September 25, 2006 (2): Libraries without Librarians?

One of the contributors to the latest discussion about search on Confused of Calcutta was astute enough to recognize the value of librarians. What made the contribution so valuable was the recognition that librarians are not “repositories of information” (at least not primarily). A librarian is primarily a “point of contact,” based on the premise that a visit to a library is a social engagement. Take away the social engagement and you take away any opportunity to get at the motives on which a search is founded. Take away an understanding of motive; and it no longer matters whether or not you get an answer to, “Did you find what you were looking for?” (which, of course, is seldom a yes/no answer). In other words any conversation about "customer satisfaction" can never be anything other than vacuous.

Now I still remember that librarians were almost entirely absent from the first digital libraries conference I attended over ten years ago. It became quickly apparent to the few brave enough to attend that the discourse of the conference was not going to address any of their concerns. I do not think things have improved very much (if at all). As far as I can tell, the compensation librarians receive for their efforts is on a decline (at least relative to the general economy); and the techno-centric ideal is still trying to purge them from “the loop.” In this setting it hardly makes sense to ask if our academies are doing a good job of educating the librarians of the future. To paraphrase the ultimate bad-taste commencement joke (delivered at Stanford about five years ago), the only question graduates of such a program will need to answer is, “Do you want fries with that?”

Perhaps one of the reasons I continue to be skeptical about social software is that it continues to push away critical issues of person-to-person engagement in favor of solving the “technical problem du jour.” At the end of the day, there is not that much difference between an effective person-to-person engagement with a librarian and one with a car dealer; and, in both cases, technology seems to be doing a great job of impeding how these people know how to get the job done. Today’s San Francisco Chronicle ran a story about the latest study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which included a sub-headline to the effect that “we may become pets of robots.” Well, if Web 2.0 creates a world in which we can no longer deal in effective person-to-person engagements, that may be all we shall be good for!

August 23, 2006: Service Science as an Academic Discipline (according to IBM)

A former colleague was kind enough to point me at the Web page for a Symposium on "Services Sciences, Management and Engineering" hosted by the IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory on September 8, 2005. He also pointed out that, if one followed the link to the Japanese content, one could find a PDF version of the presentation given by James Spohrer from IBM Almaden Services Research. My colleague had not know that I had "vented" about my experience at Almaden in March of 2004 in the June 25 entry for this blog. Obviously, I was very curious to see if the story had improved at all since my last encounter with the IBM point of view. Having now reviewed the material, my personal opinion is that there is a lot more content but not a lot of improvement. Obviously, I want to elaborate on this!

Apparently, the first step in declaring a "Service Science" is to come up with a definition for it. This is the first one that was presented to the Symposium audience:

The application of scientific, management, and engineering disciplines to tasks that one organization beneficially performs for and with another (‘services’)

I have to say that I think that describing "services" as "tasks that one organization beneficially performs for and with another" is not a bad idea. I just wish that Spohrer had taken it more seriously. The rest of the slides had a very prescriptive tone, but there seemed to be a tacit assumption that benefit would arises as a side-effect of all the recommendations being prescribed. I think this is not just silly but dangerous. My own experience has led me to the conviction that any enterprise that is serious about being a service provider must assign top priority to looking for new opportunities to provide benefits to the customer. Once you get beyond theory into the realities of practice, this priority trumps the "coproduction of value," a buzz phrase that sounded great the first time I saw it in the Harvard Business Review but has begun to grate on my nerves the more I hear it. Value is the side-effect of understanding where the benefits are, not the other way around.

So how do you understand where the benefits are? The first step is to cultivate the art of customer engagement. However, as I have already observed, our techno-centric fixations with such "solutions" as CRM have done little more than warp our ability to master this art. Thinking in terms of science, management, or engineering seems to have done little more than reduce the customer to an object with requirements to be satisfied. This is the heart of the warped thinking that results: The customer must be engaged as a subject; and, as one understands customer-as-subject, one will understand where the opportunities for benefit are. Understanding is the operative action here (and it should be treated as an action, rather than a result of analysis). This is why my entry about service on June 17 was such a desperate attempt to invoke the lessons that Habermas had to teach about a theoretical foundation for the actions that lead to achieving understanding. Furthermore, the progression from engagement to opportunities for benefit is essential a problem of interpretation. Customer engagement provides the opportunity to "interpret the customer;" but it is also necessary to "interpret the world" that constitutes the customer's context. Now, when Spohrer's presentation finally gets around to proposing a curriculum, the unhappy truth about what is on his slide is that, while all of the subject areas have to do with decision making, none of them have to do with interpreting that "world" in which the decisions have to be made! To use the language I have appropriated from Kenneth Burke, to think of decision making as a strictly scientific problem and to ignore the role that dramatistic thinking and acting plays is dangerous. It is like the blind man who thinks that feeling an elephant's leg is enough to understand the whole elephant.

At this point I should observe that one theme that plays a very heavy role in Spohrer's slides involves the word "innovation." Perhaps this obsession gets at why a research laboratory with its roots in physics and computer science (the way in which the slides introduce IBM Research) will never understand what makes service "work." Yes, innovation is a term in the equation, so to speak; but it is an auxiliary term. A service provider arrives at innovation by focusing on how to get customer engagement and benefit discovery right; and what could be more innovative than identifying an opportunity for benefit that the competition has either ignored or overlooked?

If we do want to talk about where innovation enters the picture, a good place to begin is probably a book by Alain Dumont entitled, Innover dans les service (published, alas, only in French). This is a book of case studies, so there is not much prescription here. On the other hand Dumont at least came up with an inspiring subtitle: De l'évident à l'impensable. In this language one might say that customer engagement begins by "interpreting the evident" and arrives at opportunities for benefit by following the interpretation through to the "unthinkable" (or at least the not-previously-thought). Now, since this book was published in 2001, there probably are no case studies that would still seem "unthinkable;" and, for any of these case studies, it will not be easy to reconstruct the mind-set of what was "evident" at the beginning of the story. Nevertheless, I think Dumont is on to something.

At the end of the day, any business that decides it want to make the shift from providing products to providing services is going to have to recognize that a cultural shift is prerequisite. The real problem with the IBM slides is that they offer an alternative to making that cultural shift, but it is a false alternative. You know how bad things are when you look at that list of 28 disciplines that get "mapped" on slide 8 (pictured above). Note that Education is at the very bottom of the list, yet that is probably the oldest (or second-oldest) service profession in history! I suppose I would even be so arrogant as to proclaim that anyone who does not acknowledge education as the most important service offering in history does not have the foggiest idea of what service really is!

June 17, 2006: Someone Should Come up to Speed on Habermas 101!

Today's E-Commerce Times ran an interview that Louise Lee, of Business Week Online, held with Richard Hunter, whom Dell has appointed to fix their problems with how they are handling customer service. Hunter's background is in manufacturing; so, in the words of his interview, he views customer service as "a giant process." As a matter of fact, it is interesting to see how he elaborates on this: "The input is calls, e-mails, and questions on the chat board. There are tens of thousands of people in the center following a process. The output is satisfied customers. That's the theory." So it should not come as any surprise that none of the variants of the word "communicate" ever appear in this interview (nor, for that matter is there any allusion to the concept of "engagement")! Needless to say, I was very disconcerted by this interview and have submitted a Talkback comment. As of this writing it has not yet passed into the system, but it will probably be worth checking the link to the interview to see if it surfaces!

Addendum: The Talkback comment surfaced on June 19!

June 14, 2006: CRM and the End of Civil Society as we Know it?

Yesterday, E-Commerce Times ran a story from the Sacramento Bee by Anita Creamer about the "user-hostile" customer service she received in conjunction with an airline reservation she had made. I decided to provide a talkback comment that built on yesterday's theme of the loss of effectiveness in the name of efficiency. My bottom line was that a call center based on CRM software may be more to blame than the airline industry, since that software is really not designed to support engagement with the customer. Nevertheless, the software may be a symptom of the general decline of civil discourse in society today, not just in the workplace but also in leisure activities.