As little as a few years ago I heard executives tout the great numbers being presented after data mining. The result of the mining was the end. However, now, managers are looking to the analytical result as the beginning. Business users use the analytics to answer two critical questions. They want to know how they turn the information into action and what effect each action will have. It is not enough to simply know the results of the analytical process. Data mining used to discover an interesting group of customers. Now we need to move to action and measurement by saying, “Here are a group of people that should be presented with product X when they call inquiring about product Y. By following this course of action we project a 20% lift in call center revenues over the next 3 months.”

Information technology is critical to the success of customer contact. However, according to The Standish Group “only 29 percent of IT projects conducted in 2004 were completed successfully.” Add to that a warning from Phillips (2007) in his article “ABC: An Introduction to IT Project Management" (Retrieved June 16, 2008, from http://www.cio.com/article/print/40342):

“Managing an IT project is like juggling chunks of Jell-O: It's neither easy nor pretty. Information technology is especially slippery because it's always moving, changing, adapting and challenging business as we know it.”

Defining the Digital Firm
Laudon and Laudon (2007, p. 7) define the digital firm as:

"A digital firm is one in which nearly all of the organization’s significant business relationships with customers, suppliers, and employees are digitally enabled and mediated. Core business processes are accomplished through digital networks spanning the entire organization or linking multiple organizations.

Digital firms sense and respond to their environment far more rapidly than traditional firms, giving them more flexibility to survive in turbulent times."

Why Pursue Digital Status?
Webber (2007) describes six customer-focused reasons why firms pursue a digital strategy. Because most customer contact organizations have not achieved digital status, companies can use these characteristics to evaluate how this strategy can benefit them. Once a company is on the path to becoming a digital firm it can use these benchmarks to assess how far they’ve come.

Customer Contact and Knowledge Management
The customer contact organization is highly dependent on knowledge. And yet much of the knowledge walks out of the call center on a regular basis because the employee turnover in a call center can range from 20 to 100 percent annually.

This industry has been struggling with how to implement viable knowledge management (KM) solutions for years. In the early years we designated teams of people as “experts” who would handle the customer inquiries that were too complex for the first line agent. We asked people to memorize vast amounts of data so they could have any answer at a moment’s notice. We then tried to embed static FAQs and Help into the agent technology but the answers were too rigid for the ever increasing complexity of customer requests. An agent trying to find an answer took too long for a customer to wait. Knowledge management systems were built that were a little more intuitive but companies failed to assign knowledge managers and so agents found incorrect answers more often than right answers. The answer had changed (and was not updated) since its last use. Agents stopped using the systems and went back to depending on their own memorization schemes.

So how do we implement a successful knowledge management solution in the contact center today?

I was reading "The Global State of Information Security 2005" (retrieved from www.cio.com/article on June 1, 2008) when I came across the following quote:

"When you spend all that time fighting fires, you don't even have time to come up with the new ways to build things so they don't burn down. Right now, there's hardly a fire code."

It struck me how similar this is to what we go through in contact center management.