The Rise of the Engaged Enterprise

A pervasive lack of focus is epidemic in today’s workplace, and this shouldn’t come as a surprise. According to the New York Times, the average American worker consumes 34 gigabytes of information and reads 100,000 words in a single day. At the same time, employees are constantly shifting their attention; computer users change windows or check email and other programs an average of 37 times an hour. Multitasking is no longer an art but a norm. 

Distraction is one of the most destructive forces facing businesses today. This lack of engaged focus rapidly erodes a company’s productivity, but it doesn’t limit itself to employees alone. Disengagement has an equally negative impact on key audiences like customers and partners as well.

The Risks of Distraction

Customers: Your customers are confronted with more competing messages, more options and more distractions than ever before. More than 30 billion apps have been installed on mobile devices, where people are spending 94 minutes a day — even more than the 75 minutes they’re spending on the web.

Employees: With additional email overload, internal instant messaging platforms, social media platforms and open work environments, employees are bombarded by distractions throughout the day. When an employee doesn’t remain focused on the job at hand, they find themselves forced to work longer hours, later into the night and on weekends to compensate. This can quickly lead to burn-out and disengagement. Accord to Gallup, 50 percent of employees today are disengaged at work, costing U.S. business US$ 300 billion per year in lost productivity.

Partners: The same distractions tugging at our customers and employees are also impacting our partners. Beyond the obstacles mentioned above, partners are struggling to keep up with the training and products of every OEM they represent. Partners are asked to take training courses, register deals and connect with customers, all while trying to keep their heads afloat. Our partners are suffering from an understandable lack of focus, and companies that become complacent about their partner networks are inviting significant risk.

The Elements of Focus

Having realized the importance of keeping audiences as focused as possible, businesses are making every attempt to achieve focus. When looking at examples where focus is regularly achieved, we find a common set of elements that include:

• A clearly defined goal
• A system of measurable progress leading to that goal
• A notion of status against achieving that goal
• A reward for reaching the goal

The focus concepts of goals, progress, status and reward aren’t novel; they’re often used concepts that appeal to the human psyche (e.g. Frequent Flyer Programs). But today’s games target more digitally sophisticated players and therefore require a more intricate and involved playing field.

Putting Games to Work

Just putting basic elements in front of individuals isn’t enough. Over the past several years, a growing number of businesses have started investing in gamification technologies to bring focus mechanics — goals, progress, status and rewards — into their digital experiences.

Gamification helps businesses engage with customers and motivate employees. By applying the same principles that inspire people to play games to websites and other online experiences, businesses can dramatically increase the size of their audiences, boost customer engagement, drive deeper employee motivation and increase revenues.

In effect, businesses are transforming themselves into “Engaged Enterprises,” a term that refers to leading-edge companies that are successfully engaging every aspect of their organizations into cohesive, collaborative, loyal and focused communities. These companies, such as IBM, Cisco, Jive and Bluewolf, are characterized by highly active, loyal and focused customers, employees and partners and they realize that through the adoption of gamification technology, they can gain a competitive advantage across every spectrum of their businesses.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Discussion Point: From Data to Decisions - Real-Time Analytics Support the Customer Experience

Every organization captures data — social media analytics, customer interactions, website traffic and other metrics, the list goes on. That the amount of data collected is growing exponentially is no surprise, that technologies are emerging every day to help us capture and analyze this data is also no surprise. But how are these analytics and data support tools changing to help better support the customer experience and what can we expect from these technologies in the next few years? That's the question we asked our esteemed panel in today's Discussion Point.

 The Question

How are analytics and decision support tools changing to meet CXM/WEM demands today & what key changes do you foresee in the next two to three years?

The Responses

Cathy McKnight — Digital Clarity Group

A founding partner and Principal Analyst with Digital Clarity Group, Cathy has a passion for working with clients to maximize their potential for success and profitability by helping them find the right-fit digital content management technology that will increase employee engagement and efficiencies. As an analyst, consultant, strategist, speaker and writer on topics related to digital content technology, employee engagement, and social media, Cathy is a strong advocate of the concepts of communities both within and around the enterprise.

Until quite recently, "analytics" in the context of WCM was almost exclusively about what was happening with the website itself: How many visitors arrived? What pages were viewed? For how long? This data was rarely available immediately nor did it need to be, since it influenced decisions and changes that would be implemented over days, weeks, or months. With the shift to CXM/WEM, analytics need to deliver insights — rapid and actionable insights — into the profiles and behavior of the visitors to the web and the performance of the content assets. So, in the first instance, it is very important for end users to understand this significant transformation in the way vendors talk about "analytics."

That said, collecting large amounts of data on behavior and performance is relatively easy. And analyzing that data, with the right tool, shouldn’t be difficult. Mining the insight and value from the data is the hard part. CXM/WEM data is now largely a real-time commodity and real-time data must be analyzed with extraordinary speed to create maximum value. The analytics and decision support tools have to become better at finding and identifying the useful nuggets almost a quickly as the data is being generated and captured, and then being able to integrate and merge that real-time data with historical and supplemental data from across the organization to provide the full value it has to offer.

Different emerging channels require different types of analysis, so analytics tools will have to adapt to accommodate, understand and integrate new channels as they evolve, appear and are adopted by the consumer. As the value of analytics ultimately lies in its ability to inform correct decisions that produce business value, feedback and verification features will become increasingly important. For example, the ability to define key performance indicators (KPIs) within the tools and base both real time content deployment decisions as well as strategic customer engagement strategies on the measurements across various channels and audience segments, will be an important functional feature. 

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com