Why Context Matters - Forget Real-Time, Achieve Right-Time

The Real-Time Hype Is Filled With Flaws

The hype around big data, social media, and mobility has many folks imagining the real-time enterprise in the future of work, next generation customer experiences, matrix commerce, or the data to decisions journey. While real-time theoretically leads to quicker information and faster response times, the reality requires closer examination for three reasons:

The Real-Time Hype Is Filled With Flaws

Customers and employees only want engagement aligned with self interest. Relevancy of information is required for customers and employees to respond. Real-time interactions quickly evolve into noise. Signal to noise ratios must be improved as garbage in will lead to massive garbage out. In some cases, customers don’t want engagement. They just want the experience.
No human can truly handle the volume and flow of real-time interactions. The proliferation of channels and data sources creates a data deluge. Filtering is required in order to handle real-time. Workers already inundated with email, sms, and chats, really just want to get work done, they don’t want to be bogged down with more interactions.
Real time is not fast enough. Real-time is reactive not proactive. Anticipation and prediction emerge as key requirements. Reaction does not lead to a better customer experience or employee interaction. Some customers want options to make the right decision. The same customers may expect a system to remember a preference based on many factors including repetitive behavior.

Delivering Context Is The Secret To Right Time Success

Context provides the key ingredient in improving outcomes. Why? Context provides the relevancy required for not only anticipation, but also prediction. For example, offering a premium channel upsell to an upset cable customer when their cable is down, may not be the wisest idea. Unfortunately, this happens too often. The customer is already upset that the issues have not been resolved and yet the company is still trying to sell instead of resolve an issue. However, offering a free appetizer triggered by a location based service during the morning commute, may lead to higher sales as this is a right time anticipation of a dinner time offer.

The Bottom Line: Start With Seven Dimensions of Context Drivers.

Consequently, the key to right-time is context. By delivering information in context, organizations can address business problems in the future of work, next generation customer experience, matrix commerce, and data to decisions. Constellation identifies seven key triggers for context in a right-time world (see Figure 1):

Relationships. An individual may serve as an employee, a parent, part of a community group, or other designation. Understanding the relationships help brands and organizations understand a broader set of experiences that answer the question “Who and What”.
Time. Time provides temporal information. Time provides related services that answer the question”When”.
Location. Placement by geo-spatial coordinates helps with narrowing geographic relevancy. Location answers the question of “Where”
Business process. Process helps determine flow and work order. Process answers the question of “How”
Role. While related to relationships, the role is different because it addresses eligibility. Individuals can play different roles among a wide variety of relationships.
Sentiment. Sentiment seeks to understand how an individual feels about an issue. Sentiment answers one dimension of the question of “Why”.
Intent. Intent anticipates future behavior. Intent answers the second dimension of the question Why”

In the design of an engagement strategy, success will require organizations to factor the seven dimensions of context drivers.

Figure 1. Seven Drivers for Context In a Right Time World

Your POV.

Are you ready for right time? Do you have an example of how context improves your efforts at matrix commerce, future of work next generation customer experience, and data to decisions? What’s next for your engagement strategy? Have a story on how you’ve achieved engagement? Add your comments to the blog or send us a comment at R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) org or R (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com Please let us know if you need help with your business strategy efforts. Here’s how we can assist:

Assessing social business/social CRM readiness
Developing your social business/ social CRM strategy
Designing a data to decisions strategy
Create a new vision of the future of work
Deliver a new customer experience strategy
Crafting a new matrix commerce strategy

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