Come. Sit. Stay: The Care and Training of Your Best Customers

"One of the problems that retail banks in particular have had is the recruitment of qualified tellers. With the rise of the ATM and projections about online banking, there was a belief that the number of necessary customer-service tellers would drop. That was wrong; there has actually been a 20% or 30% increase in the demand for tellers," said Nancy. "Consumers actually value both. They want online ease-of-use. But they also expect to have access to their bank, have it near where they live, have extended hours and be able to match their lifestyles."

And to the degree that banks (and other FSIs) can go out of their way to serve the non-traditional customer (who has a night job, or is constrained in other ways to bank during "normal" hours), those customers will have a greater appreciation and, thus, become customers with greater inertia to stay.

So "switching friction" has two sides—the carrot AND the stick.

Search is the New BI
I should stress at this point that Nancy’s company (or, better said, Nancy’s group within FAST), doesn’t usually get into customer-service conversations specifically... it’s still about the underlying technologies such as search and business intelligence that she deals with, not so much the automation of specific services. But it’s also true that the additional value derived by leveraging these underlying technologies in order to gain an edge in "customer sat" is icing on the cake.

It is within the realm of business intelligence (or better yet, where BI and search compare and contrast) that was the heart of the conversation between Nancy and me. The ability to integrate disparate systems and create reportage that uses data from various sources is, in my mind, the domain of traditional BI and ERP tools. These are large, expensive, complex and cumbersome software tools that have, frankly, a limited "audience" due to the extremely specialized nature of their application.

But Nancy talked about something else; she advocates "search" as a viable replacement for those tools in some cases... "Search is the New BI."

"One thing to keep in mind," said Nancy, "is that search is oriented around the user. BI is oriented around the data source. Search comes from the understanding of how users interact with information; the linguistics of the query and determining what the user is really trying to get," she explained.

In many ways, sophisticated search is more interested in the input than the output. It’s counterintuitive; when you think about search, you think about the results. But to a large degree, successful search (and thus successful end-game applications) relies more on translating the question than in finding the answer. I suppose if you can process the query well enough, the retrieval of the correct and appropriate result is relatively easy.

"We pass the query—whether it’s structured or unstructured—through a number of processing stages, such as removing ‘stemming,’ where you can identify ‘run’ and ‘ran’ as part of the same concept even though they are different words, or equating synonyms like ‘car’ with ‘auto.’ It’s about normalizing the concepts behind the query." Then—and only then—is the newly refined query passed along to the indexed "search" part of the engine, where it will presumably do a better job than a "non-normalized" query would.

"There as so many ways to customize search to fit a company’s particular needs. People think search is a black box that is a ‘one-size-fits-all’ for everybody. But that can’t be true! The needs of a Reuters are dramatically different than the needs of a Best Buy. How do they look at their data? How do their users ask for information? What types of content do they want to promote and feature? Consumer search is not optimized in that way... it’s the best we have for the general search purposes, but when it becomes specialized to the degree that the Best Buy intranet or whatever needs, it’s not adequate."

Ideas Cost
It’s all well and good to propose change. It’s another thing to pay for it. Every time someone has a bright idea—"Let’s integrate all our back-end repositories to provide a better understanding of our customers!" "Let’s normalize all our databases for faster access! "Hey, my dad has a barn—let’s put on a show!"—it’s probably going to involve an IT effort. Another one. And yet IT budgets are NOT growing anywhere near as fast as the information it needs to manage, and consolidation and governance issues have only added further burdens on overburdened IT resources.

"For certain types of applications—not for everything, but in certain cases—search can accomplish information retrieval with less equipment and less maintenance and support from your technical resources," Nancy insisted. "If you compare the resources necessary to design a new data warehouse versus implementing a search-based system (both having the same goal of serving up information to your customers and employees) you will find a much faster ‘time-to-market’ with fewer resource demands using search. You don’t have to worry about all the underlying data models of the structured and unstructured data. Search takes a ‘schema-less’ view of data retrieval," she said.

Search therefore democratizes business intelligence by taking it out of the hands of lofty experts and giving it to the knowledge workers who need it. "Across all industries, but especially in financial services, we’re seeing the demand from highly skilled, highly paid knowledge workers who are demanding access to more and more information, faster and faster."

Nancy used a familiar example to bring it home: "Bringing BI to the mainstream is sort of like the ‘Wii generation.’ The Wii outsells the PS3 because its market is not necessarily the hardcore gamers who have impeccable control of the complicated interface. It’s for the mass market of people who just want to pick it up and enjoy it. In the same sense, BI built on search drives user adoption. It’s BI without extensive user training. It’s long overdue; we need something like the Wii for BI!"

I haven’t played a Wii yet. I’m still in the Donkey Kong generation. But anything that brings easier access to business knowledge is OK in my book. Thanks, Nancy.