“The Intelligent Enterprise.” A new buzz word in town!
New? Not quite. Back in 1992 at a time when digital natives and millennials were about to be born, James Brian Quinn already envisioned the Intelligent Enterprise. He predicted a new trend and paradigm: “How knowledge and services-based systems are revolutionizing the economy, all industry structures, and the very nature of strategy and organizations.”
Using examples like Apple, Honda, Merck, and Wal-Mart, Quinn describes how these companies leverage human and capital resources much more efficiently than other companies. He predicted that these companies will increase value through technological sophistication, better knowledge bases, and more creative customer responsiveness.
Interestingly, all the companies Quinn analyzed are still market leading companies and haven’t disappeared like former industry icons like Kodak or Nokia.
CPaaS: Communications platform as a service solves connection complexity
Taking Quinn´s theory means knowledge, knowledge management, and the insights this knowledge provides is the ultimate currency and backbone of an intelligent enterprise. Capturing data is still a challenge for many companies, and capturing and analyzing data intelligently is an even higher level of sophistication which most companies are far from accomplishing.
For many organizations, leveraging the gained insights across all areas in the org is an unachievable task – at least as long as they’re operating in silos and using long spreadsheets as the source of truth.
Sharing information between sales, marketing, and service organizations is rarely happening, so organizations only get a siloed view of their customers. Ultimately this creates a poor and frustrating experience for the customer. Needless to say, this mode of operation is far from being an Intelligent Enterprise.
Consumer data and insights generated through user content , as well as the influence this content can create is nothing new. So far, this kind of content was posted in rather unstructured in blogs and communities, or published by professional influencers on social media.
It’s amazing that only now are many organizations beginning to capture and analyze consumer input in a structured way. But thanks to a lack of providing customers with their communication channel of choice, many companies are still struggling to do so.
Enterprises cannot afford to rely on one communication channel only, and must engage their customers on multiple touchpoints to collect feedback. This way they can collect a wide span of feedback leveraging the consumers preferred communication channel.
Leveraging a flexible and consumption-based cloud CPaaS (communications platform service) will solve the complexity of connecting with multiple vendors, channels, and communication solutions.
Leading cloud communication providers are providing platforms that make it easier for developers to add API-driven communications and microservices to their apps, without having to build the backend infrastructure themselves. These capabilities can cover and consolidate every channel – voice, SMS, e-mail, and social – as well as automated communication mechanisms like chatbots.
Organizations connecting to multiple channels and backends through an intelligent cloud communications platform service capture customer-relevant experience data along the process from problem recognition to post-purchase evaluation.
By combining such experience data with the operational data footprint, organizations will gain insights to help accelerate the Intelligent Enterprise.
Empowered by combining the analyzed insights and data points, organizations can turn a problem into an opportunity via CPaaS, and turn customers to fans. The groundbreaking thesis of Brian Quinn to structured and intelligent use of knowledge and insights is truer today than ever before, and it all starts with the right channel at the right time.
