Other Organizations Get It
Think about it. Other organizations that gather intelligence take a much more expansive view of the term. Military and spy organizations gather numbers, stories and rumors - and recognize each one's strength and weaknesses. Numbers are satisfying in their succinctness: casualties are down 12 percent, for example. Stories bring a narrative element to what's going on: casualties are down due to the element of surprise and better medical care at the battle front. Rumors - which can consist of either numbers or stories - suggest possible future changes, but it's not always easy to discriminate between fact and fiction.
By mixing stories and numbers, these organizations identify what's gone wrong, how big a problem it is and identify solutions - often suggested by stories from the front. These groups get a visceral feel for what's going on and, because of that often, see problems before they get big enough to turn up in a number.
Following are two examples of what happens when businesses look at the numbers but don't read the stories.
Story #1: CompUSA
On March 8, 2007 David Pogue posted a blog entry in The New York Times entitled, "The Gutting of CompUSA," where he offered his view of why CompUSA was shuttering half of its stores: high prices and unknowledgeable salespeople. Within two days, readers had posted 258 comments, with the vast majority in agreement with Pogue. The blog comments created a storybook of bad experiences at CompUSA, in stark contrast to CompUSA's official reason for scaling back, "Based on changing conditions in the consumer retail electronics markets, the company identified the need to close and sell stores with low performance or nonstrategic, old store layouts and locations faced with market saturation."
In this case, BI would have been helpful in identifying stores in saturated markets and with low performance, but would not identify store practices that alienated customers, such as the former customer who wrote, "I stopped shopping at CompUSA when they all but frisked me going both in and out of the store."
Story #2: Dell
A second example is Dell, which has belatedly started to gather the stories. Faced with diminishing market share, Dell is in the process of remaking itself: bringing back Michael Dell as CEO and otherwise revamping the management team. One result of this "out with the old, in with the new" attitude is Dell's creation of Dell IdeaStorm (www.dellideastorm.com), a Web site where customers can post suggestions to Dell, vote for them, and Dell can respond. In CRM buzzspeak, this is "listening to the customer voice."
In some cases, the comments confirm what Dell no doubt suspected were reasons for losing market share: a potential customer points out that a comparable HP desktop is 10 percent cheaper, so he'll probably be buying a computer from HP. However, in other cases, the comments decry Dell practices that the company had been expanding, such as including extra software on the system that the user didn't order (e.g., Google toolbar). Some customers were apoplectic at having to spend hours deinstalling unwanted software that came with the system. In reply, Dell said they are letting customers of high-end systems "opt out of almost all preinstalled software" and are making it easier for customers to automatically deinstall software.
What's Needed
By talking to employees and customers in the field, companies - and I'm sure both CompUSA and Dell - get an inkling of what's going on in a general sense. It isn't as if executives are wearing ear plugs. However, it's difficult to act on such information when it seems to be rumor - heard on one or two trips to the field but lacking the certainty of the hard numbers that turn up daily on the corporate dashboard.
Therefore, the issue is not so much that stories are unavailable, but rather that they arrive via different channels or different people see them. For example, customer support logs are a treasure trove of information on why customers are disgruntled - but C-level managers rarely read through them.
Therefore, the BI duty is to ensure that the stories are seen at the highest levels in the company, even if they are less succinct than numbers. The way to do that is to argue for "drill sideways" capabilities in portals and BI tools. If customer satisfaction numbers have dipped, is it possible to put a hyperlink next to that metric that points to a set of customer comments or a customer wiki? Another option is to perform sentiment analysis on customer emails, a form of text analysis that measures gradations of customer satisfaction based on the vocabulary used. Put another way, BI gains a metric by distilling stories.
By giving stories a place alongside numbers, BI professionals will help corporate managers see the customer happiness and anger that often drive the numbers: and help them understand that the best BI is visceral BI.
Guy Creese is an analyst with the Burton Group, covering content management and search. Creese has worked in the high tech industry for 25 years, at both Fortune 500 companies and small startups, in positions ranging from programmer to product manager to customer support engineer. He can be reached at gcreese@burtongroup.com.
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