BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE ALERT MESSAGING: PREVENTING THE "IF ONLY I HAD KNOWN" SYNDROME
By Don Farber
If you are considering whether your organization could use a business
intelligence alert messaging solution, ask the following question: "How many
times a day/week/month does someone in your organization start a sentence
with the words: "If only I had known ..."
If your answer is anything except "never", you can probably see the reason
why BI alert messaging was created. Simply put, it is to address the "pain" of
not knowing, or of knowing too late. By providing a way for organizations to
share knowledge across the corporation, and to respond to that knowledge in a
timely manner, BI alert messaging software enables organizations to
prevent (and react to) crucial corporate events.
Prevention and reaction are two traits that are essential to every
successful organization. Prevention allows an organization to avoid problems,
challenges, and potential disasters. Prevention means not having to expend the
time, resources, and money that are required to address a problem that has
already occurred, resulting in more time, more resources, and more money that
can be spent on positive, pro-active endeavors.
Reaction is secondary to prevention; sometimes an event cannot be prevented
and thus the best an organization can do is to react to it. In this regard,
timeliness is key. An event that is reacted to in five minutes may be nothing
more than an annoyance; the same event that is reacted to in five hours may be
a difficulty, and the passage of five days may prove catastrophic. Wherever
prevention is not possible, a timely reaction is critical.
It is usually not too difficult for an organization to identify those times
when their inability to be informed about some event (or their inability to be
informed soon enough) results in a loss of time, resources, or money. Here are
some examples of situations that many organizations would like to prevent:
- An order is shipped to a customer who is over their credit limit.
- A sales rep places a "cold" call into a big customer who has called into the service department 3 times that day.
- A sales rep references an account to whom the finance dept has just sent a dunning letter.
- A sales rep promises a client a piece of product literature that is out of stock.
- The customer service staff spends hours with a client who hasn't paid their maintenance fee.
- The sales manager arrives at the office Monday morning and has to wait 4 hours for the current month's revenue forecast.
- A large capital expenditure is made without realizing that there is a significant decrease in this month's revenues to date versus last month at this time.
- A service technician is about to travel to a customer's location and doesn't know that the delivery of a critical part has been delayed.
If scenarios like these cause your organization pain today, you should try
to identify why these events occur, why your current technologies and
applications are unable to prevent them, and how much time, resources, and
money these events are costing you.
In order to determine why critical events are so common among organizations
today, and how a BI alert messaging technology can enable an organization to
avoid those events, one needs to first identify where an organization's
current software infrastructure falls short.
By reviewing the preceding list of common "painful" events, it is clear that
the common thread that runs through them all is an inability for certain
people to be alerted about certain information in a timely fashion. This being
the case, it is possible to identify some of the root causes of such
events and the corresponding capability of a BI alert messaging solution.
An Inability to be Alerted About "Triggered Events"
The vast majority of software applications are not designed to detect
certain data conditions and then to automatically send alerts to the
corresponding people. This capability is most often found in some customer
service/help desk applications, and in the more costly and more complex sales
applications. Without the support of triggered events, an organization
puts itself in a purely reactive posture.
BI alert messaging combines the information retrieval capabilities of data
mining with such alert capabilities as e-mail, fax, page, and webcast.
An Inability to Define Site-Specific "Triggered Events"
Of the relatively small subset of software applications that do support
triggered events, many of them restrict an organization to a pre-determined
set of alert scenarios. Thus, a specific solution may automatically send
alerts when scenarios "a", "b", and "c" occur, but not when events "d" through
"z" occur. Depending on how important events "d" through "z" are to
an organization, this can be a major issue.
BI alert messaging enables organizations to specify triggers and alert
messages based on any conditions in application data.
An Inability to Send Alerts Via the Right Methods
It may sound simple, but not everyone wants to be communicated with in the
same manner. Some people live and die by e-mail; others rely on their pagers;
still others count on their fax machines, and more and more people are turning
to the Web. To compound matters, many people want to be notified via different
methods based on the timing (and severity) of the event that's occurring.
Information that is sent via an unused medium is as useless as no information sent at all.
BI alert messaging typically supports notifications via e-mail, fax, page,
PDA, and webcast.
An Inability to Send Alerts to the Right People
Until recently, the communication boundaries of a business reached only as
far as the walls of the organization itself. That's no longer true. With the
rise of e-commerce and the Internet, the ability to communicate with business
partners, members of the supply chain, and one's own customers has become
essential. Unfortunately, many applications have not caught up with this
trend. And if successful communications are measured in terms of "keeping
everyone in the loop," a single break in that loop can prove
disastrous to the whole process.
BI alert messaging can send alerts to employees, customers, prospects,
business partners, et cetera.
An Inability to Send Alerts Soon Enough
How quick is quick enough? To prevent certain pains, an organization might
require notifications the very minute that an event occurs; for other pains,
an alert that is sent within 10, 30, or 60 minutes might be soon enough to
avert a critical situation. The Gartner Group talks about timeliness in terms
of "zero-latency;" the bottom line is even simpler than that: an
application must deliver information when it is needed.
BI alert messaging enables organizations to specify how quickly they need to
be informed about each critical event.
An Inability to Detect Cross-Application Events
More and more organizations are realizing the value of integrating
applications, sharing departmental data, and creating a richer pool of
knowledge for each employee. And yet, virtually all alert technology continues
to reside on the application level. Events that are defined by conditions that
exist across multiple applications are ignored simply because the technology
to address them has not existed. But if the benefit of cross-application
knowledge is to be believed, can the benefit of cross-application alerts be any less important?
BI alert messaging can be integrated with any front or back office
applications and supports alerts based on the convergence of data across
multiple dissimilar applications.
So far, this document has addressed the topics of not knowing and of knowing
too late in terms of the pain that they can inflict on an organization. There
is no doubt that when an organization is looking to invest in a software
application, they should consider how such an application can
reduce (or eliminate) the pains they are experiencing.
But an alert technology should not be viewed strictly as a medication to
alleviate an illness; if used wisely, it can create as many new, positive,
and profitable opportunities as it has relieved pains.
This is especially true when applied to an organization's sales processes.
By using an alert technology to look for specific conditions in any one (or
assortment) of application databases, an organization's sales staff can better
identify the best times to call, incremental sales opportunities, accounts
willing to be references, and so on. This goal of "one-to-one marketing" has
become the rallying cry of the most successful CRM ("customer relationship
management") initiatives. By combining traditional data mining technologies
that provide the tools to identify incremental marketing opportunities, along
with the real-time alert capabilities of today's predominant notification
mechanisms (i.e., e-mail, fax, page, PDA, and the web), BI alert messaging
enables organizations to sit back and consider "What would be the benefit to
sales and customer relationships if we were alerted about ..."
And so, the bottom-line benefit of BI alert messaging goes far beyond merely
alerting organizations to potential problems and challenges; it empowers
organizations with the unique, time-critical ability to pro-actively identify
opportunities that would otherwise pass unnoticed or noticed too late.
About KnowledgeSync
KnowledgeSync, created by Vineyardsoft Corporation, is the industry's first
application-independent BI alert messaging technology that sends alerts about
time-critical corporate data events via e-mail, fax, page, print and web push
technologies.
With KnowledgeSync, everyone connected with an organization: sales
representatives, service agents, business partners, and CEOs- are proactively
alerted about the crucial data events that impact their decisions, their
productivity, and their profitability.
For more information visit www.vineyardsoft.com.
Author Bio: Don Farber has over 15 years experience in the customer
relationship and analysis software industry. He has provided application and
industry consulting to over 500 organizations worldwide and has delivered
seminars both in the U.S. and internationally on such topics as Implementing a
CRM Solution, Leveraging the Internet to Improve Customer Relationships, and
Identifying and Preventing Support Staff Burnout. He has published articles on
customer-related software technologies in such journals as Call Center
magazine, Software Developer and Publisher, and TeleMarketing and
Call Center Solutions.
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