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|In: Cognitive Enterprise|Last Updated:

Customer Elimination Management … CEM … is CRM’s evil twin.

We all have memories of companies doing their utmost to drive us away. If you’re like me, my family offers its sympathies to your family.

No, wait, that wasn’t it. If you’re like me you might have wondered just when the first instance of CEM took place.

Wonder no more. While it might not have been first, science has pushed the date of the earliest known gripe back to 1782 BCE. That’s the approximate date of a clay tablet found in the ruins of the Sumerian city-state of UR …

In the clay tablet, a man named Nanni whined to merchant Ea-nasir about how he was delivered the wrong grade of copper ore. “How have you treated me for that copper?” he wrote. “You have withheld my money bag from me in enemy territory; it is now up to you to restore [my money] to me in full.” (“World’s Oldest Customer Complaint Goes Viral,” Christina Zhao, Newsweek, 8/24/2018.)

Even with the best efforts of digital technology, I doubt your calls to customer service, recorded as they are for training and improvement purposes, will be discovered for translation by even the most diligent of 5918’s archeologists.

In the meantime we’re left to wonder if Nanni received a response that began, “Your clay tablet is important to us …”

We’re also left to wonder, with a bit more relevance to the world of modern commerce, if Digital technologies and practices (no no no no no, not “best practices!”) can, as promised, transform customer service.

But we aren’t left to wonder very long, because the answer is obvious. For companies already dedicated to providing outstanding customer service, Digital technologies won’t transform it, but they will undoubtedly improve it.

For companies that didn’t give an infinitestimal damn before Digital strategies and technologies became the Next Big Thing, Digitization will make their already awful customer service even worse.

In theory, business intelligence technologies, applied to masses of data gleaned from social media, might make a persuasive executive suite case that current service is putrid and customers are defecting in droves because of it while blackening the offending company’s reputation among those who, without the benefit of Yelp, might have given it a shot.

In theory, these same technologies, combined with the near-future capability to interpret telephone conversations for both substance and emotional content, might give that same company’s decision-makers, who couldn’t enter the Clue Store with a plutonium American Express card and leave with any merchandise, the clues they need to figure out why their cost of sales is so much higher than that of their competitors while their customer retention and walletshare continue to plummet.

But in the wise words of 1882 Yale University student Benjamin Brewster, in theory there’s no difference between theory and practice, while in practice there is.

The service a company provides its customers is an inextricable component of the overall value they receive when they buy its products and services. Digitize a business whose leaders don’t personally and intrinsically care about it … who care only about the impact bad customer service has on their annual bonuses and options awards … and the result will be the same bad service, available through more channels.

We’re entering a post-Turing world of chat ‘bots, email autoresponders, and, very soon, AIs with synthetic voices, all poised to correctly interpret what we’re saying or writing so as to accurately diagnose their product’s defects and scour our databases of successful resolutions so as to find the one that precisely fits our situation.

More often than not, though, what these capabilities will give customers are the same useless non-solutions to the problems they contacted the service channel to complain about, delivered a wider variety of more convenient channels but not providing more useful information.

Only now, the IT organization’s name will be on whatever complaints do filter through to top management. Which in turn suggests it isn’t too early to think about the brave new world of software quality assurance. Because in addition to the litany of tests IT already applies to its software … unit, integration, regression, stress, and end-user acceptance being the most prominent … we’ll need to add another.

Call it AIIQ testing. Its purpose will be to determine if the artificial intelligences we’re deploying to support buyers of the company’s products and services are just too stupid to expose to the outside world.

Maybe we can figure out how to use artificial intelligence technology to automate the testing.

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|In: Office Politics|Last Updated:

I didn’t have time to write anything original this weekend. Instead, a cautionary re-run from November of 2003 about information security and how not to go about ensuring it. – Bob

# # #

Students of corporate behavior, attempting to account for the seemingly incomprehensible level of self-destruction evident everywhere in the business world, often find themselves at a loss. Why, they ask, would a business do something like this, whatever “this” is this time?

The answer is usually easy to find, if you know where to look: Businesses can’t be self-destructive, for the simple reason that businesses aren’t selves. Human beings make the decisions, either individually or in groups.

Some of these individuals and groups make their decisions with the good of the company in mind, even though “The Company” is a fictional beastie that lacks any actual intent, consciousness, or independent reality. Others focus on “shareholder value,” showing an admirable, albeit misguided altruism toward their employer’s legal owners — misguided because their altruism is rarely returned by the shareholders whose interests they hold paramount.

The majority of decision-makers do neither. They base their decisions on exactly the criteria they’re supposed to use in a capitalist society: They look out for their own best interests. Often, their best interests have nothing at all to do with what’s best for the company.

How else to explain the following event:

A character arrives from corporate headquarters. Looking in the mirror, he sees a secret agent looking back. Or maybe he thinks he lives in The Matrix. Hard to tell.

“Why are you here?” the head of security asks him.

“I can’t tell you.”

“What are you planning to do?”

“I can’t tell you that, either.”

“What can you tell us?”

“I need a work space with a network connection, telephone, desk and chair. And please don’t interfere with what I’m doing.”

He’s from the holding company’s headquarters. A quick check confirms he has the authority and the right to ask for this, and so it is done. A few weeks later, he packs up and leaves, having downloaded a number of security intrusion tools used to … keep in mind, this is a true story, not paranoid fiction … break into and damage several production servers, thereby proving, I guess, that the network is vulnerable to someone from headquarters connected inside the firewall, with no oversight or supervision, no responsibilities other than breaking into the network, and the authority to insist on being ignored regardless of his actions.

From a security audit perspective, his behavior is unprofessional on at least two counts. The first, of course, is that he did actual damage instead of simply leaving evidence of his successful entry.

But that’s the lesser example of the complete worthlessness of his efforts. The greater is that he ignored the basics. The test of an organization’s security isn’t whether it can be hacked, let alone whether it can be hacked from inside its firewall. The test … actually, the two tests of any organization’s security are (1) Does the organization’s security policy fit its needs? and (2) Does the organization’s actual security implement its security policy?

Since Mr. Bond never bothered to read the security policy, he’ll never know. All he knows is that it’s possible to penetrate his subsidiary’s firewall from inside the firewall.

An impressive performance.

How does one go about explaining behavior this bizarre? It requires neither a conspiracy theory nor a temporary shortage of Thorazine.

All it requires is an understanding that everyone in every company acts solely in their own best interests. It’s up to the company’s leaders to ensure their best interests line up with those of the company, and that they understand this alignment.

At a guess, HQ’s secret agent saw a possibility of career advantage from showing up the subsidiary’s IT staff. Viewed in this light, his behavior makes perfect sense: By engineering a situation in which he couldn’t fail to successfully intrude, he can claim to have revealed serious security deficiencies. And because he works at corporate headquarters, he figured he could use his superior access to decision-makers to paint any objections to his behavior by the subsidiary’s IT staff as nothing more than a defensive attempt to cover up incompetence.

I’m speculating, but at least this explains this odd event. Viewed from any other perspective, the behavior of this strange visitor from another city would be incomprehensible.

I take that back. There is one other perspective that would explain it.

Maybe he’s just stupid.

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