Joab Jackson of Network World reports, “IBM has started a new practice to help organizations interact more effectively with their customers through the use of social media and other emerging technologies. ‘Today, businesses have a completely different way of engaging customers,’ said Mahmoud Naghshineh, IBM vice president of services research, noting that social media and mobile technologies have provided organizations new forms of feedback from their customers. ‘There are all these new ways of reaching out to people [but] you need to know when the right time is to engage.’ The IBM Customer Experience Lab will provide clients with access to both IBM researchers and IBM business analysis consultants, who will generate new ways for clients to communicate with customers and employees.” Read more

For-profit businesses clearly are tuned into the social media-sentiment analysis trend, to stay abreast of how their brand, services or products are perceived. But are non-profits equally as concerned? The answer seems to be yes, and not just when it comes to social media but across all paths of constituent engagement.

At this week’s Sentiment Analysis symposium in New York City, Banafsheh Ghassemi, the American Red Cross vice president of marketing, e-CRM, and customer experience, pointed out some reasons why. “It’s a brave new world for those of us in the non-profit world,” she said. While charitable organizations don’t like to use the word competition, because they’re all working for the greater good, the number of non-profits angling for contributors’ dollars, time, or other resources, has grown by 60 percent in recent times. And there are even for-profit organizations doing some of the same things the Red Cross itself does, such as blood collection. “We still have to attract your attention for your dollar, time, and even the physical part of you that is blood,” she says.

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This year’s National Retail Foundation’s Annual Convention & EXPO, also known as “Retail’s Big Show,” is going to feature a session entitled Profiting from Semantic Web in Retail: The new tool of successful practioners in Customer Experience and Operations. The session will be led by Mphasis, an HP company. According to the description, “IT and data practices have always needed humans to interpret the data and act on results. The Semantic Web aims to make data intelligible to computer systems, and is already leading to applications where computer systems replicate the nuanced decision making of humans. In this session we introduce Semantic Web concepts and ways in which retailers are already putting it to use to enhance customer experience and achieve orders of magnitude changes in operating efficiency.” Read more

Bill Guinn, CTO Product Enablers, Amdocs Product Business Unit, delivered a keynote at the 2011 Semantic Technology Conference in San Francisco. His talk was one of the highlights for anyone interested in how Semantic Technology can be used in enterprise systems.

“I truly believe that semantics can be a game changer in just about any B2C model.” – Bill Guinn, Amdocs

Amdocs, a company focused on innovating in the space of Customer Experience Systems, is a $3 Billion company that provides customer care, revenue management, and operational support for large telecommunications companies. To do this requires heavy duty transaction processing systems, with Amdocs processing a few billion transactions per day, resulting in petabytes of information. In his keynote, Mr. Guinn addressed how Amdocs leveraged Semantic Technology to “improve revenue, reduce cost, and improve customer satisfaction.”

The full keynote is presented in the video below. Read more

The opening keynote sessions at SemTech this week made one thing abundantly clear: Semantic technology is for business, and it’s time to start putting it in practice there.

“Semantics is a game changer in the B-to-C model,” said Bill Guinn, CTO Product Enablers, Amdocs Product Business Unit. The company’s focus is on delivering customer care and experience systems in the telco space, but Guinn’s address was centered on “applying semantics in any situation that involves complex and recurring relationships between business and consumers,” with the aim of improving revenue, reducing costs, and retaining customers.

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