An overwhelming majority of customer care executives believe their organizations’ success managing unstructured content and sharing it across their staffs will, in the future, impact their ability to serve customers — but few feel they’re handling the job well, according to a recent survey by Coveo.

In a survey of more than 100 executives, 84 percent said their companies’ management of unstructured content will determine how effectively and efficiently they’ll be able to serve customers.

“Unstructured” data cannot be logically stored in a database, and an increasing percentage of it is coming from communities and social networks outside the enterprise.

“The survey clearly shows how organizations consider it a critical priority to do a better job drawing insight from unstructured content in disparate sources and sharing it across departments. Millions of dollars are at stake, and potentially entire businesses are at risk if they don’t take action. Companies that deploy best practices for uncovering actionable insight to drive more consistent customer experiences across channels are the ones that will succeed in an increasingly competitive economy.”

• In the same survey, only 7 percent of respondents felt their organizations do “very well” at bringing together useful customer, product and project data from all sources and sharing it among product development, marketing and customer service staffs.
• Other findings include the following:
  • 98 percent say “immediacy” within their organizations is either a “somewhat-critical” or “mission-critical” priority.
  • 87 percent consider it “very important” to share near real-time integrated data — if they had it — between product management, customer service and sales in their organizations.
  • 66 percent say their organizations either can’t bring together customer, product and project data from all sources and share it or are trying to share but are facing challenges.

  Despite the hurdles organizations face, survey respondents indicated that their organizations recognize the importance of the issue and are making progress. More than 59 percent said they either currently have an initiative to combine social media data with enterprise data and customer interactions across all channels or are planning one in 2012.

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Tags: Coveo, unstructured data analysis