The CX Blog

Often when I work with clients, I’m amazed at the web 1.0 approach to their intranet–static information handed out from some remote team in headquarters, lacking  input from the users who have the most to say, no tagging, no rss feeds… It makes one yearn for some disaster that would render useless their existing tools so they’d have to build anew…and hopefully this time it would be different. (That said, in the credit-where-credit-is-due-dept., I noticed a post the other day that lauds the many great things corporate intranet teams have done, more here.)

Winston Churchill said, after the House of Commons was destroyed by enemy bombs, that the decision to rebuild would have to be made consciously for, as he said, “We shape our buildings, and afterwards, our buildings shape us.”

Creating anything that houses us, our information, our knowledge, our culture, necessarily has to be useful and attractive, has to be consciously designed. This is no less true for the resources we ask our frontline agents to use every day.

But more often than not, those resources are difficult to use and reflect more about the knowledge management team and the internal web dev team than they do the actual end user. What’s an agent to do? Resort to Google, of course. Or ask a neighbor, who resorts to Google. Nothing at all against Google, it’s just not your information, not consistent, not necessarily timely and could really impact the customer experience. Worst of all is the last option: give the customer wrong information because you can’t find anything else or because you stopped trying.

Many of us are very very hopeful about the potential of web 2.0 tools because the difficulties of hierarchical information and processes have directly impacted us as workers or as customers or as both. Andrew McAfee has an interesting post on his own optimism regarding web based open tools–you can read it here.

Web 2.0 tools are a leap of faith for many companies because the questions they have are generally tied to Web 1.0 technologies and processes. For wikis, the inevitable question right out of the gate is almost always: how can you control who writes what? The second question is: how can we measure if it’s effective? The twin ideas of community control and adoption are difficult to communicate–wikis, blogs and tagging then become a technology that requires its users to “get it” in order to understand the many uses. Sort of serpentine, that.