This is another excellent free ebook from IBM that renders well on a kindle. This book can be down loaded from the IBM Information Management Book store or the direct link here.
Overall like the Understanding Big Data book I reviewed last time I think it is a good introduction to the subject matter giving you a quick way to get up to speed with some of the concepts involved and the evolution going on around the social sphere and customer experience. The book is again split up into sections, this time three: Part One: The CEA Opportunity, Part Two: The Customer Experience Analytics [sic] Solution and Part Three: How to Package a Customer Experience Analytics [sic] Program.
Part One: The CEA Opportunity covers a few case studies of how various industries use customer experience to fuel decisions that affect the business and the customer. It then moves on to how that our societies are moving toward increasingly automated way of interacting during the sales and marketing processes makes collecting the data for CEA a lot easier and quicker to act upon. The third chapter in this part looks at the evolution of the customer decision making process, and how a single customers influence on the wider world can (should) affect how a business deals with them. This raised some interesting thoughts in that basically people that are “listened” to (facebook, twitter, text messages in a social group) should be treated differently when they have a complaint than those that “listen” and do not contribute back, pushing “stardom” down onto those that are not famous, but are popular in a social group. The final chapter in this section looks at the “bazaar” of data that exists for CEA and touches on big data concepts again.
Part Two: The Customer Experience Analytics [sic] Solution is a slightly technical, but more theoretical look at with out pushing any particular products how you would go about creating you CEA solution. It covers Master Data Management (MDM), Stream computing, Predictive Modelling and a couple of other topics, but not to a depth to make you a master of these areas but at least enough to let you in on the conversation.
Part Three: How to Package a Customer Experience Analytics [sic] Program is basically how you would put together a business case for CEA and the conclusion of the book. The business case for CEA varies from needed to stay in business (mobile phone compaines) to currently only done on an Ad-Hoc basis and needs to be built up in the company or the industry. It would be hard to place the company that I currently work for on this scale as I am un-aware of what and if anyone else does in the sector that we are in, but I think it has legs and should be something that we should be pushing, would defiantly like to get involved in the technical side. I also think what we do have in place is to rigid in the way it carries out its current matching and we really need to be pulling in or getting the social sphere of the customer somehow.