I buy, sell, market, service… When did ECM become a Monte Carlo celeb?

I am writing this at 40,000 feet, on a morning flight to Nice, final destination Monte-Carlo, for what promises to be a very busy 4-day event. The European leg of IBM’s Smarter Commerce Global Summit runs from 17-20 June at the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco, and in a strange twist of fate I am neither a speaker nor an attendee. I am staff!

The whole event is structured around the four commerce pillars of IBM’s Smarter Commerce cycle: Buy, Sell, Market and Service. Each pillar represents a separate logical track at the event, covering the software, services and customer stories.

Enough with the corporate promo already, I hear you say, where does Enterprise Content Management come into this? Surely, SmarterCommerce is all about retail, transactional systems, procurement, supply chain, CRM and marketing campaign tools?

Yes and no. It’s true that in the fast moving, high volume commercial transaction world, these tools share the limelight. But behind every new promotion, there is a marketing campaign review; behind every supplier and distributor channel, there is a contract negotiation; behind every financial transaction there is compliance; behind every customer complaint there is a call centre; and behind every customer loyalty scheme, there is an application form: ECM underpins every aspect of Commerce. From the first approach to a new supplier to the friendly resolution of a loyal customer’s problem, there is a trail of communication and interaction, that needs to be controlled, managed, secured and preserved. Sometimes paper-based, but mostly electronic.

ECM participates in all commerce cycles: Buy (think procurement contracts and supplier purchase orders and correspondence), Sell (invoices, catalogues, receipts, product packaging, etc.), Market (collateral review & approval, promotion compliance, market analysis, etc.).

But the Service cycle is where ECM has the strongest contribution, and its role goes much beyond providing a secure repository for archiving invoices and compliance documents: The quality, speed and efficiency of customer service, relies on understanding your customer. It relies on knowing what communication you have previously had with your customer or supplier (regardless of the channel they chose), it relies on understanding their sentiment about your products, it relies on anticipating and quickly resolving their requests and their problems.

As a long-standing ECM advocate, I have had the privilege of leading the Service track content at this year’s IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Monaco. A roller-coaster two month process, during which we assembled over 250 breakout sessions for the event, covering all topics related to commerce cycles, and in particular for customer service: Advanced Case management for handling complaints and fraud investigations; Content Analytics for sentiment analysis on social media; Mobile interaction monitoring, to optimise the user’s experience; Channel-independent 360 degree view of customer interaction; Digitising patient records to minimise hospital waiting times; Paperless, on-line billing; Collaboration tools to maximise the responsiveness of support staff; and many more.

A global panel of speakers, with a common goal: putting the customer at the very centre of the commercial process and offering the best possible experience with the most efficient tools.

More comments after the event…