A Customer Contact Odyssey.

Here on the cusp of the 21st century, how far have we come in communications? Although we cannot make video calls from the space station using a credit card on the Bell network (Who, in 1968, could have foreseen the breakup of AT&T?), what we have wrought is a worldwide communications network that facilitates global commerce, education and health care -- that brings light to previously dark and mysterious places. Through television, radio and the Internet, we can see the common interior of our government. We can look inside a courtroom (though not quite into the Supreme Court) and see there is no mystery: the judges, the lawyers, are like you and I, just doing their jobs in the mundane work-a-day world. Through our media, we demystify our leaders, take them off their pedestals, even listen to them on Oprah, give our opinions through 800 numbers, chat with them in chat rooms or send them e-mail. But we are yet not under the control of a HAL 9000: we can project the demographics of a precinct in Miami or Palm Beach, yet our technology is still that we cannot accurately measure the voice of the people. We are not in the often frightening dream of the future brought to us in science fiction: if we were, there would be an exact count of everyone in this country, all nicely numbered and registered votes tallied without question.

But in business, this accounting reigns paramount. The more information we have about our customers, the better: the better to serve, the better to sell. Open communications systems have unleashed the power of the collected knowledge of the enterprise, allowing a free exchange of information in real- or near-real-time (often the difference is so brief as not to be perceptible to the human consciousness): information to educate -- we learn about our customers. We can analyze their buying habits and listen to their needs. We can know exactly what they are asking about as they send us an image and we can push screens to them or perform remote diagnostics on their computers. We put what we have learned from each interaction into a knowledge base we continually refine, which grows like memory. Just as James Joyce boasted you could reconstruct Dublin from Ulysses, we can reconstruct our customers. They may not be HAL, but we can talk to machines (speech recognition has made tremendous strides in past few years) an d listen to what they have to say, interpret their reports.

As telecommunications networks bring us closer and shuttle launches become commonplace, perhaps we have lost some of the sense of wonder that was in the air in the '60s when 2001: A Space Odyssey was filmed, but through telecommunications our exploration of the world, of space and the human condition has continued. Business, like life, is a journey. Let us avoid the Scylla of bad customer service and the resulting Charybdis of loss of market share on our odyssey of customer contact, Although we depend on our machines, we still put our trust in the voice on the line, the person on the Web chat, helping us on our journey of discovery.

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