Voice of The Customer: Speech Meets Larynx at CRM Evolution 2009

Last week, I keynoted the CRM Evolution 2009 conference - probably the best conference I ever attended, though I was biased because I also chaired it - first time I ever chaired a conference - so I had the opportunity to be a participant in more than just the speech.

But the keynote wasn't just for the CRM Evolution conference; it was a joint keynote for CRM Evolution 2009 (get all coverage here) and SpeechTek 2009, the annual best attended speech technology conference (get some coverage here).

So I had this dilemma. What can I say to a joint group of people with diverse interests that would interest both without watering down the message?  Honestly, it took me WEEKS to solve this one. I truly had no idea beyond a mundanely clever title for the presentation - Voice of the Customer (get it?).

But after awhile I realized that I was thinking about the whole thing wrong.  I was trying to appease the dual groups rather than realizing that my actual job was to get across my idea in their metaphor.  AND that there was a common glue that bound both audiences - they were all business people who needed to engage customers.

The ultimate difficulty was combining the metaphors in a way that would attract both audiences. The idea remained the same and its one that I preach constantly - "the social customer is the customer of the 21st century and they demand engagement and knowledge that they need to accomplish a piece of their personal agendas.  In order for you as a business to provide that you need insight. That means data needs to be captured and analyzed. But data is no substitute for human judgment, merely an aid to it."

Here's my presentation. I'm doing this because I got the idea when Michael Krigsman, our ZDNet compadre who has the world class IT Project Failures blog, did the same for his presentation at CRM Evolution last week. Please let me know what you think. This was slightly uncharted waters for me, so I can stand to get some pointers on where I might have done better - both on the ideas and the style of presentation. Though I do admit, that I think its pretty good.