In most companies, you’ll hard pressed to find a manager that isn’t battling an overload of work.  In that context, the compulsion to avoid overwhelm makes us ignore the most powerful data we have.

For different roles, overwhelm comes at different points….which one is your biggest problem?

• listening: being able to capture all the available inputs
• organizing: immediately and efficiently putting data into buckets
• acting: transforming data buckets into actionable information

According to Clarabridge, many of these problems develop when ‘listening posts’ are “silo-ed”.  The result is an incomplete picture and a tendency to ignore the data.  Unfortunately, many companies take the ‘ignore path’ and create a competitive advantage for competors which chose to act on the same information.

Technology plays a huge role when new channels, like social media, create massive amounts of customer generated "feedback" and chatter -- something which was totally absent earlier. These feedback channels are multiplying -- leaving technology enabled solutions as the only approach to address the opportunity and challenge that they present.