A silly bird shows up, like clockwork, outside my living room and expends an hour or two, each and every afternoon, flying into our window. Whack. Whack. Whack: head first, into the glass.

Einstein famously said that doing the same thing over and over yet expecting a different result is the precise definition of insanity. But, maybe repetitive stupidity has another cause: memory failure. Is the whacking bird insane, or simply unable to recall the existence of that impenetrable glass? Mental illness or memory loss? While disagreeing with Einstein is clearly not a high percentage proposition, isn’t a fair bit of the world’s repetitively stupid behavior ‘just’ a consequence of really bad memory?

Josh Foure’s (in his super-fun book ‘Moonwalking with Einstein‘) makes a compelling case that humanity (as in ‘each of us’) increasingly suffers from memory failure. Pre-printing press, we were what we could recall. The Roman Senator memorized his speech; the teleprompter crutch did not exist. The medieval scholar had books, but the books had no indexes, so knowledge required more or less internalizing their sacred texts. Not so long ago, anything we couldn’t summon up from the depths of our grey matter essentially ceased to exist.

Foure says the march of technology amounts to the progressive replacement of internal memory (brain cells) with external memory (technology). First: Books, then books with indexes, then libraries. 100 years ago: audio recordings, then: movies. Recently, the internet and now facebook. Many of history’s most life-altering innovations have a common theme: creating external memories preserved, memorialized and accessible outside our brains, allowing us to forget without the cost of forgetting. Foure cautions that the incredible win of preserving our knowledge and experiences in ‘media’ comes, however, with a huge unintended consequence. Homeric story-tellers could once recite all 15,000 lines of the Iliad. Today, we can’t remember our credit card number. The calculator makes mental arithmetic rather pointless; externalizing our memories in blogs, photos, and tubes similarly ‘frees’ us from the need to be good at remembering. What we don’t need to do, we tend not to do.

The out-sourcing of our memory to technology is accelerating. Isn’t this now true: Google is mankind’s memory? If my brain can store the phrase ‘Agile Manifesto’, I don’t have to actually remember what’s in the Agile Manifesto, because the full text is always milliseconds away via search. If I can manage to remember a person’s name, Google Desktop will recall every communication and meeting we’ve ever had.

All good. The counter-point is that, pressured by the power of digital memory, Memorization is a lost art and remembering is becoming a lost skill. Of course, we choose whether the power of our tools enfeebles or enriches us. The car doesn’t require us to stop walking, and Google doesn’t force our memory to atrophy. We can make Google our prosthetic hippocampus, or it can become bionic memory, making easy what once was hard, and showing us pathways & connections beyond the capacity of even a super-charged Homeric memory to hold. Either way, though, the best way to understand Google may not be as a search engine, but as our Common Memory. (Google’s mission statement “to organize all the world’s information making it universally accessible”, reads like the medical definition of a global hippocampus ). Perhaps Google is suddenly under attack from governments all over the world for a simple reason: it is simply so important.

If people memory is ever-more Googly and less synaptic, what can we say about the memory of the “artificial person”, aka the enterprise? The enterprise, once upon a time, relied on the memory of its workers. Life-long or long-term employees embodied the institutional memory of modest-sized companies. As the manager of my local Creamery says: “We may not know your name, but we know your flavor.” But, excepting the neighborhood store, relying on brain power to remember the who, what, when and why of our customers is no longer an option.

Just as our individual memories are now preserved Digitally, so enterprise memory has been google-ized. The central mission of your CRM system is, of course, to be the enterprise’s external memory, your Google for memorializing customer relationships. And, without good memory (meaning good CRM), the enterprise becomes a whacking bird, repeating the same errors over and over. So, how do we improve Enterprise memory, and make CRM better? How do we avoid those whacking bird moments when customers have to provide their names to three different agents or mimic the funny, humming noise their phone is making to multiple technicians?

Recently, at lunch with leaders of Google’s Search quality team, I got a 30,000 foot level lesson in how Google’s memory improves. Increasingly, the answer is: micro case by micro case. Google’s journey towards the perfect search experience proceeds, nowadays, in little leaps. Clever engineers isolate particular search patterns (combos of word lengths, or patterns of types of words (a Place and a Name)), and dream up better algorithms to handle this specific and particular Search Case. The proposed new approach is then quickly prototyped and tested, establishing efficacy before significant engineering investment is made.

We can learn from Google’s unmatched expertise in improving “external memory”. For CRM to become a better engine for recall, the key is to remember in the context of micro-experiences. By breaking up the spectrum of customer touchpoints into little groups of ‘Experience Flows’ (as we call them in the Service Experience Management - SEM – world), we can think about the patterns of experiences coherently. Then, just as Google’s engineers can hone in on a particular search scenario and tune it, Service Experience owners can identify the information needed to improve CRM memory in the context of a given interaction type. It may not be important to remember the precise nature of the firmware installed in a device when the customer is complaining about an unexpected credit card charge, but this meme is vital when service is focused on an installation problem. Isolating and tuning against highly defined micro-instances of service experience delivers the Googlicious outcome of creating constant improvement, creating manageable ‘worlds’ for thought-experiments, minimizing the risk of quality regressions, speeding testability, .

Key to the Google philosophy of micro-cases is to look for patterns that cover enough search traffic to be worth an investment in improving. The goal may be to find a stand-alone pattern, but the pattern has to be common enough to move the needle. To quote the Google folk, the trick is to find an interesting lever for improving a class of searches, and then ‘look to generalize as much as possible’. Similarly, as we look to create a service flow, the challenge is to find a set of customer touch points that are ‘alike’, stretching out from there, broadening that set until similarity breaks down. For Xerox, an experience flow about installing Printer Model 276 may not be worth the investment, a flow about Desktop Printers may be, a flow about Printer Installation is surely investable, but perhaps loses experiential coherence. “We never work on just a single search query or too narrow of a class, we push to invest in broader ideas that will cover more.”

Grey hair means a daily struggle with whacking bird syndrome. Where did I leave my glasses, this time? Do I know that person coming up to shake my hand? I thought I asked to change that wireframe, but did I? I’m reasonably sure that most of the stupid things I do aren’t because I’m insane, but because I forget. Realizing, for people, enterprises and search engines, that memory is a skill that can be improved with focused attention and the applied use of micro-feedback loops is a relief. We get frustrated with ourselves when memory fails; our customers likewise get angry when the enterprise forgets. As Moonwalking with Einstein is the silver bullet for improving our personal recall, so Google’s micro-case method offers a cure for the sclerosis in Enterprise CRM.

(Mark Angel is EVP and CTO, KANA)

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