10. CRM Becomes Seriously Ill

This is a less technical chapter devoted to a CRM management problem of poor performance of an organization such a call center or a technical support department. We explore a technology that can detect this performance and a root cause for it, in terms of We explore the phenomenon of Distributed Incompetence (DI), which is an opposite to Distributed Knowledge and occurs in various organizations such as customer support. In a DI organization, a team of employees is managed in a way that, being rational, impresses a customer or an external observer with total irrationality and incompetence, an inability to get things done. In most cases, the whole organization or individual team members gain from DI by means of refusing customer compensation while avoiding other obligations. We investigate DI in a variety of organizations to analyze its commonality as well as specific DI features for organizations and communities. A discourse-level analysis to detect DI in textual descriptions of customers and observers is outlined. We report a detected DI rate in financial organizations and propose a solution to handle it, such as a chatbot.