Service Cloud2 – Salesforce.com taking Customer support into the cloud?!

Salesforce.com has always been very visionary and successfully pushing the SaaS model into the market for sales force automation (SFA).

In their presentation of the “Service Cloud2” yesterday, they showed that the same SaaS model can also work for customer service and support.
Marc Benioff said that the average service and support applications are about a decade old – and I would totally agree with that. Having seen some installations and the associated data centers behind these applications, I can imagine the potential that Benioff sees in this market and that customers see in potential savings.

SFDC presented some very important new modules of the Service Cloud2 that are indispensable for high quality customer support:

• A knowledgebase (competing with RightNow)
• CTI integration (powered by CISCO?)
• Integration to social networks (like Facebook and twitter)
• Customer portals and communities (competing with Jive SBS)

While all these elements are not new and there are solutions out there to handle them, SFDC is probably the first one that is able to deliver a fully integrated solution (including crowdsourcing) out of one hand and paid solely per usage. This will allow small and medium sized companies to deliver a great customer experience with very little upfront investments in infrastructure and licenses.

Very obvious that putting all CRM in the hands of SFDC also has the risk of a vendor lock-in. And realistically, even if they call this a cloud, it is still not what I would call true cloud computing and it will not be possible to easily switch parts of the CRM to some other vendors or ‘in-source’ the application in the future.

But still, this is a very nice vision that Benioff and his team are bringing to a life and I am very sure that it will be as successful as the SFA module was.

Technorati Tags: CRM 2.0,Salesforce.com,Service Cloud,Customer Support

Twitter - just a temporary hype?

I just read a post from Jennifer Leggio talking about twitter presence and overall social media strategy of corporations. And I have to agree that twitter has a somewhat limited value in a CRM 2.0 strategy as well.

The Comcast example might not be the blueprint for followers.
On one hand the twitter user numbers still seem to be growing fast, on the other hand I see lot of the communication moving to other platforms like Facebook. User numbers not necessarily visualize the amount of valuable information that is transmitted through such a platform.

My personal feeling is that the future will be a mashup of several social networks. Users will be looking for applications that combine the data streams seamless. I am using TweetDeck which has Facebook and MySpace connectivity already.

The idea of short messages enriched with pictures, location information and links to other sites might stay, but will twitter be around in a couple of years? Who knows…

Technorati Tags: CRM 2.0,Twitter,Social Media

Socialnomics: Social Media Revolution

Looks like there is a new name in town… what happened to the Wikinomics?! The short version of the video mentioned earlier also re-uses the business velocity theme.

Check out the interesting video response from tippingpoint labs:

Not 100% sure if the hula hoop is a valid comparison, though… what is the value add of a hula hoop, really? not much I would guess. Social Media has more to offer I’d say.

Technorati Tags: Socialnomics,social media,CRM 2.0

CRM 2.0 Presentation

…done for my Thesis Defense last Saturday.

The goal was to squeeze the Thesis into a 20 minute presentation, so I put many slides into the backup section. I still could not finish within the 20 minutes, though…

CRM 2.0 By Guido Oswald

View more presentations from Guido Oswald.

Technorati Tags: CRM 2.0,Enterprise 2.0,Social CRM,Master Thesis Defense

Salesforce.com the big winner in 2009 ?!

The CRM Magazine has published the winners of their CRM Market Awards for 2009. Looks like SFDC is the dominant player, winning the top four categories (not really playing in the other categories).

Marc Benioff (SFDC CEO) is listed as one of the eight most influential leaders (next to Anthony Lye from Oracle and Tony Hsieh from Zappos). I am missing Paul Greenberg in this list…
It is noteworthy that Tony is in this list as someone that is actually doing CRM 2.0, not just talking about it or selling software that is supposed to implement successful CRM. This is a good example of how CRM 2.0 can look alike without spending too much thoughts on the technological or theoretical side of it, but just DOING it.
Tim O’Rielly (Enterprise 2.0) is also listed, because of his vision of the modern enterprise. Again, Tony has shown how this vision can be executed… Let’s hope Amazon can keep up this momentum and learn from Zappos rather than applying the Amazon culture.

Besides the extreme dominance of SDFC there is not a lot of surprises in the list of winners. Microsoft is massively gaining ground and I am unsure how Deloitte won the consultancies category – looks like they have done some successful projects to pass Accenture, IBM and Capgemini…

Amdocs (ex Clarify) does not show up anymore – looks like they killed the CRM business and put focus (back) on billing and their QPass and Cramer acquisitions. Although Rogers finally decided to upgrade to CES 7.5 and SmartClient, I am not seeing any new logos for Amdocs CRM in the past year).

Technorati Tags: CRM,Market Awards 2009

Social Media Ad

just came across this YouTube video that has some impressive numbers to show that the rise of social media (through Web 2.0 technology) definitely has begun…

Interesting that it picks up the comparison of the time to reach 50 million users.

Technorati Tags: social_media,CRM 2.0,business_revolution

My Masters’ Thesis is progressing…

now at about 20 thousand words on 90 pages:

More to come soon, stay tuned....

CRM 2.0 at Progress Software

Interesting to see that the company I work for (although not selling CRM) is rapidly adopting the CRM 2.0 theme.

Gary Conway, our new hired CMO, is talking about a real dialogue with customers and sees the employees as the best evangelists of the company and its products. This is actually a very good start into a cultural change within the company and is accompanied by a marketing campaign to promote the Progress brand, which is pretty unknown in the marketplace of SOA. This is particular surprising as  Progress Software has some of the best in class products there…

The new website is already life and features a life chat possibility which allows customers to ask questions w/o taking the receiver and dialing a number. It is really good to see that we’re going into the right direction here and it shows that CRM 2.0 or Social CRM is gaining momentum.

BTW: you might have noticed that the post frequency has dramatically reduced. This is due to me now actively writing on my Masters’ Thesis and therefore not allowed to publish some of the stuff that I am writing. But be sure to find a lot more when I am finished writing on August 13th (latest).

Stay tuned,
Guido

Technorati Tags: CRM 2.0,Social CRM,Progress Software

Sometimes you have to ignore your customers!

Jensen Huang (Co-Founder of NVIDIA) has an interesting sight on Corporate Vision and the fact that you have to ignore the customer base in certain situations. That is when you are sure that your vision is so much stronger than that of your customers:

This is actually a good point and sometimes probably necessary to differentiate from competition. Risky, though, when you completely lose contact to the end-users.
For NVIDIA it worked out quite well. But as Jensen said, they were competing against 200 other graphics chips producers in the 90s, so differentiation is sometimes hard and might really lead to the ignorance of customers (for a while).

A CRM 2.0 strategy must not always mean that a business has to blindly follow what customers demand. Some products or services might not have an obvious business case (i.e. will not create immediate money), some might see no demand at the time you have to start developing them. Still they can deliver in the mid- or long-term if there is a strong vision behind it (and the vision fulfills).

A Revolution needs strong leadership and only a limited number of people are able to discover this in an early stage.

Apple is another good example where products are created with very little or no involvement of (potential) users. A very successful example as we all know… The question is do I really want to completely ignore customers? And if so, for how long?

I think executing on a strong vision does not mean that you have to lose contact with your customers. There are always some people out there that share the same vision. It’s all about finding these individuals and getting them into the boat. The connected (Web 2.0) world these times is a tremendous help here!

So CRM 2.0 is also about finding the right people out there and co-creating products and services with them. If done well, these customers will get real advocates for the brand.

Technorati Tags: CRM 2.0,Vision

Crisis Management in Web 2.0 times

After the post about the “Amazon Fail” incident, I stumbled upon a nice slideset about crisis management at Domino’s Pizaa from Taly at Trendspotting:

Crises Management: Trendsspotting Insights On Dominos Case Study

View more presentations from Taly Weiss.

Taly did some good research about crisis management and the presentations shows how this has changed in terms of reaction time (still to be improved) and used media type.

CRM 2.0 can help reacting to incidents like this one and avoid the Streisand effect that can cause major brand damage.

Here is some media coverage and Domino’s official response:

Technorati Tags: CRM 2.0,Domino's Pizza,Crisis Management