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

Are Facebook and Twitter just new channels?

Someone could argue that the new Web 2.0 platforms like Facebook, Twitter and co. are just additional channels that have to be supported by the existing CRM suite.

Dealing with these platforms as additional channels will not bring the benefit they could provide, though. Accepting that the rise of the Web 2.0 is dramatically changing the consumers’ behavior, leads to a simple conclusion – Businesses need to change the way they deal with the ‘new customers’ as well!

This means that Facebook and Twitter are only the spearhead of what will come in the near future. They are indeed channels that need to be dealt with (the more agile, the better) BUT the way corporations make use of them needs to change as well. The whole corporate culture needs to change!
Adapting to the new consumer behavioral patterns leads us to what I call a CRM 2.0 strategy (any other term will do as well as long as it has the same meaning and results).

New questions must be asked:

• How can I have a meaningful conversation with my customers?
• How can I engage customers to take an active part in this conversation?
• How can I leverage the knowledge and willingness of customers?
• Does my corporate culture allow meaningful conversations (what changes are required)?
• Do I know the little aches and pains of my customers? Are they dealt with?
• Who are my customers and where / whom do the talk about products and services?

In the very end, this might be the end of the transactions based CRM (not counting any order management here…) towards a more dynamic, flexible, agile and customer centric environment that acknowledges that customers are persons – usually – that make the buying decisions often based on trust and relationships.

Technorati Tags: CRM 2.0,Facebook,Twitter,Channels,Meaningful Conversations

Avoid getting into the fireline…

Amazon is currently experiencing a customer rebellion that has some similarities to the “I hate Siebel” wave that I wrote about in an earlier post. (search twitter on #amazonfail and #glitchmyass)

Basically this is all about the filtering of gay and lesbian authors in Amazons search functionality. I do not have full insight in what has really been filtered and if this has a negative effect on the authors’ book sales or not (and I really don’t want to get into this discussion as there is a lot of coverage already). But I want to analyze the happenings from a CRM 2.0 viewpoint and think of solutions for companies to avoid such massacres by detecting the development early enough and reacting in the right way to avoid the negative PR or even reverse the effects.

In Amazon's case, everybody can easily understand that adult books must be filtered from regular searches and bestseller lists to protect the younger users of this platform. On the other side, I can also understand the furious reactions of the gay and lesbian customers that feel discriminated by such a ‘censoring’.
What really happened here is that Amazon was getting into the fireline between parents and homosexual people. Not filtering the lists would probably have caused similar reactions on the other side…

So how can CRM 2.0 help?

This example shows that the empowerment of customers is advancing. Although we are talking about a minority, the amount of press coverage is massive and might have true negative impact on the Amazon brand. The beauty of a CRM 2.0 strategy is that it aligns a business with its customers. Although this does not make the conflict disappear, it would have signaled the responsible people much earlier.
This ledge could have been used to engage both groups into a meaningful conversation and find the solution that will probably be found and agreed on anyway in the end.

Having engaged the customers would not only have avoided the conflict to raise like it did, it would also have created more loyal customers because everybody would have felt involved and taken care of.

Funny enough, you can buy the domain AmazonFail.com at the other big arriviste of the eCommerce boom – at EBAY…

Technorati Tags: CRM 2.0,Amazon,AmazonFail

Lexnet Interview

 

Lexnet is starting a series of email interviews with focus on CRM. I think this is a brilliant idea and Paul Greenberg and Christopher Carfi already shared some insights.

Find my answers here: http://lexnetcg.com/blog/email-interviews/email-interview-guido-oswald-crm/

Technorati Tags: interview,CRM 2.0,lexnet

The future of the Web (3.0?)

Creating a CRM 2.0 strategy that is viable in ten years from now would be tightly connected with an accurate prediction of what the Internet (WWW) will look alike by then.

But the question must be asked if this prediction can be made at all? The world is turning faster and faster. Predicting the next 10 years of the World Wide Web would be like predicting the rise of HDTV and Flat TVs in the 1950s…

Remember my slides around Business Velocity?

Business Velocity

View more presentations from Guido Oswald.

Or do you remember your top bookmarks in 1996 (I was at university at that time convincing the Professor to upgrade the 56k Internet connection…)? comScore lists websites like WEBCRAWLER.COM, NETSCAPE.COM or INFOSEEK.COM amongst the top 5 – all dead and gone ten years later!

On one hand, the ®evolution of the Internet is going at the speed of light (Paul did recognize this a while ago :) – on the other hand, I believe that the cultural revolution that has taken place, initiated by the Web 2.0, has passed its zenith and will continue at a much slower pace the upcoming years.

With the acknowledgement that the future of the Web is hard to predict, a CRM 2.0 strategy should not solely rely on the most hyped platforms like Facebook or Twitter, but focus on a foundation that will last when they will be gone in ten years from now. “Covering the base” is the motto here rather than jumping on the short living buzz.

Technorati Tags: CRM 2.0,Business Velocity,Hype,Future of WEB

Do we still need Operational CRM ?

According to Gartner “the ratio of operational CRM, analytical CRM and social CRM in packaged applications will shift from 90:9:1 in 2009 to 70:20:10 by the year 2020”. This means there would still be a strong focus on operational CRM and the so called ‘social CRM’ part will only account for 10 percent of CRM suites in 2020.

One one hand I have to agree that operational CRM will still be an important part when it comes to CRM software – even in more than ten years from now. On the other hand I strongly believe that the way companies will execute a CRM 2.0 strategy will dramatically change and shift more to the ‘social CRM’ part than Gartner predicts.

My vision is a software suite that comprises not only traditional CRM tools such as a call center frontend and a sales force automation application, but also all the enterprise 2.0 features such as

• wiki-webs
• forums
• instant messaging
• knowledge management tools
• intranet search (across all platforms)
• social networking applications (linked to external/public platforms)
• web-conferencing
• video-conferencing
• Document collaboration / store

This would allow to effectively execute a CRM 2.0 strategy and reduce the operational part to a minimum as customers can be invited to use these tools (some thoughts need to be spend on security here…) and actively contribute rather than getting stuck in a fixed sales or support process flow.

Currently i do not see any CRM suite getting close to this vision. SalesForce.com might get there soon, but their problem is that the perception on the marketplace is still as a provider of sales force automation – the curse of the brand – and that the networks need to get (much) faster to allow the SaaS model (I do not see them doing Cloud Computing, yet) to deliver an acceptable experience with all these tools. Implementing the full set currently requires a best of breed approach including tools like Jive SBS, Google, SharePoint, WebEx and many more…

Technorati Tags: CRM 2.0,Enterprise 2.0,CRM Software,Vision

Enterprise_2.0_install.exe ?

While reading through Dion Hinchcliffes article “Sharepoint and Enterprise 2.0: The good, the bad, and the ugly”, I keep mapping his experience to what I am currently going through.

We are currently trying to establish a collaboration environment in our PreSales organization in EMEA and was checking out Sharepoint last week. First bumper: it requires a Microsoft Internet Explorer! What do my colleagues with their MacBooks do now? After this rather disappointing experience I found the integration into Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint pretty convenient. But again, what if your focus is not the Microsoft Office suite (looking again at all the MacOS users…) or you need to share office documents across the Microsoft boundary to OpenOffice?

I actually think that we will use Sharepoint only for collaborating on Office documents in bigger projects and only as long as there is no alternative that is more flexible. My Company is currently upgrading Jive ClearSpace (now SBS?) to the latest version and we will probably use this platform as a main target for collaboration and knowledge sharing. But still this will be just a tool that only helps us doing our work better – nothing less but also nothing more.

This example shows very well that there is nothing than Enterprise 2.0 out of the box. It can only be a part of a larger CRM 2.0 strategy and has to be extended outside the corporate firewall to be effective – or would you be happy to enter your personal data again for the internal social network after having this information available on LinkedIn and XING already?? What if your customers have answers to problems and are willing to share this knowledge?

The secret is not copying the successful Web 2.0 platforms inside the company, but making use of the reference application secure enough to utilize the original instead of (a) copy… At least our new Progress Communities (going live end of the week) will share internal AND external data on the same platform. This means customers can actively take part and influence products and their development. Authentication will separate employees and customers if needed (and only if needed!). Now I would like to see my favorite social networks being integrated into Jive (and then twitter, then IM, etc…).

Welcome to the new world!

Technorati Tags: CRM 2.0,Enterprise 2.0,SharePoint,Jive SBS,collaboration

What is a “Conversation” ?

When it comes to Social CRM or CRM 2.0, we often talk about establishing a conversation with customers. I think we all agree that pushing marketing data to a (static) Corporate Website or waiting for customers to call in when they have problems with the products is far away from having a conversation with them. But how can we define and establish such a conversation?

Creating a group on XING / LinkedIn, signing up as a corporation to Facebook or having an ‘official’ MySpace page does not automatically create efficient conversations with customers or prospects.

First step to get into a meaningful conversation with customers is a tough one, as it requires a company to share information that might normally be treated as confidential. This insight and the possibility to allow feedback from customers and prospects (using Web 2.0 tools) is the starting point of a real two-way conversation.

Of course the feedback has to be read and analyzed by someone in order to answer and get further feedback. This leads to a dialogue (and true collaboration) that allows to take action to improve a product or create new products and services.
To close the loop, the information about the new or improved products have to be shared again to allow new feedback and so on…

The Enterprise 2.0 paradigm can help creating the mindset within the corporation and will allow to create a relationship with customers that is worth being called so!

Technorati Tags: CRM 2.0,Meaningful Conversation,Two-way CRM

Call Center –> Contact Center –> Enterprise 2.0

While in the 90s Customer Support predominantly happened on the phone, with the rise of eCommerce new channels were added and the “Call Center” was renamed to “Contact Center”. Unfortunately some of the additional channels (other than Email) like online chat or instant messaging (IM) did not get very popular due to technical limitations in the pre-Web 2.0 era and the missing experience of customers with this kind of communication.

In the current economic climate the agent costs are being reduced by the use of tools like knowledge management or customer self service. RightNow is a CRM tool focusing on this area and  showing some popularity when the focus is short- and mid-term savings (without losing customer satisfaction).

With the rise of Web 2.0, there are additional channels that need to be supported like blogs, micro-blogs, forums, wikis, social networks, SEO, etc. Within a CRM 2.0 strategy, the increased transparency and the concept of an Enterprise 2.0 helps reducing the costs even further by allowing direct contact into the company (even right to the experts) and establishing conversations that not only reduce the need for specialized support agent, but also help building the self service capabilities and knowledge management repository. SalesForce.com is recently growing the number of partners to leverage these new channels for its new customer support strategy.

In addition to the savings, the conversations help analyzing the customer requirements and aligning the product development with the customer needs. Involving customers also helps creating advocates - opening additional (viral~) marketing channels.

It has to be kept in mind, though, that these new channels are mostly targeted towards a tech-savvy and younger audience that is familiar with the new technologies. It would be a bad idea to completely shut down telephone support or tele-sales, even if the target group is the generation Y and techies.

Technorati Tags: CRM 2.0,Contact Center,Enterprise 2.0