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

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