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

Trust in a Customer Relationship Model 2.0

The recent change of Facebooks terms (now claiming perpetual worldwide license for all content) showed how hard it is to build up a trusted relationship in the Web 2.0 world.

Although Mark Zuckerberg probably did not have any ulterior motives and reversed the change in terms shortly after facing massive protests from the community, it shows that there is very little trust in corporations and users are suspicious by default when it comes to their own content or data.

For CRM 2.0 this means customer rights have to be treated very very carefully as long as the new communication channels are completely established and trusted. It is not acceptable for users to read and sign complicated and long terms and the community will react very harsh if some parts of the terms seem to be fraudulent. In essence – treat your customers like you would like to be treated yourself. The communities in the Web 2.0 will find any malpractice and make it public, possibly causing massive damage to a brand. “Don’t be evil” and stick by it!

John Sviokla has listed the following principles on his blog post:

• Allow users to own their content and identity
• Make all "sharing" options default to the most conservative setting
• Create a better infrastructure for anonymity and tracking of content
• Don't sneak up on the audience

Technorati Tags: CRM 2.0,Trust,Facebook

Enterprise 2.0

Andrew McAfee defines Enterprise 2.0 as “the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers”.

According to his definition, CRM 2.0 is part of Enterprise 2.0 because he extends the use of social software to partners and customers – interesting thought. For me though, Enterprise 2.0 is a (crucial) part of a CRM 2.0 strategy, but not the other way around.

To successfully implement a CRM 2.0 strategy, it is necessary to change the corporate culture towards collaboration, co-creation and transparency - Using the Web 2.0 tools within the corporate is a logical and required step.

Good thing is that Generation Y will ‘naturally' bring some of this culture into the enterprise, as they grew up with the Web 2.0 and do not have the reservation that Gen X and the Baby Boomers have. Of course social software within an enterprise has higher requirements towards reliability and security, which might disqualify some of the services that are already out there and are widely used. Salesforce.com seamlessly integrating Google Docs is a brilliant example of how enterprise 2.0 (within a CRM 2.0 strategy) could look like. Microsoft Office Live might follow up, soon.

I am pretty sure we will see more and more companies using channels like Blogs, Twitter or Instant Messaging. Not only externally but also internally. Missing standards make interoperability between the different media and among the different platforms difficult, though.

Technorati Tags: Enterprise 2.0,CRM 2.0,Strategy

Cloud CRM – a definition

 Cloud Computing is replacing SOA as the buzzword in 2009. I spent some thoughts on how this will influence CRM 2.0 in technical and business terms.

SalesForce.com is currently heavily pushing their “Service Cloud” solution, which is a little misleading in its naming I believe. The Service Cloud is not exposing any services into the cloud but utilizing some public APIs from platforms like Facebook or Google.

This is adding new channels to the contact center (and such enhancing the customer experience) and feeding solutions from customers back into the knowledge base – good thing - but what really has all this to do with Cloud Computing? My opinion… nothing!
Maybe this is just a way to get something out of the buzzword and sell new contact channels as a brand new product?!

Their example of Orange and Plantronics is nice to view, but what happens if I am not a SFDC customer? The SalesForce to SalesForce interface is (like all the others) a Point-to-Point integration and not even based on any standards like Web-Services, I believe (correct me if I’m wrong).

Having said this, what is my vision of ‘real’ Cloud CRM then?
For me, Cloud Computing means that I (as a user) do not know where the processing power or storage resides physically. In contrast Software as a Service (SaaS) is a piece of software that is running for a dedicated user at a known location (I count the url “www.salesforce.com” as a known location…).
Now if we use standards to communicate with the services in the cloud, this would make them pretty much completely exchangeable. Of course this is not a good thing for the vendors of these services and hence Amazon, Microsoft and Force.com introduced their own proprietary structures and interfaces.

In an ideal world – and we are far away from that, yet – all vendors would agree on one open standard and the consumers (i.e. users) would have the choice to dynamically exchange and combine services from the cloud to create their individual CRM platform that perfectly scales and performs as required. But how would ISVs feel if their customers had a zero vendor-lock-in? If they could exchange the CRM service with a couple of mouse clicks and the new service would still integrate seamlessly to their ERP or OSS?     Maybe then even the producers of CRM software will have to think about a CRM 2.0 strategy… (I like that idea)

Ok, stop dreaming now! We are in 2009, facing global recession and I am delighted to see that SFDC is integrating to social platforms like Facebook (more to come I suppose) and help companies that are looking to implement a CRM 2.0 strategy by giving them the right tools to execute such a vision. The IdeaExchange functionality is a good (though proprietary) starting point to gather feedback from customers and get the involved – a first step to collaboration and co-creation.

There is a long way to go until Cloud CRM becomes reality. Standards have to evolve, security has to be ensured and SLAs have to be controllable. SaaS is (only) a first step into this direction.

Technorati Tags: Cloud CRM,Cloud Computing,CRM 2.0