November 4th, 2009
Organic Social Networks, the Yankees and....Wha'? (UPDATE: WE WON OUR 27TH WORLD SERIES!)
Needless to say, being a Yankees fan of the entirely driven and committed sort, I’m biting every nail on my hands off and frankly, if I could reach my feet, would go at those nails too (Ugh.). I do that every time that the Yankees are in the playoffs or World Series particularly, though, I have to admit, I do it to a lesser degree, but to a degree during the 162 game regular season too. Meaning, from April through hopefully early November, I don’t need nail clippers.
But this year is very, very different. Aside from being in the World Series for the first time since 2003, which makes it different, Twitter, Facebook, text messaging, push technologies and an iPhone make it different.
I no longer watch the game by myself though I’m the only person in the room (my wife, also a Yankees fan, is up in Newfoundland at the moment with her mom who’s recovering from surgery). I’m not even just watching the game with friends of mine who are Yankees fans on Facebook such as fellow Yankees fan David Sims, who is without a doubt one of the all time great writers and columnists in CRM and other IT matters - and one of the funniest. I’m also watching the game with several thousand people who are actively conversing from the stands at Yankee stadium or watching it on TV themselves - all members of either subgroups within social networks communicating via channels or members of organic communities - outcome based communities that have come together for the World Series and the World Series only and who will, for the most part, disappear after the Series ends.
But note something, I said will disappear for the most part, not entirely, which we’ll get to
If this were 2003…
If this were 2003, I think probably by now I’d be hating Josh Beckett (wait I still don’t like Josh Beckett) for beating us and Jesus Hoyos, a CRM thought leader in Latin America, would be the happiest man on the earth because the Marlins had beaten the Yankees - though to his credit, he’d be happy if the Marlins had beaten anyone at all in the World Series because he’s not a Yankees hater, he’s a Marlins fan. But how would he be letting me know (if we knew each other - which then, we didn’t)? An email maybe - a phone call? And only after the result itself was in and done. To communicate in some real time fashion with even one person was either cumbersome or expensive even then. Or at least more cumbersome and expensive.
But This is 2009….
While the Series isn’t quite over when I’m writing this (prior to game 6), here’s the picture so far and now.
The kicker is that I’m in Bogota Colombia, as one of the keynotes at CRM conference here, but no worries, broadband is solid and I have a subscription to MLB television on MLB.com which gives me streaming video live for the game. Or, I can watch it - yes watch it - using the MLB iPhone application streaming via Wi-fi that’s readily available.Or if for some feverish reason, I’m sick of Tim McCarver and Joe Buck (which is a frequent occurrence) I can listen the audio/radio feed from NY with John Sterling and Suzyn Waldman - our homie broadcasters.
In the meantime, David Sims is getting ready to watch it from New Zealand somehow - TV or streaming maybe. The key Yankees bloggers for the press like Mark Feinsand are already starting to set their tweets out to the Yankees fan faithful to get prepared for the game. The conversations are already beginning on #yankees on Twitter and in the “enemy camp” at #phillies on Twitter.
When the game begins, I’m watching somehow or listening and in the meantime, between communities and sub-communities on Twitter and my Facebook buds, we’re rarin’ to go. So the night is a viewing experience and a conversation stream that organically evolved that includes my CRM colleagues, my cousins, a good friend who roots for the Phillies and other friends I have who happen to root for the Yankees or the Phillies who I had lost touch with but am now hooked up with primarily on Facebook. Plus there are the myriads of unknown folks gathered either physically at the park or watching on the tube or the web who are connected in total through twitter via their mobile device.
The conversation stream is real time and its intense and responsive to the game itself.
What’s remarkable is what organically happened from the beginning of the playoffs. People who I’ve befriended over the last couple of years and vice versa, or who are mutual followers began yakking about something they are passionate about using not email but social networks and communities to correspond. Which dovetails with the Nielsen data from their Global Network Survey in March 2009. Their finding was that more Internet users correspond via social networks (66.8%) than via email (65.1%). WOW.
The Social Side
But think about this. I’m working on a personal social graph that is outcome based - i.e. built around an event - the World Series - that incorporates my family, sub-communities of CRM influencers; large communities of yankees fans who I only will know for the games - and phillies fans - and fans who are converging because of the World Series only - regardless of who they root for #WorldSeries - using social channels like Twitter and social networks like Facebook. What makes this even more fascinating is due to Facebook Connect, my tweets are carried to Facebook allowing my friends on Facebook who don’t tweet much to comment and converse on the content of my tweets.
And this is all organic.
A few months ago, I wrote a blog post on outcome based social networks (OSN) which was an excerpt from the 4th edition of CRM at the Speed of Light. What was most prominent about it was that the OSN was pretty much archived when done. That’s likely, hopefully after tonight. But in the course of this amazing playoffs, two things happened. I made some new friends and found a bunch of new people on Twitter who follow me and/or who I follow. I saw how quickly that even existing social networks and communities can morph themselves into new forms with new rich results and conversation - which tells you how important it is to not just understand the business value of the communications revolution that we’ve seen in the last five years or so, but the social value that’s been added when it comes to being able to converse with “people like you” in real time in a few seconds after you decide you want to. Extract what business value and thinking you want from this observation. I’ve got to get ready with my laptop and iPhone, for the game, sitting at my hotel in Bogota.
Though I wish I could be at Yankee Stadium tonight.
October 29th, 2009
RightNow Right Now is Right On
I know that I’m known as a tough critic and truth be told, I revel in it at times. I like finding flaws but not because I want to be mean about it but because I want the industry that I participate in, and hope I represent honorably, to be better and to provide what at least I think they should to the customer. So I look pretty deeply at the product claims and at the companies that are providing the products because I’m an ardent believer that the culture of a company needs to reflect what they are supposed to be providing to the customer when it comes to the aggregate of products, services, tools and most importantly to new business model paradigms, consumable experiences.
What that also means is that the company should be making efforts to align their culture and outlook with the contemporary mores of the customer’s world too.
If you accept the fact that the business ecosystem is centered around the social customer now, there are implications for corporate culture, that in my mind can’t be ignored by any company, and that would go for CRM vendors, as well as the practitioner companies who are trying to implement some sort of CRM strategy.
Those corporate implications for vendors (not just technology software companies, BTW) are pretty specific:
1. The products you provide need to be at least conversant with
a. the requirements that the social customer has - which in the current case of Social CRM, is something that allows the technology vendors’ customers to engage their own customers through multiple channels inbound and outbound - that of course is what we mean by “social”, isn’t it?
b. the idea that the customer wants to participate in their creation or, if not that (depends on the product), at least have enough real information, not just marketing collateral made available to them about the product to make an intelligent decision on how they are going to use the product. That means an authentic (for the word du jour) look at the product, including its immaturity. True product transparency is everything. It also means, if it makes sense, invite the customer into the creation process for the products. If it makes sense. Not if some pundit like me tells you that you should. At this stage, which is still early, it’s an optimal thing to do, not a requirement for survival.
2. The services and tools that you provide to the customer are what they ask you for, not just what you think that they should have. The voice of the customer, not just the one that is in your head, but the one that emerges from their actual larynx and vocal cords, needs to be engaged and listened to. “Listened to” means matched against your corporate plans and budgets and then implemented accordingly.
3. The consumable experiences mean that the type of message that you are presenting to an audience of customers and prospects has to be consistent and true to the actual experiences that you are providing to that same audience. In other words, as I talked about in my blog posting on the nature of new competition, the customers expect what you are telling them to expect. It’s truly eat your own dog food or, in my case, cat food.
This isn’t complicated. In fact, it’s pretty direct. But the implications are far reaching because there are many companies producing products that are in the realm of Social CRM, which means they fall between purely social and purely CRM or as we are starting to see with things that I saw, for example, a couple of weeks ago at Oracle OpenWorld, are truly Social CRM. Many of those companies are really cool or have great CRM groups but few, very few, have institutionalized capabilities and practices that reflect a deep (and usually somewhat or badly painful) cultural transformation that truly is one that means they’ve chewed a lot of Friskies.
I have to say that I think RightNow is making that cultural transformation.
Let me tell you why I think this.
Where Is Paul-o?
Currently, I’m sitting on an airplane heading back to Washington Dulles airport and home (using American Airlines wi-fi for the fist time - very cool) after having left the Broadmoor Resort in Colorado Springs Colorado. The place is stunning, the rooms are really well done, and the service level is beyond phenomenal. Since this isn’t meant to be a travelogue, what does make this important is that I was there for the RightNow User Conference in the U.S. as a speaker (did that on Monday to the Executive Summit of roughly 35 C-level large corporation executives) and analyst or, as my badge says, “Influencer” which I think is a term for, “what does he actually do? I’m not really sure….”
While their array of new and improved products is extensive and interesting, what I find is even more important to their potential longer term success is that they’re “releasing” a new culture and new set of consistent and authentic experiences that are associated with the way they do business. While it’s by no means perfect, it is one of the better and maybe the best (though that still has to be tested by time and results) alignment of a vendor culture with a message organized around collaboration with customers. However, I say that with caveats about the message (see below)
The History
Keep in mind, what makes what I’m about to describe even more incredible is that, as far as I’m concerned, RightNow has been struggling for the last few years to get their message right. They have always had a good, well engineered product when it came to customer service. It was solid; it was on demand; it was scalable. They pioneered the selective upgrade - meaning the customer got to choose what parts of the upgrade that they wanted to implement - if any - rather than the SaaS world’s ordinary automatic upgrade procedure back in the day a few years ago. The standard was that the customer had no say in the upgrade process and it was immensely frustrating to those customers sometimes, when customizations based on a prior version were wiped out. But RightNow changed the industry that way.
But about 3 years ago or so, they recognized that the customer experience was paramount and began to set up their messaging accordingly. They had always been a customer friendly company but understanding the customer experience which was step one wasn’t necessarily automatically associated with aligning your corporate culture with that knowledge.
I didn’t think then that they fully realized the fundamental truth about the customer experience - which was it was more the customer interactions than the customer transactions that would determine the customer’s relationship to any given company. The interactions were how the company and customer “got along” while many of the transactions were a reflection of that result. Like many of the more customer-centric companies who were still organized with traditional thinking, they still saw the world from the standpoint of the corporate ecosystem. That meant that transactions remained king. Improvements in the customer experience were still being seen as making internal business processes more efficient, or at best, effective, to free up more time to improve the customer experience. But the customer remained an arm’s length away from the improvements. This was best reflected in a statement I got from RightNow at that time that SalesNet had been purchased “to help improve the customer experience.” That is emphatically not what sales force automation (SFA) applications do.
But it’s a learning process, and to RightNow’s enormous credit, what they released at this conference indicates that they now have begun to seriously align their culture to the actual customer experience as it relates to an ecosystem dominated by a social customer. That’s quite remarkable because it is an indicator of the possibility of long term success, not just short term growth - and they are one of the few companies who seem to have made the effort and investment in doing that.
What Did RightNow Do Exactly?
Don’t get me wrong. This is a really healthy company - and given the recession, they’ve done very well despite it. They are now 800 employees; they are going to achieve around $150 million in revenue this year; they are cash flow positive; they are increasing 13%-15% year of year with their recurring revenues; and have around $100 million in the bank. That’s a solid, successful company.
Their new mission is to “rid the world of bad experiences.” Needless to say, I publicly asked them to support the Yankees in the World Series, because a series loss would be a bad experience for me, so we’ll see whether or not they truly mean what they say. You RightNow guys willing to stand by what you said? Go Yankees? YES!
While this is a lovely mission statement, it is more marketing than realizable obviously since that has been every single human reformer’s goal since time began and we still have a lot of bad experiences to deal with.
What is significant is what’s reflected by two announcements - one of which has a lot of fanfare and another which was not discussed all that much and got lost in the incredible volume of product releases and evolutions.
They also I think made one significant error and once again it’s in the area that they’ve made much of their mistakes - in their messaging. Plus they need to correct something or at least clarify something they said that I said.
But I’ll get into all that in a sec.
The New Releases
The total number of new and improved products was staggering and far too extensive for me to cover in this posting. I would generalize them in the following way.
First they made “experience improvements” which they structured around social, web and contact center (which I would personally call agent-centered) experiences. For example, they added new capabilities and made significant improvements to their Customer Portal, which should be used for web and mobile self service interactions. They added strong co-browsing capabilities (I’m not sure whether this was native or in partnership with LiveLook) and proactive chat for agents. This was part of their improvements in the “Web Experience.”
For all areas, they added design tools that use graphic interfaces and drag and drop functionality to enable non-BPM people to develop their own web, social and contact center experiences. A good thing all in all.
Second, they added improvements to what I call “human contact” capabilities. Ultimately, what we’re doing, even with the digitization of our interactions is still attempting to reproduce human contact. That’s why most of us love Amazon. It seems to be reflecting “human contact” though we aren’t dealing with humans. Our need for validation and acknowledgement is all part of how we socialize as human beings and the power of the social web is that it gives us the tools to get that through these one-to-many interactions with “strangers like us.” What RightNow released are tools to manage that human contact - such as their phone and multi-channel interaction management; or to understand how the human contact works using RightNow Engage’s analytics engine. They claim it delivers insight, which is probably a bit too strong - even if as good as it seems - it delivers information that can be used for insight. Analytics engines can’t deliver insight. Only humans can.
These are just a few highlights. I want to get into three more things - what I found to be the most important thing about what RightNow is doing now and into the future -then, their problem - and just a question or two that remains.
What’s So Good…
Now on to the two announcements that I think bode well for their long term success.
First, their September acquisition of HiveLive, a malleable, very intelligently constructed social network platform led to the development of products like Support Community and Innovation Community. What the community products do are exactly as you would expect. In the case of Support Community, they are providing a location for the customers of a company to interact with the company around customer service and support and are providing a forum for the customers to help solve each other’s problems. Innovation communities are places that are used are used for co-creation and product feedback and collaboration. They tended to emphasize the feedback side; I would provide more on the collaboration front.
What makes these releases important are the significant growth in business’ interest in communities because of the involvement of much of the population in some form of social network or another. About 74% of all connected adults participate in a social network of some kind - though, granted it leans more toward socnets of the Facebook variety - hell, not the Facebook “variety” - Facebook. But what this is doing is seasoning the population to use social networks which will be more likely than not make them more amenable to using communities and social networks beyond the firewall. In fact, Nielsen Global did a survey back in March that found that more people were communicating via social networks (66.1%) than via email (65.3%) for the first time. I may be off on the 10ths of a percent a little but you get the idea.
That makes the RightNow releases of support and innovation community building tools and actual communities significant and tuned into a growing trend.
But there is something far more important to the long term health, which was barely discussed at the conference. That would be the investment in hiring customer success managers. These would be individuals not working off quotas who, separately from account managers, would be responsible for the healthy relationship between particular accounts and RightNow. These customer success managers would be assigned to support the customer in ways that helped them succeed. I didn’t hear what they thought criteria for success would be but all in all this was an extraordinary move - one that indicates a deep cultural commitment toward customer collaboration and communications in ways that acknowledge the changing customer demand.
This makes me happy to hear because it reflects what goes on in the in-between. RightNow is starting to make the appropriate investments in transforming their culture to align themselves with the 21st century customer and what they require to satisfy their personal agendas - in a good way.
And Not So Good….
Despite all this goodness, I have a few concerns and caveats, though I will say, the positives outweigh the negatives.
First a correction. I was reading some material that they produced for the press and the analysts on why they are now Cx and “not CRM.” That’s one of my concerns but before we get there, the correction. In that piece they claim I said that CRM had a 70% failure rate.
I didn’t claim that. In fact, what I have consistently said, is that Gartner back in 2002-03 claimed that there were 50%-70% failure rates, but I saw that due to the immaturity of the industry and the customers’ buying into hype that led them to have dramatically escalated expectations about what CRM could do. Now, the success rate is around 55% according to varying industry sources (they’re in my book but I can’t check on who it was here). That’s due to - what else - the maturity of the industry and the leveled expectations that customers now have about its ROI. So please, if you see that, it ain’t me.
Now, Cx, Not CRM. Cx is the overall approach, vision and tools that RightNow is calling their contemporary offering. Cx has nothing to do with Rx - it stands for customer experience. But as Bob Thompson smartly pointed out in a Fireside chat with Greg Gianforte, the buying agents - c-level execs, etc. aren’t buying customer experience, they’re buying tools to increase their successful strategy. RightNow also insists they aren’t trying to create a new category with Cx. Yet the minute they said it “wasn’t CRM” - which is a category, that’s exactly what they were doing.
The problem isn’t with Cx which is fine as their vision and platform/tools. The problem is the “not CRM” part which is a no-win component and useless to say. They aren’t competing with CRM - or definitions of anything else. They are providing a solution set, services and something of a strategic outlook to the customer in the name of Cx. This is their classic messaging problem. They often put their foot up to their mouths - though not in it - and overextend or reach too far to fit something in that they really shouldn’t do. They did it in their earlier days with customer experience. They did it when they felt somewhat discomfited with the designation CRM and they are doing it with their approach to positioning Cx. It only muddies the waters with another acronym and limits their market a bit more than they need to. Just call it “Cx” and trash the “not CRM” part.
That isn’t huge per se but it does reflect a problem they haven’t gotten over yet. They need to deal with it or customer misperception will cloud their otherwise bright future.
Finally a couple of other answers needed. Estaban Kolsky someone that you should be reading if you’re not already, pointed out to me that there were no delivery schedules mentioned except 2010 - which doesn’t qualify as a delivery schedule, only a year. What is the delivery schedule for these services, and the customer success managers and the varying communities and their newer cloud product improvements? Hats off to you, Mr. Kolsky.
Also, what’s the VAR strategy? Is there one? What about a more open development model? These aren’t criticisms, just questions that are only either somewhat answered or still entirely open.
All in all, this is a HUGE leap forward for RightNow and what I think bodes well for them is that they take culture change very, very seriously - and seem to be doing what they have to do make it real - something we rarely have seen yet, in the era of the social customer.
Now, if they only eliminate the Phillies from the World Series to keep me from having any bad experiences….
October 20th, 2009
Finally! A Three-Cornered Consulting Service for Enterprise 2.0
Its not too often I endorse a new service - in fact, I never have without a lot of due diligence and at least some production history. So, for the first…and potentially only….time ever, I’m telling you that I’m truly excited about the launch of Pragmatic Enterprise 2.0. I’m not only telling you as readers at larger enterprises to bring these guys to the table but I’m also going to tell you why its easy for me to support this new entity despite the fact that its only been launched today.
What in g-d’s name is Pragmatic Enterprise 2.0?
Pragmatic Enterprise 2.0 is a triangular consulting service that fits into the “its about time someone did this” category of consulting services. For a really good comprehensive blog posting on PE2 check out Sameer Patel’s, “The E 2.0 Service Appliance” here.
Okay, back to this station.
Triangular?
The First Triangle: The Players
Yep, for two reasons. One, it’s a trinity of three major heavy hitters in varying spaces that cover the enterprise and contemporary business thinking. They are, in no particular order:
Dion Hinchcliffe - perhaps the godfather of Enterprise 2.0 - and the boss of Hinchcliffe Associates, He is the most knowledgeable guy in the space that covers the strategies and practices for the contemporary enterprise - especially when it comes to real world applications of internal collaboration and strategies for co-creation within the enterprise that return a genuine ROI. The guy is also a fellow ZDNet blogger who I think writes some of the best posts that ZDNet produces in his Enterprise 2.0 blog Dion is so well known and so successful in his realm that he has a customer list to drool over.
Michael Krigsman - Michael is the CEO of Asuret and a revolutionary in his own right. He has developed a methodology and an application to go with it that actually is able to ferret out the problems that are likely to arise during a project implementation at an enterprise. What he and it shows is uncanny and he and it work like a charm. Michael is also a popular ZDNet blogger who writes the well read (including me) “IT Project Failures” blog - which, incidentally, is now covering CRM, thenks got.
Ross Mayfield - Chairman and President of Socialtext, pioneer in Enterprise 2.0 and especially the world of corporate wikis - and a rockstar too - one of the most visible luminaries in the Enterprise 2.0 firmament. Ross’s Socialtext platform won my “SuperStah!” designation in the upcoming CRM at the Speed of Light’s 4th edition for the chapter on wikis because it is the best in its class without a doubt (at least without a doubt of mine) - as is Ross as a thinker. Ross did a blog entry on Social CRM a few months ago, called “The Social C.R.M. Iceberg” that sparked a major discussion in the industry - well worth reading - again.
While its cool that there are such notables tied into this venture, that isn’t, by itself, the thing that gets me going frankly. What I do like and will be anxious to see in action is the other triangle that they are providing, not the star power. I know and trust them for what they are able to do.
The Second Triangle: Framework, Platform, Application
The more powerful triangle is the offering itself - a trio consisting of a framework, a platform and an application - all tied to services that the joint effort will provide. What makes it important is that this is a close to a practical package of strategies and tools as I have ever seen in the world of co-creation and collaboration. There are some Social CRM implications for this too as we’ll see.
Let’s treat this simply. They’ve got an offering that is for the first time that I can see, based on the best practices at the IT, process and strategic levels, complete. Here’s the framework (See Figure 1):
Figure 1: The Pragmatic Enterprise Framework
If you look carefully at the framework, something stands out -its nearly complete. The only thing that I would say I don’t see is a way to allow the customer to collaborate with the company - the inbound communications and interactions “layer”. I suppose you could make the case for Community Management being that component, but I don’t. I would want to see a customer interaction channel as part of the framework. While not piddling, that doesn’t in any way denigrate the power of this particular framework - especially as an internal collaboration strategy and implementation. With Socialtext being the platform that this framework is built on and Michael K’s Asuret application (see Figure 2) a foundational app for implementation, this framework, Socialtext platform and application (FPA) is the first of its kind to make the way to market.
Figure 2: Asuret Anonymous Participant Analysis
What gets me excited is the possibilities. I would say is that, rather than the ridiculous noise about nomenclature that goes on all the time around enterprise software and strategy, especially when it is a nascent area, these guys are providing something that is eminently practicable for business. That indicates that the market is starting to mature.
Why (before you jump all over my butt for making that statement)? Because the framework, software and platform all have sufficient best practices, sufficient application to the market, sufficient histories of success and sufficient strategic relevance to indicate that there a body of knowledge ready to be applied. THAT’S why I say starting to mature.
So, congrats to you, Pragmatic Enterprise. Its exciting to see your two triangles out there. Your launch is a good sign for a growing business approach. Hopefully your future success will be a better sign.
October 14th, 2009
Oracle OpenWorld 2009 - Social CRM Technology Rears an Actual Head
I am almost always in awe of Oracle OpenWorld. The scope of this conference is spectacular. Can you imagine an event that the attendance is down to 37,000 attendees? Actually, that puts me in awe of their event planners more than even the event. How in the name of whoever can you put together something of this magnitude?
Back in 2007, I was also thunderstruck by the changes they made to their CRM products thanks to the team led by Anthony Lye. It was dramatic and it impacted Oracle as a company - and as it turns out, has had an impact on the industry as a whole. While I can’t remember exactly when they started calling it Social CRM, I do remember they had somehow understood that the customer’s requirements and demands and mindset had changed. They adapted accordingly - which was another source of astonishment because they were about the last company I expected to see this kind of progressive and valuable thinking from. But to their credit they did it.
While my focus has always been CRM, I have some experience with enterprise products generally, having built practices for a variety of them back in the 1990s and into the early part of this century - so I keep my eye on them. But the CRM transformation changed my expectations of what the company would deliver as a whole - ranging from their excellent CRM applications to their mysterious Fusion Apps (which are apparently going to drop at this show) to their entirely forgettable Beehive collaboration server (which I hope Oracle has forgotten too). Plus Larry Ellison’s flair for the dramatic makes me expect something remarkable.
Sadly, there was nothing remarkable presented, which is not a condemnation, just a fact. Outside of the CRM products (more on that shortly), what I’ve seen from Oracle so far (with the keynotes of Safra Katz and Charles Phillips) has been…..uneventful at best and pedestrian at worst. Not bad, just uneventful to pedestrian. The changes (at least generally) in their products have been incremental and small increments at that. Statements were made that were dramatic such as Safra Katz talking about Oracle’s “slavish devotion to Open Standards” but nothing dramatic actually occurred.
Don’t get me wrong. The keynotes by Charles Phillips and Safra Katz were fine if you were interested in an overview of what Oracle has been doing in the last year or so. The “keynote” by an EVP of Hewlett Packard was nothing more than a giant ad for Hewlett Packard, only interesting because of Oracle’s acquisition of Sun. Unfortunately, the wisdom of the crowds so to speak, supported me here because they abandoned the hall in droves during the speech.
including the growth of their retail business and the useful sophistication of their retail products - but all in all, nondescript is a good description (get the irony there?) of what I’ve seen so far.
Oracle CRM Moves Forward In Quality…And In Thinking
I will say, even with my narrow focused lenses, Oracle CRM stood far out far ahead of the rest of the Oracle Apps pack. Also let me tell you right now, I’ve been a retained consultant with Oracle though as you all know, that buys them nothing but a good job (I hope) by me. Not anything in these things I write.
CRM at Oracle seems to remain their star application, probably because it is, in 2009, the fastest growing application suite at Oracle and probably will be the Oracle revenue leader this year. That’s because they’ve understood what businesses need when it comes to being successful with customers. Note that I didn’t say collaborating with customers. That’s not what Oracle CRM is all about. They are really applications for sales and marketing effectiveness. They don’t have much to speak of in the world of customer service - with the exception of their tight partnership with Helpstream - an excellent move given their lack of native customer service apps. But they are doing what they do very well utilizing their existing Siebel applications expertise and their on demand applications in combination with a view toward internal collaboration at a company. Witness the development of Social CRM Sales Library On Demand in the last few months.
But what Anthony Lye, Mark Woolen, Christine Viera, Melissa Boxer and Adam May showed at an executive briefing yesterday on the advances in CRM was heartening because they are molding their CRM applications - traditional ones - with social and collaborative features that make them infinitely more valuable.
Anthony Lye, SVP in charge of Oracle CRM and the intellectual driver for much of this, started off with a discussion on the idea of reinvention rather than recovery as the strategy that companies need to take aggressively during poor economic times.
So far, so good.
He then framed the soon to appear demos by talking about what he saw as 3 game changing strategies:
- Executing the cross-channel customer experience flawlessly - Anthony distinguished between multi-channel and cross-channel (which was something like the difference between multigrain and whole grain) - multi-channel was a strategy that delivered an experience in mobile, field, community, call center etc. Cross-channel was a strategy to traverse all the individual channels at any given time by embedding processes to instrument business so that the customer experience was consistent. PG: While I thought the strategy was smart from a software and processes standpoint, I wasn’t truly sure that cross-channel was that much different from what I know as multi-channel. But regardless, the idea of a consistent (though he didn’t talk about authentic which is the companion piece of consistent when it comes to the customer experience) customer experience accessible whenever across channels was dead on.
- Tap into the power of the social web - this is the one that goes without saying and is the technological and process driven aspect of how Social CRM works - though by no means all of it.
- Deliver CRM data, when, how, and where users need it - this was the most interesting actually.
Anthony’s contention was that there were two types of relationships that CRM users needed to know when it came to customers. First, the explicit relationships - what kinds of communities was the customer associated with; who were his or her friends or friends of friends; the historic transactional data about the cutomer and the more contemporary profile data. But most interesting to me at least was his idea of the implicit relationships. These were not of the “who do you know” variety, but more of the “who do you look like?” When Mark Woolen, the always personable and very accomplished #1 VP for the Oracle CRM grouplet, demonstrated an app for a I presume fictional company though it was one that sold the iPhone 3G (S), he showed a button with the name “Connect to Someone Like Me.” When that button was pressed, it took you to a list of customers who were ranked by percentage of how close to your profile they were. You then could type in a question to ask of those like you. Great feature and entirely social in how it was connected. Built through the new Siebel toolkit I believe.
This is not a new idea. Political campaigns use micro-targeting to identify the lifestyle habits of their potential voters and identify blocks of voters who might all own Mercedes, be involved in social clubs etc. They then use this “implicit information” to figure out who those “similar folks” would most likely vote for, based on this kind of data. What Oracle is contending and I think rightfully is that the transactional data that’s been gathered by CRM applications can be used to find “someone like me” segments - and they’ve gone ahead used Siebel toolkits to build out what they claim here. Impressive and smart.
Melissa Boxer, who is probably the smartest person I’ve met anywhere when it comes to applying the principles of loyalty to enterprise software, demonstrated a genuinely fantastic iPhone application for Swedish Rail (SJ). Here’s a screenshot on that.
Swedish Rail Social Marketing iPhone App
What makes this application powerful is that it literally allows you use the points you have in a loyalty program to purchase items from Swedish Rail including tickets that are not only shipped right to your iPhone when you’ve used the points to buy them but can be redeemed via the iPhone. Additionally, you can make reservations directly and then have your itinerary delivered to your iPhone and if you choose to make it public so your friends (chosen friends) need to know where you are going - it can be delivered to Facebook for public or semi-public scrutiny. Swedish Rail then gets all this new data about your transactions and interactions and can use it to create targeted offerings on the spot.
Way cool and what social marketing looks like, albeit in a nascent form (so don’t get in my face about something that might be missing, okay? Nascent form.).
But Oracle is even doing more than that. They have done some I think is important with a traditional CRM application. They’ve extended Siebel with the use of a new Siebel toolkit that allows developers to integrate business processes and components into any framework whatever. That means the results of the development can be delivered to users via a widget, or an mini-application or a mobile app. But what makes this toolkit particularly important is that its got APIs based on RESTful architecture.
This is big for Oracle. The reality is that Sage led the way in the effective use of RESTful architectures and builds their current products on this simplified and yet powerful architecture. Unlike Sage, Oracle, and most of the other major vendors has been relying on service-oriented architectures which use far more commands than a RESTful architecture for their messaging and are considerably more complex. For the Siebel toolkit to use REST to deliver Siebel metadata is an important step forward in the world of CRM. It will allow for more effective and easily consumable applications when combined with the other piece of the Siebel puzzle - a visualization toolkit to change the interface to be appropriate to the delivery channel.
There were a number of other developments including a strong offering of Siebel OnDemand Release 17, which has added features that are most often found in larger on premise products including PRM, advanced analytics and what I think Adam Day said was the OEMing of Best Systems Marketing Development Funds program. and an increasing amount of vertical applications including a mobile pharma app for salespeople. All in all, there are 12 new products, 31 new features, 88 “customer-driven enhancements” - Anthony’s words not mine - and nine new integrations.
But to me the core developments are the improvement in true social marketing that recognizes the behaviors and activities of social customers. Oracle is using the traditional customer transaction data and the newe interaction data in an intelligent way tp micro-target and create “segments like me.” That’s really good for improving customer insight but what makes this truly powerful is that they’ve developed the channels and outputs to give the customers access to that same information by hooking them up with the people discovered through the micro-targeting efforts. Not only does the business gain insight, but the customer gains access. Truly multi-directional. In other words, this is what a technology can do to support a social CRM strategy. Everyone benefits.
So, hats off to Oracle now for conceptualizing and building a genuine social CRM application. But capital H Hats off to Oracle when they release it and get it beyond the demo stage. This is important and may be a paradigmatic set of CRM applications if it bears out in the real customer world as well as it seems to in the demo and development environment.
NEXT UP: Marc Benioff Speaks; Denis Pombriant and I speak; Larry Ellison speaks. Other OOW 2009 coverage worth following.
October 7th, 2009
Salesforce.com Plays In the Enterprise - Again
Back in 1999, I was a salesforce.com user and at that time, it was a rather kludgy sales force automation application that didn’t do much right - for example if I tried to export a .CSV file it gave me an .XLS file and vice versa. I read something by Marc Benioff then that said, “we are going to be the leading enterprise application provider” (or to that effect) which spurred me on to criticize them for their statement - which at the time I saw as ridiculous.
That led to Marc Benioff, who got wind of it because Salesnet had taken my criticism of salesforce.com and put it up on their website, to send me a note that said pretty much literally:
“I love to convince skeptics. Can I take a crack at you?”
My email back to him was:
“Take your best shot.”
Which he did and, to his credit, with a few great-story-to-tell glitches, he convinced me.
That’s why I saw the recent salesforce.com announcement about their their joint venture, alliance, minority investment, in Unit4 Agresso to create Financialforce.com as something both fascinating and even a little ironically amusing given that decade ago comment by Marc.
What It Is
Financialforce.com seems to be salesforce.com’s/Unit4 Aggresso’s joint effort to enter the financial/accounting market in the cloud. Coda 2Go, the original product, now rebranded Financialforce.com is already built on the Force.com platform so this isn’t a technological stretch at all. Given my at least rudimentary knowledge of accounting software and its market place (though I’d trust Dennis Howlett’s excellent September 30 take on this before I’d trust mine), this move has advantages for both salesforce.coma and Unit4 Aggresso. For salesforce.com, they get a force.com created, functionally solid accounting package - they don’t have to build their own. From the Coda 2Go perspective, despite CEO’s Jeremy Roche’s comments in Destination.crm’s Jessica Tsai’s very good article on this joint venture about their “distinct branding strategy” from salesforce.com (yeah, right, that’s gonna be really easy to distinguish), this gives them a mighty sword to go to market with.
Here’s what their home page looks like for those of you who think that this cloud offering is merely vapor.
Financialforce.com Home Page
My Take on It
I’m not clear on what market they are going after yet. If its the same market as NetSuite goes after - the midmarket to upper midmarket, with some bleeding into the larger enterprises, that means that Financialforce is going to put itself squarely in the wheelhouse of SAP also - and Oracle for that matter though SAP probably has more to worry about. But it doesn’t stop there. On the lower end, Financialforce might be competing with financial software juggernaut Sage - which as you may know is much larger in the backend systems market then they are in CRM - not that they’re slouches in CRM either. But the bulk of their nearly 6 million customers is ACT! and their varying financial packages. Plus we got Intuit in the mix here too - who are arguably the small business leader - period. Then there’s Microsoft…. In other words, this is not going to be easy for this new venture, though I don’t doubt some measure of success since they seem to be able (from what I’ve seen) to be competitive at least in their functionality. But its a really tough market to be in because it’s very mature when it comes to the quality and range of offerings.
I never count out a salesforce.com-related venture - especially in a market one they set their sites on 10 years ago. Back then Marc B. convinced a skeptic. Now he has to convince a believer that he can play in the back office. The cloud makes this promising and something of a differentiator. I think it is great that they’ve made the plunge. They seem to be successful in the areas that they get into more often than not - see the recent Customer Interaction Center announcement combining their Service Cloud 2 offering with the Cisco Unified Communications Platform for example. But this is a different kettle of fish - a busy market that doesn’t look for an innovator, though any newcomers (which they are despite Coda 2Go) still need to be an original to succeed.
September 28th, 2009
A List: CRM(ish) Reading Worth it.
Sorry to have dropped off the radar for awhile. I was on the road. First in Chicago having facilitated a customer event with Sword Ciboodle customers at the Union League Club - one that included a presentation by Brian Carey of Sears on what Sears is doing to improve the customer experience. Actually, for me, eye opening since Sears is NOT the place that I would choose as among the most progressive when it came to customers - but they are. I also found out as if to punctuate a VERY good presentation that Sears will allow customers to buy stuff from other companies on their site. Amazing.
I then went to Scottsdale, ostensibly to do what was a cocktail (not bad, “doing” a cocktail as an engagement) for Sage’s CRM group at Gartner’s annual CRM symposium - all about Social CRM BTW, but ended up little at the conference (though I did the cocktail) and more at Sage HQ where I met with the ACT! and SalesLogix teams and did an all-hands (totally about 180 folks I think) on “What in Hell is Social CRM? 21st Century Edition.” A responsive intelligent crowd. The time spent with the teams was well spent too. Without going into details, since I can’t, I will say that ACT! 2010 is a quantum (social) leap over previous editions and other contact managers that I’ve seen and adds functionality that is close to placing it competitively with simpler CRM systems, including a social dashboard (for the want of a better term) and e-marketing capabilities (OEMed from Swiftpage). VERY impressive. Impressive enough for me to break a tradition of not writing about contact managers - which aren’t CRM - normally. I will be writing about ACT! 2010 at some time in the near future.
But that brings me to this post. One other reason I fell off the radar - as noted by several of my friends and colleagues - is that I have been finishing up the 4th edition of CRM at the Speed of Light - which is done for the printed edition (due in late November) and almost done for the 5 web chapters which will be freely distributed, starting before then.
All that book prep got me to thinking about other books on social CRMish or CRM otopics that are well worth it since there are a surprising amount out there. I’ve read a lot of them and decided that I would pass on to you the ones that I truly thought were excellent. This isn’t all the books out there that I liked but they are many that stood out to me.
So here goes:
- The New Influencers and Secrets of Social Media Marketing both by Paul Gillin. A classic tandem. These two books in combination provide you with a superb overview (The New Influencers) of the social media market and opportunities in business and the tools/techniques (Secrets…) - a true how to. As fast as the market is moving, I HIGHLY recommend picking up both of them for their combined knowledge.
- Sales 2.0 by Anneke Seley and Brent Holloway - Hands down the best both compendium and how to book out there to date on selling in a social world - loaded with case studies and examples and just damn well written. Anneke, a pioneer in CRM, knows her stuff.
- Managing Customers for Profit by Dr. V. Kumar - Even though it has the dreaded term, “managing customers” in the title, this is actually one of the most important books on how to measure customers value proposition scientifically out there. It takes customer lifetime value and adds the dimensions of customer referral value and customer brand value to the mix, blowing away Net Promoter Score (NPS) in the bargain - in a good way that is. A seminal work on customer value - especially social customer value.
- The Future of Competition and The New Age of Innovation by C.K. Prahalad and co-authors. These are masterworks on co-creation and well worth reading for that. The former is the “what is co-creation?” and the latter is the “how do you deliver co-created works?” Get ‘em.
- Return on Customer by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers - a critical work on how focusing on customer value returns value to stakeholders all across the business universe. The equations aren’t the key here - the content rules.
- Barack 2.0: Barack Obama’s Social Media Lessons for Business by Brent Leary and David Bullock. Easily the best work of the many that are out there on how to apply what President Obama’s campaign successfully did to your business environment. This one is a “do it now!” Really. Now. Git.
- Putting the Public Back in Public Relations by Brian Solis. This is the handbook on using social media in the world of P.R. - not just what to do, but highly insightful on why you have to do it. If you’re a P.R. or marketing maven, or even flack, read this.
- Trust Agents by Chris Brogan. I’ve just finished reading this on my Kindle (2) and trust me, this one is a keeper. This is one of the best books I’ve ever read on how to influence via the web. Brogan, a major social influencer, wild child and all around good human being - not only gets this stuff but can articulate it so well that even a novice will be able to figure this out - without him talking down to you big shots out there.
- Your Call is Not That Important To Us by Emily Yellin. Probably the best book on the state of customer service and how to do something about it I’ve read. This is VERY strong on the actual agent based customer service world and its failures and the best practices for doing it right. Very important book.
- Seeing What’s Next by Clayton Christensen et. al. When it comes to discussing innovation, anything by Clayton Christensen is groundbreaking. You could have chosen any of this other books here. I just chose this because he shows how to use innovation and disruption to forecast change effectively - which actually seems to work. Ask Denis Pombriant. He did that with salesforce.com.
- The Cluetrain Manifesto by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger. This is a seminal work on the social customer. In fact, its the seminal work on the social customer. You have to read this one. I have the original. The link is to the revised 10th anniversary edition that just came out which I haven’t read yet. This one set the bar for the new relationships between corporate and customer.
- The Experience Economy and Authenticity by Joe Pine II and James Gilmore. Both seminal works - lots of seminal works in my list it seems. The Experience Economy set the tone for consumable experiences as a core customer requirement back before the century. Authenticity set the tone too - for the use of honesty and the appearance of honesty as a corporate requirement.
- Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. This one covers the universe that social customers/people now live in and what social media and communities are doing to enhance and transform that universe. There is no better book on that subject out there now. None.
For now, that’s it. Are there others I could have put on the list? Of course! I don’t have only 15 or so books that I think are great. These are top of mind and standouts. There’s also many I haven’t read yet. Plus I have to get going.
Yes, the praise for these is effusive but that’s because I think these are great books and that’s why I’m recommending them (duh.). Please do me the honor of reading them. They are so worth it.
September 14th, 2009
Brent Leary Expounds: The SMBs Rejoice
Brent Leary, who is not only my bud, but one of the leading, no, the leading, small business consultant and analyst when it comes to small business (duh!), CRM, social CRM and social media, is someone that I want to highlight on these pages. Not that you need to come here to see him. The man is OUT THERE pretty widely. He has a blog called Brent’s Social CRM Blog, a radio show/podcast called Technology for Business Sake, writes for the American Express Open Forum and Black Enterprise online and speaks all over the place. In fact, he’s just getting back from Argentina. He has a book that I would highly recommend you read called Barack 2.0: Barack Obama’s Social Media Lessons for Business. And of course, most important of all, he is my partner on The CRM Playaz, easily the coolest show in the CRM world, though how much that’s saying, I’m not sure. But one thing is sure. The man is VISIBLE. And really smart.
He recently was a judge for the CRM Magazine Market Awards small business category and after the awards came out, had quite a few things to say - a retrospective of sorts really. I thought they were something that you should hear here (yeah I see it). So without another word from my yap, here’s Brent on CRM, the SMBs and the vendors that you should be watching.
Small Business CRM Market Leaders - The Addendum…
CRM magazine recently came out with their annual Market Leaders award issue. This is my second year participating in the small business suite category selection. And while a lot has happened over the past year in the space, the usual suspects continue to top this year’s list. Salesforce.com found itself back as the winner here, while last year’s winner, Maximizer, dropped back into the leader’s category. Joining Maximizer as leaders are Netsuite, Zoho and Sage’s ACT!, which moved up from being “one to watch”. This year’s one to watch ended up being SugarCRM, who also picked up the market award for open source CRM suite…no surprise there.
While I don’t have any major issues with the list (hey, I was one of the voters, remember?), there are a few bones I’d like to pick. So, in the immortal words of DJ Kool, “Let Me Clear My Throat…”
Salesforce’s Last Year At The Top?
Salesforce.com has been the poster child for on-demand CRM for years. Along with NetSuite and RightNow, Salesforce.com survived the Dark Ages where nobody seemed willing to trust vendors with their customer information. Not only did they survive, but Salesforce deserves a huge amount of credit for popularizing the SaaS movement, with their quarterly updates and marketing magic. And they’ve continued to innovate with things like AppExchange and the Force.com cloud computing platform. So you’d think that Salesforce.com would be in position to stay on top of this category for as long as it wants to. But do they? That’s a question a growing number of small businesses using SFDC seem to be asking, as their customer satisfaction score of 3.5 (out of 5) came in a half point lower than last year. As a former Salesforce.com certified implementation partner, I still talk to a good number of small businesses using the service, and some feel like they’re not valued as highly as they used to be. And then there are the ones who’ve already switched over to solutions like Zoho and InfusionSoft (we’ll talk about them in a minute). Apparently I’m not alone in hearing these stories, as other analysts are quoted as hearing the same thing.
I have no doubt that Salesforce.com will continue to innovate and offer top-notch products, but that’s not enough for many small businesses. They are really looking for a partner to listen to them, and to demonstrate a real interest in what they need. But if they feel they’re not being valued as highly as they used to be, or that bigger companies are more important than they are, they are likely to find another vendor who they think will treat them better - even if the functionality is not as good as SFDC’s. So if Salesforce.com doesn’t change the trajectory of the customer sat ratings, I can’t see them winning this award in 2010, or possibly ever again. There are companies out there that are focused 100% on small businesses who will likely take over the mantle.
Maximizer Needs A Public Option, I Mean A SaaS Option
Just kidding about that public option stuff, I’m definitely not getting into that. But not having a SaaS offering seems to be the only thing that kept Maximizer from repeating as the small business suite champion, as demonstrated by their low ranking for company direction. Maximizer is all about the SMB space, and has earned a solid reputation for providing good products and services to that community. I also think their big push into mobile CRM will pay off for them and their customers (to hear more about their mobile push check out my recent conversation with Maximizer president Vivek Thomas). But not having a hosted option in the “on-demand age” is a puzzlement. I understand that they’re a smaller competitor and have to pick their spots, but all the other vendors on the leader board here have the SaaS option.
Where’s Microsoft ?
Taking a look back at my take on last year’s list, my choice for “one to watch” was Microsoft. In fact, here’s exactly what I said:
“Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online - I don’t know how you can’t keep an eye on what Microsoft does here. But the strange thing is I’m not hearing as much about CRM Online as I expected to when it went live back in April. The price point is right, and the integration with Outlook is seamless. But again it’s kind of weird that it didn’t even make the list of ones to watch.”
All I can say today is the folks at CRM magazine got it right, because a year later I’m still not hearing much about CRM Online… and I’m still kind of surprised, just not as much as before. What’s up with this? I really don’t get why Microsoft is laying so low here.
Speaking of Ones to Watch
Well at least I wasn’t the only one to swing and miss. While Sage moved up to be a leader from last year’s “one to watch” list (and deservedly so), the other company identified last year was NetBooks. Netbooks…which is now WorkingPoint…after running into big problems and having to reinvent itself. Needless to say Netbooks/WorkingPoint did not make the list. And let’s not even get into the whole Entellium affair, who obviously didn’t repeat as a leader in the sales force automation category.
Although the Microsoft pick from last year didn’t pan out as I expected, I still have high hopes for my other choice last year for “one to watch” - InfusionSoft. InfusionSoft makes no bones about their target audience - small business. When it comes to marketing automation and workflow functionality, it gives you a lot of bang for the small biz buck. They’ve recently changed their pricing model to make it that much more affordable for small businesses to jump into serious online marketing capabilities. And they’ve raised some nice funding to make even more changes that tells me they are willing to do what is necessary to become a small business advocate - not just a vendor.
I also think Avidian Prophet is worth a look if you’re a big Outlook user. Bantam Live and Network Hippo are two other small vendors I’m keeping my eye because of some cool things they’re doing at the SMB level. And another small player to keep an eye on is BatchBlue, which offers a very affordable online crm application called BatchBook. What I like about BatchBlue is that they really get the spirit of social CRM with their online activities, and they also are involved with The Small Business Web consortium. This is a group of small vendors (including Freshbooks, MailChimp, Shoeboxed, etc.) creating apps for the small business market, where all involved have pledged open APIs, making it possible for their apps to work together.
It’s All Good
All in all I think the CRM mag list is a good one. But I do see Salesforce.com and NetSuite moving in directions that take their focus away from the real little guys out there. So will they still be considered small business leaders a year or two from now? I’m not sure. But the good news is there are a number of vendors out there more than ready to fill the void. Zoho is staying true to their small business roots, and investing time and effort making their multitude of apps work better together - like the deep integration between their CRM and email applications. Maximizer continues to focus on SMBs and their needs for mobile CRM. And Sage’s ACT! 2010 has breathed some new life into the product, which is definitely good news for many small businesses heavily invested in the application. Plus I can see SugarCRM following in Sage’s footsteps and moving up into the leader’s category, under the right circumstances. And you know there will be an unknown company or two (or three) that will shake things up, and keep the leaders honest in their approach to the needs of the small business customer. I can’t wait to see where we stand in 2010. In the meantime what CRM vendors do you feel are doing right by the small business community?
September 4th, 2009
Now I Know Why I Can't Stand the Washington Redskins
About 15 minutes ago I saw this story in the online version of the Sporting News: “Redskins suing fans who can’t keep their season’s tickets.”
I now know why I can’t stand the Redskins and their ownership.
The story is clear enough: The Redskins are suing 125 seasons ticket holders who they say wouldn’t work out financial arrangements with them to pay their multi-year seasons ticket contracts. The Washington Post, publishers of the original story, had interviewed 20 of the season ticket holders most of who claimed that they had lost a job or had some sort of financial hardship. The Redskins claimed they attempted to work something out but the ticket holders said in response that the payments were too hefty for them to afford anymore.
Okay, its bad enough that the Redskins, who are wildly popular in D.C., would probably have not all that much trouble reselling the seats, though admittedly that’s a presumption, but it was the following comment that just reminded me why I am no fan of this club.
“The Post reviewed lawsuits in which the Daniel M. Snyder-controlled entity WFI Stadium Inc. sued 125 Redskin ticket holders for a total of $3.6 million. The team won judgments totaling $2 million from 34 season ticket holders, most of whom did not hire an attorney and defaulted by not making an appearance in court.
(Redskins attorny David) Donovan said other teams sue their fans. “I don’t know of any pro football team that doesn’t,” he said.
The Post, being intrepid, went and asked other teams if they sue their fans since they clearly weren’t going to take the word of David Donovan. They found that the Baltimore Ravens, Cincinnati Bengals, Green Bay Packers, Houston Texans, Jacksonville Jaguars, New York Giants, New York Jets, Seattle Seahawks and Tennessee Titans, don’t. So much for Donovan’s blanket statement. The Patriots said they sued and the Chicago Bears said “yes, rarely.” The rest of teams either declined to comment or didn’t respond. So of the 11 responses, 9 said they didn’t sue. Hardly an overwhelming statement of support for Attorney Donovan’s “they all do” comment.
Does that mean that others do? I imagine so. But apparently Redskins management don’t talk to the 9 teams that understand that hardship actually is hardship and their fans can undergo it. Reality is that even in hard economic times, there are enough people out there spending oodles of money to cover the lost ticket contracts.
From the standpoint of the customer, what should a team say when these situations arise?
We love our fans but are perfectly willing to destroy their lives because they are unable to pay for something we are likely to resell?
OR do you think that they should do what the Giants (disclaimer: I love the Giants) and others did and simply reclaim and resell?
The question is how the fan experience is impacted by a team that you love and root for enough to purchase a multi-year very expensive package so that you can attend games - a discretionary expenditure to say the least. But if you lose your job, should the team be compassionate and let you slide and just repossess the tickets or should they sue because you’ve signed a contract?
Technically, they can sue and likely win judgments. But from my standpoint, they aren’t going to have a problem selling the multi-year seasons tickets to another Redskins fan. So suing and winning and then reselling they get twice the (ill-gotten in part) revenue.
Way to go Redskins. That’s why, even though I live in D.C. I will NEVER root for you. You don’t understand your own incredibly devoted fans. Which, given present management, is no surprise.
This is a true FAIL for customer relationship management.
August 31st, 2009
Voice of The Customer: Speech Meets Larynx at CRM Evolution 2009
Last week, I keynoted the CRM Evolution 2009 conference - probably the best conference I ever attended, though I was biased because I also chaired it - first time I ever chaired a conference - so I had the opportunity to be a participant in more than just the speech.
But the keynote wasn’t just for the CRM Evolution conference; it was a joint keynote for CRM Evolution 2009 (get all coverage here) and SpeechTek 2009, the annual best attended speech technology conference (get some coverage here).
So I had this dilemma. What can I say to a joint group of people with diverse interests that would interest both without watering down the message? Honestly, it took me WEEKS to solve this one. I truly had no idea beyond a mundanely clever title for the presentation - Voice of the Customer (get it?).
But after awhile I realized that I was thinking about the whole thing wrong. I was trying to appease the dual groups rather than realizing that my actual job was to get across my idea in their metaphor. AND that there was a common glue that bound both audiences - they were all business people who needed to engage customers.
The ultimate difficulty was combining the metaphors in a way that would attract both audiences. The idea remained the same and its one that I preach constantly - “the social customer is the customer of the 21st century and they demand engagement and knowledge that they need to accomplish a piece of their personal agendas. In order for you as a business to provide that you need insight. That means data needs to be captured and analyzed. But data is no substitute for human judgment, merely an aid to it.”
Here’s my presentation. I’m doing this because I got the idea when Michael Krigsman, our ZDNet compadre who has the world class IT Project Failures blog, did the same for his presentation at CRM Evolution last week. Please let me know what you think. This was slightly uncharted waters for me, so I can stand to get some pointers on where I might have done better - both on the ideas and the style of presentation. Though I do admit, that I think its pretty good.
August 20th, 2009
Deconstructing United Airlines: Where Customers are Transactions
United Airlines: Customers are Merely Transactions
If you’re a loyalty marketer and look at my United profile, you find something that would make you 4.5 on a scale of 5.0 when it comes to warm and fuzzy. You’d see hundreds of thousands of United Airlines frequent flier (FF) miles; a pattern that suggests that I fly exclusively, including client bookings by their travel agencies on United for me; you’d see signing up for dozens of promotions; you’d see using hotel loyalty cards to get United FF miles in the place of hotel points; you’d see me flying United partners Star Alliance airlines whenever I can’t fly United. You’d also see about 50-75,000 miles per year over the past few years. I’d look like a very loyal United flyer.
I’ve been Premier Executive for a few years, which means that I flew 50,000 miles or more each year. But in 2008, I had a horrible auto accident in August that limited my flying to virtually none for the rest of the year. As a result I flew 36,000 miles which brought me down a notch to Premier. But by November 2008, I was okay and I had booked and paid for 26,000 more miles of flying from January 4 though Feb 15, 2009.
That sets the stage. Oh, one other thing. United’s timeframe for determining FF status is from January 1 through December 31. Status privileges run from March 1 through February 28.
In any case, as late November 2008 rolled around, I received a letter in the mail from United Airlines. In effect, it said:
“Hey, we see that you only have 36,000 miles this year which will make you a Premier rather than a Premier Executive flyer. Tell you what, you give us $2300.00 and we will give you the additional 14,000 miles that you need to be Premier Executive. How about that?”
I swear. They wanted me to pay $2300. I was….incensed…and I’m only saying “incensed” because of my PG-13 rated worldview. I mean, can this approach be much more disgusting….and, for that matter, out of touch with the reality of a customer?
But, then the real question is what should have happened?
If I were United’s Vice President of Customer Experience (I believe that they’ve had four of those in five years though don’t hold me to that exact number), I would have an algorithm or two that would pretty much spit out the same info as they had. But then I would have had a plan to address the issue that wasn’t “send us $2300.” It would go something like this:
“Hey, we see that you only have 36,000 miles this year which will make you a Premier rather than a Premier Executive flyer. We’re concerned. What happened that caused you to fly so much less?“
Let’s assume I made the choice to respond to United and told them what happened. At the point I understood that Paul’s Acura had stood in the way of his flying in 2008, if I were United, I would also check to see what Paul’s history is and future bookings are. Then, as United, I probably would notice that Paul Greenberg had paid for 26,000 more miles for January and February. In other words, traveling that much before his 2008 official Premier Executive privileges ran out. Then I, United, would send another note in this spirit:
“Hey again. Since you’ve been a Premier Executive flyer for a few years and you couldn’t help your circumstances and you’ve already paid for 26,000 more miles which would total 62,000 miles by the time your privileges run out, we’ll take a chance on you not canceling those bookings (PG note: I didn’t cancel) and extend your Premier Executive flyer privileges another year. We’re very sorry about your accident.”
They didn’t do that but instead insulted me with their “offer” to let me pay. Rather than me moving a bit closer to being an advocate, the result I truly dislike United. Though my loyalty numbers don’t show that, do they?
Lesson #1 For United: What Should Have Transpired
The key to this isn’t the offer to keep me Premier Executive for another year. That isn’t that significantly different than Premier when it comes to rewards. It’s the note to me asking “what happened?” Rather than the:
“Hey, we don’t really care that something might have happened to you to break your recent historic patterns, we are only interested in getting something from you in return for letting you ‘keep’ the privilege of your status.”
Contemporary customers demand some sort of human or at least seemingly human interaction with the companies that they frequent for more than a utility purchase. United still sees customers as transactions. Thus, I look entirely loyal because of my “transaction numbers” e.g. amount of miles etc. But my behavior is driven by inertia - the cost of my investment and the cost of change outweighs the effort I can afford to give it now. My emotions are driven by disgust for the very company I look loyal to. AND, because I have a wide number of venues to write for and speak at etc. every year, I get to use United as a lesson in what not to do when it comes to engaging customers in front of what amounts to hundreds of thousands of people. Not exactly good but you wouldn’t know from the numbers.
Yet Another United “Customers are Transactions” Story……
A dear friend of mine is a Senior VP at a major government contractor here in Washington D.C. She passed on this United story - in fact the trigger for writing this piece.
“Hi Paul….If you recall…last year there was a problem with one of the so called “customer vouchers” for my son. It was issued to my son when they had delayed his flight (their errors) for about 10 hours. When I called about the voucher being basically impossible to use (required to physically go to an airport and present it versus use it online), United gave me the run-around, I asked to speak to a supervisor….and UNITED transferred me to American Airlines.
Well…now they have changed their frequently flyer program and cancelled his points. Now cancelled in 18 months vs 2 years. I spoke to a manager…and got the run-around again. Bottom line zero points. Oh yes….for $350 they will re-instate his 25,000 points.
The United Customer Service Supervisor said they changed the rules for frequent flyer points in January 2007…reducing from 2 years to 18 months. In January 2007, (The boy) was a Junior in high school. He was not keeping track of United’s frequent flyer changes. I don’t keep track, because unfortunately - I fly them. He lost a round-trip on United that he could have used to visit his Grandmother. Verbally they said we could buy the points back for .0125 per frequent mile PLUS an administrative fee - but we can only do this online. My head is spinning. Gee - maybe I could use the $150 voucher that I can only use at the airport toward this - ha ha ha.
United gets a grade of F for customer satisfaction. They really don’t care - I say….let’s all go fly Southwest. They care about their customers.”
United Lesson #2: What Should Have Transpired
There’s so much wrong with what United did here.
First, transferring the customer, out of pique one can only presume, to American Airlines, is problem #1. Second making the use of a voucher difficult rather than easy is problem #2. Then cancelling a kid’s points and then saying, “oh, we’ll reinstate for $350,” is problem #3.
Wow.
Its easy to make the case - at least easy for United - of “well, them’s the rules, boys and girls. You gotsta follow the rules. The timeframe for use of FF points was over.” And, if customers are transactions they may be right. But sometimes, the human circumstances and reality (a reality that of course United banks on), merit an interaction rather than a transaction - meaning, you find out that most people aren’t that aware of rules changes and there had been a lot of grief and angst associated with the chain of activity on this particular situation, calls for a bending of the rules.
What the problem is here is not necessarily just a bad set of circumstances with a customer. There was a bit of this that was just outright stupid - the transfer to American Airlines instead of a supervisor. But most of this is due to a rigid set of broken procedures.
First things first - there needs to be a way to use the voucher online. United makes a point of encouraging the use of online reservations as a cost savings measure for them and a benefit to the customer - and online Easy Check-in is one of the few good things about United. However, making it impossible to use the voucher online goes against what they want to begin with and only makes it more difficult for the customer to use a benefit that they got in return for something that was a discomfort to the passenger to begin with.
Second - Given the particular circumstances, someone should have been made available to the customer who was empowered to restore the points. No one is saying do it uniformly, but, United, you need to remember that customers are looking for personalized treatment and when a circumstance that allows it arises, be smart enough to be flexible - rather than looking like an organization that, once again, sees the customer as a transaction. The answer here should have been, “okay, this once, we can restore the points, given everything else that happened, but it is an 18 month limit now and please be aware of that for the future.” Rather than “it’ll cost you $350.00″ - apparently a familiar theme.
And Yet Again: United’s Broken Guitar - The One We All Watched
I think we’re all familiar now with “gone-viral-on-YouTube” video “United Breaks Guitars” which has gotten over (there is no past tense on YouTube only past perfect) 4.8 million hits since it went up. Here it is if you haven’t seen it. I don’t like country, but I did like this.
It was amazing enough that it took United more than a year after the guitars had been broken and numerous complaints and a refusal to pain as their final answer originally to finally agree to pay for the broken instruments. Which Dave Carroll of the Sons of Maxwell (the Nova Scotia based country group that had the guitars broken) didn’t want and had donated to charity. But that wasn’t enough. Listen to this incredibly lame response from United:
“‘While we mutually agree this should have been fixed much sooner, Dave’s excellent video provides us with something we can use for training purposes to ensure that all customers receive better service for us,’ spokeswoman Robin Urbanski told the (Chicago Sun Times).”
Not the response you wanted to hear.
United Lesson #3
The only thing I could call this “official” response is cowboy bootlicking contrition - it sounds insincere and actually doesn’t address the problem. While its great they are going to use the video to train, what about the processes and the hiring policies that led to this happening in the first place. A humorous video that gained a lot of attention isn’t the training I want to be giving. It may be funny to watch and a nice little public relations ploy, but as a customer, I’d rather hear about how they were overhauling their customer service policies given the number of complaints they get on a daily basis. And the massive mistrust that they continually engender. But then, that’s just me.
What United should have done here is pretty obvious. Pay for the f—ing guitar when it broke, not when it became the subject of a clever viral video. The damage was done by that time. Additionally, they should announce significant changes to their customer service training and policy and be transparent about them.
What United seems to be overlooking in their training mea culpa is that not only was it broken due to gross mishandling by some employees apparently, but they refused to pay for it - a management decision. This video being used in training doesn’t change their policy. Which simply should be if they break it they should pay for it.
And Another…..
This one is short and sweet. Last fall, their Chief Customer Officer, Graham Atkinson, left United and Dennis Cary became the Chief Customer Officer.
United Lesson #4
Unfortunately, for United, Dennis Cary is already their Chief Marketing Officer. The fact that they are combining the two positions is another egregious example of their incredible lack of understanding of customers. CCO and CMO are NOT positions that live in a single human body. They have vastly different purposes and can even be at odds. This is nothing disparaging to Mr. Cary. I don’t know him so I’m not speaking to his qualifications for either job. But he shouldn’t have both. A Chief Customer Officer is, when appropriately tasked, to engage customers in the kinds of interactions that make them advocates of the company at a programmatic and policy level. Those policy decisions and “rule bending” that we’re talking about are a CCO’s responsibility - and should be as far away from marketing as possible. The irony is that the message that the combined positions sends is that to United customers are nothing more than objects of marketing. Transactions again. You’d think marketing would figure that out…..
Finally….One of the Worst
What makes this final United story totally ironic in addition to being a serious problem is that it happened to my wife and mother in law yesterday as they were heading to St. John’s Newfoundland via Montreal beginning at Dulles. In other words, while I was writing this.
To put it simply. My mother-in-law is 86 and needs a wheelchair to travel. United is required to have a wheelchair, if requested, available to her at the gate when she leaves the plane. We requested the wheelchair at Dulles airport, they called it ahead. According to Air Canada, United should have finished the request so that she was covered when she got to Montreal and then St. Johns.
Well, there were delays due to mechanical issues on the flight to Montreal and they got in but were unable to make their connection (they had a 15 minute window after they landed). One of the reasons, aside from the incredibly short time was that there was no wheelchair waiting for my mother-in-law and ultimately they didn’t really have one for her. My mother in law of course was discomfited by this whole fiasco. My wife managed to commandeer a wheelchair later without United’s help. An Air Canada representative was good enough to help them and told them that the flight attendants on United are aware of special needs passengers as are the ground personnel and since it was going to be delayed obviously, the United ground personnel should have made sure that a wheelchair was waiting despite the delay. There wasn’t one and not much interest in helping them either.
United Lesson #5
Aside from don’t mess with my family, United should have done what they should always do. Accommodate change. If there is a special needs passenger known to them and a problem that they cause one way or the other, then they need to make sure that there is a smooth and seamless transition so that the customers aren’t discomfited. Not that big a game plan for that. It would have taken a phone call to say, “hey, there is this special needs passenger on the flight to Montreal. The fight is 2.5 hours delayed. Can you makes sure that we still have a wheelchair waiting?” Not that tough to figure out.
In Sum
The heading of this final section is ironic. Because “a sum” is exactly how United views its customers. Its why United is continually one of the lowest in customer satisfaction surveys and is beaten up continually in the cybersphere. They are going to need a fundamental culture shift to recognize that the customer - the social customer - is looking to have them provide the kind of experience that excites them to be associated with United rather than repulses them. So Dennis Cary, stop looking at the numbers that your loyalty people throw at you and instead talk to your customers in a serious concerted way and then, listen to them.
I’d love to lay out a few of them here, but why should I? Hmmm, maybe for $2300 I’ll do it so I can afford to be Premier Executive again…..
In addition to being the author of the best-selling "CRM at the Speed of Light: Essential Customer Strategies for the 21st Century," Paul Greenberg is President of The 56 Group, LLC, a customer strategy consulting firm, focused on cutting edge CRM strategic services and a founding partner of the CRM training company, BPT Partners, LLC. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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