Category: Customer Service
November 23rd, 2009
Chatting (Not Chattering) About Salesforce - Part I
(NOTE BEFORE I START: This is one really long post. So rather than post it in all its glory in a single file or post it here over two days, I’m trying something new. I’m posting the first half here. And the second half on PGreenblog. Let’s see how that works.)
I’d like you to think about something. The Big 4 of CRM are considered the following:
- Oracle
- SAP
- Microsoft
- Salesforce.com
Salesforce has at best 1/15th the revenue of the smallest revenue of the other three. At best.
By no standard imaginable - except one - does salesforce.com belong in this list - especially IF size matters.
But that one factor is the combination of their continuing ability to at least be the leading market edge when it comes to recognizing trends and at best be the innovator and the creator of those trends. Plus the incredible energy and charisma of Marc Benioff doesn’t hurt either. ’Cuz if it were sheer numbers that determined the leadership - not just the shareholder value - there is only a big three - and little slightly more than a billion dollar salesforce.com wouldn’t be on that list.
But larger than (business) life they are - as Yoda told me just the other day.
So where are they with the release of what Marc called the “4th Cloud” Salesforce Chatter yesterday along with the other three - SalesCloud 2, ServiceCloud 2 and CustomCloud?
I’d say, at least if choosing my body of options, they aren’t creating the trends or innovating here. What they are doing is nailing what the trends are and being on the leading edge of those trends. That’s going to be the suit they wear in the post-Dreamforce 2009 world that we will all be inhabiting after this week.
Marc and salesforce.com have always had an uncanny ability to see the business world in its sexy glory. Marc put it well several times when he said that creating the company and the initial sales app/service were inspired by Amazon and the current incarnation of salesforce with its products etc was inspired by Facebook, Twitter and what pretty much amounts to the social web.
My take has always been that consumer thinking has penetrated the enterprise - been saying this since I was a young whippersnapper back in 2003. But salesforce.com has had a vision for years and been following through on that vision with an extraordinary rigor.
What is that vision, you ask? Well hop onto the Wayback Machine, Sherman and let’s go to 2003.
The scene is a hotel restaurant in Shanghai with men and women of mystery eating their breakfasts, talking to “someone”, murmuring under their breathes about important things. I’m sitting at a table with Tien Tzuo, the then CMO of salesforce.com, now CEO of the very successful SaaS billing and payment systems vendor Zuora. Know what he’s telling me?
(This is a paraphrase. Read the 3rd edition of CRM at the Speed of Light for the literal): “We want to be the place that all business people come to run all their business applications. We want to be the Business Web. We’re not just a CRM company.”
Guess what folks, while this may be an ambitious goal and one that they’ve tempered with the message that Marc peppered his two days of keynotes with at the conference that (again paraphrased) “we realize that companies will be running other systems,” this is precisely what they are continuing to drive for - with force.com and cloud computing. Have they succeeded? No, not yet, there is a long way to go, but they are walking on the same road - even trotting on it - that they were walking back in 2003. To those who say that force.com takes them away from their “core competency.” Knaves, you are wrong. Force.com is their core competency. (Boom. Fade to black).
Now, lets get on with it. For the rest of this post, I’m going to discuss their so-called 4 clouds. Service Cloud 2, Sales Cloud 2, Custom Cloud 2 and of course, Chatter, their 4th cloud. At PGreenblog, I’m going to do a piece on the back stories of the conference - like the analysts who were there in droves, the conference management, the meetings I had, and maybe even some of the parties. We’ll see. That’ll be out before Thanksgiving.
First, Is All This Social CRM? The 4th Cloud?
The answer - which will be qualified by the end of this piece - is “Yes” “No” and “who cares?” But I do want to start this by telling you that calling Service Cloud 2, Sales Cloud 2, Custom Cloud 2 and Chatter the 4 “clouds” are not clouds. They are either cloud services (Chatter), cloud applications (Service Cloud 2 or Sales Cloud 2), or platform as a service (force.com a.k.a. Custom Cloud). I don’t particularly like marketing like this because it just confuses a market with customers and prospects who are trying hard to understand what the cloud is. This isn’t the cloud. Not clouds. Niet wolken. No nubes.Keine wolken. ניט קלאָודס. 没有云彩
That’s my multi-lingual declarative and I’m sticking to it. Take me on if you want with some comments, but I won’t fold. Ironically, I did a webinar on the cloud for salesforce.com about a month or two ago that you can access here (registration is necessary). Listen and then tell me that those 4 things are “clouds.”
The Big Picture
While touted as game-changing, earth-shaking, revolutionary, and transformative, I didn’t see that. Other than the “apps are talking to me” I didn’t see anything that I hadn’t seen implemented somewhere else - and better elsewhere n some cases (I’ll discuss that later). But what I did see and was beyond impressed with was a fully integrated framework and architecture for social computing that integrates social CRM, and could easily enough deliver social ERP and social “supply chain” and social “anything you damn well want.” We saw that with the extraordinary - and I do mean extraordinary demo by Vetrazzo CEO, James Shepard.
Were they perfect and seamless? No. But after all the conferences I’ve attended this year of all the vendors, this was the most developed and integrated execution of an end to end contemporary platform I’ve seen to date. That said, it still was a demo with what seems to be a February through indeterminate 2010 release date. So how complete it ends up, remains to be seen. By way of comparison, Oracle Fusion, talked about for 3 years, which could be the competitive platform to this someday, is still in the “wait and see” stage with a demo of Fusion Apps for the first time at Open World 2009. For now, end of 2009 and into 2010, force.com, even with the problem of Apex as a proprietary development language, is going to be the platform to beat. (if anyone dares excerpt this in part, w/o the caveat, I’ll kick your butt.).
Also, the claims that were being made sounded a bit much at times, though not always by salesforce. One that particularly stood out was that Frost and Sullivan in a May 2009 report said that salesforce.com had 55 percent of the revenue from North American SaaS deployments of customer service. I’d love to see that Frost and Sullivan report and hear they came to that. I literally don’t believe that number - even if Frost and Sullivan “proved” it. Sorry.
So how does this all shake out ? Let’s break (dance) it out.
The Health of salesforce.com - Left Brain
The numbers speak for themselves. If you’re a fan of run rates they are at a run rate of $1.3 billion annually as of now. My run rate is about 4.5 mph. So you know where they and I stand in this. That’s all fun but a bad month can kill a run rate. But their actual numbers are pretty healthy too. Revenue for the 3rd Quarter was $330.5 million up 20%, beating financial analyst expectations by a little (I had no expectations - which is why I’m not a financial analyst) They now have 67,900 customers with 4700 new customers. They were slightly more profitable. All in all not a bad showing, which of course is why their stock price declined on the news of their improvement - nothing like Wall Street to ruin a party - except the ones they throw using their newly restored bonuses. (PG Safe Harbor: The previous sentence is a populist commentary, not an expert analysis. Thank you).
Service Cloud 2
When salesforce originally announced Service Cloud a year plus ago, I thought it was a good thing because they were filling out the portfolio for CRM at least with something that has been notoriously poor in CRM suites though it was offered, and for them it at least filled a major hole. Though I was, after an initial rush, somewhat underwhelmed by the first offering. with Service Cloud 2 they’ve filled gigantic gaps from the 1.0 version and they’ve added some integrated social features. They have the requisite Twitter integration, which is a perfectly adequate integration though frankly, the current stellar enterprise Twitter customer service integration belongs to SAP with the use of Business Objects Insight to provide a sophisticated sentiment analysis capability and business rules/workflow/alarms/triggers etc. Salesforce.com, of course, integrated Chatter functionality around things like case resolution for example (e.g. have a “service conversation” with not only the customer but with the managers and so that the triggers and alerts are visible as a subscribed feed. Again, you’ll understand what in god’s name I’m talking about a little later.)
They’ve also gone the “complete solution” route by allying with Cisco to provide a pre-fab contact center for small and medium businesses which is a very wise move on salesforce’s part as they continue to move upstream. This way they don’t lose the market that made them what they are - small and medium business.
One area that they’ve done extremely well in this release is built around customer knowledge. One of the reasons that customers are turning away from the companies and more toward peers when it comes to solving problems with products and services is that they don’t trust the companies to give them the right answer nor do the companies have the knowledge captured that they need to really help the customer. Plus the search capabilities for many of these knowledge bases is awful.
But rather than simply try to improve the quality of the knowledge presented to the customer from some internal source, salesforce has taken the most intelligent route possible by embracing this new paradigm and using the “wisdom of the crowds” (god. If James Surowiecki gets a royalty for every time that phrase is used, he will be richer than Ellison soon enough) rather than fearing it or trying to compete with it.
What they’ve done is create Salesforce Answers which essentially lies along the “engage customers through communities to help solve problems” spectrum. While this model in more specific ways has certainly become popular in 2009, Salesforce Answers is a relatively flexible option that is highly configurable to the customer service needs of the customer. Combined with Salesforce Knowledge their “multitenant” knowledgebase and their so-so Twitter integration, there is a lot of customer service value being provided, particularly around customer service engagement and self-service. Service Cloud 2’s concept is responsiveness, information and engagement.
My rating: A bloop single because of the improvements from the original Service Cloud, not because of its strength relative to other packages. Its only a hard line drive but caught there. (for non-baseball left-brainers 3.00 of 5.00; for non-baseball right brainers “not bad.”
Sales Cloud 2
Now we’re talking! This is actually more exciting to me than Chatter, and given my proclivities toward (oh-be-have) social “stuff”, that’s saying a lot.
Salesforce was always a leader in sales force automation. No doubt about that. They have had solid functionality, a tolerable interface as the tab pioneers and strong traditional SFA functionality. Of course, that meant that the functionality was geared toward sales management more than directed toward providing features that would be valued by sales persons. However, not only have they strengthened the management features, but they added features that were without a doubt aimed at providing what the sales person actually needs to do his or her job.
Are they the first to do this? No. Oddly Oracle was back in 2004 when they added a quote generating engine for their Oracle CRM (pre-Siebel, pre-PeopleSoft CRM). I wrote about it in the 3rd edition of CRM at the Speed of Light in fact.
But salesforce has done a major league job by improving on other quote engines by providing a real time quote engine. They model it, according to them, on the power seller paradigm that eBay uses. Meaning a few clicks and there is a quote based on the current pricing and configuration. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy as the Geico gecko says.
One major feature that I think is a vast improvement over past editions is the Cloud Scheduler. What makes it more than a personal information manager feature is that it allows scheduling with outside partners and customers pretty much using drag and drop. If your partners and customers - and of course - other staff are connected (opted in) then you can do what Outlook does with the “find best available time for all concerned” automatically.
Of course, they have the requisite Twitter integration, though aside from me not being particularly impressed by their Twitter integration in general, what its doing in a sales application beyond a monitoring tool, I have no idea. Even in their official press releases they talk about converting “Twitter conversations into customers” which is honestly, a crock. It isn’t an integration that converts a Twitter conversation into a customer. I’m glad you can integrate Twitter conversations of customers into the sales record but beyond that, so what?
Any salesforce Content Library document is available on mobile devices with this release which is a huge plus for those on the road all the time - which includes, what else - salespeople. All in all a smart feature.
That said, let’s take a brief look at the social integration of the Content Library. Salesforce claims that rather than just getting a presentation from a repository, you can now take a look at the content, see what others have said about it, find out which deals it was used on, solicit feedback on the value of the presentation or document given the opportunity and also collaborate on changes. While this is fine, it sounds like a somewhat less robust and thus almost dead ringer for Oracle Sales Library. So I don’t think this was inspired by Twitter and Facebook. Sounds more like it was inspired by Oracle. But, its still a good addition to the library.
Sales Cloud 2 actually is a significant step forward for this company formerly-known-as-CRM’s CRM SFA application.
My rating: A line drive triple into the gap, driving in at least a couple of runs. (for non baseball left-brainers 4.00 of 5.00; for non-baseball right brainers - really quite cool)
November 16th, 2009
CRM Association-Netherlands Rocks Het Huis!
I’m in love with Amsterdam….no wait, I love it but I’m not in love….no, hold on, I like it a lot, but I’m not in love, nor do I love it.
The Theory….
Interestingly enough (to me at least and who else am I really writing this for anyway?), while this may seem to be nothing more than the ramblings of an emotional confused sensitive male, during my speech at the CRM Association NL spectacular conference a couple of days ago I spoke about those very emotions as a way of looking at how granular the knowledge of emotional states are for each individual human being when it comes to truly knowing how you feel. Humans actually operate a.k.a. live with this incredibly complex knowledge of their range of individual emotions. This is not how many loyalty marketers look at it, though. While by no means am I opposed to the science of loyalty marketing, what I find as often as not is that traditional loyalty marketers tend to reduce their view the universe of human connections and relationships in scales - often from 1-5. Without any disrespect to those who don’t, a scary number of them see a “granular understanding” as a scale of 1-10 instead of 1-5. Metaphorically of course. Maybe.
(The problem is that loyalty (and advocacy) are the results of emotional connections to someone or something which can’t be truly measured on a scale of 1 to anything. For example, what can you tell me of the loyalty of a person who measures 4.2 on a scale of 5 versus the commitment of another person who measures 4.5 on that same scale? Nothing. Broadly, does it matter to me or you whether or not the demographic segment that this person represents scales at 3.8 rather than 3.6? If it does, please see someone. Really.
Again, putting my edgy New York sarcastic blade aside for a moment, the way customers actually work is to get involved with a company in a way that satisfies the emotional (and buyers) needs of some aspect of our personal agenda at some time and over some time. We don’t scale things. We say “they’re really cool!” Not “they’re just so 4.6.”
Chris Brogan, one of the social media mavens that I thoroughly respect and actually like too, told a story on Callie Lewis’s Geekbrief TV the other day about how a car service that that was supposed to pick him up to get him to Microsoft headquarters didn’t show. He tweeted his anger/anguish and a CEO of a national car service sent him a tweet with “here’s my cell.” Call it whenever you need a car and I’ll take care of it for you.” Car came, Brogan happy, loyal customer. As Chris rightfully said, “Yes, you may say its opportunistic, but he listened (to the tweet) and he solved my problem and now I’m loyal to him.”
That’s what I’m talkin’ about!
While this might be a long aside, a version of it was part of my speech and at the same time, I’m in love with Amsterdam and the Dutch and love the incredibly high caliber the CRM Association NL works at and I like the food a lot.
Amsterdam is So 5.0…err…Romantic and Amazing
I flew to Amsterdam as the second to last leg of “PG’s 41K Flyabout” I had committed to speaking there, which I felt I should as the EVP of the CRM Association of the United States. It was a fellow association, after all though 3700 air miles away. I was in touch with the man who has been its face for several years, Wil Wurtz, who also runs Metrics and More, a company that designs the measures for companies so that they have some idea of how they have to perform to make their customers - and shareholders - happy.
But I had never been to Amsterdam, nor had I known that much about the CRMA-NL except that they were expecting around 200 people at the event, pretty much 100% from the Netherlands.
The Practice
In Love
One of the reasons that I loved this trip was that I had the opportunity to meet both Mark Tamis, who came in from Paris for the event and Wim Rampen - who lives in the area. If you don’t know these guys, shame on you. Both are becoming key Social CRM/Social Business (call it what you will) thinkers in Europe and thanks to blogs and Twitter, internationally. You can find Mark’s blog here and Mark on Twitter here. You can find Wim’s blog here and Wim on Twitter here. This was my first opportunity to meet them. Mark got in early after a 6 hour drive from Paris and we met about 1 hour after I got to the Savoy Amsterdam Hotel (more on that later).
Mark graciously gave me a 5 mile walking tour of Amsterdam (he is a Dutch native living in Paris) that was not only great in terms of realizing the history of Holland and the remarkable nature of the the city but also a great chance to get to know this very fine human being.
Amsterdam is without a doubt a city that combines a remarkable history with a culture that might be unmatched anywhere in the world. Stunning churches with remarkably ornate rectories and ceilings that reached some point in the universe that was unviewable from the church floor - now museums. A culture that treated bicyclists as more significant than auto drivers. Thousands of cafes, restaurants, and bars, cobblestoned or bricked streets that saw human and bicycle traffic with the occasional car up on what you would think was a sidewalk. A people who are the tallest I’ve ever seen who drive cars half the size of what you see in the U.S. And are perhaps the most relaxed and funniest with, let’s say, a lusty sense of humor, I’ve ever met.
At one point, yesterday morning, I looked out the window of my room at the Savoy Hotel and I saw a light rain falling that had coated the streets - made them damp with a little glistening, rather than really wet. Across the narrow street were these homes/buildings with courtyard like wide alleys - most of them built out of brick in the 17th century - also damp. There were two bicyclists - one riding slowly and steadily up the street; the other walking her bike. I started thinking “Van Gogh could have seen this exact scene” - which was entirely true until the BMW drove by. But the charm and romance of the thought really nailed me. I just simply “got” the city and the people at that exact moment.
I am in love with Amsterdam.
Love
The CRM Association of the Netherlands (CRMA- NL hereafter), I would have to say, is the best organized, most substantial CRMA I’ve ever run across. Led by Wil Wurtz and Gerard Struijf, it has 200 member companies who support it wholeheartedly and in return it provides a range of services that any CRMA worldwide should be envious including this conference. This was a CRM Awards conference with awards for CRM Accelerator (went to UBS) and CRM Excellence (went to CarGlass) that are taken seriously. In fact, the only awards I ever saw taken as seriously were those that GreaterChinaCEM jefe Sampson Lee gave out at his conferences in Shanghai over the past few years to Chinese companies.
What also makes the CRMA-NL a gem is the way that they related to vendors. Unlike the incredibly ambiguous approach that U.S enterprise institutions have with the vendors - which is to treat them something like lepers with money - they treat vendors the same way as they treat practitioner companies - as companies who have something to sell because that’s what companies do. Meaning the vendor sponsors are as integral to the growth of the CRMA-NL as the practitioners and are treated as equals - they co-mingle. They can talk with each other about anything they want. Sponsorships can be from Microsoft and Accenture as well as ING or DSM International. It kind of simplies what I alwasy see in the U.S. with conferences - contortions on the policy toward vendor sponsors. Our Dutch compadres have practitioner sponsors too - because of the way the vendors are perceived - as a company rather than a predator.
Lest you think I’m going soft, I’m not. Any company will still continue to be the public subject of my ridicule if they deserve to be. But other than that, they are on equal footing to me too.
OK. Now that I’ve protected my manhood, I’ll continue on.
The conference was attended by both vendors and practitioner companies - mostly practitioners. I gave the keynote with a somewhat new version of the Era of the Social Customer (see below) -not the same as the one I did for the Lithium Social CRM Virtual Conference. I was told Dutch audiences are shy as an audience and direct as individuals. All true.
Here’s the presentation. (Note: There this is a slidecast with creative commons licensed music. Maria Daines “Rollin’” Get it here.
When it was done, I spent the next several hours (except for an incredible interview with Sales Exactly correspondent Marielle Dellemijn that became so interesting a conversation, I was interviewing her as much as she interviewed me) fielding questions from individuals - being challenged (a little) on ideas, and having amazing discussions with the practitioners.
I was truly impressed by the commitment to CRM that these attendees had - meaning they were spending money implementing social CRM and traditional CRM.
- DSM (which is an international company) is carrying out a significant series of social initiatives that they are linking to CRM systems - particularly in e-commerce run by the Director, Corporate E-Business, Marc God. They are as good as or better than any I’ve heard of anywhere.
- Financial services giant, Robeco has a department, led by an industry veteran, Gerard Wolfs, who’s sole purpose is to develop customer insight. Hear that? Not manage customer data, not use analytics per se - but to develop customer insight. An entire department. A whole department. Insight.
- The MC was a brilliant host named Rens de Jong. He is a radio personality and managing editor at BNR Nieuws Radio. Let me tell you, as a host, the man knows how to move a crowd. But more germane to Social CRM, he led an initiative at BNR, which is not a small entity, to develop a community of known listeners - and they are 4000 strong within a few months. Think about it. Radio listeners don’t usually have names and lives associated with them listening. They just listen. The only data that normally is gathered is transactional such as the data that Sirius/XM has for those who subscribe or the names of donors to National Public Radio (NPR) in the U.S. But with the BNR community we are talking about living, breathing humans.
- Carglass Nederland (which does car glass repair and is international) won the CRM Award 2009 for their company wide B2B and B2C implementation of an integrated customer centric strategy aiming at 100% satisfaction of customers. This involved all levels of the business and creative thinking around it. For example, if your windshield breaks while driving, they send someone to you to replace it on the spot. Customer experience indeed. UPC Nederland, a cable company won the CRM Acceleration award for their progress in their customer-centric implementation and strategy. Meaning they don’t allow it to bog down in the bureaucracy we often see when it comes to CRM programs.
Those are only a few examples. On the vendor side, Microsoft and Accenture along with BrixSoftware, a Dutch SugarCRM partner were particularly prominent. Martin Hermsen, who runs the Benelux CRM Practice at Accenture, was so astute and good natured that he got me a little closer to the “let bygones be bygones” stage with Accenture, with whom I’ve had a long standing animosity.
Okay, I know that this isn’t some big “how to” piece on Social CRM or related to the ongoing discussion in social CRM practice that needs to continue. Honestly, if you have a jones for that right now, you should be reading Graham Hill’s very important “A Manifesto for Social Business” over at CustomerThink, and (note I didn’t say “or) read Esteban Kolsky’s absolutely extraordinary and groundbreaking series of five posts on “The SCRM Roadmap” (it starts with #1 here). They are groundbreaking. Any one or all of them will take care of that for you - and I’m sure that I’ll have something to say to each of them because I never know how to keep my mouth shut.
But if there’s anything I think characterizes Social CRM or the whole science of CRM in general its that it is a science of business that attempts to reproduce the art of life. That means what actual people are doing to improve how we contact each other is what really is exciting. So when I am blessed (in a secular way, of course) with the opportunity to meet those who are doing it in the business world - who are real humans, and not personas or avatars, once in awhile I’m taken so much by the experience that I feel compelled to deal with it one of the ways I know how - which is to write about it. Because the human part of it, not the processes, measures, or technology, is electrifying.
Like a Lot
I have to say that the overall hospitality was pretty amazing too. The Euro-style hotel, the Savoy Amsterdam (which makes all the sense in the world in Europe), had the requisite small room,
Savoy Amsterdam - See how charming it is?
but unlike the Hudson Hotel in NY, of Margin of Utility infamy, the room was well laid out - i.e. I could get out of bed without smacking my head into a wall; and the amenities were meaningful - a free, full Dutch breakfast;extraordinary but low key service from the front desk; a free mini-bar. Even though the mini-bar was just a variety of alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks, the idea was amazing. ”Free” and “mini-bar” are not a phrase you see strung together frequently. Additionally,
The Room - Smaller than it looks, but great
there was a free bar - a help yourself kind of bar in the lobby - though I didn’t partake. What was astonishing to me in the “like a lot” was the hotel exceeded my expectations, which had been tempered by the Hudson Hotel in NY, because it was supposed “euro-style.” Here not only were the accessories high end, but the value adds were wonderful and the service excellent - and most important, the room just big enough and comfortable enough to make its purpose successful - sleeping in it. Thus, the additional stuff went from being an ineffective mask like the Hudson, to a delightful set of additional benefits.
Enough No More
So, thank you to the CRM Association - NL. This was the best leg of the 41K so far.
The lesson on the Social CRM side, since I’m not supposed to be writing travelogues for ZDNet?
Loyalty doesn’t lie in stats or data, it lies in humans being human and how you apply your business principles to that simple understanding.
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….
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…..
May 6th, 2009
Philadelphia Flyers Rock! - When It Comes To Customer Experience, That Is
I need to make something clear from the start. I’m a diehard NY Rangers fan when it comes to hockey. In fact, with the exception of women’s soccer where I root for the Women’s Professional Soccer League’s (WPSL) Washington Freedom, I root for New York everything when it comes to sports - especially the NY Yankees.
But, I have to tell you, the Philadelphia Flyers‘ fan engagement program is by far the single most well thought out and successful CRM strategy and program I’ve seen to date in professional sports. Bar none - including my beloved New York teams. Shame on the Rangers.
What makes this program, which is called “How You Doin’?“ exceptional in any environment is that it begins where CRM strategies and programs should begin - with the culture.
“The How You Doin’ program is the culture of this organization from full time to part time personnel to the fan base,” says Senior Vice President of Business Operations, Shawn Tilger. “We are always making sure that we aren’t just implementing software, but are embedding the philosophy and outlook into everything we do internally and externally.”
All the staff at the Philadelphia HQ of the Flyers and at the Wachovia Center are trained to greet everyone as they come into the stadium, trained to answer questions for anyone who has them, and trained to go above and beyond for customers. They take a high touch, get involved approach.
Their strategy is two pronged. First, engage the fans generally. Second, know each fan and their individual lifestyle and customize programs according. The third prong is measure, measure, measure; learn, learn, learn.
What that means in real terms is that they are constantly gathering information about each of their fans. That means they are getting granular profiles of their season’s ticket holders. They are gathering information about each fan that attends a game or buys merchandise.
Using a combination of salesforce.com, marketing ubër-application Eloqua, and a stored value program that allows customers to go cashless and use their ticket or cell phone to purchase seats, merchandise, food and any other concession they have at Wachovia Center, they are able to capture the kind of information about a fan that lets them know fan behaviors from the time they walk out the door to the time they leave the stadium.
Philadelphia Flyers salesforce.com Customer Record (source: Philadelphia Flyers)
To provide what they call “stored value” on the ticket or the cell phone, they use a system from IMS, a point of sale company with a deep penetration in the sports world.
The system that does this, the IMS Stadis system, gives the team the means to “store” a cash value on the ticket that exceeds the ticket price itself and then track the usage. Not only can the fan buy a Flyer’s hockey puck or a hot dog or a beer if they are alcoholically-inclined, but the transactions are tracked into a database that is merged with the customer record of that individual. This process and system is what Bruce Culbert, a leading CRM expert and Managing Partner of BPT Partners, LLC, calls “event revenue optimization.”
In the words of IMS itself:
“STADIS is a venue integration solution that uses stored-value ticketing to deliver a ‘Single View of the Fan’ for teams, colleges and specialty destinations.”
But STADIS is only part of the system - and that system is only part of the strategy. What they do with this “single view of the fan” is what becomes fascinating given their commitment to a contemporary customer-centric culture.
Armed with the deep profile data, they have several programs designed to on the one hand engage fans and on the other solicit their feedback. To that end they are constantly doing real time polling and surveys of fans at the games on their game experience, their ticketing experience or even the cleanliness of the building.
What makes this fascinating is that it is real time and the data is captured real time. So if they have 1000 fans who complain about the cleanliness of the third floor, they can dispatch people to take care of the problem (if they choose to) within minutes of receiving the feedback.
He Shoots! He (Lead) Scores!
Because the combination of salesforce.com and Eloqua can be powerful, the Flyers are able to develop deep lifestyle profiles of season ticket holders based on the products they hold and the interests they have. In other words, not just do they have a full year package, but do they drive a Mercedes or a Pontiac (oops). It’s not just transactions/purchases or income levels. It’s what hobbies they have, other sports interests, foods they like.
These in-depth profiles provide enormous leeway to the Flyers to target how they are going to interact with their fans; what they are going to propose as a package to their fans; and what kind of messages they are going to send to their fans.
For example, they have season ticket holder profiles. They match these season ticket holder profiles to individual fans who have the exact same profiles first, and then those that are nearly the same. The idea is that there is a propensity for those individual fans with the same profiles as the season’s ticket holder to be more likely buyers of a season ticket than others with less of a match.
But how they approach the fans with ticket sales and renewals is also important, once they’ve identified the prospects. They don’t just do standard pitches for ticket sales. They look to provide an innovative way of immersing the fan in the Flyer experience. Take a look at this video.
This is a remarkably immersive idea that works to involve the actual fan in the Flyer’s drive to renew and sell tickets while providing an unparalleled fan experience. Makes me almost root for the Flyers.
Almost.
What also makes this so extraordinary is that they not only had programs to re-up the solid season ticket holders but also had a game plan for the fence sitters who were wavering because of financial considerations.
It wasn’t that complicated. Here are the repeatable steps.
- They booked the Hall of Fame Room at Wachovia Center for the first intermission for each of two games.
- They invited 30 accounts each night who were undecided about renewing their season tickets mostly due to financial reasons.
- They simply provided ice cream for the guests and used this time to talk to accounts about renewals and new payment options
What’s both simple and great about this is that the customers felt that they were getting personal attention in a room that also reminds them of the team’s rather storied history. And - they got ice cream - which really isn’t a lot but the combination made the wavering ticket holders feel good. Remember this dictum - you don’t have to have luxury, you only have to feel luxurious. When you can make a customer feel that way, you are in the process of developing an advocate. In the case of the wavering ticket holder, you’re reducing the up and down uncertainty and solidifying the likelihood of a re-up.
More on the Technology
The use of salesforce.com and Eloqua was based on a best of breed approach in choosing what technology packages to use. The idea was a deeper integration between the sales and marketing folks so that using the two applications, leads could be created and scored and gotten to sales from marketing in a timely way. This was not meant to be just a simple implementation to track opportunities. Timeliness mattered and customer history mattered so that Eloqua and salesforce.com could work together to provide highly qualified leads in as close to real time as possible. It no longer was marketing for lead and demand generation, sales as a data repository. They now worked in conjunction.
Fan Stimulus Plan
But, you may inquire, furrowing your brow, what about the fact that we are in a recession and people don’t want to spend money on sports because it’s a discretionary spend. All that cultural effort and that technology pool would be needless, if people weren’t buying tickets wouldn’t it. Besides, hockey isn’t as popular as football or baseball anyway, is it?
Non-believers, I am going to debunk the “don’t want to spend money on sports” part of this. As far as more popular than football or baseball, probably not yet, though I love it - baseball first for me, though.
The Flyers, fully aware of economic reality, didn’t step back and limit their creativity. They instead developed an innovative approach that has had a real return.
They created a Fan Stimulus Plan.
The Fan Stimulus Plan is much bigger than just perhaps a price break or a payout. They began by creating a Season Ticket Holder Advisory Board that was there to help them determine what would be the programs that made sense for their ilk in a recession. Based on ongoing feedback they had been getting from the Advisory Board and the other fans, the Flyers then created a Consumer Assistance Department which developed personalized, individualized payment plans so that the fans could continue to afford season tickets. They kept pricing flat unlike my wonderful, great New York Yankees, who misunderstood their aura - and charged $2650 for a home plate field level seat. The Consumer Assistance Department also sent out notices earlier than in the past around season ticket renewal so that the renewal could be planned for better than it was in the past. They set up a nine month payout for a season ticket, rather than the customary seven.
You’d think that would be it, but no. They also created two marketplaces. The first was for those who want to offload game tickets they aren’t going to use - something like a Flyers specific StubHub. The second market was for finding partners who would go in on purchases of a season ticket with you. Something like a non-gender based match.com. That way, you and the matched partner or, I presume, partners (thought of in a non-kinky kind of way), could split the cost of a season ticket.
Okay, but results matter. “Did you see any results with the recession in the way, Shawn?” (That would be me talking). “We are 24 percent ahead of season ticket renewals from last year.” (That would be Shawn talking)
Those are results. Yet, given the depth of the program, the level of fan immersion and experience provided and the incredible granularity of the customer data and profiles, it’s no particular surprise either.
That’s how they’re doin’.
May 5th, 2009
CRM, Heroism and 26/11 in India
I imagine you’re wondering what one has to do with the other since they’re terms not associated with one another. Let me tell you a story:
Back in late January of this year, I went to Mumbai to keynote and teach at a conference on Loyalty and Advocacy in India sponsored by the Bharati Vidyapeeth’s Institute of Management Studies and Research (BVIMSR). BVIMSR is an extraordinary organization, who’s Director, Dr. Dattajirao Y. Patil, told me has ties to every major university in India and has set up hundreds of rural schools. They, like many Indians I met at this conference in an extraordinary trip to India, were very concerned with CSR - corporate social responsibility - so concerned that the acronym was as natural to them as CRM was to me.
You know, the reason that I didn’t cover this at the time I was there was that I was so overwhelmed that I couldn’t get my arms around it. I just didn’t know what to write - it was just too big and so much different than I could have possibly expected.
I had only seen a slice of India. It was about two months after 26/11 which is what they called the terrorist attacks on Mumbai in November 2008 and that was not only still fresh in the psyche of the population but the military were everywhere and armed to the teeth from the airport to the city. Yet, these amazing citizens had just picked up and kept going within a couple of days after the attacks - despite the fact it had killed nearly 200 of their citizens. I was staying at the Taj Land’s End - the “other Taj” - the one that hadn’t been attacked. Yet, in stark contrast to this beautiful five star hotel, which is one of the few five stars I’ve stayed at that deserves the name, across the street, visible from my window, was the Palace Hotel which had been blown up in a terrorist attack in 1992 or 1993 and was never repaired.
While only a slice of India, which is, needless to say a lot bigger than Mumbai - and this was a sliver of Mumbai’s 18,000,000 on seven Islands - I was profoundly affected by the resilience of the people I met and the keen interest in doing “the right thing” and their deep interest in CRM too - which was incredibly enthusiastic - at least when it came to the 300 or so people at the event.
There was SO much more than that, but I’m not going to cover it because it still overwhelms me a bit. All I know is that I want to go back and do more there.
I’ll do a report on the CRM market in India sometime in the near future. Suffice to say that Oracle, SAP and a little more surprisingly the Campus Management-owned Talisma are strong forces there.
Back to the story:
One of the hotels that was attacked during the horror of 26/11 was the Oberoi in Mumbai. Several customers were killed in the assault, but if it weren’t for the incredibly quick thinking and the CRM training of the folks at their customer contact center it could have been considerably worse.
I had a conversation with Ravish Swarup, the SVP of the Oberoi Contact Center and was incredibly impressed at how the Oberoi handled that horrific situation.
According to Mr. Swarup, during the crisis, the call center opened up their lines to the rooms of the customers. They were able to reach a good number of the hotel guests and keep them posted on what was happening and what to do. In one case, where it looked like the guest was going to bolt the room due to what seemed to be a panic attack, they were able to talk the guest into staying in the room, most likely saving that guest’s life.
Mr. Swarup told me that this was because of the culture of the company and their CRM training. First, they understood without any hesitation that their first obligation was to maintain contact with their guests. Second, they were responsible for guiding their guests and keeping them fully informed so that they had the information they needed to remain calm and think throughout the crisis. They also understood that time constraints were irrelevant. They were even able to help keep a semblance of activity up, risking their own lives to make sure the guests had what they needed to get through this.
What happened after the attack was also incredible - and a direct reflection of how one thinks in a customer-centric environment. It wasn’t a big thing but it could have been.
As with most hotels, the Oberoi sends out a request to each of the customers that asks what they thought of their stay. You can imagine what would have happened if they had sent that out after the terrorist attack on the hotel. Luckily, they were thinking and caught it. Instead, they’ve spent time contacting guests who stayed at the hotel during the crisis and have been crafting packages and special arrangements if they should decide to come back.
As a result of this heroism they, and their counterparts at the Taj won a special National Tourism Board award called the Atithi Devo Bhava - Pride of India Award in February for exemplary bravery. Entirely deserving.
This is an amazing story - and one that you don’t often associate in any way with CRM. In this case it was and it actually makes me glad this kind of thinking was put to a use that likely saved some lives. The staff and management at the Oberoi are true heroes.
Mr. Swarup asked me to stay at the Oberoi next time I come to Mumbai. I’ll do so happily.
April 3rd, 2009
When Health Care Law, Health Insurance Companies & Customers Don't Mix
My wife and I get our health insurance from Anthem Blue Cross & Blue Shield, here in Virginia. Because my wife is a cancer survivor our insurance rates are exorbitant. Last year, we had a $500.00 deductible (each) and were paying more than $1600 a month for coverage that at best was going to get us 80% when the deductible was covered.
Toward the end of last year we made a decision to increase our deductible to $2500.00 which would not only get us 100% coverage when the deductible was done but would lower our rate to around $1279.00.
Quite the bargain (he said entirely sarcastically). But the increase in the deductible was offset by the reduction in the monthly payment so that we were swapping more upfront costs and maybe a couple of hundred dollars more for 100% coverage. Worth it to us. This began January 1, 2009.
However, little did we know what was in store. We got a notice yesterday that said our monthly rates were going up to $1576.00 as of May 1, 2009 - an increase of nearly $300.00 per month. A convenient fact, they forgot to tell us when we were changing our deductible for this year.
To add insult to financial injury this paragraph was in the letter accompanying this rate increase.
“We work hard to keep your costs down
“As health care costs continue to rise, we work hard to find ways to save on the health care services you need. For example, as the largest health insurer in Virginia, we have used our negotiating power to keep local provider and national pharmacy costs as low as possible. But even with cost-cutting initiatives like these, we’re finding it necessary to increase premiums for all members enrolled in your type of plan.”
Their idea of saving us money is to increase our premium by $3500 a year? Their cynicism is breathtaking.
The Nature of the Health Insurance Beast
One would think that with the outcry over the high costs of health insurance, the general health insurance bashing that’s going on, the bad perception as cold and uncaring that they have and the discussion of universal health care, their concerns about actual living, breathing (that of course presumes they had been able to afford health insurance when they got sick) beings - sentient creatures called, drumroll please,…………customers would be paramount.
They are not concerned. Their customers aren’t even a subject of discussion.
This came abundantly clear when I called the customer service line for Anthem and spoke to a very nice representative who was clearly hamstrung by two things a. the company b. regulation. I was absolutely astounded, not just by the magnitude of the increase (around 23 percent) but by what I was told. This was a “policy wide” increase. In other words, my actual health didn’t matter, my wife’s didn’t matter, nor did our track record in any way matter. This premium was raised whether you were a category 4 (high risk) or category 3, 2, and 1 (low risk). This was raised regardless of any individual whatever. It was a raise whether you paid $1279 per month or $450 per month. You were raised that same nearly $300.00. Why, because it was “against the law” to treat individuals as individuals, when it came to pricing policies for specific insurance programs. So this increase was based on the performance of the policy itself - not the customers using the policy. You can imagine that, in effect, my human health concerns are reduced to the level of an actuarial table, an algorithm or two and a policy. There is NOTHING human about that. There is NO customer differentiation - actually not even recognition by Anthem that there customers are something more than a name on a policy.
Is there a law preventing this differentiation? My customer rep told me that they have been told there is.
I checked as best as I can and I couldn’t find anything that substantiated that either nationally or in Virginia. That said, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It could.
But can insurance companies treat their customers individually if they’re blocked by law? They can’t right?
Wrong.
In the 3rd edition of CRM at the Speed of Light I covered another Blue Cross Blue Shield (this would be back in 2004). That was Blue Cross of California and their My LifePlan program which was a customer friendly program that provided a large set of online tools to help you find what you needed without much bureaucracy - be it a specialist, pharmacy or a wellness program.
More germane was this:
“It is in the interest of the insurance company to see that a diabetic customer has regular checkups for blood sugar. Consequently, by institutionalizing CRM processes, the alert will show on an agent’s or other appropriate CSR’s screen that diabetic customer A should take advantage of a free test being given in his area over the next month. Aside from any humanitarian concerns that the insurance may (or may not) have, keeping that diabetic customer healthy is in the insurance company’s interest, simply because if the diabetic is healthy, no one collects and premiums are paid for a longer time. The insurance vendors can also track whether the diabetic took advantage of the free blood sugar test. The response can create the need to adjust the level of risk associated with the diabetic. This is a step better than even the thought-leadership that CRM-driven insurers can provide and is a major step to reducing risk without the cold-blooded approach characterized by State Farm.”
As of 2009, you can substitute Anthem for State Farm. No wait. Add “and Anthem.”
This approach would be aimed at preventing recurrences which benefits the insurance company that doesn’t have to pay out the dollars. Second it would make a policyholder feel like the insurance company gave a crap beyond the money we’re feeding them each month so that we don’t have a catastrophe that we can’t afford to pay for. In other words, this would be a way to treat a customer like an individual that mattered to the company.
Has Anthem ever sent us a notification of something related to preventing a recurrence of my wife’s cancer - either through an email or a direct mail piece?
Noooooo.
All we ever have gotten in the nearly a year we’ve been with them is notices of bills and notices of things that might become bills. And the monthly invoice. And now the notification of the premium increase. I mean this literally. Not metaphorically.
Sure, look, I get the fact that they are a business but if the customer in the highly sensitive area of health is nothing more than an actuarial table and a policy performance tied by an algorithm, then their business doesn’t deserve to survive, much less prosper.
Whether you believe in universal health care or not (I do), I would presume you would see that this is not just an inhumane approach, it is a cold blooded model implemented by heartless creatures who have no concern for their actual policyholders. They are concerned that a. you pay and b. you don’t use the insurance ever.
My wife and I are stuck with this company for awhile. Because of her past condition, it isn’t that easy to guarantee coverage, so the cost of moving is perilous for us. But from a CRM lesson learned here, it should be clear that not only is this a company that should never have its practices emulated, even with nice CSRs, but it should be seen as a model of what not to do when your customers are more engaged and more concerned than ever.
January 14th, 2009
CRM 2.0: The Government, Public Service & A Transformed World
I KNOW that everyone who reads ZDNET columns loves technology. I get that. I also KNOW that everyone who reads ZDNET blogs loves it when the bloggers dish on technology companies - especially, it seems, Microsoft. I realize that coolness and government don’t go together very well - probably something akin to eating milk and cookies except that this time it’s goats milk and veal cookies (not like Oreo Double Stuf cookies - check out the Manning bros and the Williams siblings for that one) - but hey, we just elected a President - and one of the reasons he GOT elected was because of his integration of campaign and personal coolness and Web 2.0 technologies - used in a groundbreaking way. If you want more stuff on the applicability of that, check out my stuff on Barack 2.0 (just kidding! Its actually Brent Leary’s stuff. See my post on how his Barack 2.0 work was plagiarized here. If you’re interested in Brent’s actual Barack 2.0 work, go here.)
The impact of President Obama’s (I’m not waiting until January 20) election campaign on the world fabric was profound, because it broke new ground in how social tools and constituent engagement strategies are applied . But applying it to administrative efforts through federal (and lets not forget state and local) agencies is very different than how its used in a campaign - the campaign was marketing so to speak and the use of constituent engagement strategies and tools is customer service - also so to speak. Its easy to want to make the linear transition but its not a linear transition.
What made the Obama campaign brilliant were several things - its recognition that people were communicating in new way and that those same people were involved in his campaign because they were fulfilling self-interested agendas - not following him in a cult-like way (though there was some of that too). In fact, the only real slip up of the campaign (which, luckily had little ultimate impact) was when the Obama changed the rewards system (the “loyalty program”) from volunteers acquiring individual points (e.g. 4571 points) to volunteers achieving a certain rank (e.g. 0-10). That removed the individual accomplishment that each volunteer had. For example, if you were the #1 volunteer and had 5000 points that was better than the #7 volunteer with 4194 points, dontcha think? But if you had 5000 points and got a 10 ranking score and the same 4194 earned you a 10 - what’s the benefit to you? The points didn’t get the volunteers “stuff”; but it did get them reputation. The idea of being high in the standings as “numero uno volunteer” among all volunteers, so to speak is far more self-satisfying than just being one of a gazillion hardworking 10s (unless you’re Bo Derek). As the #1 volunteer said when the point system was eliminated “they can’t do that. Its my points!” Which is precisely the, ahem, point. There are a number of great articles on how Barack did this, besides, of course, Brent’s ongoing posts. Here’s a couple. - CIOZone. Wired’s Blog Network.
However, the transition to constituent engagement built around either a customer service model or a contemporary collaborative version of what’s called the public-private partnership is a lot more strenuous and actually a lot harder because its purpose is a continuous engagement of a diverse set of constituencies at the individual level that does not have an election day end date. Additionally, its highest purpose is the restoration of the public’s faith in institutions that are currently severely damaged. That would be the government institutions. This isn’t a matter of a lack of faith in a sitting President or the desire to believe in an incoming one. This is the institutions of day to day government - executive, legislative and administrative. This means bodies that supersede individuals and that outlast any one administrator. It also means governments beyond just the United States.
The social customer that I and industry thought leaders like Chris Carfi spend so much time talking about is one that wants not just transparency - which allows him or her to make a more intelligent decision on how they are going to engage with an institution - but they then want to actually engage with that institution. This is not the human participant of even five years ago. They expect that transparency, honesty and the means to engage made available from every-single-institution they potentially interact with. That extends from business to social to leisure (e.g. sports team) to government. The universal expectation is the same, though some of the specifics might vary from institution to institution.
This is no mean feat when it comes to the government. To put it bluntly, no one trusts the government - at least in the U.S. - to do what its expected to. In fact, the Edelman Trust Barometer 2008 points out that trust in government institutions across the 18 country board is 39% - a pathetic level of trust. The numbers are staggering - U.S. 39%; Europe (except Sweden & Netherlands where trust in govt. is 63%) it is between 29% and 37% in all other countries; in Asia - India, Japan, South Korea - 40%-49%; (China an anomalous 79%). In other words, 15 of 18 countries it ranges from 29-49% with most in the low and mid 30s. That sucks.
The remedy is already on the table. Oddly, a government that gets somewhat maligned in the U.S. from time to time, is easily the most responsive in the world and one that I’ve visited several times and written about on occasion and that would be Singapore - and I am not alone in those (these) findings. As I’ll show you in a bit, Accenture published a study a few days ago that verifies my claims.
Yeah, Singapore.
2005
In August 2005, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong delivered what was a andmark speech in which he declared a “National Service Excellence Initiative” that would create a service environment along the lines of the Ritz Carleton - “ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen.” What made this ground-breaking was that this was the first time (at least that I could find) that a government stood entirely behind an initiative that was based on creating an extraordinary customer experience that extended from every employee of government or business to the employers to the individuals who touched the shores. Some of it was to encourage international investment in this tiny city-state but for the most part it was to provide the kind of experience for its citizens that would make them loyal to the institutions that ran the country. It started with the retail industry but extended far beyond that.
I experienced this first hand when I landed at the Singapore airport a month after the declaration of the initiative and they had someone who greeted me and took me through customs without a hitch. A few days later when I had neglected to get an issue of the Singapore Business Times that carried an interview with me and couldn’t find it the next day anywhere - the hotel I stayed at - a five star called the Sheraton Towers Singapore, made an unsolicited effort to get me the paper - by sending someone to the offices of the Singapore Business Times and delivering to me in my room on a Saturday. The stuff legends are made of - and a direct result of the National Service Excellence Initiative.
2007
But Singapore didn’t stop at just creating a high caliber service environment. They have actually created feedback programs that would be classifed by Trendwatching.com (sister site to Springwise) if they had “in-between” grades, something like Feedback 2.5.
Feedback 2.0 (which is now being superseded by Feedback 3.0) is, according to Springwise:
“…about these rants—and some raves—having gone ‘mass’(no, make that MASS!). The long-predicted conversation is finally taking place, albeit amongst consumers and not, as intended, between corporations and consumers. Companies have started to take note, but to a large degree still choose to listen, not talk back, trying to ‘learn’ from the for-all-to-see review revolution. Which is surprising, to say the least, since a quick and honest reply or solution can defuse even the most damaging complaint.”
Now look at the definition of Feedback 3.0:
“FEEDBACK 3.0 (which is building as we speak) will be all about companies joining the conversation, if only to get their side of the story in front of the mass audience that now scans reviews. Expect smart companies to be increasingly able (and to increasingly demand) to post their apologies and solutions, preferably directly alongside reviews from unhappy customers. Expect the same for candid rebuttals by companies who feel (and can prove) that a particular review is unfair or inaccurate, and want to share their side of the story.”
Singapore probably falls somewhere in between that, around 2.5- as a country!! Whoa!! They actually have an annual National Feedback day which is designed to capture feedback from interested citizens so that they can input government policy and budgets. In 2007, I attended National Feedback Day with about 6,000 Singaporean citizens and watched with astounded fascination the mostly intelligent and passionate discussions on varying government reports with proposals in different areas such as housing, or transportation or education. Citizens flocked to general and proposal-specific sessions to discuss their thinking on the different proposals and present their counterproposals or support for the existing recommendations. The actual committees that wrote the report were on stage and available to be grilled. The back and forth about housing or education policy based on the proposal was amazingly detailed. Each committee had a scrivener who took notes on the citizens’ comments.
If you couldn’t’ attend, they had all of the reports available online and you could provide them with feedback there. All of the in person and online feedback was aggregated and then incorporated into the revisions discussion. Recommendations were made and policies changed accordingly.
Surreal but right there.
But it didn’t stop there either.
2008
While national feedback efforts were embedded into the political, government and social fabric of Singapore, they remained on top of the transformation going on in communications too. So, in mid-June 2007, at the Arts House New Media Forum, Dr Lee Boon Yang, Minister For Information, Communications and The Arts, gave a really amazing speech that showed the level of Singapore’s commitment to contemporary communication. In the course of his wide ranging discussion on the importance of and the potential dangers of “interactive digital media (IDM)” as he styled it, he announced a number of initiatives through the Media Development Authority and other agencies of the Singaporean government as part of the IN2015 program. Perhaps the largest and most significant was the S$500 million investment in IDM through the universities in conjunction with a review of the Media21 framework that would incorporate significant changes to include IDM for making Singapore a state of the art media city-state.
By June 2008, this investment paid off, with the announcement that 82.5% of Singaporean households now had broadband - though their objective was 100%. In conjunction with that saturation point, the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) and the Media Development Authority (MDA) began a series of initiatives that were built to institutionalize an effort to create a truly digital engagement capacity and business model. These ranged from making Singapore - the entire country - a hub to “manage distribute and trade digital media assets such as movies, video programmes, music and mobile content (Blogger Note: This latter one is really important) through the creation of a “national authentication framework” for access to next generation services - meaning all those social media and social networking initiatives that we spend so much time riffing on. Phase 1 was a 6 month $20 million Singapore investment that ended December 31, 2008. I’m not sure where the next phase is.
But that isn’ the end of it either. For National Day Rally 2008 (that’s not dyslexic, that’s their word order), they decided that because feedback is so critical, they would conduct a feedback “exercise” which comprised, “SMS, online polls, discussion forums and blogs. We have also recently added Facebook as a new channel to solicit feedback from Singaporeans.”
The ROI (if You Continue to Use That Archaic Measure)
About five days ago, Accenture put out its “2008 Leadership In Customer Service: Creatings Shared Responsibility for Better Outcomes”, a report that makes up in substance what it lacks in title mojo. This is one that they’ve annually done and, despite its abstraction of a title, looks at what best practices can be extracted from public sector institutions. This year, the 4 best practices are:
- “Better service starts with better understanding.”
- “Engage. Listen. Respond.”
- “Harness all available resources.”
- “Be transparent. Be accountable. Ask for and act on feedback.”
All in all, the report is well worth reading, which is saying a lot for me, given my historic (though softening) antipathy toward Accenture. Despite that, this is really good work and you can read about it here.
What’s important to this posting is that it shows Singapore’s ROI for these programs.
Take a gander at the following comparative numbers:
Accenture’s Question |
Result (positive responses) |
| How good do you think your government is at delivering a better quality of life for you and your family? | #1 - Singapore (59%) #2 - Ireland (55%) |
| How good or bad is the government at providing equal access? | #1 -Singapore (67%) #2 - Ireland, Australia (56%) |
| How good or bad is the government at targeting resources? | #1 -Singapore (59%) #2 - Malaysia (48%) |
| How good or bad is the government at tailoring services? | #1 -Singapore (51%) #2 - Canada (45%) |
| How good or bad do you think your government is at seeking the opinions of its citizens? | #1 - Singapore (50%) #2 - Ireland (45%) |
| How effective or not do you think the different government departments and services are at working together to meet the needs of citizens? |
#1 - Singapore (69%) #2 - Ireland (60%) |
| How effective do you think the government is at working with non-government organizations, such as businesses and voluntary/non-profit organizations, to improve the quality of your life? |
#1 - Malaysia (61%)#2 - Singapore (56%) |
| Overall trust in government to improve quality of life (worked on a mean score) | #1 - Singapore (3.5) #2 - Malaysia (3.2) |
| Source: Aggregated from Accenture’s “2008 Leadership In Customer Service Report” |
What is completely noticeable is that in all but one area the government of Singapore comes in first in the world when it comes to constituents who trust them to be transparent, provide a quality of life that is personally valuable to individual constituents, to do the right thing and at the same time, to continuously engage their citizenry.
A meaningful ROI. If you’re into that sort of thing.
Don’t underestimate the value of CRM 2.0 here. The core of CRM 2.0 has always been engagement whether the engaged individual is in the shoes of the customer, the constituent or the game player - whatever role they play in and with the institution they are interacting with. Follow the right path around practices and strategy, implement the right programs, support it with money, listen to the changes that your constituents ask for, act on the ones that you are able to. That will net you a contented and involved citizenry - which is what its all about, ain’t it?
December 16th, 2008
CRM 2009 - Companies to Watch For - Second Verse, Different Than the First
Industry Giants -the New Adults on the Block
Most of these might not be surprising to you but they are to me. With maybe the exception of Sage…and NetSuite….and RightNow and…..ah well. I guess they aren’t really all that surprising. But to some degree, IBM and Cisco are surprising. Remember, I write about CRM and Social CRM and really, in the past, when push comes to shove, neither of these two have been obvious CRM heavyweights. Oh, I suppose the case could be made that IBM was a significant player in the consulting world on CRM - that would be an easy thing to do - but then I’d have to talk about Cap Gemini Ernst & Young as a……hmmmmm. I think I….won’t.
I’d rather just get moving on this one before I get any more confused.
- IBM - IBM has always been a player in CRM - but through IBM Global Business Services, their consulting arm, not their software or applications groups. Their CRM applications built on Lotus Notes, were, to be charitable, so-so. That’s really charitable. But, I think we’ve pretty well established that CRM has changed dramatically - at least in my Hollywood-stricken eyes. We’ve moved from customer management to customer engagement as the means to provide the experiences that customers are now looking for from companies. That means when it comes to the supporting technology, IBM is in good position, because social software becomes increasingly important to the software schema that CRM applications should be providing. This is where IBM does itself pretty proud. They’ve innovated with the only social software full suite on the market - Lotus Connections and, with the release of version 2.0, got it right - notwithstanding an odd design decision or two (like for example, why they’ve chosen what I have to call a truncated wiki like collaboration space called activities when a wiki service would probably do what activities do and allow for more. Just because they used activities in their own work environment doesn’t make it the commercially correct thing to do). But, honestly, a feature quibble isn’t that big a deal - given how far IBM has come over the past two years as super-player in what is the new Social CRM/CRM 2.0 space. One of their greatest strengths has been a long standing one. A powerful global CRM consulting group stretching from the U.S. to India to Colombia to pretty much everywhere else on the planet. Their CRM practice is not only among the best in the consulting world, but has a voracious appetite to stay on top of trends and practices and on top of the market. Plus, IBM HQ has a number of corollary organizations devoted to innovation, change and thought leadership that make it a highly visible, outspoken institution. For example, they have the IBM Institute for Business Value or the Institute for Electronic Government. More germane to CRM and further proof that that IBM GBS gets it, in September 2008, IBM launched a CRM Center of Excellence for SaaS. Around the same time they launched the Center for Social Software. All of this is part of their Tomorrow at Work initiative - a brilliantly conceived look at how the future of business and work is going to look. A month later a Cloud Services Initiative was launched. Internally they use hundreds, maybe thousands, of blogs and wikis, communities and rich media to carry out their daily business on a collaborative basis. There is no stopping the institutionalization of thought leadership and innovation at IBM. But the development of a solid though a wee bit flawed social software suite in combination with their CRM consulting expertise, is what starts IBM catapulting to the top of the CRM pantheon. Is this a perfect scenario? No. The integration of CRM and social software at IBM is still in the hands of IBM partner iEnterprise who announced the integration between Connections and iEnterprise’s CRM software in September. That has to be corrected. For them to lead the way in the concrete world of CRM 2.0, their internal integration of the social apps with the CRM offerings of their global consulting group - be it Siebel or SAP or Oracle or some new and better Lotus Notes-based CRM application - is a necessity. The theoretical foundation will be there in the new releases of Notes and Domino expected to be out in the near future which is supposedly will be fully integrated with Connections 2.0. But CRM will be the kicker for them, not the social tools. For IBM to play at the level they normally do elsewhere and be mentioned in the CRM-smelling breath with Oracle, SAP, Microsoft and salesforce.com, they have to take their usual lead and make sure they have those integrated tools to offer and to use. They have everything else.
- SAS - As large as the privately-held SAS is ($2.15 billion in revenue in 2007) and as great a place as they are to work (always among the lowest turnover rates in any industry and voted among best places to work by everyone), I had to hesitate before including them here - which might seem a little churlish. This is a company whose revenue went up 15% last year, more driven by partners than ever before. They increased their customer base by 1,100 - a great number. They consistently hit the quadrants in the Business Intelligence and in the Multichannel Campaign Management category as a leader, according to Gartner. So that would seem to be amazing right? But I still had to hesitate - though here they are. They To get into this list, I have to think that a company is going to play big time in 2009, and as much as I like these guys, I’m not 100% sure of that. But I am convinced enough to make them a tenuous choice. To their credit, They have three distinguished CRMish applications that are clearly excellent - their Marketing Automation application, which, while headlined by Campaign Management, is much larger than that. It additionally includes Marketing Mix Management (this is the former Veridiem, which had an office in an old warehouse with amazingly high ceilings in the Boston area, many moons ago) Marketing Performance Management, Web Analytics and a host of others; their Customer Experience Analytics are smart and capable While not terribly pretty, the interface is more than serviceable. They even have a whole series of products including marketing automation, marketing mix management and business intelligence that they offer on demand. They have staff members who are both incredibly smart and incredibly personable. Some of the more “radical” among them are making prodigious and good use of social tools like Twitter & Facebook for more than personal reasons - and doing their company a service. They have Better Management.com, a well organized highly practical site with “what to do’s” everywhere including a Web TV show called Better Management Today that I’ve happily appeared on twice. But I have this nagging problem that I’ve had for years with them. I have heard for years that they are changing their marketing approach and positioning to suit the actual marketplace and not the imagined one they have - which seems to be one left over from William H. Whyte’s “Organization Man” of the 1950s and maybe the early 60s. Watch Madmen on AMC if you’re not old enough to remember the era. I just don’t see the necessary changes in their marketing strategy or even creative work. About two years ago, I was in a meeting at SAS where I saw a highly original & creative product of planned changes to their marketing which only got crushed up the chain somewhere. This year I didn’t see anything that told me that they’re fully adopting to contemporary marketing requirements - which, when it comes to a technology company riding a wave that the customers control, can become a serious problem. That said, they still are a company that operates on the strength of its products and the viability of its environment - and for that alone, they make the list - this year.
- Cisco - This is the company that’s the biggest surprise and the least surprise. For the last two years, the company positioning itself as “the human network” - and using one of my favorite songs in the world - Baba O’Riley by The Who (also used on CSI:NY) for the marketing - has been placing itself into position of being an all purpose end to end set of applications, hardware, software and process engines for engaging the social customer. Not only did they link up with Oracle CRM on demand via their WebEx organization in 2007, but they’ve been building and modifying a “Unified Call Connectors” for integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM or salesforce.com since 2006. But it goes so much further than that. Oh so much further. In 2007, Cisco purchases two social networking properties - FiveAcross, a socnet platform and tribes.net - more of a community aggregation site. These acquisitions led to their announcement at the end of 2007 of Eos - an entertainment operating system - that’s designed to deliver rich media experiences across communities. In February this year, The Sports Museum of America announced their use of Eos. Even better, the Yankees are using Cisco as the technology backbone to power the fan experience at their new stadium using some remarkable innovative future-looking fan friendly mobile, high def and interactive capabilities - which for me would be enough to declare them “king of the hill, top of the heap.” (who can guess what this refers to? Be Yankees specific please. The first one to leave it as a comment will get a free copy of the 4th edition of CRM at the Speed of Light when it comes out in August) But of course, sigh, that isn’t enough. But there is so much more to Cisco’s play. They have succeeded quickly with Cisco Telepresence - a phenomenally well done holographic sort of technology that allows meetings between any groups in the world from any locations in what seems to be projection a la holodeck. It has been wildly successful. Check out this video for a mindblowing look at it. But Telepresence and the Yankees, while incredibly cool, isn’t the reason they’re included. Under the aegis of John Chambers, they’ve organized their company culture and structure to make sure that each employee not only has access to management but are empowered to present ideas and follow through on problem solving both internally and externally. They have a democratic culture that actually is organized around innovation. They emphasize organic leadership for that innovation and encourage the use of social media and social networking tools to facilitate that leadership. They understand their internal customer - the employee - as well as they understand their external customer. Their number 1 ranked internal blog is about collaboration. The combination of this open and democratic culture, the positioning as a leader in the “human network,” the integration of Oracle CRM on on demand into their portfolio and their obvious interest in CRM via the Unified Call Connectors, their social networking acquisitions and how they’ve integrated them both into their portfolio and into their day to day corporate culture, and of course, we can never forget their dominance of the enterprise router business, position these guys as a company we could see emerge in 2009-2010 as a significant leader in social CRM. My only concerns in that regard are that as of now, these don’t seem to be part of a coherent strategy to be a leader in world of the “customer engagement” infrastructure. They are just pieces of a puzzle that happen to fit. So perhaps, Cisco is content with doing all this to be the #1 player in the $50 billion router business - and that wouldn’t be a bad thing. But if they seecan se how thewhole puzzle fits together (not just the pieces) and can present the vision - they could be a major surprise for the likes of SAP, Oracle, salesforce.com, Microsoft, etc. We’ll see, but watch what they do in 2009. If not what I think, the ride will be really, really cool anyway.
- Sage - For years, Sage former Sage Software formerly Best Software formerly SalesLogix was perplexing. They had a good product in SalesLogix for the small and midsized world - especially the lower to mid -end of that. No one doubted its functionality. They had a strong partner program - in fact as far back as 2000, their partners drove 86% of their SalesLogix revenue. They were attempting to provide some thought leadership in the SMB world, though I can’t say a lot. But some. All in all, they had been a player since the late 90s in CRM - and they’ve always been to some extent since. But there was something…off…. about them. It was never that hard to figure out what was wrong. Their strategies in the past had been somewhat pedestrian. They suffered an occasional serious misstep. They even attempted to play in the enterprise world at one point, though they dropped that and its architects within about a year of the idea. But at the high level, this ordinary strategies and a lack of vision - or at least, even an obvious vision - led them astray. For one, it kept them pitching ACT! as a CRM application. For another, it hurt their channel strategies because partners began to compete against themselves, actually pitting SalesLogix against their other CRM product, SageCRM in demos. Not only did I hear about this from others several times, but I actually saw it. It also kept their technology architectures a generation behind pretty much all the time. Not a good formula for success in a world where CRM was both rapidly maturing and then rapidly changing. As an example, when the world was moving to SaaS, they hung in there with client/server and threw up a sort-of on demand product that was clearly half-hearted. But something changed dramatically in the last two years or so with the emergence of innovators and visionaries like CRM General Manager Dave Van Toor. First, they made an really good architectural choice, that while different from the contemporary standard choice, a service oriented architecture, was still on the money for SMBs. That would be REST or what is now called WOA - Web Oriented Architecture. Their line of argument for that stinks - SOA is bad, use REST (see their otherwise very interesting Sage CRM 2010 Strategy doc) - but their choice is good. REST is the same architecture that its being used as you’re viewing this web page. Its simple and familiar and standardized - and perfect for the SMBs. For a good detailed definition of REST, see this one. But just a good architectural choice is not the only reason I have them in this list. They’ve also seen the CRM 2.0 world and embraced it at multiple levels. In SalesLogix 7.5, they’ve built in significant wizards for handling multiple tasks such as the import of leads to make life easy; they’ve got the means to create and use mashups, and an interesting timeline visualization that can be customized to view both internal data/events and external events, among many other improved and Web 2.0 features. They’ve developed an attractive mobile SalesLogix for the Blackberry application that uses location in an interesting way, with “who’s nearby” feature that allows you to find out which clients are in the same vicinity as you, in case you want to go visit them, I presume. I’m not sure of the actual value of that particular feature, which, while cool, doesn’t really account for the fact that unplanned client visits of the “sure, drop by because you just called me up” nature, don’t often happen, but the application as a whole is very good. Additionally, when they released the new versions of their CRM products earlier this year, they were able to offer something that is becoming increasingly important in the business world - anytime, anywhere connectedness - even if you’re disconnected. This is is easily the best part of their current CRM applications strategy. The customer gets a choice of on premise or on demand (their other CRM product, SageCRM, has a hosted version SageCRM.com) The experience can be hybrid (on premise mixed with on demand) and can be connected, disconnected or mobile. What distinguishes this particular part of the strategy is their idea of Context Aware Services - which lead to their anytime, anywhere workforce awareness which when you break it down is device awareness, user awareness, network awareness. Finally, in a move to clarify vision and strategy, they’ve shed the idea that ACT! is CRM. That is LONG overdue. Dave Van Toor announced on his blog that he is no longer going to have ACT! as part of his portfolio - “just” SalesLogix and SageCRM. Rightfully. This is what I mean. No longer a generation behind, this is going to make the formidable Sage, with a total (including its accounting packages) of 5.5 million customers and 15,000 employees and $2.3 billion in revenue - even more formidable in 2009 in the CRM market space they’ve carved out. Finally, Sage is talking ’bout my generation. Its about time.
Been There…Now Starting to Do That
- SugarCRM - I have to presume you know who SugarCRM is. But if you don’t, they are the most successful (by far) open source CRM platform. They have a lot going for them. They have a smart business model - one that engages a 30,000 plus developers community called the Sugar Network (which appropos of nothing, is also the name of a network of 16 entertainment and beauty properties for women) to develop on the core platform. They are open source but they are not free when it comes to licenses. There is a free basic edition, but if you want functionality and tools worth anything you will buy either their on premise or on demand versions - which are competitively priced, though not exceptionally so. In the past, I thought they were overpriced and in fact, with “The Cube,” their standalone server solution - they were - though it seems to be a little better now. They have a savvy CEO in John Roberts, who while he isn’t the best rock singer in the world (kidding, just kidding….) is a great CEO and very smart business dude. They’ve made some really great hires, for example, Martin Schneider, a former analyst for the 451 Group and a brilliant one at that, who ostensibly handles analyst relations for them but does so much more (and is a damn good rock guitar player). They have a rather fluid corporate culture that really lives the “open source” way and doesn’t hassle too much about things yet is still accountable for success in business. With their recent release of the SugarCRM 5.2 platform, they overcame their glaring lack of social features by adding a small set of social feeds and what they call Portal Dashlets, which is basically a treacly name for enterprise mashup widgets - something being offered by SAP, Microsoft and many other vendors too. What’s most interesting is that they are offering “cloud connectors” which are hooks to any feeds of a LinkedIn, Jigsaw or Hoovers nature - in other external data sources to provide what would be a richer look at competitive intelligence. These are the technical links, not the actual feeds to any one of them. Finally, they’ve added Sugar Feeds which is a Twitter like (really more Yammer-like or SAP ESME-ish) way of interacting inside SugarCRM applications - and provides status, alerts, and notifications. All in all, a good start, though, of course, a long way to go. These make SugarCRM a company to be watching with a more intense look in 2009 than you might have in 2008. Where I still have some concerns with SugarCRM are that they are competing now as much as a platform as they are a CRM application suite and which one is the focus they want to give is not entirely clear. Their market message gets mixed sometimes, though they seem to lean to flexible CRM suite. I think. Also they have a partner program, that while miles better than it was a year ago, is still not competitive with their competitors. They have a ways to go and they will have to expend a considerable effort in building that, now that they will be oh-so-much-more-appealing due to the economic downturn. Otherwise, I can’t complain. Open source gets really interesting in economic downturns but I have to put a caveat here - its really interesting as a possible option, but it not only isn’t free, its not that cheap either. Just reasonable. SugarCRM’s competition? Maybe VTiger and Concursive….there are several others but I don’t see them as all that competitive - at least not as of yet. VTiger comes to you from Zoho/Adventnet so they have some market smarts and reach. But no one outreaches SugarCRM in open source. This is a company that has made huge strides in the last two years and gone from me occasionally glancing at them during 2007 to, as 2009 begins, staring at them. Time to pay very, very serious attention.
- NetSuite - NetSuite has had a consistent strategy that is unlike any other of its ilk in the industry. Led by the charismatic and hip CEO Zach Nelson, and the uberbrilliant co-founder and CTO Evan Goldberg, NetSuite hasn’t attacked the market with social features or been focused around innovation as its core. Its basic hardcore strategy has been to improve functionality so that you can do enterprise related operational work anywhere in the world in an on demand environment. They have been particularly focused on the upper end of the midmarket and have succeeded there very well. They have developed their One World edition that handles globalization and localization in one fell swoop in a rather effective way with a single interface. They went public at at time they should and even though they are of course affected by the recession, they are still in a strong financial position. They’ve fallen in the business platform pot like all their competitors. Unlike their competitors, though, their platform, NS-BOS is narrowly focused around developing industry specific applications - not just anything. Their pragmatic strategy has been historically part of their CRM applications, NetSuite CRM+, since day one with a core focus that extends back to their early days as financial software company NetLedger. They build their CRM applications around order management at the center. They are aimed at the upper end of the midmarket and squarely at SAP. They’ve even recently announced a “BusinessbyNetSuite” program for SAP customers to capture those customers who are exposed by the SAP Business by Design glitch. SAP needs to be concerned about NetSuite in this market. NetSuite is pragmatic and sound in their approach, they’ve had steady growth over the years and they try to not overstep their planned strategic boundaries. They are solid as a rock when it comes to their functionality. Finally, this is a company that knows how to market and communicate with the analyst community and press exceptionally well. Zach is a terrific speaker and a marvelous spokesperson in general for NetSuite - and a very, very cool, good natured guy. Mei Li, their SVP of Corporate Communications is not only known throughout the industry but extraordinarily well liked throughout the industry - not easy when it comes to cynical analysts and press and keeps the press and analysts well informed. I like this company and have for a long, long time. Yet, this doesn’t exempt them from what I see as some things they they need to do to become the breakout company they could, and I think it will take them until 2010 to do it. They still have some known customer service issues, though, commendably, they are working to fix them, from everything I’ve seen and heard. Additionally, I’ve always considered their channel program far too lean. Even with the excellent win of HP as a strategic partner, I don’t see rapid enough improvement here. This is an area, especially since they have a strong industry-specific focus to their strategy, that is absolutely vital to their future and its something I’d be jumping on right away and spending (their) money on. That said, they have some interesting partners - like Apple, CastIron and of course, the aforementioned HP. Finally, I think that they are going to need to start adding 2.0 functionality and I know from the horse’s mouth, that this is going to be the case for 2009. I have only one real complaint with them on the marketing side which I’ve always had - and this might just be me. I wish that they would stop their competitor attacks and competitive “we just won customer x from vendor competitor y” press releases and emails. Personally, I couldn’t care less who they took from whom, since I’m just as sure that the same vendor who lost the customer to them has taken one from them too. Win on your merits, NetSuite, which are formidable. I really have high hopes for them, but the things they need to do will take some time. They are a solid choice already, and always will be, but to get to the next level, they’ve got a busy year plus worth of work to do. But they are worthy of watching right now.
- RightNow - This company is a company that’s there and yet…almost there and have been that way for several years. I think 2009 is their breakout year if certain initiatives they’ve undertaken fall into place and they make sure that they manage their positioning around these initiatives well. They have been long established as the go-to guys for on demand customer service for quite some time. In fact, two months ago, Gartner positioned them as leaders in the E-Services Magic Quadrant, rightfully so. Unlike many of their on demand brethren, with perhaps the exception of Aplicor, they’ve penetrated the public sector deeply, an incredibly smart move. They’ve spent a good deal of time trying to position themselves and direct and redirect strategy. Sometimes too much and with odd glitches. For example, they bought the highly functional SalesNet in 2006 for $9 million (see this Phil Wainewright ZDNET 2006 entry for some solid analysis of the deal) and then tried to call it something that “improved the customer experience.” Not one of their better moves. Yet, they’ve moved to keep a focus, one better directed on customer experience as a core requirement of customer service. More recently, they’ve wisely begun to integrate some social CRM thinking and a bit of the functionality into their offering. For example, they have a tight partnership with Lithium since 2006 - which gives them the capability to provide threaded discussions inside of company-produced forums and communities. No longer just operational, they are beginning to integrate some quasi-social functionality - especially with the August 08 release of their on demand service (Their November 08 release is more geared to large scale contact center improvements and consolidated services). They have a pro-active chat function that tracks customer activity and when a pre-determined threshold is reached, a chat window pops up for the customer’s use if they so choose - based on the conditions of the activity. Additionally, they have a co-browsing function that pretty much sounds like GotoMyPC for tech folks. They added a single sign on customer portal that is primarily built around creating highly personalized services offerings that can be sculpted by the user themselves. The access is classic single sign-on. All in all, quasi-social and a great start. But Its only a start. But with CEO Greg Gianforte, who knows how to operate lean and VERY smart in lean times at the helm, RightNow could be a strong established up and coming (odd juxtaposition there, eh wot?) leader this coming year but like NetSuite need another year to mount up.
- Zoho - I’ve been a long standing fan of Zoho and saw their potential back in 2006 when they were first coming on the market. Before I get into them a little, I need to myth bust. They are viewed constantly as this startup making good. In truth, they are part of Adventnet, a nothing-like-a-startup and there are 600 engineers devoted to Adventnet products. This is a highly skilled company with a smart contemporary culture and a transparent, honest and responsive CEO, Sridhar Vembu, who, while I have some disagreements with when it comes to his public pronouncements, is, all in all, a refreshing change in his willingness to be actually accessible beyond a press conference or formal call and genuinely transparent regardless of the heat it might generate. Zoho has always provided a widespread and nearly complete collaboration suite. Originally consumer-strength and mostly free of charge, at the end of 2007, they announced their first “Business Edition” applications. They are web-based, not on demand per se, though they have a subscription model. Germane to us in these here parts, they have a CRM application - in reality, a sales force automation application. I have to tell you, it is functionally pretty solid. Its weakness, as with most Zoho collaboration and operational tools also, is that they don’t integrate that well with each other or with any other applications. The lack of integration issue seems to have been an issue that I fanned the flames of - though actually that isn’t entirely true. It was actually re-ignited by a comment from a reader of my blog Phil Hodgin in the above linked blog entry of mine - though I agree with him wholeheartedly. In any case, their lack of integration is addressed by Sridhar in this Zoho blog entry if you want to read about it. Shortly after the not-very-controversial controversy, Zoho announced Zoho CloudSQL, a first step really. It is middleware for developers that allows the use of SQL to access Zoho data in the cloud and is compatible with MySQL and Oracle’s, IBM’s and Informix’ flavors of SQL. A start at least. They have a staggering array of applications - enough to take up several more “pages” of a blog entry like this. What is important is that they get the social customer’s thinking and are geared to a future of “social customer behavior. Their combination of collaboration tools and operational applications is broad enough and now functionally deep enough and organized enough (See Zoho Creator and Zoho Notebook), lack of thorough integration notwithstanding, to provide a genuinely useful set of apps that small and midsized businesses can understand. While they are an astonishing open company and an honest one, they are not the greatest marketers on the planet and that is painful because they are up against the best in the software world in some cases. Beyond Sridhar, they don’t have a lot of traction when it comes to thought leadership and they need to invest in doing that or they will lose some ground. That said, they’ve graduated from the new kid on the block to the young adult making their way in the world successfully early on. They are currently an SMB player, to be sure; not an enterprise threat, but I wouldn’t put that past them someday.
One last note for this:
You’re probably wondering why Google isn’t included in this list since they’re included in every other list, are tied deeply into salesforce.com and are out for world domination -attempting to take over the universe, in fact. The world isn’t enough. I think that Google Earth is just their view of their perceived fiefdom.
The reason you don’t see them here is that this is, just a gentle reminder, a CRM-related companies watch list and this is not an area that Google shines. Where it gets very murky is that Google does have a series of collaboration and social applications and cloud computing is a major focus for them so that by next year, given the way that CRM 2.0 is evolving into a social customer strategy, I very well might, not all that surprisingly, include Google. But it is there lack of operational applications - even the back end ERP type apps - that eliminates them from this watch list. Though that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t watch them. They are hard to not watch, now, aren’t they? Google Google and you get 2,712,000,000 (that’s billion) references. Google “Paul Greenberg”, CRM and you get 216,000 references.
I know where I stand.
Next up: Companies you probably don’t know but really should and a few I’ll look at in the mid part of the year but want to mention now (some hints: HA! No way! These are cool up and coming companies. You’ll have to wait.)
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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