November 23rd, 2009

Chatting (Not Chattering) About Salesforce - Part I

Posted by Paul Greenberg @ 6:35 am

Categories: CRM Buzz, Customer Service, Enterprise 2.0, Industry Analysis, Marketing, Social CRM, Social Networks, Technology Reviews

Tags: Salesforce.com Inc., Customer Service, Twitter Inc., Sales Force, Customer, CRM, Integration, Force.com, Service Cloud 2, Sales Force Management

(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:

1. Oracle
2. SAP
3. Microsoft
4. 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 3^rd 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)

(Okay, now continue on to PGreenblog for Part II - the remainder of this analysis which covers Custom Cloud and Chatter and some other notes on the conference.)

October 29th, 2009

RightNow Right Now is Right On

Posted by Paul Greenberg @ 3:52 am

Categories: CRM Buzz, Customer Service, Industry Analysis, Social CRM, Technology Reviews, Thought Leadership

Tags: Customer, Customer Experience, RightNow Technologies, CRM, Product Transparency, Innovation Community, Cx, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Advertising & Promotion, Enterprise Software

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 21^st century customer and what they require to satisfy their personal agendas - in a good way.

And Not So Good….

Despite all this goodness, I have a few concerns and caveats, though I will say, the positives outweigh the negatives.

First a correction.  I was reading some material that they produced for the press and the analysts on why they are now Cx and “not CRM.”  That’s one of my concerns but before we get there, the correction. In that piece they claim I said that CRM had a 70% failure rate.

I didn’t claim that. In fact, what I have consistently said, is that Gartner back in 2002-03 claimed that there were 50%-70% failure rates, but I saw that due to the immaturity of the industry and the customers’ buying into hype that led them to have dramatically escalated expectations about what CRM could do.  Now, the success rate is around 55% according to varying industry sources (they’re in my book but I can’t check on who it was here). That’s due to - what else - the maturity of the industry and the leveled expectations that customers now have about its ROI.  So please, if you see that, it ain’t me.

Now, Cx, Not CRM.  Cx is the overall approach, vision and tools that RightNow is calling their contemporary offering. Cx has nothing to do with Rx - it stands for customer experience.  But as Bob Thompson smartly pointed out in a Fireside chat with Greg Gianforte, the buying agents - c-level execs, etc. aren’t buying customer experience, they’re buying tools to increase their successful strategy.  RightNow also insists they aren’t trying to create a new category with Cx. Yet the minute they said it “wasn’t CRM” - which is a category, that’s exactly what they were doing.

The problem isn’t with Cx which is fine as their vision and platform/tools.  The problem is the “not CRM” part which is a no-win component and useless to say.  They aren’t competing with CRM - or definitions of anything else.  They are providing a solution set, services and something of a strategic outlook to the customer in the name of Cx. This is their classic messaging problem.  They often put their foot up to their mouths - though not in it - and overextend or reach too far to fit something in that they really shouldn’t do.  They did it in their earlier days with customer experience. They did it when they felt somewhat discomfited with the designation CRM and they are doing it with their approach to positioning Cx.  It only muddies the waters with another acronym and limits their market a bit more than they need to.   Just call it “Cx” and trash the “not CRM” part.

That isn’t huge per se but it does reflect a problem they haven’t gotten over yet.  They need to deal with it or customer misperception will cloud their otherwise bright future.

Finally a couple of other answers needed.  Estaban Kolsky  someone that you should be reading if you’re not already, pointed out to me that there were no delivery schedules mentioned except 2010 - which doesn’t qualify as a delivery schedule, only a year.  What is the delivery schedule for these services, and the customer success managers and the varying communities and their newer cloud product improvements?   Hats off to you, Mr. Kolsky.

Also, what’s the VAR strategy? Is there one? What about a more open development model?   These aren’t criticisms, just questions that are only either somewhat answered or still entirely open.

All in all, this is a HUGE leap forward for RightNow and what I think bodes well for them is that they take culture change very, very seriously - and seem to be doing what they have to do make it real - something we rarely have seen yet, in the era of the social customer.

Now, if they only eliminate the Phillies from the World Series to keep me from having any bad experiences….

October 14th, 2009

Oracle OpenWorld 2009 - Social CRM Technology Rears an Actual Head

Posted by Paul Greenberg @ 7:54 am

Categories: CRM Buzz, CRM Strategy, Industry Analysis, Marketing, Social CRM, Social Networks, Technology Reviews, Thought Leadership

Tags: Oracle Corp., Siebel Systems Inc., CRM, Anthony Lye, Advertising & Promotion, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Software, Marketing, Software, Paul Greenberg

I am almost always in awe of Oracle OpenWorld.  The scope of this conference is spectacular. Can you imagine an event that the attendance is down to 37,000 attendees?  Actually, that puts me in awe of their event planners more than even the event. How in the name of whoever can you put together something of this magnitude?

Back in 2007, I was also thunderstruck by the changes they made to their CRM products thanks to the team led by Anthony Lye.  It was dramatic and it impacted Oracle as a company - and as it turns out, has had an impact on the industry as a whole.  While I can’t remember exactly when they started calling it Social CRM, I do remember they had somehow understood that the customer’s requirements and demands and mindset had changed. They adapted accordingly - which was another source of astonishment because they were about the last company I expected to see this kind of progressive and valuable thinking from. But to their credit they did it.

While my focus has always been CRM, I have some experience with enterprise products generally, having built practices for a variety of them back in the 1990s and into the early part of this century - so I keep my eye on them.  But the CRM transformation changed my expectations of what the company would deliver as a whole - ranging from their excellent CRM applications to their mysterious Fusion Apps (which are apparently going to drop at this show) to their entirely forgettable Beehive collaboration server (which I hope Oracle has forgotten too).  Plus Larry Ellison’s flair for the dramatic makes me expect something remarkable.

Sadly, there was nothing remarkable presented, which is not a condemnation, just a fact. Outside of the CRM products (more on that shortly), what I’ve seen from Oracle so far (with the keynotes of Safra Katz and Charles Phillips) has been…..uneventful at best and pedestrian at worst. Not bad, just uneventful to pedestrian. The changes (at least generally) in their products have been incremental and small increments at that. Statements were made that were dramatic such as Safra Katz talking about Oracle’s “slavish devotion to Open Standards” but nothing dramatic actually occurred.

Don’t get me wrong. The keynotes by Charles Phillips and Safra Katz were fine if you were interested in an overview of what Oracle has been doing in the last year or so. The “keynote” by an EVP of Hewlett Packard was nothing more than a giant ad for Hewlett Packard, only interesting because of Oracle’s acquisition of Sun. Unfortunately, the wisdom of the crowds so to speak, supported me here because they abandoned the hall in droves during  the speech.

including the growth of their retail business and the useful sophistication of their retail products - but all in all, nondescript is a good description (get the irony there?) of what I’ve seen so far.

Oracle CRM Moves Forward In Quality…And In Thinking

I will say, even with my narrow focused lenses, Oracle CRM stood far out far ahead of the rest of the Oracle Apps pack.  Also let me tell you right now, I’ve been a retained consultant with Oracle though as you all know, that buys them nothing but a good job (I hope) by me. Not anything in these things I write.

CRM at Oracle seems to remain their star application, probably because it is, in 2009,  the fastest growing application suite at Oracle and probably will be the Oracle revenue leader this year.  That’s because they’ve understood what businesses need when it comes to being successful with customers.  Note that I didn’t say collaborating with customers. That’s not what Oracle CRM is all about. They are really applications for sales and marketing effectiveness. They don’t have  much to speak of in the world of customer service - with the exception of their tight partnership with Helpstream - an excellent move given their lack of native customer service apps. But they are doing what they do very well utilizing their existing Siebel applications expertise and their on demand applications in combination with a view toward internal collaboration at a company. Witness the development of  Social CRM Sales Library On Demand in the last few months.

But what Anthony Lye, Mark Woolen, Christine Viera, Melissa Boxer and Adam May showed at an executive briefing yesterday on the advances in CRM was heartening because they are molding their CRM applications - traditional ones - with social and collaborative features that make them infinitely more valuable.

Anthony Lye, SVP in charge of Oracle CRM and the intellectual driver for much of this, started off with a discussion on the idea of reinvention rather than recovery as the strategy that companies need to take aggressively during poor economic times.

So far, so good.

He then framed the soon to appear demos by talking about what he saw as 3 game changing strategies:

1. Executing the cross-channel customer experience flawlessly - Anthony distinguished between multi-channel and cross-channel (which was something like the difference between multigrain and whole grain) - multi-channel was a strategy that delivered an experience in mobile, field, community, call center etc.  Cross-channel was a strategy to traverse all the individual channels at any given time by embedding processes to instrument business so that the customer experience was consistent.  PG: While I thought the strategy was smart from a software and processes standpoint, I wasn’t truly sure that cross-channel was that much different from what I know as multi-channel. But regardless, the idea of a consistent (though he didn’t talk about authentic which is the companion piece of consistent when it comes to the customer experience) customer experience accessible whenever across channels was dead on.
2. Tap into the power of the social web - this is the one that goes without saying and is the technological and process driven aspect of how Social CRM works - though by no means all of it.
3. Deliver CRM data, when, how, and where users need it - this was the most interesting actually.

Anthony’s contention was that there were two types of relationships that CRM users needed to know when it came to customers. First, the explicit relationships - what kinds of communities was the customer associated with; who were his or her friends or friends of friends; the historic transactional data about the cutomer and the more contemporary profile data. But most interesting to me at least was his idea of the implicit relationships. These were not of the “who do you know” variety, but more of the “who do you look like?”  When Mark Woolen, the always personable and very accomplished #1 VP for the Oracle CRM grouplet, demonstrated an app for a I presume fictional company though it was one that sold the iPhone 3G (S), he showed a button with the name “Connect to Someone Like Me.” When that button was pressed, it took you to a list of customers who were ranked by percentage of how close to your profile they were.  You then could type in a question to ask of those like you.  Great feature and entirely social in how it was connected. Built through the new Siebel toolkit I believe.

This is not a new idea. Political campaigns use micro-targeting to identify the lifestyle habits of their potential voters and identify blocks of voters who might all own Mercedes, be involved in social clubs etc. They then use this “implicit information” to figure out who those “similar folks” would most likely vote for, based on this kind of data.  What Oracle is contending and I think rightfully is that the transactional data that’s been gathered by CRM applications can be used to find “someone like me” segments - and they’ve gone ahead used Siebel toolkits to build out what they claim here.  Impressive and smart.

Melissa Boxer, who is probably the smartest person I’ve met anywhere when it comes to applying the principles of loyalty to enterprise software, demonstrated a genuinely fantastic iPhone application for Swedish Rail (SJ). Here’s a screenshot on that.

What makes this application powerful is that it literally allows you use the points you have in a loyalty program to purchase items from Swedish Rail including tickets that are not only shipped right to your iPhone when you’ve used the points to buy them but can be redeemed via the iPhone. Additionally, you can make reservations directly and then have your itinerary delivered to your iPhone and if you choose to make it public so your friends (chosen friends) need to know where you are going - it can be delivered to Facebook for public or semi-public scrutiny.   Swedish Rail then gets all this new data about your transactions and interactions and can use it to create targeted offerings on the spot.

Way cool and what social marketing looks like, albeit in a nascent form (so don’t get in my face about something that might be missing, okay? Nascent form.).

But Oracle is even doing more than that.  They have done some I think is important with a traditional CRM application. They’ve extended Siebel with the use of a new Siebel toolkit that allows developers to integrate business processes and components into any framework whatever. That means the results of the development can be delivered to users via a widget, or an mini-application or a mobile app. But what makes this toolkit particularly important is that its got APIs based on RESTful architecture.

This is big for Oracle. The reality is that Sage led the way in the effective use of RESTful architectures and builds their current products on this simplified and yet powerful architecture.  Unlike Sage, Oracle, and most of the other major vendors has been relying on service-oriented architectures which use far more commands than a RESTful architecture for their messaging and are considerably more complex. For the Siebel toolkit to use REST to deliver Siebel metadata is an important step forward in the world of CRM.  It will allow for more effective and easily consumable applications when combined with the other piece of the Siebel puzzle - a visualization toolkit to change the interface to be appropriate to the delivery channel.

There were a number of other developments including a strong offering of Siebel OnDemand Release 17, which has added features that are most often found in larger on premise products including PRM, advanced analytics and what I think Adam Day said was the OEMing of Best Systems Marketing Development Funds program.  and an increasing amount of vertical applications including a mobile pharma app for salespeople.  All in all, there are 12 new products, 31 new features, 88 “customer-driven enhancements” - Anthony’s words not mine - and nine new integrations.

But to me the core developments are the improvement in true social marketing that recognizes the behaviors and activities of social customers. Oracle is using the traditional customer transaction data and the newe interaction data in an intelligent way tp micro-target and create “segments like me.” That’s really good for improving customer insight but what makes this truly powerful is that they’ve developed the channels and outputs to give the customers access to that same information by hooking them up with the people discovered through the micro-targeting efforts. Not only does the business gain insight, but the customer gains access. Truly multi-directional. In other words, this is what a technology can do to support a social CRM strategy. Everyone benefits.

So, hats off to Oracle now for conceptualizing and building a genuine social CRM application.  But capital H Hats off to Oracle when they release it and get it beyond the demo stage.  This is important and may be a paradigmatic set of CRM applications if it bears out in the real customer world as well as it seems to in the demo and development environment.

NEXT UP: Marc Benioff Speaks; Denis Pombriant and I speak; Larry Ellison speaks. Other OOW 2009 coverage worth following.

May 26th, 2009

CRM Playaz Episode #9: SAP, Sage, Serious, Merry, Eat, Drink, Bling

Posted by Paul Greenberg @ 3:42 am

Categories: CRM Buzz, Humor, Industry Analysis, Notable Stories, Technology Reviews

Tags: Beverage, SAP AG, Episode, Conference, CRM, Advertising & Promotion, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Software, Marketing, Software

CRM Playaz Episode #9

Welcome to CRM Playaz Episode #9.  Yeah, we’re still in business.  This episode, even with no C-Level Smackdown (#10 will have one. Guest is ready to rock) will warm the cockles of your heart - for those of you over 50, you might know what the heck that means. We talk about Sapphire - the SAP conference. We talk about Sage Insight - The Sage conference.  We’re even serious about it for awhile, which runs counter to our stated mission for the show - but who in the world cares?  We then do what’s important about the conferences and blab on the food, parties and the swag a.k.a. bling.  What ’til you hear what we ate, drank and got.  I’m sure you can’t wait.

As always the music plays and we are set free.

Music

Opening: Use Your Experience by Charles Bobus. Courtesy of The Podsafe Music Network

Closing: Got My Mojo Working from the album, The Lost Tapes by Muddy Waters. Buy it at Amazon.com

May 11th, 2009

CRM Playaz Episode #8: Kindle DX, C-Level Smackdown RightNow's Greg G.; and Twibes?

Posted by Paul Greenberg @ 4:00 am

Categories: CRM Buzz, Humor, Notable Stories, Social CRM

Tags: Music, CRM, Advertising & Promotion, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Software, Marketing, Software, Paul Greenberg

CRM Playaz Episode #8

We are back again.  Still posting it here on ZDNET.  This is one of our best shows ever because of the C-Level smackdown.

We talk about the Kindle DX which stands for…you’ll hear.

But we get something better than the Kindle DX (though there are lots of things better than the Kindle DX, now that I think of it).  Our C-Level Smackdown this week features Greg Gianforte, the CEO of RightNow, industry rockstar and HOFer and a good dude. Does he slip up? You’ll have to listen.

We do the Twidiocy thang and find out that “Twibes” is not a bad idea, but really is a stupid term.

When it comes to the opening and closing, we love Charlie Bobus and Muddy Waters.  BTW, There’s no comparison between the two. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you should be ashamed.

As always, the music makes us free (and is creative commons licensed).

UPDATE: Brent and I have removed the segment of the show on the Sex 2.0 conference. We don’t normally alter what we do, but in this case we feel we had to because we found that we had inadvertently offended the attendees of the conference, and sex workers, which was not our intent at all.  Both Brent and I feel very comfortable in our edgy humor when it comes to the information technology world and especially CRM, because we are both well known by the members of that industry. Thus, they know our purpose is to mock, but to do so without rancor.  But in retrospect, this time we went outside the industry that knows us and as a result, we offended people who we certainly had no intention of offending. To apologize, we’ve removed the segment.

Music

Opening: Use Your Experience by Charles Bobus. Courtesy of The Podsafe Music Network

Closing: Got My Mojo Working from the album, The Lost Tapes by Muddy Waters. Buy it at Amazon.com

April 9th, 2009

Who Do You Think Is On Top in Enterprise Technology Innovation?

Posted by Paul Greenberg @ 3:16 am

Categories: CRM - Traditional, CRM Buzz, Enterprise 2.0, Industry Analysis, Social CRM

Tags: Innovation, Technology Innovation, Leadership, Strategy, Management, Paul Greenberg

I’ve been torn. I’m trying to figure out who is the leading technology innovation pack at this juncture but the changes come so fast and so furiously that its become almost impossible to pinpoint it. So I’d like to get you weighing in on this.

Here’s a poll with a significant number of companies that you can choose from.  Choose one and, once you do, I would LOVE to get your reasons in Talkback as to why you made your choice. If you choose “Other”, please feel let me know in a write-in who you think is innovating.

This isn’t meant to be only who the coolest is, though that can factor into the choice you make certainly.  It is meant to be the most innovative - leading the leading edge for enterprise.

Okay. Here we go!

UPDATE: The poll will remain open for the remainder of this week. It will close on Friday April 17 at the end of the day Eastern Time

UPDATE: The Poll is CLOSED. Watch for a blog posting on the results.

April 2nd, 2009

CRM Playaz Episode #4: Social & CRM Mavens "Punditize" About Social CRM; Coolest Names

Posted by Paul Greenberg @ 5:03 am

Categories: CRM Buzz, Humor

Tags: CRM, Advertising & Promotion, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Software, Marketing, Software, Paul Greenberg

CRM Playaz Episode #4

We’re getting better and moving faster - despite the fact that I’m holding up the phone to my PC for the music.  This time around these are Creative Commons licenses so you’ll see the attribution at the end of this posting.  Coolest music around for CC licensing can be found at the IodaPromonet site or the Podsafe Music Network, run by father of the podcast, Adam Curry (who’s real father, Jay Curry, is a friend of mine).   I love both these sites and you can license all their music under varying Creative Commons licenses for your broadcast, whatever the form.

Additionally, some CRM Playaz news!! We now have a home and a sponsor - though we’re still moving in. We’re living in Hubspot.  For those of you who don’t know them, they are a small business-oriented internet marketing operation that gets millions of pageviews and provides some actually good content - not self-serving but serving their own constituency.  You might know them through their WebSite Grader and Twitter Grader tools.  Brent and I are pumped for this and we’ll be able to do some cool stuff on their platform.

Now, the show.

Notice how the social media guys are jumping on the CRM bandwagon and the CRM guys are jumping on the social bandwagon. We’re getting the bastard child “Social CRM” from this and, while we’re sure it’ll grow into a wonderful adult, right now its keeping us all up at night. Let’s just say we “comment” on this. Plus we look at all the acronyms that are out there competing for attention - much like love starved children do.  For more on this check out my PGreenblog April 1 entry (Heh. Heh.)

Next up, the names that just sound the coolest to us in the world of CRM. Interestingly they happen to be attached to very cool CRM people.  Which makes me think that there’s something causal in this - parental units take note.

Finally, we announce something that I’m going to give away here. The first, ahem, C-leveler who’s going to be on the hot seat for “C-Level Smackdown.” No, wait, I’m not going to announce it here. You’ll have to listen.

So, look at the top and listen up.

Oh yeah…once we move to Hubspot and get set up, I’ll build the RSS feed,  register this with ITunes, Podcast Alley and other appropriate sites. We’ll be “subscription-enabled.”

The Music

Opening: Use Your Experience by Charles Bobus. Courtesy of The Podsafe Music Network

Closing: Got My Mojo Working from the album, The Lost Tapes by Muddy Waters. Buy it at Amazon.com

Closing Note Not in Broadcast: NetSuite Really Smart; Dignan Beats Me To It

I was going to write something about the incredibly wise move that NetSuite made by working with a number of their partners including Cast Iron, Pervasive, Boomi and Celigo, to create “cloud connectors” for their ERP offering with salesforce.com’s CRM offerings. This couldn’t be any smarter.   But Larry Dignan wrote a great post on it. Beat me to it, dammit!  Just read his.

March 30th, 2009

The Open Cloud Manifesto: Whats Up With That?

Posted by Paul Greenberg @ 6:03 am

Categories: CRM Buzz, Enterprise 2.0, Industry Analysis, Technology Reviews

Tags: Salesforce.com Inc., Google Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Standards, Cloud Computing, Software As A Service (SaaS), Emerging Technologies, Paul Greenberg

This morning, to a lot of pre-launch buzz, the Open Cloud Manifesto (OCM), spearheaded by IBM, launched officially, much to no one’s surprise. The idea behind the OCM is that there exist a body consisting of many companies - and in the future, many, many companies, that would semi-formally agree to interoperability between cloud computing competing “clouds.” The OCM would provide a core set of principles, not work on standards. The principles, developed initially in this document, would  be agreed on and we all would float through the cloud seeing only cumulus and never cirrus or lenticular, though every now and then an occasional cumulonimbus would insert itself to the concern of all - though it does have cumulus characteristics….

The Manifesto is an interesting and early stage piece of work, which was pieced together, according the FAQ at the site, “in a few weeks” as was the whole initiative.  At this stage, its a fairly high level and somewhat benign document that would be hard to disagree with though apparently some do.  The Manifesto, which I would suggest we all get acquainted with, broadly covers the value proposition for cloud computing (e.g. scalability on demand, business process improvement). It surveys the barriers and challenges to to adoption. Among them are security along the same lines that SaaS was always derided - though has overcome - and most importantly, the challenge of data and application interoperability, given the cloud competitors out there. There are several others discussed worth viewing.

It doesn’t stop with the value prop and the barriers though. It goes through “The Goals of an Open Cloud” too. These are about as broad as humanly possible without losing the ability to construct words.  They are Choice, Flexibility, Speed and Agility, and, a little oddly, Skills (caps theirs).  The latter is justified, though again, just a little weirdly, as a “side effect.” Apparently, an open cloud reduces the proprietary programming models. An IT pro at best only knows a few of them. Since there are fewer new technologies to learn, the organization who needs the skills are more likely to find the pro with them.  Odd inclusion. True or not, who can possibly tell? I can’t.

It then goes on to define the principles - six of them.  In an abbreviated way, here they are:

1. Cloud providers must work together to address the challenges outlined in the Manifesto, through open collaboration and “the appropriate use of standards” (which, I presume, given their statements, they aren’t going to develop)
2. “Cloud providers must not use their market position to lock customers into their particular platforms and limit their choice of providers.” (I’ve reproduced this in full because it goes to the heart of my concern - see below)
3. Cloud providers don’t need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to standards. Use the existing ones.
4. When new standards are needed, we should create those that promote innovation and not too many of them at that.
5. Any community effort around this should be driven by customer needs - and verified against real requirement (AMEN to that, if its not an empty construct. Who’s customers would be my first question?)
6. All cloud related orgs and communities should hang together before they hang separately - and don’t conflict or overlap.

Who Did…Who Didn’t Sign

What’s notable about this initiative is who didn’t sign it as much as who did. On the one hand enterprise industry players like IBM - who drives the initiative - Cisco, Sun, and SAP all signed it and support it. As did the Open Cloud Consortium (OCC), North Carolina State University (NCSU) and AT&T.  But what’s particularly notable and certainly troubling, is who’s missing - Amazon, Google, salesforce.com, Microsoft, and the troubled Cloud Computing interoperability Forum (CCIF), who made their intention to not participate clear in a posting on co-founder Reuven Cohen’s ElasticVapor blog yesterday, though the reasons all in all seem to be sort of murky.  Even more importantly, Amazon publicly stated they will have nothing to do with this initiative either as did Google - who claimed to support open standards nonetheless, and according to the ZDNET Between the Lines blog posting yesterday, Google had actually been on the list of members.
Salesforce.com VP Bruce Francis, made a brief kind of wait and see statement that said in sum, “while we support many of the goals of the open cloud manifesto, we will not be signing at this point.”
Google’s Jon Murchinson’s statement: “We’re not a ’signatory’ member of the manifesto, (but we value) industry dialog that results in more and better delivery of software and services via the Internet, and (we) appreciate IBM’s leadership and commitment in this area.”  For the most cogent criticism check out Microsoft Senior Director Steven Martin’s Development Unfiltered Blog wrote a long posting that jumpstarted the furor around OCM to begin with.  Read it here.

This wasn’t the first time that an attempt was made to create an Open Cloud Initiative either. 3Tera tried it last year and without Amazon support it seems to have faded into the ether pretty quickly. At least, I can’t find any evidence of its existence beyond its inaugural proclamations.

The initial discussions are not all that promising. Here are a series of postings worth reading and, I think they reflect what the current buzz on the Open Cloud Manifesto really is.

1. ZDNET Between the Lines: Can you have an Open Cloud Manifesto without Amazon, Google, Salesforce and Microsoft?
2. eWeek: Is the Open Cloud Manifesto Doomed?
3. BusinessWeek: Meet the Open Cloud Manifesto
4. GigaOm: The Open Cloud Manifesto is Nothing But a Vapor Tiger
5. CNet News: A Look Inside the Open Cloud Manifesto
6. The Wisdom of Clouds: CCIF Pulls Out of Open Cloud Manifesto
7. The Connected Web: IBM’s Stop Amazon Cloud Putsch

Some Thoughts

There is good reason to be a bit skeptical about the OCM - especially Principle #2 (see above).  That would be fine if the strongest cloud providers - like Amazon, Google and salesforce.com were part of the initiative at this juncture because that would be true skin in the game. But the reality is that the signators on this document are the ones who have everything to gain and not much to lose when it comes to open standards and interoperability.  They are not leading the market.

Additionally, the document is benign and actually a little vague overall.  Its hard not to get behind what are fairly classic discussions that have applied to SaaS and other enterprise software iterations over the years time and time again.

I think they are starting poorly - you can see the skepticism dripping throughout the media (not particularly unusual). I think they rushed to “production” way too fast -apparently doing this whole thing in a “few weeks” - hardly enough time to pull together the coalition necessary to make it a force.  They are damaged by the refusal of the above companies to participate - companies that they needed. They have a vague document that just seems passive in the face of an important technology/architectural/delivery model of the near future (and even the present).

Gartner seems to think that cloud computing is going to be hot in 2009 with over $53 billion in revenues this year and $150 billion by 2013. Nick Carr, ubercynic and pundit, thinks that cloud computing is going to be a disruptive force in IT, much as SaaS was several years ago. Meaning, the group of tech heavies that put together OCM, should have taken some time to work on building the coalition considerably deeper than it is. Also building a much less plain vanilla statement of principles - and to be sure, make #2 less whiny than it is. To do that though…more coalition needed.

That said, I’m not as ready to write the whole thing off that quickly as some others are. I like the idea of some of the tech heavy hitters starting the conversation as they notably put it - even if that conversation is a bit self-serving.  But, the discussion has to start somewhere and this may be where it aggregates - if they can increase their credibility and get at least a few of the biggest cloud players involved.  If they manage that, then, as the old Ella Fitzgerald warbled song goes,  this may be the start of somethin’ big.  I hope so, but its got a long way to go.

March 27th, 2009

CRM Playaz Episode #3: Twitter Hall of Shame; Customer Service - Sometimes It Hurts

Posted by Paul Greenberg @ 8:18 am

Categories: CRM Buzz, Humor

Tags: Customer Service, Twitter, CRM, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Product Marketing, Advertising & Promotion, Enterprise Software, Software, Marketing, Paul Greenberg

CRM Playaz Episode #3

Okay, here’s the latest.  We’re working it and working on it at the same time. But for better or worse, the latest episode of CRM Playaz (that would be #3) which we recorded about a week and a half ago, static notwithstanding.  We cover two of everyone’s favorite topics - customer service  stories that we can bitch to and of course, the newly developed Twikipedia’s Twitter Hall of Shame - including our first celebrity inclusion!! I’ll keep you in suspense as to who it is but the hint is that you might know him under multiple names…..

Listen in, we even have music - sorta.

March 23rd, 2009

Is Twitter Social CRM? Nope.

Posted by Paul Greenberg @ 1:02 pm

Categories: CRM Buzz, CRM Strategy, Industry Analysis, Social CRM, Social Networks

Tags: Twitter, CRM, Jeremiah Owyang, Social CRM, Advertising & Promotion, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Software, Marketing, Software, Paul Greenberg

Over the last few days, social analyst Forrester’s Jeremiah Owyang and PR 2.0 pundit Brian Solis have been calling Twitters’s Future: Social CRM.  Jeremiah did it in his wildly popular Web Strategist blog here and Brian did it in his very good PR 2.0 Blog here. While Jeremiah’s argument is somewhat different than Brian’s the basic premise that both of them have is that Twitter can be (not is going to be) a Social CRM something. Product? System? A little unclear actually.

The reality is that they’re both wrong. Twitter is an increasingly important channel that provides businesses with a means to engage customers on Twitter and to gather data in real time from Twitter, potentially. If Twitter was to be social CRM system or product, it would need the level of overhaul that would make it Twitter no longer.  Twocial TweeRM?

Jeremiah claims that Twitter has two of the three elements of CRM - customers and relationships.  Just not management.

A retail clothing chain has customers too - so do all businesses.  That doesn’t make them a social CRM system or product.

Relationships the way he discusses them - which is peer relationships that discuss a brand and its rivals positively and negatively can be found on ePinions, FeedbackPlanet, and MyStarbucks Ideas too - but that doesn’t mean that this is the opportunity to turn any of them into a Social CRM product or system.

Twitter’s benefit and its relationship to CRM is that it is a location, a community of people who are engaging with their peers in honest open discussions about things that benefit or hurt specific businesses, among many other things. Because there are operational CRM tools and will be new tools that can potentially tie business rules and workflow, processes and systems  to communities of prospects and customers who are conversing,  then a channel or location like Twitter becomes eminently valuable.

The first reason? Because a problem can be monitored, noticed and acted upon, with tools like the Twitter extension to the salesforce.com ServiceCloud or the SAP/Business Objects integration of Business Objects sentiment analysis with Twitter that allows businesses to monitor customer conversation and route the conversations for action to the right people to take action.

The second reason? Because gathering data on the actual discussions around brands - both yours and competitors is invaluable.

But all of that is just on Twitter, not the thousands of other channels that Brian Solis actually identified in his now well known “Conversation Prism” of the types and sources of conversation going on via the social web.

Twitter is one of those. Social CRM requires more than one channel.

Even though Social CRM/CRM 2.0 is a strategy, it does require tools and systems to get the strategy accomplished.

Jeremiah seems be focused around:

“tremendous opportunities for Twitter should they create their own brand management system that they can resell to the world’s companies to monitor, alert, track, prioritize, triage, assign, followup, and report on the interactions with brands.”

But that makes the competition companies like Radian6, and the other 170 social media monitoring companies (thanks to my bud, Nathan Gilliat for the number) not CRM companies. Even if they focused on competing in that space, the problem a Twitter brand management and monitoring system would have is that they’re only going to monitor Twitter. The social media monitoring companies who complement CRM so well aren’t even nearly that limited. They monitor, blogs, forums, and other social networks/communities as well as traditional sources of brand monitoring and company information like Reuters and Hoover. Twitter would be limited to monitoring…Twitter - unless they decided not to be Twitter anymore.

At the moment, Social CRM is in a nascent stage, so all discussions like this are necessary, so we can define what it is.  But CRM products and services are a mature market with a substantial dollar value, one that Twitter would be smart to take advantage of.  It would be a way of monetizing themselves.  Perhaps, rather than Social CRM, might I suggest Twitter do as one of Jeremiah’s commentors suggested and extend their API and provide a paid service to CRM (and other) vendors to customize the activities they integrate with on Twitter.  I can’t speak to the details, but the key here is “service” which is simply something that Twitter offers, NOT Social CRM applications which would be FAR beyond their scope or purpose - I can’t speak to their expertise in building them.

With the customers in control of the business ecosystem, companies have no choice but to define strategies for customer engagement.  Twitter is at this point a channel for finding the customers to engage with and to get data from so that richer customer insights can be garnered and problems solved in real time or nearly so.

That’s a channel. Its not a Social CRM strategy, system, or application.  It could provide premium services to make it a more responsive channel but it won’t be Social CRM unless it’s no longer Twitter.