Category: CRM Strategy
October 14th, 2009
Oracle OpenWorld 2009 - Social CRM Technology Rears an Actual Head
I am almost always in awe of Oracle OpenWorld. The scope of this conference is spectacular. Can you imagine an event that the attendance is down to 37,000 attendees? Actually, that puts me in awe of their event planners more than even the event. How in the name of whoever can you put together something of this magnitude?
Back in 2007, I was also thunderstruck by the changes they made to their CRM products thanks to the team led by Anthony Lye. It was dramatic and it impacted Oracle as a company - and as it turns out, has had an impact on the industry as a whole. While I can’t remember exactly when they started calling it Social CRM, I do remember they had somehow understood that the customer’s requirements and demands and mindset had changed. They adapted accordingly - which was another source of astonishment because they were about the last company I expected to see this kind of progressive and valuable thinking from. But to their credit they did it.
While my focus has always been CRM, I have some experience with enterprise products generally, having built practices for a variety of them back in the 1990s and into the early part of this century - so I keep my eye on them. But the CRM transformation changed my expectations of what the company would deliver as a whole - ranging from their excellent CRM applications to their mysterious Fusion Apps (which are apparently going to drop at this show) to their entirely forgettable Beehive collaboration server (which I hope Oracle has forgotten too). Plus Larry Ellison’s flair for the dramatic makes me expect something remarkable.
Sadly, there was nothing remarkable presented, which is not a condemnation, just a fact. Outside of the CRM products (more on that shortly), what I’ve seen from Oracle so far (with the keynotes of Safra Katz and Charles Phillips) has been…..uneventful at best and pedestrian at worst. Not bad, just uneventful to pedestrian. The changes (at least generally) in their products have been incremental and small increments at that. Statements were made that were dramatic such as Safra Katz talking about Oracle’s “slavish devotion to Open Standards” but nothing dramatic actually occurred.
Don’t get me wrong. The keynotes by Charles Phillips and Safra Katz were fine if you were interested in an overview of what Oracle has been doing in the last year or so. The “keynote” by an EVP of Hewlett Packard was nothing more than a giant ad for Hewlett Packard, only interesting because of Oracle’s acquisition of Sun. Unfortunately, the wisdom of the crowds so to speak, supported me here because they abandoned the hall in droves during the speech.
including the growth of their retail business and the useful sophistication of their retail products - but all in all, nondescript is a good description (get the irony there?) of what I’ve seen so far.
Oracle CRM Moves Forward In Quality…And In Thinking
I will say, even with my narrow focused lenses, Oracle CRM stood far out far ahead of the rest of the Oracle Apps pack. Also let me tell you right now, I’ve been a retained consultant with Oracle though as you all know, that buys them nothing but a good job (I hope) by me. Not anything in these things I write.
CRM at Oracle seems to remain their star application, probably because it is, in 2009, the fastest growing application suite at Oracle and probably will be the Oracle revenue leader this year. That’s because they’ve understood what businesses need when it comes to being successful with customers. Note that I didn’t say collaborating with customers. That’s not what Oracle CRM is all about. They are really applications for sales and marketing effectiveness. They don’t have much to speak of in the world of customer service - with the exception of their tight partnership with Helpstream - an excellent move given their lack of native customer service apps. But they are doing what they do very well utilizing their existing Siebel applications expertise and their on demand applications in combination with a view toward internal collaboration at a company. Witness the development of Social CRM Sales Library On Demand in the last few months.
But what Anthony Lye, Mark Woolen, Christine Viera, Melissa Boxer and Adam May showed at an executive briefing yesterday on the advances in CRM was heartening because they are molding their CRM applications - traditional ones - with social and collaborative features that make them infinitely more valuable.
Anthony Lye, SVP in charge of Oracle CRM and the intellectual driver for much of this, started off with a discussion on the idea of reinvention rather than recovery as the strategy that companies need to take aggressively during poor economic times.
So far, so good.
He then framed the soon to appear demos by talking about what he saw as 3 game changing strategies:
- Executing the cross-channel customer experience flawlessly - Anthony distinguished between multi-channel and cross-channel (which was something like the difference between multigrain and whole grain) - multi-channel was a strategy that delivered an experience in mobile, field, community, call center etc. Cross-channel was a strategy to traverse all the individual channels at any given time by embedding processes to instrument business so that the customer experience was consistent. PG: While I thought the strategy was smart from a software and processes standpoint, I wasn’t truly sure that cross-channel was that much different from what I know as multi-channel. But regardless, the idea of a consistent (though he didn’t talk about authentic which is the companion piece of consistent when it comes to the customer experience) customer experience accessible whenever across channels was dead on.
- Tap into the power of the social web - this is the one that goes without saying and is the technological and process driven aspect of how Social CRM works - though by no means all of it.
- Deliver CRM data, when, how, and where users need it - this was the most interesting actually.
Anthony’s contention was that there were two types of relationships that CRM users needed to know when it came to customers. First, the explicit relationships - what kinds of communities was the customer associated with; who were his or her friends or friends of friends; the historic transactional data about the cutomer and the more contemporary profile data. But most interesting to me at least was his idea of the implicit relationships. These were not of the “who do you know” variety, but more of the “who do you look like?” When Mark Woolen, the always personable and very accomplished #1 VP for the Oracle CRM grouplet, demonstrated an app for a I presume fictional company though it was one that sold the iPhone 3G (S), he showed a button with the name “Connect to Someone Like Me.” When that button was pressed, it took you to a list of customers who were ranked by percentage of how close to your profile they were. You then could type in a question to ask of those like you. Great feature and entirely social in how it was connected. Built through the new Siebel toolkit I believe.
This is not a new idea. Political campaigns use micro-targeting to identify the lifestyle habits of their potential voters and identify blocks of voters who might all own Mercedes, be involved in social clubs etc. They then use this “implicit information” to figure out who those “similar folks” would most likely vote for, based on this kind of data. What Oracle is contending and I think rightfully is that the transactional data that’s been gathered by CRM applications can be used to find “someone like me” segments - and they’ve gone ahead used Siebel toolkits to build out what they claim here. Impressive and smart.
Melissa Boxer, who is probably the smartest person I’ve met anywhere when it comes to applying the principles of loyalty to enterprise software, demonstrated a genuinely fantastic iPhone application for Swedish Rail (SJ). Here’s a screenshot on that.
Swedish Rail Social Marketing iPhone App
What makes this application powerful is that it literally allows you use the points you have in a loyalty program to purchase items from Swedish Rail including tickets that are not only shipped right to your iPhone when you’ve used the points to buy them but can be redeemed via the iPhone. Additionally, you can make reservations directly and then have your itinerary delivered to your iPhone and if you choose to make it public so your friends (chosen friends) need to know where you are going - it can be delivered to Facebook for public or semi-public scrutiny. Swedish Rail then gets all this new data about your transactions and interactions and can use it to create targeted offerings on the spot.
Way cool and what social marketing looks like, albeit in a nascent form (so don’t get in my face about something that might be missing, okay? Nascent form.).
But Oracle is even doing more than that. They have done some I think is important with a traditional CRM application. They’ve extended Siebel with the use of a new Siebel toolkit that allows developers to integrate business processes and components into any framework whatever. That means the results of the development can be delivered to users via a widget, or an mini-application or a mobile app. But what makes this toolkit particularly important is that its got APIs based on RESTful architecture.
This is big for Oracle. The reality is that Sage led the way in the effective use of RESTful architectures and builds their current products on this simplified and yet powerful architecture. Unlike Sage, Oracle, and most of the other major vendors has been relying on service-oriented architectures which use far more commands than a RESTful architecture for their messaging and are considerably more complex. For the Siebel toolkit to use REST to deliver Siebel metadata is an important step forward in the world of CRM. It will allow for more effective and easily consumable applications when combined with the other piece of the Siebel puzzle - a visualization toolkit to change the interface to be appropriate to the delivery channel.
There were a number of other developments including a strong offering of Siebel OnDemand Release 17, which has added features that are most often found in larger on premise products including PRM, advanced analytics and what I think Adam Day said was the OEMing of Best Systems Marketing Development Funds program. and an increasing amount of vertical applications including a mobile pharma app for salespeople. All in all, there are 12 new products, 31 new features, 88 “customer-driven enhancements” - Anthony’s words not mine - and nine new integrations.
But to me the core developments are the improvement in true social marketing that recognizes the behaviors and activities of social customers. Oracle is using the traditional customer transaction data and the newe interaction data in an intelligent way tp micro-target and create “segments like me.” That’s really good for improving customer insight but what makes this truly powerful is that they’ve developed the channels and outputs to give the customers access to that same information by hooking them up with the people discovered through the micro-targeting efforts. Not only does the business gain insight, but the customer gains access. Truly multi-directional. In other words, this is what a technology can do to support a social CRM strategy. Everyone benefits.
So, hats off to Oracle now for conceptualizing and building a genuine social CRM application. But capital H Hats off to Oracle when they release it and get it beyond the demo stage. This is important and may be a paradigmatic set of CRM applications if it bears out in the real customer world as well as it seems to in the demo and development environment.
NEXT UP: Marc Benioff Speaks; Denis Pombriant and I speak; Larry Ellison speaks. Other OOW 2009 coverage worth following.
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…..
July 6th, 2009
Time to Put A Stake in The Ground on Social CRM
The debate and discussion about what defines Social CRM a.k.a. CRM 2.0 vs. its traditional parent has been going on for about 2 years pretty regularly and started, according to thought leader Graham Hill almost a decade before that.
Personally, I’m done defining it and am moving on. I think enough time has been spent trying to decide what we’re calling it and what it is. I think that we’ve reached the point that though there is no one point of view, there is a general idea of what we have. So this post, which will be on ZDNET and PGreenblog is my stake in the ground for the definition of Social CRM. If anyone asks me what the definition is, they are going to be referred to this post on either blog. I’m putting it on both blogs, but it has implications for each blog that are somewhat different. Check toward the end of the post where I’ll discuss how I’m going to approach each one.
Also, for this post, I still will welcome comments and discussion on the definition if you want. But I’m really ready personally to move on.
Why?
First, there seems to be a consensus on the definition already. We all agree on its general characteristics. We see it as the use of social and traditional CRM tools and processes to support a strategy of customer engagement. Or some permutation of that.
Second, there’s too much other work on Social CRM to do. Its time to start figuring out and documenting the business models, policies, practices, processes, social characteristics, applications, and the methodologies that we need to actually carry it out. There is some great work going on in those Social CRM areas already with folks like Graham Hill, Denis Pombriant, Thomas Vander Wal, Brent Leary, Prem Kumar, Chris Carfi, Bill Band, Natalie Petouhoff, Mike Fauscette, Michael Maoz and Ray Wang, among others (please forgive me if I didn’t mention you. There are many others). But we need to create a repository for all this work - and an institution that can represent it agnostically. Right now, the body of practice out there is all over the place. Even with this, the work on Social CRM’s “how” needs a dramatic escalation now.
So, I’m providing one last aggregate look at what I see Social CRM to be. When the 4th edition of CRM at the Speed of Light comes out, you’ll see a lot of the what and how in that nearly 800 pages. This is the condensed - black hole condensed - version of that.
I hope that I’m reflecting the consensus. If not, I’m sure the discussion will go on. But as far as I go, I’m interested in the more substantive discussions on what we actually have to do - not how it differs from traditional CRM nor what we’re talking about when it comes to “social” and whether or not we are going to call it CRM 2.0 or social CRM.
My Take On It
Okay, here’s my take on Social CRM’s definition.
- I’m conceding to “Social CRM” as the term of choice, rather than CRM 2.0. If ZDNET will let me, I’ll change the name of the blog to “Social CRM: The Conversation” CRM 2.0 has been a placeholder at best and obscuring at worst - it doesn’t reflect the customer’s control of the business ecosystem all that well. Social CRM is a better, though not great, reflection of what we’re talking about. Let’s use the acronym of the Twitterverse group for it - SCRM or sCRM. I don’t care which.
- The customer controls the business ecosystem and the conversation, but not the business a.k.a. company a.k.a. enterprise itself. What that means is that while customers have much greater control over their destinies in how they interact with businesses, make no mistake about it, they don’t run the business, nor does the business have to concede everything to the customer.
- What this means is that SCRM is an extension of CRM, not a replacement for CRM. Its a dramatic change in what it adds to the features, functions and characteristics of CRM but it is still based on the time honored principle that a business needs its customers and prefers them profitable and that same business needs to run itself effectively too.
- The transformation that’s sparked the need for Social CRM seems to have occurred in 2004. It has been a social revolution in how we communicate, not a revolution in how we do business per se. All institutions that humans interact with have been affected by things like the cellphone/smartphone, the new social web tools and the instant availability of information in an aggregated and organized way that provides intelligence to the person on the street, not just the enterprise.
- Part of that transformation affects how we trust and thus who we trust. Since 2004, “someone like me” is the most trusted source, not businesses, NGOs, government agencies or corporate leaders. That means that peer trust is how influence and impact germinates and then propagates most effectively - at least as of now.
- The lesson for business, in terms of Social CRM is that we are now at a point that the customers’ expectations are so great and their demands so empowered that our SCRM business strategy needs to be built around collaboration and customer engagement, not traditional operational customer management.
- We’ve moved from the transaction to the interaction with customers, though we haven’t eliminated the transaction - or the data associated with it.
- Businesses still need to run their operations, set goals that are cognizant of what the customer wants and needs, but not determined by that. They need to map their goals and objectives to the customers’ goals and objectives to make it work for all concerned.
- That means that we need to recognize that there is an extended enterprise value chain which consists of the company, its suppliers, vendors and agencies that the enterprise has to deal with. There is a separate “personal value chain” which is the total greater than the sum of its parts of what an individual customer needs to achieve whatever their personal agenda is.
- For the company to succeed, since they cannot control the personal value chain of the customer, nor should they want to, they can only provide what the customer needs to satisfy that part of the customer’s personal agenda that is associated with their enterprise. That means products, services, tools and experiences that allow the customer that satisfying interaction.
- The intersection of the extended enterprise value chain and the customer’s use of part of his personal value chain to satisfy that personal agenda creates the possibility for a collaborative value chain that engages the customer in the activities of the business sufficiently to provide each (the company and the customer) with what they need from the other to derive individual and mutually beneficial value.
- That means that transparency and authenticity become more than buzzwords because in order for the customer to make intelligent decisions on how they are going to interact with the company and the level of that interaction, they need that visibility and honesty from the company.
- That also means that the companies need to make the decision that its a good thing to allow the customer to have that increased level of knowledge, access and honesty - it can help the company immensely in their engagements with their customers. That’s a cultural issue that has to be resolved for Social CRM to work.
- If these aforementioned conditions are met, the customer is afforded the ability to co-create by the company. What that means is not all that pat. It can mean anything from customers and the company collaborating on product development, to customer suggestions on how to improve a company process, to customers helping other customers solve customer service issues, to even doing what gamers do and modifying game play using tools for scenario creation which adds value to the game. Co-creation is the ability of the company and customer to create additional value for each other - what form it takes is not always THE BIG THING. But co-creation, mutually derived value, is at the core of SCRM.
- SCRM differs from Enterprise 2.0 though is integrally related to it. Enterprise 2.0 is organized around increasing the productivity of the workforce in all that it does utilizing new collaborative tools to do so. It uses those tools to aggregate and organize information and systems. However, though different, Enterprise 2.0 is integrally related because part of that improvement in productivity increases the effectiveness of employee-customer interactions. It also increases the company’s ability to capture useful information and knowledge about customers, not just boatloads of data. But what it doesn’t do is provide avenues for the customers to engage themselves with the company. That’s not its purpose. That is the purpose of SCRM.
- SCRM also changes the nature of what kind of customer is optimal for you. Rather than aiming at a satisfied customer (an increasingly useless metric) and even rather than thinking that a loyal customer is your best customer, your objective should be to create advocates and settle for loyal customers.
- How you measure customer value changes when you’re thinking about SCRM. Rather than just Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) - which reflects the direct financial value of a customer to a company over the life of his relationship to that company, think too about Customer Referral Value (CRV) which measures how valuable influential customers are when they tell others about your company, not just promise to.
- When you look at the SCRM applications out there - there are no actual SCRM suites, no matter what the claims of any company on either the CRM or social tools side. What you do have are effective and important applications that increase the ability of employees to interact with customers - though they are not tools that facilitate the actual interaction. You also have the integration of social media and community building tools with traditional CRM tools which are providing effective combinations which are leading toward SCRM. I want to emphasize. These are all good tools. They are worthy of any company’s consideration. There is just no SCRM suite out there - as of yet or in the near future. Which doesn’t matter one iota.
I’d say that covers the basics.
A Shorter Definition
For a shorter definition of SCRM, I’d say:
“CRM is a philosophy & a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes & social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted & transparent business environment. It’s the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.”
Well, it may not be tweetable but it’s shorter.
A Tweetable Definition
“The company’s response to the customer’s control of the conversation.”
With the quotes and the period, its 71 characters. Get rid of the period and you can just write it twice.
What’s Next?
Let me reiterate something. This is my stake in the ground. It would be presumptuous of me to assume I can halt a discussion that I no longer want to participate in. That said, in presentations etc. I’m going to continue to give the definition of SCRM because people will be asking. But I’m not going to try to define it anymore. I know what it is. I think that most people who read my stuff know it too - and many who don’t, also know it. I also am no longer going to engage in discussions or defenses of whether or not it’s “necessary” or “marketing hype” or any of that. Again, stake in the ground. While there is plenty of room for traditional CRM strategies, the change in the customer necessitates some sort of commitment to social CRM to succeed with that neo-customer.
So, here’s what I’m going to be doing and not doing from here on.
- No more debates on what Social CRM is, though I certainly will discuss what it is in presentations and when else it makes sense. But I’m not trying to define it any more
- No more detailed defenses on whether or not its necessary. Its existence is always necessary. Its use is necessary in appropriate situations.
- No more calling it CRM 2.0 for me. Its Social CRM.
- In all the venues I have when it comes to discussing Social CRM, it will be the new business models, the processes, the methodologies, the practices, reviews of the applications that are part of the SCRM universe - and debunking the claims of those apps if need be. I’ll be providing as many success and failure stories as I humanly can so we can develop a body of practice.
- For ZDNET, now that the book is done, I’m going to focus on what the ZDNET audience loves the best - the technology and processes of Social CRM - related or otherwise. Plus the practitioner stories of successful implementation. There will be deviations from that but that’s my ZDNET primary direction. Plus I’m going to try to change the blog name, if it doesn’t wreak too much havoc to Social CRM: The Conversation
- For PGreenblog, the focus will be on the discussions ranging from the business models, the social psychology, the economics to the theoretical concepts and the practical strategies. I’ll look at the culture of the companies, the nature of the customer’s thinking, the effect of style on all of this, etc. I’ll do the best I can with what the line of business person needs to know and what the academician needs to explore.
- I’m going to spend some time trying to create an institution to capture all of this called the Institute for the Future of Business and the Customer (IFBC) which will include the actual B2B and B2C and B2G customer on its leadership body with the company leaders. Unlike any other institution of its kind that I know of. This is not an easy task. I’ve been trying for two years to do this already and have made some progress but it needs a good academic institution and an endowed chair and a couple of companies to underwrite it. It is an agnostic body that will attempt to aggregate and organize all this incredible knowledge on how companies and customers engage and establish what the new business world looks like going forth. Ambitious, even grandiose? Maybe. But I’m going to try or go down in flames trying.
That’s it. Stake is in the ground. Comments on the definition per se are welcome this one last time on either of the blogs that you see this.
But I’m done. AND I’m just starting.
June 24th, 2009
Enterprise 2.0 2009 Conference: Aggregate and Organize
I finally made it to Boston for the Enterprise 2.0 conference with my record intact. That record would be that I have NEVER in 15 years of flying to Boston a hundred times, NEVER, repeat again, NEVER been on time both ways. This one was resolved quickly because my flight to Boston was over an hour late on United. I once thought I would get out on time about 10 years ago and 11 minutes before we were to board, a luggage belt in the terminal I was in caught on fire and we had to evacuate the terminal. The gods spoke loud and clear and continue to, for some reason, yell at me for coming to Boston
But at least the Enterprise 2.0 conference is a reason to withstand the wrath of the gods. Before i get into some of the highlights and my take on at least the first day of the conference, I want to emphasize something that makes me sound like a fanboy. If there’s one conference you need to attend that ends with a 2.0 - this is the one, if you care about your business. If you’re a geek, I think you could make an argument for O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 conference; if you’re a government employee or even government contractor, Government 2.0 is a good place to be; but if you are a business person and you want to understand what you have to do in the next year to 2 years….this.is.IT. Hell, I am a fanboy when it comes to this baby. Come here next year. Even with the gods of Logan arrayed against you. If you’re fearful of the gods of Mt. Logan, they announced a second conference for San Francisco in November of this year, with a much less frightening airport.
Aggregate and Organize
I’m noticing a trend that might actually be worth making note of that I’ve just seen reinforced multiple times here at the conference. That would be the that the new enterprise, from particularly mid-market to largest enterprise, will realize the most value from strategies, systems and technologies that aggregate and organization information and/or systems.
Several years ago, composite applications were the rage - that application framework that allowed you to take your legacy systems, and combine the data from those systems in ways that made the legacy systems “new” applications. You were able pick the interface that you loved the most from among them to be your interface of choice for the composite application. I did a longer piece on them back in 2005, if you’re interested.
As the social web began to move into place in 2006 and later, the companies that specialized in composite applications, like AboveAll, while genuinely foresighted, began to fail, because the tools of its successor and ultimately, its killer, became available and they were at least initially, cheap. That would be enterprise mashups - which not only allowed the enterprise to use the data for legacy applications, but also allows you to incorporate external data through RSS feeds. Plus the data, rather than tied together by a complex framework of APIs through a SOA architecture was vastly simplified. Here’s two diagrams that at least metaphorically give you the picture. The first was the AboveAll architecture. The second is the enterprise mashup equivalent (source Mike2.0).
Well, the role of enterprise mashups and applications has changed and that is apparent from the Enterprise 2.0 conference. First, on the technology side, to understand this, we have to give props to the evolution and increasing maturity of service oriented architectures and RESTful architectures - and - really, web services in general. They are to the point where not only are they mature as frameworks and underpinnings for corporate technology backbones, but they are more easily (though, of course, nothing is that easy) integratable then ever before. Second, the standards for communication between systems have been, well, standardized. J2EE, XML, etc are so ordinarily accepted that interoperability among systems and even between disparate companies systems is now a doable thing. (hey, don’t get your pants jammed. This isn’t meant to be some technical treatise - just an explanation of what I’m seeing as a dominant trend at Enterprise 2.0 with a bit of background. So I’m going to use difficult technical terms, like “doable thing.”
On the business side, complexity, while an unavoidable part of a large company’s operations, is not seen as a desirable condition. As the amount of information available to companies in both structured and unstructured formats (made available through those external feeds and internal data systems like CRM systems) becames both increasingly large and necessary to decipher in ways that are valuable, the need to aggregate, organize, and thus simplify both the information and systems within the corporate firewall is becoming a corporate desire and necessity. How information is processed and presented is perhaps the most important IT and cultural function of a company. What you do with information is not trivial - it makes or breaks the company.
So taking the complexity out of both the processing and the presentation of information is what Enterprise 2.0 does. It giveth, because the ability of Enterprise 2.0 applications and thinking to get incredible amounts of information from behind and beyond the firewall is unparalleled in business history. If its working right it taketh away, because it can strip the complexity and mask the processing and presentation effort so that the information is provided in a way that is incredibly valuable and rich. It becomes truly shareable knowledge, rather than just information that is technologically available to all.
This is what I saw as the underlying theme. What do you have to do to make sure that your employees have the knowledge they need to increase their productivity and to improve the culture of the company. What steps have to be taken to do this using the good old people, processes and technologies that have been such a dominant CRM theme for infinity plus a day and now are a dominant enterprise theme.
Example: the winner of the Oliver Marks-Stowe Boyd Award for Open Enterprise Innovation this year was Booz Allen Hamilton for their Hello system. Walton Smith, a senior associate of BAH, presented on the system, which is open to all employees (not contractors), without reservation. The core of the system are activity streams tied to profiles which resemble FriendFeed activity streams. What that means is that, as an employee, you can follow people that provide you with critical expertise via their activity streams, all available on a single page and tie in feeds that you need for information (aggregate). You can then tag the information and rank and rate the information (organize).
Example: I had the good fortune to interview Suresh Kuppusamy, the CEO, CTO and co-founder of Bluenog. Aside from the very salient he is a really nice human being, Bluenog which I hadn’t heard of until yesterday which is more my bad than their problem, does exactly what I’m talkin’ about - aggregate and organize. They have framework that was built on open source called ICE (at version 4.5) that ties enterprise content management (ECM), business intelligence (BI) and a portal through common, and secure services, so that a midmarket company can provide role-detemined information through the portal regardless of what system, internal or external the data is drawn from. Columbia University is one of their customers. They use the Bluenog portal and single signon so that, as Suresh said, “they can push the right content to the right entities.” This means that management has a dashboard indicating how well they are doing with their KPIs, there are shared calendars, content from feeds like wikis or blogs or standard structured sources or internal data is all aggregated and organized (there are those words again) for each kind of person on a need to know basis. These guys have been so successful that they have been winners on the Red Herring 100 and the Infoweek 50 in their mere 3 years of existence. Check out the diagram and then check them out. Smart.
Aggregate and organize.
Example: This is a mashup of Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext and 2.0 ubermensch. It’s the combination of his discussion on a panel and an interview I did with him and his very bright VP of Professional Services, Mike Indinopulos. What Socialtext is doing from a technology standpoint has been and continues to be for me the ne plus ultra when it comes to aggregating and organizing information in ways genuinely create actionable knowledge - not just intelligence. They are moving the fastest in the world of wikis at least into the realm of CRM with their technological capability to expand into not just behind the firewall but at this stage a private outreach to customers for collaboration within the Socialtext framework. They can do public interactions, but private is what a few of their more forward thinking customers are ready for.
What is even more interesting though is their (his and Mike’s) development of the Social Software Value Matrix which is almost (not quite) a maturity model for oganizational evolution when it comes to using the services that social software provides for early stage operational improvements to late stage businss model innovation. I won’t outline the whole thing but it basically organizes the information from a company and ultimately its customers across departments, silos and throughout customer and partner networks. Aggregate the information and organize it. That underlays the entire matrix. What changes is the purpose its used for and the scope of the information gathering. But it is an incredibly well thought out piece of work, increasingly my confidence in my choice of Socialtext as the SuperStah! for the chapter in CRM at the Speed of Light 4th edition that goes through wikis. Even though they integrate far less with existing CRM systems than the folks at Atlassian, they get what has to be done when it comes to Social CRM.
There are countless other examples that I could provide for this such as some of how even Microsoft Sharepoint, the collaboration industry 800 pound gorilla is being used for aggregation and organization, but for now that’s enough.
Enterprise 2.0 so far has been an eyeopener because its telling me and around 1200-1300 others that there is not only a lot of cool and collaborative things going on but E2.0 is moving into mainstream thinking and soon into mainstream operations, systems, and best of all strategy. Plus this thing is REALLY well organized by the TechWeb folks. No glitches at all.
However I do have a beef with the conference content.
Where’s Social CRM? Or CRM 2.0 if You Want To Call It That
I actually thought, maybe in a bit too self-absorbed a way, that Social CRM was going to be one of the key themes here. It isn’t. I remember CRM being mentioned once by someone but it is not even a blip on the radar. Granted, this is an enterprise 2.0 conference so it could very well be firewall constrained but I would have liked to heard a speaker who was looking at Enterprise 2.0 from the standpoint of how it would engage customers directly into the collaborative value chain of the enterprise. However, at least in the 1 on 2 I had with Ross and Mike there was discussion of that and they do really get it. But I would suggest for the San Francisco conference later this year or next year’s conference they have some explicit discussion around Social CRM since the customer engagement is now a strategic imperative for business, rather than just customer management which, as a strategy needs to be relegated to, as a famous leftist once said, “the dustbins of history.” You operations guys need not freak out. We still need traditional CRM for day to day business ops.
Rock On, Social CRM
Tonight I’m doing this Rockstars of Social CRM panel with Brent Leary, Michael Thomas and Frank Eliason, moderated by Chris Brogan and Marcel LeBrun at the Renaissance Waterfront Hotel in Boston between 8-11pm. Has both live participating audience and a twebinar attached and will discuss what social CRM is. There’s also a party with Rockband 2 and karaoke which I am announcing now that I will NOT participate in since I have a some arthritis (sadly, not just an excuse) and I suck at it too. Check on the links that I have here to register for the live event (which may be closed) or for the Twebinar which is always open - like the bar. There are in total over 500 registered participants already.
June 18th, 2009
Outcome Based Social Networks: Yet Another CRM at the Speed of Light Excerpt
I’m going to finish the book today. CRM at the Speed of Light, 4th edition will be done by the time that the day ends - though I suspect a lot sooner. It’s going to be a 750 page tome - mostly print, some supplemented electronically, on CRM 2.0 - I hope a definitive work. In honor of me being able to devote much more time and effort to this blog and the rest of my life than I’ve been able to in the last few weeks, even months, I’m doing one last chapter excerpt from the upcoming book, pre-edited. Let me know what you think of the idea - This is on Outcome Based Social Networks. Again, this is unedited so it will be improved in final form. I have to edit it once before I send in, as I always do and then I send it in to be edited by my copy editor.
Enjoy!! Read the rest of this entry »
June 11th, 2009
Guest Post: Steve Wylie on The Enterprise 2.0 Conference
I’m heading over to the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston on June 22. If you’re interested in the social customer and how businesses should respond to them - and how workplace performance can be improved - this is the one conference you shouldn’t miss all year. I mean that. Go. I’ll hook up with you if you’re there. Contact me via Twitter to set up some time.
I asked Steve Wylie, the GM and Conference Director for this knockout of a conference and all around good guy, to write a guest post because I don’t think I’m persuasive enough and this guy has those needed mesmerizing powers to get you there - using rational thought as his hypnotic tool of choice. He is also the editor of the Enterprise 2.0 Blog, which means he can write a pretty mean posting to begin with. He’ll give you an idea of why an Enterprise 2.0 event is even more cogent than ever.
SF-based Steve is an events industry veteran, having handled some of the biggest conferences around including the Interop mega-events in Las Vegas and New York. He is an IT industry veteran too, as the former program director for InteropNet, which ran a multi-vendor test lab geared to evaluate, improve and showcase early implementations of open-standard IT infrastructure technology.
I’m always amazed at what it takes to run an event. I think event planning is a magnificent and difficult venture. But Enterprise 2.0 is not just an event, but one with actual content - and plenty of networking. Oh, if you want to hang around with the rock stars of the social web, they hang there too. Here’s where you can get more info on the conference.
I’d truly take advantage of this and make the effort to get there.
Take it away, Steve
The Next Phase of Enterprise 2.0 Adoption
Paul kindly invited me to share my thoughts on the Enterprise 2.0 market and provide some highlights for the upcoming Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. As the conference chair, I’ve got a fairly unique perspective on the state of Enterprise 2.0 and some ideas on where we’re headed. We’re roughly three years along since Harvard Professor Andrew McAfee first described this new category of enterprise software and organizational strategy that he dubbed “Enterprise 2.0”. Someone recently asked me what’s changed in the Enterprise 2.0 market from that point to present day.
For starters, we really didn’t have much of “a market” to speak of three years ago. At that first Enterprise 2.0 Conference we described a new vision for business applications that included some truly ground-breaking concepts. Attendees were largely business users and managers, frustrated with the disparity between fast-paced, consumer technology innovation and the dated applications being supported by corporate IT. At that first conference we were embarking on a radical journey to turn these business applications and the corporate culture around them upside down. We were ready to take on the world.
Fast forward three years and those early aspirations are now grounded in reality. Momentum is building for what is now truly an Enterprise 2.0 “market” and we’re seeing many early signs of success. But while we’ve made tremendous progress in three years, Enterprise 2.0 concepts and applications are still striving to reach more wide-spread, enterprise-scale adoption. There is an abundance of use cases around small or department-level successes but far fewer examples of large-scale deployments – examples of Enterprise 2.0 concepts and applications that form part of an organization-wide fabric for productivity and communication. Why is that?
While we could argue that this is a very new market and that businesses take time to change, I also believe that Enterprise 2.0 will be challenged by large-scale adoption until corporate IT is fully on board. Early adoption has been largely driven by business users and department-level managers. They had a problem to solve and were fed up waiting for IT to provide the solutions they needed. They took matters into their own hands by finding workable, web-based solutions and even celebrated this new found freedom from IT. With a few exceptions, IT took a reactive posture to Enterprise 2.0 and viewed it as a threat to be managed, secured and even blocked in some cases.
Three years later and I see that posture changing for many IT leaders. We’re entering a new era where forward-looking IT leaders embrace Enterprise 2.0 as a strategic advantage and as part of a cohesive, company-wide system. This change is an important ingredient to the next phase of Enterprise 2.0 adoption.
So what should you expect from this year’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference? Expect to network with nearly 1500 people from over 40 countries. Expect our most comprehensive program to date with deep coverage of new topics like Social Media and Cloud Computing. Expect even more innovation from industry veterans and start-up vendors preparing for the next big thing. And expect to hear some really compelling case studies and speakers from organizations like the Obama Campaign, the US Army, Booz Allen Hamilton, Volvo and Jet Blue, all ready to share their experiences on how Enterprise 2.0 is transforming business – changing the world.
June 4th, 2009
Excerpt #2: Customer Experience - Chap 21 from CRM @ The Speed of Light, 4th ed.
I have to be straight with you. I’m entering the head down, grind it, drive to the goal line when it comes to CRM at the Speed of Light’s 4th edition. Which means that in other areas that I’m writing, I’m treading water. So there is a dual purpose to these excerpts. One is I’m treading water. The other is to give you a peek at what’s coming. Its going to be around 750 pages all in all - a definitive work, according to me at least, on CRM 2.0/Social CRM covering everything - some in depth, some touching on it. In a way, it has a companion relationship to the 3rd edition which is far more technology focused than this edition, though there is a healthy dose of technology in the 4th edition. But if you want details on, say, how analytics works, get the 3rd edition. If you’re more interested in the business value and contemporary usage of analytics for customer insight, get this one.
In any case, I’ve got a new excerpt for you from another chapter. Once again, its unedited and unexpurgated a.k.a. raw. Let me know what you think and what changes I might make. I’m stubborn. So convince me, please. All used input in the editing will be attributed.
The excerpt:
Why Customer Experience Mapping?
How many of your employees directly interact with your customers? How many of your senior management ever interact with customers by anything but accident? How many of your customers have demands that you think are probably outside what the company can do or ever has done? How many of you use the incredible amount of intelligence that customers provide even in normal conversations? How many of you presume you know your customer? By the way, “presume” is a precisely chosen word.
The answers. Many. Almost none. Several, but what can you do? Not too many. All of us, especially marketing people.
Here’s how little you really know your customers. EMarketer reported on a 2008 study done by QCI International:
- 41% of the companies surveyed do not record customer contact channel preferences.
- In more than 90% of companies, the staffs who are responsible for talking to customers could not articulate why customers should buy from them.
- Only 13% of senior management has regular contact with customers.
Truthfully, we don’t know our customers all that well, despite their often easy willingness to be known. Put on your customer hat for a minute. How many companies are you willing to say, “Damn. They seem to know just want I want!” A few…maybe. But what about this next statement, “They not only know what I want, but how I want it?”
Back in Chapter 4, I spoke a lot of American Girl. I mentioned the varying options that they had that each cost something. How each young girl dresses their doll, which services they choose (haircut, hot dog) and which associated media they see or buy, affects the revenue of Mattel. It’s rarely a matter of price except as a consideration in a granular look at the customer experience.
The reason for all this variation is that each of us is self-interested. Note, I didn’t say selfish. Self-interested. Mother Theresa was self-interested. Doing Good with a capital G was a way of satisfying her internal emotional “benchmarks.” Self-interest. Not selfish. That individual interest can be a benefit to a company that understands what it is that drives that customer but a major headache when it doesn’t. The biggest “FAIL” is when someone at the company presumes that they know what the customer’s self-interest is - and they don’t. Believe me, they don’t.
There is a simple answer to that presumption failure though which I mentioned way back in Chapter 4. It’s worth repeating. ASK THE CUSTOMER WHAT IT IS THEY THINK AND WANT!
Mapping will be your first set of brushstrokes for your freshly painted customer portrait.
The Preparation
Customer mapping isn’t merely a questionnaire that you get to ask a customer - via Survey Monkey or your internal email system. However preparation for customer mapping can be done using the traditional instruments for customer queries.
But it doesn’t start with that.
Before there is a single question even discussed there are several strategic CRM elements that have to be in place.
Consistent Perception of CRM Mission and Vision
I established the importance of the mission and vision statements last chapter. NOTHING proceeds without a clear mission and vision statement that provides the customer-facing cues that the company needs to define how it will approach its interactions with the customers and what the future holds for that. This is a prerequisite for any sort of customer experience mapping that you are preparing to do.
The full evolution and development of a strategy isn’t.
The reason that it isn’t is pretty straightforward. If successful, the mapping will help you define the strategy - helping you execute on your mission. As time goes on and you redo the mapping - yes, redo - this isn’t a one-time-whew-we’re done- wipe across the forehead - it will provide you with the insight to tweak the elements of the strategy going forward. That means that your vision can be realized.
However, before you get to that, you have to make sure that the perception of the mission and vision are consistent across the company also.
What do I mean by that?
Let me get literary.
In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Titinius returns home to find Cassius of the lean and hungry look, dead. He says, “Alas, thou has misconstrued every thing.” That is a state that you have to make sure that you avoid.
The only way to avoid that is to make sure that the mission and vision that are the fundamental statements for the CRM 2.0 strategy are not only clearly defined but clearly understood across the entire value chain. By having that mission and vision clear, the direction that the strategy has to be pointed will be obvious to all concerned - and that doesn’t need the entire strategy done.
The entire value chain, includes the accounting department, your logistics organization, the warehouse managers, the human resources department and all others in the back of the company. The reason this encompasses the entire value chain is that with the increased customer demands and the heightened emotional sensitivity due to extreme economic fluctuations, among others, how every part of the company performs will have an impact on the customer experience.
For example, several years ago, a client of mine called up with an odd dilemma. Their accounting department, a few years before the call, had developed a technique that they used in accounting entries that saved their rather large department around $40,000 per year. However, they had added ecommerce to their portfolio of sales pipes. As a result, this accounting technique created an online “glitch” which made the customer purchasing whatever they did online enter some of the same data twice. Never mind how it got there - it’s not germane to this.
They wanted to know what to do.
My recommendation, since it wasn’t technically fixable was to jettison the technique - despite its improved efficiency, because it was degrading the customer experience - and thus irritating customers, who expected their online shopping to be seamless and easy.
They did just that. Which is great, but the true moral of this story is to note how even the back office can affect a customer experience that is expected to be something it turns out not to be - in other words, there is a failure to meet expectations.
So what can you do to prevent that - and, hopefully, even exceed expectations?
The Traditional Approaches
There is nothing wrong with traditional approaches - though they work less and less. When I say “traditional” approaches that includes focus groups, standard surveys, customer interviews that have directed questions and attempts at customer segmentation. Each of them has a strength or two, but there is an underlying flaw that they tend to have - the results tend to reflect the prejudices of the company - rather than the raw honesty of the individual customer. Even with analytics-driven customer segmentation for example, your result is the assessment of people who are similar to you but not of “you” as an individual. While “someone like him” might be your customer’s most trusted source, companies should remember that it isn’t a good demographic in the eyes of that same individual customer. They may trust someone like them but they want you to know them personally.
To do that, you need to start by mapping the customer experience.
Now We Map
Mapping the customer experience is a granular process - and one that encompasses all channels that a customer uses to interact with you or vice versa. If you are a retail store, it encompasses every interaction starting with the moment that the customer walks through the door and notices something to the moment that they leave the store and go home; to the time they call up customer service or the sales rep that has to do follow-up on the purchase. It encompasses their web experience and how they interacted with you on the web - ranging from how comfortable the site was when they were navigating to the effect that the 11 seconds of latency that you uncovered in your customer interview affected that customer behavior or marred their experience - or not.
But as important as the specific interaction is the expectation of the result of that interaction the customer brings to the table - and what kind of importance the customer assigns to it.
I’m going to start by breaking out the fundamental elements.
Interactions
An interaction, for the purposes of the customer experience, is any time that a customer communicates with the company - regardless of the communications channel - and regardless of the whether it is a cyber-communication or a physical conversation.
Examples of good and bad interactions are in Table 21-2.
|
Communications Medium |
Good Interaction |
Bad Interaction |
|
Retail Store |
Clean, well lit, friendly service from a store representative, and well-stocked |
All the other good but a surly store representative |
|
Web-based |
Easy to navigate, no latency when ordering |
Ten second or more wait for order to complete when submit is clicked |
|
Telephone Based |
Immediate access to the right human being |
Multiple IVR menus |
|
|
Rapid customer service turnaround in answering a support question |
More than 24 hours wait time for answering a support question |
|
Customer Service |
Solving a problem - and adding a bonus as a “we’re sorry.” |
Lack of knowledge or unsupportive CSR |
|
Fax |
Completion of a transaction |
Unsolicited offer from a company you know |
Table 21-2: Examples of good and bad interactions via different channels
These are simply examples. What I’m sure is that as you read them, you were able to attach a real life experience either specifically or that more generic, slightly ethereal feeling that you know what I mean, but you can’t pinpoint it specifically.
But “good” or “bad” can be attached to interactions only if there was an expectation of how that interaction was going to turn out. If it met or exceeded the expectation - voilà - good. If it fell below the expectation - oi vey - bad.
Expectations
Then what is a customer “expectation?” One definition (Olson and Dover, 1979) says, “Customer expectations are pretrial beliefs about a product that serve as standards or reference points against which product performance is judged.” I don’t know about you, but that’s good enough for me.
There are at least six significant factors that customers incorporate when it comes to determining their expectations. What kind of result do I expect:
- Given my past history with this company - especially my last interaction
- Given what I’ve heard about this company - especially from my peers
- Given what I expect of the industry this company is in (e.g. airlines)
- Given what that kind of interaction, in my experience, typically results in.
- Given ordinary standards of human behavior when it comes to interactions
- Given anything that might have happened to me the day (or so) that I’m interacting with you that could affect how I’m thinking about things (random and uncontrollable)
Each of them, and, usually, all of them, has an effect on what the customer thinks the outcome is going to be.
Weight
But not all expected outcomes and their actual results are the same. What makes understanding the customer’s thinking even more difficult is that each expectation and how well or poorly it is met has a different importance in the eye of the particular customer.
But you already know that, don’t you?
For example, I have to assume that most of you reading this have used review sites like Yelp to find a restaurant that you might want to eat at or Epinions to see about a camera or Amazon for the book reviews. When you go to the review, you use the ratings - say, 1 to 5 stars to filter how you want to read the reviews. Maybe you want to only read the bad reviews, not the good ones, so you can see how bad the negatives are on something that you really want to buy. Or maybe you read all of them. What I think most of you don’t do is to aggregate the stars and make your decisions based on the number of stars that a product has. Instead, you actually read the reviews. What you then do is to say, as you read them, “oh, that reviewer says the delivery was a bad issue, but that doesn’t matter to me, but they loved the look of the product, which matters to me a lot” OR “that reviewer says that they think the duck at the restaurant is too dry but that the tilapia is to die for.” If you like duck, you tend to not go, if you like fish you tend to go - because you are weighing what is important to you - and not. But note something, “if” is a key word here. Fish or duck? That will determine something based on a review that might be 4/5 stars.
Want to check how you weigh further? Go back to the beginning of the chapter and read the descriptions from the review sites. What’s important to you in each of the reviews? Was it what was important to one of the reviewers and not the other - or a compilation of both - or neither met your standard for importance?
You get the picture now?
This is a major facet of what can be uncovered when you do customer experience mapping.
May 29th, 2009
Excerpt: Marketing 2.0 From CRM at the Speed of Light 4th Edition
I’m going to try something out here. I am ready to cringe as the tomatoes and old iPods are thrown at me, or the praise is showered on me…oh, wait, that’s someone dumping buckets of tar over my head. I’m providing an advance excerpt of Chapter 13 of CRM at the Speed of Light, 4th Edition, my new book coming out with McGraw-Hill in late October 2009. The chapter name is “Sales & Marketing: The Customer is the Right Subject.” I’m down to writing the last three chapters as of today and should be done with a bullocks to the wall effort by mid June.
But I want feedback and discussion on the ideas that I’m putting forth. That said, there are some caveats.
- This is completely raw. Unedited. Its a submitted chapter untouched by other than my human hands (and there is some question on whether or not I fit the category)
- This is a small part of what is the largest chapter in the book on sales and marketing 2.0 so there is some context issues here - though don’t let that stop you.
- This is a new area. But I think I’m right about the synthesizing of the material and the concepts I’m putting forth - though I’m not claiming tons of originality in the concepts. A couple of pounds maybe.
Have at me. Let me know what you think of the ideas, the writing, the works. For those of you unfamiliar with CRM at the Speed of Light, I’ll toot my own horn for a sec. It’s called the “Bible of the Industry” (though I insist on Old Testament because I’m Jewish). Its gone through 3 editions, sold quite a few copies, and is in 8 languages. This will be the 4th edition and it will be a combination of print (600 pages) and electronic content (another roughly 150 pages or so) and is a completely (from scratch) rewritten book. The foreword to this edition is written by Marc Benioff, CEO of salesforce.com. It is due out in late October and is meant to be a reference for Social CRM/CRM 2.0 - I think the first of its kind. I hope the first of its kind. I pray the first of its kind. I am down on hands and knees the first of its kind.
In any case, that’s the background. Without further ado: the excerpt. PLEASE GIVE ME THE BENEFIT OF YOUR INSIGHTS AND ARGUMENTS. This chapter still can be edited and changed. If I use something you give me, you’ll get attribution in the book.
Have at it.
*******************************************************************************************************
Marketing uh, 2.0: New Mindset, New Tools
What I’m about to say may be obvious, but doing what I’m about to say just isn’t easy. In order for you to sell to someone, they have to care enough to know who you are, what you sell and see some reason to buy what you sell. They also have to see the reason that they should buy what you sell from you since they can probably get something similar from someone else.
That’s the essence of marketing - but to achieve that customer advocacy nirvana takes a lot . That “a lot” means a strategy, the use of tools and systems, and a completely new view of what marketing today is.
Listen Up! The New Competition is Attention
When you go to Whole Foods, you see heirloom tomatoes, regular red tomatoes, plum tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, grape tomatoes, locally grown tomatoes from a variety of different local farms, and organic versions of all of them. Which do you buy? Oh, you don’t shop at Whole Foods? Oh. Well, the point is that there are some twenty or thirty different varieties and types and sizes and farm-specific versions to choose from. If you’re confused about which to buy, you tend to the familiar. You buy regular or organic regular tomatoes. If you’re decorating a salad with something other than slices or chunks, you buy grape or cherry tomatoes. But if you’re making a sauce, you know it most likely calls for plum tomatoes - sometimes in another section of the store where you can get canned versions of the same. If you’re someone who supports local farmers as a principle - you get a locally grown version. If you’re decorating a salad you might buy heirloom tomatoes due to their riot of color.
In other words, your choices are specific to you and the person next to you buying the exact same tomatoes might be buying them for different reasons entirely.
Now, multiply that by some number that reflects the all the other vegetables calling out to you from the produce department - and then the fruits in the same area. If you’re not planning on buying tomatoes the rest of the produce might make you skip them entirely. There is so much to see and choose from, that the choices become bewildering.
The tendency when confronted with too much is inertia - to simply not make a choice. This creates a major problem for marketers, as we’ll see in just a moment.
The Attention “Economy”
If ten or eleven choices for tomatoes (or something) are blindingly difficult to decide about, imagine what it takes to do something when you’re being besieged by 3000 messages per day or roughly one million per year. That means via the Web, direct mail, on television, when you see a billboard or an ad in a store or in a newspaper or magazine and in a video game.
Think that you’re immune to it as a consumer? Here’s test that I do when I speak and the subject of capturing just the attention of someone comes up. I ask the crowd (and you can ask yourself):
- How many of you get direct mail? (Of course, everyone raises his or her hands)
- How many of you read all the direct mail you get? (Almost no one raises his or her hands)
- How many just throw out most of or all of the ads? (Almost everyone raises his or her hands)
I have no doubt that the vast majority of you follow the crowd when it comes to answering those three questions. If you don’t, you win a prize. Let me know your address and I’ll put it in the mail. Just remember, don’t throw it out when you get it.
As marketing guru Seth Godin put it in an interview with William C. Taylor of Fast Company as far back as 1998:
“Marketing is a contest for people’s attention. Thirty years ago, people gave you their attention if you simply asked for it. You’d interrupt their TV program, and they’d listen to what you had to say. You’d put a billboard on the highway, and they’d look at it. That’s not true anymore. This year, the average consumer will see or hear 1 million marketing messages - that’s almost 3,000 per day. No human being can pay attention to 3,000 messages every day.”
This is called, as you might be able to guess, interruption marketing - your attention is captured because your routine activity is interrupted. But with 1 million messages a year, this doesn’t work the way it did in the 1960s. You do what I said above - you just zone out.
This isn’t just some construct that is there to move things in this book forward a bit. While you might think that your business competes with other companies who put out like products and provide like services, the stark reality is that you compete with every single message being thrown at your prospective customers. You can’t even start a smart legitimate marketing campaign aimed at lead generation without capturing the attention of your prospects first.
This is a recognized problem. Howard Handler, the Chief Marketing Officer of Virgin Mobile USA, in 2008, understood it: “To cut through with a message or a brand or a piece of content is more challenging than ever.”
The underlying idea in Handler’s comment is that because the amount of attention a consumer can give a product or service or company or idea is finite and increasingly more difficult due to both bad information like spam and rich information sources available everywhere, the competition for that attention is increasing and attention is becoming a commodity.
Customers are so tired of being bombarded (aren’t you?) with this constant barrage of messages that they simply zone out and don’t want to give companies that they might otherwise be interested in their time or consideration. What they actually want and are beginning to accomplish is control over what messages they consider “taking” and what brands they allow into their homes. Attention is given so little at this time that it’s been commoditized by its scarcity.
Evidence of this commoditization of attention is pretty easy to find. It shows in the compensation that is often given if you’ll just watch something. For example, when you watch a TV show that you’ve had queued in Hulu, the Web based service that’s either owned by NBC, Disney and News Corp. or aliens who look like Alec Baldwin and Dennis Leary, you will often get a choice of commercials that run at regular interludes through the web broadcast or seeing a single one minute commercial at the top of the show. For your attention to the commercial in the form that you want, you are being compensated by being allowed to watch the show for free. This is a very different model than Apple’s iTunes which sells the content commercial free for between $1.99 and $2.99 per episode. What the Hulu model is doing is buying your attention. They know your name through the registration on the site, but they recognize that having your name and you watching a commercial doesn’t mean that you’re a qualified lead. It means you gave them consideration. Period.
Compensation for attention is something that is not only being considered, but has to be considered. The rather old-fashioned idea of “pay them for their time” is becoming “pay them for their attention.” So there are companies who will give you free things e.g. cell phone minutes, ad free music, etc. if you view their ads for x time frame. There is a model for online revenue sharing that even Microsoft is looking into. There is a service called “ScooptTM Words” that operates as a “blogger agent” that will get companies to buy what bloggers are saying for commercial use and then split the revenue stream, which sounds kind of nice for bloggers, but not exactly in the spirit of the blogosphere.
The music industry has had an ongoing discussion which very well may go nowhere that is also around attention compensation but was driven by music piracy. The idea would be that rather than trying to prosecute or scare or harass someone who downloads a music file, usually MP3, illegally, give them the music in return for them viewing a 30 or 60 second ad. Once the ad has been completely viewed, they get the music.
While that may never go anywhere, it points to how serious the competition for attention really is.
There are nascent metrics to measure the attention too. They’re called engagement ratings and they’re primarily focused around TV at the moment. Not exactly a big surprise. They’re being used to figure out what programs to advertise on. Also not a big surprise - and sadly typical of the TV world - new metrics, old reasons.
Engagement ratings are the equivalent of “stickiness” on a website. It’s not just whether you have a large audience; it’s whether that audience is willing to continue to lavish its attention on you and your advertisers
Myers’ Emotional Connections© research in 2007 showed that Fox News Channel topped the “viewer engagement ratings” with positive engagement ratings in four categories by 80 percent of its viewers. But it dropped to 21st place and 30 percent (for two categories) when it came to advertising engagement. What this can be interpreted to mean is that the audience was riveted to Bill O’Reilly and made a sandwich during the ads. I’d be the other way around.
Despite the particulars here, what’s important about the Myers work is that they’re doing some of the first research and measurement of level of attention and what it takes to gain that attention - which precedes even lead generation.
But attention-getting can go overboard and does especially when devotees of what is called the “attention economy” actually call attention capture the new currency - and they mean that literally. Meaning, somehow, providing attention will substitute for your national currency.
Lead generation from the marketing side comes when you have gained and kept the attention of your potential customers - but I wouldn’t go overboard with this either.
Hard Times for Tradition
Marketing never gets respect (We miss you, Rodney Dangerfield). Never ever. Never ever ever. Know why? Because marketing is viewed by the company as an expenditure that has immediate tangible return. Marketers are by the customer as a nuisance. They are viewed by people like me as a department that presumes for the customer and doesn’t really know what the customer is actually thinking, which to add to their problems, is often true.
It’s even truer now because the stakes are higher, the expectations and demands of the customer have increased and their hunger for being contacted in multiple ways - the ones of their own choosing - is greater than ever.
But that doesn’t negate the value of traditional marketing - especially when it’s used in combination with new marketing approaches. For example, the conversation rates in email marketing are still between 2 and 5 percent. Good numbers there. A study in May 2009 done by internet marketing small business legend, Hubspot, took a look at the effectiveness of traditional press releases as opposed to social media press releases found that the traditional media releases were considerably more effective in syndicating. The typical ratio was about 5:4 in favor of the traditional press release when it came to the number of places it was syndicated. The only time the ratio was favorable to the social media releases were with online properties. Not exactly a surprise. But what that indicates is that you shouldn’t stick with a single kind of release or a single approach. Do what makes sense for the location, channel and people you’re trying to reach. Social media marketing, search engine marketing and the like are becoming the centerpiece of many organizations marketing efforts.
If I had to speculate (or maybe pontificate is the right word here), marketing is up for the most comprehensive and dramatic overhaul of any of the three traditional pillars of CRM. Marketing professionals are aware of this and, those that aren’t panicking are remodeling the way they do what they do
I’m only here to help. I come to praise Caesar not to bury him.
If you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll believe this statement from someone with a lot of street cred on what constitutes successful contemporary marketing:
“Ultimately, successful marketing results,” Anil Dash, SixApart’s Chief Evangelist who you met in Chapter 10 says, “Lead to “people relating to brands as culture. They will be part of a cultural, emotional and entertainment bubble.”
You KNOW he’s right, don’t you? So remember, traditional isn’t dead, but the old marketing logic is.
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.
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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White Papers, Webcasts, and Downloads
- VMware Infrastructure: A Guide to Bottom-Line Benefits VMware Frustrated by the costs of maintain ever larger data centers?or building ... Download Now
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- The Impact of Virtualization Software on Operating Environments VMware Today's use of virtualization technology allows IT professionals to ... Download Now
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Smart Tech
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Discussion and advice on management issues that revolve around making your world smarter and more useful.
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