As Forrester Research’s Customer Experience Forum continues on its second — and last — day here at the Grand Hyatt New York right next door to Grand Central Terminal, the sentiment here seems to be one of not if customer experience is necessary, but rather when — and how. Fostering a quality customer experience no longer seems to be a nice-to-have, judging by the tone and subject matter of the keynotes and other presentations here. Bruce Temkin, a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, had a keynote address yesterday (my story on the speech is here) on the beginning steps companies should take.

In other news, Forrester announced the inaugural winners of their Voice of the Customer (VoC) Awards. Out of 40 applicants, only three companies took home the prize:

• Experian;
• Progressive; and
• Vanguard.

Speaking of “voice of the customer”, I sat in on a related track session yesterday: “Building a World-Class Voice of the Customer Program.” While the panel discussion was informative, I picked up on something rather interesting. Only one question in the entire 45-minute talk dealt with the literal audio of a customer conversation. Every other question asked by the attendees dealt with how to parse the information found in social media. This was not only evident to me, but also Natalie Petouhoff, a senior analyst at Forrester who sat with me at the session. Is this the direction VoC is taking? Are we glossing over speech analytics and going straight to social media? I’d love to get your thoughts on this.

Another question I have stemming from this conference: What exactly is customer experience? I haven’t found a catch-all, agreed-upon definition just yet. This is something I plan on exploring when I begin writing my December 2009 feature for CRM magazine on the topic, but I want to know what you believe it to be.

Now that social media is hitting the mainstream, suddenly people are finding that it’s cool to be a nerd (To be honest, I think the nerds already knew that they were cool when they started to bring “sexy” into their vernacular–that is, you know, in addition to the millions they were making off of something they built in their dad’s garage.). Dave Hendricks, executive vice president of digital marketing technology company Datran Media, opened his morning presentation at the Direct Marketing Association’s DMDays by talking about how nerds/geeks are reveling in all their tech-savvy glory. At the 140 Character Conference,  also in New York this week,  Sharon Glassman (@sharonglassman), an author, Huffington Post blogger, and speaker, performed a song she wrote about “Nerds, Dorks, & Geeks.” Geeks, she said, are passionate, dorks are charming, and nerds are brilliant. It was entertaining – you can listen to the song on her Web site, but last I checked, the link was broken…

Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to attend a couple sessions at the Direct Marketing Association’s DMDays here in New York. More attendee tweets can be found at here under the hashtag #dmdays. I’ve fleshed out and added links to the original tweet stream below.

Read the rest of this entry »

By Larry Ritter, senior vice president & general manager, Sage CRM Solutions

[EDITORS' NOTE: This is part of a series of posts that began here, dissecting a two-page chart that appeared in CRM magazine's June 2009 issue on social media. The digital edition of that issue can be found here, and a standalone image of the chart itself can be seen here. (Click on the “View Full Size” button at the top right of that page.) To view all posts in the series, please add this RSS feed to your RSS reader.]

JUNE 12, 2009 — Interesting diagram! CRM magazine’s Social Media Maturity Model illustrates how the very nature of exchanging information is changing, rapidly.

During CRM 101 — see detail, below right — businesses had much of the control over communication as prospects typically learned from, and potentially became motivated by, information that businesses pushed to them. As we move further along the maturity curve, prospects are making — or will soon start to make — their business and purchasing decisions by gathering more and more kinds of information on their own, information generated outside the influence of the selling organization.

This shift may be a challenge for some, but overall it’s a change for the better. The new circumstances represent a natural evolution aided by technology companies and individuals who assert themselves by publishing and sharing their opinions. It’s also an opportunity for more-open communication, problem-solving, and collaborating among businesses and their customers.

With prospects increasingly being influenced by sources outside of vendors’ immediate control, it’s vital to monitor, understand, and ultimately manage — to an appropriate degree — all the sources your prospects are learning from.

Information has always been the main catalyst for CRM. Over time, we’ve experienced several iterations of learning how to manage ever-larger amounts of information — the adoption and proliferation of email in the early ’90s is a classic example.

Today’s CRM is good at collating and organizing information: the messages that have been sent, the history associated, timely contact points, the recall of critical facts and attentive service — collectively and (especially) cumulatively, these all make a difference in closing the sale. Today’s technology makes it easier and faster to search and collate data in real time — makes it easier, in other words, for us to find the information we’re seeking.

The world of information, however, has now become too big and too fast to digest efficiently or effectively by searching alone. We need a new kind of information organization — and social media is helping to shape it. Through even the most basic social media activities — such as joining groups, publishing our profiles, networking with like-minded and interesting people, monitoring, and gradually introducing some context and location-aware capabilities — information of interest finds us!

So now what? Various observers report that less than 10 percent of connected people on Facebook and other social networking sites have frequent or meaningful exchanges. Are you tired of former coworkers finding you on LinkedIn asking you to “join their network” when you know you’ll never really have anything to do with them? How do we separate the true opportunities from the endless number of people and sites that will tie us up for hours on end? It’s about aggregation, filtering, and managing a prioritized order of action. People, businesses, and technologies are all merging in a collaborative fashion to define and create these efficiencies.

As an industry, we’re onto something big here. I’ve heard people say companies won’t let their employees engage in social media because that activity allows information to escape the organization. These may be the same people who as recently as five years ago were saying, “Let’s lock down Internet access so employees don’t spend their day surfing the Web.”

Can you even imagine doing your job today without always-on Internet access? Well, apply this to social networking three and five years out. You’re at risk of becoming utterly irrelevant if you’re not directly engaged with your entire ecosystem of prospects, customers, partners, coworkers, stakeholders, and influencers.

The natural evolution of CRM is to better manage information by teaching it to find us, and then doing something meaningful and profitable with that information when it reaches us.

CRM and social media definitely have a cooperative place in our new world, so don’t just watch this space — be part of it.

Larry Ritter is senior vice president and general manager for Sage CRM Solutions (@sageCRMsolution on Twitter), part of The Sage Group plc, supplier of business management software and services to more than 5.8 million small and midsize business customers worldwide.

By Marshall Lager, contributor, CRM magazine

[EDITORS' NOTE: This is part of a series of posts that began here, dissecting a two-page chart that appeared in CRM magazine's June 2009 issue on social media. The digital edition of that issue can be found here, and a standalone image of the chart itself can be seen here. (Click on the “View Full Size” button at the top right of that page.) To view all posts in the series, please add this RSS feed to your RSS reader.]

JUNE 11, 2009 — There are already a lot of good critiques and discussions about CRM’s Social Media Maturity Model, and I’m gratified that my input is being considered alongside that of people I think are leading the way. I have an advantage over most of them, however, in that I was actually present when the chart came together.

Don’t ever let anybody describe it as “a simple chart” or anything like that; ain’t nothin’ simple here.

It took weeks just to decide on the physical shape of it—there were squares, circles, triptychs, and self-reflexive models that would have given M.C. Escher [at right] a migraine—or even whether it should just be posted directly to the Web instead of condensed into a two-page magazine spread.

There was talk of it covering more than three pages, as a foldout — or even as a “fold-in” in the style of Mad magazine’s inside back cover.

As you might guess, a lot of discussion revolved around finding the right balance of simple and comprehensive. The weakness of any chart like this one is that it’s static and two-dimensional. Really explaining what the model is getting at requires more than any graphic designer can provide: It requires conversation, which is why we’re all here.

One of the strengths of the model is its grounding in what CRM magazine proposed five years ago — the simplified graphic of which is now the “CRM 101″ center of the new model. [See detail, below.]

That’s the way CRM works within most organizations today, and how it will continue to work for some time. Having that at the core of the model helps the reader relate to the changes that are already happening.

No matter how attractive the concept seems (to customers), there may never come a time when the customer completely dictates the message, operations, and products of the business — at least not without unlimited resources and access to replicator technology a la Star Trek.

So the customer is still looking in from the outside — but less so than before. Smart businesses are realizing that, in terms of the ability to affect brand image, every customer is potentially as important as the organization itself.

Taking the external conversations and internalizing them in a way that leads to repeatable actions and processes is the new goal, and the maturity model shows the possible direction its pursuit will take.

[Editors' Note: See detail, below right, for the time progression of the chart's internal/external/hybrid model of service and feedback. The lists of channels and media in each time frame are clearly incomplete, and need both expansion and refinement.]

Real internalization means more than just cherry-picking certain comments, finding ways to segue a conversation into a sales pitch, or a “Did we serve you adequately?” survey. It’s a fundamental change in the way things get done.

Salespeople will remain salespeople, though their success will increasingly depend on their ability to remain present in customers’ minds in some small way after the deal closes, rather than suddenly becoming a presence in customers’ lives when the quarter is closing and they’re short on their quotas. In other words, relationships are important again.

Marketers will once again have to identify markets and craft messages to get customers’ attention, rather than being handed a product and thrashing about in the hope of dragging a new market toward it.

A group with no clear demographic but a large number of members is a gold mine, not a quagmire. Such customers are not owned; they are courted, and if sufficiently delighted, they will buy what you’re selling. And they’ll buy it more than once. And they’ll want to know what else you’re selling [see detail of chart, left].

One thing that can’t be ignored, though, is that nobody has yet got it completely right, in this blog or in the world at large. That will still be true at the end of these 30 days, at the end of this year, and quite possibly for all time. Despite the Maturity Model proposed here, despite the fact there are a number of very smart people out there who live and breathe social CRM, we’re all still kinda new at this, and there is likely no grand unifying formula.

Miko Matsumura of Software AG recently commented (on Twitter, though I saw it on Facebook) that he “would like a twitter filter that blocks anyone whose profile says ‘Social Media Expert.’ ” I think I agree, at least for now.

If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. Then twitter about it.

Marshall Lager (marshall.lager@gmail.com) is a contributor to CRM magazine and managing principal of Third Idea Consulting. He can be found on Twitter as @Lager.

By Michael Idinopulos, vice president, customer success, Socialtext

[EDITORS' NOTE: This is part of a series of posts that began here, dissecting a two-page chart that appeared in CRM magazine's June 2009 issue on social media. The digital edition of that issue can be found here, and a standalone image of the chart itself can be seen here. (Click on the “View Full Size” button at the top right of that page.) To view all posts in the series, please add this RSS feed to your RSS reader.]

JUNE 10, 2009 — I love CRM magazine’s Social Media Maturity Model, but it doesn’t go far enough. Social media will not only alter the way companies work within existing silos; it will fundamentally redraw the org chart.

The Maturity Model is basically my own Social Software Value Matrix on steroids. The CRM team has taken my concept of social software evolution, and broken it out by corporate function: Sales, Marketing, PR, and Service. The result is a fascinating, dizzying array of icons and concepts. Kudos to the graphics team who put this together!

But the Model doesn’t capture how radical this transformation is going to be. The Model takes as its starting point the categories which define today’s corporate interactions (Sales, Marketing, PR, and Service).

But here’s the rub: In five years, those aren’t going to be the categories.

The Model’s categories reflect four different types of interaction that a company has with outsiders:

• Marketing: Talk with market about yourself
• PR: Get others to talk with the market about you
• Sales: Talk with prospects about yourself
• Service: Talk with customers about yourself

In a world where everyone hears everyone talking to everyone all the time, these divisions are no longer meaningful.

Here’s a scenario: A prospect goes to your company’s Customer Exchange and chats with a current customer about your resolution of a recent equipment failure. Is that Service? Marketing? PR? In a way, it’s all three. It’s a customer talking with a prospect about your company.

Or how about this one: An irate customer twitters about the stopping distance of his racing bike. One of your engineers sees the tweet and tells the customer to replace his third-party brake pads with the ones made by your brand. The customer follows the advice and reports positive results. The advice gets retweeted multiple times, and finally gets written up in a popular cycling blog. Service? PR? Marketing? Sales? Hard to say.

The real five-year story in social media is the convergence of these different activities. Familiar divisions between Sales, Marketing, PR, and Support are driven largely by channel constraints. As those constraints disappear, and public interactions become more transparent, the different conversations all blur into one another. As the conversations blur, so do the functions.

So how will companies be organized in five years?

As public interaction becomes more ubiquitous and transparent, I predict that companies will increasingly organize around expertise. Corporate functions will be defined by what people have to say, rather than who says it or whom they can say it to. In place of PR, Sales, etc., I expect to see companies organize themselves in categories such as:

• Thought Leadership;
• Technical Expertise;
• Relationship Management; and
• Transactions.

The familiar corporate functions of Sales, PR, Marketing, etc., won’t disappear entirely. But those roles will morph into one of coordination and project management. They will be routers and trackers of information, rather than originators. To borrow from author and New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, a Marketing professional will be more of a connector than an evangelist or a maven.

In a nutshell, here’s my prediction for social media five years hence:

The people driving the conversations will be the people who have something to say, and they won’t need a lot of corporate apparatus to help them say it.

Michael Idinopulos is the vice president of professional services and customer success at Socialtext. Previously, he had been director of knowledge technology at the consultancy McKinsey & Co. His professional passion is making work easier, more interesting, and more rewarding by helping people connect to each other and the information they need in order to be effective. He can be reached on Twitter at @michaelido, and his typical blogging output can be found at Transparent Office and at Socialtext’s own blog.

By Prem Kumar Aparanji, principal consultant, CRM, Cognizant Technology Solutions

[EDITORS' NOTE: This is part of a series of posts that began here, dissecting a two-page chart that appeared in CRM magazine's June 2009 issue on social media. The digital edition of that issue can be found here, and a standalone image of the chart itself can be seen here. (Click on the “View Full Size” button at the top right of that page.) To view all posts in the series, please add this RSS feed to your RSS reader.]

JUNE 9, 2009 — In CRM magazine’s Social Media Maturty Model, contemporary CRM is depicted in conjunction with social media and has been put in the era of social functionality. It is shown in conjunction with VRM, too. [See detail, below right.]

What this means is that the customer has become empowered and is challenging businesses with a communication channel that, for a change, the customer is capable of wielding more effectively than businesses are.

To date, businesses have used letters/correspondence, telephone, fax, email, chat/IM, etc., very effectively, much to the chagrin of the customer, to push their messages. Businesses strive to control these media to derive the utmost out of them for the benefit of, hold your breath, themselves.

Social media, however, changes the whole equation. (After all, it’s called “media” for a reason.)

Social media is a channel where the customer controls the conversation. Today’s social media messages predominantly flow from the customers to the business. And, oh horrors! Messages are also flowing from customer to customer! And the business has little or no control over the direction of the conversation.

Wait, did I say “conversation”? Wasn’t that supposed to be “a scripted response”? Or at best “a dialogue”?

Yeah, I know what this sounds like: “What will these youngsters come up with next!” But you must have read by now the various reports and surveys indicating that social media is no longer the prerogative of youngsters. These same reports suggest that the older demographic is active in social media — in fact, that its members are the ones conducting the most transactions online.

Now certainly social media or networks or apps or whatever-you-call-it poses no real threat to CRM. After all, we’ve been able to properly integrate and control the electronic channels with CRM before, haven’t we? It should be no different for us to break this social media horse and saddle it. It should be simple, right?

Wrong. It’s not simple at all. We’re talking about the mother of all conversations here — social conversations, in existence since the primordial days, when man became first became a social animal.

We cannot saddle this horse of a conversation any more than J.R.R. Tolkein’s Rohirrim or Gandalf The White could have saddled Shadowfax — the Great Lord of the Horses, descendent of Felarof, of the race of the Mearas, the greatest of all horses of Tolkein’s Middle-Earth.

As it happens, Gandalf did ride Shadowfax — but not by dominating or saddling it. In the parlance of contemporary social media, he had to friend Shadowfax first, showing the respect due to a majestic beast capable of comprehending human speech. He spoke with the Great Lord of Horses — not to it. He gained Shadowfax’s trust, built a relationship of mutual respect (maybe even friendship), and cared for it as it did him.

Think of the Rohirrim as the traditional approach of businesses to media, the Mearas as the human tendency to converse, and Shadowfax as social media itself — the current descendant of the primordial need of man to converse in a social setting. Just as the Rohirrim could not control Shadowfax, the traditional CRM approach cannot control the conversations on social media. But Gandalf friended Shadowfax without trying to control it — and, as a result, each of them delivered value to the other. By the same token, a business may try to embrace the conversations on social media and add value to its customers.

So who does Gandalf represent in that scenario?

Gandalf is this new entity grown out of CRM that is able to integrate traditional CRM with the social media. Call it a strategy, a mindset, a philosophy, a technology — the reality is that this new entity may be some combination of all of those. This new way of building social relationships with each customer — relationships that go beyond the mere transactional level — is something we can call “Social CRM,” and it’s all about respecting the customer, having conversations, building trust, and contributing to value.

The value that Gandalf and Shadowfax created for each other and derived from their friendship is, in our terms, customer cocreation. Better men than me could guide you through that — I am only now beginning to get a glimpse of this new promised land of Undying Lands.

What does this mean from a technical point of view? It means integrating social media (and social networks) with the traditional CRM systems as a new channel. I have attempted to construct an explanation of this emerging Social CRM architecture in this presentation:

Without doubt, my framework for this architecture — like CRM’s Social Media Maturity Model — can be improved upon. I need your input for that, and look forward to it. :)

With extensive experience in CRM, business process management, quality assurance, and solutions & innovations management, Prem Kumar Aparanji leads the Social CRM/CRM 2.0 initiatives at Cognizant Technology Solutions. In addition to his deep interests in the social web and the free/libre and open-source technology movement, Aparanji also writes frequently on rice. On Twitter, where he appears as @prem_k, he’s commonly engaged in — and often leading — conversations using the #scrm hashtag for “social CRM.”

By Oliver Marks, founder, Oliver Marks & Associates

[EDITORS' NOTE: This is part of a series of posts that began here, dissecting a two-page chart that appeared in CRM magazine's June 2009 issue on social media. The digital edition of that issue can be found here, and a standalone image of the chart itself can be seen here. (Click on the “View Full Size” button at the top right of that page.) To view all posts in the series, please add this RSS feed to your RSS reader.]

JUNE 8, 2009 — I’m a huge fan of taking a few steps back and looking at the big picture, and this chart works well on a number of levels for me. More on this in a moment, but first some big-picture stuff on the topic of “the social customer.”

June is CRM’s so-called social media issue …but I have an issue with “social media” itself. What is it exactly?

For people inside the industry bubble whose antennae are tuned to find and consume information on this topic, the answer seems apparent. Wikipedia, that king of the crowdsourced encyclopedias, offers up this overview on the phrase:

At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content. It’s a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologues (one to many) into dialogues (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers. Social media has become extremely popular because it allows people to connect in the online world to form relationships for personal and business.

Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM).

The same source, meanwhile, says that “CRM” comprises the “processes a company uses to track and organize its contacts with its current and prospective customers.”

Social media is one of these catch-all phrases that seems to mutate — much as Web 2.0 did over time — and diffuse, and there’s a danger in that.

Now, I know a lot of people could jump in and concisely define where we are in June 2009; that’s not my point. Most people on the planet are informed from a consumer perspective about Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and texting, and have some hazy ideas about how these new channels are being used to reach them. Facebook today, in my opinion, is very similar to what AOL was in the ’90s: training wheels for Web 2.0.

The advertising and public relations industries love the idea of social media because it appears to be the way to nirvana: word-of-mouth marketing. Think back to the early days — the early promises — of email marketing. Have you checked the contents of your spam filter recently?

There are plenty of talented, principled, and well-meaning marketers out there using the new media channels creatively and beneficially, but the low barriers to entry of being a so-called “social media expert” mean there are an awful lot of folks out there who see online infomercials and social media conversational spam in your future. It’s not going to be pretty.

CRM is all about keeping the lines of communication open with customers. In the future, as trusted voices become harder to pick out from the crowd, CRM’s role for customers may come to resemble the role played by a bouncer in a rowdy bar — policing (or even removing) the loud guy who keeps hitting on the girls and won’t take no for an answer.

An example: My wife’s Volkswagen New Beetle blew a hose and lost its coolant in downtown San Francisco a while back. The AAA towed it to a shop that, after getting quotes, I subsequently had do the repair work. The repairs got done, we got a six-month guarantee — and then the same problem recurred last week.

This time, I went on Yelp.com to check the garage out, and found a bunch of whiny, negative comments.

I took the car back in with a prepared-to-be-negative attitude and all set to take my business elsewhere…

…but the staff at the garage surprised me (and, not incidentally, contradicted the whinging complainers on Yelp): They behaved very honorably and fixed the problem — which was an overheated plastic-part issue they missed last time — at no cost to me.

Unless I post my experience to Yelp, the opinions and prevailing perspective there will continue to be skewed. (As an aside, there has been a spate of accusations flying around online recently about Yelp being a borderline blackmail site.)

My point: The “conversation,” like the ones in a crowded bar, depends totally on the quality and active participation of a representative cross-section of engaged people.

Now, some thoughts on CRM’s Social Media Maturity chart with the above in mind.

There is a world of difference between consumer conversations — branding, below the line — and business-to-business. I’m not going to get into the world of internal collaboration — my specialization — but you can be sure that this is in a different universe.

I think Marketing and Public Relations should be moved to the left-hand side of the chart, with Sales and Service on the right — that seems to be the way engagement flows: Sales and Service should be tightly intertwined and not differentiated or siloed as technology enables this.

Marketing and Public Relations conversations should ramp up to Sales action coupled tightly to Service, there’s a natural progression there that continues the conversation after the sales transaction, supporting the customer and reinforcing the relationship. We have “blended marketing & support” on the chart — see detail, right — this, for me, is foundational to the future.

More subtly, I believe we will see much more structured fragmentation going forward, particularly for huge companies. Collaborative networks of interlinked business communities, whether outward-facing (Marketing and PR) or supporting existing customers (Service and Sales), will be smaller and more agile, while having greater connectivity between parts. This breaks down the “blind giant” syndrome that is currently killing multiheaded companies such as Sony.

Three years out, I think we will really start to really see the effects of linked data: contextual ribbons of information associated with every digital artifact, as a result of semantic technologies starting to harness the siloed and unconnected information we currently (and only haphazardly) find through search engines. In addition, we’ll see interoperability with other xRM components, such as human capital management systems for internal employees.

With my crystal ball, I also predict unified communications blurring, with telephony, digital video/telepresence, microblogging, and texting forming a relatively seamless communication spectrum. We may also see the demise of the QWERTY keyboard I’m typing this on, to be replaced by a less-percussive way of communicating.

I’ll not hazard any guesses on five years out: So much change is under way in the business world, on so many levels, that today’s circumstances may well be wholly unrecognizable in 2014.

Five years is tough enough, but when “Where is Everybody?” — an interesting post by Thomas Baekdal — has a go at the grand sweep of history, the effort gets dangerously fuzzy as Baekdal predicts the future. (The image at left is from that post.)

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Oliver Marks is the founder of Oliver Marks & Associates, which provides seasoned independent consulting guidance to companies on the effective planning of collaboration strategy, tactics, Enterprise 2.0 technology decisions, and roll-out. He writes the popular Collaboration blog at ZDnet, and also blogs at his own site. He can be reached on Twitter at @olivermarks.

By Ian Jacobs, senior analyst, Datamonitor

[EDITORS' NOTE: This is part of a series of posts that began here, dissecting a two-page chart that appeared in CRM magazine's June 2009 issue on social media. The digital edition of that issue can be found here, and a standalone image of the chart itself can be seen here. (Click on the “View Full Size” button at the top right of that page.) To view all posts in the series, please add this RSS feed to your RSS reader.]

JUNE 7, 2009 — Like all who have bravely gone before me in this experiment, I feel I must thank Josh Weinberger, CRM magazine, and destinationCRM — not just for giving me the opportunity to blather on and on (and on), but also for being foolhardy enough to tackle a project as ambitious as a Social Media Maturity Model.

Virtual hats off to you guys. Let no one say you lack chutzpah!

The ambitious nature of the model itself makes dissecting it a daunting prospect. As Christopher Carfi alluded to in his June 3rd post, any one of the throughlines in this model could form the basis of 30 days of meaningful discussion.

(Oh, and Chris — Thanks for setting the bar so high for the rest of us poor schlubs. A video? With onscreen highlighting? Come on — have pity on us poor, technologically deprived analysts!)

Since I only get one day for my soapbox, I’m going to try to tackle a reasonably small segment of the model: some of the ways that customer service might change that are not explicitly detailed in the model.

I have two main areas to expand on:

1. social media–focused service as a driver of improved product development; and
2. community-assisted service or user-collaborative service.

Service-driven product development: As an analyst covering the contact center and CRM space for many years, I’ve always pointed out that companies large and small are missing a tremendous opportunity for continuous improvement in product development by not using all the data they gather in their customer service operations. In the same way that Google is arguably a more-effective tool for predicting flu outbreaks than traditional epidemiology, contact centers can be an excellent predictor for identifying aspects of a product that demand improvement.

Note that I am not talking about user-driven design of products—others have put forth that idea [see detail from the Social Media Maturity Model, left, which makes a reference to the product design aspect in the top-left "Sales" quadrant], and while I have many issues with that concept, it’s simply a different beast than what I’m talking about here.

I’m referring to the untapped motherlode: If companies mined the data that they were sitting on in all those megabytes of recorded customer calls, they would have a much clearer idea of what problems were costing them precious dollars in customer service. They could focus future development efforts on fixing those issues and reduce the volume of costly customer support contacts.

I understand the structural limitations that get in the way of companies doing this type of proactive product development today. Contact centers ‘own’ their data. But even if the contact center identifies a product problem (or a pricing problem, for that matter, or even a Web-site-design problem), there’s little the contact center can do about it. Not only does the contact center not “own” those areas of the business — but without some involvement, vision, and direction from higher up the corporate ladder, the center doesn’t even have much influence in those areas.

Social media, however, can change this equation.

By making silos and their attendant structural hurdles visible to customers, social media can provide a great impetus for companies to tackle those flaws. Think about a Facebook-like customer-support site: If 500 customers have similar problems with a product and post to the support site, the last 400 to arrive will see that their issue is inherent to that product. The visibility of the problem intensifies the urgency for a solution. If that sounds like product development and product improvement driven by a desire to avoid corporate embarrassment — well, it is. Embarrassment can be a powerful motivator; just ask the collections industry.

User-collaborative service: Frankly, I was really quite surprised to not see something in the Social Media Maturity Model’s service category on community or peer-to-peer service. [See detail of the chart, right, for a closeup view of that quadrant.] While my first point in this blogpost — service-driven product development — may belong in the farther reaches of the model’s time scale, user-collaborative service is already happening.

In a formalized, online social network sense, there are sites such as Get Satisfaction, a site that calls its function “people-powered customer service.” The site itself acts as a neutral space — i.e., not a company-sponsored or -controlled site — in which regular customers can exchange ideas, and get help with or tips about product- or service-related issues.

The Get Satisfaction site allows companies to participate on essentially an equal footing with customers, and knowledgeable customers are as likely (and often more likely) to be the ones providing support to other customers. Some very large companies, including Adobe, use the site to help their customers and to help arm their expert customers to help each other. And hundreds of other companies should probably be paying attention to this social media–driven support concept since their products are being serviced via this medium. [Editor's Note: Get Satisfaction was one of CRM magazine's 2009 Rising Stars. See our coverage here.]

But a specialty support site is not a requirement for this more-collaborative approach to customer service. It is happening on Twitter, as well. Caltrain is the commuter train that runs from San Francisco to San Jose, right through the heart of Silicon Valley. Thousands of people use the train to commute to and from their jobs every day. Service delays, trip cancellations — even the status of the scarce space on the train cars that accommodate bicycles — all command great interest from Caltrain’s riders.

Caltrain’s Web site provides a published schedule, but it’s a fairly static page and has no facility to provide real-time travel alerts or advisories. Even if Caltrain’s site did provide real-time notices, there was no mechanism to have those notices sent to riders.

The @caltrain Twitter feed came to the rescue. The @caltrain account on Twitter identifies itself as “community-supported Caltrain notices, one tweet at a time.” Interested Caltrain riders receive an email key that allows them to email tweets that then get posted to the @caltrain account. As I type this blogpost, there are some train delays and the tweets are flying, giving the 1,500 or so followers of the feed real-time updates on what is going on with their commute. Users helping other users, creating some social form of community support.

That is the user-collaboration element. But this is not simply a case of the lunatics taking over the asylum. Caltrain officials themselves use the @caltrain feed to provide information — they preface their tweets with an upper-case “O” to identify themselves. There’s a very good reason for the company to get involved in this effort: The social media–driven communications are often faster than the mechanisms of corporate communications will allow.

An example: In early June, a train hit and killed someone in California. This caused massive and widespread delays throughout the system. The Twitter feed not only kept passengers informed of the delays, but of the actual cause. And it did so much more effectively than Caltrain’s own communication system.

I saved a tweet from that day:

@caltrain: Power of twitter: passengers on my train knew details of delays before our conductors did

Admittedly, user-to-user support for public transit is not quite in the same league of complexity as user-to-user support in the realms of home networking or automotive repair. But the underlying concept can work across all sorts of verticals, especially if the companies get involved on the users’ terms as Caltrain did by joining in the user-generated efforts of the @caltrain feed.

In fact, that’s really the key of what I see missing from the model: Users will collaborate with each other to help solve issues and companies will need to get involved on the community’s terms, not their own. It’s a major shift in mindset, and one that may cause some wrenching growing pains, but it’s coming.

Bonus Topic (or, “Continuing the Torture”): I know I promised just two issues, but I have another idea — minor, and not as well-formed — that I’d also like to throw out to the four winds.

The model actually has a slot for preventative service, but it seems to be the result of direct engagement with and continual feedback from customers. That does seem to be one of the logical conclusions from the trends that are pushing service out of the realm of formal customer service organizations (i.e., contact centers) and into a more social domain. But the model also seems to imply that these changes are taking place exclusively because of the flourishing social media — and that may be overstating the case.

These changes are not happening in a vacuum. Being a bit o’ geekiness myself, I would argue that pervasive computing and ubiquitous computing can and will also have a role in the transition to preventative service. When some manufactured object can tell the company it needs servicing/upgrading/fixing, the company can push that service proactively, either through computer-to-device communications or through proactive contact between the company and the customer. This happens now in some enterprise technology departments, at least in the machine-to-machine realm (although those systems aim for self-healing), so why should consumer-focused goods be any different?

Obviously, pervasive computing will also not drive preventative service on its own. There’s some undefined field of overlap between socially mediated customer service and support and technologically automated service and support. Just something to watch for on the edge of the five-year time frame spelled out by the model.

Finally, while my mother never literally told me, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything,” that cultural message sank into my brain somewhere along the line. So I want to be clear that I am not just about pointing out ideas missing from the model. I also want to heap some praise on the model: CRM magazine has done a stellar job of putting a stake in the ground and allowing this conversation to unfold.

Bravo, folks.

Ian Jacobs (ijacobs@datamonitor.com) is a senior analyst at Datamonitor and an ASBPE-award-winning columnist for CRM magazine. He can be found on Twitter at @iangjacobs. For more on his perspective on social technologies in the enterprise, see his Customer Centricity column from CRM magazine’s June 2009 Social Media Special Issue.]

By Ryan Zuk, senior media and analyst relations manager, Sage CRM Solutions

[EDITORS' NOTE: This is part of a series of posts that began here, dissecting a two-page chart that appeared in CRM magazine's June 2009 issue on social media. The digital edition of that issue can be found here, and a standalone image of the chart itself can be seen here. (Click on the “View Full Size” button at the top right of that page.) To view all posts in the series, please add this RSS feed to your RSS reader.]

JUNE 6, 2009 — Christopher Carfi of Cerado nailed a big point with his video blog contribution to this social experiment:

Customers belong at the center of CRM magazine’s thought-provoking Social Media Maturity Model, since the model itself focuses on communicating, collaborating, and doing business with them.

Perhaps this is a natural assumption for many people viewing the model, although I think most would also agree it’s important to define your audience, prospects, partners, and customers — your people — and to stay focused on serving them.

Consider the buyer-persona concept that David Meerman Scott encourages in his writing and presentations. [Editors' Note: David Meerman Scott will be participating in this series later this month.] Businesses can benefit by putting a name and a face to all types of members within their addressable markets, keeping current profiles of each, and solving their problems.

Now more than ever, whether considering the struggling economy or the Long Tail nature of commerce, we need to get to know our people better, learn what motivates them, and use this information to create connections that sustain and grow successful businesses.

Genuine conversations remain the best way to do this, despite all the fancy Web and social networking tools now available to us. (And we do so love the tools! As Esteban Kolsky notes in his comment on Mike Fauscette’s June 2nd post, they’re really a new set of enablers.)

[Editors' Note: CRM guru Paul Greenberg also examined these tools in the November 2008 issue of CRM.]

To successfully relate to customers in our right-now, no-waiting economy, indirect communication needs to give way to direct communication, and, as the Social Media Maturity Model indicates in its upper-right quadrant, dictating needs to evolve into collaborating. (See image, left.)

Social media provides public relations an opportunity to assist this transition while impacting all corners of the social media maturity model. Perhaps the model needs to be expressed in a more circular ecosystem fashion — again, positioning customers in the middle.

Regardless, it will be an interesting journey to the era of social commerce. Here are some thoughts on how PR can help organizations and customers get there:

• Moving the Needle – Organizations need to move from “Why social media?” to “How do we implement social media?” They need someone to demonstrate the benefits of monitoring and participating on the social Web. This is a perfect role for PR, although PR doesn’t have to have sole ownership of it.
• Connecting the Dots – Customers don’t want a megaphone communications approach — they want information that’s tailored to their needs. Social networking gives us an authentic means of discovery. PR can encourage and facilitate customer conversations that help marketing, sales, and service further understand buyer motivations so products and services can address the needs of real people.
• Keeping It Real – As organizations venture into social media conversations, they’ll need to consider bridging virtual with reality. Not every interaction should be online; in-person engagement with customers still matters. PR is in a unique position to help create these opportunities and “events.” As such, PR must also be comfortable providing accurate information not only to traditional media, analysts, bloggers, and market influencers, but also to customers directly. Doing so is the catalyst for authentic collaboration with customers to create products and services that are truly desired, and to shape the branding and messages that support them.

These aren’t flip-the-switch processes. They require learning and maturing, and are well worth the effort of connecting directly with the customers we’re trying to reach in the first place.

My thanks to Josh and the CRM magazine staff for inviting me to participate, to all the contributors of this blog series, and to everyone reading and commenting. Let’s see where this goes.

Ryan Zuk, APR, is senior media and analyst relations manager for Sage CRM Solutions, part of The Sage Group plc, supplier of business management software and services to more than 5.8 million small and midsize business customers worldwide. He also writes the monthly “Digital Dialogue” column for the Public Relations Society of America’s PR Tactics journal — a recent example of his work can be seen here — and blogs at criticalmasspr.com. He can be reached via email at ryanzuk@gmail.com and on Twitter as @ryanzuk.

By Joe Manna, community manager, Infusionsoft

[EDITORS' NOTE: This is part of a series of posts that began here, dissecting a two-page chart that appeared in CRM magazine's June 2009 issue on social media. The digital edition of that issue can be found here, and a standalone image of the chart itself can be seen here. (Click on the “View Full Size” button at the top right of that page.) To view all posts in the series, please add this RSS feed to your RSS reader.]

JUNE 5, 2009 — The Social Media Maturity (SMM) diagram is a good slice of what should be the seamless interaction between sales, marketing, service, and public relations in most midsize and large organizations.

On the other hand, I come from the perspective that not every company necessarily operates this way — nor do they need to.

To begin with, I find a couple of important topics missing from this detailed chart:

• Product Development and
• Privacy and Security.

Putting developers close to the customer experience improves the product and business long-term. Additionally, there needs to be some congruency in privacy practices designed to insulate customer data from breaches or nightmares of public relations.

PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT & CUSTOMERS
In my experience, software developers who write programming code that adheres to business-requirement documents (which often list cut-and-dried deliverables) miss one of the software’s most important stakeholders — the current user. The software developers who become fluent at building great user-centric software are the ones who can build the product with the end in mind, instead of taking only incremental steps toward that end.

Even in our own team at Infusionsoft, the chief system architect and the senior engineer (Eric Martineau and Mike Daniels, respectively) are engaged with customers in our support community. From within the community, they can glean the unfiltered, pithy, and telling experiences directly from customers — enabling them to quickly prioritize and implement changes in the product and communicate those changes. This is one of many distinct benefits of putting developers close to customers.

Additionally, we have our product management team fully leveraging the benefits (and convenience) of UserVoice for crowdsourced suggestions that let customers complete the familiar refrain, “I want the product to…” The point-based system that Infusionsoft uses not only encourages current customers to prioritize their wants and needs, but also guides our development team to prioritize immediate feature-set projects alongside the higher-level evolution of the entire product. Minimizing barriers between customers, developers, and product management lets the internal team and customers see eye-to-eye, gives customers a voice, and invests all parties in a product they become proud to use.

PRIVACY AND SECURITY
In the SMM chart, there seems to be a lack of attention on data retention, security, or privacy governance. I see a lot of examples of communication between groups for the purpose of marketing and service, but no mention of privacy and security. It’s important that, as consumers provide data to organizations — voluntarily or involuntarily — there’s oversight into how long that data will be retained and into the performance of routine security audits.

How does privacy relate to social media? Social media delivers substance to privacy policies and establishes trust among consumers that their data is safe. To maintain data integrity, it’s important to manage users’ permissions in CRM software, establishing guidelines for access to customer data. It’s a good idea to maintain a log of access to and changes in customer records in order to isolate and address the issue in case of a breach in data security. Organizations whose networks might be accessible from the outside should consider the use of those nifty RSA SecurIDs that add an additional layer of security. (They also add a bit of frustration, but that’s not an uncommon cost of security.)

Empowering consumers to clear their Web-browsing histories, opt out of marketing, and preclude themselves from further tracking is a great way to avoid government regulation — and at the same time keep organizations in the good graces of consumer advocacy groups. Even aggregated data can contain personal details and must be treated with caution.

On a similar note, we need to respect the data that consumers provide and use it to improve our marketing and service delivery.

AOL, for one, is no stranger to managing and mishandling user data, especially in the aftermath of a 2006 ‘scandal’ involving search records for more than 600,000 users. Since then, the company has lived by its publicly posted privacy practices and has internally restricted those who have access to valuable customer data.

For a bit of comic relief, the ACLU illustrated an example of what happens when CRM and behavior targeting strikes back against the consumer.

There are several truisms that every company should consider along the path to becoming a respected brand over the long term:

• Customer service occurs around the clock. (Whether or not the lights are on.)
• Customers expect exceptional service. Especially during an economy when they know they can take their business elsewhere.
• Customers want to be heard. Whether that contact comes in the form of a tweet, a critical email, or an upsetting blogpost, dedicating the resources to capture, respond, and implement that feedback is necessary to building a customer-centric brand.
• Giving up control is gaining control. By not trying to force all customers and prospects into one community — and in fact, being present on multiple social media outposts — a brand gains leverage, visibility, and market share with customers.
• Build relationships and permit transactions. Many companies still tend to focus on the transaction and not the relationship. Now is the time to be following up, calling, emailing and twittering with customers, nurturing them on your industry and not your product. Establishing credibility is more difficult, but the results pay dividends later with frequent product purchases and the word-of-mouth distribution of praise.

The Social Media Maturity chart is always changing and developing with customer needs and company pains. There’s nothing wrong with making mistakes so long as the team learns, and that’s what this chart includes – managing feedback, becoming transparent, streamlining operations, and heeding the voice of the customer.

That’s what makes it great.

Joe Manna is the community manager for small business marketing software provider Infusionsoft. With an extensive background in social media and community management, his passion revolves around advocating for consumers’ needs and helping others leverage technology to collaborate online. You can follow his daily ramblings on Twitter (@JoeManna) or catch his posts on small-business marketing, social media, and entrepreneurship on the Infusionsoft Blog.