Greetings from the Customer Experience Summit here in the Windy City — Chicago. The conference, just a stone’s throw away from Soldier Field and Lake Michigan, is focusing in on not just delivering service, but a superior customer experience to an ever demanding customer base.

Check out our Web site for daily news postings from the event over the next couple of days. In a session this afternoon, “Going From Good to Great Service While Saving Money: Using the Voice Of The Customer to Drive Brand Aligned Service,” John Goodman, vice chairman of TARP Worldwide (not to be mistaken for the government bailout), pointed out ten myths of customer service that must keep in mind in order to evolve.

1. Always exceed customer expectations.
2. If you answer the phone the quickest, that alone is the key to success.
3. People always prefer talking to people.
4. The customer is always right.
5. If complaints are down, customer service is better.
6. Employees are the cause of the most dissatisfaction.
7. Price and cost cutting are the keys to success.
8. If your company is at 90 percent satisfaction, you should declare a victory.
9. If you measure Net Promoter Score, you are done insofar as analyzing your customer loyalty.
10. If you have a 100 percent satisfaction guarantee, everyone is happy.

“The law of diminishing returns does not really apply when it comes to customer experience,” Goodman pointed out.

For customer service managers and supervisors out there, do you believe that these ten points are truly myths? Are you still operating under these maxims? Are there any myths here that you’d either like to debunk or add to?

Maybe not news, exactly—I’d be posting it on destinationCRM if these were properly-written news articles—but recent developments that deserve a little cheerleading. Three items have crossed my desk recently, and I wanted to be sure to share them. All three deal with information sharing of one sort or another, each from a different perspective.

Thing One: the (mostly) internal perspective. ShareMethods has a new product called ShareSpaces, a sales and marketing collaboration environment. Beyond keeping salespeople and marketers on the same page with customer opportunities, ShareSpaces has contract management and partner tools as well. Examples I saw included contract collaboration (complete with electronic signature), agency collaboration for developing creative, and branded partner space that looked like more than just a portal. It takes inspiration from social networking and makes it work for content management—no mean feat.

Thing Two: the (mostly) external perspective. Sendside is launching Sendside Packages, what it calls a “customer communications portal” that improves on email’s ability to engage and convert prospects. It doesn’t replace email—in fact, one delivery method is through email—but makes content delivered that way do more. Sendside Packages embed live documents within an email without requiring the recipient to download anything, or go to an external portal. Delivering content this way appears to open up the possibilities for discussion, real back-and-forth, on matters at hand. The format allows much greater security, as the sender can choose what parts can be printed or forwarded by the recipient. It also allows better use of analytics, because each part of a package can be tracked separately and delivered to the right people—salespeople instead of marketers, for examples.

Thing Three: the community. Just announced today, Sage North America has launched the Sage SalesLogix Online Community, serving Sage’s customers, partners, employees, developers, and pretty much anybody with an interest in CRM. It’s analogous to Sage’s Act! online community, which has received no small amount of praise. David van Toor and other Sage execs will be participating, so we can expect some life in this one as well.

Each announcement takes a different road to a central concept: One-way, blind broadcasts of business information becoming less and less valid. If you don’t know what’s happening at the other end, and don’t have a way to encourage use, reuse, and discussion about what you’re offering, you may as well not send it in the first place. The tools mentioned above are just that—tools—but they let clever and creative people find new ways to exchange ideas, and maybe generate some revenue. What could be bad?

It could be that I’m seeing these announcements through rose-colored glasses. I don’t deny that anything that opens up communications possibilities makes my business-journalist side smile. But ShareMethods and Sendside both briefed me recently, and each meeting provided an “Aaahh…” moment when I had the sense that they got what I’m on about. Also, Sage has had considerable success with its Act! community so far, and creating one for SalesLogix—a more complex and robust system, reflecting its lower-midmarket customer base—will only make that product more attractive. Plus, whenever Mr. van Toor gets into the conversation, it will move in interesting and sometimes visionary directions.

Salesforce.com hosted an event in New York on Monday designed to create some separation between itself and the rest of the on-demand world. Lately, Salesforce.com’s competitors have gone on the attack in an attempt to me-too their way into software-as-a-service (SaaS) prominence by effectively commoditizing some of the more successful aspects of on-demand computing. Salesforce.com cofounder and CEO Marc Benioff would not sit still and watch —and has instead expanded the definition in the last year.

Cloud computing is now the hot idea — [Editor’s note: See today’s Wall Street Journal for more on the trend.] — and it takes into account more than simply delivering an application to include interoperating with many other Internet-based applications.

The commoditization aspect is a neat trick and not unexpected. Some of the gains of on-demand computing such as browser based applications and stateless computing make it easy to build applications that run on the Internet as well as behind the firewall. Retrofitting conventional client server applications in this way gives vendors the ability to deliver some of the advantages, especially lower costs, to customers. It also enables them to offer a choice of deployment options that range from conventional behind the firewall applications to traditional facilities management options and standard on-demand.

In that light there is a lot to like especially if your organization does not want to jump into cloud computing just yet. Maybe you don’t have an ATM card yet either, but I digress.

The New York Cloudforce event was designed to say that there is a lot more to this than using the Internet as the networking medium for enterprise business applications. The program started by pointing out some of the accepted benefits of multi-tenant computing such as such as all of the technology acquisition and management services built into cloud computing. We know what they are and they include up time, security, skilled labor and a lot more.

To those table stakes, you can add what I have called WebNecessary applications. By that I mean, applications or combinations of applications that support innovative business processes that either can’t be done at all, or only with great effort, through conventional computing.

Last fall, Salesforce.com made a big deal about its integration with Facebook to improve the sales process. This time, the company turned its attention to the service process and announced integration with Twitter, the fastest growing social application on the Web.

As I look at it the integration of these products makes great sense in a service environment. The basic idea is that when people need something they are increasingly motivated to ask their circle of friends and acquaintances for advice. Twitter is a good bit of functionality for broadcasting your need and as the network continues expanding the likelihood that someone will see your plea and send help only grows. But to me that’s not the important part.

Salesforce.com has implemented technology that captures the help stream when it gets generated and presents it back to the vendor or manufacturer as a mini-service bulletin or candidate for inclusion in a knowledgebase. If the solution works the vendor can make it part of the standard support offering.

The idea of customers helping each other with advice like this is not new. Other service and knowledgebase vendors offer similar capabilities but they tend to be tedious exercises in a more formal writing and approval process.

The Twitter process leaves some things to be desired. Limited to 140 characters, people who want to help with more-involved support issues will need to merely forward links to longer advice. But that shouldn’t blur the importance of domesticating an easy-to-use and very popular social application for the needs of business. It’s a good idea — a 1.0 idea — and we’ll see where it takes us.

Back to New York, for sure.

I got a lot out of the afternoon session I attended — a presentation to the financial analysts (which I am not) about the company and its business prospects. Like the morning’s review of cloud computing, there was a bit of review but I doubt anyone minded. Annual revenues are now over a billion bucks, there’s almost that much in the bank, subscribers and customer numbers continue what looks like an inexorable upward march. It was just the kind of thing to warm the heart of any financial analyst who spent this winter covering the Wall Street equivalent of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow.

Listening to the discussions you get a sense of the scale of this company’s ambition. CRM is a big market but enterprise business software is an order of magnitude or two greater. Moreover, many of the enterprise business applications that will make up that market have not been designed yet or are operating in clumsy spreadsheets.

Perhaps a natural concern on the minds of many analysts (and competitors) is how one company using a multitenant architecture can expect to serve this growing market. Doesn’t scale become a limiting factor at some point?

Salesforce.com anticipated the question and for the first time opened up its kimono enough to provide some insight into its architecture. Surprisingly, fewer than 50 servers (spread across three data centers) run the whole shebang right now. And a modest number of (it has to be said) very large database tables — about 20 — holds all the data. Smart algorithms take care of ensuring your data is delivered in an average of 300 milliseconds with three 9’s reliability.

Salesforce.com is still a young company despite its billions and its place in the market, and I got a sense of that as I listened to a discussion about its finances. Benioff said that it can take upwards of 18 months for an investment in sales talent to provide a return. Like any company today, Salesforce.com tries to be appropriate in its spending — increasing when the market is accommodating and reducing in times like this.

All in all, the day gave me the impression that CRM is and will continue to be important to Salesforce.com. Its recent efforts to include social media in the business processes it serves to customers is proof of that. The company continues to grow and has its eye on larger markets that dovetail into front-office computing. If companies like IBM, Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft each represent milestone moments in the history of enterprise computing, and they do, then certainly Salesforce.com is rising to that iconic status. Its place will be secured if it can continue to convince a decreasingly skeptical audience of the value of cloud computing.

So Twitter, it seems, has scored yet another fan — joining the corporate accounts of Comcast (@ComcastCares), JetBlue (@jetblue), Southwest Airlines (@SouthwestAir), and dozens of others on the upstart microblogging social network, Salesforce.com has opened a support channel for its users and other interested parties. Follow @asksalesforce, and see how many of your fellow 6 million Twitterers join you over the weekend. [UPDATE, 3/23/09: There are now more than 8 million users on Twitter, according to Compete statistics cited by Salesforce.com]

Salesforce.com, of course, already had several fingers in the Twitter pie, from the unofficial to the official. (One of the company’s social-media gurus — Kingsley Joseph — is a frequent twitterer over at @Kingsley2, for example.)

As for us, you can find us, as always, at @CRM (for the magazine) and @destinationCRM (for live-twittering, blogposts, and other online activities). We also have channels for our August conference, CRM Evolution: @CRMevolution (for the event itself) and @CRMe09 (for editorial coverage).

[Note that @CRMe09 replaces @dCRM08, the channel for editorial coverage of last year's conference.]

j.

I don’t pretend to know all of the ins and outs of the financial industry. That said, I do feel that I know enough to get by — I can make a deposit, withdrawal, and check up on things online. I can even tell you what a CD is without complaining about the rise of the MP3. You know, those pesky certificates of deposit.

That said, when I made a deposit at a Wachovia branch Tuesday morning close to CRM magazine’s world headquarters in Manhattan, the receipt I got from the half-awake bank teller at 8 a.m. said “Deposit Date: 3/17/09″ and, this is important, “Deposit Effective Date: 3/17/09″.

Now, to me, “deposit effective” means that the deposit is in fact now available for use. Later in the day, I needed to check my Wachovia account online because this was a situation in which I needed the money rather quickly, so I wanted to make sure that it was actually in my account.

Well, it wasn’t.

Being that I’ve had some really nice interactions with Wachovia’s customer service in the past, I was looking forward to having the problem rectified — or at least let me know why the deposit hasn’t shown up on my online account yet.

Well, that wasn’t to be the case. I tried to navigate the online banking’s (different from the general customer service telephone number) hellish speech recognition system, and then I was finally prompted after three minutes of options to say “representative” to speak with a live agent. They couldn’t have just offered that up front? I digress.

Finally, I get a woman who simply says that “deposit effective” means the bank will process the deposit that day — but it won’t be available for use until the next day. I quickly asked her if she thought it was misleading. “Deposit effective,” at first glance, means the deposit is good to go … to me, anyway.

Her response? “Well, it is misleading if you don’t understand what ‘deposit effective’ means.”

Uh, no kidding. By the tone of my voice she could tell that I was not satisfied with her reply, and asked if I wanted to be transferred to customer service. I agreed, and was transferred quickly.

I got another agent, and I explained my situation again. She affirmed the last agent’s response that the deposit would show up the next day. I asked again, “Don’t you think that is misleading for someone who is not attuned to the nuances of financial services?”

Her response, while said in a softer tone, was not any better. “Well, maybe with the Wells Fargo acquisition there will be a change in procedure.”

What? Why pass the buck to Wells Fargo?  Also, it’s not even a procedural issue. I have a very easy fix. On the receipt, instead of saying “deposit effective”, how about “deposit available” and then the date?

What bothered me more than the inability of Wachovia to see my point was the fact that, unless it ends up in a tagged recording somewhere, I don’t have confidence that the problem — or my suggestion — will be registered. There is no vocal suggestion box I can not-so-anonymously drop my feedback into. There wasn’t a post-call survey offered to me, either.

Essentially, I understood early on that I wouldn’t be able to use the money I deposited until the next day. What bothered me was that no one took my concern seriously. I just feel like my problem was discarded without any serious thought.

Have you run into the same problem as customers calling into contact centers? Or, on the other side, how do the customer service representatives and supervisors out there deal with calls like this? Do you have a feedback management plan in place so that calls like mine are not made in vain?