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?

According to new research from Nielsen Online, online activity within “member communities” — which includes social networks and blogs — has bypassed personal email. According to Nielsen’s March 2009 “Global Faces and Networked Places” social networking report, in 2008, activity in member communities accounted for one in every 15 online minutes. On a global scale, social networking and blogging now accounts for nearly ten percent of all internet time.

Member communities are now the world’s fourth most popular online sector after search, portals and PC software applications and for the first time, ahead of email.

The report states: “The staggering increase in the amount of time people are spending on these sites is changing the way people spend their time online and has ramifications for how people behave, share and interact within their normal daily lives.”

In addition to growth in time spent on social networks the overall time spent online increased by 18 percent between 2007 and 2008. According to Nielsen, Facebook saw the greatest increase in time spent on the site. As the ninth most popular brand online, Facebook’s average time per person comes to three hours 10 minutes — the highest among the top internet brands. Yet Facebook activity isn’t just college and high school aged-students killing time between homework assignments. In fact, Nielsen reports that the greatest growth sector on Facebook has been in the 35-49 age range. Nearly one quarter of Facebook’s members is over the age of 50 years.

There’s no doubt that social network sites have the “time suck” affect, but the fact that people are spending more time on sites like Facebook and Twitter and throughout the blogosphere instead of in their email inboxes is pretty staggering. It leaves me wondering what accounts for “activity.” Does leaving a Twitter tab open all day in you browser count as time spent engaging in a “member community?” Does the ordering of online sectors speak to your time spent online? Any predictions for 2009?

There’s a cafe in Kettering, Ohio where the owner is, “allow[ing] the patrons to decide how much to pay for their meal.”

In this economy, consumers are told not to be so frivolous with their money, and yet, it’s precisely their spending that will bring us out of the recession — so why not have them pay at least something rather than nothing?

Sam Lippert, owner of Java Street Cafe, withdrew from his 401K to open this cafe in April 2008 and just when the economic tornado was about to take down his shop, he managed to hold on.

CNN Correspondent John Roberts interviewed Lippert on “American Morning,” yesterday morning and asked the obvious question that would deter many skeptics from ever implementing this tactic:

Roberts: Yes, so, does anybody try to game the system? You know, they’ll get a big meal that would be worth $10, $12 and then give you 50 cents for it?

Lippert: Well, you know, they have to look me in the eye and say that that’s what they think is fair. And, you know, that’s a big incentive. When someone’s at the counter and you say, you get to pay what you think is fair, very few people are going to take advantage of that situation.

On a broader level, it’s this mentality–”people are generally good”–that promotes trust and mutual respect. While there are always some bad apples, the shame of walking away knowing you cheated someone is enough to deter most people. Even when a restaurant prices something really cheap, we may find ourselves “compensating” in the form of exorbitant tipping. In that way, even though the tips go to the wait staff instead of the restaurant itself, we’re indicating how much we thought the food and the experience was worth (ironically, we may be paying to express our gratitude at how inexpensive the meal was).

In early February, Howard Kurtz, a staff writer for the Washington Post, published a piece entitled, “What’s It Worth To Ya?” — which discussed the challenges journalists and newspapers are facing in an world where news is–or at least, is thought to be–free. While I appreciate quality journalism, I also appreciate having unobstructed access–spoiled by this “democratization of information.”

We’re willing to pay for something we can’t get otherwise, for convenience, or for access. The Office’s Dwight Schrute makes a good point though–he never tips for anything he can do himself:

“Why tip someone for a job I’m capable of doing myself? I can deliver food. I can drive a taxi. I can, and do, cut my own hair. I did however, tip my urologist, because I am unable to pulverize my own kidney stones.”

So I can’t be everywhere at once and if it came down to paying for the news, I’d probably do it. If Java Street Cafe served me something I could never make on my own, I’d probably pay more than if I could.

Value, as you will read in the market focus on Retail in the upcoming May issue of CRM magazine, is  all we as customers are looking for. We want to know that what we’re paying for is worth the money we’re forking over. For food, it’s easier to gauge, especially if you pay after you’ve consumed. For other products or services, particularly if they’re being purchased online, value becomes a bit more difficult to discern. Therefore, it’s the responsibilty of the company and its employees to help the customer is making the right decision (e.g., customer reviews, product specs). Give them transparency, authenticity, and of course, a fair price.

Last week I posted a short note about Legacy Locker, a company that helps with the tying up of online loose ends when a person dies. I thought it was a neat and somewhat necessary idea, and figured I’d leave it with that. But as any good Watchmen fan knows, “nothing ever ends.”

It seems Legacy Locker is not alone. This weekend, I spotted this AP article in the New York Times (though I’ve linked to Yahoo! instead) in which two similar services are mentioned. While some in my office think the names (Deathswitch and Slightly Morbid) leave a bit to be desired, they address an important concern: What happens to all your personal online information and passwords when you die?

In the space of a week, I’ve been introduced to three companies that do more or less the same thing, and the business model is pure profit; secure private storage of account info is cheap-cheap-cheap, and these companies are charging for convenience and security. The example in the AP piece of a person who kept his info on a USB drive may seem like a cheap and easy alternative—USB drives are often given away as free promotional materials—but they’re not secure and are easy to lose.

I remain of two minds on this topic. On the negative side, this feels like profiteering—capitalizing on uncertainty and grief. Anybody who has had to make funeral arrangements on short notice knows what that feels like. On the positive, the financial impact is negligible while the ability to achieve closure is quite valuable. And as I said before, we’re living more of our lives in the digital ether, so we should make arrangements for when that life comes to an end.

Enjoy the rest of your Monday.

When you think about Amdocs, you probably think of it as a vendor primarily serving telecommunications companies and service providers. Looking to further extend its reach in that area, the company is hoping to make great gains through self-service.

This industry vertical in particular is looking for ways to acquire and sell to new customers online with as little investment as possible – because cash-strapped companies are trying their hardest to reduce customer churn, much less pick up new customers along the way.

It is because of this, according to Stephen Krajewski, product marketing manager of Amdocs Self-Service (now part of Amdocs Interactive) that his company is taking a renewed look at self-service. For starters, in the past six months the self-service business has moved out of the customer management group in which the CRM is developed, and has gone into the Amdocs Interactive outfit. “It’s because Amdocs Interactive is focused on Web and portal experience, and that very much is what Amdocs Self-Service has been about,” he says.

Krajewski goes on to explain that there are two areas of the utmost importance for service providers when it comes to customer service:

• account management, via letting end users take on or manage their accounts and take responsibility for their own customer care; and
• ebilling.

Krajewski says that now his outlet is focusing on expanding into three areas with pre-packaged offers: account management/ebilling, ecommerce, and eservice. Why? Krajewski believes it can help lower the cost of self-service in the short term, but that isn’t the only reason.

“Long term, we’re intent on changing what self-service is defined as,” he says. “We’re thinking that OK, maybe it is beyond purely management of my finance or trouble tickets, or even an online shopping cart. How can we expand self-service into various aspects of service delivery? For example, reaching out to devices that are intelligent, computer-enabled, and thereby a greater scope of control from a Web or self-service portal.”

In the past, self-service was looked at as “the poor cousin,” Krajewski recalls. “It was the way to take some cost out of your business. Now as more people want to use this channel, companies are finding what they have doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.”

According to information released by the company, there are already new offerings including E-Billing Start Pack, which combines self-service ebilling software with product-specific implementations services. The hope is that it can lower costs, grow revenue and, for the trifecta, deliver a better customer experience.

For the service providers out there,  do you believe that self-service is the channel you need to bolster first? Or, are you more interested in shoring up your contact center infrastructure? What sits at the top of your investment wish list during the recession?

I’d like to think it was fate — or maybe the CRM gods — that brought me to my cab driver when I arrived in sunny, balmy New Orleans for Microsoft Convergence.

Exiting the airport, I immediately darted for the first cab I saw, not knowing that there was some formal process of having to go downstairs and actually calling a cab. But everything was okay, my cabbie said, doesn’t look like the police were watching–and hey, he got another passenger without having to wait in line.

While in the car, we started talking about my PC, his Mac. He’s been a Mac user ever since Photoshop was only a Mac product. When I asked him whether or not he had an iPhone he casually said, “No, I hate Cingular.”

When Katrina devastated New Orleans, he and his family had to evacuate and among the possessions he took with him was his cell phone. He was  staying at a friend’s place, unsure of where he was going to live next, but he needed to renew his contract–so he got a year’s worth of service. Six months later, the service suddenly terminated. “I was living out of a paper bag!” he told me. In it, amazingly, he had his contract and showed them the dates. Cingular said it could do nothing about it. He had to renew. So he switched.

He also has beef with AT&T, which acquired Cingular in 2005. When his mother left her home in New Orleans, she continued paying her phone bill until my cabbie finally helped her cancel her service. When they moved back to New Orleans, she tried to reconnect her telephone service but AT&T accused her of missing payments and was ready to inundate her with fees. So he told his mother to hang up the phone and they called the cable company–they came that afternoon and installed everything. “Why in the world,” he said. “Would you push away those asking for your business??”

It’s certainly not unusual to speak with a disgruntled customers, but it only reinforces just how disconnected companies are from the needs of their consumers. The fantasy is the notion of having customers run businesses — but aren’t we all already customers? That’s why I’m really excited about the social trend that’s quickly gaining momentum (Check out our June 2009 issue on Social CRM!)–I’ve been to many conferences where the theme was “dialogue” or “conversation,” but I think until you’re actually talking/chatting/tweeting/texting with the customers, it’s all just theoretical fluff.

We all know retaining customers is cheaper than acquiring a new one, and in the long run, your loyal customers are typically your most profitable. In the eyes of the consumer, however, it seems all companies want is quantity, with very little care for relationships.  “I’d be a horrible CEO,” he said. “I’d keep all my customers, but I’d never be profitable.” Ironically, it’s this mentality that will help companies be profitable, especially now. Unfortunately, it’s likely that this fervent thirst for the numbers drives people toward reckless acquisition, rather than relationships.