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 on… »

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.