Gen X grew up with the PC, while Gen Y grew up with the cell phone. I can’t remember how people got along without cell phones — were we more punctual people back then? Or have our minds just got that much more relaxed now that we have technology to do all our remembering and excuse-providing (“Yeah, I sent a text message to you to let you know I’d be late! You didn’t get it? Must be my phone. Whoops.”).
Chris’s younger sister, however, is in a whole other playing field when it comes to mobile — 17,000 text messages in one month. ONE MONTH! I don’t send that many in a year, or even two. I can’t even imagine what the group Marketspace’sJeffrey Rayport called Generation Z (born in or after 2003) will be like when it comes to technological consumption.
Thomas — a past recipient of CRM magazine’s Influential Leader award — noted results from one study that said 87 percent of Americans claim their mobile device is an integral part of their lives. Rarely do we ever leave the house without our phone. For the most part, it’s right up there with our wallet and keys.
For me, before I got the iPhone, I was horrible at remembering to bring my phone. (Even with the iPhone I still have problems answering my phone when someone’s calling/texting me. It’s very much a when-I-need-it device, as opposed to a when-others-need me one. Whoops.)
Since I wrote my piece on mobile marketing last year, it seems little has really changed in terms of mobile developments. Sure, the iPhone has come out, and there are now 50,000+ applications for it on Apple’s App Store, but, in terms of bringing external information onto the phone, consumers and marketers are still getting used to using marketing tools like short codes, mobile URLs, and taking pictures of a barcode, to get information on their mobile devices.
Asia’s been doing this stuff for years, it seems. Japan, Thomas said, is three to five years ahead of the United States in terms of mobile technology. And yet, even when we do get the technology, he emphasized that like any marketing channel, there needs to be:
a strategy;
an end result in sight; and
metrics.
I’m going to be in Japan in three days. I’ll let you know what three years from now looks like when I get back.
As we begin the final day of CRM Evolution 2009 here at the New York Marriott Marquis in Times Square, we’ve heard a lot about the changing customer. Namely, how businesses will have to start playing on the consumers’ terms rather than the other way around. A large part of that, according to virtually any keynote or session here, will have to do with embracing Web 2.0 tools and social media.
This also means the government — at all levels. In my March feature on government and CRM, one source explained that we could expect to see great movement in Web 2.0 due to — at that time — newly elected President Barack Obama’s call for transparency.
While some time has passed since I wrote that piece, it seems that government agencies are getting the message loud and clear. On the first day, Brian Komar, director of strategic outreach for the Center for American Progress (CAP), talked about his work with Salesforce.com and Eloqua to bring structure, analytics, and a clear view into his business in order to further its mission of striving to improve the lives of Americans. He explained that as CRM continues to evolve, we will begin to see the line blur between non-profit and for-profit organizations.
He had three key takeaways:
We may be a non-profit but we are not that different from you, as both public and private sector organizations are generally concerned with products and customers.
We are a non profit, and we are a little different from you with regard to what success looks like. He noted the business community is usually about maximizing profits, but for CAP, it can be about exerting influence, and metrics aren’t quite as clear.
As CRM becomes more social in nature, non-profits and businesses have more to learn from one another. Komar said the business community is good at maximizing return on investment, while non-profits are good at building communities and soliciting volunteers.
Building upon the work non-profits are doing, yesterday’s session, “Web 2.0 Tools in Federal and State Governments Drive Participation, Transparency, and Citizen Empowerment,” looked even further at just how far government entities have come — and will go.
Casey Coleman, chief information officer of the General Services Administration (GSA) talked about the revolution, not evolution, of how government is interacting with citizens. “This isn’t your father’s federal government … it’s changing,” she said. “The bottom line is government serves the public better when it makes decisions based on citizen input. Everything we do must enable citizens to be part of the process, and Web 2.0 helps us to make that happen.”
She noted the GSA’s use of Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, and other burgeoning social media sites as evidence that the government is continuing to go to where the people are increasingly flocking in order to provide them the information they need in the form in which they prefer. “Government has a lot to offer,” she said. “The public is hungry for information, and they want to participate and be involved in the dialogue.”
Robert Greenberg, chief executive officer of G&H International Services, gave attendees a sneak peek into what social CRM can — and is starting to – deliver for the public sector, namely in homeland security. “There’s a significant challenge in homeland security because of who the stakeholders are and how they’re organized,” he said. “The first thing to understand is that everything starts on the local level before moving to state and federal. It’s also an incredibly fragmented community, as there are approximately 55,000 different agencies in terms of police, fire, and emergency medical.”
Combine all of these different audiences with billions of dollars spent in local infrastructure that cannot be ripped and replaced as well as incredibly difficult to get to connect and integrate with one another — and there is a real problem. No one wants another Hurricane Katrina. “The lack of seamless information sharing is what made Katrina that much worse,” he recalled. “In reality, all states that wanted to help out had no easy way of doing so.”
There is hope though, as Greenberg pointed to two projects of government being used as a platform: Virtual Alabama and VIPER.
“At the end of the day, homeland security is about having a capability so when you are under stress from a political, social, or economic standpoint, you can bounce back as rapidly as possible,” Greenberg said. “The key is making information actionable. Without that, what are you going to do?”
It can be argued that is the same problem facing private sector businesses today. Connecting with customers (or citizens) and being able to take the information culled from them and make it actionable, both for the business and for consumers themselves. Are you finding a change in how you can access information from government, regardless of municipality? Do you think that federal government can even be overhauled in these terms, or is it too big to change?
In Greenberg’s words, the game of the CRM Playaz, “is to rag on the industry.” So in this case, maybe you can hate the playa.
It began with a group brainstorming session — What are some of the most shameful ways people are playing off of the word “Twitter”? Greenberg was turned on to this idea when, one day, Clark Kent (@clarkkentclub) began following him. Everything seemed in-line with the comic character, until the very last line:
Name:clark kent
Location:Metropolis
Bio:Because of the declining newspaper industry, I got laid off from the Daily Planet. I now monitor my arch nemesis, social media, using X-Ray Twision
So, with the help of the attendees, we pulled together a list of equal caliber, such as:
Twust (Trust);
Twesident (president who tweets);
Twiller (tribute to Michael Jackson);
Twictionary (Dictionary);
TRM (pronounced: Twee-RM); and
Twuncate (Truncate).
There were more, but I can’t remember (feel free to contribute more!). At the #140Conf earlier this year, one of the speakers had said, “Everybody takes things so twiteral on Twitter” — but I chickened out and didn’t nominate my word. (PG: Can I still get a copy of the book?) The people who nominated the top three words (each audience member voted for their favorite three) will be receiving a free copy of Paul’s newest book.
Afterward, Brent and Paul played a game they call “C-Level Smack Down,” the premise of which is to grill c-level executives with questions they have to answer — the trick is that executives in the hot seat can’t say their company name, or even refer to their specific business industry, when responding.
Chuck Schaefer, CEO of on-demand CRM software provider Aplicor, was today’s lucky participant. Questions ranged from “what do you do on an average day?” to “do you like fruit?” to “who are your competitors?”. Schaefer made it to the end of the 5-minute stretch with a great response to Brent’s final question about his competitors. “Our biggest competitor is us.” Well done.
As a prize for make it through the 5-minute ordeal, Schaefer wins a custom ad made on the spot using Paul and Brent’s snazzy Flip video camera. The video will then, I believe, be posted on the Playaz’s site. “Free advertising for a month.” Pretty sweet.
Executives that don’t make it to 5- minutes are subjected to a “smack down” by the audience. Not sure how brutal CRMers can really get, but in my mind, it would go something like this.
Ever used the hashtag #SCRM (Social CRM) on Twitter? You can thank Brent Leary for that. He started the now-popular hash tag with hopes that it would trend up with social media Tweets like it has today. [UPDATED, 8/28/09, 11.39aET:Editors' Note: At least a "h/t" worth of credit for the spread of the hashtag goes to Prem Kumar Aparanji of Cognizant Technology Solutions ( @prem_k on Twitter ), who helped popularize its use.]
Leary, the cofounder and partner of CRM Essentials, presented today at this week’s CRM Evolution conference in New York on the topic of social CRM. As I’m sure you know, much has changed on the CRM front thanks to the “Social Revolution.”
Consumers are socially empowered, but businesses aren’t at that same level (yet.)
Here’s how Leary shows they differ:
Traditional CRM Goals:
centralized customer data,
operational efficiency,
forecasting,
activity management, and
reporting.
Social Challenges:
finding time to turn searches into answers/solutions;
finding enough trusted information;
finding trusted vendors;
they don’t trust companies – they trust people at companies;
people don’t feel warm and fuzzy from a corporate Web site;
It’s been just more than one year since we kicked off our blog in conjunction with last year’s conference, destinationCRM 2008. One of my first posts had to do with a keynote address at that time which talked about CRM and customer experience management (CEM). Namely, whether or not the CEM acronym would take over, as the customer experience was — and still is — becoming an essential goal for companies.
As I stated a year ago, and will again, we have no intentions of changing the name of our magazine anytime soon. But, in today’s keynote address here at CRM Evolution 2009 by Jeffrey Rayport, founder of Marketspace, LLC, he concluded by saying he felt in a couple of years we could expect to be talking about CMR — customer managed relationships — moreso than CRM.
“In a couple of years, it will not CRM Evolution, but CMR Evolution,” Rayport said. “Not customer relationship management alone, but how to put the tools and friendly interfaces — speech, voice, natural language — in the world where brands must play a new game. I’ll argue that’s CMR, for customer managed relationships, as [consumers] are at the center of everything we do.”
Are we just getting caught up in the details? Is it that important to coin another acronym to recognize that the customer is in fact crucial and essential to the business landscape today? I’m curious to know what those attending the conference, as well as our faithful readers back at home, think about this topic.
There are three ways to grow profitability (in order of popularity):
acquisition;
development; and
retention.
Thomas Cates, founder and president of consultancy The Brookeside Group, argues that the order is all wrong. “They’ve got it backwards,” he said (”They,” I presume, is your typical, sales-hungry business). CRM is “too often about technology, too often about big systems.” Cates is doing something bold — he’s putting the “relationships” back in CRM.
He highlighted the expenses of one company that spent the first third of its year paying for the costs of customer attrition, which he analogized to trying to fill a tub without a plug. “Plug the leak!,” he told the audience this afternoon at our CRM Evolution conference in New York this week. “Focus on retention first, then getting upsell and cross sells, then worry about new business.”
Satisfaction was the old standard — you fulfil your task, satisfy a customer, but that doesn’t guarantee consumer loyalty. With so many choices (50,000 products in your average supermarket! 300,000 products in your average Wal-Mart!), why would consumers ever tie themselves to just one vendor?
Cates describes the characteristics of any loyal relationship. They:
exist to meet each party’s needs;
are based on perceptions, not reality; and
are dynamic, always changing, and naturally drift apart.
Basically, if you really want a loyal relationship, he said, “get a dog.”
The Brookeside Group developed a Sales Intelligence System to measure “aroused motivation,” which basically helps you determine what stage on the relationship spectrum a customer is in his or her interaction with you, and how, depending on where the customer is, what you need to do to “arouse” them into action.
The system is broken down into six dimensions:
Integrity (satisfier): Are you a company I can respect?
Competency (satisfier): Are you (the company) skilled in what you do?
Recognition (motivator): Have you (the company) done something that makes me (the consumer) think my business is important to you?
Proactivity (motivator): Are you looking out for my best interest?
Savvy (motivator): Do I think you know my (the consumer) business?
Chemistry (motivator): Is our communication pleasant? Do I look forward to working with you?
On the other side of the equation, is the consumer Loyalty Index (ranked based on descending degrees of loyalty):
Loyal (a vocal advocate)
Value-added
Transactional
Antagonistic (a vocal detractor)
Cates argued that consumers with high “aroused motivation” exhibit significantly higher conversion rates compared to those with low around motivation, exhibiting behaviors such as:
9x more likely to be responsive to a call;
spend 2.5x more; and
4x greater retention rate.
“Companies don’t have relationships,” Cates emphasized, “people do.” Success is ultimately dependent on getting the right information to the right people (i.e., sales, marketing, or customer service), at the right time, so that they can best serve your consumers. To that extent, he added, “Departments can’t fix relationships. People do.”
While there has been some news of the economy beginning to stabilize, macroeconomic trends are still helping to shape how contact center practice leaders must proceed. Here at the first day of CRM Evolution 2009 at the Marriott Marquis Times Square in the heart of Manhattan, Art Hall, manager of customer relations at Alvarez and Marsal explained to attendees how recessionary conditions are influencing contact center strategy.
“Today’s economy is focusing on performance improvement, which means that most companies are not in the green, are not healthy,” Hall said. “Most are sliding are into the yellow, orange, or red categories. Organizations in the yellow and orange — in the revenue slide, are mostly in denial.”
Bearing this in mind, Hall points out three strategies being employed today by companies owning and operating contact center operations:
rationalizing contact centers, forcing companies to optimize overhead costs as a way to preserve cash that results in an increased demand in outsourcing;
rethinking technology investments, which Hall says is leading many contact center practitioners to think about software-as-a-service (SaaS)/hosted solutions, unified communications, and social media; and
Speaking specifically about technology investments, Hall stated this may be the last resort for contact center managers trying to get through to c-suite executives who may not necessarily understand the day-to-day challenges they face. “If you’ve squeezed everything from process improvement and making agents more efficient … it’s time to rethink the technology,” he said.
This also means thinking about adding on other channels including social media. If contact centers do go this route, Hall stressed that it must be integrated into the overall multichannel strategy, otherwise it is all for naught. “We should never lose sight of importance of customer and social responsibility of organizations delivering on their value propositions,” he said. “A judicious use of contact center technology, along with a customer-driven approach to training and live-agent empowerment, should result in effective and efficient operations balanced with high customer satisfaction.”
For the contact center managers and supervisors out there, are you finding these same trends affecting your particular centers? If so, how are you trying to tactically address these trends while at the same time continue to — and improve upon — the experience you deliver to end-customers?
The discussion over just how influential Twitter actually is continues to wage on. According to a new study by research firm Pear Analytics, less than one in ten tweets have any real “pass-along value,” as more than 40 percent of tweets are “pointless babble.” (Check out an upcoming story on our Web site for more details on what was behind the Pear Analytics study.)
According to the news source, the research was meant to take a snapshot of what people were actually using the social networking site for, and jumped into the stream of tweets every half-hour between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. Central Daylight Time on weekdays — in the span of two weeks — to collect a total of 2,000 messages.
The messages were then grouped into six categories:
conversational ……… 37.5 percent;
news …………………… 3.6 percent;
pass-along value … 8.7 percent;
pointless babble …… 40.5 percent;
self-promotion …… 5.9 percent; and
spam …………………… 3.8 percent.
While the second-largest percentage, conversation, was encouraging, the fact that the majority, 40.5 percent, of tweets were deemed to be “pointless babble” is disturbing.
As with any other type of technology, or even social group (online or offline), the experience is what you make of it. Do you believe this will also be the case with Twitter? Can you sweep away the clutter from the gems through selective following, privatizing your Twitter feed, or another tactic? Furthermore, does that take away from the open nature of the microblogging site?
Lastly, do you believe this is something that will work itself out in time as the site matures, as was discussed in the commentary from my last Twitter-related blogpost?
CureCRM, which officially launched yesterday, has something to its credit that not a lot of other CRM vendors can lay claim to: It has integrated with Twitter from Day One. The Web-based, CRM service operates on a fairly simple premise — salespeople spend a heck of a lot of time in their email inboxes.
According to its site, CureCRM offers the following:
Emails and Tweets sent and received from prospects and customers get logged into CureCRM automatically. CureCRM also extracts phone numbers, email addresses, tweets, and other relevant information about your contacts.
CureCRM is fully integrated with your Outlook client and Salesforce. When reading emails from prospects & customers in Outlook, CureCRM shows you threaded conversations, contact information, and upcoming meetings.
I recently spoke with CureCRM’s founder, Alex Schliker, and here’s a bit of our conversation:
Where did the idea for CureCRM come from?
Initially we weren’t even a CRM — we were an email assistant. There was this thing back in the day called, “I Want Sandy.” It was an email assistant that helped people keep track of their schedules. It would add meetings and events to people’s calendars immediately.
It was pretty popular and Twitter acquired them. I thought that idea was great and I wanted to take the idea of an email assistant and sell it to the enterprise world. It would replace the concept of a human assistant … No one really wanted it. A human assistant makes like 8-9 bucks an hour. That’s not that much of a cost. We, after scanning emails — part of our program is to make our emails that much stronger so people didn’t have to email an assistant and it does that automatically — we slowly learned that this is more of a CRM application than an email assistant.
However, we do still have an email assistant in the product. It is a big core feature, which is unique with CRM. There isn’t any other CRM with a built in email assistant for scheduling stuff.
I get the chance to write quite a bit about the topic of customer experience — how companies are measuring it, trying to implement it, and figure out what it actually is. Oftentimes, my focus is on North American-based companies, but new research conducted by Greenfield Online (in full disclosure, also sponsored by Genesys Telecommunications Labs) finds that not adequately following through on customer experience is leading countries across the globe to miss out on precious revenue.
According to the study, businesses in Australia, New Zealand, and India lost a combined $5.6 billion in revenue due to inability to meet customer expectations. That’s not chump change. The largest offender of the three was Australia, which lost $2.6 billion, followed closely by India, losing $2.46 billion. New Zealand came in a distant third, posting a loss of $995.6 million.
The consumer respondents complained that these three countries, in particular, were displeased with automated self-service programs that didn’t allow them to reach a human agent and were difficult to navigate. Also, working with agents who weren’t empowered to make decisions, and having to repeat information — such as name and account number — every time their call is forwarded to another department was another pain point mentioned.
While those complaints are also levied stateside, the study did come up with some interesting statistics regarding the price tag on how much lost relationships with customers really cost companies.
According to the research, the average value of a relationship ended due to poor customer service experiences costs:
$338.85 in Australia; the average consumer ending 1.37 relationships;
$257.33 in New Zealand; the average consumer ending 1.17 relationships; and
$121.81 in India; the average consumer ending 1.84 relationships.
Scary numbers, especially since the majority of customers surveyed here will not crawl into a corner and cease to use the product or service in question. According to the study, at least 60 percent of respondents each of the three countries took its business to a competitor.
Do these numbers surprise you? Do you think the prices here are similar — or (gasp) worse — here in North America?
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