By Denis Pombriant, founder and managing principal, Beagle Research Group

NetSuite's graphic to describe its offering for SRP — services resource planning.

NetSuite’s idea is an integrated solution blending three elements:

• enterprise resource planning;
• services-oriented planning; and
• sales modules.

The combination, in NetSuite’s parlance, goes by the name of “SRP” — services resource planning — and the idea has legs.

[More on why that is, after the jump...]

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“One reason Best Buy has been around for 43 years is that we have been able to evolve,” said Barry Judge, Best Buy’s Chief Marketing Officer at Wednesday’s Forrester Consumer Forum (#FCF09) in Chicago. It’s a tough landscape, especially with competitive retail giants Amazon.com and Wal-Mart delivering consistently low prices on electronics. So how does Best Buy differentiate? Our people and our culture, Judge said. The “Blue Shirts,” as the company calls its employees, seek to deliver upon the following promises to customers:

• Make sure you know all we know.
• Deliver an experience that inspires you.
• Blow you away with the latest and greatest.
• Never leave you hanging.
• Make a difference.

Judge said that he admires Zappos and its company culture centered on happiness. Happiness is a customer loyalty strategy that Best Buy is striving toward, because at the end of the day, Judge said, “We sell the same products [as our competitors], What’s different is how we sell it.” Judged pointed out that often times, for customers, it comes down to price, but in many cases, customers need hand-holding after the sale, to figure out “How do I turn this thing on?” That’s where the Blue Shirts come in.

In his keynote presentation, Judge touched upon the following points:

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Bob Kraut, vice president of marketing communications, took the stage yesterday at Forrester’s Consumer Forum in Chicago with his iPhone in hand. After introducing Pizza Hut’s native iPhone application, he did what most attendees were hoping he would do. “I’m going to order a pizza to the conference,” Kraut said.

Kraut, whose background is in advertising and emerging media, spoke about Pizza Hut’s strategies in marketing to its customers — and its goals in connecting to customers in a fragile economy. There’s a new mindset out there that’s going to stick around, Kraut said. Not only are consumers more strategic in searching for deals and the best value for their dollar, customer confidence is low. A company such as Pizza Hut is especially linked to consumer confidence, he said. “Whatever we can do to lessen anxiety, give more choices, and give more value, Pizza Hut is prepared to do,” he told attendees.

Kraut then shared Pizza Hut’s 4 Key Strategies in marketing to its customers:

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The sun hasn’t even risen yet here in Colorado Springs, Colo., but RightNow Technologies is already pulling back the shades on what many have been wondering about since its acquisition of HiveLive back in early September.

The cloud computing vendor officially unveiled its November ’09 release this morning, including its debut of RightNow CX, a multichannel customer experience solution spanning across Web, social, and contact center touch points.

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Previous posts: here (Part I), here (Part II),  here (Part IIb), here (Part III), and here (Part IV)

Wherein Our Hero Fights for $100 at the Heart of the JetBlue Contact Center

I got an agent after a few minutes on hold — maybe five or six, but now that I was in full meltdown mode it seemed like a thousand, compared to the instantaneous service I had received before.

When an agent picked up, I hurriedly gave her all my information, asking her, desperately, if my flights were in order and if I would ever be able to leave Rochester (which more and more seemed like a prison of sprawling greens and rivers). The agent assured me that I did have a flight booked from Rochester back to Florida. She added, however, that I had missed a flight from Florida to Rochester a couple hours back and would now be levied with a $100 penalty fee.

Turns out, the agent who had booked me before had correctly added my new flights, but she forgot to cancel my old ones. Originally, I was supposed to go to Florida first and then Rochester, but due to a scheduling conflict had to switch the trips. Now, I found myself effectively double booked. I explained this to the agent and asked what could be done. Right away she canceled the remaining flight from Rochester to my next destination, Washington, D.C.. Still, however, the $100 fee remained. I pressed her on that and told her to go ahead and look at when I booked the flights. She could see for herself that I had called the second reservation in 20 minutes after the first. Clearly, my story checked out.

“Hold on,” she said. She had to check the terms. Read the rest of this entry »

CRM magazine will be on the scene at this year’s RightNow Summit, RightNow Technologies’ annual user conference, in Colorado Springs, Colo. The main conference begins Tuesday morning — expect stories on our Web site this week covering keynote speeches and panel discussions.

In the meantime, be on the lookout for blog posts from my one-on-one conversations with RightNow executives and customers. Don’t forget about Twitter, either — I will be doing my best to live-tweet when possible off of our @CRM or @destinationCRM handles. If necessary, I will also tweet off my personal handle, @cmusico.

The other Twitter hashtags and corporate handles to keep tabs on include:

• #rnowuc;
• #scrm;
• @RightNowNews; and
• @RightNowEvents.

For those not able to attend this year’s conference, what would you like to find out from RightNow executives and customers?

You may have heard that Twitter has recently added a Lists feature, rolled out in beta format to an unknown-but-limited number of users. As proof of how arbitrary the selection process must have been, I was one of those users. I’ve been building Lists ever since.

I oh-so-quickly discovered two things:

1. that, as you create them, your Lists stack in immutably reverse-chronological order — like Followers, or tweets themselves; and
2. that we’re each only allowed to build a maximum of 20 Lists.

(Others, who were filling their Lists even faster than I was, realized that each List also has its own maximum: 500 names.)

If you’re one of those who has the feature now, you can see my Lists here: http://twitter.com/kitson/lists

Last night, the company announced it had expanded the rollout, reaching 5 percent of the user base, with plans to expand further. (Our @destinationCRM channel was among those gaining access during this latest wave — our @CRM channel is still waiting. Let us know in the Comments below what kinds of channels you’d like us to curate.)

I decided to conduct a random sampling of some popular twitterers, to see who had been added to the most Lists thus far.

Think you can guess the Top 20? The list (with figures current as of 12 noon ET and 11.59pET) is after the jump.

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As customer service solutions providers continue to seek ways to expand their footprint, many are doing so by way of strategic partnerships rather than mergers and acquisitions (though there were a couple we recently covered).

Two partnerships in the past week are of particular note, as one is centered around making waves in new business opportunities, while the other looks to deepen social CRM capabilities.

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Lizzie Schreier needed to get crap done.

To do so required her to be determined, vocal, understanding, and brilliant—all characteristics that also made her presentation one of the most popular at the eMetrics conference in Washington, D.C. this week. In 50 minutes, Schreier explained how she went from “mission impossible” to “mission accomplished.”

When she joined Allstate Insurance as senior internet marketing strategist in 2006, the company’s Web conversion—that is, just getting visitors to request a quote, not even closing the deal—rate was a dismal 20 percent. Moreover, Allstate’s search engine ranking was on the ninth page.

Part of the problem, she said bluntly, was that “Allstate is a very siloed organization.” The company was selling through its 14,000 agents and content updates were only as quick as the Web masters were able to make the change [Read about marketing and technology alignment in Marketers Need Technology to Step Up.]

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So it seems California doesn’t seem to have any better luck with flights in the south either. [Read about Lauren McKay's journey up north]

Just to preface, this post does not end with too many angry people.

About an hour before my flight from Newark was to land in San Diego, the captain notified us of a last minute change of plans: We would be flying into Los Angeles International (LAX) Airport — a good 125 miles away from the fog (also known as a “marine layer”) that had blanketed San Diego. At the time, visibility in San Diego was apparently only 100 feet. We landed in LAX around 7:30.

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