I just wrote a news story for destinationCRM on a joint effort between 24/7 Customer and the Corporate Executive Board to develop a business intelligence tool around CEB’s customer effort scoring. For those of you not familiar with it, the customer effort dashboard looks at the amount of effort a customer must expend to have his issue resolved and how that affects his customer satisfaction and loyalty.

To come up with this scoring matrix, Corporate Executive Board conducted a study involving more than 75,000 consumers who had interacted with a company over the phone, the Web, chat, or email. CEB also held hundreds of structured interviews with customer service leaders in large companies throughout the world. The goal of the research was to find out how important customer service is to overall brand loyalty, which customer service activities have an impact on loyalty, and how companies can increase loyalty without raising operating costs.

In doing so, two items emerged that should give pause to customer service professionals: First, CEB found that delighting customers doesn’t necessarily create a loyal following; reducing their effort—the number of hoops they must go through to get their issue resolved—does. Second, acting on this insight, often on an agent-by-agent basis, can help improve customer service and loyalty.

Sounds pretty intuitive to me.

It’s no secret to my friends and family that I date…a lot. Not really by choice, but I’m especially particular after two nosedive relationships. Now I’m living in the biggest city in the U.S., so it’s expected and also exhausting. Anyway, I tend to pick up various interests from these dating experiences along the way despite their failures. Among these interests: Cardinals baseball (failed relationship #1), crunchy peanut butter (failed relationship #1), Bravo reality television (failed relationship #2), Sex and the City (failed relationship #2 (at least I didn’t pick up his Gossip Girl addiction)), sushi (New York dating prospect #4), and Twitter (Chicago dating prospect #11).

When I received my 100th Twitter follower this week, I realized just how important the social media platform has become in my daily life since #11′s exit. Each morning, I sign into Twitter and get my news from the various news outlets and journalists I follow. I catch up with old school friends and sometimes make a 160 character (or less) comment about a news story. While I may not be addicted, I certainly rely on Twitter to get me through the day.

This morning on its blog, Twitter announced it has acquired TweetDeck, a third party dashboard used to monitor followers in real-time, for an undisclosed amount. I used TweetDeck for the first time when covering Microsoft’s Convergence user conference in Atlanta last month and was impressed. While Twitter is a fantastic platform, it has the occasional malfunction. With such a high volume of activity, the site often gets bogged down with too much traffic and feeds are unable to load. I retweeted and tweeted effortlessly from the event, thanks to the glitch-free platform.

With the CRM Market Awards on the minds of the editors, the acquisition made our ears perk up a bit this morning. Twitter seems to be positioning itself in a major force in the social media market. After months of rumors about this acquisition, it came true which makes me think the company may have a few more surprises up its expanding sleeve.

In the meantime, my new goal is bit lofty:  1,000 followers. Want to help? @brittanyfarb

I just returned to the office after three days away in sunny Florida for SAPPHIRE, SAP’s annual user conference. I left with many good impressions. Here are just a few of my random thoughts:

– Orlando must be better the second time around. I’d been to Orlando once before a few years ago and was sadly disappointed–quite frankly, I expected, I don’t know, more. But this time around it was truly enjoyable. It probably didn’t hurt that the weather was so much nicer than what I left back in New York, where people are starting to build arks in response to all the rain we’ve had.

– The Days Inn chain, while definitely rolling out the no-frills welcome mat, has the customer service thing down. Sure my room was nothing compared to the swanky digs I could have gotten at one of the more expensive hotels near the Orange County Convention Center, but I wasn’t complaining — most of my time in the room was spent with my eyes closed anyway. The front desk staff was friendly as could be, and the dedicated toll-free technical support line to help me resolve a problem with my in-room wireless Internet connection was a nice touch.

– When SAP puts on an event, everyone wants to attend. Apparently, SAP was planning for  between 8,000 and 9,000 attendees but 17,000 people showed up, and more than 80,000 more people around the world tuned in to the portions of the show that were broadcast over the Internet. If the numbers turned into a logistical nightmare for the event’s organizers, it didn’t show. As far as I could see, everything ran smoothly and nothing was in short supply.

– SAP is a scheduling machine. Show organizers planned my entire conference itinerary for me, scheduling meetings with the right SAP executives, customers, and partners to maximize my time. They even provided me with a list of conference sessions they thought would be “right up my alley,” and hit the mark with each recommendation. You could say they really know CRM (and they really know CRM, the magazine)

– The one main takeaway from the show is that HANA is fast. The entire day 2 keynote, given by Vishal Sikka, a member of the SAP executive board, and Hasso Plattner, SAP co-founder and chairman of its supervisory board, was all about how SAP’s HANA and in-memory computing is speeding processing time for companies all over the world. The keynote, which clocked in at nearly two-and-a-half hours, was a big love-in for HANA (High-Performance Analytic Appliance), an integrated database and calculation layer that can process massive quantities of real-time data in main memory to provide immediate results. Customers were the ones touting the solution, though, so it was OK with me. We so seldom hear real customer stories today.

– And finally, SAP is committed to providing solutions “on-premises, on-demand, and on-device.” How cool is that for a slogan?

Ok I admit it, I ate a lot of cake yesterday.

However, it was for a good cause. I attended Avaya’s Think Big Analyst Event and Carlos Bakery Owner Buddy Valastro, a.k.a. The Cakeboss, made an appearance with the camera crew from TLC to unveil a rather high-tech culinary creation for the event. Not only did I get to eat a hunk of of his mouth-watering red velvet cake, I also scored an interview with the reality tycoon after the event.

Valastro is currently in the process of implementing Avaya into his fast-growing business. At the event, he spoke about the telecommunications company supporting his team and even admitted he is using the solution to track his delivery guys to make sure they aren’t “sleeping on the job.”

Valastro told me he especially liked how Avaya “really wanted to understand” his business. “They knew what I needed and why I needed it,” he said. “They didn’t just try to sell me a system.”

“Hearing the capabilities of what it does” also was a major selling point for Valastro. Although implementation is still underway, I think the ROI for Carlos Bakery will be substantial as Valestro’s popularity skyrockets each day. “As the business grows, I’m sure the technology is also going to grow,” he told me. “[Avaya] is a committed partner and we both want to get this right.”

However, Valastro’s most inspiring sound byte of the day came at the conclusion of our interview and really emphasized the importance of Avaya’s commitment to businesses like Carlos Bakery. “I’m glad they are seeing the potential of small- to medium-sized businesses because I really think they are the heart and backbone of America,” he said with slight twinkle in his eye. “I also think if our businesses do well, the economy will go with them.”

I have a feeling the Cakeboss is on to something.

While writing my features for June and July over the past couple of months, I quickly realized just how huge the mobile explosion has been. Interview after interview, industry analysts, service providers, retailers, and other prominent sources confidently proclaimed: “If you’re not thinking mobile, then you should be concerned.”

Last week, Practical E-Commerce published a list of the 17 mobile apps for customer management. A few of these apps stood out from the pack as the top three by being especially efficient and useful. The best part? All of these apps are free.

Salesforce Mobile

Yes, I already proclaimed my admiration for Marc Benioff in a previous post. Salesforce mobile gives customers access to its cloud-based data on-the-go. From the convenience of your Blackberry, iPad, iPhone, and Windows phone, you can access all account information, loop back to recent sales, log calls and meeting data in real-time, and respond to new leads or requests to name a few.

Hashable Mobile

Business cards that are actually…cards? This may soon be an obsolete idea. With Hashable Mobile, users can send along virtual business cards, manage leads, and get real-time updates about potential and current clients. The downside? The app is only available on the iPad and iPhone for now.

Facebook and Twitter

Sure, you may get your celebrity gossip from @peoplemag, but your personal social media accounts are now also vital business tools while out of the office. Available on Andriod, Blackberry, iPad, iPhone, Playbook, Windows Mobile, and Windows Phone.