There’s no doubt that customers’ attitudes have changed drastically in only the past two years. The biggest recession of our lifetime has shaken many to the core. We’ve lost well-known financial services firms such as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, as well as local banks and businesses. Consumers weren’t to blame for the economic collapse, yet they’re shouldering the burden of it, thanks to the taxpayers’ bailout of Wall Street.

What do cash-strapped, middle-class taxpayers have to show for it? While the economy is showing signs of improvement, nearly one in 10 are still out of work. Many of those who are working are enduring, salary freezes, salary cuts, and furlough days. Over the past two years, they’ve watched their home prices fall, retirement accounts fluctuate wildly, and healthcare costs rise.

As if the economic fallout isn’t bad enough, consumers are also realizing that corporate and legislative negligence of yesteryear left us with an environmental mess that can leave an indelible mark on our planet. If we want to preserve the health of our planet and its inhabitants, we must clean up our acts today. Years of neglect and abuse by big businesses and the government have left many confused, upset, and angry. As a result, they’ve become distrusting and disloyal.

Fortunately, social media has become a cathartic release for many, enabling them to vent to family, friends, colleagues, and peers. And thanks to smartphones, they’ve become far more connected and vocal. According to The Wall Street Journal, Research In Motion sold about 500,000 BlackBerry Storms in that device’s first month on the market—and about the same number in the second month. Apple sold a million 3G iPhones in just one weekend—to a marketplace that already had a sizeable number of first-generation iPhones.

These numbers are staggering and clearly show that consumers are not only comfortable using these smart phones and Web-enabled mobile devices, they’re eager to use them.

Many are using them in their professional lives as well, whether or not their organizations support them—which is what inspired our March 2009 feature story, “CRM and the iPhone.” These purchases, combined with a need to connect and commiserate with others, have accelerated a cultural shift toward a hypercritical, instant gratification society.

That they’re able to expand their networks makes them far more influential. Customers are watching businesses and critiquing them to anyone who will listen. It’s a new reality for businesses—one that must be addressed.

Lior Arrusy, president of Strativity Group, in the Webinar, “2010 Customer Relationships – Emerging Smarter, Building Stronger” (February 3, 2010), assumes the role of the average consumer to describe the general consumer sentiment toward big businesses: “I was betrayed by you or other vendors. You are the reason I’m in trouble. You will have to do heavy lifting to fix this relationship. I will be watching and commenting on everything you do,” he said.

This is a general trend. To find out exactly how customers are feeling, you’ll have to listen to them. But, how do you respond? What do these new consumer attitudes mean to organizations’ products, services, and customer relationships? How do organizations adapt in this new world? Who are their real customers? Which products are in real demand? Join Lior Arrussy, me, and others to find out the answers to these questions and more at our first Customer Executive Forum (April 19–20) at the Camelback Inn and Resort in Scottsdale, Ariz. This is a great opportunity to explore and define next-generation customer strategies by engaging with peers in an interactive environment.

By Prem Kumar Aparanji, principal consultant, CRM, Cognizant Technology Solutions

Monday, February 15, 2010

I was in the U.S. last week. The journey from Bangalore to Washington, D.C., in itself was quite interesting: A three-hop journey (BLR-DBX-ATL-IAD) that took away ~32 hours of my life, but since I traveled west (& I gained time) I really lost only about 21 hours.

(Yeah, I know, convoluted. This is similar to that guy Louis Wu in the Ringworld series who kept traveling west to extend his 200th-birthday celebrations!)

The reason I was in the U.S. was to “evangelize” social CRM. But before I got to tell parables of The Customer Gospels to the flock, I went for my baptism by the Pope of Social CRM — Paul Greenberg. :)

OK, enough with clichés and cryptic ranting.

I came to the U.S. to attend what became known as the #SCRMSummit and follow it up with meetings with my peers, clients & partners to discuss & get things done around social CRM.

I got more than I bargained for. Caught in Washington, D.C.’s worst blizzard in more than a century, I spent the days cooped up with other thought leaders, analysts, consultants, systems integrators, vendors & practitioners of social CRM. There were 68 of us and, if you hated social CRM, this was the place to obliterate it. (Sorry, you missed the chance — though we’ve been talking about it for weeks now.)

The story of what ended up happening continues after the jump.

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By Kathy Herrmann, partner, Pathlight Solutions

Friday, February 12, 2010

The #SCRM community recently practiced what it’s been preaching when Paul Greenberg pulled together the top thought leaders in SCRM to a summit in Washington. Many thanks to Paul for being the magnet that pulled us all together — and my personal thanks for including me in the event.

Where to start? First, much to my surprise, we had almost-full attendance despite the snow and travel challenges. I was a local and almost got scared from braving the roads, but knew I needed to be there given the number of stellar attendees. And I’m pretty darned sure that’s what motivated the other attendees to brave the travel tribulations too.

What I loved about the group was the open discussion, and sometimes debate, within the conference room and in the evenings’ various social gatherings. We don’t always agree with each other, but everyone handles the debates with professional courtesy and a willingness to evolve their thoughts. That’s how we all grow.

After the jump are the 7 takeaways that struck the loudest chord for me.

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By Brent Leary, cofounder and partner, CRM Essentials

Friday, February 12, 2010

I’m writing this while on a plane, flying back to Atlanta from Baltimore. I’m coming back home from BPT Partners’ Social CRM training event that was headed up by Paul Greenberg (aka The Frientor of CRM). The event was held in Herndon, Va., a stone’s throw from Dulles Airport, which is where I flew to attend the event. But I had to fly out of BWI in Baltimore after having two flights cancelled from Dulles because of the blizzard that hit the Northeast.

I’m writing this after suffering through a 2½-hour delay, which had me sitting a total of eight hours at the airport. I’m tired…and cranky…and hungry, because the five pretzel bits the airline gives you on the flight ain’t cutting it. But, more importantly, I’m happy that I traveled in blizzard conditions and got stranded for a couple of days, because coming to what was eventually dubbed the Social CRM Summit was worth every cancellation of flight, minute of delay, and inch of snow…and that’s truly saying something.

It goes beyond the training, which was stellar. Jeff Pedowitz did a great job going over the practicalities of tying “social” to demand generation efforts. Ryan Strynatka from Radian6 gave a nice demo of his company’s social media monitoring tools, sparking quite a discussion — not just on the tool, but on the subject overall. We performed a couple of interesting case studies that really got our minds (and our creative juices) going. And, of course, PG did his thing. (I can honestly say that he was in the rarest of form. But I knew he would be.)

This is where I stop talking about the training. If you want a blow-by-blow of developments, check out the PDF of all the #SCRMsummit tweets put together by the one and only Esteban Kolsky…who seemed to actually be there with us, even though the weather (and airlines) conspired against him making a physical appearance.

And I’m sure there are already blogs posted about the event that have covered it in ways that make it unnecessary for me to do so here (Brian Vellmure’s write-up is an example). So I’ll talk about it from another perspective. [Editors' Note: That perspective begins after the jump...] Read the rest of this entry »

By Michael Fauscette, group vice president, software business solutions, IDC

Monday, February 15, 2010

Last week, I joined a group of social CRM thought leaders — and representatives from 14 software vendors — for a two-day social CRM summit. The event, led by noted CRM author, blogger, and consultant Paul Greenberg and BPT Partners, was held in Herndon, Va. (See the pic below, taken from the Westin Dulles during the snowstorm that kept most of us there an extra day or so.)

Westin Dulles, Snowpocalypse '10 — #SCRMsummit on February 8, 2010

The event generated some great discussions and networking opportunities. One of the biggest takeaways for me is that SCRM is still in the bleeding-edge-new zone and some really smart people are defining and refining it on an almost-daily basis. I also believe that it’s on the edge of trendy — in other words, it’s starting to attract some people around the edges who are trying to jump on the bandwagon and yet are not “experts” in CRM at all.

I won’t go through my whole social business speech again, but I do want to re-emphasize that “social business” and “SCRM” are not equivalent to “social media” or “social networking.” They are not defined by consumer tools such as Twitter and Facebook either. Social Biz and SCRM are about changing corporate culture and about relationships, IMHO. I also am joining Paul in the decision to stop trying to define and debate the definition of SCRM…it’s time to do.

OK, enough of that — on with today’s point. There are some excellent write-ups already published (CRM Strategies Blog and Brent’s Social CRM Blog) on the summit so I won’t try to recount the whole event, but instead I think I’ll just hit on a few points that I think are worth repeating. [See those points after the jump.] Read the rest of this entry »

By Brian Vellmure, FreeCRMstrategies, @CRMstrategies on Twitter

February 12, 2010

One of the worst snowstorms in the history of our Nation’s capital, the most flight cancellations since 9/11 (almost 6,000), and the closure and inaccessibility of a pre-booked venue were the circumstances surrounding BPT Partners’ Social CRM Certification Training, better known to the Twittersphere as #SCRMsummit.

Despite the obstacles, a little publicized event at a brand new Westin Hotel in Herndon, VA brought together a mix of customers, vendors, and a large majority of the world’s thought leaders on the subject of Social CRM. In all, participants not only descended on the blustery white winterland from all regions of the United States, but also from Canada, Mexico, Columbia, France, The Netherlands, and India. It truly was a global event.

The #scrm Accidental Community was almost completely represented with one largely apparent omission, Esteban Kolsky, who was grounded before he could leave his hometown due to flight cancellations. Esteban made his presence felt during the event and after by assembling the tweets which you can download here to get a sense of the flow of the event. Here are the links from Day 1 and Day 2, and I have more on my take after the jump.

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With the explosion of social media, the idea of customer engagement is taking on an entirely new meaning than simply offering a 1-800 number. Adobe, recognizing that it wanted to establish Acrobat.com — a suite of online collaboration tools — as a major player in that market, had to turn users into loyal evangelists.

A suggestion box wouldn’t do — company executives wanted to foster a real conversation with (and among) users. Lisa Underkoffler, principal product manager at Acrobat.com, decided to turn to Brightidea’s WebStorm software to help create an online forum unveiled in March 2009 called Acrobat.com Ideas.

It started as an experiment, but since the launch, Acrobat.com Ideas tallied more than 155,000 visitors from 195 countries. Nearly 500 ideas have been submitted from more than 1,700 users, 40 of which have already been implemented.

I had the chance to speak with Underkoffler and Matt Greeley, Brightideas’ chief executive officer, about the implementation.

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The “official” start to the holiday shopping season on Black Friday has not left us without myriad statistics regarding shopping preferences. According to a recent holiday survey of more than 2,300 consumers by Prospectiv, an online performance marketing firm specializing in connecting women to brands, found:

• 25 percent will use coupons more often this holiday season;
• 16 percent will shop online to find the best deals; and
• 35 percent will utilize email to share great deals they either receive or find with friends.

Convergys, a relationship management provider, also unveiled findings from a recent survey:

• 86.1 percent of respondents will plan to shop online;
• 37.3 percent will do all or most of their shopping via the Web;
• nearly nine out of 10 consumers say the most desirable attribute is the ability to shop whenever they like; and
• 61 percent of shoppers prefer the online channel because they can “get customer service on their own terms.”

No matter which numbers you scrutinize, one thing is clear: online retailing is rapidly taking the hearts — and wallets — of consumers. I had the chance to speak with Doug Farmer, Convergys’ senior director of customer management, about his company’s survey results, one statistic that shocked him, and what he has seen in his work with Convergys’ customers in the retail industry.

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By Ken Redekop, director, customer experience management solutions, Telus

With the holidays around the corner, many are looking forward to spreading holiday cheer with families and friends. But, the period leading up to the holidays often brings less than good tidings when a flood of stressed-out shoppers start making their holiday purchases en masse. The crowds. The lines. The staff shortages. All of these experiences prove frustrating to customers and can even impact a company’s bottom line.

As the busy holiday season draws near, companies would be wise to take stock of their customer experience programs. This involves listening to customers in a multifaceted way, including in-person, online, and over the phone, to provide personalized service and educated answers.

[Editor's note: Check out the December issue of CRM magazine for more on the customer experience.]

[Suggestions after the jump...]

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