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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So here’s a new feature: We’re going to start aggregating each month’s posts, for easier reference.

We’ll start this off with a few groupings from the month of October — which, if you’ll permit a moment of horn-blowing, I have to say I’m really proud of. We covered a lot of ground in the month, literally and figuratively, with staffers filing on-the-scene dispatches from nearly a dozen events at various locations nationwide, and guest-blogposts from not only our regular contributors but several newcomers as well.

October also marks the introduction of these monthly archives (which, one hopes, will appear sooner after the end of each month), and compendiums of coverage from all the big events (which, one hopes, will appear sooner after the end of each event). In the Comments below, I hope you’ll let us know if we’re giving you the kind of material you want.

For starters, here’s a blog-only exclusive, one I hope you’ve been watching all along:

Eric Barkin’s “Eric Across America” series of blogposts, a firsthand look at JetBlue’s “All-You-Can-Jet” promotion from the perspective of a participant:

• Eric Across America, Part I: The Story of One Man’s Journey into the Heart of JetBlue and JetBlue’s Entry into the Heart of That Man http://sn.im/dcrmblog100909b
• Eric Across America, Part II: Buying the JetBlue Pass http://sn.im/dcrmblog101209b
• Twitter Drove JetBlue Promotion — Eric Across America, Part II(b) http://sn.im/dcrmblog101309c
• Eric Across America, Part III: Booking Flights http://sn.im/dcrmblog101509a
• Eric Across America, Part IV: Trouble in the Contact Center http://sn.im/dcrmblog102009b
• Eric Across America, Part V: JetBlue Levies a Penalty? http://sn.im/dcrmblog102609b

And our posts from this year’s Oracle OpenWorld #oow09:

• Hello From OpenWorld ’09 http://sn.im/dcrmblog101209a
• GUEST-BLOG: The Perplexities (and Fun) of Oracle OpenWorld, by Beagle Research Group’s Denis Pombriant http://sn.im/dcrmblog101309b
• A Keynote That Will Pump (Clap) You Up http://sn.im/dcrmblog101409b
• GUEST-BLOG: Overloading on Oracle, Both Good and Bad http://sn.im/dcrmblog101409c, by Third Idea Consulting’s Marshall Lager
• GUEST-BLOG: Cloudy Computing at Oracle OpenWorld http://sn.im/dcrmblog101409d, by Third Idea Consulting’s Marshall Lager
• Also keep an eye out for our compendium post of #OOW09 coverage from across the Web.

The rest of the month’s posts — including coverage from The Conference Board’s Social Media Summit, the DMA 2009 show, eMetrics ‘09, the RightNow Summit ‘09, and Forrester Research’s Forrester Consumer Forum — are 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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Come on, admit it: You have at least one story — either your own or one you’ve heard from a friend — about waiting for hours at your house for the cable guy, only to find out at the end of the day he wasn’t going to show up.

Turns out that you’re nowhere close to being alone. Statistics from a survey conducted by Harris Interactive and TOA Technologies finds that many Americans continue to have this problem with field service, highlighted in this month’s Re:Tooling column in CRM magazine, and customer retention is seriously at risk.

Findings include:

• 18 percent have lost wages to wait for field service at their home in the first half of 2009;
• 18 percent refused or canceled a product or service because the field technician was either late or did not show up;
• 29 percent of respondents have left their home in frustration — costing their service provider more money in rescheduling, customer service, and operations costs — due to lateness or a no-show;
• 63 percent wait two or more days each year in their homes for service or deliveries;
• 57 percent believe the company providing the service is at fault — not the actual field technician; and
• 37 percent of consumers believe the standard wait window is four to eight hours because companies “take advantage of the fact that people will most likely wait for the service/delivery because they want or need it.”

Pretty damning stats — if you provide field service, do these numbers surprise you?

Losing nearly 20 percent of customers due to showing up late or not at all is a large number, especially in today’s economy when organizations say they are doing all they can to keep their consumers loyal.

What are you doing to try and improve the punctuality your field technicians have when they’re going on customer calls?

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

Market analysis firm IDC figures the market for service and support software will reach $4.2 billion before the end of the first Obama administration. That’s reason enough for software vendors to want to be all over the market like a cheap suit, like white on rice, like a junkyard dog. But as the market moves from on-premises to on-demand you can expect the revenue potential to go way down. That’s the beauty of on-demand computing — score one for the customer.

But whether there are four billion of those dollars or just one billion, that’s still real money — and enough to motivate the behavior of lots of people — so it was no surprise that both Salesforce.com and Oracle shored up their service and support offerings this week. What was fascinating to me is that, despite all the secrecy surrounding each company’s announcement, which I witnessed first hand, the two CRM titans managed to make similar announcements within a day of each other.

I attribute the coincidence to the simple logic of the situation: Each company has built out very good offerings in sales and marketing, so it was time that each gave some extra attention to service and support.

[More after the jump...]

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During the CRM Evolution 2009 conference in New York last week, the CRM magazine staff twittered its collective fingers off — as did many of our fellow attendees (thank you all very much for that!).

Across the magazine’s @CRMe09 Twitter channel, staffers’ own personal accounts (when spotty Internet access forced us to our account-specific smartphones), and the #CRMe09 hashtag, we tried to sketch an admittedly incomplete overview of the various keynotes, sessions, and presentations.

Below, you’ll find the @CRMe09 tweets in chronological order. When posting to that communal channel, we tried, whenever possible, to initial our tweets:

• LM (Lauren McKay);
• CM (Christopher Musico);
• JT (Jessica Tsai); and
• JW (Josh Weinberger).

Beneath those, you’ll see a handful of session-specific live-twitterings from individual staffers.  See ‘em all, after the jump — and to see the bulk of #CRMe09-hashtagged tweets from all attendees, in chronological order from Mon., Aug. 24, through Thurs., Aug 28, we’ve archived those here: http://www.destinationCRM.com/crme09-tweets.html

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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.”

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?

[Editors’ Note: The next chapter in this case study appeared in our August edition of CRM magazine.]

There is a common misnomer that customer service representatives (CSRs) are either poorly trained or just taking the position to make ends meet. Combine that with an advanced degree from an institution of higher education, and you have a recipe for CSR morale disaster.

Nowhere was this more evident than at OSIsoft, which helps companies record and track systems data information on the health of the software utilized. The company’s support staff all hold degrees in engineering or an engineering discipline, and Don Smith, vice president of customer support for the company, says the idea that the degree may be wasted working in a customer support position had plagued the company for years.

“Customer support has a reputation of being a starter or low-end position,” Smith says. “The average person expects to have the first person [they speak with] barely take down their name and know nothing about the product in question. You have people telling parents what they’re doing, and the parents ask, ‘That’s a good job for you as engineer? You got your master’s from Stanford, right?’ So I wanted to grow the role and integrity of the position.”

Smith recalls that many who had entered the position of support agent quickly wanted to transfer to other facets of the company such as sales or engineering. Agent retention had plummeted to lows of approximately 29 percent, mainly because they viewed the position as a stepping stone rather than a quality career destination. “I wanted them to see support as one of the most exciting jobs they have,” he says.

A key way to help accomplish this aim, according to Smith, was to finally rejuvenate the company’s broken knowledge base system. Only 40 percent of those who utilized it reported that they were able to find the proper answer. Smith wanted to incorporate all of the company’s employees — including the support agents — to expand the volume of articles with the most up-to-date, correct information. “If I could get a third of the company in a room at one time, ask a question, and agree on an answer … that’s as good as we’ll get,” he says. “That’s my dream.”

To make this dream a reality, OSIsoft turned to Socialtext, an enterprise 2.0 solution provider, to provide a wiki that would empower all employees to contribute when applicable. Through the use of the wiki, Smith can show the support workers they are not only doing break/fix issues, but are also helping to keep the world’s largest companies running smoothly. “Using the technology with our support people means they are engaged in their work, instead of being burdened by the workload and missing the fact they are doing exciting work,” he says. “The wiki allows that to happen.”

Retention has risen to 85 percent since implementing Socialtext’s wiki. “Support is where the action is happening,” he says. “They’re learning relevant stuff, be it helping an alternative energy launch get off the ground or get solar wind farms on line. We are providing a manufacturing record of what’s going on, and we are on the cutting edge by helping companies get the information they need to resolve problems.”

Who says innovation has to cost gobs of money?

I just had a conversation with a couple of members of Vertex North America’s management team – John Hall, managing director, and Kurt Thearling, head of decision sciences. Vertex North America is a facet of Vertex, a United Kingdom–based business process and customer management outsourcing group.

Amidst talk about customer experience, and the metrics used to measure it for different verticals – according to Hall, the company is focusing on utilities, retail banking/consumer credit, travel/leisure, telecommunications, technology, and retail in North America – the notion came up about many companies still not recognizing that contact centers are more than just cost centers.

Hally says it is especially important today that, instead of trying to focus on automating all communication channels, to uncover the “pockets of value that have been untapped in overall customer interaction.”

“There is a place for automated channels, but it is not the whole story,” Hall stresses. “This may mean moving people to a higher-cost channel [like a live agent] because the cross-sell or upsell can be closed more easily. It’s very important to understand what the value and role is of each channel, and divert the right transaction to the right channel.”

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