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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by Jeremiah Owyang, partner, Altimeter Group

Surveying the Social CRM Industry

At the Altimeter Group, business partner Ray Wang (focused on enterprise strategy) and I (customer strategy) are undertaking a major project for a client in the nascent social CRM arena. We’re surveying the landscape to learn about a variety of vendors in the space, and to assess their capabilities and deployments. A small portion of our survey involves seeing who’s eating their own dog food, and truly demonstrating they understand the “social” aspect of social CRM — by living it.

Companies That Sell Social CRM Should Demonstrate Credibility by Living It

While critics may be quick to cite the mere inclusions of a blog or community to a product landing page, the message goes much deeper. Social CRM isn’t just about bolting on a plugin to your system like a new air foil on your minivan but instead is a new way of doing business. The promise of social CRM — responding, anticipating, and making the commitment to improve products and services — says that companies are truly listening to their customers wherever those customers are. Vendors that are assisting brands in bringing this promise to the marketplace need to demonstrate they fully understand the ramifications of social CRM — not just a keyword checklist of the buzzword du jour.

Criteria: How We Graded the Social CRM Vendors

There are four major areas of assessment:

1. Simple sharing of social content from the corporate product page.
2. Surfacing a developer or business community, and a look inside of the discussions in each community, with bonus points for integration with product page.
3. Thought leadership with relevant blogs on the subject, and a gauge of their level of interaction and any Twitter accounts they may have.
4. A subjective look at the overall page experience in the context of a company that’s offering a “social experience.”

Findings: Overall, Social CRM Vendors Aren’t Walking the Talk

We’ve decided to make our findings public (at least for this part of our client deliverable) to see how some of the leading vendors in the Social CRM space are walking the talk.

[See the table after the jump...]

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There are big happenings this morning out in San Francisco, where Salesforce.com cofounder, chairman, and CEO Marc Benioff is expected to take the stage in a few hours (damn you, Pacific time!) to ignite a bit of marketing spectacle for the company’s new customer support offering, called Service Cloud. (Marshall Lager’s got the scoop on that release, over in our news section; the Service Cloud home page went live at midnight ET this morning; you can tune in to the live now-archived Webcast of Benioff’s address here, beginning at 3 p.m. ET.)

But I wonder if he’ll take a moment to draw attention to this other item that came over the transom this morning — just in time for the build-up to Tuesday’s inauguration ceremony for President-elect Barack Obama (whose full name is supposed to be used on first reference now, thanks to a change in AP style that I missed when it was announced back in November).

It seems the success of Salesforce.com’s Salesforce Ideas offering at companies such as Starbucks and Dell has inspired the presidential transition team to select that software to help gather citizens’ suggestions for the future direction of the country. (The branding on the product seems to have changed, as well. The release refers to it as Salesforce CRM Ideas — a change that warms the CRM-specific cockles of my heart, of course.)

Salesforce CRM Ideas is being used on the Change.gov Web site to gather input from the American people as part of the effort to foster greater collaboration with citizens and a more transparent government.  The application is now live at http://citizensbriefingbook.change.gov.

[...snip...]

The top ideas will be presented directly to President-Elect Obama and his cabinet following the inauguration in the form of a briefing book entitled The Citizen’s Briefing Book.

No word in the release whether that Briefing Book will also be made public, but a transition-team spokesperson is quoted in the release calling the initiative “yet another way that we will ensure that this transition is the most open and transparent one in history” — so I’m hopeful. (I also wonder if they’ll use the same Ideas technology to solicit suggestions/responses for Obama’s much-ballyhooed economic stimulus package, which — despite whatever amount of ballyhoo — still has yet to see the full light of day even though it just increased in size from $775 billion to $850 billion.)

Meanwhile, I’m curious what this means for RightNow Technologies, which got an enormous bump over the last 18 months as the very public provider of the Obama campaign’s knowledge base, known on www.barackobama.com as the Answer Center. We’ll be trying to get some reaction from them later today. (There’s that Pacific time thing again.)

UPDATE, 01/15/09, 11.01aET: Christopher Musico just heard from RightNow’s spokespeople — the official word is that RightNow isn’t involved in Change.gov in any way, and has no comment regarding what the Obama team does on that new site.

But here’s something that I haven’t seen reported anywhere: The Answer Center that RightNow set up for barackobama.com seems to no longer exist. (I haven’t tried a Google Cache search yet.) If you try going to any link there, you get the following error:

Fatal error: Unable to open file

I imagine there are thousands, if not millions, of broken links all over the Web now. And here’s the really big question: What’s become of all that collected information?

The Obama-Biden Transition Team, working with salesforce.com and consulting partner Reside, was able to implement Salesforce CRM Ideas in less than four weeks…

I have to admit — I’d never heard of Reside before this morning, but it’s on my radar screen now. The efforts at Change.gov continue to intrigue me, and you’ll see more coverage from us in the coming weeks — and in the March issue — about CRM and its role in government. (Speaking of magazine tie-ins, if you’re wondering about cloud computing’s ever-increasing impact, check out our January cover story, “The Google-ization of CRM,” by Lauren McKay.)

The full Salesforce.com release is below, after the jump, but suffice to say that if anyone wondered whether the company’s community offerings could scale — well, we’re likely to find out very, very soon.

Also? If the company suffers another outage like the one that hit earlier this month, the effects won’t be as easy to sweep aside or overlook.

The more people you’ve got under your cloud, the more people get wet when it rains.

j.

UPDATE, 01/15/09, 10.28aET: Looking for links to populate this post, I noticed Salesforce.com’s homepage for Salesforce CRM Ideas has a typo in its metatags — the line at the top of the browser window reads (in part) “Salesforce Ideas – Formally CrispyNews”:

Evidence, I suppose, that the branding there hasn’t yet been updated to “Salesforce CRM Ideas,” but, more surprising, it’s almost certainly supposed to read “Formerly CrispyNews” — which just made me realize two things:

1. I’d never asked Salesforce.com how it developed the technology, and
2. Whoever Salesforce.com acquired the technology from had the good sense to demand (or the good fortune to receive) permanent credit atop Salesforce.com’s corporate page for it. As far as I know, that puts CrispyNews in a class by itself.

I dug up an old (April 2008) post by Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine, where he has this quote from Marc Benioff:

“We started using the technology ourselves[...]and we noticed right away that this was a powerful way for us to connect with our community[...] [...]After using it for a while, we decided this had to be part of our portfolio, so we acquired the assets of the company that built it (called Crispy News), and the employees work at Salesforce now.”

(It’s not immediately clear if that parenthetical near the end was added by Jarvis or if it’s just his way of including a spoken aside by Benioff.) Also in that blogpost, Jarvis quotes Benioff’s now-prescient view of how this technology should be applied in government:

* What about government starting ideastorms? “That is simply a killer idea. We are in an election year of course, and I would like to see both parties use technology to better connect with the electorate. Salesforce Ideas is democracy, as the saying goes, red in tooth and claw. But you have to invest in a conversation—it’s not going to work unless there’s a real back-and-forth.”

While I’m at it, I should also note Brent Leary’s series of posts regarding Obama, and his work on Barack 2.0: Barack Obama’s Social Media Lessons for Business. Good stuff.

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I had an interesting conversation with Christopher Faulkner, vice president of sales for Scottsdale, Ariz.-based contact center solution provider TDI about its newest outbound communications offering, Liberation Connect!, and how it fits into the grand scheme of our helter-skelter economy today. We’ve had several stories in the past few months at destinationCRM.com from Soundbite Communications and Varolii about similar offerings–and how important it is to be able to connect, especially on debt collection calls.

Faulkner explained that his company identified a shift around the Summer 2006 from just straight telemarketing to more emphasis on debt consolidation and credit collection than just sales. “We watched the business go from selling to, ‘Oh my God, the customer is really hurt,’” he recalled. “We had to get out ahead of the trend … because dialing automation is needed more so in a down economy than [otherwise].”

Bearing this in mind, business should be booming right now for TDI and other CRM vendors … right? Maybe not.

When I asked Faulkner about the most important decision he would have to make in the upcoming year, he quickly said turning away bad business. “We all want business, especially as times get tighter but [potential clients] have more difficulty in obtaining financial approval,” he continued. “We can’t do that to ourselves or to our peers. We want to win business based on virtues, not because of margin.”

This reminded me of my conversation with Jason Mittelstaedt, chief marketing officer for RightNow Technologies, at the company’s user summit last week. He did admit that the current situation can provide great opportunities for his organization and the CRM industry in general. However, if companies are put on hold in regard to purchases, then what? “It’s a question of staying power,” he said. “People still have businesses to run, and budgets can’t stay frozen forever. Ultimately the money will come.”

For CRM vendors today–are you finding yourselves almost closing a sale just to find the potential client has had its budget frozen? If so, how are you dealing with that … and what are your plans to continue to forge ahead despite the economic landscape?

After RightNow Technologies CEO Greg Gianforte gave his company update and thoughts on why customer experience is going to have a major play in many businesses’ strategies moving forward here at the RightNow Summit 2008, Vice President of Products David Vap took the stage to take the crowd on a road trip through the company’s product offerings this year as well as a glimpse into the future.

Vap explained that there are several trends that “consistently bubble to the top” amidst conversations and observations from analysts, competitors, customers, engineering, and the sales team:

• offering a multichannel choice, which Vap admitted isn’t new — adding companies have been working on this for the past decade — but cited extreme customer demand as the continued driver;
• service is the new sales, he explained his company continues to look for ways to help customer service organizations influence revenue;
• proactive customer care, which has the ability to “head off a lot of cost and pain” according to Vap;
• augmentation of traditional agents, which he assured software-as-a-service (SaaS) is well positioned for since many contact centers are now becoming niche and spread out globally; and
• the growing communication, influence, and power of consumers themselves.

These trends, along with the four pillars RightNow fervently abide by, drive the products Vap’s team designs.

Vap added the company is committed to delivering the same quarterly release cycle as this year (February, May, August, and November)–which is the beauty of the SaaS model in his eyes. “We don’t expect you to follow [the release schedule] because you should upgrade when it’s best for you,” he told the crowd.

I had the chance to have a follow-up conversation with Vap here at The Broadmoor, the site for this year’s summit, and I asked him about the biggest obstacle he and his team face in the product realm. He explains that many companies may want to jump ahead of the release cycle and customize their current RightNow offering.

That in itself isn’t the problem, according to Vap. It’s when the customizations are available out-of-the-box in ta future release and the companies jumping the gun want the productized version to then be migrated immediately to their solution that the issues begin. “There’s no direct way to do that,” he laments.

In a sense, this could be both a blessing and curse for SaaS. On the one hand, you don’t have to upgrade with each new release (RightNow keeps the releases generally and fully supported for 24 months). Vap even admits that would be virtually impossible for large enterprises, as they would have to continually retrain and get used to new functionality every few months. So there’s some flexibility and wiggle room there.

That said, if companies want to join the early adopter train and customize to the hilt, they may run into trouble when the upcoming releases have their “specially tailored” functionality right out-of-the-box, since there’s no straight-and-narrow path to forging the two sides together — at least in RightNow’s case.

The best way to try and avoid this problem, though, isn’t to forgo any customization or innovation. “We love getting customer feedback, even criticism, because it makes our product better,” Vap explains. “We’ll work with our clients to figure out the best way to tackle specific business needs.”

For others carrying the SaaS flag, is this a common problem you face as well? How do you handle trying to stay ahead while at the same time waiting (maybe not-so) patiently to see what is coming down the pike in the next quarterly release?

In the ramp up for Bozeman, Mont.-based on-demand customer experience management provider RightNow Technologies’ Summit 2008 here in Colorado Springs, you can expect many of the attendees to yearn for — and ask about — ways to continue to improve their companies’ customer experiences amidst an economy that has taken the country for a roller-coaster ride in the past several weeks.

Expect some more “on-the-scene” blog posts after some conversations with key executives and customers as the summit officially kicks off in a couple of hours with a keynote speech from RightNow Chief Executive Officer Greg Gianforte.

Nevertheless, there was a recent survey conducted by Harris Interactive (and in the pursuit of transparency, sponsored by RightNow) on the impact of customer experience. In its third year, the study finds that the experience is becoming more important as consumers continue to demand the service bar to be raised.

Here are some highlights drawn from the poll of 2,112 United States consumers (age 18 and older):

• 87 percent will discontinue business with a company after a negative customer experience, an increase of 7 percentage points from 2007;
• 58 percent will “always or often” pay more for a better experience during a down economy;
• 84 percent of those polled will tell others about a bad customer experience, up 10 percentage points since last year; and
• 51 percent of consumers want the option of a live Web chat session.

What was particularly interesting was the way in which consumers react to poor service. According to the study:

• 26 percent have sworn;
• 17 percent have shouted;
• 9 percent have felt sick;
• 5 percent of males say they hit or break something; and
• 9 percent of females cry.

With customer service hubs becoming the first interaction touchpoint for many consumers, the study finds it is imperative for companies to ensure they are doling out the goods for both instant and future business success. Fifty-eight percent of respondents are “at least somewhat likely” to make a purchase during a service engagement. Additionally, outstanding service is the top reason respondents would recommend a company to someone else–coming in at 58 percent. Low prices and product/service quality came in second and third, respectively.

Now for the call to action. For the companies out there waging the war of customer service every single day, are these stats surprising to you? CRM magazine and other media publications have been writing about the customer experience for some time now, but is it really hitting home or is it just another nice-to-have for you at this time?

You might think after looking at the title that I’m on some type of crazy pills, or just didn’t have my second cup of coffee. (If you’re thinking it’s the coffee, you’re right.)

At first glance, you may have two questions come to mind:

• Isn’t customer service supposed to be by and for those brave souls willing to go back to a company and ask a question or has an issue that has to be addressed?; and
• Isn’t this controlled by customers?

Yes and no.

The goal is the same–solve the customer issue at hand. However, there is a difference in who is controlling the interaction: the company or the consumer. Traditionally, customers have been driven to only call a customer service line, send an email, or just peruse Frequently Asked Questions on a company Web site. There was not really a choice–customers reached out for help the way they were told.

Michael Maoz, Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst told me back in March that “we’re forcing the customer into the process of our choice, as opposed to letting them have the process launch from the channel at the time of their choice.”

Those days appear to be coming to a close. The advent–and consumer adoption–of Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs (like this one), chat, discussion boards, forums, and videos are in a sense forcing companies’ hands. In speaking with Rob Bois, research director for AMR Research, about today’s story on RightNow Technologies’ August ‘08 release, Web 2.0 is here to stay. “The consumer generation is demanding more and more technology to be incorporated in how they’re serviced,” he said. “You have to provide multiple channels for your customers that may vary by demographic, generation, geography, or culture.”

But how quickly will customers be able to fully take the reins and truly dictate the interaction? Maoz predicted it will take two or three years before we see more companies able to really deliver on tightly integrated, multimodal communication–including chat, email, kiosk, phone, etc.

Bois didn’t give a timeframe, but also maintained this is still a process for many organizations that vendors need to help guide along. “A lot of companies recognize that they need to look at some of these Web 2.0 technologies, but don’t know where they’re going to apply,” he said. “[Businesses] don’t really understand where it’s going to come from, or who is going to own it. By packaging [Web 2.0 capabilities] within the solution, RightNow solves a lot of those problems.”

It seems to be a logical progression–and surefire way to at least start the customer interaction off on a positive note–to give consumers the choice of preferred contact. With increasing economic competition and price commoditization, customer service just might be one of the last uninhabitated planets of differentiation.