The small-to-midsized business (SMB) space has arguably been getting the short end of the stick for awhile now. Much like the Tampa Bay Devil Rays — er, Rays — used to until they defeated their larger American League East compatriots, the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox, for the AL East Division title last year and fell just short in the World Series.

Enough with the baseball analogies, though. The SMB space is vast yet it is not until recently that many different software companies have begun to create solutions that are geared specifically for this burgeoning business segment. For years it had been dumbed down, cheaper versions of enterprise-grade software that likely made many SMBs feel as though they were like hand-me-down clothes from your older siblings. And, unless Tim Gunn is the own handing them down, do you really want them?

Executives at VoIP application provider BroadSoft also believe that is misguided, particularly in the area of telephony. Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) can help SMBs be more competitive with its larger counterparts, says the company’s vice president of marketing, Leslie Ferry. “Quite honestly, small businesses work harder [than their larger counterparts] sometimes,” she declares. “They shouldn’t let their appearance from a telephony standpoint negatively impact what they can deliver from core competency.”

She expands further, saying that in the past six months her company has been on a mission to explain why SMBs would want a VoIP solution — essentially, a set of facilities used to manage the delivery of voice information over the Internet — over more traditional analog solutions for its telephony needs. “We’ve been in the business for 10 years,” she says. “There’s just a lot of institutional, market, and product knowledge we thought we could use to self-educate small businesses to understand our solution.”

Some fast benefits Ferry points out include:

• getting VoIP as a hosted, on-demand solution thereby eliminating upfront capital expenses;
• integration with a Web portal from a CRM desktop so information is there immediately about incoming client calls;
• cheaper costs for handling calls via IP solutions;
• the ability to have a virtual call center and leverage work-at-home agents, eliminating the costs of opening a brick-and-mortar facility;
• call forwarding and call routing;
• the ability to network and use support services anywhere; and
• mobile phone services to help keep SMB workers in touch with colleagues and clients at any time.

Sound like something we would expect for a large company with multiple contact center sites? Absolutely — that’s exactly the point Ferry is trying to get across. SMBs can have this functionality now, so when we call into one of these smaller businesses’ customer service lines we forget if it is a multibillion dollar coporation or a mom-and-pop outlet.

For the SMBs out there, do you feel as though you need VoIP to run the telephony for your contact centers, and to keep up with the changing times? Do you believe that you’re finally getting solutions that speak specifically to the challenges you face every day, as opposed to just a stripped down version of an enterprise-grade offering?

In the conversations I’ve had with analysts about different topics during my time here at CRM magazine, I’ve surmised that in most cases the more mature a software becomes, the more apt it is to be delivered in verticalized solutions, whether its for a particular industry (retail, government) or business segment (SMB).

Is this something that you see as well? As SMBs — is this a good or bad thing? You be the judge.

First, Happy Halloween!

OK, that’s out of the way. To me, the best part about Halloween is that it marks the unofficial beginning of the holiday shopping season. At Macy’s in Herald Square, just a quick jaunt around the corner from CRM magazine’s office in Midtown Manhattan, you can already see Christmas lights being strewn up in preparation.

Not only are people getting a head start on hanging lights to spread holiday cheer, but they are also shopping earlier. With an economy that make many say “no, no, no” instead of “ho, ho, ho,” consumers are looking for the best prices as early as possible as their budgets for discretionary purchases continue to shrink.

With less than two months left until floors are littered with torn wrapping paper with images of sleighs, Charlie Brown, snowmen, and other images of holiday yore, many small businesses looking to cash in during this usually prime shopping season seem to be increasingly focused on shoring up the customer experience it provides to those poring through their shelves — or online catalogs. As my fellow CRMer Lauren McKay points out in an earlier blog post, the stakes are even higher this year for businesses because of the economic downturn.

A study conducted by RatePoint, a Needham, Mass.-based customer feedback solution provider for small-to-midsize businesses (SMB) finds companies are getting the message loud and clear:

• more than 80 percent said business reputation and solid customer support impacts their ability to attract and retain consumers;
• forty percent report they are hiring up to five new employees for customer support over the holidays to help manage inquiries, orders, and returns; and
• most will spend an average of 10 hours monitoring their reputation to safeguard against any possible early warning signs of customer issues.

To Richard Turcott, chief marketing officer or RatePoint, this shows him many in the SMB segment are realizing the importance of forging quality customer relationships, as he says this is directly correlated with company reputation. He was particularly shocked by the second survey nugget, the fact that almost half of SMB owners say they’re hiring up to five new employees despite the economic environment.

While he admits the new hires may not all be full time, it is the principle that matters most. “The SMBs are sticking their necks out, providing exemplary support, and demonstrating they are customer-centric businesses,” he says. “These [new additions] are primarily part-time employees, but [nonetheless] provide a great view in which the small business community sees feedback and service as an important driver to helping them stay strong through this tough economic climate. These [organizations] are building equity rather than short-term hits.”

In a time when Web 2.0 technology is the soapbox du jour for many consumers sounding off about a company’s products or services, having a strategy to proactively cull and act upon customer feedback is even more important. “The prevalence of social media perpetuates the ease in which competitors and disgruntled employees can say negative things about a business,” Turcott says. “For small businesses, it’s more a necessity than a luxury to actively manage its online reputation. If they don’t know it now, they will very soon.”

For the SMBs — and also larger enterprises — out there gearing up for the holiday season, what strategies are you using to manage customer feedback and consequently improve the experience your shoppers have?

As promised, the Annual Call Center Exhibition in Phoenix earlier this week produced some laughs, thought leadership, and surprising statistics. However, industry vendors also utilized the conference as a stage to unveil its latest solutions aimed at helping companies improve customer service.

Seattle, Wash.-based contact center solutions provider Envision Telephony unleashed Envision Centricity for immediate availability. The offering attempts to fly in the face of siloed information by unifying all of the company’s current workforce optimization (WFO) solutions for the contact center into one integrated suite, something Tom Aiello, vice president of worldwide sales and marketing for the company, says is absolutely necessary given market conditions. “There is high customer demand for a suite,” he said. “At the end of the day, customers just want an end-to-end solution.”

While he noted the two main differentiators for Centricity are the facts that the integration is seamless and the total cost of ownership then drops, its goes deeper than just the actual products. Looking to target mid-tier contact centers, which Aiello defined is 1,000 seats max, he said his company takes time to visit prospective clients and dig deep into its operations — he says this can take anywhere from a day to two-and-a-half days — to determine if Envision can deliver a solution to improve the business. “It’s the way we deal with our customers that truly makes the difference,” he said.

LiveOps, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based virtual call center company, focused on the agent desktop and security in latest Fall 08 On-Demand Call Center Platform. LiveOps agents can now log into an encrypted virtual desktop in order to ensure no customer information can be copied, pasted, and used for potentially malicious purposes. This jibes with other vendors like West at Home, a West Corporation subsidiary, announcing its locked-down desktop security environment earlier this year. On the agent desktop side, agents are now privy to quantitative and qualitative information allowing them to see how they are performing compared to their peers. For example, virtual agents working on the Lifelock account (a LiveOps customer) will be able to access call recordings and also metrics like average handle time and assess themselves compared to others.

Azita Martin, LiveOps Vice President of Marketing, said this all points to LiveOps proving both its on-demand platform and home agent force are mission-critical right now–a question many industry pundits and enterprises have asked when talking about software-as-a-service (SaaS) in the contact center. “We have a heavy emphasis of SaaS reaching a mission-critical point in the enterprise,” she explained. “LiveOps is … because we have to be. We run our business on our own platform.”

Forging ahead another step in its next-generation Impact 360 suite offering, Melville, NY-based WFO provider Verint Systems seeks to take great strides in what Jerome Brown, solutions marketing manager at the company, says is largely misunderstood in the contact center: coaching. Officially called Impact 360 Coaching, it ties coaching together with agent scorecards, key performance indicators, quality evaluations, and other metrics that can automatically trigger coaching sessions or allow supervisors to look at the data and manually determine if work needs to be done.

Noting the fact that Verint’s customer advisory board has asked the company to develop this for years, Brown the solution took some time to go through development but is well worth it. “There had to be a method and process to guarantee success [in terms of agent coaching] and we found it,” he said. “It takes a very small investment to do this, and you can very quickly realize a return in [return on investment] because you can take action immediately.”

Yesterday I wrote a story for destinationCRM.com about Maximizer Software’s announcement of its Mobile CRM branding. Along with the press release, the folks at Maximizer passed along a YouTube video that demonstrates the need for accessing CRM, even on-the-go.

The video is pretty funny, and as Laurie McCabe (SMB analyst with AMI-Partners) points out, it’s a good attempt at viral marketing.

The topic of smartphones brings me back to Tim Bajarin’s keynote at the dCRM conference last week. Bajarin, who rubs elbows with Steve Jobs, says:

“These devices will represent 70 percent of all phones sold in the us by 2012. That is a huge change in thinking.”

Bajarin goes on, saying that generation Y will not even consider using a regular cell phone anymore. A phone without a text keyboard? Forget about it.

Mobile CRM makes sense. CRM is not an industry that ties its employees to desks. Sales and marketing people are often traveling and doing business whenever and wherever. Recently, I had the privilege to have dinner with a several CRM vendors, one of whom sells mobile CRM solutions for BlackBerry. At one point during the evening, the man next to him turned and said, “I need you.” He shared that all through the day at the destinationCRM exhibit hall, he was meeting people, making contacts, and taking business cards. He was frantically writing down information on the back of the business cards so that when he goes back and enters the contacts into his CRM system, he will hopefully be able to put a face to the name. However, as he told the mobile CRM guy, if he would have been able to pull up the CRM database on his BlackBerry, it could have been done in seconds.

I recently purchased a smartphone, mostly because I wanted to be able to check email on the road. I won’t share which kind of phone it is, but I will tell you that it’s not an iPhone or a BlackBerry. I have found myself, even after having the phone for about six months now, discovering new features and using it in new ways. Perhaps my favorite application is the quick access to Google Maps. [It means I don't have to bring my old fold-out map with me when trekking through new areas of the city. Basically, it allows me to still look "cool" in New York, even when I am incredibly lost and confused.]

Talks of mobile CRM has seemed to have taken conferences — and headlines — by storm. In the words of my dear colleague, Jessica Tsai, “Dude, I’m so relevant.”