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Blog Carnival: The ROI of Social Media is The CRV of Revenue Impact

This post is part of the Social ROI Blog Carnival at Think Customers: the 1to1 Media blog. Visit the blog carnival post “Calculating the ROI of Social Media" to check out the full lists of posts from numerous well-known social media thought leaders.

ROI = Social Media CRV

There have been an amazing number of attempts to quantify the benefit of social media so that we can get a traditional result to measure against.  Most of them fail or are indecipherable stretches that really don’t apply.  The problem is that social media interactions are in a simplified world, only of a few types:

1. Identifying and capturing some unstructured information that is quantified by assessing the emotional state of the person’s who is the subject of the information.
2. Identifying a number of interactions which define the volume of interactions or the source of interactions
3. Taking an action based on the social media interaction -  capturing a lead and starting the process of lead nurturing or opening a case due to a social media based complaint.

But when social media is treated as a channel for the interactions and is integrated with CRM customer records and CRM systems, then the ability to measure an ROI for social media becomes not only possible, but also important.

What does that mean?

Well, lets start with this. To me, as we enter what I’m calling the era of customer engagement, we are seeing a more mature view of social media and its use as part of a multi-channel strategy.  Social channels have become one of the sets of channels being considered along with email, phone, etc. – They do represent a disproportionately influential segment because conversations in social channels have the ability to scale from one to one to one to many or even many to many.

What this implies is that the measurement of social media ROI has two components. One is strategic – and there it isn’t measured separately. It is part of the achievement of your planned overall return. The other aspect is tactical.  And this is where it gets a bit dicey.

Ultimately, any company trying to measure social media ROI needs to be able to think beyond the traditional marketing measures like reach.   But the problem is that many of those things that you’re looking to get a return on are nebulous when it comes to measurement.

For example, how do you measure your impact on influencers which is one area that social media is used for by some?  To do that, it implies that you know how to measure influence digitally.

“Do you?”  Well sure, you say, a Klout score.  Sorry. Not the case. Klout is good at measuring how engaged an individual is on social channels at any given time but doesn’t really measure influencers of the buyer kind or the industry kind.  Three weeks off the grid would lower your Klout score but wouldn’t necessarily impact your influence.  You see that don’t you?

But social media measurement ROI does need to be associated with meaningful metrics, nonetheless.

Measuring Advocacy

Bet you think that I’m going to talk about Net Promoter Score as a measure of ROI for social media, right?

Nope.

I’m going to talk about something far more important that begins to address the scalable power of social media and the most important return that social media can provide – revenue. Because we are talking about marketing to a large extent for this Blog Carnival, I’m going to stretch the definition to the more recent look at the alignment of sales and marketing that was initially discussed in 2009 by our hosts, Peppers and Rogers in their “Sales and Marketing, the New Power Couple,” report.

In his book, “Managing Customers for Profit,” Dr. V. Kumar speaks of an extension of customer lifetime value (CLV) that he calls CRV – customer referral value.  For those of you not acquainted with it, customer lifetime value is the measure of the economic value of a single customer and his/her household over the full length of a relationship that the customer has with a particular company. It is a measure of direct revenue impact.

But what customer referral value does is take a look at the power of a brand’s value in the social channels by operating under the assumption that customers who may or may not have a high CLV, could be strong brand advocates who will refer their friends and others to the brand. Then some of those friends and others buy the products or services based on the brand referral.   This is indirect revenue impact.

To determine that, there is data that needs to be collected from both social and traditional channels.  There are four questions that have to be asked to prepare to do that.  They are:

1. Would you recommend this company to someone you know  - the traditional Net Promoter Score question?  This signals intent.
2. Did  you recommend this company to someone you know?  The  key question – signals action on the intent. About 1/3 actually do recommend.
3. Did they become a customer?
4. Are/were they a profitable customer?

These four questions are the foundation for the ROI of social media. If you use social media to determine who the brand influencers are and then go a bit deeper to find out who those brand influencers actually influenced, you can get an actual ROI for your social media usage.  Which is what you want right?

Social Business in Atlanta: The Opening Gun Fired by Brent Leary

(PG: This is straight out of the pen of Brent Leary. Brent for those of you who don’t know him is….oh, wait, everyone of you knows him so I don’t have to explain. He is hosting the first ever SocialBizAtlanta. conference on Feb 3 and I think that you need to take advantage of the free registration and show up there. I would if I were you.  Know why?  Let me let Brent tell you.

Take it away Mr. Leary!)

 

I have the opportunity to go to a lot of CRM/Social events during the course of the year, most of which are held in cool places like San Francisco, Boston and Orlando.  And while I love going to those places, I’ve always wanted to have one of those events down here in Atlanta.  And while I’ve threatened to do
it, I would always find an excuse (or 200) not to do it.  Not the right venue, not the right time of year, nobody in the industry would come, nobody likes me… man I better stop before I really depress myself.

Anyway, thanks to my friends and some great sponsors, I’ve completely run out of excuses.  So I have no other choice than to say that on FridayFebruary 3^rd I’d love for 
you to join me in Atlanta for the Getting Down to Social Businessconference being held at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) Conference Center.  It’s also being called Social Biz Atlanta because the event site is SocialBizAtlanta.com.  And it is free to attend if you register online in advance.

This is a full day event that will focus on the need for companies to transition their approach to “social” away from a narrow, reactionary set of disconnected activities, to a full-fledged corporate culture strategically aligned to build long-lasting relationships with today’s empowered customer.  And it's aimed directly at small and mid-size businesses - and even you enterprise folks working at the departmental level of your organization operating like a small business. 

Now I said my friends deserve all the “blame” for this making this happen, and let me tell you why…

A Venue I Couldn’t Pass Up

I’ve said to many people that I’d only organize an event if I could get a space like the GTRI Conference Center, because it’s a great location in Midtown Atlanta, has great amenities for attendees, and even has free parking.  This made for a great excuse for not doing something, until Donna Ennis of Georgia Tech’s Enterprise Innovation Institute said I could use the GTRI venue.   Gee THANKS Donna!

Incredible List of World Class Thought Leaders Volunteering to Come

Now that I couldn’t use the venue excuse, I really was relying heavily on the “nobody would come to Atlanta” excuse.  And, of course, not only did people want to come, many of them even offered without me having to ask.  I mean, who would’ve thought a group of thought leaders, experts and influencers like this would say yes:

• Anita Campbell, CEO and Publisher, Small Business Trends,
• Robin Carey, CEO, Social Media Today,
• Ginger Conlon, Executive Editor, 1to1 Media,
• Bert DuMars, Vice President of Digital Marketing and eCommerce,Newell Rubbermaid,
• Donna Ennis, Project Director, MBDA Business Center,
• Paul Greenberg, President of the 56 Group & Author of CRM at the Speed of Light,
• Art Hall, Director, Alvarez and Marsal,
• Cory Hartlen, Product Marketing Manager, Radian6,
• Jeanne Hopkins, Vice President of Marketing, HubSpot,
• Adam Naide, Executive Director of Social Media Marketing, Cox Communications,
• Jeff Nolan, VP of Product Marketing, Get Satisfaction,
• Larry Ritter,SVP & General Manager, Sage CRM Solutions,
• Michael Thomas, Customer Success Manager, Microsoft,
• Matt Trifiro, SVP of Marketing, Assistly,
• Lauren Vargas, Community Management Strategist, Aetna,
• Emily Yellin, Author of Your Call Is (Not That) Important to Us

OK so I knew Paul G. would come and do it even if it were just me and him…which would have made it a CRM Playaz episode anyways.   But who knew all these great folks from great companies would say yes? Now I was down to my last excuse…

I CAN Have Regular Guy (or Gal) Food For Lunch At One Of These Things?

This is the biggie.  Having been to a number of cool events, the lunch situation can sometimes be dicey.  And I said to myself if I ever organized an event I’d have to have some “regular guy” food available.  Something I could sink my teeth into like some Chick-fil-a; a chicken biscuit perhaps...  And just when I thought it was illegal to serve this kind of food at a business event, I found out that I could actually do it.

No More Excuses…I’m Talking to You!

So now I’m all out of reasons for why I shouldn’t host a social business event here in Atlanta.  And due to having great sponsors like Microsoft, Radian6, Sage, Assistly and Georgia Tech, we’re able to make this whole event free! So if you work at a small or mid-size business and live in or near Atlanta (or you’ve been looking for a good reason to come here) you’ve run out of excuses not to attend.  Let’s see:

• Great Speakers – Check!
• Great Venue – Check!
• Great Location (with free parking) – Check!
• Great Eats (if you’re like me and dig Chick-fil-a) – check!
• Great information on an important topic – Check!
• And it’s free – Check! (or is that no check since you don’t need your checkbook )

In all seriousness we really do think we’ve put together a great day of content coming directly from experts, practitioners and vendors who can help your organization transition to becoming a social business.  So here are the details:

Title: Getting Down to Social Business: The New Business as Usual in the Age of the Collaborative Relationship (AKA Social Biz Atlanta)

Date: Friday February3rd

Time: 8:30-4pm

Place: Georgia Tech Research Institute Conference Center

250 14^th Street NW

Atlanta, GA 30318

Cost: None with online registration

Event Site: SocialBizAtlanta.com

I hope to see you there!

CRM 2012 Forecast–The Era of Customer Engagement Begins– Part II

To understand why I’m saying this, please go to Part I on my ZDNet blog here.

Gamification becomes Serious Business

No matter how old you are, human beings never lose their desire to play. Play makes us happy. Each of us, and I challenge you to deny this, wants to have a happy life. We do what we have to in life to improve our chances to have one. One of those things is to have as many happy moments as we can accumulate throughout our lives. Even if we aren’t all that universally happy (not projecting here), each of us has had times where we were that we can point to.

Gamification, while often over hyped and misunderstood, is a concept that has increasingly important business value. It doesn’t mean playing games; it isn’t game theory; it isn’t a form of hunting meat. My favorite definition comes from Constellation Research Group CEO (and key influencer) (and great friend) Ray Wang from his recent research paper, “Demystifying Enterprise Gamification for Business:Behind the Hype of Influencing Behaviors and Effecting Business Outcomes:”

“Gamification describes a series of design principles, processes and systems used to influence, engage and motivate individuals, groups and communities to drive behaviors and effect desired outcomes.”

To see it in action, even in an unexpected place, take a look at how SAP has gamified Accounts Payable. As odd as that may sound, they’ve done a genuinely good job. Here is a post on it with screenshots at Enterprise Gamification.

These aren’t edge cases for a small niche. Gartner Group in April 2011 thinks that by 2014, 70% of all businesses in the Global 2000 will have “gamified apps.” Research firm, M2 says that by 2016, the gamification market, currently sized at $100,000,000 will reach $2.8 billion, with 200% growth in 2012.

In other words this is starting to get big.

The vendors are in the game too. Those who have enterprise ready gamification platforms out there include Bunchball, Badgeville, and of course, Gamify, all in all about a bakers dozen.

We’re already seeing sophisticated gamification frameworks being set up. Innovative small companies like the award-winning UK virtual mobile network operator GiffGaff used gamification to recruit their initial customer community prior to their beta launch by providing DIY tools to create videos – the best of which got a £5000 prize.

For a more complete discussion on gamification worth reading, please make sure that you read the posts by thought leader and Lithium Chief Scientist, Dr. Michael Wu. They are well worth it.

Ray Wong, Gartner, M2, all say gamification in a big way starting this year over the next few. I say, amen, brothers and sisters.

Insight Solutions will emerge as a technology category of its own

One thing that we can’t ignore (okay, that I can’t ignore) is that if customer engagement is to work, then insights into how customers want it to work are becoming increasingly necessary.

But again, we’re dealing with scale and we’re dealing with a dynamic social web with constant conversations that are liquid and changing continually. They are being carried out in multiple channels – channels that number all in all, in the thousands, both public and private.

The current generation of social media monitoring tools with a few exceptions – Radian6 and Attensity come immediately to mind – are somewhat passive tools that scour the web, find the conversations and organize unstructured data in the form of a report that provides the users with what is being said, usually in a positive, negative or neutral vein. The better tools provide strong analytic capabilities that give some insight into how customer segments are thinking or how “nodes” are responding. That would be Attensity, for example. Or they provide highly focused, highly specific, well thought out intelligence such as the sales intelligence focus of InsideView. Radian6 takes this to a whole new level with their Insights Platform which takes Radian6’s vast data mining and information organizing capabilities and integrate other technology tools that combined with Radian6 provide deep insight into individual customers, if that’s where you want to go. With the future capacity to tie this to salesforce.com or database.com or data.com transactional data, and contact information, we are beginning to see how an insight solution would work. It’s obvious limitation is that it will be tied to salesforce.com only customer data. But that aside, we are talking about something that at least foreshadows what are a future class of applications. Bryan Jennewein, the product manager for the Insights platform calls the results “social insight”, which is not an inappropriate term, in this case.

But Radian6 hardly plays in its own sandbox here. There are a number of emerging players in this space which I’m calling “insight solutions” who have been misplaced in or evolved from other market categories. Currently, the runaway number #1 of these for me is Coveo, which came from the Enterprise Search space. Following them is Allegiance, emerging from the Enterprise Feedback Management world and Lattice Engines, which inhabits the sales intelligence world uncomfortably. Another newcomer that has flown under the radar is WiseWindow, a "mass opinion business intelligence" (MOBI) provider, who specializes in vertical insights among other things and come from the BI world All four have the technology to provide insights. Each takes an entirely different approach to attaining the knowledge that can support insight, but each minimally provides dynamic data mining, collaboration and analytics. All four either can or do integrate with CRM, by the way.

This is not to say that more “traditional” analytics such as text and sentiment analysis, business intelligence, etc are going to be replaced or suffering. In 2012, they will be even more important than they are now.

Several vendors are either upping the ante or providing new ways of looking at the data – all in the name of recognition of the importance of insight – into customers primarily, but also employees, opportunities, processes, etc.

For example, Clarabridge is both upping the ante and providing a new approach to analytics by taking sentiment analysis to a whole other level beyond the traditional five-point expression (very positive, positive, neutral, negative, very negative) and ratcheting it up to eleven points using semantic analysis so that there is context to the sentiment, besides. Recently, SAP, despite the fact that they own the best analytics firm known to man – Business Objects, recently announced a partnership with social analytics provider Netbase to become a VAR that would sell “SAP Social Analytics by Netbase” to their customers. They realized like others before them, insight is 2012 table stakes and social data is the tableware.

Analytics as a whole is becoming fundamental to all business strategy. 2012 brings more of that than ever and the rise of a new category customer-focused solution that provides a combination the surfacing of dynamic information and the analysis of that behavior as dynamically as it is surfaced.

An optimal customer experience becomes the core of what CRM can provide. Finally.

In 2011, we saw a significant shift away from the pure left-brained messaging of CRM toward a much stronger focus on customer interactions, engagement and behaviors. Traditional CRM vendors for reasons that are both good and bad began to rebrand their messaging around the idea of technologies that can support an enhanced customer experience. The good reason is that they needed to do that and they did. The bad reason is that they did it as a reaction to historic CRM bad press a lot of times, rather than just recognizing that the context had shifted and we were entering a period that demanded that customer experience and engagement got attention. Right results, sometimes wrong reasons.

Vendors like Sword-Ciboodle have taken it further and begun to present their product portfolios not as a menu of features and functions but around solution sets that help you do your jobs better. The name for it is jobs-based thinking. The academic framework for that is Service Design Logic, something that is gaining increasing credence in the business world. If you look at the Sword-Ciboodle site, you’ll see that it’s got a roles-based focus. The reason for this is that there is a recognition that we are dealing with behaviors – both customers and employees, not just products.

But the interest in providing the “right” customer experience high. Witness these numbers that come from the “2011 State of Customer Experience Management” put together by ubër-expert Bruce Temkin, the leading customer experience influencer and best of the lot in my book. These numbers are indicative of both where things are (not new but embedded) and where they can go (toward maturity). Temkin found that:

• Nearly 60% of the companies surveyed have a senior executive in charge of customer experience
• There are 30% of the companies that have 20+ employees who are delegated to the customer experience
• There have been positive results (measureable ones, people!) from Voice of the Customer programs in 84% of the companies using them
• The percentage of companies that received a moderate or better competency rating rose from 22% on 2010 to 30% in 2011.

That’s the good news.

The signs that this is still immature?

· “Only 3% of companies reached the highest level of customer experience maturity, which (Temkin calls) a Customer-Centric Organization

· Only 17% of respondents believe that their executives regularly support decisions to trade off short-term financial results for longer-term customer loyalty.” (source: Temkin, 2011 State of Customer Experience Management)

That means that there is a lot of room to grow and in 2012, I expect that we’ll see a continuation of these efforts to improve and get measurable benefit, though nothing dramatic.

The only real “trend” that will likely stand out when it comes to customer experience in 2012 is that I think vendor messaging will be increasingly focused around it. That’s not really much of a trend, if you think about it. You feel me?

Social marketing becomes an integral part of an explosive marketing automation sector

Social marketing and the broader, customer-facing interactive marketing are becoming ubiquitous as customer engagement becomes the increasing focus of companies thoughts.

Chief Marketer in their 2011 Social Marketing survey found that 73% of the respondent companies were incorporating some kind of “social messaging” into their marketing campaigns and in 2012 an additional 10% (meaning around 83%) would be doing the same. What’s interesting is the primary reason that the respondents were doing so. Fully 85% of them felt it was a way to “reach customers at multiple touchpoints.” That’s 25% more than the next reason, which is that customers are spending more time on social networks. In other words, there is a recognition that social channels are now part of the mainstream and that they are additions to the channels that we’ve reached customers on traditionally. To get a feel for how big a deal this really is, in August 2011, Forrester Group came out with their “U.S. Interactive Marketing Forecast, 2011-2016” and saw the market spend up from $34 billion in 2011 to nearly $42 billion in 2012 and $77 billion by 2016. The bulk of the spend will be in the more traditional channels of interactive marketing – e.g. display ads and search marketing with emerging marketing such as mobile and social increasing about 250% in that time.

This is not surprising and if you look at it, the technologies available are once again more primitive than the efforts expended by the practitioner marketing departments.

The vendors are beginning to recognize the value of social marketing and are trying mightily to catch up and either incorporate it into their existing marketing automation or revenue performance management (sigh) applications and services. There are only a few genuinely useful pure social marketing or niche related apps out there at the moment, notably CRM Idol 2011 finalist Crowd Factory. One example of a niche related vendor would be the FuzeDigital reputation engine.

However the larger marketing automation/revenue performance vendors are taking note too. We are seeing social features being incorporated into more traditional applications from Marketo, Eloqua and Silverpop for example. Analytics giant SAS, rather than incorporating too much social into their marketing automation application, built and social media analytics application to take the pulse of the brand conversations going on out there. Companies like Infor, who provide customer interaction engines like Epiphany are using them to engage their prospects.

2012 will bring us continued explosive growth in marketing, especially social marketing because we have reached ubiquity when it comes to utilizing social channels as part of campaign planning. The more engagement is on the table, the more that marketing – with social marketing functionality as a prerequisite for a contemporary marketing suite – will grow dramatically. Forrester has it partially right with the increase of some 20% year over year in interactive marketing expenditures.

Think I’m wrong? Prove it. Launch a campaign on Twitter to do that. Ha!

Short Bursts: Other Trends

These aren’t meant to be full blown prognostications – just short takes on interesting trends that I’ve noticed that I want to make you aware of. There is too much in the sections above for me to draw these out but I didn’t think I should ignore them even if I don't spend a lot of digital ink making the case.

1. Mobile CRM - As in 2011, the creative development of mobile CRM will be driven by the tablet market and by the ability to analyze large amounts of data quickly that will show up on the tablets. The iPad will still be the dominant driver of mobile CRM application development. But we will see more activity around mobile payment than we will around anything else as Near Field Communication (NFC) is deployed on devices to a much greater extent than 2011 and Google Wallet grabs share of….mind as more and more businesses adopt.
2. Small Business SCRM – The success of Hubspot in 2011 and the emergence of a myriad of other technology platforms and companies who are small business focused (see CRM Idol again for many of the technology companies who concentrate on small business) is an indicator of the interest that small business has when it comes to doing business using social channels. I’m going to leave the details to Brent Leary in a forthcoming post here on the small business CRM market in 2012.
3. Big Data Becomes Really Big Data - The issue of how to data the massive increase in data and especially desirable data becomes possible the highlight of 2012. This is being fueled by the substantial increases in unstructured data on the social web, in the use of video, images, audio files and other rich data and by the growing ubiquity of the cloud all leading to what IDC feels is going to jump to more than 2.7 zettabytes (that would be 1021) in 2012, which is 48% higher rate of growth than 2011 – and 90% of it will be unstructured (Source: IDC Predictions for 2012: Competing for 2020). Managing this data will drive not only the storage and infrastructure markets, but will make even more “traditional” areas like Master Data Management (MDM) something that businesses will be investing in. This is a massive opportunity and a massive issue.
4. Acquisitions – The shrinkage of the market via acquisitions and it’s strengthening via strategic partnerships that support Social CRM and social business ecosystems will continue as they did in 2011. IN 2011 we saw, among others, salesforce.com acquiring DimDim, Radian6, Assistly, Model Metrics and Rypple; Oracle acquiring Inquira, Endeca and RightNow; SAP acquiring SuccessFactors and Microsoft acquiring Skype. We also saw a key strategic partnership between IBM and SugarCRM which was crucial to both companies. There will be more of the same in 2012 with interesting acquisition targets (at least interesting to me, not because I heard anything. Just to be clear) will be Marketo, InsideView, Coveo, SugarCRM and a handful of others including several of the CRM Idol contestants. Though, as always I’m sure I’ll be surprised and completely wrong. But acquisitions and partnerships will be the stars of 2012, whether I’m surprised or wrong or not.
5. The Cloud – 2012 continues the bandwagon though the hype will slow. This year not only did we see Amazon continue to be the cloud to beat, but companies like Oracle announce their “public cloud” and SAP went deep into the cloud as they announced at the recent SAP Business Influencers Conference not only buying SuccessFactors shortly after they announced that they wanted to significantly compete in the cloud but also announcing that from here on they are going to architect what they produce as cloud and will adapt it to on premises, rather than the other way around – a 180° turn in philosophy and development strategy. We also saw the cloud become the delivery system of choice, if you take it from the rate of adoption, not the amount of deployments out there in the on premises v. the cloud competition. Since this is short, let me recommend the always fantastic, quiet thought leader, Louis Columbus’ great aggregation post on cloud adoption. Read that to get the picture. On premises still is the dominant installation for CRM and other business technology, with hybrid deployments a popular option – and one offered by companies who have historically been invested in on premises software. In fact, all the leaders but salesforce.com offer it as part of their portfolio. More of this in 2012 as the unstoppable cloud juggernaut continues to gain delivery mechanism share.
6. Innovation/Co-Creation – This will continue to be in the purview of the most progressive companies – the leading edge of thinking and practice in business. But only at the lowest levels – feedback etc. will it be pre-eminent. The true practitioners of co-creation are just beginning to make their appearance on the global stage. I expect we’ll see most of this in the Fortune 3500 companies. I’ll be writing more on this and you’ll be seeing guest posts on this subject in 2012.
7. Knowledge Management – while there will be no slacking off of the existing models for knowledge management – accessible knowledgebases being the core of that – there will be considerably more focus on dynamic knowledge with as close to real time response as possible and the use of knowledge for insight (via analysis). The technologies to meet the requirements for the latter are just beginning to appear in the market. Knowledge grabbed from customer user forums and other external "unstructured":
8. Applications Marketplaces – Application marketplaces are becoming increasingly prevalent as more and more companies begin to view things from the standpoint of providing their customers with customized/configurable ecosystems. So now, in addition to the technology company marketplaces we know and…whatever emotion you want goes here….we are seeing even government agencies like the U.S. General Services Administration or the U.S. Army providing these application marketplaces to their constituents – in the former case, the other U.S. federal agencies and the latter case, varying Army commands. There is no reason to think that this is going to slack in 2012. In fact, look for it to accelerate.

The One By Itself

This is the most important prognostication for 2012. Period.

The Yankees Win the World Series – Locked and loaded. Our starting pitching straightens itself out, Teixeira gets his batting average back to a normal .290 or so; A-Rod revives his career enough to be a difference maker; Jeter just continues from his 2011 second half and Rivera of course is Rivera. Thus, The Yankees Win. The Yankeeeeeees Wiiiiiiiiin! Yay!

Finally

Look. This may be the most uncomfortable "forecast" I've ever made. It wasn't easy. I'm evolving a perspective I've had for almost 10 years and it has implications that are important, though not that dramatic, for how the industry will be developing and the strategies that need to be considered - if I'm right.

And that makes me uncomfortable. But I've learned a few things in my 62 years that I think have done me well over the years - some of it due to adversity that makes my skin very thick. Let's just say criticism doesn't exactly phase me.

First, I've learned that you are always learning.  That means that what I am writing here while I think its useful is only the beginning of something that I hope will have some impact but that will be constantly evolving even as it does due to collegial inputs from smarter people than me and those who are testing out what I'm hypothesizing here and finding how to tweak it or to show me that I'm wrong.

But if there is one thing I've learned that probably will never change, there is a way to think about all this. You make as good a case as your observations allow and then get on with your life and see how the next phase plays out. Which is what I'm now doing for 2012.

The Voters Speak! CRM Idol 2011 Announces Winners & Who Voted

Alright, I'm not going to keep you in any kind of suspense.  I'm going to let you know from the get go who won. Though please go to the CRM Idol website for more coverage of the winners.

The Winners

In the Americas - Get Satisfaction!

In EMEA -BPMonline!

The Americas contest was particularly hard fought with Get Satisfaction edging out two of the three other contestants. Edging out was the operant phrase. It was a tough race and there were differences of opinion between the judges and the popular vote.

If you remember, back in April, I made the statement that this is an "easy contest to enter, but hard to win." Exactly what this proved to be. The process was long, though not grueling. There was a lot of interactions, mentoring programs, a lot of questions that had to be answered. We had to learn some things on the fly - like incorporating a semi-final round before the finals. It turned out to be absolutely necessary and important to have so we could learn more about the companies that were (and weren't) ultimately chosen for the finals.

Congratulations to both Get Satisfaction and BPMonline. Well played, teams, well played.

The Judges

The Primary Judges - me, Brent Leary, Esteban Kolsky, Denis Pombriant, Jesus Hoyos, Silvana Buljan, Mark Tamis and Laurence Buchanan functioned as the brain trust throughout this process and were responsible for making whatever changes were made to the process and deciding on things that had to be decided on - even beyond the voting - when it came to companies who did good things and bad things.  All are back on board for next year which is totally exciting.

Breaking Down the Vote

Ha! You thought you were going to get a breakdown of the vote totals for the finalists.  Not going to happen.  Too bad.  That would be prurient. Instead, let me tell you a few other things that would be prudent, not prurient.

The voting for CRM Idol exceeded our expectation with several thousand votes coming in.  I'll tell you a little about who voted and what it indicated. We had a series of additional (optional) questions that roughly 22% of the voters answered which gave us a flavor of who was voting and how they understood and implemented CRM. The results were interesting for sure.  Here's a few stats:

The voting was geographically pretty well divided with:

• The Americas - 44.0%
• EMEA - 38.4%
• Other - 17.6%

It was mostly users and manager/execs who voted with 29.9% and 27.9% respectively.

In the question that was "My Company uses the following CRM(ish) modules (choose all that apply) the results were a bit eye opening really - a little surprising. The top 5:

• Contact Management - 50.5%
• Sales Force Automation - 49.0%
• Help Desk - 41.9%
• Social CRM - 37.1%
• Marketing Automation - 36.2%

What is surprising here is that the #1 CRM application is contact management - which indicates a small business presence typically or a confusion between contact management and sales force automation which is something that has existed for years. (e.g. some people use salesforce.com for contact management. But others use ACT! for sales force automation).  Most surprising, to me at least, is that #4 is social CRM as distinguished from social media monitoring which was #9 on the list. Meaning there was an understanding that there is a difference. Also that so many companies feel that they are deploying it. That fascinates me because if it is any indicator at all, there is considerably more usage of SCRM technology than I had imagined. That's something that I'm going to dig into early in 2012 to find out about the actual usage of Social CRM technologies in business - and what people think that Social CRM is.

What people felt that they really liked about CRM Idol was overwhelming one of the actual reasons we created the competition.  Over 63% felt it was "learning about other companies" - by far the biggest reason. That means as far as what we wanted to do for these small companies vis a vis the general public - we did (pat, pat, pat on the back for us.)

What did the voters want to see more? That was pretty close.  Top choices - greater focus on CRM categories - a conclusion that we are taking to heart - and one that we've been talking about a lot as far as modifications for next year. The second most - more commentary from the judges. That one I'm not so sure of. If they mean more commentary from more judges - maybe.  If they mean more commentary from the primary judges - well, some things you just don't get in life. We were pretty stretched to have to review nearly 60 companies within 7 business days (or so) of their reviews and we did it. But it wasn't easy. More commentary from the 8 primary judges is highly unlikely, even if was a popular suggestion. I'm just sayin'.

Finally, we asked what would you like to see more of or less of for CRM Idol 2012? Interesting result. The biggest answer overwhelmingly was "None of the above (48.8%). Since "Other" with room to specify was also a category, and was the least answered, we have to assume that people who voted for none of the above were happy with what we provided and the way that we did it. That's a reasonable assumption, right? You would think so.

#2 on that, though, was CRM categories (though in a bit of a flaw in the questioning on our part, we don't know if less or more is what they meant). However that dovetails with the answer to "Next year I'd like to see" greater focus on CRM categories as the #1 thing. So we hear it LOUD and clear.

Coming Up

There's a lot to be done in the period between contests and I'm sure that next year, the preparation will be starting a lot earlier than it did this year. We learned a lot along the way and will be taking our lessons from the streets - though not mean streets, nice streets - and the feedback we get. We'll be making changes accordingly.

In the interim, we are going to encourage all companies that have been participants to keep participating. First, because we have a community now of the competition organizers who are influencers in the industry and subject matter experts par excellence and companies that are now emergent, whether they won or not. Plus the prospects for the 2012 competition will be invited in to join the community in advance of next year so they have a shot a some visibility and great interaction with the influencers and this first graduated class of CRM Idol participants. Our slogan/mantra has been "once a participant always a member" and we will take that seriously.  To that end, the inestimable Kelly Craft has volunteered to be our Community Manager and we all gratefully took her up on her generous offer. The woman has mad skills, passion, enthusiasm, and serious chops when it comes to all this.

I can assure you of one thing. Next year we are going to take paid sponsors for the contest so we can hire someone to handle some of the logistics which was massive. I spent 2-3 hours a day for 7 days a week from late April thru now - with some hiatuses - doing this and it was more work than I ever anticipated. Plus financed the bulk of it out of my pocket. Though I have to say that Brent Leary generously paid for some of the costs and DRI, the Portuguese open source solution company did the website for nothing, saving thousands for us and doing a brilliant job.

I'm not complaining. I chose to do it that way. But honestly, I'm going to need help for the logistics and sponsors will be important to helping finance that.

So, I'll keep you posted of course on the things upcoming and I'm sure I'll be trying to wangle some participation time out of you to help out next year so that we can keep highlighting these companies and their great potential.

Stay tuned here.  Thank you to the primary judges, our media partners, our extended judges panel, our voters and of course, those that spent the time and effort to participant in CRM Idol 2011.  It has been awesome - and will continue to be.

CRM Idol 2011: The Polls Are Now Officially Open

Okay everyone, I'm going to have this as my only post or at least the one at the top of the page for the next 10 days through 6pm on October 31, 2011. What you see here is the 4 Americas and 3 EMEA finalist videos for CRM Idol 2011. We need you to pick the winner for each. One from America's and one from EMEA. This is a big deal. These contestants have worked long and hard to get to the finals and long and hard on their videos and 5 of the 7 aren't going to win. There are nearly a million dollars (estimated) in prizes, visibility etc. and a chance to help a small company with a vision, dream and a good solid approach and products/services to become more than just a small company in competition with others. And much of this can be up to you. So, here's what I'm asking you to do.

The Voting

I've posted all seven videos here. Please review them. Spend time with each. Then if you care to go further go to the links that I've posted underneath each of the videos and take a look at the supporting materials on the CRM Idol website. If you don't want to do that, no problem. Then vote. The voting form has a link at the bottom of the page. Just simply pick your Americas and EMEA winner. There are some additional questions we're asking to get a bit of profile of who is voting though the responses will remain anonymous. NP for not answering the additional questions. But PLEASE vote. You truly have the chance to impact a company's future.

 

The Americas

(in alphabetical order)

Assistly

 

The URL to the video on YouTube: http://youtu.be/LB2EVYaXVxQ

Links to CRM Idol data:

Contestant page: http://www.crmidol.com/contestant/assistly

Judges Review: http://www.crmidol.com/reviews/assistly

 

Crowd Factory

Crowd Factory CRM Idol 2011 Finalist Video

The URL to the video on YouTube: http://youtu.be/ymbmL_qPuMc

Links to CRM Idol data:

Contestant page: http://www.crmidol.com/contestant/crowd-factory-social-marketing-suite

Judges review: http://www.crmidol.com/reviews/crowd-factory

 

Get Satisfaction

Get Satisfaction CRM Idol 2011 Finalist Video

The URL to the video on YouTube: http://youtu.be/PH0I9G8d2NU

Links to CRM Idol data:

Contestant page: http://www.crmidol.com/contestant/get-satisfaction

Judges Review:http://www.crmidol.com/reviews/get-satisfaction

 

Stone Cobra

The URL to the video on YouTube: http://youtu.be/eLGncjiWTFk

Links to CRM Idol data:

Contestant page: http://www.crmidol.com/contestant/stone-cobra%E2%80%99s-apps-service-cloud%E2%84%A2

Judges Review: http://www.crmidol.com/reviews/stone-cobra

 

EMEA

(in alphabetical order)

BPMonline

BPMonline CRM Idol 2011 Finalist Video

The URL to the video on YouTube: http://youtu.be/klFdNo0RGvM

Links to CRM Idol data:

Contestant page: http://www.crmidol.com/contestant/bpmonline-crm

Judges Review:http://www.crmidol.com/reviews/bpmonline-crm

 

Workbooks.com

Workbooks.com CRM Idol 2011 Finalist Video

The URL to the video on YouTube: http://youtu.be/aoDBKfEBCjg

Links to CRM Idol data:

Contestant page:http://www.crmidol.com/contestant/workbooks-crm-edition

Judges Review: http://www.crmidol.com/reviews/workbookscom

 

Zestia (Capsule CRM)

Zestia (Capsule CRM) CRM Idol 2011 Finalist Video

The URL to the video on YouTube: http://youtu.be/DgX9hK0Tr78

Links to CRM Idol data:

Contestant page:http://www.crmidol.com/contestant/capsule

Judges Review: http://www.crmidol.com/reviews/zestia

 

Vote Here!!

CLICK HERE TO VOTE FOR YOUR FAVORITE CRM IDOL FINALISTS.

Remember one for the Americas and one for EMEA.

CRM Idol 2011: Now Finally It All Ends With EMEA

Given that today is the day that CRM Idol finalist videos are going to be appearing in our dropbox folder for public viewing starting on Saturday October 22, I thought I'd finish the finalist reviews with a flourish - and do all three EMEA candidates.  Use these reviews for all the candidates in your deliberations. But remember, with great power comes great responsibility, Spidey.

The EMEA finalists:

BPMonline

Process-based CRM is a category created by, and to our knowledge, only supported by, Forrester Research about 3 or 4 years ago to explain companies like Pegasystems and Sword-Ciboodle when those companies moved beyond just the Business Process Management (BPM) space.  At first, there was skepticism about the category but as time moved on, more and more evidence has emerged that not only is there a place for that category, but it is a legitimate area for practitioners to consider when they either want to handle routine processes in an way that has an effective outcome, or they need highly customizable capabilities for handling complex business processes that might have major impact on the businesses utilizing them.

BPMonline CRM is one of the most substantial contenders in this category that we’ve seen emerge in a long time.

BPMonline CRM has 50 employees and is ably run by its CEO and co-founder Katerina Kostereva.  They are headquartered in London and have a wide geographic reach with customers in dozens of countries around the world, according to the map on their website.  They have more than 50 customers with the average user number being roughly 25-30 though the users can go from under ten to thousands of users on either end of the spectrum.    What makes them remarkable is that they have been in existence for less than a year and have done what they’ve done in the SaaS space in just a few months.

Their pricing model is more than competitive with the vendors in their space - $29 per user per month regardless of which sized company you are.  According to BPMOnline, their target market ranges from small business to the enterprise, something that concerns us as you will read later.

BPMonline CRM makes the concept of process based CRM elegant.  There are two major components to their offering – a CRM suite and a BPM platform that can be used to develop process-centric applications whether or not they are CRM.  Their technology model is similar to the successful one that salesforce.com has been using with Force.com – provide solid, deep functionality in most areas and then provide the means to extend the functionality, integrate with other applications, build new functions or build an entirely new, unrelated application.

There is a lot to like with their technology.  They, like many of the other global contestants, use a .Net architecture in combination with Silverlight and Ajax to provide a flexible platform which in combination with RESTful APIs provides them with what is a very well-constructed SaaS architecture.

Their product has a very attractive user interface that is clean and easily navigable. Take a look:

Yet, underneath this nice looking hood lies a very powerful engine that is focused on the ability of the user to not only use the functionality that the product provides, but also customize how they want to use it – without having to be a developer.  We’ve heard this claim before and are usually pretty skeptical and right to be so, but in this case, BPMonline CRM meets the claim successfully.

The basic functionality they provide is extensive:  it covers the three traditional CRM pillars – sales, marketing and customer service.

It includes (among other things):

• Customer Data Management which includes an incredibly well thought out, highly integrated social profile drawing from not only email, phone, web, but Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter and of course the customer transaction history.
• Sales Management including pipeline, opportunity and lead management, with a strong, not surprising sales process customization capability.
• Campaign Management including customized segmentation, targeted campaigns management, and response/revenue measurement
• Time Management including the calendar functionality, an Invisible CRM (another CRM Idol contestant) integration with Outlook for all activities (tasks, calls, emails) plus assignment and routing (via the business process engine) for team members with specific roles.
• Document Management which includes document approvals online, an e-library, automated documents merger with data and templates, archiving and of course, assignment

They, as you can see, are focused heavily on automating processes to make the interactions between team members and staff in general much easier than it would be in most CRM applications.  Their marketing and sales capabilities are enhanced by the underlying process engine and the customization capabilities and we really like what we are seeing here – a lot.

However, their customer service module is a weak offering. They offer basic case management functionality but do not have the functionality necessary for contact centers.  If you are looking for a sales-oriented case management process, what BPMOnline provides is adequate, but that’s all.

They integrate best not with other CRM platforms – they really don’t need to do that – but with ERP applications that incorporate invoices and quotes etc. and other financial information in particular.

However, their crown jewel is their BPM platform.  It is one of the best graphical designers I’ve seen and actually does make it easy for the non-techie to develop a process that can be injected into a sales component or a marketing function or across the entire enterprise.   Here’s what it looks like.

Not too complicated. Clean and easy to use with a very powerful toolset that allows complex process creation from, maybe not novices, but non-technical users.  It is an aptly named a What You See is What You Execute (WYSWYE) process and workflow designer.

BPMonline CRM is one of the most evolved applications that we’ve seen in this competition – providing deep user-friendly customization at an incredibly inexpensive price point.

But we do have a concern.

Our primary concern is their perception of their target market. They see themselves as a full spectrum provider from the smallest business to the largest enterprise. We think that this is a much too broad a definition of where their strength truly lies.  While they can compete with Pegasystems and Sword-Ciboodle at the enterprise level, their real sweet spot is in the upper end of the mid-market and the lower end of the enterprise. We think that they might be able to make a case for the Fortune 500 though we are saying that more on faith than anything definitive and that if they stretch to the lower end they could compete with Sage in the bottom of the midmarket. But thinking that small business is a target market, is probably an overestimation in our view, whether they have customers there or not.

However, our concerns are far outweighed by our admiration for this excellent application and their even better platform.

Zestia

Without question the presentation and demo from Zestia covering the Capsule solution was one of the more impressive and also surprising we saw on CRM Idol EMEA. Capsule is a solution aimed at providing simple CRM to small businesses and sales teams. The company is a relative newcomer to the CRM market, founded in 2008 by Duncan Stockdill (CEO), Philip Haynes (CTO) and Wendy Rule (FD). They are a small, UK-based company with only a handful of employees but explosive growth of 1200% in 2010 prompted the company to expand and they are now hiring 3 more developers as well as customer support, infrastructure and UI roles.

The Capsule product was launched in beta in November 2008 and then went to general availability (GA) in March 2009. It does what is says on the tin which is provide basic CRM functionality for small businesses online to help them keep track of relationships. The pricing model is simple and represents good value for money with a Free edition and a Professional Edition. The Free edition provides a solution for up to 2 users with 10mb of storage, 250 contacts and unlimited opportunities and cases. The Professional edition, priced at £8 (or $12 usd) per user per month gives 2GB of storage, 50,000 contacts unlimited opportunities and cases and integration with a number of pre-defined services e.g. Kashflow, MailChimp.

The product has been built on a modern architecture with an HTML5 / Javascript front end, Java / SCALA middleware, deployed on Amazon EC2 and delivered as a SaaS solution. From a usability perspective the UI was one of the cleanest and most intuitive UIs that we saw in the competition: uncluttered, highlighting key information to the user and pulling in social data to supplement account information:

In the demo we saw basic capabilities, focused on a small business service provider, covering contact management, task and opportunity management and pipeline forecasting. The things the vendor showed they did well but we also recognized that features / functions were very basic – we saw nothing you would not expect to be in most CRM for SME solutions – for example pipeline forecasting shown below. The out of the box functionality would most likely not meet the needs for larger, more complex organisations who might want verticalised functionality or multi-language support (only English language is supported at this stage).

However, a few things surprised us about Capsule. Firstly, the developers have taken a mature and forward-looking approach to services integration. They recognize the functional limitations of the product and have ensured that it is very easily extendable. First with a simple ability to add fields and second with a range of integrated services including Mailchimp for e-mail marketing, Wufoo for web forms, Quoteroller for quotations, Freshbooks for invoicing and Google Apps for mail / calendar and apps. In particular the Google Apps integration we saw had been executed extremely well. We saw a demonstration of the creation of a new sales contact and lead from within G-Mail, directly into Capsule:

The company plans to continue this services based integration approach to Social CRM, partnering with best-of breed tools rather then building their own capabilities. We admired the way in which the vendor was able to get scale from a small development team by partnering with like-minded and complimentary providers and not trying to own every piece of functionality themselves. In this way they have developed their solution much faster than had they chosen to build everything themselves.

The second thing that surprised us was that the company has already built an HTML 5 app that we saw demonstrated live and working on an iPhone (see screenshot below). The app works both online and offline and provides basic capabilities for account, activity and opportunity management.

Finally we were also surprised at the level of international growth that Capsule has already experienced. Most contestants on CRM Idol EMEA had focused on their home market first and were now looking to break into an international market. However, only 25% of Capsule’s customers are based in the UK. The largest market for Capsule was the US & Canada, accounting for 40% of customers, with AsiaPac and Continental Europe 12%.

The go-to-market approach for Capsule had clearly been well through out and already strongly executed. The company has already signed up 500 affiliates. These range from traditional IT and Consultancy firms, to (rather surprisingly) customers, who the company incentivizes with a  generous 20% royalty to act as recommenders for their product. The company also places a strong emphasis on the Google Apps market place where they are ranked number 3 in the CRM category.

Overall, the Capsule presentation and demo left the judges feeling positive about the Capsule product. This is not a solution for those with sophisticated CRM requirements. However, for a young company, entering a fairly crowded market, we felt that Capsule had come a long way very fast. For a small vendor, they showed surprising maturity in both their product development strategy and their go to market approach and we applaud them for that.

Workbooks.com

Company Background

Workbooks.com CEO John Cheney is a veteran in software development, we all noticed that during workbooks´ presentation, from the beginning on he demonstrated subject matter expertise, and experience with presenting to influencers. It was no surprise when he told us that he founded two previous successful SaaS security companies which he later sold for good money (Blackspider and Activis).

Workbooks was created in 2007 in the UK and rapidly became one of the fastest growing, European based providers of web-based CRM and Business Applications in its home market. Currently the company counts with a core team of 6 people on management level. Its suite of Business Applications is specifically designed for SMB and delivered via SaaS. Workbooks sells efficiency gains to its customers, especially by reducing operational costs. The customer portfolio mainly comprises local UK SMB companies from practically all different sectors, meaning that workbooks is not specialized in a concrete vertical industry.

Their sales strategy is quite unique and impressed us: a free edition of workbooks.com products is offered via online marketing, for upgrading to the so called “core editions” a user can purchase it on different partner sites on the internet (e.g. Google Apps marketplace).

Since its creation in 2007 workbooks.com was focused on raising funds and intense product development. Currently they can presume with 100+ customers using their workbooks CRM edition and workbooks Business edition software. Turnover in 2010 reached $450,000 US, the target for 2011 is $1 million US.

Market

As other contestants of CRM Idol, workbooks.com is targeting the SMB market, a very important and promising segment in Europe. To be positioned well in this sector a software vendor must offer “something more” than CRM functionality only – SMB`s do not have such a complex application and system landscape as big multinationals do: simplicity and efficiency are the key values a software needs to provide. Why is workbooks.com in the market? The following picture perfectly describes the business problem it offers to solve to its customers:

Workbooks.com can provide its customers with a web-based, complete business suite including CRM functionality, avoiding that different applications and data repositories around customer interactions are being used. This is exactly covering the needs of the SMB segment.

Workbooks.com competitors in this segment are salesforce.com, MS Dynamics CRM, Sage and SugarCRM, though Sage would be the only one offering a wider set of business applications apart from CRM functionality (compared to the other companies mentioned).

Product

The product offering is quite simple, and follows the workbooks.com slogan: online software for your business (with the emphasis on “your business”). It´s available in two different packages: Workbooks CRM Edition (Marketing, Sales and Customer Service) and Workbooks Business Edition (Sales Order Processing, Purchase Ordering, Invoicing).

During the demo we noticed that workbooks.com UI is similar to the Windows desktop, creating a sensation of familiarity to the user, and therefore avoiding initial resistance of using the system. The UI is also very nicely structured, there is no screen with huge amounts of data in a xls type, and reports are created in well defined graphs (see screenshot of marketing management dashboard below).

What we could identify as the products strength is its integration ability and facility to other systems. There exists a standard integration to Sage and to Google Docs, for instance. Regarding data structure and model its clear advantage is the concept of organizational relations it uses, and the role definition of relationships between employees (not only between customers).

The products pricing model is midrange for CRM, and higher end for the business edition: workbooks.com CRM costs around 22€ /user/month, the Business edition has a monthly cost per user of 45€. What makes the pricing model interesting is the free edition for up to 2 users with basic SFA, marketing and service functionality (especially interesting for very small companies), and the high probability of up-selling to the CRM or business edition once the user gets familiar with the application. Online support, system documentation, videos and training material are available for free.

Compared to the main competitors, workbooks.com says with his own words that the product investment (including implementation) is available for 1/3 of the price.

Vision

Workbooks.com has a clear understanding of its current positioning in the UK market, and targets to accelerate investments in marketing and sales to further strengthen it. Product enhancement and innovation is the 2011 focus of the company (e.g. release of mobile client, custom page layouts, MailChimp synchronization, Linked-in/Twitter integration). Afterwards the key objective is a geographical expansion to international markets. This is a well thought and healthy definition of a roadmap to lead workbooks.com to a promising future. For international expansion the key will be finding the right partners to market the product, apart from the online sales channel.

Final Thoughts

As a summary, the presentation and demo convinced us that very professional staff is behind workbooks.com: they´ve been in business for a long time and know what counts to develop and market a product to their key segment, there are no boy scouts. The product itself convinces by its simplicity and integration scenarios, but is nothing completely new in terms of functionality. All in all, workbooks.com is an interesting alternative to the current spectrum of key CRM players in the SMB segment.

CRM Idol 2011 Finalists Reviews #2 - The Americas Redux

Okay, yesterday we had the first of the two Americas finalists for your perusal. Now the last two. I'd say Slainte but that sounds ridiculous and has something to do with drinking, so I'm not saying it. However, we have two wild and crazy foxes - Stone Cobra and Get Satisfaction.  Stars in their own right.

Here goes:

Stone Cobra

Customer service is a disciplined and exacting affair — part art and part science, it makes many demands on agents and their organizations and requires a good deal of automation to support numerous activities.  Historically, there have been many software companies offering a part of the overall solution that call centers pick from to produce solutions that meet their distinct needs.  However, quite often an organization fails to achieve its goals.  It runs out of money for this or that application, decides to build it “someday” or figures out a workaround — too often involving a spreadsheet.

The results are uneven.  One call center might excel in training its agents while another might be superior in first call resolution or call deflection to other channels.  Too often the result is customer dissatisfaction but the dissatisfaction is often unique to the particular call center.  The idea of buying or building a call center system and then supplementing it with point solutions has been around a long time and while it might have been a good one a decade or more ago, it has taken us as far as possible.

The call/contact/service center is too important to a company’s mission today for it to fail for lack of tools that can make the difference for customer experience and, ultimately, loyalty.  Also, most call centers have so much invested in both time and money that changing out their systems is something they must consider carefully.  So improving an existing solution is a logical step.

Stone Cobra is a solution that fills in the gaps, where they exist in call center systems in use today.  The company’s unique idea is to build a complete suite of relevant applications that complement core call center functionality (or replace complicated, unused processes) and to pre-integrate them with popular systems (e.g. Siebel, Salesforce’s Service Cloud).  The result is a layer it calls Systems of Engagement (SE).  The SEs accesses data held in CRM, communities, Knowledge Management systems and other enterprise applications (Figure 1), process it and present the most relevant information to the agent.

Figure 1 Systems of Engagement.  Source, Stone Cobra

The idea that a system of engagement can provide a layer between systems of record and the user is not new.  For instance, two decades ago products like PowerBuilder emerged to present a GUI interface for mainframe green screens.  While this analogy may be imperfect it can provide a good metaphor for what Stone Cobra does.  The idea coincides with the research of at least one of us (Esteban Kohsky described Customer Service 4.0 involving mashups in 2010).

Stone Cobra is all about providing a Web 2.0 experience for the user, which enables better employee engagement and may lead to greater customer satisfaction.  The product is designed to reduce or eliminate mouse clicks and to anticipate some of the information that might be required in a customer interaction that often may need to be culled from multiple systems.  There are seven applications or systems of engagement in the product.  Briefly they are:

• High Volume Case Responder
• Knowledge Centered Support
• Advanced Case Management
• Agent Productivity Tools
• Real-Time Training & Coaching
• Problem Management
• Kepner-Tregoe Resolve

Without a doubt a company can buy these kinds of solutions from multiple vendors and while Stone Cobra’s products are good what differentiates them are their integration with each other and their out of the box integration with Siebel, Salesforce Service Cloud Inquira and Instranet.

The company is made up of CRM industry veterans, mostly from the call center space and includes co-founders Amanda Roberts (CEO) and Scott Sanders (CTO) they have a pedigree that goes back to Octane, a call center application that was bought by Siebel about a decade ago.  The cash from that deal combined with the co-founders’ reputations have enabled the company, in its early stages, to sell without a formal sales team and enabled the company to refrain from taking on venture capital.

The product is built as a native Force.com application and is therefore delivered as a cloud-based solution.  Stone Cobra says it has built all of the applications it intends to so the product is complete though innovation will continue.  The close relationship with Salesforce means the company also tries to match subscription pricing terms, price and discounts when selling into that community.  Pricing tiers are: two applications $39/user/month, four applications $69/user/month, all apps $99/user/month.  Still the company derives most (70%) of its revenue from consulting, not product sales, a condition it expects to invert in the near future.

We think this solution has legs and the company has legs owing to its veteran leadership and deep experience.  The big issue we see is that the company will always need to react to changes in the underlying products’ functionality.  Any vendor could decide to add functionality that directly competes with Stone Cobra if it wants to.  Also, any of the call center products could age out or otherwise cause customers to consider migrating away.  But if Stone Cobra is as in tune with customer-centricity as it presents then it should be able to weather any such difficulties because it will have a loyal following.

Get Satisfaction

Get Satisfaction provides a platform allowing companies to build online communities in order to facilitate conversations between companies and their customers.  Founded in 2007, the San Francisco based company has approximately forty employees, and targets customers of all sizes with their community platform.  Get Satisfaction recently closed a $10M round of Series B financing, to bring their total of capital raised to $20.9M.

Get Satisfaction gets its customers create online communities where their customers can post questions, comments, and complaints that all community members can read. GS clients can respond to posts directly, and their customers can respond to each other. Community members can rate the responses based on how helpful they are.

Get Satisfaction provides its customers an easy to use platform that allows them to encourage community participation, provide valuable customer insights, and enhance customer loyalty.

The approach GS takes to finding customer insights is to analyze the wealth of unstructured conversation data generated in their communities by adding metadata around it – things like keywords, products, sentiment, and other attributes.  The metadata is oriented around conversations in the form of the topics, of which Get Satisfaction collects 1.8 million topics a month across their roster of client communities.  Information they attach to categorize conversations include:

• Topic Type
• Title of Topic
• Topic Sentiment
• Topic Product/Service
• Keywords assigned by moderator

Adding this information makes conversation data more usable to enterprise line of business applications, like those of integration partners including:

• Salesforce.com
• Zendesk
• Assistly

GS makes it easy for community members to search knowledge bases and leverage dynamic FAQs to find answers to problems on their own, or by leveraging the knowledge of community members in real time conversations. Widgets are also provided to place access to knowledge base information on websites, Facebook, and on mobile devices - making the information more accessible to people looking for solutions.

Get Satisfaction includes tools to collect and prioritize product-specific customer feedback by adding a feedback tab to any (or every) page of a customer’s website.   And it recently upgraded its integration with Facebook by making it possible for administrators and customer service agents to take data from a wall and channel it into a Salesforce.com and worked as a case.

Get Satisfaction powers sixty thousand online communities, with a total of 2.5 million registered members.  They are adding 106,000 new registered users a month. 12 million unique visitors come to their communities every month, generating 30 million page views.  Thirty percent of network traffic comes from outside the US.

There are different levels available to fit a variety of budgetary and functional needs:

• Free (adding 1,600 a month))
• $49/mo
• $99/mo
• Enterprise
  • $6K
  • $20K

The majority of their customers are B2C companies. Approximately 2,360 of the 60,000+ communities are fee-based; including 120 enterprise customers.  The average enterprise deal size is $27,000, and they average closing eight enterprise deals a month with a 27% conversion rate after prospects sign up for a 15-day free trial.  The close rate for standard community deals is 75% after trial signup, averaging 244 monthly conversions.

The application is built on a multi-tenant architecture with Ruby on Rails, using Amazon cloud services.  Serving the community needs of a number of Fortune 500, as well as tens of thousands of smaller companies, the application is built serve a huge (and growing) number of members.

All in all, the competition in the online community space is only going to get more intense.  Players like Lithium, Jive and a few others will provide stiff competition, particularly at the high end of the market.  But Get Satisfaction has what it takes to be among the leaders.  They have an offering for all levels of business, which allows them to grow relationships with companies that can start at one end of their community offerings and move up as they mature.  And their recent deal with Salesforce.com to become a reseller allows them to offer CRM with community management and workflow - all in one single solution.

The company has a lot of momentum, and we expect that to continue into the foreseeable future.

CRM Idol Finals: Now for the Fun

This Friday at 6pm Eastern time, the seven CRM Idol finalists - 4 from the Americas and 3 from EMEA - will be submitting their videos that will pretty much determine who is going to be chosen the first ever CRM Idol finalist from the Americas and from EMEA. There is a lot at stake here. A HUGE amount of important prizes, recognition that they were the very first competition winners ever. Folklore in the making. Legendary activity.

Okay, maybe not that extreme, but the contest has gained its legs over the past several months and is an institution now - a competition that will be done annually.  On Friday, the seven finalists will be submitting videos that met the criteria that we laid out.  Then the extended judges panel and the general public will be voting and a winner declared for each of the Americas and EMEA - that will be on November 7.  Then they get all kinds of good stuff.

In any case, in honor of the finals and the videos, I'm reprinting the reviews we wrote about the 7 finalists.
In date order here's what you'll see:

1. October 19 - Crowd Factory, Assistly
2. October 20 - GetSatisfaction, Stone Cobra
3. October 21 - Zestia, BPMOnline, workbooks.com

I'm publishing them here and on my ZDNET blog.

Enjoy and vote responsibly. Watch for a list of "polling places" on Friday too - though of course, you can always vote at the CRM Idol website. There will be a survey monkey voting poll set up for that. No app though.

Here ya go!

Keep in mind, all reviews are signed off by the CRM Idol Primary Judges panels.

Crowd Factory

Social media marketing is a term widely used by many of us to define how we manage a Facebook page to gain Fans or to drive traffic with promotions using hashtags on Twitter. There are hundreds of free and commercial applications to assist in doing just that, but their value add is questionable. Is this really enough to call the process social marketing?

Not really. What the market needs (in our humble opinion) are solutions that help make your current marketing more social. This is what Crowd Factory does: help make your current marketing campaigns more social. Crowd Factory provides Social Marketing Automation (SMA) solutions (notice the omission of the word “media”).

Crowd Factory is built on the foundation that consumers trust, peer recommendations but few of us trust banner ads (or any ad for that matter). This trust should drive traffic, influenced by recommendations and suggestions from peers, to a purchase or a community of peers. Crowd Factory embeds its technology in many social media and digital channels to help drive traffic and engagement using voting systems, recommendations, promotions, discounts, comments and ratings widgets.  Some of these channels are:

1. Facebook Pages
2. Display Ads
3. Landing Pages
4. Mobile Apps
5. Email
6. Video

Crowd Factory provides a marketing process to convert traffic to your eCommerce site from a digital ad campaign.  Within the ad you can place a voting system with social share capabilities that customers can access without leaving the ad or landing page helping drive conversion or group buying. The fact that you are not taken to another site and the social activity is done within the widget is an important benefit. It optimizes the traffic conversion and, more important for social marketing and the marketer, makes it trackable and measurable.

The nice thing about this process is that you end up with a database of engaged customers, influencers or users. The marketing processes provided by Crowd Factory have different uses besides a voting system with social share.  Social discounts, viral comments and “like management” are a few more.

Crowd Factory has an impressive list of customers: Microsoft, HBO, MTV Networks, Universal, MolsonCoors and GolfChannel. According to Crowd Factory some of their customers have obtained significant lift on top of paid media (73%) and lowered their acquisition costs (7 cents per conversion).

Crowd Factory is a B2C social marketing tool that allows monitoring and campaigns optimization with combined analytics from Facebook, ecommerce, websites and other social channels. This gives the ability to provide continuous testing and measuring of your social marketing campaign.

Crowd Factory’s roadmap includes the integration to CRM, email and marketing systems. They have also joined Jive’s Apps Market. Their application allows engagement within the community by creating group offers and deals.

Crowd Factory provides more than hashtag marketing it really does support social marketing in all of its dimensions. It is an ideal solution for B2C organizations that are looking to create engagement and increase traffic conversion. If you need to test and measure your social campaigns, Crowd Factory is worth considering.

Assistly

Assistly is a cloud-based customer support platform focused on servicing small and midsize businesses.  Founded in October of 2009, it is the fourth startup created by a core group of four serial entrepreneurs with deep customer service software experience.  Three of their previous startups were customer service application service providers – including eAssist and eShare.

The company currently has thirty-six employees, with key executive hires bringing additional call center experience to the organization.  They have multiple locations including San Francisco and New York.  Their board of advisors is made up of executives with solid business experience and acumen, most notably Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban.  Additionally, Assistly has raised $5.7 million over two rounds of financing.  Investors include Salesforce.com, Index Ventures and True Ventures, to name a few.

Assistly’s target audience is companies with  5-1,000 employees.   Additionally, 30% of their current customer base is headquartered outside of the US, although there has been limited focus on overseas distribution.

The solution is geared towards assisting their clients in providing multichannel support to their customer bases.  They emphasize being a contact center solution, as opposed to a more traditional call center application, as it is not optimized for telephony (CTI/IVR) integration.  They focus on companies with business models that are more web-centric because of the tendency for these organizations to favor a multichannel approach.

Assistly’s plaftform provides the following capabilities:

Interaction Management

• Dynamic FAQs (on your website)
• Community Q&As
• Manual Telephony
• Email
• Chat
• Twitter (reactively and proactively)
• Facebook

Case Management

• Including realtime executing business rules, workflows and filters

Knowledge Base

• Internal and external support

The solution comes with interfaces for the agent desktop, system administration, and reporting.  Also included is the HelpCenter self-service portal, which provides the following out of the box functionality:

• A searchable, skin-able, customizable place on the web that can connect with client websites
• Client customers can go to discover their own answers or ask other users for assistance
• Full knowledge base can be exposed

As a customer submits a request through the search function of the portal, Assistly will take a pass through the knowledgebase and display the top three answers that could provide possible solutions while the customer types.

The solution is a Ruby on Rails based, self-provisioning SaaS application, using Amazon’s EC2, S3 and Cloudfront services.  Its REST-based API allows developers the ability to retrieve cases for a particular customer, retrieve or update a customer’s information, and to create new interactions, cases and customers.  And they are working on native iPhone, iPad and Android apps for the agent interface to be delivered within next 60 days.

Assistly has come up with a pricing model that makes it attractive for SMBs to try it out.  The first user (fulltime agent) gets to use the system for free, with every additional fulltime agent costing $49 per month.  But the most interesting piece of the pricing model is how they charge for part time agents.  Assistly charges part time (or as they say flex) agents $1 per hour of usage.  So if a group of five part-time agents work a total of 80 hours, Assistly will charge the customer $80.  That’s a big discount from having buy each of them a $49/mo license.

Assistly also offers an onboarding “to-do” list that companies can go through to help them get set up for configuring the system, including:

• Setting up email boxes (and outbound email boxes)
• Writing macros
• Writing articles to fill out Knowledgebase (same KB is used by agents, and website visitors for self help)
• Adding Twitter accounts
• Adding Facebook Pages

These tasks not only help customers and their agents to get up to speed quickly, but as you complete tasks Assistly gives you bonus flex hours to use – a nice gamification twist that creates a win-win scenario.

The customer support field targeting the SMB space is definitely an area more companies are focusing on.  But there is no eight hundred pound gorilla in the space and in many cases bug tracking systems and homegrown tools are the biggest competition.  But as more companies use social channels to provide support to customers, they will need systems that make it as easy as possible to do so.  Assistly is in a good position to be a leader at the SMB level.  The application has the needed functionality while being easy to use.  The architecture in place should allow them to scale their operations when needed.   And the pricing model will be attractive to SMBs needing to ease into using this kind of system.

From Brent Leary: Tweet for Chance to Win a Free Dell Laptop. From PG: Do It!

NOTE: Since this is a really good promotion for winning a Dell E6320 and it’s a reliable  one because its coming from my great friend, CRM Playaz sidekick and seriously heavyweight CRM thought leader Brent Leary, I’m reposting his post from yesterday in full so that you all have a chance to win this plus give feedback to Dell.  The only thing changed is that I changed the word “tomorrow” to “today”  in the first lines below. I’ve included a pic of the laptop too. Slick.

Brent, take it away, dude.

 

Sorry for the short notice, but this is pretty cool.  I’m helping the small business folks at Dell (@DellSMBUS) give away a Latitude™ E-6320 laptop (approximate value of $1,529).  It’s a random drawing for those who participate in a tweet chat taking place 12:30pm – 1:30pm ET today - September 29^th.

Here’s what you need to know in order to get in on this:

• Follow me on Twitter, at least until a few minutes after 1:30pm tomorrow (you’ll know why in a minute).
• You automatically will receive one (1) entry into the contest for each message you post that answers the question, “What’s your trade secret for ensuring on-the-job reliability?” andincludes the hashtag #tradesecrets.  You can have up to three entries in the contest.
• Winner will be selected in a random drawing from all eligible entries received on or about 12:30PM – 1:30PM EDT on September 29, 2011.
• One winner will receive a Dell™ Latitude™ E-6320 laptop. Approximate retail value (“ARV”) of prize: $1,529.00.  Prizes are non-transferable.
• Potential winner will receive a direct message from me (which is the reason you need to follow me until a few minutes after 1:30pm ET) through Twitter account used to enter the Promotion on or about September 29, 2011.
• If a potential winner does not respond to direct message or complete the Prize Disclosure Agreement and W-9 (see below for this) within the required timeframe, prize will be forfeited and awarded to the next runner-up.

Those are the basics. Below are the details and legalese that cover everything you’d ever want to know about this contest.  But the bottom line is by sharing a couple of your secrets for “getting the job done” and building a reputation for being reliable, you get a chance to win a really nice laptop.  And even if you don’t win the laptop, you’ll get chance to pick up some great tips that can help you build better relationships with customers and prospects looking for reliable business vendors.

So remember:

• Follow @BrentLeary – at least until a few minutes after 1:30pm ET on September 29^th
• Join the #tradescrets chat 12:30-1:30pm ET on September 29th
• Answer the question “What’s your trade secret for ensuring on-the-job reliability?” andincludes the hashtag #tradesecrets. 
• Be quick to respond to my DM letting you know you were selected to win the laptop.  We’ll have to go to the next person if I don’t hear from you within a couple of minutes.

Hope you join us tomorrow at 12:30pm ET!  Below are all the intimate details for your review.

The Latitude-E Promotion

Official Rules

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN. A PURCHASE DOES NOT IMPROVE YOUR CHANCES OF WINNING.

Promotion may only be entered in or from the 50 United States, the District of Columbia and entries originating from any other jurisdiction are not eligible for entry. This Promotion is governed exclusively by the laws of the United States.  You are not authorized to participate in the Promotion if you are not located within the United States.

1. How to Enter. During the Promotion Period, visit http://twitter.com/#!/brentleary (“Administrator’s Twitter Page”) to receive instructions on how to enter the Promotion.  Prior to doing so, you will be prompted to sign into your Twitter account.  If you do not have an account, visit www.twitter.com to create one.  Twitter accounts are free.  Once logged into your Twitter account, follow the links and instructions to become a follower of @brentleary. You automatically will receive one (1) entry into the Promotion for each message you post that answers the question, “What’s your trade secret for ensuring on-the-job reliability?” and includes the hashtag #tradesecrets.

By entering, each entrant warrants and represents the following with respect to their Twitter message: (a) entrant is the sole and exclusive owner of the message; and (b) the message is entrant’s own creation and will not infringe on any rights of any third parties.

Dell (“Sponsor”) and Administrator reserve the right, in their sole and absolute discretion, to disqualify any messages that are inappropriate for any reason, including without limitation, for depicting or mentioning sex, violence, drugs, alcohol and/or inappropriate language.

Limit: Each entrant may enter a total of 3 (three) times during the Promotion Period. If you post updates to or receive updates from twitter.com via SMS from your wireless phone, your wireless-service provider may charge you for each text message you send and receive.  Please consult your wireless-service provider regarding its pricing plans.  You must be an active holder of a non-private Twitter account and be a follower of the @brentleary account to be eligible to enter this Promotion. All terms and conditions of twitter.com apply.  Multiple entrants are not permitted to share the same Twitter account.  Any attempt by any entrant to obtain more than the stated number of entries by using multiple/different twitter accounts, identities, registrations and logins, or any other methods will void that entrant's entries and that entrant may be disqualified. Use of any automated system to participate is prohibited and will result in disqualification.  In the event of a dispute as to any Twitter account, the authorized account holder of the email address used to register at twitter.com will be deemed to be the entrant. The “authorized account holder” is the natural person assigned an email address by an Internet access provider, online service provider or other organization responsible for assigning email addresses for the domain associated with the submitted address.  Each potential winner may be required to show proof of being the authorized account holder.

All entries become the sole and exclusive property of the Sponsor and Administrator, and receipt of entries will not be acknowledged or returned. Sponsor and Administrator are not responsible for lost, late, illegible, stolen, incomplete, invalid, unintelligible, postage-due, misdirected, technically corrupted or garbled entries, which will be disqualified, or for problems of any kind whether mechanical, human or electronic.  Proof of submission will not be deemed to be proof of receipt by Sponsor.  By entering the Promotion, entrants fully and unconditionally agree to be bound by these rules and the decisions of the judges, which will be final and binding in all matters relating to the Promotion.

2. Start/End Dates.  Promotion begins at 12:30PM EDT on September 29, 2011 and ends at 1:30PM EDT on September 29, 2011 (“Promotion Period”).

3. Eligibility. Participation open only to legal residents of the fifty United States, the District of Columbia, who are 18 or older as of date of entry.  Void outside of the 50 United States, the District of Columbia, and where prohibited, taxed or restricted by law.  Employees, officers and directors of Sponsor and its parent company, subsidiaries, affiliates, partners, advertising and promotion agencies, manufacturers or distributors of promotion materials and their immediate families (parents, children, siblings, spouse) or members of the same household (whether related or not) of such employees, officers and directors are not eligible to enter.  You are not authorized to participate in the Promotion if you are not located within the United States or the District of Columbia.  All federal, state and local laws and regulations apply.

4. Random Drawing/Odds. Winner will be selected in a random drawing from all eligible entries received on or about 12:30PM – 1:30PM EDT on September 29, 2011.  Odds of winning depend on the number of eligible entries received for the drawing.  Drawing will be conducted by Administrator. By entering the Promotion, entrants fully and unconditionally agree to be bound by these rules and the decisions of the judges, which will be final and binding in all matters relating to the Promotion.

5. Prizes. One winner will receive a Dell™ Latitude™ E-6320 laptop. Approximate retail value (“ARV”) of prize: $1,529.00.  Prizes are non-transferable.  No substitutions or cash redemptions.  In the case of unavailability of any prize, Sponsor reserves the right to substitute a prize of equal or greater value.  All expenses not specifically listed herein are the responsibility of winners.

6. Notification. Potential winner will receive a direct message from Administrator through the Twitter account used to enter the Promotion on or about September 29, 2011. Potential Winner will be required to respond to the direct message and complete a Prize Disclosure Agreement and W-9 form within 3 (three) days of receipt.  If a potential winner does not respond to direct message or complete the Prize Disclosure Agreement and W-9 within the required timeframe, prize will be forfeited and awarded to the next runner-up.  Potential winners must continue to comply with all terms and conditions of these Official Rules, and winning is contingent upon fulfilling all requirements.  Potential winner will be required to sign and return, where legal, an Affidavit of Eligibility, Liability/Publicity Release and/or rights transfer document within 3 (three) calendar days of prize notification.  If any potential winner is considered a minor in his/her jurisdiction of residence, Affidavit of Eligibility and/or Liability/Publicity must be signed by his/her parent or legal guardian.  If a potential winner cannot be contacted, or fails to complete and respond to the direct message within the required time period, if any prize or prize notification is returned as undeliverable, if any potential winner rejects his/her prize or in the event of noncompliance with these Promotion rules and requirements, such prize will be forfeited and may be awarded to the entrant with the next highest score.  Upon prize forfeiture, no compensation will be given.

7. Conditions. BY PARTICIPATING, ENTRANTS AND WINNERS AGREE TO RELEASE AND HOLD HARMLESS SPONSOR, ADMINISTRATOR TWITTER, AND THEIR ADVERTISING AND PROMOTION AGENCIES AND THEIR RESPECTIVE PARENT COMPANIES, SUBSIDIARIES, AFFILIATES, PARTNERS, REPRESENTATIVES, AGENTS, SUCCESSORS, ASSIGNS, EMPLOYEES, OFFICERS AND DIRECTORS, FROM ANY AND ALL LIABILITY, FOR LOSS, HARM, DAMAGE, INJURY, COST OR EXPENSE WHATSOEVER INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION, PROPERTY DAMAGE, PERSONAL INJURY AND/OR DEATH WHICH MAY OCCUR IN CONNECTION WITH, PREPARATION FOR, TRAVEL TO, OR PARTICIPATION IN PROMOTION, OR POSSESSION, ACCEPTANCE AND/OR USE OR MISUSE OF PRIZE OR PARTICIPATION IN ANY PROMOTION-RELATED ACTIVITY AND FOR ANY CLAIMS BASED ON PUBLICITY RIGHTS, DEFAMATION, INVASION OF PRIVACY, COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT, TRADEMARK INFRINGEMENT OR ANY OTHER INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY-RELATED CAUSE OF ACTION.  Any and all federal, state and local taxes are the sole responsibility of the winners.  Participation in Promotion and acceptance of prize constitutes each winner’s permission for Sponsor to use his/her name, address (city and state), likeness, photograph, picture, portrait, voice, biographical information, and/or any statements made by each winner regarding the Promotion or Sponsor for advertising and promotional purposes without notice or additional compensation, except where prohibited by law. Entrants who do not comply with these Official Rules, or attempt to interfere with this Promotion in any way shall be disqualified.  Sponsor and Administrator are not responsible if Promotion cannot take place or if any prize cannot be awarded due to travel cancellations, delays or interruptions due to acts of God, acts of war, natural disasters, weather or acts of terrorism.

8. Additional Terms. Any attempted form of entry other than as set forth above is prohibited; no automatic, programmed; robotic or similar means of entry are permitted. Sponsor, Administrator, their affiliates, partners and promotion and advertising agencies are not responsible for technical, hardware, software, telephone or other communications malfunctions, errors or failures of any kind, lost or unavailable network connections, web site, Internet, or ISP availability, unauthorized human intervention, traffic congestion, incomplete or inaccurate capture of entry information (regardless of cause) or failed, incomplete, garbled, jumbled or delayed computer transmissions which may limit one’s ability to enter the Promotion, including any injury or damage to participant’s or any other person’s computer relating to or resulting from participating in this Promotion or downloading any materials in this Promotion.  Sponsor reserves the right, in its sole discretion, to cancel, terminate, modify, extend or suspend this Promotion should (in its sole discretion) virus, bugs, non-authorized human intervention, fraud or other causes beyond its control corrupt or affect the administration, security, fairness or proper conduct of the Promotion. In such case, Sponsor may select the winners from all eligible entries received prior to and/or after (if appropriate) the action taken by Sponsor. Sponsor reserves the right, at its sole discretion, to disqualify any individual it finds, in its sole discretion, to be tampering with the entry process or the operation of the Promotion or web site.  Sponsor may prohibit an entrant from participating in the Promotion or winning a prize if, in its sole discretion, it determines that said entrant is attempting to undermine the legitimate operation of the Promotion by cheating, hacking, deception, or other unfair playing practices (including the use of automated quick entry programs) or intending to annoy, abuse, threaten or harass any other entrants or Sponsor representatives.

CAUTION: ANY ATTEMPT BY AN ENTRANT TO DELIBERATELY DAMAGE ANY WEB SITE OR UNDERMINE THE LEGITIMATE OPERATION OF THE PROMOTION MAY BE A VIOLATION OF CRIMINAL AND CIVIL LAWS AND SHOULD SUCH AN ATTEMPT BE MADE, THE SPONSOR RESERVES THE RIGHT TO SEEK DAMAGES FROM ANY SUCH PERSON TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW.

9. Use of Data.  Sponsor and Administrator will be collecting personal data about entrants online, in accordance with Sponsor’s privacy policy.  Please review Dell’s privacy policy at http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/policy/en/policy?c=us&l=en&s=gen&~section=000. By participating in the Promotion, entrants hereby agree to Sponsor’s collection and usage of their personal information and acknowledge that they have read and accepted Sponsor’s privacy policy.

10. List of Winners. To obtain a list of winners, send a self-addressed, stamped envelope by October 15, 2011 to: Latitude-E Contest Winners, c/o Zócalo Group, 200 E. Randolph Street, Suite 4200, Chicago, IL 60601.

11. Sponsor. The Sponsor of the Promotion is Dell US SMB Marketing, One Dell Way, Round Rock, TX 78682.Tweet for a Chance to Win a Free Dell Laptop Tomorrow

Choice, Circumstance, Context: The Hilton Hotel & The Vagaries of the Customer Experience

For whatever reasons, the hospitality and travel industries are amazing for providing an endless fount of stories. These stories could almost be called, in a strategic sense, individually customized services discussions - but that resonate with other people. Of course, while it does feel like these are stories of things that happened to YOU - and you only, truth be told, they really are easy to understand. Travel experiences (hotels, airplanes, trains) are built around what is a very emotional set of events. There are expectations that are pretty redundant from event to event, occurrence to occurrence. The expected quality of the service or event is about the same from venue to venue. In the case of a hotel it would typically be:

1. Easy check in
2. Recognition of elite status if you have it
3. courtesy regardless of status including things like eye contact
4. working room keys
5. clean rooms
6. working appliances in the rooms
7. efficient room service
8. Many other things
9. customer friendly design
10. Easy checkout

Needless to say, I can go on and on. But, its these things that as more than a sum total, that make up components of a customer's experience at a hotel. What the hotel chooses to do at these impact points can make or break how a customer thinks about the hotel, or more importantly feels about the hotel. If the bad is not just coincidental but is perceived as either a company policy or bad conscious choice, then there is a higher premium placed on the impact of the experience for the customer. I'm going to skewer the Hilton Hotel in midtown Manhattan - use them as an example of exactly that - bad choice that seems to be either conscious policy or poor on the spot decisionmaking. Unlike the Ritz Carleton, or much of the Marriott chain, The Hilton, at least to me, has no more than a generic customer experience strategy. Walking in to the Hilton, my overall expectation was that it would satisfy my needs, not exceed them, because that is minimum standard that all hotels operate on, and I can expect faithfully when I check in the note. But this particular Hilton, made some small bad choices that led to a horrible experience, which because it was repeated with others in one fashion or another, had a bad business outcome.

Why Was I at the Hilton in NY?

Simple. It was for the CRM Evolution conference for 2011, which for the first time was at the Hilton on Avenue of the Americas, which, incidentally, is called 6th Ave, by any proper New Yorker. The conference, which lasted from August 8-11, pulled together a broad spectrum of very high powered influentials in CRM and smattering of social influencers, a significant number of vendors, the largest group of practitioners in the conference history. The unofficial number of attendees for the conference, which I heard from one of the principals was 500 in total. I chair the conference annually,and as long as the good burghers from Infotoday ask me back, I will be back. On a sidenote: They did ask me back for 2012, which I happily accepted. I really like chairing this conference). To put everything in a nutshell: The conference was a significant success, the Hilton Hotel wasn't. The Hilton was this year's venue and the reason for it was that both Internet connectivity and the treatment of meals was supposed to be a step up from the Marriott Marquis - site of the last several conferences. Let's just say it was and it wasn't.

The story….

My wife and I blew into town a couple of days early to catch Wicked at the George Gershwin Theater on 51st St where it has been running for eight years. I'll digress for a second and tell you this: outside of an iconic performance of "Man of LaMancha" which is seared into my soul for all eternity, this may have been the best musical that I've ever seen with only "Billy Elliott" competing and I've seen dozens of musicals. Okay, back from the commercial. In any case, this was a first for me, staying at this particular Hilton in NY. I've stayed at Hiltons and some I've liked and some have left little impression on me, but none has really gotten me p.oed before. Until now.

What Happened?

I'm going to number this sequentially.

1. As the conference chair, my hotel stay was placed on the conference master account. When I checked in with my wife, as I've done with literally every other hotel I ever have stayed at in the last 3 years or so, I gave my rewards program (Hilton Honors) number. They said to me, "Oh, well, because you're on the master account, you can't have the points." I found this a little puzzling, since I've literally NEVER run into that at any hotel I've stayed at including Hiltons and any Marriotts, nor has it been a problem on airlines. So I asked about it. He said, corporate" and let it go and didn't really want to talk about it. Bad start to a stay.
2. My wife and I then went to go to our rooms and I couldn't find the elevator for a minute so we went and asked a desk that seemed to be a bell captains or something like that but, like every other desk in the lobby where there was no real place to sit (except for the bar and its extension), the desks were unlabeled. A young guy there told us where the elevator was, asked for our room, offered 500 points. That seemed odd since I didn't tell him that we hadn't been given the points - until he hit us up for a resort properties seminar in the hotel the next day. Eventually, we managed to escape to the elevator.
3. When we arrived at the room, imagine our surprise that we had two double beds! Let's just say that we were obviously a married couple at the front desk. Even if they couldn't tell that we were married, they called us Mr. and Mrs. Greenberg, so you have to assume they knew that. They didn't give us a choice, nor did they say, "I'm sorry but the only room available had two double beds, is that okay?" Nada was said at all.
4. We decided to roll with the punches, and put on the lights in the room, which seemed unnaturally dark, probably due to the buildings outside blocking light, but hell, this is NY, what would we expect? Except that one of the lamps didn't work - the bulb kept fritzing out and then back on and out again. So we called customer service, which picked up after about 3 minutes. They sent someone up 10 minutes later and he checked and said, "the lamp has to be replaced." About 30 minutes later, there was a message flashing on the phone that I listened to which said, "sorry about the lamp. Someone will be up tonight or no later than tomorrow morning to replace it." Well, I guess the morning extends to about 2pm in Hilton time, because it wasn't replaced when we got back the following day from a traipse around the city to get ready to go to Wicked - and only because I called customer service again and told them it better be replaced by the time it got dark.
5. In parallel with all this, I needed to get Internet connectivity and, since I'm not elite at the Hilton, I realized that I would have to pay something. Well, imagine my surprise when I found out that if I wanted wireless connectivity it had three levels with actual high speed, which is typically what I need going for a stellar $18.99 a day. But the other two choices which racketed down to $13.99 by their own standard were considerably lower, making me think that what should have been one choice - high speed, for whatever price they want it to be - since its their prerogative - was a much smarter idea than the way they presented their Internet options. Though not a biggie.
6. That first night, we decided to order in because we were tired and went with room service as an option. After 5 minutes, room service picked up and promised our order in 30 minutes "or less." Forty-five minutes later, I called and said, "where's the order?" They promised it in ten minutes. Twenty-five minutes later it showed up. Food wasn't bad though.
7. Next day, I got ready to take a shower and I couldn't pull the handle out. After a futile call to customer service since we were trying to leave within the hour, I found the problem. Someone (I presume a kid) had jammed a stick underneath the handle blocking it from being pulled fully out. I broke the stick and it was fine. I would have thought they'd have checked the shower and used the water to wash the shower floor before we got there but I guess not.
8. Without giving you too much detail, lets just say it took them SEVEN HOURS to solve an important problem in the bathroom in addition to the one I solved with the shower. Yah. Seven hours after they promised they'd be right up. We left came back 6 hours later. It hadn't been taken care of, even though I had called them prior to leaving. It still took 2 more customer service calls to get them to solve it an hour after we got back.
9. We asked the person who cleaned our room to not do something. She agreed easily. Ten minutes later, when we returned to the room, it had been done. Ten minutes after we asked her to not do it.
10. The elevators closed really fast on people trying to get in and out. Sometimes by the time people got out, it was already closing. Seems to be a minor annoyance, yes? It would have been.
11. When we checked out, no one asked how our stay was - which might have been a good thing under the circumstances. It was a no eye contact, room number, see ya kind of checkout. Again, minor? Not by that time.

One additional factoid - David Myron, the jefe of CRM Magazine and sponsor of this conference told me that he's had more complaints about this hotel than in the three years preceding when the conference was at the Marriott Marquis, which was no great shakes either.

So, now, you have the chain of events. Let's look at what this means for thinking about customer experience - how it works in the minds of those that are customers - especially in emotional industries - like hospitality.

Choice, Circumstance, Context: The Concept

Customer experience is something that has been at the core of CRM since day one of its existence. Even though CRM had a decidedly left-brained bent and was based on a company's operational activities, at least its stated purpose was to improve the experience of the customer in his or her dealings with the company. It often failed at its stated purpose and instead, became identified with the use of technology to automate processes that would support the operationalization of sales, marketing or customer service. But its fundamental purpose never went away. Even disgruntled former CRM supporters admit that much these days. So when someone like me tries to place the Hilton experience in a CRM context, its always based on a simple reality. As an individual and as a CRM practitioner, what did Hilton do that p.oed me with the individual hat and how would I go about fixing it with my practitioner hat. What I've come to understand over the last several years, and like all of us, have probably always known, is that a few poor choices can enhance the negative feeling around what would be circumstantial instances because of the context that they were in when they occurred. To put it in terms that the Gunning-Fog Index would probably prefer:

When companies make consciously stupid decisions on how they are going to treat customers - when they have a choice - the negative impact of other bad things is amplified greatly. Why? Because they are framed by dissatisfaction to begin with.

That is simply what we mean by choice, circumstance and context. Do wrong with the things you have control over, and the bad things you don't have control over will bite you in the butt that much harder, because of the ill will you've generally fostered. Think about it this way. What if:

1. The Hilton had given me the points, which I had come to expect because of my experiences with other chains and even other Hiltons
2. They had asked me and my wife about their decision to give us two double beds, which is ordinary courtesy
3. The guy had just directed us to the elevator without trying to pitch us.

Three choices that the Hilton made in the early part of the checkin experience. Think about it. If you had a benign or good early experience, how would you have felt about a lamp that was out when you got there? If you weren't already irritated, would you have even paid attention to and thought about the ridiculous pricing tiers for Internet connectivity? The lamp wouldn't have been a source of irritation, it would have been a service request. The 3 tiers might not even have come to your attention beyond making a choice. It wouldn't have meant much at all. Now, the room service was a problem. Choice? No. Circumstance? More than that. But because of the three little irritations at the beginning setting the context, the room service lateness became a major irritation. What's interesting here is how they might have remedied it - and didn't.

Another story.

I was at the Marriott Marquis in San Francisco for salesforce's Dreamforce 2011 conference last week. I was in the bar with Accenture CRM practice leaders and ordered some food. It took more than 30 minutes. When I talked to the bar attendant about it, she went and found out what was wrong, took care of it, had the food out in 5 minutes, and without any expectation on my part of anything else said, "I'm not charging you for it." Wow. Thank you. I like this place. Contrast that to the Hilton, who should have offered something. Free dessert, no charge, a free drink from the menu or something as an apology rather than the "I'm sorry" that they offered the first time it was late and the second "I'm sorry" the second time it was late. But they didn't. So rather than rectify a situation, they exacerbated the irritation that had been building due to the lateness of the food twice and in the context of a bad initial experience that day. Remember, the effects of small bad experiences in emotional industries like hospitality tend to be cumulative, not singular.

The Business Outcome of Bad Experience

So now you say, meh, what was that all about? All that explanation for so little a result? Let me tell you the business impact. As a result of an experience like this repeated multiple times in different forms (ask Ray Wang about his experience at the bar), CRM Evolution is no longer going to be at the Hilton. For the next three years, CRM Evolution is going to be back at the Marriott Marquis. Customer experience is, and always was, the foundation of CRM - and the business outcomes that are what makes it something that we've always thought important. But there is only so much of the customer's individual experience that is controllable by the choices that the company makes. But making those small choices and being sure that they are made as repeatable ones and at the same time, providing the environment to support the smart decisions so that the employees are making the right decisions by nature. Then other circumstantial things become less problematic because the contesxt is good. And then, maybe CRM Evolution stays at the Hilton. Ray, bartender story