Got data?
I feel like social CRM has become a burger joint. You want fries with that? Is the traditional up-sell question made famous in skits and jokes but now I feel like we need to ask something akin in social CRM. The revised question? You got any data to go with that?
To date the lion’s share of information about the wonders of social CRM has been anecdotal, short stories about a customer here or there that succeeded or pieces by noted writers on the subject stating what ought to be true.
Now, I am not out to criticize anyone or any method of research, in fact, taking a broader view of this or any trend the first phase often runs this way. There are claims and counter claims and eventually no one really knows much and the old phrase “let’s get down to brass tacks” makes its reemergence yet again.
There’s an irony here that I can’t help but observe though. Not long ago I noted that a quick Google search on the words “social CRM” returned about seven million hits. I did it again as I write this and got over 14 million hits just now. Of course, Google could just be messing around with its algorithms again. The same search for “social CRM expert” brought back about 1.5 million hits back then and just now the number was holding steady.
The irony to me is that underlying the practical CRM use of social media is the notion of crowd wisdom or crowd sourcing but this is substituting for real research. Too many people have the same or very similar opinions about the efficacy of social CRM. We debate definitions and let that stand for wisdom and in the process the debate takes on a theological cast.
We need quantitative research. This idea requires a certain amount of detachment — independence, decentralization and diversity as Jim Surowiecki might advise. But in the echo chamber that has become front office computing all we get is someone’s opinion bolstered by the re-tweets of those who agree. It’s time we cut to the chase and did the hard work of counting noses.
Already there are reports in the popular press about the failure of social media in business. As I have written in this space before, many of those failures come about from operator error — misunderstanding what is possible with the technology or poor application of existing ideas. Hey, it happens.
It happened with CRM in the way-back and it’s happening again. Back in the day, I surveyed the Siebel customer base to try to understand why so many CRM projects were failing. The principle finding was that half of the organizations that bought CRM had no idea of why they bought it or what they would do with it. These customers were remarkably consistent — they had no plan and no pre-implementation self-analysis that said, in effect, this is what we need to fix and we’ll know it’s fixed when we can achieve these results. Nothing, zilch.
Of course, it’s impossible to do the kind of research I am suggesting early on simply because we need some hardy souls to take on the products and use them. In effect we need to analyze use and with that use comes a certain percentage of success and failure. But that time is over, there are enough examples and we need to analyze them.
Analysis means taking a statistical look at a large population. It’s nice to have customer stories and case studies but they only tell a story in a single instance and a single instance can be wrong or it even can be right but for the wrong reasons. We need to prove statistically what works.
Luckily a movement has started to do the kind of analysis that will yield the results that encourage later adopters to jump in. Paul Greenberg http://bit.ly/amOQHe has begun agitating for us to roll up our sleeves to produce the kind of gold standard research that’s needed to guide the industry in the adoption of this very important technology. I think that’s great and it’s long over due. Sign me up!
If you are a user of social CRM it would be great to hear form you and if you have ideas for what to analyze and which pitfalls to stay away from I’d welcome your input too. To paraphrase Shakespeare, enough of the anecdotes told by a vendor about its own products and customers. They signify nothing.
La vie en zombie
Zombie life
This is strange.
In the last six hours I have been invited to two webinars each of which will only run in Internet Explorer and each by companies who ought to be a tad more ecumenical. These aren’t small companies either — they are Microsoft and Oracle.
Oracle wanted to brief me on some of their announcements for Oracle Open World, the annual user conference that will draw about 40k people to San Francisco in September. I’ve tried to get into other Oracle on-line invitation-only events before but their software won’t even allow me to see the goings on. This one is the same.
Microsoft asked me to sit in on a series of briefings but they advise in the email “You must have Microsoft Office Live Meeting 2007 installed to view this webcast.” Well, I don’t.
I also don’t have any intention of buying more proprietary software especially for something that should be as free and open as a browser. I have a Mac that is happy to run Safari, the Apple browser, as well as Firefox and Chrome.
Now hear this guys, I am out of patience with this nonsense so I am going to scrap my customarily diplomatic demeanor and cut to the chase.
Grow up.
You are not going to attract more customers by making your stuff more proprietary. Those days are over and out and they ended with the IBM 360 architecture.
In case you haven’t noticed we’re living in an age of standards and open architectures. Unfortunately, much of what you offer has at least a little that’s proprietary and it’s not top shelf. Can you say Ubuntu, Safari, Chrome?
I know Apple has lots of proprietary stuff too but they don’t make you feel like a leper by keeping you out of one of the basic levels of communication on the Internet. What’s next? Will Outlook email only communicate with Outlook? Will Oracle only trade data with other Oracle databases?
To repeat, this is not how you build a user base or loyalty. This is a retrograde action for a set of policies that died a long time ago and are apparently embarking on a zombie life-cycle.
How to schedule a briefing
We’ve become so attached to our asynchronous communication modes that we’ve lost sight of the importance of getting something done in real time. I am referring to how we try to schedule meetings. Too often I get an email asking for a meeting to which I respond that the inquirer should call. In my weaker moments I say that I take briefings after 2 PM most days. At that point I get a Swiss cheese calendar of options and I have to scour my appointment book to see what fits, constantly referring back to the email to check. This might be followed by more email to pick a day and modify the time if possible. And on and on… This can easily be followed by a chain of emails but we could avoid the back and forth if you’d just call.
This isn’t to make life difficult but the opposite. When you call we discuss possibilities and book something.
The alternative is to put a hold on several blocks of my time while you check with your client’s schedule and get back to me. This I cannot do. My calendar runs a first com/first served algorithm. If it didn’t I would end up with a lot of wasted time as blocks expire.
I put out this reminder about once a year and scheduling improves but then inevitably falls back into the old pattern.
I find this very interesting because I have been doing this long enough to recall a time when all meetings were scheduled by phone. It was quick and painless and it the person on the other end of the phone had to schedule multiple meetings it was pretty easy to grab a small block of customer time and fill it up without the mindless back and forth.
I suspect that on-line meetings have contributed to the problem. Back in the day, you made appointments for face time and so you knew you’d have that block. With on-line meetings you might often be booking a meeting here or there filling in holes in your client’s calendar. It’s different.
I don’t care. It’s maddening to try to schedule the number of meetings I take through email. So, I know this is a rant and thanks for reading but would you mind calling to schedule a briefing or other phone meeting?
TSM (Thanks so much.)
The meta customer experience
Last week I looked at an interesting downside of social media. Social media makes it possible for anyone with very little effort to start a blog or social group that thrashes a vendor. Generally speaking the people behind these sites have a gripe that has a fragment (or more) of truth in it and it would be harder for a corporation to fight these annoyances than to simply let them be. That strategy implies that the publicity acquired by fighting is greater than what’s gotten if the perpetrators simply do their thing. Twisted up in all this is the concept of the customer experience.
Customers who take the time to start a blog or other social site with the title “[your company’s name] sucks” are more than a little bent out of shape as evidenced by the effort they spend dragging your name through the mud. In part one of this series I showed how I discovered this trove of social CRM research just waiting for some analysis. This week it’s time for analysis.
As I mentioned in part one it is amazing that much if not many of the critiques of companies have less to do with actual product or service issues and more to do with what I call Level 2 customer experience but we could also call it the meta experience. The meta experience in on full display at the “BP Sucks” sites where people tear into the oil company for its runaway oil well in the Gulf of Mexico and other issues. People these days aren’t disposed to love oil companies and the disaster appears to have put them over the edge. Other oil companies have their detractors too but none except Exxon have a greater negative following. As the largest company in the world, Exxon is in a class by itself.
Even categories of entities you’d think were or should be immune from the phenomenon get rung up. My best example is the Ivy League colleges. Yep, the Ivies. You would have thought that people who get there would have nothing to complain about but in this free-swinging era you’d be disappointed. Some of the Ivies have suckometer readings that would make a corporation blush. Topping the list of Ivy League schools on the suckometer is Dartmouth with a very healthy About 1,080,000 results (0.38 seconds).
Why is this?
Well, to coin a phrase, I guess if you live by the customer experience you also die by it. The entities that have some of the greatest problems seem also to be the ones that have least control over their customer experiences. Many companies today actually try hard to design good customer experiences. In an interview with Greg Gianforte, founder and CEO of RightNow, recently I learned about how hard that company tries to design its own customer experiences and how they try to instill the importance of design in their customers. I think it’s working too.
But what few of us ever expected is the idea of the meta experience — the experience your customer has as a result of mere insinuations made my your company, usually in a different context. Starbucks is a good example.
Starbucks sells an experience much more than it sells either coffee drinks or edibles and that experience shapes how its customers perceive the company and — surprise — how they see themselves. Starbucks is not alone in this and when a company falls down over some issue that affects how people see themselves, fans become detractors.
Clearly, if you care about what your customers think and say about you then not only do you need to design the primary experience but you have to look out for unintended consequences or blowback from every action you take — a.k.a. the meta experience. That sounds hard and perhaps it is, but here are some ideas to help.
- Understand what you stand for and make it part of everyday life. Companies used to have (still have?) mission statements that often included words about ethical treatment of customers, employees and vendors as well as concrete descriptions of what they do. For instance, Google is famous for a somewhat tarnished and unofficial one-sentence summary, “Don’t be evil”. People are watching so it might be time to dig up the mission statement and make sure it influences your business decisions. You know, walk the walk.
- Test your customer experience design with real people. This is really just a quality control step and I’ll bet lots of companies engineering customer experiences only go so far as to test if anything breaks along the way and see if every sub-process ends properly. You need to ask real people who are not interested in your profit and loss statement to break the design before deploying it.
- Think outside the box. In this case the customer experience design itself. Use communities to gather data about your customers’ attitudes, needs and biases. If you run the community right (get help if you need it) and people freely reveal their thoughts, the process will reveal things you would never even think about in a million years.
This is important. In market after market today, the pecking order is already established — we know who is number one and who is supposed to be trying harder. In other words, there are fewer green fields to go after and few net new customers to get. The way to growth and profitability today is to keep the customers you have and now and then steal some from the other guy. Providing inadequate customer experiences — even unintentionally — is a sure way to lose in this zero sum game.
iCentera’s patent
Kudos to iCentera for receiving a U.S. patent for its sales enablement portal platform. For years this pioneering company, with a tag line of “portals for mortals” has diligently worked to popularize the idea of easy to use portals that companies can use to communicate and collaborated with customers or any other audience. You can read the announcement coverage here http://yhoo.it/dqTcWI if you like.
A portal is simply a private web site that a vendor can deploy to develop an interactive customer communication channel and it can be very effective at providing very low cost and unobtrusive contact. iCentera’s portals have been used extensively by more than 170,000 subscribers and more than 10,000 portals have been delivered as a SaaS service by the company.
I think these numbers will look small in a couple of years for several reasons. First, the marketplace is changing and it is becoming increasingly friendly to the portal approach. As companies build ever larger customer bases and see the value in cross selling or up selling existing customers they will increasingly need sales channels that are inexpensive to maintain because the margins on cross sells are often much smaller than the original purchase.
But also, customers are becoming ever more sophisticated and are becoming less receptive to a constant barrage of calls from sales people. A portal puts more of the control in the relationship in the hands of the customer. Finally, as transportation costs increase companies will seek alternatives to putting expensive sales talent in front of customers if the same results can be gained through a portal.
For all these reasons, I think portals have a bright future. The U.S. Patent Office’s grant of a patent simply acknowledges the advance of the art of portal design and deployment and makes no case for its efficacy. That’s what analysts are for.
