1.       I call customer service and get to talk to an agent right away?

2.       I get a correct resolution to my problem fast?

3.       I can find a colleague in Europe who works on the same problem?

4.       Post a question on discussion board and get solution within 5 min?

5.       When my call gets transferred from one department to another I do not have to repeat who I am and why I am calling?

6.       Agent at the podium actually likes me asking him/her questions and trying to be truly helpful?

7.       I purchase products and services that are reliable enough that I do not need to deal with points 1-6?

8.       ..  you can add your Ifs here!

What is the formula of success in keeping your customers happy in most “unhappy” moments – when they contact you [in person, via social media channels, phone, etc..] with issues [or questions] about your products and/or services??

Here is my recipe:

70% – culture: customer focused company – not a person, not a channel – the whole company is customer focused!

20% – analytics and analysis – 100 degrees: why so many issues? Do we need to fix a product? Do we need to update Knowledge Base? Add agents? Increase support hours? Focus more on social media channels? Etc..

10% – software tools/solutions – the right mix of enabling technologies to support required business processes.

Is your company a GOOD COOK? What is your recipe?

Participated:

Tatyana Kanzaveli – Moderator

Tatyana Kanzaveli, CEO of Social CRM World, has broad experience in sales, marketing and business development, technology and professional services. She held executive roles in number of start-ups and large multinationals. She was an early adopter of social media and social networking channels, using them to build successful online and face-to-face communities. Tatyana runs strategic Social CRM and social media marketing consultancy — http://scrmworld.com.  She is also an organizer and curator of TEDxBayArea events. You can follow her on Twitter: @glfceo

LaSandra Brill

LaSandra Brill is a social media enthusiast, avid blogger and marketing innovator. As Senior Manager of the Service Provider Digital & Social Media Marketing group, LaSandra Brill shapes Cisco’s marketing strategy to include a mix of social media marketing techniques leveraging web 2.0 technologies. At Cisco she is known for building and executing the social media strategy of one of the top five product launches in company history.

LaSandra is also an Ezine expert author and authors a blog, Marketing in a Web 2.0 World, where she explores how marketing is changing for B2B companies with the rise of social media and Web 2.0. She has over ten years of technology marketing, communications, and web strategy experience. Before joining Cisco, she held management positions at Mirapoint and AppStream.

LaSandra holds a Bachelors of Science in Business Administration with a concentration in Management from San Jose State University.

Richard Margetic is the Global Social Media lead, currently responsible for Dell’s strategy, governance and presence in social media, cross-segment, around the globe. For the five years he’s been with Dell, Richard has been instrumental in the launch of Dell’s social media presence, including blogs, idea platforms, wikis and Twitter accounts. With 15 years’ experience in web  marketing and development, he was a managing global web consultant for IBM and PWC Consulting prior to Dell and led the opening of Microsoft’s Sidewalk office in Dallas.

Frank Eliason is currently Senior Vice President of Social Media at Citibank. Frank became well known in social media for the Customer Service outreach function that his team at Comcast was involved with. This work has been recognized by many news organizations such as ABC News, New York Times, Business Week, among many others. Taking the simple approach of asking “Can we help” has created new communication channels for Customers and an improved Customer experience. Prior to joining Comcast in 2007 Frank has worked in Customer Service management for Advanta Bank and Vanguard Investments. Connect with Frank on Twitter at @FrankEliason or his blog http://frankeliason.com

Sudha Jamthe is the social media strategist for PayPalX platform where she brings contagious passion for grassroots communities and social media to distrupt and build all facets of business with a methodical strategic approach.

Sudha brings 15 yrs experience in Internet marketing and is passionate about social technologies, platform play and mobile space.

She is a rare marketer who believes passionately in the power of innovative teams and thrives in developer ecosytems, leads the Bay Area Facebook and Twitter Meetups, Weekendapps, Barcamps and Community leadership summit and brings social apps to large marketing campaigns such as DEMO Live, a facebook partnership for live conference conversation, Developer Program for Bebo/AOL and Twitter Campaigns at Intuit.

Earlier she was Director Business Solutions at $2Billion education publisher Harcourt where she led strategic planning across 27 business units. She often forays into the startup world with pet side projects, a mobile middleware startup Coola, ecommerce startup Moomli, Facebook Micropayments startup Socialmints and tmeet, a twitter location application on the iphone.

She is a venture mentor at MIT and social media adviser for DEMO Conference. She has a MBA from Boston University and a BS from Madras University. She blogs at coolastory.com and lives as @sujamthe on twitter

Key points we discussed:

-         Social Media Management Systems. Core processes:

o       Listening;

o       Publishing;

o       Workflow;

o       Reporting;

o       Analyzing;

o       Integration with other systems.

-         What tools are used:

o       Over 10-15 products have been mentioned, including Sprinklr, Radian6, Group Vine, Social Ping, Omniture, Salesforce, Position 2,  ScoutLabs [Lithium], Techrigy [Alterian].

-         Organizational structures:

o       Central Social Media Team [shared services]:

• provides Social Media training;
• special sub-group on measurements – creates reports, distributes to all other teams;
• responsible for creating Social Media guidelines and standards;
• tools evaluation and selection for company-wide adoption in Social space;
• for now this team is also doing some functions that should eventually go back to corresponding BUs such as content creation, content distribution, support, etc.

Seems like this is a desired framework, some companies are almost there, some are in a process of getting there.

-         Listening at a high level works – gives a good feel on a state of the brand especially in comparison to competitive brands, however not all the data is captured by most of the known tools. Companies are using combination of local specializes searches in addition to overall listening tools to get the most coverage;

-         There is no single product out there that does most of the functions of SMMS – seems like companies are using 4-6 tools [at least] to manage overall processes;

-         Timing matters – analyze what times people are visiting key destinations and schedule your messaging accordingly;

-         Use combination of automated and manual processes/responses to manage interactions.

Join over 1000 executives from F2000 companies at Bay Area Executives meetup [it is Global and free to join!] to stay updated on other events in Social Business [Enterprise 2.0, Social CRM] space.

Huge Thank You goes to sponsors of this Global Social CRM meetup:

CISCO Systems

CISCO Public TelePresence Suites

Contact Me to Sponsor Next Global Social CRM Meetup

Workshop was held at Harvard Law School facilities. Attendees included vendors and thought leaders in VRM space, some industry folks, few CRM practitioners and others. Format of the event was a blend of formal presentations/panel discussions and un-conference type of activities masterfully moderated by Kaliya Hamlin.

Here are videos from Day 1 of the workshop:

I also taped couple of break-out sessions. One was on Government 2.0 and community involvement in governance. And the other one was a demo of VRM-like application for personal medical information/processes management.

Interesting data on #VRMCRM2010 Twitter coverage:

Here is a quick recap of my views on VRM:

- still in early stages of development;

- very technology focused;

- no clear definitions of what VRM application is and what is not;

- VRM depends on people’s willingness to share their personal data/activities in cloud-based Personal Data Stores – I anticipate lots of discussion related to security, privacy;

- Customer Master Data files: what is the overlap or potential overlap with PDS-stored data and customer data maintained in ERP/CRM systems – ownership and synchronization issues;

- VRM will shine more when applied to cross-industry – processes-based applications [see medical example video above].

- I recommend more industry specialists attending future workshops and creating business cases and roadmaps for actual applications;

- VRM and CRM systems will have to be integrated in a future. Examples:

• sales process: pricing, products, customers data are maintained in CRM; intents, etc will be captured via VRM; analytics will reside on both; etc..
• marketing: CRM will keep track of all marketing campaigns, metrics, materials, etc; VRM will potentially supply leads for some of the marketing activities;
• service/support: CRM will handle all back-end tasks – problem tickets creation, assignment, metrics; VRM and Social will allow to capture complains, knowledge..

I might be completely off as this was my first exposure to the VRM world. But I do want to bring VRM discussions closer to specific business processes and have more detailed discussions on a process per process basis with technology as an enabler..

I am sure your views differ from mine – feel free to challenge me here!

Thanks again to Doc Searls and team for facilitating amazing discussions and bringing top minds to VRM-CRM summit this week!

I was reading recent post written by Michael Arrington on his less than pleasant flight experience SFO-JFK-SFO on Delta airlines and I was thinking how broken all the processes are – all those processes that should integrate back end, front end and social echo systems to enable companies to provide excellent customer experiences to those people who pay for their services.

Let’s look at Michael’s experiences:

I bought a first class ticket, which is one of the small luxuries I’m willing to pay for in life. This was a last minute purchase and the flights were around $1,500 each way.

Don’t you think that every single person at the airport who interacts with Michael during his trip should be aware he paid that much money? Does Michael care, that security people are not employees of Delta airline or should he care?? How difficult it is for airlines consultants to create an integrated business process that impacts overall customer experiences during the whole process of flying?? How hard it is to equip TSA agents with the bar scanning devices to check tickets at the security points [they check them manually anyway]? And that system can automatically check the a) the validity of the ticket; b) show status of the passenger..

These are just some of many obvious process improvements steps airlines can make …

Let’s take them a step further.

If there would be Social CRM in place and the social part would of been integrated with all processes that impact airline passenger experience.. then:

TSA folks would also be able to see that Mr. Arrington has over 34,000 followers on Twitter and his Klout score indicates his high level of influence and .. and.. and…

I truly believe that every single person who is flying is entitled to experience the best customer service with or without their social influence level, but… if you know the social influence level of your customers you might leverage that for special sales and marketing actions??? something else?? Maybe think twice before saying or doing something bad?

Anyway, you can comment on missing bags, attitude of the crew, many other things that greatly frustrate us as customers paying money.. and not getting services…

Michael have written a blog post about his experiences during this flight, post have been re-tweeted 862 times, shared on Buzz, Facebook.

The question is: is Delta listening social media channels? Will it act? How long it will take for them to get back to Michael with apologies? And most importantly when they will start thinking about overall customer service experiences and doing right things to start improving them?? How they can implement the culture of CARING?

Social Business StartUps Showcase.

Here are some of the presenters of our Social Business [Social CRM and Enterprise 2.] startups showcase:

Nimble

Nimble is a Web Based SaaS platform that helps small businesses attract and retain customers by enabling their team to work more effectively together and stay top of mind with their prospects and customers. Nimble was designed to enable small business to attain the same benefits larger companies have achieved with their CRM strategies without the associated costs and complexities. Nimble CRM combines the power of relationship management, unified conversations/communications, social media tools, and team Collaboration under one roof. Nimble keeps you and your team organized and allows more effective communications between your company and its contacts from one centralized SaaS platform regardless of what they are using: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, IM, text message or email.

Presenter:

Jon Ferrara, Nimble CEO and Founder, is long-time CRM veteran who founded and ran award-winning GoldMine Software, an early pioneer in the CRM market until it was acquired in 1999. He understands small businesses sales/marketing needs and knows how to create solutions to meet them, channel strategies to implement them and viral branding to maintain awareness. As a veteran, Ferrara can speak what Social CRM needs to become in the Web 3.0 world. After living in the Small Business trenches for twenty years he understands CRM and the SMB market better than anyone.

___________________________________

eCairn

eCairn Inc. is a privately held software technology company, founded in October 2006. We specialize in community and influencers marketing and differentiate in “who matters”. Our headquarters are in Los Gatos, California in the heart of Silicon Valley. Our founders have a cumulative experience of 50+ years in e-marketing, knowledge engineering, collaborative filtering, linguistics, software development and software engineering at well known companies such as Hewlett Packard, Sun, Xerox, eBay and Motorola.

Presenter:

Laurent Pfertzel
COO and Co-founder of eCairn.

___________________________________________________________

Synopsis of Crisp Social Analytics Platform

Crisp’s NetModerator Platform is automated moderation and social analytical technology, which has been deployed to date, predominantly in the online gaming sector to detect, track, report and action on anti-social behaviour including spamming, gold farming, bullying and online grooming. However, it can also be used to track sentiment (both positive and negative) in and across all online social environments including; blogs, Twitter, Facebook, review sites, and brand specific UGC communities and we will soon be releasing our new product “Crisp Social Analytics Platform”.

Crisp’s Social Analytics Platform is different from other Social CRM technology as it enables:
- Real-time interactivity with the user – you can track sentiment right down to an individual level and are able to interact with that user automatically where needed.
- Real-time contextual-based sentiment data – It helps companies discover not only what people are thinking today but tracks their sentiment over time. All profiling is active and dynamic.

Presenter:

Peter Maude – CTO & Founder

Peter has worked as the lead software architect on a number of major online games and virtual worlds including Dubit where he developed its ground-breaking GAML platform, the first mark up language for virtual worlds that allowed, for the first time, all actions and game content to be scripted.
As CTO of Crisp Thinking, Peter oversees the entire product development and architecture for all our solutions and forthcoming products. With expertise in systems integration, security, advanced web technologies, CRM and mobile applications, Peter is one of the UK’s leading software technologists.

Click here for Registration and more information about this event!

On another hand we all were unhappy with unreliable WiFi connectivity at the hotel. Seems like most of the venues in SF are not addressing this very important issue..

First day’s keynote was packed with people occupying empty floor spaces on a back of the hall.

Major partnerships has been announced:

-         with Microsoft – seems like Sugar CRM was able to secure MS support in cloud applications space;

-         with SnapLogic – also important partnership; integration is always a constant area of concern and with SnapLogic’s opening of integration widgets appstore, this potentially expensive and time-consuming task can be simplified;

-         lastly with their partnership with SIOS, Sugar CRM was able to address the reliability aspect of cloud-based mission-critical applications.

For the rest of the conference I pretty much reserved my space in Social CRM room. Listened to series of great presentations from Mitch Lieberman, Esteban Kolsky, Jeremiah Owyang, and others.

I really wanted to talk about Social CRM with SugarCRM customers. And I planted myself at the table with 5 small businesses owners at lunch time and initiated conversation around “social” aspect of CRM. To my surprise: none of these 5 people have used Twitter or Facebook. Some of them have attended Social CRM sessions but could not relate to the content – was too advanced for them. I am not sure how representative these 5 were out of hundreds who attended the event, but I thought it would have been helpful to split Social CRM sessions into novice and more advanced groups.

I managed to video tape few talks:

- Esteban Kolsky;

- Jeremiah Owyang;

- Kira Wampler.

In general it was great to chat and listen to thought leaders in Social CRM space and learn more about SugarCRM’s strategic directions in this space.

Special thank you goes to Mitch Lieberman for great facilitation of Social CRM discussions!

Hope to see you all next year!

John Ragsdale is the vice president of technology research for the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA). Previously he served as the vice president of technology research for AFSMI, SSPA, and TPSA. Ragsdale’s area of expertise is in creating strategies for improving the overall customer experience and services operation through technology. Ragsdale drives TSIA’s highly regarded technology research agenda, delivering insightful, thought-leadership research and analysis on the most pressing business issues facing services leaders to enable them to better plan and execute their service strategies.

Prior to joining SSPA, Ragsdale spent over five years at Forrester Research as vice president and research director. During his career, Ragsdale has held product management and marketing positions at various service and support technology vendors, including Clarify, AnswerSystems, Platinum Technologies and Nortel Networks. He has been involved in customer service throughout his career, including over ten years managing both the internal and external customer support organizations at J.C. Penney, before moving to the Silicon Valley in the mid-90s.

With his in-depth industry analysis experiences, Ragsdale brings an extensive understanding of the technology and vendor landscape for services. He leverages those insights to help guide Association members in making informed technology, business and investment decisions.

I am posting his presentation and video recording of his talk.

Video recordings from our previous meetups are posted on our iTV channel.

Social Business [Social CRM and Enterprise 2.0] news, discussions and jobs are posted on our LinkedIn and Facebook pages.

All Social Business resources are listed at Social CRM World web site.

Why We Cannot Get CRM (and SCRM) Quite Right

Instead of commenting on each of these blogs I decided to write this post. Mainly because my view on the topics above is somewhat different. And the main difference is that I can’t discuss something so high level and vague as overall Social CRM framework. I want to start with specific business processes as we know them and assess the impact of “social” on them.

Let’s for example take a look at a classic enterprise B2B software sales process. It consists of stages. Here are sample stages:

Field Sales Stages:

-         Opportunity development;

-         Discovery;

-         Preparation of Solutions Set;

-         Proposal;

-         Socialization;

-         Potential Pilot;

-         Project Approval;

-         Contract negotiations;

-         Closing deal.

Companies manage sales process in SFA module – either stand-alone or part of CRM system.

Each sales person has his/her own assigned group of accounts. Either territory, industry, etc. based or named accounts.

Once telesales done with the lead, it gets auto assigned to a sales executive. And then sales executive walks this assigned qualified lead through the stages mentioned above to hopefully a happy end: “won! closed deal”.

Now let’s look at this sales process from a “social” point of view. What will change?

First stage - Opportunity development:

You need to set up meetings with client’s executives, document their requirements, start building relationships and at the end of this phase create detailed account plan.

How is this stage impacted by “social”? – well, you do want to do “social” discovery: do executives from this target company blog, are they on twitter, etc.. You did somewhat “social” discovery before. Its just before your search results were returning conference talks, magazine articles, etc.. as these new additional “social” channels such as Twitter, Facebook, etc.. either did not exist or were not that popular before.

Moving on to the next stages of the sample sales process listed above – well, none of them actually will change.. no impact of “Social” to them. Is that right? – Yes! Or almost yes. One of main new stages that will go in parallel to the old ones will be social media monitoring. As a sales person you need to know what your target customer is talking about in social space as you are moving through your sales process – they might accidently tweet something important!

New Sales Process Stages:

Why did I go through this exercise? Just to prove the point that there is no such a thing as an overall “social framework” for whatever term you comfortable using: CRM, Social CRM, CRM 2.0, Social Business..

We need to step deeper inside and start talking about enterprise business processes and the impact of “social” on each of them.

Expect some disagreements here. Again my choice for a sales process was driven by my  enterprise software sales experiences – B2B sales to F1000 companies. Your company’s sales process might differ. And for what you do the impact of “social” could be greater than in this example. Great! Then do what I just did and map out stages and assess each of the stages with “social” hat on.

Your comments of course are greatly appreciated!

Last night I posted 2 videos from our most recent meetups – panel discussions on sentiments analysis and communities, innovations, enterprises.

I usually post links to all meetups and industry related materials on our Facebook Fan Page and LinkedIn group.

Let me know if you’d like to present at one of our upcoming events.

See you all soon!

I’d like to go back to basics if you will and refresh our understanding on one of the key pieces of “social” strategy for any business: online content strategy.

In media production and publishing, content is information and experiences that may provide value for an end-user/audience in specific contexts. [Wikipedia]

Here is how I classify online content:

-         Static [Web site; Press Release and alike];

-         dynamic:

• Real-time [twitter and alike];
• Periodic [blogs, RSS feeds and alike].

Online content distribution channels:

-         web site;

-         Twitter;

-         Facebook;

-         LinkedIn;

-         Google Buzz;

-         Google Wave;

-         Blog;

-         New channels, etc..

Points to address:

-         What online content distribution channels my business need to engage with?

-         Will the same content be used across all of them?

-         Sequence of content distribution;

-         Dependencies;

-         Frequency;

-         Ownership;

-         Workflows.

I am sure different businesses [and people] have deployed different content strategies.

Today, for example, Tim O’Reilly posted the following on Google Buzz:

Ok. I’ve stopped feeding my tweets into Buzz. Will use this site only for longer discussions. Adding comments to tweets didn’t really work because they take too long to show up here. Those of you who did read my tweets here, you should follow @timoreilly on twitter.

I may still post some of the same links to both places, when I want to make additional comments.

What is your content strategy? Does it work for you? How do you assess the quality of the content and the quality of online content distribution strategy?

Your war stories please!