Third Idea Consulting

Here in the Northeast (New York to be precise) we’ve just had our first big winter storm. It wasn’t as bad as predictions threatened, but it’s still made a mess of things. Ice and snow are now part of our daily lives, along with puddles of slush and people who seem to forget (or to never have learned) how to drive, walk, or operate a thermostat when the weather turns ugly.

As with most big cities, we rely heavily on public services, and even more so when it’s time to dig out from under a snow storm. Unfortunately, those services are among the last strongholds of people who don’t know how to listen to or care about customers. Make no mistake: Citizens are customers of their municipalities, and we’re not always served appropriately.

To be fair, bad weather makes life harder for everybody, including plow drivers and the transit workers who keep the subway stations free of ice. We’re also short on funds to pay for emergency crews. Still, I’ve been noticing an attitude of “I don’t care” this year, and because of the situation it’s hard to provide feedback in a timely and effective manner.

Some of our subways stops are above ground (crazy, isn’t it?) so they receive a heavier load of snow and ice. The steps leading up to the platforms are metal clad, which makes them incredibly slippery when wet. In my travels these past few days I’ve seen a number of stairwells at busy and not-so-busy stops that haven’t been shoveled, swept, salted, or even sanded. Slippery stairs plus impatient people plus city property equals hundreds of potential personal injury claims against a town that can’t really afford to pay. But nobody’s saying a thing, because if we’re using those stairs then we’re on the way to or from someplace, and it’s too cold and miserable to stop.

Yesterday afternoon I watched a snow plow try to make a right turn while a woman pushing a stroller was trying to cross the street. The plow (which had to start from a dead stop) essentially chased the woman out into the middle of the intersection in order to make the turn. But nobody said anything, because it’s cold, and everybody’s on the way to someplace else, and there isn’t a good way to chase down a snow plow on foot.

In both cases, and many more, the incidents get pushed to the back of one’s mind after a while because there’s something else to think about, and no lasting proof, and ultimately nothing gets done. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

If you’ve been keeping up on this whole social CRM thing, you’ll have seen the powerful effect that a photo or a short video can have in motivating corrective behavior when a company screws up. We need to remember that city services are a business, and we’re its customers, and we should hold the city to the same standards of responsibility with the same threat of ridicule. We’ve all got cameras on our mobile phones nowadays (at least many of us do, and the rest are expecting one this Hanukkah-Christmas-Kwanzaa-Solstice-Festivus). So just do what you’d do if your local big box merchant drops the ball on safety and service: Take picture, shoot a video, get it online ASAP. Tweet the incident to your friends and family. Blog about it. Be responsible customers, so that the city can be a responsible entity—or be held responsible.

I’m not advocating playing gotcha with city governments. We’re already far too prone to try and squeeze money out of government in this overly litigious society of ours. This is not about blackmail. This is about making those who watch out for us do what’s right.

Other than that, things are pretty good, and I hope all of you can say the same. Have a happy, healthy, safe holiday (whichever one it is for you), and try not to get too stressed out.

I was thinking today about the similarities between bad CRM practices and owning cats. I realize that telling you this and then writing about it may hurt my credibility, but (1) it’s true that I was thinking this and (2) I am really tapped for better ideas today, so here goes.

The dialogue, if you can call it that, between cats and their owners is mostly in one direction. I buy a new toy or type of food for the cats, and then try to interpret their interest—marketing. We don’t speak the same language, just as businesses often don’t think of a successful product in the same way a customer would.

Once I’ve started the marketing campaign, the next step in KRM (Kitty Relationship Management) is trying to close the deal, turning up the pressure in order to sell the cats (their names are Cookie and Dr. Harbl, in case you were wondering) on the wonders of these new rawhide mice, or frozen raw venison burgers, or whatever. Again, the success or failure of my efforts is dependent on factors I can neither predict nor understand. In time I might develop some insight to what these particular cats prefer, but I can’t necessarily communicate that information to somebody else, nor can I apply it to other cats.

Kitty customer service? Again, failure to communicate is the order of the day. I am prepared to respond to certain requests from my cats, so every time they provide input I try to interpret it in light of those expected requests: feed me, pet me, or clean the litter box. It took a while to learn that last request, mainly because my own data told me I was doing an adequate job. If I’m not doing what the cats want, they have limited means for setting me on the right track, and if they don’t lodge some kind of protest, I continue with what I’ve been doing.

Good CRM, especially the social kind, is like speaking cat language. Maybe that doesn’t sound like a ringing endorsement, but trust me—it’s huge. If you’ve ever had a cat deposit its “customer feedback” on your laundry bag, you’ll agree.

Businesses are starting to understand the value and importance of a social media approach to CRM, if the calls I’ve been taking are any indication. That’s good, but sometimes I feel that for some people, the terms we use—social media, social CRM, Enterprise 2.0 and the rest—are just words hung onto a concept, their meanings ignored.

While letting “social CRM” exist merely as shorthand for a broader concept—like Paul Greenberg’s excellent and tweetable definition, “the company’s response to the customer’s control of the conversation”—I prefer for the concept to remain grounded in the words that describe it. In this case, the best definition of social itself is from Merriam-Webster: of or relating to human society, the interaction of the individual and the group, or the welfare of human beings as members of society; tending to form cooperative and interdependent relationships with others of one’s kind.

It’s great if your company is engaging its customers and partners in conversation through its own social networking tools. It’s beyond great, it’s necessary in most cases. But there must be more. You’ve got to reach out beyond your own circle, and start exchanging ideas with new people and organizations, ones in whom you don’t already have a financial interest.

This is not to say that you should abandon any current social efforts. Just make sure you’re sticking your corporate nose into somebody else’s as well. I’m not talking about corporate espionage—that’s bad. I mean participation in timely and topical discussion groups (the Answers section of LinkedIn is an excellent example), attending Webinars, and just letting your people explore where their interest takes them.

If our hunter/gatherer ancestors hadn’t been willing to meet other bands of like-minded people, we would never have gotten beyond tribes and clans, warring with one another for access to water, hunting grounds, and abundant vegetation. (You could make a decent argument that we still haven’t gotten beyond that, but I’m feeling generous to our insane species today.) Communication with “the other” brought trade, exchange of ideas, and the peace of mind that comes from knowing what those guys in the next cave are up to.

It’s no different in modern society. Looking for new ideas and new associates to share them with is a major driver for the modern, socially-aware business. Does your desire for partnership and creativity outweigh your fear of competition? It should; competition is healthy. Social interaction means business doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game. Your competitors may glean some ideas from you that they might otherwise not have, but you will do the same. You will each innovate, raising the standard for all. You will allow your entire industry to serve the customer better.

Take the next step. Get your company onto somebody else’s social network. It’s only natural.

When budgets are tight, businesses tend to focus on cutting costs and reducing expenses. This usually leads to reticence on the part of executives to spend for new or upgraded business technology. Sadly, this is a case of being penny wise but pound foolish, if the figures reported in a recent study are to be believed. Billions of dollars are slipping through the fingers of companies who deliver poor customer service, and a lack of good CRM is one of the causes.

“The Cost of Poor Customer Service: The Economic Impact of the Customer Experience and Engagement,” a joint study by Ovum and Greenfield Online (commissioned by Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories) surveyed nearly 9,000 consumers in 16 countries. It revealed that lost relationships—defined in the study as transactions taken to a competitor or abandoned entirely—cost businesses $338.5 billion per year. That works out to about $243 per loss, according to the study. So if somebody ever says, “So what’s one customer more or less,” now you can tell them. For complete reporting, see the destinationCRM.com article by Christopher Musico.

Certainly, poor business processes and a lack of understanding of how to best relate to customers take part of the blame, but everything cited in the study as needing improvement—being trapped in automated self-service, waiting too long for service, callers having to repeat themselves, and customer service representatives lacking the skills to answer inquiries—everything can be remedied by smart use of CRM technology. Here’s a list of the traditional solutions to these problems:

• Trapped in automated self service? This one is easy, even anti-tech: Make sure there’s a way to escalate from the IVR to a live agent. Call deflection has value only if customers are getting the help they need. A timer or tracker that follows a customer’s call and lets a customer service rep break in with live service if the call goes too long or revisits the same menu too often would work if the company (foolishly, in my opinion) doesn’t want a “press zero to speak to an agent” option.
• Waiting too long? There are more than a few on-demand contact centers out there, as well as software that allows companies to direct their call overflow to work-at-home agents who can help absorb the volume. Take your pick.
• Callers having to repeat themselves? This makes me sad, because even simple integration between the CRM system, the IVR, and the agent’s desktop takes care of this, 100 percent. I can’t believe it’s still an issue.
• Representatives lacking the required skills and permissions? A well-stocked and -maintained knowledgebase means that your customers don’t have to suffer for gaps in a particular agent’s expertise. E-learning tools help agents stay current on important information. Not penalizing an agent for handing the call off to somebody who does know how to help, rather than flailing uselessly at a problem, is also wise.

Those are the usual ways to deal with the issues brought up in Musico’s article. It also mentions social media as a potential problem solver. I don’t deny the closing statements of the piece, where Ovum analyst Daniel Hong says it will take some time to get businesses comfortable and proficient with social CRM, but the investment of time and money must be made. It’s been shown that fellow customers are often better at solving some problems than a CSR, so answers are provided for free without costing agent time. Answers generated by the community can be added to the company’s knowledgebase, and over time this feedback can help fix issues with the next product or service in development. That sense of shared experience also makes for loyal customer advocates, which is money in your pocket.

Basic integration has been too long in coming for too many businesses, so perhaps the study will show them the true cost of delay. I hope they remember the social CRM part of the integration as well—bringing businesses into closer and more productive contact with their customers.

My latest guest post for Sage SalesLogix is up at their community site. You can see all the glory there (Sage deserves the traffic), or you can read it here, after the jump and some comments I’m about to make which are not related to that.

At this moment I am busily finishing up the chapter I’m writing for a joint-effort book about so-called Digital Natives, those people who never knew a world without cellphones, Internet, and other technological marvels of the modern age. (I don’t know what the title is yet, or I’d point you to a preorder link.) It’s been more difficult than I expected, because I’ve had to do a lot of relearning about how things are different with that mindset.

I’m not technically a digital native, but I was naturalized at a fairly young age (hey, that’s a good line; I think I’ll use it) because of my nerdy youth and the degree to which the school system and my parents catered to it. Still, I remember when every phone was attached to a wall or sitting on a table, except for pay phones on the street (which people actually used). I remember when high-tech home electronics included the Atari 2600 and the microwave oven, and cable TV remote controls were switch boxes hardwired to the cable box.

More importantly, I remember what customer experience was like before the data revolution, and even for some time afterward. Having this perspective is good for my work, but it also makes it a challenge.

The lesson was reinforced this afternoon at a visit with my doctor. I needed to renew a fistful of prescriptions, and she offhandedly suggested I could save some copay money and get a little extra convenience by using my insurance’s mail service. I know plenty of people who use such a program, but it had just never occurred to me. It’s so natural for me to take my paper scripts to the local pharmacy, wait (or leave and come back), and interact with the pharmacist directly, that I don’t think to do it any other way. I still haven’t decided which way to go this time. It’s not an issue of the digital age, at least not directly, but it reminded me of just how much we’re conditioned by what has become habit.

Anyway, enough of that. Here’s the Sage guest blog I promised:

I hope you’ve all had a good couple of weeks since Sage Summit. This was the first week back in my home and office since starting my guest blog for Sage just beforehand, and already it’s after Thanksgiving. That means we’ve just been through Black Friday and you’re likely reading this on its younger sibling Cyber Monday.

I’ve always been confused by Black Friday; so much importance is placed on one day that it could be its own holiday. Apparently, Black Friday is the Groundhog Day of retail, as one can predict the success or failure of the holiday shopping season by looking at the results. Retailers sweeten the pot by launching progressively larger discounts and special promotions that day, after teasing us with Christmas advertising starting sometime in mid-September.

I don’t see how it works. Sane individuals should avoid Black Friday like the Black Plague. Named after the chaos surrounding the U.S. stock market crash in 1929, Black Friday references the current shopping day’s murderously hectic pace and impossible crowds. Between that and the post-Thanksgiving food hangover, I don’t want to be within three miles of a shopping mall. Most years, I don’t even leave my home.

In terms of customer experience, Black Friday should be the disaster it sounds like, but shoppers keep on showing up and the lines grow ever longer. Maybe there’s something about walking into a retail war zone that stimulates our primitive hunter-gatherer instincts (hunting for deals and gathering merchandise). Or maybe it’s that the experience of fighting through crowds is what we’ve come to expect—it’s not a bad experience if it’s the one you’re planning on. An easy shopping day might be unsatisfying for such people.

Which brings us to Cyber Monday, the e-commerce equivalent to Black Friday. Unlike Black Friday, though, Cyber Monday is mostly fictional. (Economists will disagree with me, but I can handle that.) There are reasons to shop early if you’re doing it in person, because it’s hard to predict how and when shops will restock. (There might also be some gamesmanship in betting more shoppers will be like me and stay home.) There is no similar incentive to shopping online on any particular day. As long as you place your orders 10 days before Christmas, the items are pretty much guaranteed to arrive in time. No fuss, no muss, no risk of car accidents or brawls over the last Malibu Stacy Beach Bungalow in the store.

Some of you are retailers, but just about all of you work for a business that sells something, complete with sales incentives and projections. How are you managing your customers’ expectations of dealing with you? Are you subjecting them to a stressful Black Friday experience when you engage with them? Do they feel no urgency to close the deal, a la Cyber Monday? Or are you providing them with an easy, pleasant sales process that keeps them coming back no matter the time of year?

I’ve just spent (and am still spending) a busy and informative demi-week at the RightNow Summit in lovely Colorado Springs, and I’m glad I came. Greg Gianforte and company are doing some very smart things.I’ve dinged RightNow in the past for sometimes lacking in effective media/analyst outreach, but that appears to no longer be the case, and the timing is excellent.

The reason for my enthusiasm is that RightNow’s message of customer experience is now a product and a strategy, CX. The social CRM and SaaS stars are finally in alignment, and the RightNow CX customer experience suite that Greg G. announced on Tuesday was born under those auspices. My tweets from that morning’s general session will give you some idea of what RightNow CX is all about, but I’ll summarize it here in a more coherent fashion. I’ve got to rely on text because I’m having trouble getting slides to work, but bullet lists are clear enough.

From the ground up, there are five main components of RightNow CX, each containing part of the package. RightNow CX Platform is the technology that supports the traditional CRM functions of RightNow Engage, which in turn supports the three customer experience components (Web Experience, Social Experience, and Contact Center Experience). Thus,

RightNow CX Platform

• Knowledge management
• Integration
• Mission-critical SaaS (more about this later)

RightNow Engage

• Marketing
• Voice of the Customer
• Sales
• Analytics

RightNow Web Experience

• Customer Portal (including Web self-service and mobile)
• Chat and Co-Browse
• Email Management
• Web Experience Design

RightNow Social Experience

• Support communities
• Innovation communities
• Cloud monitoring
• Social experience design

RightNow Contact Center Experience

• Phone and multichannel interaction management
• Case management
• Voice automation
• Contact center experience design (including desktop workflow, agent scripting, and contextual workspaces)

Mission-critical SaaS includes something the company is calling Invisible Updates, with elimination of downtime as the goal. The concept appears similar to Salesforce.com’s 5-minute upgrades, but RightNow is aiming for true seamlessness. It also prides itself on having always provided service level agreements with teeth—the company cuts checks for its customers when downtime exceeds what’s spelled out in the SLA. It’ll be fun to see how the two rivals stack up in this matter.

A lot of the new customer experience functionality, especially the knowledge base and Social Experience parts, are the fruit of RightNow’s acquisition of HiveLive in September of this year, followed by what must be the fastest assimilation of technology since Star Trek introduced the Borg. A six-week turnaround from acquisition to deployment was unheard of before this, as far as I know.

RightNow takes the position that customer experience is everything, and is making “ridding the world of bad experiences” its goal. The path to achieving this leads through the contact center, and recognizes the power of the customer to make or break a business no matter how good the products might be. Numbers from the 2009 Customer Experience Impact Report (commissioned by RightNow from Harris Interactive) back this up:

• 86% of consumers will never go back to a company after a bad customer experience
• 60% will always or often pay more for a better customer experience (up from 58% in 2008)
• 82% who had a bad customer experience told others about it (up from 67% in 2006)
• 53% will recommend a company to someone else because they provide outstanding service

To illustrate the potential impact of one bad experience, we were treated to one more showing of the “United Breaks Guitars” video—but with a twist, because Dave Carroll (the creator) took the stage partway through to finish out the song and give us a first-hand account of his experiences. As he finished up, he revealed what I’d call PR gold for him and RightNow: Carroll’s only option for getting to the conference was to fly United, and the airline lost his luggage. If you listen carefully, you can hear United’s market capitalization dropping even further than the $180 million attributed to the initial incident.

If RightNow CX Platform is as good as it looks, and the company is true to its word, 2010 could very well be RightNow’s year. Every single one of Greg G’s customer visits in the past three to four months (he’s done more than 300 customer visits in the past 18 months) has had social CRM as a focus—driven by the customers, pulling RightNow into the conversation. That’s encouraging to me, since I’d hate to have established a practice in a field nobody cares about.

You’ll also be glad to know that I am now officially Huge On Twitter, at least as far as the PR team from Horn Group and RightNow Technology is concerned. I hope to continue living up to the accolade.

I know a pretty fair amount about social CRM. I can tell you what it is, how important it is, and how you can benefit from it, whether you’re an individual (or sole proprietorship) or a large business concern. I can tell you where to start, how to own it, and what to look for as far as success is concerned. But there are limits.

In the end, I’m just one (phenomenally talented) guy. Setting up a big project strategy, seeing it through to completion, and sticking with it for deep insight crosses from social CRM into Enterprise 2.0, which is probably beyond my personal scope for now. But I was just briefed on something that makes me a little jealous, because it provides a strong option for the sometimes elusive “how” of adding the social business component.

Michael Krigsman, CEO of Asuret and respected ZDNet blogger, told me about his company’s partnership with Hinchcliffe & Company and SocialText to provide a service they’re calling Pragmatic Enterprise 2.0, a low-risk approach to getting social computing right from the start.

The intent of Pragmatic Enterprise 2.0 premise is “to bring a new level of maturity to Enterprise 2.0 and social CRM projects that hasn’t been there,” Krigsman says. “Adding social media is effective and necessary for the modern office; half of all organizations have Enterprise 2.0 tools, either by plan or virally, but real adoption and meaningful uptake is slow, and most organizations are still learning the ropes,” adds Dion Hinchcliffe, president of Hinchcliffe & Company.

Often, IT departments are unfamiliar with the tools and techniques of social CRM/E2.0, and consultants don’t always understand how larger companies buy and implement new software. Pragmatic Enterprise 2.0 aims to manage all the variables. Hinchcliffe provides the methodology and delivery, while SocialText is the go-to (though not exclusive) social tool set. Asuret is responsible for project intelligence going in and going forward.

Strategy and planning come first with Pragmatic Enterprise 2.0—which seems pragmatic to me, at least—and include Agile software development methods. Once the client’s needs and goals have been assessed and the IT requirements mapped out, the integration begins. Data gathered during the process gets analyzed, fed back into the process, and used to improve the implementation. A typical project will run 24 months, more or less, including two to six months of implementation iterations. Complex projects being complex, however, the actual timetable will vary.

I must say, the idea that somebody who writes a blog about IT failures (Krigsman) is putting his name behind what appears to be an IT implementation business raises an eyebrow for me, but I’ve met Michael and he’s definitely got the chops. SocialText and Hinchcliffe are respected names too, so this is a team.

What I’m still trying to get my head around is the nagging feeling that social CRM and/or enterprise 2.0 shouldn’t be an IT project. That’s because CRM shouldn’t be an IT project. The history of our industry tells us that, when CRM is driven by technology and technologists, it fails. But there’s no reason to tell that to somebody who writes a blog about IT failures, I hope. This Pragmatic Enterprise 2.0 thing really looks good, though, so I’m looking forward to them proving me wrong about my slight misgivings.

Speaking of respected bloggers (authors, consultants, what have you), Paul Greenberg has weighed in with his opinion: “This service is needed and I can’t think of a better group of people to bring it to market.” I’d be happy with that.

I keep forgetting that there are other settings for San Francisco weather than, “hey, that’s really nice.”

Tuesday at Oracle Open World was the single worst climatic day I’ve ever experienced in California, and in fact the heaviest rain the state had seen since 1962. That’s right—the last time it poured like this, the LA Dodgers were still a relatively new idea, the NY Mets were truly new (and truly terrible, losing 120 games their first season), and working class people could still afford to see a baseball game. If you’re wondering why I keep referring to baseball, it’s because I’ve spent most of my time here in the company of Paul Greenberg, a fine fellow traveler who harbors a passion for America’s Pastime and a deep, uncanny lust for the NY Yankees. For better or worse, Oracle Open World + the Bronx Bombers in the postseason = associating enterprise CRM with baseball whenever Paul’s in the room.

Back to the weather: It’s fitting that the skies opened up and drenched us, because Tuesday amounted to Cloud Computing Day at the show. There are plenty of software-as-a-service (are we still calling it that?) vendors at this convention, and in fact they’ve got their own section of the show floor staked out in Moscone South, but the biggest one of all—Salesforce.com—pulled out all the stops. In addition to their sizable booth presence (not in the SaaS area) and excellent T-shirts, there’s a fleet of SFDC-liveried Mini Coopers circling the downtown area. As a special treat, Marc Benioff himself hosted a session in the nearby Yerba Buena Arts Center.

By “special,” I mean there was a massive queue of people waiting in the drenching rain, with no shelter, for a good half hour. By “treat,” I mean SFDC was giving away HD flip cameras to the first 500 attendees, which probably helps explain the queue. To be fair to myself, though, I didn’t know about the camera until after I was indoors, so my soaked-to-the-skin experience was all about seeing what Marc would have to say in Larry Ellison’s back yard.

If I’m honest, I must say that there was little news to be had at the event, at least for people who track SFDC at all closely. Marc modified his message to play better for the enterprise crowd that comes to OOW, many of whom are less interested in SaaS than his typical audience, and the demos were compelling for those who hadn’t seen them before. As always, Marc brought his considerable force of personality to bear, and made a strong case for cloud computing. He was respectful of his host (a company that has a cloud product of its own) and didn’t step on toes, though I felt the overall effect was toeing the line. SFDC makes all its bones on the cloud, whereas Oracle devotes only a relatively small amount of its efforts in that direction; to make that strong case at the show of somebody who is comparatively weak in that area is bordering on poor taste. Note that I said bordering; Marc and his team stayed classy, but controversial enough for me to point it out.

There are numerous companies here using the appearance of unrest as their marketing approach, arguably with less class. They cover a range, from businesses I’ve never heard of to Microsoft SQL Server, all taking turns on the streetcorner with placards, prisoner costumes, and the rhetoric of a World Bank protest to generate interest. It’s such a common theme this year that I wonder if there was a planning meeting with Oracle to plan it. Phrases like “Better Dead than Red” (stolen from the McCarthy era), “Encryption Shouldn’t Be a Pain in the App,” and “Stop the Spindle Swindle” are stuck in my head, though I doubt any of the associated companies will follow suit. The use of protest imagery by so many organizations dulls the effect of each, so it looks like the sort of picketing you can safely tune out.

On another note, I get a second chance to hear Larry Ellison speak this afternoon, at the 2:45 closing keynote. While it’s too late for me to redeem my Sunday failure (necessary though it was), it will help my sense of accomplishment for the week. More importantly, I get to see one of my idols. Not Larry—Roger Daltrey of The Who will be performing at tonight’s appreciation event. The headliner is Aerosmith, and we’ll also have a shot at Three Dog Night, The Wailers, and Shooter Jennings, but for me it’s all about Rog.

It’s Tuesday, thus time for Monday’s bloggery. I pretty much failed to liveblog Oracle Open World’s keynote, but at least it wasn’t through my incompetence; spotty WiFi and simultaneous Twitter overloads and outages conspired to keep me mostly silent, and the rest of the day had me on the move too much to post for you.

So many things happened Monday at oracle open world, though to be honest I think the day needed to accelerate before it got really good. The morning keynote led by Charles Phillips and Safra Catz was fairly sedate, as it felt like there was no binding force between the many segments. To be fair, I missed the Sunday night keynote due to personal burnout, so it’s entirely possible that Larry Ellison–a man I’ve never heard speak in person–really did the setting of tone last night and Monday was the start of the “business” part of the conference. Esteban Kolsky pointed out that there was an undercurrent of unrest in the room (something you never want when there are more than 10,000 people), and his tweets really captured the flow of the morning. He had much beter WiFi connectivity than I did, and seemed less affected by the problems experienced by Twitter, so I recommend checking out @ekolsky to see all the stuff I wanted to liveblog. Props to Esteban.

There were two stand-out segments, though. One was with Anthony Lye, which (and whom) I’ll come back to in a moment. The other dealt with retail, particularly “fast fashion” as implemented by H&M.

I have no use for the store or its brand, but I must say that the way H&M is using Oracle technology to change the way the apparel industry works. Any apparel business can (and should) use CRM and ERP technologies to make their purchases more efficient, but that still uses the antique method of basing inventory decisions solely on the debut of fashion “seasons” that might be nine months ahead of actual time. Fast fashion is a step beyond. Presenter Duncan Angove and an associate whose name I missed explained how H&M uses it to spot current trends and new products and act on them every month, perhaps even sooner. Combined with dashboards linked to regional maps, this means H&M can put what items will be most likely to sell well in each individual store, change out stock efficiently, and entice customers with promotions as needed to keep sales coming. Smart business and satisfied customers.

Now to Anthony Lye, who gets the other allotment of props for Monday. His part of the keynote delivered what the entire session should have done: a real tactical and strategic sense of how enterprise apps (like CRM) fit into a company’s efforts to increase efficiency and profitability, but without ever forgetting that it’s all about the customers and what you can do to make them not just content to do business with you, but happy enough from doing so that they encourage others to do the same. He didn’t stop there, either; he led two sessions later in the day that drilled even deeper into modern customer engagement strategy, and both were spot-on. His first had him and his team demonstrating how the Siebel CRM family is helping Oracle customers find their way in social CRM via cross-channel, experience-driven business practices. Very sharp. Then he put two powerhouses–Paul Greenberg and Denis Pombriant–together to discuss social CRM and cloud computing. A session with either Denis or Paul is always worth the time; both of them plus Anthony is more than most can hope for. The conversation was lively, though Anthony’s questions did seem (understandably) to support Oracle’s mostly-on-premises model. Regardless, Anthony Lye is everything Oracle needs in a CRM exec: he’s sharp, relatable, works well with the rest of his team, knows the industry, never forgets the customer, and is a pleasure to speak with. This man needs a raise.

More to come after today’s happenings, and I’ll try to post my thoughts in a more timely maner. No promises though; I still owe you my impressions of a great social CRM dinner I attended with Tealeaf last week revealing its latest customer experience survey results. Great stuff, and I want to do it justice, but I feel funny about the time delay.

Yesterday I had a quiet lunch with Marc Benioff and 300 of his closest friends at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in New York, off Columbus Circle. Well, maybe it wasn’t exactly quiet, and I don’t think Marc actually ate anything, but the fact is he was there. So was a large chunk of the Salesforce.com management, several partners, and a lot of customers.

The purpose, I think, was to get some excitement going for the Dreamforce conference next month in San Francisco. Discussion centered on developments in Service Cloud 2, the company’s social CRM approach to the contact center.Much of the presentation was covering stuff I already knew about, such as the various parts of Service Cloud and the partnership with Cisco that lets Salesforce.com be part of a unified communications environment. Since the audience wasn’t exclusively press and analysts, I have to assume the goal was to put all the information together for the public to show that SFDC will probably be making a major push for contact center business.

One truly new thing (to me, at least) was the announcement of five-minute upgrades. Contact centers can’t afford downtime, and one of the things that has held back adoption of SaaS contact centers systems is the lack of control over when that downtime hits. SFDC will be able to update its customers’ instances in minutes instead of hours, which should go a long way toward making it a more attractive option. Integrating with Cisco, a respected force in communications technology, doesn’t hurt either.

The event may have answered the “what is Salesforce.com up to?” question for most of the attendees, but it created more questions for some. A few of us (CRM magazine’s Josh Weinberger and Yankee Group’s Sheryl Kingstone) were wondering what the threshold is for SaaS update speed. Is it five minutes? Two minutes? Thirty seconds? More important, we couldn’t figure out how the partnership will make SFDC its next billion dollars. Josh spent a good half hour grilling Alex Dayon (senior VP of customer service and support products) about how SFDC and Cisco could each profit from the arrangement—they’re splitting a relatively small pie.

It’s not my biggest worry how they earn their bread. I’m more interested in them making social CRM in the contact center work for customers as well as businesses. When viewed from that perspective, Marc’s got an exciting product to roll out, and I’ll be watching closely.

Disclosure: I have some stake in this discussion, since I will be part of a panel at Dreamforce on Why Collaboration Between Sales and Service Is Imperative in Today’s Economy. If you’re in town, the session is Thursday Nov. 19 at 2:30pm.

More about this as it develops. Tonight, I’m out to dinner with Tealeaf and a roomful of people to hear the results of the 2009 Survey of Online Consumer Behavior. The state of online customer experience is our topic for the evening, and you just know I want to get the details.