Third Idea Consulting

So I took another briefing with Sword Ciboodle yesterday regarding its SAS-powered CRM suite for mid- to large enterprise. That makes something like four in the past two months. These folks really want to get the word out—when I worked at CRM magazine, we typically didn’t have editorial staff meetings as often.

I’ve already discussed Ciboodle One (the agent desktop) in this space, so I won’t repeat myself except to say that it’s probably the cleanest and best example of its ilk I’ve ever seen. I haven’t had as much time in front of the other elements, Ciboodle Flow and Ciboodle Live, at least until yesterday. Seeing the components working together made a better case for integrated CRM with top-flight analytics than anything I could say. Ciboodle gets it.

Ciboodle also treated me to a demo of Ciboodle Crowd, the last link in the chain. [Warning: Link contains unfiltered marketing content. Caveat lector.] Crowd is the social platform. More to the point, it’s the environment for companies to manage their participation in social CRM. Looks good, and it clearly isn’t dependent on any specific social media, so it can adapt as old players drop out and new ones appear.

All this is good for CRM, good for Ciboodle, for SAS, and also for consultants like me. SAS was smart enough to partner with Ciboodle to provide applicability and usability in CRM, and Ciboodle was smart to recognize the value of powerhouse business intelligence. Together they provide a suite with a lot of possibilities built in. And to their credit, the companies provide the services to back it up, so that the customer isn’t purchasing six-figure shelfware. Capgemini appears to be helping to achieve this end.

But vendor services can only take you so far. There are still too many potential buyers of Ciboodle’s suite who have only a vague idea of what they want from it, or who haven’t put their organizations through the sort of cultural and process evaluation needed to get the most out of the purchase. Mistakes can be made with those tools even when they’re used correctly, at least in a technical sense. A hammer and chisel work really well together, but you probably shouldn’t use them to defrost your freezer unless you’ve carefully considered how to do it and understand the risks involved. (I have done this, and despite due consideration managed to wreck a freezer by focusing on individual hammer blows instead of the big picture.)

When somebody decides they want to become an astronaut, the first step in that journey is not flight training and mission briefings; it’s learning about the job, the dangers, and the potential benefits. Ciboodle and SAS have built a mighty space vehicle, and they are providing top-notch training to anybody who enters the program. I get to be the career counselor who makes sure it’s a good fit, and I can definitely live with that.

This is a good-news post: I’ve been named a finalist in this year’s Azbee awards for my work on Pint of View, the monthly column I write for CRM. Given by the American Society of Business Publication Editors, the Azbees recognize the best work being done in the industry, and I’m honored to be considered. I’ve won a few before, and so has CRM itself. We go up against publications like Businessweek, so it’s especially gratifying to play at this level.

If you’re interested—and I just know you are—you can see the specific columns they’re using for considering me here (June 2009) and here (October 2009). To get the full effect, you might want to look at the Digital CRM editions here and here.

Also on the subject of my dear friends and former employers: I’ll be moderating a panel discussion at CRM Evolutions 2010 in New York City, with participants from Lithium, Radian6, and Jive Software. We’ll be discussing the newest trends in customer engagement through social media on Wednesday, August 4 at 10:00 AM. Based on the list of attendees and sponsors (not to mention the tremendous amount of work the CRM mag folks put into every conference), I think this is going to be a great event.

You may have already heard the announcement from June 3 about Sword Ciboodle using SAS Realtime Decision Manager (RDM) analytics in its new contact center application, Ciboodle One. If not, you have now. I’d have told you about it sooner, but I didn’t get the official briefing until today—I couldn’t share what I knew until then.

The curious can see Ted Hartley, chief channel officer for Sword Ciboodle, talk about the combined SAS RDM/Ciboodle One value proposition here.

According to Ted (he’s a friend, so I can use his first name), Ciboodle was approached by SAS about six months ago seeking a business application to support with its RDM technology. Around the same time, the Ciboodle boffins were thinking of how to create a more compelling experience in the contact center.  Faster than you can say “you got your chocolate in my peanut butter,” the two companies were coding up a system to use existing data to increase the comfort level of customers at the point of contact. Ted says it’s a continuation of the focus on voice of the customer, but now getting into the mind of the customer.

The result is likely to be a new high water mark in customer intelligence and frontline service. SAS is the first name in analytics, and Ciboodle has one of the sweetest CSR agent desktops I’ve seen. With SAS handling high-level intelligence and pushing the results to the Ciboodle desktop, agents can have a better sense than ever before of who they’re talking to. This means better routing, less repetition, and smarter cross-sell/upsell. Most importantly, the agent sees the customer’s history, recent activities, and attitudes so there is a basis for communication—it feels like a relationship, not just a transaction.

The SAS-powered Ciboodle One is rolled out in North America presently, but according to Ted the SAS salespeople in other regions are already calling to ask for the partnership to be extended further abroad.

There’s been a lot of maneuvering going on in the CRM space (as I noted at the tail end of this post), especially where business intelligence meets customer service and social CRM. There’s more to the story in development as you read this, so my lips are sealed until things become official. All I can say is this: The contact center is the natural home for social CRM, and a social engagement model that uses serious analytics is bound to make a difference if somebody can develop one. Stay tuned.

It has been a busy couple of weeks for followers of CRM, Social CRM, and all that goes along with it. I haven’t got my head around all of it yet, but I’ll provide a handy link-dump at the end of this post to give you some starting points. It’s good to know that even when there’s more happening than I can reasonably cover, I can always link to my friends.

I’ve just returned from BPT Partners‘ Social CRM Summit (search the hashtag #scrmsummit to see some of what went on) where I had a great time refreshing and expanding my skills. Paul Greenberg—friend, mentor, mensch—was at the helm as usual, and it never ceases to amaze me that he always has something new to say on the topic of social CRM.

I don’t want to say too much about the specifics, since this is professional development and I need to be able to sell the result of what I’ve learned instead of giving it away, but there was a lot of emphasis on usable business strategy. A few years ago, social media strategy for business amounted to, “Get involved now, because this is gonna be huge.” It was good advice in 2006, and it’s still good, but we’ve had a lot of time to refine our techniques since then. With the addition of social media monitoring and analytics, it’s possible to make a really solid business case for SCRM adoption.

Catching up with friends and meeting new ones is always a benefit at events like this. Brent Leary even showed up—the trip from his neck of the woods to ours wasn’t trivial, even if it was in the same state—to say hi and let me talk smack about his alleged free throw skills. There was an escalation, and something tells me we (along with Mike Boysen, Mitch Lieberman, and others) will be putting it on the line to shoot from the line in the near future for bragging rights. I don’t care how bad I do, since basketball is my anti-sport, but as long as I outscore Brent I’ll be happy.

A few days before heading down to Atlanta (actually Kennesaw, which is near Atlanta in the same way that Northampton is near London), RightNow Technologies held a launch event here in New York for RightNow CX. I provided a lot of my thoughts on the company’s new social platform in October, but I want to reiterate that this looks really good. While history may show that CRM got the most traction among sales professionals, today’s customer-driven social CRM has a natural starting point in customer service and support. RightNow, with its contact center pedigree, is definitely one to watch here They’ve got some great customers, including CBS Interactive, Match.com, MySpace, and Aircell (the gogoinflight people), that show off what a natural fit SCRM is when grown in contact center soil.

A few days prior to that, I took a call with Clare Dorrian of Sword Ciboodle to discuss the company’s direction and new offerings. Ciboodle is more of a traditional CRM vendor (which is fine), serving larger enterprises. It also has strength in the contact center—I love the look of Ciboodle One, its new unified agent desktop—and is further building out its work flow and Web self service capabilities to capitalize on that. I just got hold of some of Ciboodle’s customer case studies, so that should give me some fun reading over Memorial Day weekend. (That’s not as sarcastic as it sounds; I have genuine interest in some concrete examples of how the company is helping businesses.)

And now the link dump. Actually, it’s more of a shout-out to two of my friends, but since they write so much and so well, it can serve both purposes.

Denis Pombriant (previously mentioned here) has been extra-prolific with his blogging lately, with a lot of coverage from Sage Insights among other things. Wish I could’ve been there, but this is the next best thing.  See all of his May content here.

Ray Wang, now of Altimeter Group, got to see what was up at SAPPHIRE 2010, the big annual SAP conference that I would also have loved to attend. He’s also been banging out a lot of news coverage, especially where acquisitions are concerned (SAP and Sybase, IBM and Sterling Commerce, Lithium and ScoutLabs, Attensity and Biz360). See his blog here.

As you might have seen from my recent tweetfest, I’m in Seattle at the SAS Global Forum. The reason, other than my need for frequent-flyer miles, is to learn about the analytics company’s new Social Media Analytics product.

The Disclosure:

“SAS invited me to their SAS Global Forum user event as their guest to attend the launch of SAS Social Media Analytics. They paid my airfare, hotel and conference registration fees and gave me access to the product for evaluation.” [Their words, but I accept and endorse them.] In other words, this.

The Assessment:

I have said previously that a company that develops a truly effective social media analytics package that includes sentiment and modeling in depth, and can tie it into CRM, has essentially created a license to print money in today’s social CRM-focused world.  I haven’t seen enough of SAS Social Media Analytics (SMA) to say if it achieves this, but the demos put me in a favorable frame of mind. Analytics (has? have?) come to my social media world, and this is a Good Thing.

SMA is more than a dashboard or reporting engine. It gives the user live interactive access to conversations about the brand. The view is not static, but can be tracked over time, against multiple sentiment components. The data models are subject to updates and new instructions, so what you capture can be sliced and re-sliced as needed. This human angle—user input refining the model—is a big deal to me. It prevents SMA from being a black box.

SMA is a slightly misleading name, in my opinion. It’s media analytics, which includes social media. I’m not faulting them on the name, mind you; social media are harder to track because each piece evolves with use. One could argue, though, that all media today are social media, since everything that’s published seems to end up on the Web with comments and links.

SMA doesn’t come cheap. While SAS is describing SMA as an “on-demand” application, there is an initial investment in data gathering and modeling, and a fee of $5,000 to $15,000 per month. I’ve overheard SMA described as “an enterprise-class Radian6,” and that’s probably a fair estimate. Radian6 appears to be more focused on engagement (which is VERY important) while SAS is playing to its strength in analysis, but both companies have capabilities that mirror the other. The way I see it, if you can afford to spend SAS money and get value from that expenditure, you probably should migrate from Radian6. It’s not just a question of money, though; I’m sure there are some massive businesses that need exactly what Radian6 provides, no more and no less. SAS has a reputation for brute-force analytics power (emphasized with last night’s demo of a multiple-terabyte process run in two minutes), and that’s got to be worth the price tag for a lot of businesses as well.

The Questions:

There are some things that still need to be answered for me, hopefully with an in-depth demonstration. For one, I don’t know how quickly SMA responds to new rules and model parameters. Would I need to back away from the workspace to change keywords and sources, then start over? Or can I play fast and loose, tweaking the factors as I go?

For another, almost everything we’ve seen today is about internal analysis of what happening in the socialverse. There hasn’t been much emphasis on the engagement portion, or on closing the loop and reiterating the feedback process. It looks like the customer is still “out there,” rather than at the core of the business process. To be fair, this is an analytics product, so I shouldn’t expect something else. Still, some more examples of how SMA can have an effect over time on the customer sentiment it monitors would not go amiss. My interest is social CRM, not merely social media—the customer and the opinion-maker need to be right up front. Capturing the voice of the customer is good, but listening to it and then capturing the ear of the customer with your response is better.

Overall, though, my first impression is that SASSMA is a promising product that arrives at the right time. I’ll be keeping my eye on this and providing you with updates as needed.

It’s important for us to stay current with the best thinking in the CRM industry, which is why I try to read the output of my friends and colleagues as much as possible. After falling behind a bit—there’s a lot out there that my blogroll doesn’t cover, must update—I ran across this excellent piece of opinionizing by Denis Pombriant, founder and principal analyst of Beagle Research Group.

Denis is without a doubt the world’s second smartest beagle. (Sorry man—I have a long-standing loyalty to Snoopy.) Clear thinking and the ability to look at the long-term effects of short-term actions make him a great source, and if I have nothing useful to say, I can always direct people to him. As usual, he’s spot on with his comments, so I’ll only add a few thoughts.

When Denis writes, “Too often in early markets customers buy market leading products regardless of their merits and vendors accommodate this need by bragging about market share,” he shows how eager so many of us are to follow the herd. Basing a business operations decision like CRM on market share is the grownup’s version of “all the cool kids are doing it.” It’s fair to include measurable market share—not necessarily leading, just on the charts—as one criterion of the buying decision, but it’s something that should be graded pass/fail. I might not even include it on my list unless there’s likely to be pushback from shareholders worried about where their money is going; there’s a place for small vendors, and not just for catering to customers with tight budgets.

Speaking of tight budgets, there’s this: “[T]ightness in the credit markets has caused a significant amount of demand destruction and that has changed the terms of selling.” I’ve been saying it for years, but it bears repeating that it’s much more important right now to hold onto existing customers than to find new ones. If you know what you need your CRM for—and you’d better—then you have a good head start on picking your vendor criteria. Allow yourself to be guided by what will provide the customer insight to keep your regulars on the balance sheet.

Kudos again to Denis for rocking the smarts.

We’ve been in this recession for a long time. What is it now, two years? (Answer: Yes. The National Bureau of Economic Research says it started in December 2007.) Businesses in all sectors have been hard pressed, especially financial services. That’s not really so surprising; the great sage Homer Simpson once said that beer was “the cause of and the solution to all of life’s problems,” and that sentiment applies fairly accurately to the stock market.

The desperation of the brokerages is plain to see if you catch their advertisements on TV or radio. Each is more eager than ever before to crow about its funds’ performance against this average or that index, as though it was the only company to have a clue how to make money in a down market. And each one’s advice is the same: Switch to us right now.

This is bad advice for just about everybody. The reason it’s bad is that things are tough all over. If any particular financial advisor was significantly outperforming the rest, we likely wouldn’t be in a recession, and that advisor would be raking in the bucks (even more than usual, since they profit by skimming the action like a casino does). Even Goldman Sachs, the company with more Washington influence than should be legal, is having its share of woes. Every broker has some funds that are doing well, and some that aren’t.

On the flip side of this, there are some Internet brokers advertising their own services on the premise that relationships are worthless. They suggest your relationship with your broker is a sham that only benefits the broker. For some people, this might be true. For others, there might not be a need to pay a commission to somebody else for your own informed financial decisions.

Changing your financial advisor is a major step, not something you do because of a commercial. In fact, making any change to your portfolio on a whim is generally a bad idea, though there are still day traders who think the path to success is rapid buying and selling. Successful investing is about patience, long-term plans, and—this is key—the relationship you have with your advisor. If you’re comfortable with your advisor, and believe they understand and are capable of helping you achieve your goals, you’re in the right place.

I’m open to disagreement on these points, as always. FinServ is not the business where I’m smartest, and the preceding post is heavily influenced by the opinions of people I respect and who know better. But isn’t that exactly what I’m talking about with relationships?

Sorry for my recent absence—I wonder what it says about my personality that so many of my blogposts begin with an apology—but I’m mostly to blame. I’ve been doing plenty of writing lately, but I have been trying to coordinate my posts here with those on another site (since I’m guest-blogging for them and crossposting here). Their schedule has reduced the frequency with which I get page time, and I let my posting here follow suit.

You deserve better than this, O my loyal readers, so here’s one to chew on while I wait for my updates. To be honest, this is one of the posts I’ve already written, so it would have wound up here anyway. But blogs are useless when left to gather dust, and I owe you for finding my work interesting.

Getting Schooled in Social CRM

Good news from the world of academia shows me there’s hope for the future of business. There’s at least one MBA student who takes customer experience seriously. The evidence can be found on 1to1 Weekly, in a news article by Elizabeth Glagowski detailing Breanna Vanstrom’s paper on the subject.

It’s all fine and dandy for businesses to talk about social CRM as the Next Big Thing in the continuing effort to better serve customers—merely saying so puts a company in a positive light for at least a little while. But businesses are too often more about inertia than action; making a few superficial changes to CRM tactics is much easier than revising the entire CRM strategy, and achieves quicker results for shareholders. The customer often receives no long-term benefit. The phrase “business as usual” has negative connotations for a reason, y’see.

Knowing that the next generation of business managers is learning from the start that a business can’t truly succeed without serving and delighting the customer is heartening to me. Even putting aside the PR angle—the customer relationship marketing course that produced the paper is taught by Dr. Tom Lacki, a member of Peppers & Rogers Group’s 1to1 Faculty—this is a sign that the stereotypical soulless MBA is becoming a thing of the past. Good luck to Vanstrom and her classmates.

For a look at some companies that are delivering great customer experiences, take a look at this news piece by destinationCRM’s Lauren McKay about the leaders in this year’s Customer Experience Index from Forrester Research’s Bruce Temkin.

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.