Third Idea Consulting

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.

So, after a less-than-spectacular 2009, we’ve arrived in a new year. And it’s cold. Really cold.

Maybe it’s not that bad where you are, but in New York we have it frigid and windy. I happen to love cold weather, and even I find this to be a bit much. The window I’m sitting next to as I write this is not the best insulated, so a draft is pouring off of it onto my left arm. (I prefer to think of pouring drafts in a more delicious liquid format, but I’m not here to talk about my weakness for fine adult beverages.)

I can hear you wondering what, if anything, this has to do with the business of getting and keeping customers. I’m getting to that. It’s just taking me a while because my brain is impaired by the cold; my fingers aren’t doing much better. It’s cold enough that, were I outside, I’d be looking for a shop to go into just to warm up. As it is, I’m considering leaving my drafty apartment for just such an adventure. And there’s the tie-in.

Walk-in customers and their online equivalent represent a great opportunity to earn new business, but only if the customer experience you provide is up to the challenge. Anybody can turn up the heat, but turning casual browsers into new customers requires warmth. Making people feel welcome goes a long way toward getting them to see what you have to offer, and this applies whether you serve consumers or businesses, in a shop or on a Web site.

Most businesses aim to showoff value first, with announcements about the latest sales and best brands right in customers’ faces when they walk in the door. This can backfire, because it’s very off-putting. Shoppers who know what they’ve come for aren’t interested, and casual foot traffic gets the sense that they are prey for a sales pitch. “How can I help you” is much more welcoming than “what are you looking for,” wouldn’t you agree?

For brick and mortar shops, simple touches like having hot tea or coffee available in the winter—preferably free—and cold drinks in the summer can earn a favorable impression and a closer look. Williams-Sonoma often has free mulled cider in the winter, and remembering that is nearly enough to get me to go there now. Always allow (read: encourage) staff to engage walk-ins in non-sales related conversation as long as it isn’t taking away from something they need to be doing. Things like that go a long way.

Getting beyond specifics like hot drinks and warm conversation in retail stores, the general principle of welcoming applies to any business. If you can make your customers think kindly of you, they will always have you in mind. They will think of you as more than just a supplier of products—and they will spread the word about how pleasant it is to do business with you, even when they’re not actively buying.

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.

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.

Hey folks: I’m at a conference with functioning WiFi! It’s RightNow Summit ‘09, and we’re just a few minutes away from the opening address. Look for my live updates on Twitter, and a full account of the news later today. Anything I don’t get, you should be able to learn from Christopher Musico of CRM magazine, Esteban Kolsky, or Forrester Research’s Dr. Natalie Petouhoff.

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.

It’s time for me to take out some of my rage and indignation on a retailer. It’s one of my favorite pastimes. To be fair, I must say that the company in question—Best Buy, in case you couldn’t figure it out from the title of this post—provided the product as requested, at the expected price, with a minimum of delay once the problems I’m about to describe were cleared. The problems encountered will probably not prevent me from buying from Best Buy again. That said, the customer experience left a lot to be desired, and here’s why.

I found myself in the market for a new notebook PC—the first one I’ve personally owned, as I’m a desktop aficionado and always received laptops from employers. My ability to travel to industry events and client sites (and do anything useful once there) would be seriously curtailed by not having portable computing power. Not wanting to spend a fortune, but neither wanting an incomplete machine (netbooks aren’t my thing), I researched the best balance of power and price. I found this, the Asus K50IJ-RX05. The only place to acquire one at the $499 price point was Best Buy.

Problem 1: finding the product. I consulted Bestbuy.com to see if either of the two “local” stores (local meaning 20-30 minutes on a bus) had my machine in stock. Neither one did, of course, so I called the first and asked whether it would be restocked soon or if I could order one. Five minutes later (after being placed on hold twice) I was told that I couldn’t, with no explanation why. A call to the second had the same result, but with some added info: The one I wanted had been discontinued—or so they said; it’s still listed on the Asus site—and the service person didn’t know what model had replaced it. She suggested I try asking around at the stores in the Bronx because they might have one or two in stock. No offer to check for me; no offer to ship the unit to her store.

Of the two Bronx locations, one was nearly twice the travel time, so I naturally chose the nearer one. I called the store. No answer. I’m not talking about no answer after pressing 3 to speak to a sales rep; no pick up at all, like they didn’t have an IVR installed. That’s inexcusable. In a moment of desperation, I tried to contact the horribly-named Twelpforce, Best Buy’s assistance line on Twitter. By the time I heard back from a twelper, or whatever they call themselves, I’d already figured out how to order online for in-store pickup—significant because the first few attempts failed, since the function doesn’t work properly unless you start from the right place on the site—and decided to bite the bullet and go to the Bronx store.

Problem 2: verifying quality. Jump forward to my arrival at the in-store pickup counter, skipping over the time spent waiting for not one but two confirmation emails (both of which I was told were necessary), the 45 minutes or so on the subway, and the difficulty navigating a horribly designed suburban mall. The store was not busy, probably the emptiest I’ve ever seen a Best Buy, but there was still a waiting line at the service desk. Fair enough, just bad luck on my part.

The difficulty came in trying to figure out whether the computer—with Windows Vista installed—was qualified for the free upgrade to the new Windows 7 operating system when it becomes available in October. I wanted to be absolutely sure what I was getting myself into, because while I have learned from long experience to never use the first release of a new OS if I can avoid it, I have no desire to use Vista; dealing with it for a few weeks or a month is acceptable if I get the free upgrade, otherwise I’d dump the whole thing in favor of a Linux distro. The in-store display said yes, the salesperson said no. It took a further 10 minutes of delay before a Geek Squad guy walked over and opened the box, revealing the upgrade offer within like Charlie’s golden ticket.

Problem 3: taking the survey. So in the end, I got home with the computer, a carrying case, and a mouse. All over, right? Wrong. This morning I got the follow-up email asking me to take a brief online survey about my in-store pickup experience. Fine by me; I don’t mind answering surveys about products or services I’ve used, at least within reason.

The brief survey turned out to be 32 questions long, actually longer because a yes or no in the right place would insert one or more conditional questions to clarify the answer. The survey tech was provided by ForeSee Results, but I’m willing to bet they had nothing to do with designing the survey itself. First of all, I’ve spoken with ForeSee people before, and they’re the first to tell you that the value of a customer experience survey decreases with length.

They’ll also tell you that, to assess customer satisfaction, you should ask relevant questions. There were some, but plenty that weren’t. If the survey is specifically for in-store pickups, why bother rating my opinion of the shipping costs? How is “Please rate the degree to which the order received matched the order placed” a different question from “Please rate the accuracy of your order”? If you’ve already had me rate the degree to which the experience matched my expectation on a scale of 1 to 1o, is there a point in asking the same question in yes/no format later? By the time I reached the bottom of the survey page, I was starting to regret taking it. None of the questions addressed how I felt about the experience, or asked what I’d change. In short, there was nothing that captured the voice of the customer in a way that will affect anybody’s shopping experience.

Was I satisfied with my overall Best Buy experience? Well, I got the item I wanted at the price I expected, and found some accessories to go along with it, so in that sense I was satisfied. But it was clear that I was nothing but a source of revenue for the company; I was not treated like I mattered for anything but the numbers on my credit card. Poor-to-nonexistent integration between store locations, marginally helpful staff, and a useless survey left me flat. I’ll use Best Buy again, but mainly because it is the only real choice nearby for consumer electronics. I wasn’t a lover of Circuit City, but at least when it was still operating there was a choice, and the hint of competition made both stores try harder.

The embargo is up, so I can report on a little piece of news I got last week from Oracle. No less a personage than Anthony Lye (with the aid of Susie Penner, one of the best media/analyst relations people I’ve ever met) laid out the details of a partnership with InQuira to deliver an on-demand knowledge management system for customer service. It’s available now.

Oracle and Lye need no introduction. InQuira is a name I’ve encountered before, though the company’s claimed strength is in Web self-service. The partnership itself is not new, either—the two companies announced something similar last year at Oracle OpenWorld, but for on-premises deployments. Today’s announcement extends their work to SaaS.

To quote Oracle’s statement: “The integrated, on demand service solution enables customers to go seamlessly from self-service to live agent-assisted service. Service agents receive overall view of customer issues and actions taken, providing a consistent experience across Web, phone and community-based channels. … With InQuira knowledge management available on demand and embedded in the Oracle CRM On Demand desktop, customer service agents have access to knowledge across the enterprise, enabling them to seamlessly access answers right from within their normal service flow.” Thus, customers who are looking for help or other information encounter fewer bumps on the way up the support chain, while agents can respond more quickly and definitively to customer inquiries. There’s greater likelihood that answers will be consistent across all access points, and the user base’s expertise becomes part of the support mix.

I can’t say that this is a totally unique product—it’s an extension of an existing partnership to provide something similar, and service automation vendors have been working at solutions like this for a few years now—but it does have the stamp of two respected corporate names as well as the addition of SaaS. In my experience, it’s easier to create integrated service environments with smaller businesses, simply because there’s less knowledge to manage and less demand on the delivery channels. Oracle and InQuira working together have a fair chance of extending service integration to really large companies, where customers have previously found it very easy to get lost or confused. The reduced tech footprint of the SaaS option doesn’t hurt either, so companies who are willing and able to go this route should be well served.

Sounds good, right? I think so too, but to be honest I had a little trouble envisioning the structure of the partnership in terms of who brings what to the table and when it comes into play during a service engagement. I’ll be taking a follow-up briefing later today to see how it all works, and maybe get InQuira’s point of view on the partnership. Should anything new and awesome emerge from that call, I’ll update. For now, though, I like what I’ve heard.