Social CRM - Delivering Exceptional Customer Experiences

A recent report by Gartner, commissioned by Salesforce.com, addresses important trends in customer service as the social web continues to impact how individuals and organizations interface. You can get a copy of the report for FREE here.

The implications of new technologies and how people are relating via social media have significant implications. Businesses that get their hands around how to really benefit from this change will have a tremendous opportunity to make a difference by delivering support in new and exciting ways.

A few key finds and recommendations from the study are as follows:

•    Expectations for social CRM (tapping into social networks to improve marketing, sales and service processes) will dramatically exceed the measurable benefits.
•    For much of the world, Facebook will – or already has – become the dominant social networking site. Marketeers and customer service managers will need to take this into consideration when planning social networking projects, while monitoring for shifts in user sentiment.
•    A new generation of Internet Protocol (IP)-based contact center solutions with preintegrated IP interaction recording platforms will be far more effective and less expensive than previous platforms.
•    Consumer willingness to perform all possible customer service functions themselves (self- service) will be universal by 2011.
Recommendations
•    Vice presidents of customer service or customer experience should be sure to measure the consistency and effectiveness of customer interactions across all touchpoints from the customer’s point of view.
•    The popularity of social networking sites means that the service organization cannot expect the customer to come to the corporate website only, but must work on ways to reach out to the customer at these destinations as well.
•    When developing a long-term strategic road map for contact center infrastructure, include call recording as part of this single-vendor solution.

Learn more about Social CRM and salesforce.com's in the video below.

Kindle vs Publishers - The Wrong Debate

Reading the recent news accounts of how Amazon and the publishing industry are wrangling over what price point digital content should be sold for makes me laugh. Think of the Titanic and the crew worrying about how furniture is arranged while the iceburg has gashed a whole in the ship's side. As Jeff Bertolucci recently explained in his PC World article "Publishers Short-Sighted in E-Book Price Fight":

Another episode of As The E-Book Turns wrapped this week, with Amazon locked in a page-turning battle with the publishing industry. The plot twists are many, but here's a quick outline: Amazon wants to continue charging $10 for e-book versions of most new titles and bestsellers, but the industry's leading publishers think that price is too low. Macmillan, for instance, wants $13 to $15 for most of its e-book titles, a demand that Amazon conceded to last week. Hachette, another major publisher, also plans to drop Amazon's $9.99 price model, and would rather see many e-books in the $15 range. HarperCollins has made a similar move. Meanwhile, the industry just gained an ally in Apple, which has agreed to let publishers set the price of e-books designed for its new iPad tablet. It's no surprise that publishers would want higher e-book prices, particularly for hot new bestsellers. But their strong-arm efforts to eradicate Amazon's consumer-friendly pricing aren't a good way to grow a nascent e-book market (and e-reader) market.

The challenge for the existing publishing industry today is the same faced by many businesses and industries. So many rules have changed, yet leadership fails to see a way to avoid the pain dealing with the change would require. Hence the chest beating among publishers which amounts to digging their heels in for a fight they cannot win. Its all about economics. In a business where barriers to entry used to be up front costs in promotion, development, distribution and production, new business models have emerged to render the past value of publishers increasingly mute.

Look at Blurb for instance. Watch their CEO Eileen Gittins who founded the online book publishing service after she had an "awful, brutal" experience trying to get her own book of photography published. That generated a "personal passion" in her for the idea that anyone should be able to publish a book with high-quality photographs or other art work. Less than three years later, Blurb has become a phenomenon -- publishing more than 80,000 titles in 2007 and creating a community of book lovers that numbers 250,000. As I mention, the debate between publishers and kindle amounts to the wrong debate about the industries future.

See this video on Vator.tv »

Social CRM - Organizations Need to Reconsider How They Relate to Customers

Consider these statistics from the socialnomics web site: HKQGXD9FR7VD

1. By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers….96% of them have joined a social network;
2. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web; and
3. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media.

There can be no doubt that social media is becoming a significant method of communicaiton and connection for people across the globe. But what does that mean for organizations ? What are some of the implications ?

Dion Hinchcliffe's recent post Social CRM, Ground Zero for Enterprise 2.0 in 2010 does a good job of sharing some forward looking thinking about how organizations must reassess their methods of interacting with customers, partners and employees based on social media trends. For more details on these trends watch the video below.

Social CRM: Enterprise 2.0

At its core businesses must redesign their method of delivering support and interaction based on these new mainstream communication and collaboration tools. As Hinchcliffe notes, Enterprise 2.0 is a new and popular term that describes using lightly structured social environments to collaborate and capture knowledge in a discoverable, reusable way. Typically, these tools are highly social and freeform, so that they can adapt to the problem at hand. Enterprise 2.0 is generally applied in a business setting between at least one to three types of participants: workers, trading partners, and customers. Social CRM fits the bill for all of these criteria.

What Does This Mean ?

Michael Krigsman came away with the following perspective in his recent interview with CRM guru Paul Greenberg:

Successful customer relationships are based on interacting, cooperating, and collaborating with customers to provide mutual value. Technology is an important enabler but is secondary to relationship.

There’s been some question wether Social CRM is part of the broader Enterprise 2.0 story. Reviewing GetSatisfaction for examples from major, well-known firms might help in evaluating that question. Regardless, with saleforce.com's new chatter platform among other CRM's that are enabling social media integration, the practice is coming to the mainstream and deserving of consideration. Fundamentally, one must reconsider the paradigms of roles, functions and methodologies that are represented in the graphic below in order to successfully deploy these new tools. More than the technology, leadership's thinking about interactions is critical to evolving to this new higher plane.

Message To The Fitness Industry - Real Innovation Requires Changing Your Thinking

One of my favorite quotes is that of Daniel Boorstin who observed, "The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." Boorstin, a renowned historian and former Librarian of Congress who wrote numerous books including, The Genius of American Politics, Democracy and Its Discontents, and The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson, was right. Overcoming challenges is largely a function of letting go of assumptions. As he put it, "If we think we know something, then we face an obstacle to innovation." In his 1983 bestseller The Discoverers , the author chronicled the achievements of Galileo, Columbus, Darwin, Gutenberg and Freud, among others, who emerged as drivers of creativity and courage, and committed ingenious acts of revolt against ingrained habit. Great discoverers dispel illusions and reveal something new about the world as is further evidenced by Boorstin's interpretation of Thomas Jefferson's contributions and philosophies, when he said,

"Jefferson, in my opinion, was the apostle of experience. In other words, he was the person who believed that everything had to change. He thought that every generation should have the opportunity to have its own revolution, to write its own laws, and that was his vision of the past and the future"

Given the crisis of obesity "Globesity as Phillip and Jackie Mills call it" should we not evaluate how the growing fitness industry has not really impacted the problem ? Reliance upon Boorstin's realizations and the lessons of history are more relevant than ever, as is the need for leaders to emerge, dispel illusion and move us forward via our own revolution in the fitness and wellness industry. Obviously what we have been doing has not been working.

Could institutional thinking in fitness and wellness be the very "illusion of knowledge" Boorstin identified? Classic institutions are by nature closed, selective and controlling. Persons participating in institutional thinking have to be "careful" of what they absorb, guarded with whom they interact and controlling of everything. Essentially, risk aversion and maintenance of the status quo is the dna of most institutions and thus the reasons most institutions are failing in an increasingly network oriented world. Are our institutions then at the heart of the problem ?

No matter the debate; be it health care, education, or your organization's effectiveness, adopting network strategies and dispelling institutional dogma is at the core of true innovation. Watch the video by Thomas Power who describes institutional thinking, its limits and the opportunity that the new paradigm provides.

What do you think ? Does the fitness and wellness industry need to change its mindset in order to become more effective at impacting the health crisis we face today ? Please contact me Bryan O'Rourke, and share your views.

Merger of Physical & Digital World Continues

Vuzix makes a variety of video eyewear that enables users to view video content up close and personal. The company recently debuted a new piece of vision wear that allows augmented reality functionality. The new wrap 920AR eyewear overlays information over video of what the user is looking at while wearing the device. This new form of continuous AR will have even more applications.

This device uses stereo cameras to capture the video and gives the user a 67 inch display when seen
from 10 feet away. The company will begin selling the new device later this year and will also offer the
AR functionality as an add on to their existing video eyewear designs. The merger of the physical and digital worlds continues.