Where are all the enterprise mashups?

The concept of the mashup—a composite application built from easy-to-integrate, reusable components—is simple: inside one application, you automatically show, compare or contrast information from somewhere else. Furthermore, you don’t have to provide parameters; the mashup automatically combines the information.

Some excellent examples involve Google Maps. For example, after the recent earthquake in Chile, mashups provided current information on road closures as well as open supermarkets. In the U.S., meanwhile, one mashup uses data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System to pintpoint road fatality black spots.

These are incredibly useful applications, but they’re also quite consumer focused. Which leads me to wonder: Where are the enterprise mashups? In 2008, Forrester Research predicted that the enterprise mashup market would reach $700 million by 2013. Ajax, Web Services and location-based services were all the rage. Experts predicted that mashups would free enterprise users especially from the tyranny of waiting weeks or months for IT to create the reports they needed—if indeed they did ever get created.

But is this user-driven state of enterprise information liberation still unfolding in 2010?

Who Wants Mashups?

In the CRM realm, on-premise Siebel CRM software, version 8.1, added an applet-based services, making it relatively easy to embed some service information into other applications. Salesforce.com also makes using these types of applets relatively easy. For example, you can access a contact’s LinkedIn information from Salesforce.com.

Perhaps the above is useful, but so far it doesn’t herald an information-access revolution.

Workplace Mashup Manifesto

What we really need are mashups with hardcore workplace upsides. For example, if I’m working in a service center and a client calls, I’d like to see all of the trouble tickets the client has open, and know if there are any outstanding issues, before I try to up-sell or cross-sell him.

From a professional standpoint, this is the information you need. And if it’s delivered via a mashup—meaning that on one page, I can manipulate and close out the trouble ticket, enter the client’s credit card to resolve the billing dispute or automatically dispatch a required part and provide an actual Fedex tracking number—so much the better.

Liberating Enterprise Data—Or Not

Technically speaking, however, creating enterprise mashups remains challenging. The sticking point is internal data. Combining your CRM application’s contact list with Google Maps to build better territories is one thing. But generating customer-facing epiphanies (or at least really great service)—for example, by mashing-up your CRM, ERP and financial systems and legacy back-end systems via Web-enabled SOA to manipulate data in any of those systems in real time—is relatively difficult, simply because the information most often remains locked in those various systems.

Financial Services Firm: We Don’t Need No Stinking Mashups

Furthermore, organizations that do make the effort to integrate and combine information from numerous systems in innovative ways often don’t need user-driven mashups; they just need the information. For example, Innoveer has been helping a large US financial services firm to extract operational data from numerous back-end systems, combine it with CRM information, and provide agents with a single Siebel CRM homepage—backed by Siebel Analytics—containing, at a glance, everything they need to know.

Front and center on the agent’s homepage is a report listing recently placed orders. This is vital information because the best way to ensure these orders turn into deals is by reaching out—the agent following up by phone, asking how they can help, and using their sales smarts to close the deal. Another report, to encourage better performance, analyzes the revenue each agent has generated, versus the number of client calls they make.

The end result: Agents see useful information, without glimpsing the underlying systems complexity that brought them the information. (That’s definitely not “need to know.”) Even better, they didn’t have to build it themselves.

Not A Quant at Heart?

Perhaps that’s the ongoing roadblock for mashups: It presumes that end users will want to mashup CRM, ERP and financial information themselves. For a small set of power users willing to get their hands dirty, this may be true. But for salespeople who excel at selling, or who can be encouraged to reach this state, the imperative isn’t to provide them with cutting-edge, self-service Web applets, but simply with the information they need: Who do I sell to, and where do I find them?

Easy access to essential information is the currency of any great sales organization. Until composite applications can provide that, and professionals have a compelling reason to use them, we won’t see many enterprise mashups.

Learn More

When it comes to CRM, less is more—and mashups are no exception.

Even without mashups, organizations have access to great techniques for getting the data they need. In particular, a service-oriented architecture (SOA) help organizations integrate their systems and consolidate information to better manage customer data and ensure a single, definitive source of information.

Photograph by Ha-Wee.

Sales force automation (SFA) is thriving, running on-premise and in the cloud, in part because one SFA application can support complex sales activities. Log on, enter or retrieve the required information, and you’re ready to sell.

The call center environment, in contrast to SFA, is much more complex, even when running service in the cloud. That’s because, instead of your salespeople calling—or calling on—the customer, they call you. So in addition to integrating CRM, back-end systems, your private branch exchange (PBX) for incoming calls, and agents’ landlines or VoIP-based calling (especially for work-at-home agents), you also need:

• Computer telephony integration (CTI) to do a “screen pop” showing a call center agent the name and details of the person who’s calling.
• Interactive voice response (IVR) to identify callers, reduce costs and resolve issues with minimal—or no—live agent interaction.

Providing great customer service, besides having top-notch customer service agents, requires integrating and making all of the above components work well together. But too often, it instead adds up to one big headache.

The Perfect Call Center Storm

Several years back, for example, one of Innoveer’s high-technology clients integrated its Siebel CRM software with third-party IVR and CTI software. But about six times per day, often at night when call volumes peaked, the call center software would crash for 10 minutes, booting customers out of call queues. For a company selling items worth hundreds of dollars and taking 1,000+ calls per day, the result was lost revenue and no small risk of customer defection.

The culprit? Small memory leaks, which in the high-production environment eventually added up to a system crash. These memory leaks resulted from the underlying third-party call center software and components having been designed for slightly different versions of Siebel—one for 7.7.0.1, another for 7.7.0.2, and so on. Meaning, no simple fix existed.

Murphy’s Law Alive and Well

Unfortunately, no one offers a great soup-to-nuts call center. Telephony systems are complicated, proprietary, not yet open, and difficult to test at high volumes. Furthermore, your vendor for every required component—CRM, PBX, IVR, CTI and so on—will often differ, and their software not be quite compatible.

Holding Out For A Hero

Arguably, call centers are ripe for a savior, and help could be on the way:

• Oracle CRM On Demand: With version 9, added a virtual CTI connector, which lets organizations more easily bring voice, voicemail, email and Web channels into the on-demand service picture. Meanwhile, IVR enablement via SOA offers new types of self-service and on-demand possibilities.
• Service Cloud: For this salesforce.com service offering running on Force.com, the company, together with Cisco, announced a Customer Interaction Cloud, aimed at SMBs, which is an out-of-the-box, SaaS-based call center.
• Asterisk: Run this open source call center software on an inexpensive Linux server, and for a few hundred dollars (including a digital-to-analog converter), you can have a working call center.

Upsides to cloud-based and open source call centers, besides their relatively low cost, are that they’ve been designed from scratch, which means they could potentially work much better than the call center technology kludge that’s become common today.

Downsides, however, include a dearth—so far—of plug-ins to make them work with your internal network, IVR software and all of the other modern call center requirements. To integrate SaaS-based service with your on-premise systems, you’ll also need to start opening firewall ports. From a security and privacy standpoint, that can expose you to data hijacking and potential break-ins, including browser cache attacks.

The Collective Power of Frustration

Will open source technology and SaaS call centers solve today’s call center technology issues? With so much collective frustration over call centers, they’re the safe bet for how we’ll make the next big step forward toward creating easy to integrate, useful and headache-free call centers.

Learn More

Mastering customer service, regardless of whether it’s running on-premise, in the cloud, or as open source software, requires treating the call center as a strategic asset. Furthermore, until you get your customer service business practices and self-service sites in order, from a service standpoint also forget social networks.and don’t worry about Twitter.

Are your events memorable? Illustration by Sabrina Campagna.

How can your marketing group be more effective? By mastering the art of event management.

Why Manage Events?

Event management is the art of generating demand by connecting with prospects and customers at events. Based on Innoveer’s numerous marketing engagements, we’ve found that event management is one of the five capabilities—including marketing strategy, lead management, campaign management and marketing measurement—that organizations must master to maximize the effectiveness of their marketing programs.

Practice excellent event management, and you will:

• Spend less time on low-value accounts
• Help salespeople close more deals
• Identify how to incrementally improve client relationships, leading to better account penetration

Best Practices: Event Management

To increase your event management proficiency, focus on these four best practices:

• Attendance Management: Using centralized coordination, target, invite and register guests at your event, ideally using multiple channels. The best practitioners use attendance management systems that monitor registration and automatically trigger follow-on campaigns to increase attendance for under-registered events.
• Speaker Management: Identify, schedule and manage subject matter experts to ensure they deliver targeted messaging at the event. Ideally, also integrate speaker development, including techniques for delivering messages, as well as feedback on presentations.
• Event Logistics: Plan and track event-related administrative details and accountabilities. The most successful event logistics practitioners track and study event outcomes—attendance volume, speaker ratings, attendees’ overall satisfaction—to learn how to improve future events.
• Lead Capture: The formal process for identifying prospective buyers at an event by recognizing and capitalizing on their buying interest. Ideally, you should qualify and score leads at the moment they are created.

File Under: Hot Prospects

Who excels at event management? Medical device manufacturers, for starters. These organizations sell multi-million dollar MRI machines and six-figure sterilization devices; their salespeople can’t just throw products in the trunk and demo them in a doctor’s office. Instead, medical device manufacturers run events to demonstrate their wares to physicians and hospital administrators. Over time, they’ve become expert at using these events to capture high-quality leads.

For example, one medical device manufacturer worked with Innoveer to adopt handheld devices for obtaining more information about people attending its events or its booth at trade shows. Now, whenever someone stops by a booth, a marketing person scans the attendee’s conference badge to “pull” their name and contact details. Then, using an application running on the handheld device, they record the attendee’s reactions to what they see and hear. As a result, the company can quickly score and qualify all of its leads to determine each person’s propensity to make a buying decision. Above all, this enables the company’s marketing managers to quickly identify and pursue the hottest prospects.

Lead Management: How Advanced Are You?

Innoveer benchmarks organizations’ marketing strategies to determine any given organization’s relative process maturity in that area—namely, whether it’s advanced, lagging, or somewhere in between. Here’s how that spectrum looks for lead capture:

• Initiating: Leads defined crudely—perhaps as simple as “attended” or “visited booth.”
• Competitive: Defining leads based on actual interest levels during or after the event. Includes a formal process to test attendee’s interest and capture their contact information.
• World class: Testing for interest during and after events by using activities, together with segmentation and channel-based strategies to continually identify, capture and target additional leads, using multiple channels.

Fix Problems First

By benchmarking their current capabilities, organizations will learn which parts of their marketing program to improve first. And while it might seem counter-intuitive, our advice is to focus first on making your weak capabilities stronger. This approach will give you the biggest improvement in your overall marketing strategy effectiveness, and thus the biggest return on investment.

Learn More

Medical device manufacturers typically excel not only at event management, but also managing key opinion leaders. Our Cultivating Key Opinion Leaders white paper details the best techniques and also explores the relationship between key opinion leader and event management.

At events, many organizations would like to qualify and score leads the moment they’re created. For guidance about how to put this into practice, look to the pharmaceutical industry, which often provides its salespeople with mobile-device-based CRM software to quickly rate physicians’ levels of product awareness and contact preferences during meetings. Using this information, marketing managers can segment physicians based on their interests, plan sales activities, and design more relevant campaigns and increase their sales effectiveness. For more information, see our white paper on Taking a Customer-Centric Approach.

Why run customer service in the cloud? Well, let’s rephrase the question in terms of business results. Namely, doesn’t every top-notch call center want to improve:

• Growth by cross-selling and up-selling customers with relevant offers?
• Efficiency by providing service representatives with a better picture of the customer?
• Customer satisfaction by talking with customers more knowledgeably, as well as with greater empathy and intimacy?

For example, you call to renew your car insurance policy. In the call center, the service representative sees not only your account history but also your current Facebook profile picture—a family photo—and notices you have a teenage son. He asks if you’d like to add him to the insurance policy as well.

Or say you’ve been in a fender bender and need to get your car fixed. When you phone your insurance company to locate the nearest auto body shop,  the service agent notices—again from your Facebook photo feed—that you have small children. She asks if you need car seats with your loaner, or if you want to use the ones you have.

In both of these situations, giving the service agent a fuller picture of the customer they’re assisting helps everyone and makes for a richer customer experience. These are just some of the benefits of moving customer service to the cloud.

Insurance Agents Relocate to the Cloud

Recently I asked, Why not run CRM in the cloud? (Just for definition’s sake, by CRM I refer not only to sales force automation, but also to marketing and customer service.) In other words, why not use software-as-a-service (SaaS) CRM applications, provided they deliver—as they typically do—more rapid procurement, easier manageability and a lower total cost of ownership, compared to on-premise CRM applications?

For many organizations, SaaS customer service applications will meet their needs. For example, Innoveer recently helped a property and casualty (P&C) insurance company deploy a SaaS-based customer service application for about 100 call center agents. This isn’t the largest call center we’ve ever worked with, and perhaps the SaaS application doesn’t have all of the advanced features that some of our bigger call center customers have, such as interactive voice response (IVR) integration or computer-telephony integration (CTI) support.

But from a functionality standpoint, the application meets all of the organization’s case management needs—from case capture and assignment to resolution and closure. Furthermore, thanks to having a good plan (because pursuing SaaS CRM applications without a plan is a recipe for failure), the P&C insurer quickly got and running.

What’s not to like about less expensive software that rapidly delivers business value?

Cloud-to-Cloud Integration Benefits

Another reason to run service applications in the cloud is for cloud-to-cloud integration. Many organizations, for example, would love to link their customer service platform to Facebook, so when a customer calls in, the service agent can literally see who they’re helping.

Well, connecting your SaaS customer service application to Facebook is much easier than integrating on-premise CRM with Facebook. (For example, salesforce.com has a Facebook connector; on-premise Siebel does not.) In fact, integrating any two cloud applications will always be easier than integrating an on-premise application to the cloud. With SaaS, one person builds a connector and thousands of people can use it. Whereas when integrating an on-premise application to the cloud, finding that economy of scale is, at best, difficult.

As the Cloud Expands, So Do Service Possibilities

Is SaaS right for all customer service requirements today? No. But that’s changing as the cloud (which includes platforms and infrastructure—not just SaaS) continues to expand.

In other words, as the cloud evolves, the attendant costs and benefits will drive more companies to host their call center in the cloud.

Learn More

Mastering customer service, regardless of whether it’s backed by on-premise or SaaS applications, first requires treating the call center as a strategic asset. In other words, drop the “necessary evil” thinking and remake your call center or contact center into a valuable corporate asset.

Until you get your customer service business practices and self-service sites in order, from a service standpoint also forget social networks. (For more on setting the right service priorities in a social networking world, see The Tweet Must Die.)

Finally, with online self-service success rates declining, maybe we should all just use Facebook for every online customer service interaction instead.

As the cloud expands, it's extending SaaS to even the biggest businesses. Photograph by doug.siefken.

Large + Complicated = On-Premise CRM?

Why not run CRM in the cloud? In other words, why not use SaaS CRM applications, provided they deliver—as they typically do—more rapid procurement, easier manageability and a lower total cost of ownership, compared to on-premise CRM applications?

Well, size may be one factor. Many people’s perception is that SaaS doesn’t work well for large enterprises. But in fact, we’ve found that SaaS solutions are quite a good feature and functionality fit for many organizations, large or small. As the list of salesforce.com customers shows, many heavy hitters are SaaS devotees.

On the other hand, SaaS isn’t the best fit for every organization, and especially large organizations with quite complex requirements. For example, we’re currently helping a large legal information services provider to adopt a new CRM system. Based on our recommendations, the company is implementing an on-premise application, in part because it needs to integrate its CRM software with various back office, order management and provisioning systems. The goal: to enable the company’s sales force to quickly move from quote to order, and then organize product delivery, all from within the CRM application. Building this is relatively complicated, technologically speaking.

Given that technical complexity, as well as the required integration, this type of project is not a great fit for SaaS—at least not in 2010.  I include that caveat because, going forward, we do see more projects of this nature—technically complex CRM implementations requiring advanced functionality and integration—being well served by SaaS.

Redefining the CRM Choice: On-Premise or SaaS

A little over one year ago, Innoveer released its guidance about when to use SaaS versus on-premise CRM software: The New CRM Choice: On-Premise Software or SaaS.

The gist is that in 2008, SaaS CRM applications didn’t offer as many features, or as much functionality, as on-premise applications. For projects with a greater degree of technical or organizational complexity, on-premise CRM software was the better choice.

But that equation has been changing rapidly—and will continue to do so—as cloud computing evolves, further extending SaaS and providing greater business benefits. CRM analyst Denis Pombriant explains:

The Cloud [has] three parts: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), software (SaaS) and, now, a development platform (PaaS). (…) The new ubiquity [of computing access] spawned by Cloud Computing — all three components — is spawning new, fast and, above all, mobile business processes, not just applications.

In other words, SaaS is now just an application layer—albeit with some minimal accompanying tools—in the cloud. To which the cloud adds an infrastructure layer (servers, storage and bandwidth from the likes of Amazon and Google) and platform layer (such as Force.com). Altogether, these layers can make any SaaS application much more useful and easy to work with.

Bigger Clouds, Greater Benefits

As cloud computing expands, it makes SaaS more extensible, useful and cost-effective. Hence my prediction is that SaaS CRM will evolve to become more deeply connected with the expanding cloud ecosystem. In other words, organizations of any size will be able to support much more complex business processes, at lower cost, using SaaS CRM applications.

In 2008, we said that “CRM projects must now begin by answering this fundamental question: on-premise or SaaS?”  Today, however, the question is simpler: Why not use SaaS? And as the cloud evolves, in another three or five years, will we even bother to ask?

Learn More

When weighing the pros and cons of on-premise versus SaaS CRM software, assess functionality requirements, organizational structures, costs and long-term goals. For more information, see our aforementioned white paper, The New CRM Choice: On-Premise Software Or SaaS.

Finally, want to know which SaaS CRM software is best? See our CRM Software Smackdown.

Whatever your strategy, put it in lights. Photograph by L. Marie.

What’s your marketing strategy? For direct marketing to be effective, you must define your strategy in advance. Many organizations, however, neglect this crucial step.

For example, one of our biotechnology clients excelled at marketing and selling to the third-party distributors that sold its products. The company ran top-notch campaigns to generate leads and managed those leads extremely well. But then its market shifted, and instead of selling through suppliers, the company wanted to sell directly to customers. As the firm shifted its approach, however, it didn’t pause to define its new marketing strategy. Instead, the company assumed that all of its indirect marketing knowledge and expertise would work just as well for direct marketing and sales. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case. As a result, the company experienced a painful transition as it was forced to rethink its entire marketing strategy mid-campaign and on the fly.

Strategy Essential for Direct Marketing

Based on Innoveer’s extensive CRM experience, we’ve found that making your marketing program excel requires mastering these five capabilities: marketing strategy, as well as lead management, campaign management, event management and marketing measurement.

To create a more effective marketing program, almost everyone will agree about the need to consider each of the above disciplines. Except for marketing strategy. “We already have one of those,” we always hear. Perhaps. But unless you define it, are you sure that it’s the right one?

Best Practices: Marketing Strategy

Having the right marketing strategy and articulating it is step one. Step two is ensuring that you can successfully execute your strategy. To do that, we’ve identified these four best practices:

• Profiling and targeting: Identify the key characteristics that differentiate your prospective buyers, to best match appropriate offers with customers.
• Cross-functional alignment: Define the integration between marketing and other customer-facing functions (sharing leads with sales, feedback with developers, etc.) to maximize the effectiveness of demand-generation programs.
• Multi-channel management: Define your strategy and schedule for executing demand-generation programs, using the appropriate marketing channel for each designated customer segment.
• Program design: Develop the objectives and plan for a campaign or collection of campaigns for each targeted audience, using selected messaging and a call to action.

Example: Multi-Channel Management

As an example of how these best practices work in real life, take multi-channel management. Done correctly, multi-channel management—reaching each customer through the optimum channel—becomes much more than the sum of its parts, as organizations can increase their efficiency at identifying and pursuing customers using a variety of channels.

Innoveer benchmarks organizations’ marketing strategies to determine any given organization’s relative process maturity in that area—namely, whether it’s advanced, lagging, or somewhere in between. Here’s how that spectrum looks for multi-channel management:

• Initiating: Just getting started with having multiple customer touchpoints.
• Competitive: Interfacing with some—but not all—channels, perhaps using some outsourcing. Also defining some, but probably not all, customer segments.
• World class: Seamlessly interfacing—across all customer-facing functions and third-party agents—with each customer via the most appropriate and comfortable channel. For example, teens on Facebook, older clients in retail stores, people with office jobs via email, direct mail to homes.

Fix Problems First

By benchmarking their current capabilities, organizations know which parts of their marketing program to improve first. And while it might seem counter-intuitive, our advice is to focus first on making your weak capabilities stronger. This approach will give you the biggest improvement in your overall marketing strategy effectiveness, and thus the biggest return on investment.

Learn More

As you plan for upcoming marketing program enhancements, know the requirements for creating more effective marketing programs.

CRM: A History of Failure?

Are customer relationship management (CRM) projects prone to failure? ZDNet reviewed analyst firms’ reports to chart general CRM failure rates for 2001-2009:

• 2001 Gartner Group: 50%
• 2002 Butler Group: 70%
• 2002 Selling Power, CSO Forum: 69.3%
• 2005 AMR Research: 18%
• 2006 AMR Research: 31%
• 2007 AMR Research: 29%
• 2007 Economist Intelligence Unit: 56%
• 2009 Forrester Research: 47%

Failure is defined broadly, covering projects that didn’t meet expectations (at best) or failed outright (at worst). Because these statistics come from different research firms using dissimilar research methodologies, you can’t accurately compare year-on-year trends. But to pick just about any given year, my immediate reaction is: There’s no need for CRM failure rates to be this high.

Will project success rates improve? In fact, I predict that sales force automation (SFA) project failure rates are going to increase even more. (The majority of CRM implementations today are for SFA.) Why is that? Simple: Companies are shooting without aiming, just like it was 1999 all over again. The only difference is that instead of implementing on-premises CRM software, they’re using SaaS.

SFA Success Starts With a Plan

What can companies do to ensure that their SFA—or broader CRM (encompassing not just sales, but also service and marketing)—projects meet expectations?

For answers, let’s flash back to 1999, when Lee Iacocca, then CEO of Chrysler, was still a well-known business figure. In those days, he talked a lot about planning as a way of saving money.

Here’s the great thing about planning: you don’t need to spend much money to get a great return. For example, say you spend less than 1% of your expected return on a one-week—or, if you like, two-week—exercise to identify the objectives of your SFA system, as well as what your two-year plan will be to achieve those goals.

As a result of having that plan, you’re probably five times as likely to achieve your objectives, versus just implementing this or that software. And really, what did the planning cost? If your returns are over 100 times that initial planning exercise investment, wasn’t the planning more than justified? In fact, why would you neglect such a foundational step, given the potential returns?

Is SaaS Short-Circuiting Our Brains?

If you follow the Freakonomics camp, you know that psychologically speaking, we humans approach financial matters not from a rational perspective—though we think we’re being objective—but rather with our emotions. And perhaps that’s the answer: SaaS offers the opportunity to have something up and running in days or weeks. It’s the latest and greatest. You want it now. Why bother pausing for even a week or two, to plan?

Just as we’re not naturally adept at rationally analyzing financial patterns, when it comes to CRM projects, we also need to check our innate tendencies at the door. Meaning, sit down and figure out what you really want to do, and how you’re going to do it. Unless you want to fail?

Planning Is Cheap

Based on our experience, and—organizationally speaking—having lived through the dot-com bust as well as the boom that preceded it, we’ve continued to emphasize this theme: Want to succeed? Then don’t just implement software. First, plan.

The good news is that over the past 12 years, we at Innoveer have codified what people should be doing in terms of their CRM planning, and have developed best practices to very quickly help people determine what their plan should be. So whereas a decade ago, planning may have been relatively expensive, today, it’s much easier and less expensive, because we already know the best practices for sales effectiveness, marketing, or customer service.

As a result, creating a plan doesn’t require starting from scratch. Rather, to create an SFA plan, one excellent starting point is to benchmark your company’s sales capabilities—in such areas as relationship management, territory management and pipeline management—against other companies to see understand where your organization excels or needs work.

We’ve found that companies often continue to invest in what they’re already good at. In fact, we recommend investing in what you’re not doing well, because that weakest part of your SFA—or wider CRM—program is what holds you back. Of course, you won’t learn that from just having SaaS CRM software. To find out, you need to build a plan.

Learn More

Innoveer offers a brief workshop to help organizations identify the cost, time and business benefits associated with achieving new and more advanced—meaning, more effective—SFA capabilities. During the workshop, Innoveer examines the five core elements of an organization’s field sales program, identifies the optimal enhancements, and produces specific, technology-agnostic recommendations for building plans and budgets, with detailed estimates of the required project time and costs to improve specific elements of your sales program.

GR5XBKAZA6HJ

Is your online self-service experience made for the modern customer? Photograph by blakespot.

Online Self-Service is Failing

Pick one: your cable television provider, cell phone carrier, gas utility, electricity provider or bank. Now ask yourself: Is its customer self-service offering any good?

In fact, self-service success rates are declining. According to John Ragsdale, research director with the Service and Support Professionals Association (SSPA), which conducts a regular study of self-service effectiveness, “the overall industry average for self-service success is 40%, down from 48% in 2003.” Knowledgebase and other self-service software vendors may claim 80-100% effectiveness, he says, but that’s simply not true.

What’s killing online self-service? The Internet has evolved beyond the domain of technologically sophisticated early adopters with the experience and wherewithal to overcome poor interface design. Now, you’re dealing with people like my 80-year old uncle Luke. If he encounters a bad customer service website, he’ll give up and call. Which, if your company is the one providing the service, costs you a lot more than if he’d stayed online.

Self-Service Must Improve

For companies with customer-facing activities, their marketing, sales and service programs—the three components of any successful CRM program—must work together to maintain an excellent customer experience. In other words, providing a bad online self-service experience is a great way to kiss your customers goodbye.

What, then, does it take to improve the online self-service experience? The answer isn’t just technology. In fact, the technological aspect is relatively simple. Integrating your SAP order management system with your website to show people where their package is in the fulfillment process? Easy. Extending knowledgebase access to customers so they can run their own queries? Easy. In short, the path to solving both of these problems is known.

Creating a great customer experience, on the other hand, is much more difficult, and on all but the best sites, it shows. For example, I can buy or return a book to Amazon.com in about 20 seconds, using maybe a dozen clicks. How long do you think it took Amazon to create that level of seamless customer interaction? There’s no easy formula for getting there—just trial, error and time.

So Let’s Just Use Facebook

If creating a great, easy-to-use customer experience—and accompanying interface—online is so difficult, then why not just find a highly subscribed online community with a great interface and layer your customer experience on top? In short: Why not use Facebook for all of your online customer self-service interactions?

Consider that Facebook now has 350 million users. Any network of that size should have powerful network effects—meaning that once there’s a critical mass of users, the more that people use it, the more useful it becomes—and yet social networking doesn’t seem to be producing these results. (How many friends do I need to suggest the latest CRM-themed Lolcats?)

On the other hand, Facebook is positioning itself, from business standpoint, to do much more, as its December deal with Yahoo—to use your Facebook Connect (aka ID) to connect with any Yahoo property, and then relay these interactions back to your Facebook base—demonstrates. According to Om Malik at GigaOm, this positions Facebook to become the single sign-on for your entire Internet experience. Consider the implications: Instead of entering separate passwords at Amazon.com, eBay, the New York Times or Yahoo, just log on at Facebook, and voila, you’re authenticated on any other participating site. From an ease-of-use standpoint, you can’t beat it.

So let’s take this a step further and increase the network effects by several orders of magnitude beyond just single sign-on, by making Facebook the one-stop shop for all online customer. Compared with the outdated, poorly considered self-service interfaces on so many of customer-facing sites, this would create much more useful and enjoyable customer experiences, leading to higher levels of customer satisfaction with a company’s products and services. And did I mention it would cost much less to support? (Again, with the network effects.)

Here’s how: Companies create their own Facebook page and self-service widgets, integrated with their back-office systems, and allow users to easily search everything on offer—knowledgebases, communities, updates—to solve any issues, retrieve their statements, or even pay their bills. Along the way, they can tap the collective power of the entire Facebook user base to help solve problems.

Go Ahead, Resist

Of course, AT&T (to pick one example) may say, “Log in to your AT&T information with your Facebook account? Never.” And that would create an opportunity for a smaller competitor like MetroPCS to take a run at AT&T’s customer base. Eventually, perhaps, so many people would be using Facebook for self-service that not offering customer service via Facebook would be the 2010s equivalent of not having a website.

Unless, of course, you enjoy today’s online self-service experience?

Learn More

In the age of Twitter and Facebook, how can companies provide effective service and keep their brand intact? Our advice: forget social networks, at least until you get your customer service business practices and sites in order. For more on setting the right service priorities in a social networking world, also see The Tweet Must Die.

For any organization catering to members, rather than customers, see our white paper on advanced portal capabilities, which contains numerous insights for creating more flexible and interactive self-service portals.

Finally, while online self-service is a valuable, cost-effective channel, mastering customer service also requires treating the call center as a strategic asset—namely, remaking your call or contact center into a valuable corporate asset, rather than treating it as a necessary evil.

Are you inciting people with a clear call to action? Photograph by Shemer.

What does it take to help your marketing group operate more effectively?

Based on our numerous marketing engagements, we’ve found that making your marketing program excel requires mastering five capabilities: marketing strategy, lead management, campaign management, event management and marketing measurement.

Best Practices for Campaign Management

Of Innoveer’s marketing effectiveness framework, here I’ll touch on campaign management: the step at which your organization must present prospective buyers with a call to action. To increase your campaign management proficiency, focus on these four best practices:

• List Development: Identify a target population of prospective customers based on program objectives and profile characteristics. To do this effectively, pay attention to data quality.
• Campaign Execution: Conduct the campaign—in other words, deliver key messages and a call to action to prospects through one or more channels. For best results, begin by testing it on a sizeable group, and then run the campaign in waves, and using the feedback to further refine subsequent waves. Remember to use the Web to your advantage. This isn’t 2002; you’re not emailing 10,000 postcards in one go.
• Message Management: Control the message being disseminated to each target group. What’s the message? That’s up to you. Just make sure you test it. A lot. For example, one of our customers buys Google ads for products it’s considering manufacturing, records the hits and then investigates building the most popular ones. It’s an extreme yet extremely useful form of testing (in this case via crowdsourcing).
• Response Management: The formal mechanism for identifying interested buyers via their response to a campaign call to action, or another indication of interest. This might be as simple as filling out an online form, downloading a white paper, returning a phone call or accepting a meeting.

Response Management Mechanisms

For response management, which mechanism works best? Really, you need to think through what will work best for your organization. For our high-technology customers, often it’s a download. For pharmaceutical or medical device customers, it’s coming to a seminar being hosted by an eminent physician on a hot topic.

For many organizations, offers are a vital response mechanism. For example, Innoveer customer Dice.com, the largest online technology jobs board, conducts a lot of email campaigns, often aimed at giving out offer to new or existing customers. For example, I recently received an email which said that I should use Dice for recruiting in 2010, and if I did so I’d receive a certain deal. Dice, of course, is looking for any responses to those deal offers, and constantly trying to determine if giving out a coupon—and what type of coupon—produces an optimal response.

Fix Faults First

In the Dice example, effectively managing responses is predicated on a number of other factors, including developing good lists (based on good leads), managing the message, and correctly executing the campaign. In other words, all of the above parts of campaign management—from lists and execution to message and response management—interconnects, meaning that deficiencies in one area will have repercussions in all of the others.

Accordingly, when trying to create more effective campaigns, you should benchmark your capabilities, and then first improve what you’re not good at. That will not only result in the biggest improvement in your campaign management capabilities, but also give you the biggest return on your investment.

Learn More

As you plan for upcoming marketing program enhancements, know the requirements for creating more effective marketing programs.

HV9P5PDDY6U4

Who rules? Photograph by Tim Hipps.

Are you still using ACT, Saleslogix or some other type of technology developed in the 1980s or 1990s? We often hear from sales VPs in that position who say they’re thinking of doing something different. Specifically, they’re wondering if it’s time to embrace SaaS-based CRM in the form of Salesforce.com or Oracle CRM On Demand.

This is a good question, albeit with one caveat: The most important success factor for CRM is not your technology. Nothing is more important than having a good plan, knowing your desired business outcomes in advance and then vigorously pursuing each one in phases.

CRM: Only 3 Choices

On to software: What should you select?

If your organization is not in the pharmaceutical, medical device or biotechnology industry, then there are only three names to consider:

• Salesforce.com
• Oracle CRM On Demand
• Microsoft CRM

Those are the players, and frankly I don’t think it makes any sense to evaluate anything else. The above software is all priced appropriately—based on company size, user base, and so on—although some are more or less expensive than the others.

Pharmaceutical, medical device and biotechnology companies should also consider Cegedim Dendrite, which is very popular with organizations in those industries.

What about using SAP for CRM? Well, if you’ve already got SAP, and 1,000 people using it everyday for manufacturing and accounting, and your CRM concerns hew more toward order entry and finance-related activities, then you should probably add SAP to your evaluation list. If you’re not an SAP shop, however, don’t consider it.

FIVE CRM Considerations

When evaluating the above software, factor in—as appropriate—the following concerns:

• Integration: Both Salesforce.com and Oracle handle integration well, including with smartphones and BlackBerries; Microsoft CRM does not. For specific integration tools, consider Pyxis Mobile.
• Oracle integration: Oracle offers prebuilt connectors to integrate Oracle CRM On Demand with Oracle Financials, JD Edwards, and so on, which creates an easy path to almost any on-premise Oracle software. For example, Akamai uses on-premise Siebel CRM for its call center, and Oracle CRM On Demand for its sales force, and integrating the two was relatively easy, thanks to their shared data models. (Side note: Oracle CRM On Demand also ships with more prebuilt analytics tools and dashboards than Salesforce.com.)
• Microsoft tie-ins: Consider Microsoft CRM, a relatively simple, good and lightweight tool, if you want tight integration into the Microsoft framework—namely, Exchange. For example, we helped Epson—which already used SAP on the back end—select Microsoft CRM as a simple tool for managing its partners.
• Popularity: Adopting Salesforce.com, the most popular CRM software on the market, means you get the advantages of working with the market leader: the largest support network, the greatest number of available third-party add-ons (via AppExchange), the most energetic user community, and so on.
• User Interface: Most users think that Salesforce.com has the best look and feel, and thus prefer it, even though it also tends to be the most expensive option.

The above considerations won’t cover every need or requirement, but when it comes to evaluating your CRM software options, it will help get you started.

Learn More

For more help in selecting and implementing CRM technology, read our white paper on The Value of Working With Experts, as well as about the economics of selecting CRM software.

Not sold on the value of SaaS-based CRM, or are you considering on-premise CRM software? Read a vendor-neutral review of the positives and negatives of on-premise and SaaS CRM applications.