Monster Mashups

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.

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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.

When Call Centers Go Bad

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.

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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.

Call Centers in the Cloud

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.

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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.