Risk is a relative concept.

When it comes to innovation, the insurance industry often gets a bum rap: slow to change, reactionary. One Dreamforce 2011 session, “The Next Generation of Insurance,” was even subtitled “Rethinking a Laggard Industry.”

Now, the insurance industry may be slow, but I’d never label it as lagging. Relatively speaking, the industry has been fairly aggressive in introducing new products and services to meet its customers’ needs. (Note I’m speaking here not about the health insurance industry, which is its own, unique space–especially with the Obama healthcare law now in play–but rather companies that sell life insurance, as well as non-life, general, and property or casualty insurance.)

Of course, the insurance industry is also built on the notion that it’s managing risk. By avoiding risky bets, insurers have historically made money, because they’ve been able to invest the money from customers’ premiums, and pay out less than they take in, thus generating profits. With a sure bet, why should the industry risk changing too quickly?

The problem for insurance companies, however, is that worldwide stock market performance has been fairly poor for some time, and it’s not forecast to get better anytime soon. Accordingly, the industry’s typical revenue-generation mechanism hasn’t been performing up to historical standards. That creates pressure on insurance companies to offset their lack of investment returns by lowering operating costs and finding new ways to increase revenue.

How CRM Helps Lower Costs And Increase Profits

Enter CRM. In fact, those business requirements have been the driving force behind most of the insurance projects in which Innoveer has participated. In general, we’re seeing insurers largely focus on these four types of customer-focused projects:

• Contact center optimization: For insurance companies, their first customer-service goal is to ensure that all inbound calls get solved by the member services agent who first picks up the phone. Of course, insurers have been focusing on the contact center for some time. But they’re coming back, since more business is now happening online, and especially on Facebook and Twitter. In addition, there continues to be a clear relationship between technology investments and business returns, as expressed by the number of calls per hour that agents can handle.
• Sales force transformation: Insurance companies often change and adapt their products to suit the needs of evolving markets, and to capitalize on new opportunities. For example, the life insurance industry has become expert at handling the complicated payouts that can be required after one of their policyholders dies. But to keep retooling their products and services, insurers typically require more flexible sales automation tools, not least to enable salespeople to remain up to date on all of the latest offerings.
• Mobile sales automation: Which salesperson today doesn’t sport a smartphone, tablet, or several of each? Accordingly, one prominent life insurance firm recently tapped Innoveer to help make its CRM software more mobile. The business driver is simple: to provide field agents with rapid access to complete customer and broker details, so they can more rapidly court customers with profitable proposals.
• Social Monitoring: While insurers aren’t adopting social technology as quickly as some other industries, such as high-tech companies, they are beginning to pursue projects that help them monitor social networks for favorable mentions, as well as distraught customers who need assistance.

Risk Versus Reward Demands Action

As these projects demonstrate, when it comes to lowering operating costs and increasing revenues, insurance companies aren’t afraid to revise their business practices and adopt the latest CRM approaches and technology. Because to reap rewards, it’s important to manage risks. And for almost any industry, including insurance, doing nothing–in the face of changing market conditions and a difficult economy–can be the biggest risk of all.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user BobaliciousLondon.

Can you hear your customers' cries for help?

With people spending more time than ever Facebooking, tweeting, and relying on online communities for products, services, and authoritative information, organizations naturally have begun asking: How do we turn social networks to our business advantage, especially when it comes to customer service?

Cue the emerging concept of social service — customer service, with a social networking overlay — which continues to evolve just as quickly as the concept of social media itself.

It’s early days for social service, but practitioners have already seen concrete business results. As with any CRM project, however, the best results come by not just pursuing big-picture “social service,” but first articulating exactly what your social-service program should achieve. In other words, start by asking the right questions, to create a rapid-action plan designed to meet your particular business requirements.

Social Service: 4 Best Practices

The best place to start any social service program discussion is by identifying which of these four best practices will best help your organization excel at providing social service:

• Community management: Enable customers to form self-service communities of interest around your company’s products and services
• Multi-channel service: Employ social technology to handle customers’ service requests, while ensuring that your business quickly resolves those cases
• Social “voice of the customer”: Use social technologies to gather and analyze post-sale and post-service customer feedback
• Experience management: Enable customers to express their delight, while ensuring that your business can quickly mitigate any dissatisfaction

Here’s more about each of those best practices, and how to put them to work for your business:

Community Management

Community management is a great first step for many businesses’ social service programs, given its great bang for buck. Examples of advanced community management programs abound. For example, many high-technology companies — including Apple — offer support communities in which customers largely solve each other’s problems, and in the process, generate a valuable knowledgebase for self-service troubleshooting. The business, meanwhile, clearly benefits from the low costs involved, as well as the potential for high levels of customer satisfaction.

As organizations gain more skill with community management, the next step is typically to integrate support communities’ knowledgebases with your contact center, since service reps will be troubleshooting similar issues. Make reps’ jobs easier, and case resolution times shorter, by giving them access to all sources of authoritative information.

Multi-Channel Service

No matter the customer service issue, businesses must hear when their customers are having trouble, including via social technology. Already, we’ve seen a lot of businesses begin to support this approach. Airlines are a great example, as we saw in the wake of Iceland’s 2010 volcano eruption. Bank of America (not one of our customers), meanwhile, employs a dedicated Twitter monitoring team. It watches for any customers with banking problems, then attempts to resolve those issues as quickly as possible.

In the future, expect to see these types of dedicated Twitter teams merge completely into the contact center, as organizations launch a universal queue that includes social networks. That way, no matter how a trouble ticket gets raised, and regardless of the business model (not just B2C, but B2B too), the contact center will log all issues and flag them for resolution.

Social Voice Of The Customer

In customer experience terms, the voice of the customer means ensuring that your business has a formal process in place for gathering — and responding — to customer feedback, or soliciting said feedback post-sale or post-service. Typically, feedback gets tracked as part of a unique profile maintained for each customer.

Social media takes this concept one step further. Why not solicit feedback via Twitter or Facebook, and maintain a social profile for each customer? Developing this social voice of the customer will also enable businesses to connect with their customers for non-service purposes. For example, say you’re in charge of research and development for Panasonic’s Toughbook division (which makes ruggedized laptops) and currently rely on email-based surveys of customers to review how the devices are performing in the field. Given the amount of time that people now spend on social networks, by surveying customers using social media, you’d likely see greater survey participation, as well as more timely feedback.

Experience Management

How do you monitor what’s happening in the social media sphere? Putting the right business processes in place to handle this monitoring will be essential for mitigating developing problems with products or services. Customer experience management, interestingly, ties in directly to the marketing channel, though requires not just reaching out, but managing the overall customer experience. To do this, when approaching social networks, always ask:

• How do we find people who are having problems?
• How do we log those issues, and ensure that they’re resolved?
• Are our customers happy, post-service?

Future Social Service Cross Sells

The above best practices are starting points for building a social service program today. Going forward, expect to see additional CRM capabilities get added to the mix, such as social cross-selling. For example, customers call audio manufacturer Bose when they need help connecting their new audio system with other gear in their house. Oftentimes, they need additional cables, which Bose then offers to sell them. Cue happy customers, plus additional revenue for Bose. We haven’t seen this type of social cross-selling happen yet, but expect to see it soon.

Jump In, Learn As You Go

As with social selling and social marketing, when it comes to social service, it’s early days; no on has all of the answers. But that doesn’t mean that your business can’t put social CRM to work by pursuing community management, multi-channel service, the social voice of the customer, experience management, or any combination thereof.

The only requirement? Begin by defining your social customer service business goals — such as more efficient service and a better customer experience — to ensure that your social service plan boosts the bottom line.

Learn More

Why become a social business? Because with 800 million people using Facebook, and 175 million registered on Twitter, the world’s gone social. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to build valuable marketing, sales and service relationships on social networks.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Johan Larsson.

Is your IT department leading the social CRM charge?

Flash back to high school: Remember the categorical imperative? You’re the only person standing next to a fire extinguisher when a roaring blaze breaks out. Ethically speaking, you have an obligation to extinguish the flames.

Similar imperatives operate in the business world — minus the split-second reaction time requirements — when it comes to applying technology. Both CIOs and IT managers have scarce, valuable knowledge and experience about the best way to employ technology to make the business run better. Accordingly, they have a duty to act.

Enter social CRM, which involves overlaying social networking capabilities onto traditional customer-focused marketing, sales, and service activities. With consumers spending more time than ever not just online, but on social networks, the new business imperative is to connect with customers and prospects on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, bespoke support communities, and everywhere else they gather.

Today, however, too many senior executives focus solely on “social,” and leave social CRM in the hands of their marketing department — because they’re the Twitter experts, right? In fact, social CRM is too valuable for the organization’s future health to just be handed off to marketing. Pursue that strategy, and your business will fail.

CIOs See Social CRM Way Forward

When it comes to social CRM — as with cloud-based (aka SaaS) CRM — businesses need their CIOs and IT managers to help drive them forward, for two primary reasons:

• Technology acumen: Today, social CRM technology (Salesforce.com, Jive, Lithium) varies wildly. Everything is differentiated; nothing is commoditized. Accordingly, businesses need technology experts who can help them evaluate the options, and think through how technical capabilities will map to solving discrete business challenges.
• Process perspective: Social business processes won’t map verbatim to today’s organizational boundaries. Rather, aspects of marketing, sales and service — not to mention HR, finance, quality and manufacturing — must blend. (Salesforce.com’s acquisition of Rypple is the latest sign, following similar moves by Oracle and SAP, that this blending is becoming reality.) Your CIO, sitting outside of those heavily siloed realms, can bring a valuable perspective about how to blend parts of these business functions for maximum impact.

Meanwhile, here’s a similar message for CIOs and IT managers: Step forward to help manage your business’s social CRM adoption strategy. Someone I used to work with loved this phrase: “If a CIO doesn’t take this action, and he was a doctor, he’d be sued for malpractice.” That now goes for social CRM.

Customer-Facing Groups Need External Perspective

When it comes to using social networks to solve discrete business challenges, it’s worth noting that beyond just technology acumen, many CIOs and IT managers have extensive personal experience with social media and mobility, typically from living on the bleeding edge of the new-technology adoption curve.

Indeed, out of every employee at your organization, your CIO and IT managers are the most likely to:

• Manage a well-regarded, personal, public Twitter feed – probably running for the past two years
• Understand intuitively what integrating with a Facebook API could do for your company’s marketing, sales and service outreach
• Grasp how running a promotion on Foursquare will boost awareness for your business’s brands

In other words, when it comes to using technology to solve business challenges, they get it, because most often, they’re the ones who’ve already actively embraced it as consumers. Accordingly, when it comes to overlaying social CRM capabilities on existing marketing, sales and service processes, ensure that your IT department’s best and brightest are not just involved, but leading the charge.

Learn More

Innoveer helps organizations assess their existing social CRM strategy, sales, marketing, service, and collaboration capabilities. Contact us to learn more about Innoveer’s Social Business Framework, based on the best practices of hundreds of CRM practitioners, which we use to help businesses rapidly develop a social CRM adoption strategy.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Sgt. Travis Zielinski.

What's in store for CRM in 2012?

8 CRM Predictions For 2012

As 2012 takes off, it’s time for that fun annual event: predicting how customer relationship management (CRM) — and related disciplines — will evolve over the year. Here are my top eight predictions for what’s in store for CRM in 2012:

1) Growth Becomes Businesses’ Top Focus

Barring the collapse of the euro, revolution in North Korea, or Kim Kardashian coming back on the scene, the macro business story is this: We’re set for an economic rebound, which will allow businesses to switch from cost-saving mode into growth mode, meaning there’s great new potential for boosting the bottom line.

Accordingly, now is the time to begin preparing for customer experience and customer service projects. That’s because the businesses that will be best positioned to capitalize on growth opportunities will be the ones that have built the best customer relationships in their market.

Cue this 2012 business imperative: contact center modernization, including tight social media tie-ins — because today, you can’t do customer service any other way. To handle all of those requirements, we expect to see sharp increases in Salesforce.com Service Cloud adoption.

2) Blurring Business Functions

The rapid growth of social CRM has had a notable side effect: it’s blurring the lines between sales, marketing, and service, as companies attempt to open up their touch points with customers. For 2012, expect the same to happen — albeit in ways we probably can’t even imagine — with HR, finance, quality and manufacturing.

That’s because one of the chief concepts behind the creation of a social enterprise is learning how to get content and information to people more effectively. For example, who’s going to know more about solving a tricky technical problem than the engineers in manufacturing? Hence the new business imperative: learn how to connect them with customers. At the same time, also ask related questions: Can we take some of the resulting troubleshooting content and publish it, then use the resulting interest to create new leads? Going forward, can we streamline the customer experience by improving build quality?

3) Cloud-Based BI

Hardcore cloud-based analytics is another trend that’s on the horizon, and which will hit maturity this year. In particular, keep an eye on Cloud9 Analytics, which offers cloud-based forecasting and pipeline management. That’s important, because software such as Salesforce.com is operational, meaning that you’re focused on current operations: reviewing the sales pipeline, looking up contacts.

But what if you want to compare the current pipeline with the pipeline from four weeks, 12 weeks, or even two years ago? (Kind of like Facebook’s new timeline feature.) Previously, answering that type of business intelligence (BI) question often took oodles of infrastructure, including building a data warehouse. But with cloud-based analytics software, you’ll be able to much more easily generate time slices, showing you where things stood at any given point in time.

4) Mobility Keeps Moving

This might sound a bit techie, but HTML5 is taking off, and one of the key capabilities it offers is the ability to more easily create cross-platform mobile applications. In other words, expect HTML5 to add even more fuel to the burgeoning mobility movement, including more mobile CRM.

5) Legacy CRM Loses Out

Given the capabilities on offer from cloud-based CRM (including built-in mobility), in 2012, expect many more organizations to ditch their legacy CRM platforms — Siebel, Oracle CRM, Pivotal, SalesLogix. Instead, they’ll be adopting Salesforce.com, Oracle CRM On Demand, and Microsoft CRM Dynamics.

6) Facebook Backlash

In other sea changes, on the social CRM front, beware a backlash after Facebook publishes its S-1 as it prepares to go public. When people see how much money Facebook is making, they may decide to opt out of helping to enrich the social network. Although, to borrow from Gartner’s research approach, I’d only put the probability of Facebook fallout at 30% (i.e. not likely, but possible).

7) Voice-Controlled CRM

Call it the Siri effect: If I’m a salesperson, when will I be able to walk out of a meeting and tell my smartphone what the meeting was about? At that point, of course, my smartphone should be able to work with my cloud-based CRM application to automatically generate all of the required activities and follow-ups. In other words, thanks to Apple’s Siri, the bar has been raised. And we’re waiting.

8) Steve Jobs Biopic Storms Oscars

Ending on another Apple and sales-related note, Salesforce.com’s vice president of corporate strategy, Bruce Francis, surely has the year’s CRM-related Oscar forecast nailed with his “Death of a Salesman” predictions surrounding the inevitable Steve Jobs biopic. Think Aaron Sorkin, writing a script based on the biography by Walter Issacson, with George Clooney playing Jobs, and Meryl Streep bagging a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her portrayal of Jobs’s sister, Mona Simpson.

As with all of the CRM changes on tap for 2012, stay tuned for more details.

Learn More

With people spending more time than ever on social networks, at least one of your 2012 CRM resolutions should be clear: invest in social CRM to reduce costs, increase efficiency, and improve the customer experience.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Darvin Atkeson.

Who doesn't want to be the big gorilla?

Truly, it’s a fine time to be a high-tech business. As organizations search for new ways to increase productivity while employing fewer people, vendors of enterprise software and hardware have seen their profits surge.

Productivity-wise, the high-tech industry likewise practices what it preaches. It’s long been one of the most enthusiastic — and successful — adopters of the latest CRM technology. To date, for example, Innoveer has worked with at least 50 high-tech hardware and software businesses with annual revenues of $1 billion or more who are diehard CRM aficionados.

Accordingly, when identifying the best way to get the most from your sales, marketing and service investments, as well as partner relationship management (PRM) programs and social enablement strategies, pay attention to the below best practices from the high-tech industry.

High-Tech: Live On The CRM Bleeding Edge

What does it take to succeed in high-tech? According to Geoffrey Moore of Crossing the Chasm fame, whoever becomes the “market leader,” aka gorilla, stands to command 50% of the market share and 80% of the profits. Accordingly, being first counts for a lot, not least because once customers see a clear winner emerge, they’re more likely to adopt its products en masse, and stick with them.

The alternatives aren’t pretty. Non-winners will constantly face the threat of extinction. But a bit more long-term, that goes for market leaders too. Novell, for example, was the leading  technology company of its time; it invented networking. But the company failed to beat Microsoft in the 1990s, struggled to reinvent itself for the open source age, and was finally sold largely for its patent portfolio.

Heavy Sales And Marketing Investments Pay Off

In their push to become the market leader, software companies typically invest millions or billions of dollars to develop a product. But once the product goes to market, the marginal cost involved in selling a DVD or online subscription is quite low. Innoveer client Citrix, for example, which sells virtualization and networking technology, and cloud application solutions, sees gross profit margins of 86%, and its end-of-fiscal year revenues increased from $1.87 billion in 2010 to $1.99 billion for 2011.

To make balance sheets like that a reality, high-tech companies tend to channel a lot of their profits into sales and marketing. The goal: expand faster, gain more market share, keep an eye on the company’s social profile, and route the best customer feedback to their engineers, to help them continue to develop market-leading products.

Automation Eliminates Friction

The imperative for high-tech companies is to remove as much friction from their customer-facing practices as possible. Accordingly, they pay close attention to sales automation, including sales process optimization, SFA system and order entry system integration, product configuration tools, lead management improvements, and sales territories. Indeed, while the typical company reorganizes sales territories every year, rapidly growing high-tech companies may do so every three months.

Automating the pricing, discounting, and related approval process for sales is likewise essential. Oracle, for example, is notorious for starting its sales discussions at 80% off list price. Only a company with profit margins in the neighborhood of 90% can afford to do that, but it still needs to do so carefully.

Obsession: Case Resolution

When it comes to service, the main driver for high-tech companies is simple: resolve cases. The mantra: “How do we intake a customer’s problem and solve it as fast as possible?” That happens via knowledge-bases, self-service tools, as well as automated systems that determine entitlement, meaning the service level to which a particular customer is entitled.

This push for maximum automation as well as case-resolution speed has seen many high-tech companies successfully turn service and contact centers into profit centers. Furthermore, many companies are tasking their field service personnel to gather intelligence about customers’ existing technology investments and in-place technology from competitors, so that salespeople can pitch replacements.

PRM Handles Mass Distribution

For selling more, as quickly as possible, high-tech companies have perfected the art of selling via business partners. Because once you become the big gorilla, the problem is no longer having to sell your software or hardware, per se, but rather distributing it as far and wide as possible, while continuing to burnish the brand.

High-tech companies typically build an independent distribution network to handle these demands, and offer profit incentives to distributors or third-party resellers. But at the same time, high-tech gorillas must carefully manage their partners. The goal is to reward successful distributors by funneling more business their way, as well as to identify and help underperformers to improve.

Social Enablement Spells Market Traction

The latest must-have high-tech capability: social enablement. We’re seeing significant increases in funding for social business endeavors, including managing and monitoring companies’ reputation on Twitter, Facebook, as well as other social networks.

High-tech companies are on the leading edge when it comes to creating bespoke communities — self-service or otherwise — devoted to their own products. These communities not only demonstrate to prospective customers that there’s a rich user ecosystem ready to handle any product-related challenge they may encounter, but also provide an inexpensive, crowdsourced knowledgebase that helps high-tech companies spot emerging issues, close trouble tickets quickly, and increase the quality of future products.

Going Forward: Go Social

By and large, high-tech companies excel at CRM. If they have one weak point, it’s that their data-loving leaders have historically been enamored with creating a 360-degree view of their customers. We’re not against that, but the concept is often pitched as a panacea for solving all customer-facing challenges.

In fact, for solving challenges today, the clear call to action is now to become more social. The mandate isn’t to know everything about a customer, but rather everything essential. Increasingly, that information is arriving via social networks, and as customers spend more time there, those networks become the go-to space for conducting marketing, sales, and service. At least, if you want to be the big gorilla.

Learn More

Do you see social CRM rising? Think that a 360-degree view of the customer should remain a top business priority? Want to lodge a complaint about the over-abundant use of animal metaphors for describing sales and marketing dynamics? Get your feedback in now, as we’re preparing our predictions for 2012 CRM trends.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Duncan McKinnon.

What are your customers saying about you?

With customers spending more of their online time on social networks, your next step should be obvious: market accordingly. That means courting customers on Facebook, Google+, Twitter or anyplace online where customers or potential aficionados of your products and services gather.

Of course, most organizations already have CRM practices and programs in place. So the question is: What’s the best way to overlay social marketing awareness?

The answer is to first recognize that you’re either managing your brand on social networks, or leaving customers behind. Accordingly, the next step is to just jump in — though preferably, backed by a plan.

4 Social Marketing Best Practices

How can organizations ensure that they have a social marketing strategy that offers the most bang for the buck? Based on Innoveer’s extensive CRM experience, we recommend focusing on these four areas:

• Brand management: Employ the right processes for monitoring, protecting and promoting brands via social media
• Demand generation: Generate interest in a company’s products or services using social technology
• Social product influence: Monitor social networks to track product perception and use that feedback to improve products
• Content creation: Enable customers to create and share content in a way that relates to your organization’s products and brands

Here’s more about each best practice, and how to put them into play:

Social Networks Mean Easy Brand Management

Brand management is a fancy way of saying “influence.” As in, you want to be sure that people stay happy and positive about every aspect of your brand. As a result, you need to get in front of people who function as influencers.

Take the VirginAtlantic Twitter feed, which regularly responds to problems or observations posed by its customers. Meanwhile, audio equipment maker Bose uses its Facebook page as a way to not just promote its brand, but gather feedback about what will make its products better. Arguably, the best examples of social brand management involve pages devoted to unique products and which not only market, but also serve as sales funnels or service channels.

Brand management on social networks, however, requires brand monitoring — who’s saying what? — and in some cases would ideally trigger a trouble ticket in the service system, or become a potential lead for marketing to review. To handle those types of situations, as well as to keep tabs on who’s saying what, many companies work with Innoveer business partner Radian 6, which enables them to listen to customers on social media channels, and then engage with them via Salesforce.com.

Demand Generation Drives Sales

Generating demand via social networks can be easy: British Airways tweets that it’s running a 24-hour sale on flights to India. Asset management firms can remind customers when it’s the end of the year, and time to make final additions to their retirement accounts. Real estate brokers can use social media to advertise when they have new leases on offer.

The bigger business picture here is that demand generation should serve as a sales funnel. That way, you’re not just creating interest and demand, but also a call to action for what people should do next.

Social Product Influence Manages Expectations

Using social networks to track how your products are perceived, then using that feedback to make product improvements, makes for easy and inexpensive intelligence-gathering.

Keeping an eye on social networks, and active influencing, can also help to prevent brand fallout. For example, if your company manufactures pharmaceuticals, and consumers are reporting on Twitter that they’re experiencing lots of side effects with a new drug, or if business partners have been unable to procure supplies of the drug — due to supply chain issues — then you need to address those concerns at the source (in this case, on Twitter).

Content Creation Channels Aficionados

Allowing customers to create or share content around a company’s products or brands is a great, inexpensive way to stoke a fan base. Coke, for example, allows people to make their own drinks on Facebook. Meanwhile, Apple offers forums where customers troubleshoot each others’ product and software issues (for free), as does Citrix. Those forums involve service, but as a prospective customer, the forums’ existence (warts and all), and knowing that no potential problem was likely to fail to draw support, could clinch a deal.

Now, why not extend this content creation model to pharmaceutical companies, medical device manufacturing, financial services, or even for selling car insurance? Content creation may not be appropriate for every industry, but every organization needs to think about whether content creation might help them better market their products and services.

Outcomes First, Technology Second

One note about each of the above best practices: Each asks — in business terms — the end state that an organization is trying to achieve, whether for demand generation, content creation, product influence or brand management. And the actual techniques or technology used to support these business goals may look quite similar.

But rather than just “doing social marketing,” it’s important to first define explicit business goals for each social marketing best practice. By focusing on these outcomes, and then putting the right techniques and technology in place to help, you’ll ensure that your social marketing activities are resulting in tangible increases in both customer satisfaction and sales.

Learn More

Why become a social business? With more than 800 million people using Facebook, and 175 million on Twitter, you’re either courting them, or you’re missing out.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user CEBImagery.com.

What's the state of your collaboration tools?

Chatter is changing. Now, you can use the collaboration application from Salesforce.com not just for microblogging — per Facebook and Twitter — but to actively break down barriers between different groups of employees, as well as with customers.

That’s thanks to new capabilities being built into Chatter, including advanced groups, which went live last week, to be followed soon by real-time IM — dubbed Chatter Now — as well as screen sharing. With the improvements, first announced earlier this year at Dreamforce, Chatter becomes an even more useful tool for facilitating internal discussions, customer conversations, sales efforts, competitive intelligence, and faster service response.

Benefit From New Chatter Capabilities

What’s the best way to get the most from Chatter and its new features? Here are our 10 top tips:

1) Don’t Chatter without a plan. The original Chatter guidance from Salesforce.com went like this: because it’s reminiscent of Facebook and Twitter, users will naturally start use Chatter. The new guidance, however, hews instead — correctly — to well-established rules for any technology: First, define why you (and your employees) might want to use it, and the business results it should achieve. Second, roll out the tool in a way that meets those business goals and user expectations.

2) Pitch Chatter for competitive intelligence. What’s a good business case for using Chatter? One perennial customer favorite is competitive intelligence. Cue salesperson’s message on Chatter: “Hey, I’m working on a deal, and ACME is competing against me. When we’ve recently competed against them, which strategies worked best?” Not just sales but also marketing teams can weigh in, quickly bringing essential expertise to bear.

3) Design groups carefully. As that suggests, one essential Chatter strategy is to design groups with care. Like Twitter, employees won’t necessarily see each other’s posts unless they explicitly “follow” each other. But having customer-specific or product-specific groups, and making sure you have the right types of people included in them, will help make Chatter into a “must participate” environment.

4) Find an executive Chatter lover. The single best technique for not just encouraging Chatter use, but setting an example for what constitutes proper use (sharing but not over-sharing, conversational yet professional) is to have a social-network-savvy senior executive, or executives, become high-profile users. By posting and responding to comments, they’ll set the tone, and simply by using it, drive their employees to adopt the tool.

5) Deploy power users first. As with any type of project, committed power users always help you succeed. So, tap them to help seed must-follow groups. Together with senior-level involvement — even better if they’re amongst your power users too — you’ll go a long way toward ensuring that employees buy in.

6) Think discussions, not just knowledge transfer. At Innoveer, we previously used forums for tackling technical issues. Now, however, people post their technical questions to Chatter, where they get seen by a wider cross-section of the company. The result is not only getting multiple potential fixes in the space of an hour, but also giving others — across sales, marketing, and service — a heads-up on a particular product, or customer issue.

7) Break down barriers. When trying to close a deal, create a Chatter group focused on the prospect that draws in sales and marketing experts. Once you snag the deal, why not then invite not just service personnel to join the group, but also the customer, in what becomes a controlled conversation? Think about the potential for decreased service response time, and increased customer satisfaction.

8) Tap Chatter Now. Chatter’s new IM application, Chatter Now, makes use of your Salesforce.com user list to offer instant chats. Accordingly, it might serve as a good replacement for IBM Sametime, Microsoft Office Communicator or their ilk, not least because it organizes communications around customer-focused tools and data, and makes Chatter even “stickier.”

9) Start screen sharing. Likewise, through its acquisition of Dimdim earlier this year, Salesforce.com is adding screen sharing to Chatter. While this might not sound earth-shattering, it adds another essential collaboration feature to Chatter, and will cut down on licensing fees if you’re currently using a different Web conferencing tool.

10) Let experts find you. On a recent sales call, one of our consultants posted a question via Chatter right after the client asked it in a meeting: Did anyone inside the company have experience with a particular AppExchange service add-on? Within minutes, he had the answer (yes), examples of specific engagements, as well as an offer from an executive with contacts at the company to make introductions and set up a meeting between the prospect and the software maker. In short, to increase efficiency and customer satisfaction, start chatting.

Learn More

Innoveer helps organizations assess their existing sales, marketing, service, and social — including collaboration — capabilities. Contact us to learn more about Innoveer’s Social Business Framework, based on the best practices of hundreds of CRM practitioners, which we use to help businesses rapidly develop a social CRM adoption strategy.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Nate Steiner.

Using Facebook, B2B marketers can target their advertisements at very specific groups -- even just people who work at particular companies or organizations.

When it comes to social CRM, this seems to be a question I get nearly every day: “What’s the business case for using social tools for selling in a B2B environment? I get that social technology is changing everything. Yes, there are 800 million people on Facebook, now more Tweets per day than emails. I know that when the Pope, Lindsay Lohan, Barack Obama and the Dalai Lama all agree on something, it’s got to be big.

“Now, that’s great. But how can it help my company? Because my company isn’t Disney, Toyota or Coca-Cola. We’re not a consumer company — we sell business to business. So, what’s my business case for social CRM?”

Making The B2B Social CRM Business Case

The short answer is that any company that sells B2B can use social CRM tools to increase efficiency, improve sales, or refine the customer experience.

As an example, take Superbig Medical Technologies (all names have been changed to protect the innocent). Superbig sells medical equipment to hospitals and healthcare purchasing groups. Most of the people that Superbig sales reps call on are doctors. Furthermore, 84% of doctors now use social media, and the vast majority of them are on Facebook, while about 19% also use LinkedIn.

So, let’s assume that Superbig has invested serious time and energy on its social strategy, and has even implemented a “social contact profile” in its CRM application. That way, sales reps can see doctors’ LinkedIn profiles and updates, as well as the public activity stream from their Facebook feeds. (Provided, of course, that they have accounts on these services.)

What advantage do salespeople now have? Well, one of the hardest tasks for a Superbig sales rep is simply to score face-time with doctors. Accordingly, getting information from Facebook and LinkedIn can help them know when they’re more likely to be able to connect with a doctor. Furthermore, gathering information from these social sites can help a sales rep build a better relationship with the doctor, thanks to understanding their “social graph” (aka who they know). For example, if you’re a sales rep and spot the fact that a doctor you’re trying to connect with went to Cornell Medical School, and you have another client — who happens to be an enthusiastic advocate of your products — who’s also a Cornell Medical alum from the same class, might not that be an effective conversation-starter, or even reference?

How Superbig Adds Social Value

Of course, given people’s privacy concerns, many doctors have opted to restrict the information they share on social sites to people and applications that they really trust. Continuing with my example, that’s why Superbig has built multiple Facebook applications, in this case using Ruby-On-Rails technology, with hosting on Heroku. These applications provide answers to doctors’ most frequent questions about the Superbig product family. In addition, they can order product samples, additional product information or related supplies. All that’s required to use these applications is for doctors to grant Superbig some access to their profile information. The benefit for Superbig, of course, is that they now have a richer social contact profile for all participating doctors.

Taking this one step further, sales reps at Superbig can use social searching tools, such as Artesian, to monitor blogs and various medical forums and review the types of questions that doctors are asking about its medical devices. These types of tools can also serve as prompts for sales reps, so they can actively answer questions on these forums, providing not just information but potentially helping to influence future sales. Later, sales reps can even approach doctors directly — via social technology, or simply by calling — knowing that they’ll have a reputation for being able to field the doctor’s queries.

The Social CRM Business Case

What’s the best way to put social CRM tools to use for B2B? Based on Innoveer’s extensive CRM project experience, we’ve developed a best practices framework for social CRM, dubbed the Social Business Excellence Framework. Built on our CRM Excellence Framework, our Social Business Excellence Framework allows us to analyze the many different customer-facing functions within an organization, and detail ways in which social media and technologies can lead to measurable marketing, sales, and service program improvements.

As that suggests, the business case for social CRM should be measured largely in “traditional CRM” terms — marketing, sales, and service results — as well as from within the business itself, through improved collaboration and idea-sharing. Each of these advances will rest on this simple premise: B2B (like CRM) still involves people, and people are social. Meaning that the Superbig sales rep isn’t selling to a hospital — he or she is selling to a person at a hospital, who happens to be a doctor (or a purchasing manager). And these people are just as likely be engaged by the same social platforms and technologies as any consumer customer of a business like Disney, Toyota or Coca-Cola, provided that there’s a compelling social experience on offer.

Social CRM Enhances Marketing, Sales, Service

What other compelling B2B experiences can social technology offer? Here are three more examples:

• Marketing: Enable B2B marketers to run very targeted social campaigns on Facebook. Did you know that you can microtarget Facebook ads to people who work at certain hospitals in the Boston area? Obviously, this would offer big upsides to an organization such as Superbig.
• Customer service: Enable B2B customers to create support cases and receive help via Facebook or Twitter. Since over 25% of people’s Internet time is spent on social sites, opening up social channels for service means that people can make these requests from wherever they happen to be. (Really, how much of a typical person’s “Internet time” is spent at work anymore?)
• Collaboration: Why not empower sales teams to share in-progress opportunities, and collaborate on proposals? At Innoveer, we’re using Chatter for this purpose and it has greatly decreased the time our reps need for sharing references and developing killer presentations together.

Again, social tools and technology offer numerous opportunities for enhancing how B2B organizations handle marketing, sales and service. The world is social; don’t be afraid to put that to use.

Learn More

Innoveer helps organizations assess their existing social CRM strategy, sales, marketing, service, and collaboration capabilities. Contact us to learn more about Innoveer’s Social Business Framework, based on the best practices of hundreds of CRM practitioners, which we use to help businesses rapidly develop a social CRM adoption strategy.

Banks need to find customer enticement and retention strategies they can trust, or die trying.

Record earnings, mass layoffs. If you had to summarize the last four years in financial services history, there’s your start.

Of course, you’d also want to detail the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the sine wave of the S&P 500, as well as nationalization, forced recapitalization, and the furious pace of financial services technology change, from mobile banking on iPhones and Android smartphones to the simple act of photographing a check to deposit it.

Business-wise, these changes have driven banks and asset management firms to look beyond customer volumes as a way to improve their bottom line. Bank of America (BoA), Citibank, and UBS have all announced plans to become smaller; they want to reduce risk.

What does all of this mean in customer relationship management (CRM) program terms? It means that financial services firms have shifted from a growth-first focus, to instead prioritizing business efficiency, as well as customer efficiency. Accordingly, they need better ways of identifying and attracting the right customers, while avoiding the wrong ones.

Financial Services Succeeds Via Innovation

What’s especially interesting with the financial services industry is that it’s always been an early adopter of technology, and has also been much more influenced by the technology industry. That’s because financial firms are essentially a service industry. They lack the hard assets of a manufacturing concern. Instead, they differentiate themselves based on innovation.

With the focus on having fewer customers, but better customers, the principle innovation we’ve seen practiced by financial services firms has been to create a deeper profile of each customer. These profiles help financial services firms recommend certain products or product changes to prize customers. Likewise, they can literally fire customers if they don’t meet desired criteria, or charge them for the privilege of working with the bank. Case in point: the recently floated (and retracted) strategy from BoA — not one of our customers — to hit less desirable customers with a $5 per month fee to use their debit card for ATM withdrawals.

Such ideas show that banks’ hands are being forced by the flat yield curve for U.S. Treasury bonds. In a nutshell, banks typically make money by using the money people invest with it, to invest in U.S. Treasury bonds. Back in 2006, the 10-year bond return was 4%, versus 2% now, while the one-year is now paying 1.5%. With the spread between short-term and long-term rates so flat, it’s impossible for banks to make money, thus they have to raise fees.

Asset Managers Seek Long-Term Differentiation

As with banks, asset managers are under substantial pressure too, because funds overall aren’t performing well. Even at the best of times, the average asset manager only has a hit rate of 50% (meaning that they make the right decision about half the time, in which case chance would work just as well). Some do much better, but in today’s down market, it’s even tougher to beat the competition.

Accordingly, one well-known asset management firm that Innoveer is working with has been redoubling its focus on customer intimacy. With the whole world turning on its head every six months, the company has taken a proactive approach by ensuring its customers understand the insights that the asset management firm is delivering, including extensive, proprietary information on market moves. By doing so, the firm is giving its customers a long-term vision about how they can weather, better than everyone else, today’s volatile market.

Banks Must Cultivate Better Customers

Other recent Innoveer financial services projects also illustrate the industry’s “must cultivate better customers” imperative. Examples include:

• Mobile CRM: For a large British bank, we’ve been helping to mobilize its CRM solution, giving bankers rapid access to complete customer details, so they can more rapidly court customers with profitable proposals.
• Customer profitability: Backed by data analytics, customer analytics, and business intelligence systems, a European bank now computes each customer’s profitability. The goal is to enable salespeople to know the best customer to be targeting, at any given moment, and with which services. Likewise, its service department can ensure these customers stay happy and loyal.
• Twitter customer service: Banks have been leading the charge to deliver customer service via social networks. For example, BoA (again, not a customer) now fields customer inquires via Facebook and Twitter.

As these projects illustrate, the best way to succeed in today’s turbulent financial services market is to ensure your salespeople have the right tools to identify, target, and sign the most desirable customers. Also deliver savvier customer service — not least via social networks — to keep customers happy. In other words, the solution to succeeding at the financial services CRM game is simple, at least in theory. Reduce risk and increase profits by finding the best customers, then making sure you keep them.

Learn More

Want to create a customer service program that excels? Start by asking the right CRM service questions. Also review our “top 10” marketing, sales and service steps to see how your current program compares to best practices and our benchmarks.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Photomat; used with permission.

Can your business handle the impact of social technology on its marketing, sales and service practices?

Let’s talk social media. There are 175 million registered Twitter users, and more than 800 million Facebook users. Dunkin’ Donuts splashes its Twitter handle across advertisements. President Obama holds town hall discussions on LinkedIn. Delta books reservations on Facebook. Going online today is rapidly becoming less about searching and surfing, and more about socializing.

What’s your company doing about it? Are you extending your marketing, sales and service programs to reach customers on social networks? If not, then you might as well be equipping your employees with rotary phones.

Of course, your best sales and marketing people may already be using LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. But why isn’t every customer-facing employee on board? In particular, why isn’t your service manager on the front lines — shouldn’t they be driving the social business? Look at any survey: customer experience is the #1 driver of loyalty, and loyalty is the #1 driver of profitability.

Do the math. No matter the customer-facing function, it’s time to embrace social technology and truly become a social business.

Social CRM Upends Existing Practices

Yes, social CRM may be overhyped. But regardless of whether you embrace it or not, it’s going to fundamentally change your business’s marketing, sales and service efforts.

This isn’t a passive, “wouldn’t it be nice?” sort of change. In fact, it has the potential to remake entire markets, whether they like it or not. Marc Benioff, most recently at the Web 2.0 Summit, dubbed this social CRM potential as an “Enterprise Spring” (alluding to the Egyptian Spring) for CEOs. As the old regime crumbles, what new type of order will emerge to fill the vacuum?

Here’s what we know so far: social CRM requires playing by different rules. By definition, social means democratic: users vote with their feet (or clicks). Businesses, furthermore, aren’t in control of the discussion. Influence must be earned.

“Social” is No Silver Bullet

While there’s been a lot of talk lately about social CRM, interestingly, the state of classic CRM — as found “in the wild” — remains relatively mediocre. Companies are working hard, but it’s a tough domain to master. At the moment, many of the organizations with which we meet are still struggling to get an accurate, consolidated forecast, or compute their return on investment (ROI) for a campaign. These are core concerns. But now, with the social revolution, everything is changing again. Many of the fundamental assumptions we had about the CRM marketplace are changing as well.

So while businesses have been actively working to achieve more mature levels of CRM, marketing must now create and work with a different view of customers. Sales, meanwhile, sometimes becomes more important, sometimes less so. And service levels will impact marketing and branding in a way they never did before.

It’s like we took all of the core CRM elements, including the quest for a 360-degree view of the customer, and threw them into a blender. We’re still organized functionally, into marketing, sales and service. But they all need to get more social.

Strike Now Or Organize For Later?

What’s the best way to become a social business? There are two schools of thought. One is, let’s wait: “Call me after you take care of the ‘CRM basics,’ then we’ll add social capabilities.” That approach is often popular with IT.

The more effective strategy, however, is to add social engagement now, and to every ongoing stage of your CRM evolution. Business-wise, that’s because social CRM offers low-cost but big-impact returns on investment.

As an example, why not improve territory management by making it more democratic? Gather more feedback from salespeople, rather than just relying on sales leaders to carve it up. While you’re at it, also build a heat map based on regions of the country that mention your brands. Study those concentrations to see if your sales force is optimally distributed so that these opinion shapers are seeing appropriate levels of interaction with your business.

Business Playbook Demands Social CRM Now

That’s just one example of how social CRM will upend your business, and why savvy business leaders are already adding social CRM strategies into their business playbook. The challenge — or opportunity — is simple, at least when viewed existentially. Businesses that lack a persuasive marketing, sales and service presence on social networks may not be seen to exist at all.

It’s important to emphasize, however, that no one has all of the social CRM answers. But right now, that’s not important. What is important is to start planning and embracing this world, which has tipped well beyond the stage of early adoption, so that you’ll figure out how it works.

Because your customers have gone social. Don’t get left behind.

Learn More

Innoveer helps organizations assess their existing social CRM strategy, sales, marketing, service, and collaboration capabilities. Contact us to learn more about Innoveer’s Social Business Framework, based on the best practices of hundreds of CRM practitioners, which we use to help businesses rapidly develop a social CRM adoption strategy.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Louis Docker.