Altimeter’s social CRM research — open and free

Ray Wang and Jeremiah Owyang at the Altimeter Group have recently published a report entitled ” Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management.”

Their new approach to research is “open research,” meaning they’ve published it under the creative commons license and are asking the market to share it and help it grow. This is, in fact, the second piece of research they’ve released this way. The first was their SaaS Customers’ Bill of Rights.

In that spirit, we’re posting the slide share of that research here. Feel free to comment here or at the Altimeter site.

Software buyers are the big winners in RightNow’s cloud services pact

RightNow yesterday released a new standardized pricing and licensing model for its customers and a challenge to its competitors.

Right now today, I’m wondering how much that will influence purchases by potential customers and how (or whether) those competitors will respond.

The move has brought some very positive press for the company in the past 24 hours. It’s been called “a Continued »

Whatever happened to SAP’s CRM OnDemand?

SAP released a new SaaS-based BI suite yesterday.

One oddity from the presentation — it comes with a pre-built integration for Salesforce.com data.

Is SAP not even bothering to pretend it has its own on-demand CRM product anymore?

Continued »

John Ragsdale on building a business case for self-service technology

In many ways the business case for self-service technology seems easy: customers get online and answer questions themselves, thereby saving calls into the call center (and costs).

Yet questions remain about just how successful the technology is, what metrics should be measured and tracked and how to build the knowledge base for the right customer segment. Given the current economic conditions, senior management still needs to be convinced of the potential ROI.

In this podcast, recorded in 2009, John Ragsdale, research director for the Service and Support Professionals Association, explains how to build a business case for self-service technology.

Ragsdale discusses:

• The future of the market for self-service technology
• How to approach upper management about self-service technology
• Where organizations are realizing cost savings
• Where they’re seeing revenue from self-service
• How to monitor customer satisfaction with self-service
• How to measure success

 

 Standard Podcast [16:23m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

  Continued »

Gartner: CRM no longer a priority… or is it?

Gartner’s business and technologies priority survey is out and the news is not good for CRM technology.

While “attracting and retaining new customers” comes in at #5 of the top 10 business priorities, CRM software doesn’t even make the list of technology priorities. Last year, it came in (along with other enterprise applications) at #2.

Yet, according to the more than 1,500 CIOs that took the survey, the business priorities typically associated Continued »

What should Salesforce.com spend $500 million on?

There were a couple of pieces of news out of Salesforce.com this week.

Today the company released Spring ‘10 the 30^th edition of its software. Among the enhancements to the latest release are a new service and entitlements feature that allows customer service agents to track a customer’s entitlements and maintain SLAs; Salesforce Answers; the Adobe Flash Builder for Force.com; and, public and private authenticated sites as part of Force.com Sites.

Yet, more interesting was the news earlier in the week that the company is raising $500 million through convertible notes. Proceeds will be used for general corporate purposes including funding acquisitions, Salesforce.com said.

While $500 million certainly isn’t going to buy someone like Siebel ($5.85 billion in 2005) or PeopleSoft/JD Continued »

The top CRM stories of 2009

As 2009 draws to a close (thankfully), it’s time, as we do every year, to look back on some of the major developments in the CRM market.

This year is not as easy as some. Gone are the heady days of CRM news, like in 2005 when all this took was throwing acquisitions, such as the Aspect-Concerto and Oracle-Siebel deals on a list, on a list with innovations, like CDI and Microsoft CRM 3.0. Even the top CRM stories of 2008 were easier to define.

But while the year was light on major acquisitions and suddenly-hot technologies, it was not without its shake-ups and developments. With the dust slowly settling on the market leaders and the major suite vendors firmly in place, 2009 became a time for everyone, including users, to regroup and map out where they’re headed. We start with the vendors:

Microsoft grows up

The year saw Microsoft CRM add its one millionth user and take Microsoft Online international. With the recession looming over 2009, Microsoft also took the opportunity to target Salesforce.com and Oracle CRM On Demand users with a special price promotion. It wasn’t alone either. Obviously sensing that price was a competitive differentiator, Microsoft and SugarCRM both took steps to make CRM cheaper, simpler and cloudier.

SAP heads for the clouds

Meanwhile, SAP’s roadmap took a familiar turn. The applications heavyweight announced plans to not only roll out its full SaaS-based business suite Business ByDesign to full production, but to add multiple business applications on-demand including sales automation, travel and expense and services management. However, for all its commitment to on-demand, SAP had very little to say about its existing on-demand CRM product. Neither did anyone else.

It may not matter. Some customers are obviously happy with SAP’s existing CRM applications. Coca-Cola is using SAP CRM to roll out the ordering system for its new beverage dispenser.

 Oracle straightens out its CRM roadmap

Oracle, tied up for years bringing together the spoils of its acquisition spree under the Fusion Applications umbrella, made some headway in 2009, announcing that the first set of Fusion Applications will be released this year, including sales and marketing modules. Oracle’s CRM roadmap includes a heavy dose of social CRM as well as long-awaited features such as running Siebel in Outlook. Paul Greenberg shared his take on the CRM roadmap and Siemens seemed to be happy with Oracle’s CRM direction. Siemens dumped a number of SAP projects in hopes of standardizing its CRM systems on Oracle.

Salesforce makes a platform push

 Cisco for a contact center in the cloud and pushing its Service Cloud, which features Twitter integration. CEO Marc Benioff spared no expense on marketing it, buying up a huge booth and staging a presentation at Oracle’s own conference.

But it wasn’t all just about the vendors.

“Cloud” gets a little cloudier

Confused about the difference between hosted, on-demand, SaaS and cloud applications? Direct your frustration to the man cited above (who is now calling Salesforce.com a “cloud company”). But it’s not just Benioff. Sage and Consona announced plans this year that will add a little more to the cloud CRM confusion. With the emergence of offerings from Amazon, Microsoft and others, it’s now possible to own the software but rent the infrastructure. It’s only getting more complicated.

Users test out their social CRM strategies

Clearly, the term of the year goes to “Social CRM,” thanks largely to the vendor and analyst community (more below) that have helped push the term beyond the early, simpler days when it was called CRM and Web 2.0 or social networks. For all the hype and confusion, 2009 marked a year when businesses started listening and formulating a strategy around social CRM. For example, Xerox embarked on a social media monitoring program and JellyVision Labs has begun leveraging social networks to help it sales force. SearchCRM.com also managed to add a couple columnists to help readers sort through the noise. Allen Bonde has been writing about social CRM from the marketing perspective while Paul Greenberg is tackling real world examples of social CRM and the strategy behind them.

CRM software sellers get social medicine

If 2009 was a year in which businesses began experimenting with social CRM, it was also the year the vendors in the market jumped in with both feet. RightNow bought HiveLive to round out its social offering, NetSuite partnered with InsideView to get social with its CRM and ERP suite. Salesforce.com, not only added integration to social networks via the Service Cloud, it promised to deliver a collaboration platform with Chatter. Again, SearchCRM.com turned to Paul Greenberg who compared several of the emerging social CRM products.

And the No. 1 CRM story of 2009?

Remember “doing more with less,” that trite little term that meant management still wanted you to work as hard, get as much accomplished, and bring in as much revenue, only with less resources? Well that had CRM practitioners focused on…

Saving money

There was no shortage of advice on how to save. Gartner offered both five low cost contact center infrastructure projects and five low-cost CRM strategies. Forrester suggested ways to mine more value from existing CRM implementations while others started to see CRM outsourcing as more attractive. Marketing got in on the action as well. Forrester analyst Suresh Vittal suggested the recession could reshape MRM and marketing while Gartner suggested now might be a good time to buy MRM.

Others may argue there were bigger stories or more important developments (and we welcome that feedback), but from our perspective that was the best of 2009. Here’s hoping 2010 is a little easier and a lot more profitable.

Process optimization in the call center

Business process organization can help organizations increase efficiency and lower costs. While many may think of BPO as an operational or manufacturing initiative, according to Strategic Contact, a Beaverton, Ore.-based consultancy, the contact center is great place to undertake process optimization initiatives. Whether you call it BPM, CBEP or BPO, process optimization can help reduce repetitive tasks for agents and improve retention and customer satisfaction. The contact center can serve as a starting point for larger process improvement initiatives or organizations can focus efforts in customer service alone. Hardware and software vendors are already introducing process optimization products and services, particularly as it relates to unified communications.

In this 15-minute podcast, appropriate for both IT and customer service business executives, Brian Hinton, senior consultant with Strategic Contact, discusses:

• An outline of the history of process optimization
• How it fits into the call center environment
• Where call center hardware and software vendors fit in
• Areas within the contact center that are ripe for process optimization
• Quick wins and good places to get started

For more on call center process improvement

Learn how West Marine is using work-at-home agents to cut costs, improve service

See Gartner’s five low-cost contact center infrastructure improvements

 

 Standard Podcast: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Lingering questions on Dreamforce, Chatter, social networks and enterprise applications

I’m back from Dreamforce and I’ve have had some time to reflect on Salesforce.com’s Chatter announcement (and to recover from Marc Benioff’s nearly three-hour keynote address).

A couple of questions linger.

Chatter, which essentially adds a Collaboration Cloud to the Salesforce.com stack (in fact, by the second day of the conference, Benioff’s slides were referring to it as such, alongside the Chatter branding), is yet Continued »

NetSuite adds social ERP to social CRM, what’s in store for the market

CRM platforms continue to get more “social” with NetSuite being the latest to integrate social media monitoring into its CRM product.

The past year has seen a wave of integration and innovation with social networking sites and CRM platforms. NetSuite jumping on the bandwagon is nothing new.

NetSuite has teamed with InsideView to integrate InsideView’s social media monitoring into the NetSuite platform. Again, not really new. InsideView already has a similar application on Salesforce.com’s Continued »