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 »

Oracle CRM veterans offer a few innovative deployment tips

I’m out in San Francisco for Oracle OpenWorld and found a few items of interest aside from the news that Marc Benioff is crashing the party.

I plan to be there tomorrow at Benioff’s session to see if he plays the polite guest (my guess is he will), but in the meantime, there were a few interesting tidbits from some successful CRM deployments at a customer panel.

These are not necessarily Oracle-specific but some practices I hadn’t seen before and worth noting here.

Continued »

What does Google Wave mean for CRM?

Invitations to Google Wave, the search giant’s collaboration platform, went out this week.

No, I didn’t get one.

Yes, I signed up for one.

No, I don’t take it personally.

The Twittersphere, the Blogosphere and all those places where gadget-heads meet up to discuss the latest “revolutionary” product is already abuzz about Wave.

So, how does that affect CRM?

Well, Salesforce.com, never a company to hesitate to latch onto emerging technologies, is already prepared to ride the wave (and yes, I promise I will never use that term again).

It issued a demo of a prototype showing how a company could leverage Google Wave with its customer service team.

So, maybe you run a forward-thinking contact center that has evolved past simple phone and IVR communications and now utilize chat and self service and maybe you’ve even found a way to involve social networks, internal and external. But it looks like you may have one more technology and business process to master.

Don’t get me wrong — Google Wave could very well be a very good thing and may, in fact, “revolutionize” how customer service agents interact with your customers. Our friends over at Unified Communications Nation, after all, are calling it Unified Communications gone wild and most people still haven’t wrapped their heads around unified communications in the contact center.

However, it is an example of how quickly companies like Saleforce.com and Google are changing things and how fast companies need to adapt.

I’m curious if that makes you excited or nervous? Or both?

By the way, SAP hasn’t stayed in the background, it’s just that its contribution focuses on collaborative business process modeling, not CRM.

Here’s a list of the extensions and prototypes for Google Wave.

U.S. CIO joins DOD in backing SaaS for government

Vivek Kundra, the U.S. CIO, today said the federal government has created an online storefront for cloud-based applications.

 Kundra expressed excitement and optimism for deploying cloud-based applications in his blog:

Federal agencies and departments encounter many difficulties in deploying new IT services and products. Procurement processes can be confusing and time-consuming. Security procedures are complex, costly, lengthy and duplicative across agencies. Our policies lag behind new trends, causing unnecessary restrictions on the use of new technology. Past practices too often resulted in inefficient use of purchased IT capabilities across the federal government. We are dedicated to addressing these barriers and to improving the way government leverages new technology.

Yet he also sounded a note of caution:

We are just beginning this undertaking, and it will take time before we can realize the full potential of cloud computing. Like with Data.gov, Apps.gov is starting small - with the goal of rapidly scaling it up in size. Along the way, we will need to address various issues related to security, privacy, information management and procurement to expand our cloud computing services. Over time, as we work through these concerns and offer more services through Apps.gov, federal agencies will be able to get the capabilities they need to fulfill their missions at lower cost, faster, and ultimately, in a more sustainable manner.

 Apps.gov store. RightNow has also been instrumental in bringing government agencies on board with SaaS. In April, it released hosting capabilities to support the Department of Defense (DOD) and other civilian government and intelligence agencies that have stringent compliance and security standards.

Bill Ives lauded both RightNow and the federal government at the time. He wrote:

 I am pleased to see greater government uptake on the opportunities the cloud brings. There seems to be a genuine drive to balance security requirements with flexibility, cost savings and reduce unnecessary red tape with standardization.

 While at the Gartner CRM Summit this week, I had a chance to talk with Jason Mittelstaedt, CMO of RightNow, who said that providing an application secure enough for the DOD has helped allay the reliability and security concerns of many potential customers.

Yet, one attendee I spoke with at lunch still wondered how people are coping with security and privacy when it comes to SaaS. His company, a financial institution in the Midwest, is running Oracle CRM on-premise and has already invested in the infrastructure required to house the system. It is still nervous about SaaS.

SaaS vendors still have some convincing to do, but the stamp of approval from Kundra and the DOD should help.

Are customer communities really all that helpful?

I’m attending the Gartner CRM Summit here in Scottsdale, Ariz. this week and Michael Maoz opened up the show with a pretty compelling keynote laying out how the way businesses interact with their customers is evolving, how organizations need to adapt as we come out of a global recession and how Gartner will address it all in the coming days.

A few of Maoz’s statements stood out, particularly in light of recent announcements from RightNow and Continued »

Switching from Salesforce.com to Oracle On Demand and back again, how hard is it?

You know how those SaaS vendors say they have to continually strive to meet customer expectations because of how easy it is to just jump ship and turn their services off?

It might not be all marketing hype. Just look to one of the SaaS vendors themselves. As Larry Dignan blogged about a few weeks ago, SuccessFactors launched a Salesforce.com project, switched to Oracle On Demand and then switched back to Salesforce.com, a flip-flop Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff was more than happy to mention on the company’s third quarter earnings call.

SuccessFactors, which provides on-demand employee management software, runs nearly all of its applications via the SaaS model, according to Paul Albright, chief marketing officer. Continued »

Natalie Petouhoff and five strategies for social media customer service

While many corporate social media initiatives have focused on marketing and public relations some companies have begun to use social networks and communities as a customer service channel.

Natalie Petouhoff, an analyst with Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research, recently authored a report outlining five strategies to achieve customer service excellence with social media. Petouhoff interviewed a number of organizations, including Comcast and iRobot, to learn best practices and pitfalls to avoid with social media initiatives.

In this 15-minute podcast, she details some of her research and conclusions and outlines the five pest practices for customer service excellence with social media.

For more on social media and customer service:

Read Natalie Petouhoff’s blog entry on the five strategies for customer service and social media

See her case studies on Lenovo’s social media customer service and Sage Software’s initiative

 

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CRM quotes of note

Summer tends to be a bit slow in the news business when it comes to the CRM market, which gives me a bit of time to catch up on my reading, both CRM and otherwise.

In addition to thoroughly enjoying Haruki Murakami’s The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, I also liked a few select passages from the blogosphere.

They’re listed below. Enjoy. I’m also open to suggestions for a new book to finish out the summer.

If I were asked for a list of things I wanted to believe in, but had to admit were pure fantasy, the top three would be Santa Claus, world peace, and the “360 degree view of the customer.”

 From Ragsdale’s Eye on Service by John Ragsdale

It’s official.  The brand marketeers have gone totally off the twist.  Call the men in white coats.

From The Sales Machine by Geoffrey James

Apparently while I was commenting on Tom Siebel’s recent comments about the maturity of the tech industry, he was recovering from an attack in the Serengeti by a 12,000 pound elephant.

From Deal Architect by Vinnie Mirchandani

Microsoft says it will have the definitive virtualized public/private/platform cloud solution ready to go in a “shrink wrap” package by 2010, and that, by the way, hosters that aren’t fully virtualized will go the way of the dodo. Of course, this may come as a surprise to all the hosters already going great guns with any variety of managed, virtualized and dedicated offerings, including cloud computing models.

From The Troposphere by Carl Brooks

Would you recommend Twitter be part of any CRM system after hundreds of pages of their documents ended up on TechCrunch?  Would you trust Twitter with just one of your credit cards, stored either on their internal servers or in the cloud right now?  Be honest. 

How about your customer data stored as Tweets on your sales cycles, or your sales reporting, even in the form of confidential Tweets only behind your firewall on an Intranet-based Twitter platform, even on internal servers?

From The Perfect Customer Experience by Louis Columbus

Social-ized CRM

If you live somewhere in the United States there’s a pretty good chance a member of Congress has been in your area holding a town hall meeting.

And there’s a pretty good chance you heard someone screaming that President Obama’s plan for national health insurance was “Socialism” or “Socialized medicine.” One woman, went so far as to say “I don’t want this country turning into Russia, turning into a socialized country.”

What you, and they, might have missed is that this is already happening in CRM….well, the “social” part anyway.

Continued »

Jill Dyché on managing customer data, social media

Managing customer data has always been a critical factor in successfully deploying CRM and that hasn’t changed. Getting the right data to the right people at the right time can make or break a CRM initiative and it’s something CRM professionals need to think about holistically.

In this podcast, SearchCRM.com sat down with Jill Dyché, partner and co-founder of Baseline Consulting, a Sherman Oaks, Calif.-based consultancy to discuss the challenges of managing customer data. Dyché, a longtime expert in both CRM and data management issues discusses some of the challenges confronting organizations during CRM deployments and day-to-day management of CRM systems, including; data governance, data quality and data integration.

In this 16-minute podcast, Jill discusses:

Why dirty data has plagued CRM deployments historically and the issues organizations are facing now.

• How companies should approach managing customer data when launching CRM.
• How companies who are already running CRM can address their customer data challenges.
• Where organizations can find “quick wins” managing their customer data.
• How MDM and CDI fit into the CRM and corporate landscape.
• When and how companies need to address the rise of social media and unstructured content in the context of customer data.

 

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