social crm

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 »

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.

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 »

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

 

 Standard Podcast: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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 »

CRM videos: Glengary Glen Ross, the social customer and ball tossers

“Put the coffee down.”

I always loved that line, and that movie. I’m a fan of David Mamet’s in fact. So, when I came across a YouTube video the other day by Wallstrip spoofing the famous Alec Baldwin scene from Glengary Glen Ross, I thought it was worth passing along.

The video’s been around for a while, as have the others I’ve embedded here, but they’re definitely entertaining.

In fact, anyone involved with CRM 2.0 or curious about it has probably seen the advertiser/consumer bit from Microsoft Digital Advertising. It definitely makes its point, as does the SAP ball throwers.

Enjoy. Continued »