One thing I am trying to visualize not very successfully is how will this all work in the enterprise software world, where most of the people that visit the site for support and community related activity are several layers of management removed from the decision makers and the people the vendor is trying to sell to. Obviously it is possible to get more information about the functionality used, expertise of the technical ranks, etc., but my basic sense is that the more strategic the product (and hence the distance between website users and decision makers in the customer’s ranks) the lower the impact of such products would be.

I am curious to hear your opinion, as well as that of Bob Warfield who hopefully is reading this.

Haim

I also want to see it in use, I think there are some deployments already under way. Will see soon…

As for data passed back, as the old saying says – you can pass anything you want to pass back as long as the data is mapped. There are not restrictions — but keep in mind that the data being passed back is limited by the amount of data available to the MA tool. In the scenario we worked, data passed back is lead score used to segment service levels. The rest is up to your imagination…

Yes, the lead scoring is done in the MA tool — which is what it does better and what you want it to do. That to me is the best part of the solution — pass data to some other tool that can do what is supposed to do and get the results only: distributed architectures at their best.

Thanks for the read
Esteban

Thanks for the disclaimer comment. I tried to use that one while at Gartner but they were not very receptive to it.

I think that Cloud/Services model makes a lot more sense than it did in the past, and something that is going to help CRM (pardon me, SCRM) be succesful this time time around (as opposed to last time) if we can just focus on the needs and how to best serve them.

The full Suite comment is very good. And I cannot add more than that to it.

Thanks for the read and the comment…

Helpstream has some interesting stuff going on.

I will be interested to see how it proves out to increase lead quality.

You mentioned that data is passed back from the Marketing Automation tool. What types of data is passed back and how is it used?

I also assume that all of the scoring of support activity is done in the MA application. Correct?

I clearly realize that you can only disclose non-proprietary info.

Bests, Chuck

I like the pluggable, or extensable approach – it also means that the platform stays open enough to allow new modules can be integrated easily to accomodate future needs.

As the business moves forward on the road implementing its Social Business Design and becomes more ‘mature’ in its acceptance and adoption of the Social Business strategy, it can take a stepped approach rather than have a have full suite dumped on them at once (with potentially catastrophic results).
.-= Mark Tamis´s last blog ..On Social CRM Options =-.