Today Salesforce announced the launch of Social.com – a social advertising solution that brings the power of Radian6 (R6) and Buddy Media (BM) (two acquisitions made by Salesforce in the past two years for over $1 Billion total that had been floundering looking for a purpose) into an innovative way to use Marketing 2.0 (or is it 3.0? 4.0? whatever version number would be the next).

There are three reasons this is very interesting:

1. It shows Salesforce listened to — well, virtually every analyst and pundit in the industry that told them that R6 and BM were nowhere near a traditional marketing solution; the number of functions that they were missing among traditional marketing resource management or marketing automation suites was staggering.  There was not a single person outside of Salesforce I found that thought they had something passable as a traditional marketing solution.
2. IT shows Salesforce is adapting to the times – instead of acquiring more vendors or building functionality to deliver the same functionality as other vendors in the market they focused on where the puck was going (how to use cross-channel that includes social media to deliver personalized, focused campaigns to the “new customer”) and created a new model of marketing (I have been having very interesting conversations with vendors and customers lately as to what the next marketing suite should look like – this may be an interesting first step).
3. It showcases how easy it is to use cloud-based technologies to deliver solutions heretofore non-existent in a relatively short time.  It also showcases how their move to a broader platform, in progress, can make integration between new solutions and established CRM components “easy” (you may say it has been a while since the acquisitions, but it was just in the past 6 months that Salesforce realized R6 and BM were not going anywhere and “pivoted” to this new model after significant “changes” in direction).

Now, for the interesting questions – will it work? does it work? is there anyone using it? what are the results?

Works in progress for the most part.  Time will tell – hope it does, not going to give them brownie points until the proof points being to accumulate.

I like the pricing (a percentage of the ad spending while using the solution) because is value-based pricing (a new innovation that Salesforce has been looking to implement since their acquisitions of Assistly, Buddy Media, and a few other properties in the past two years) and I find this a very interesting solution to a real-life, relatively new problem that customers were having and where solutions were lacking (although, a few vendors here and there proposed snippets of this solution, this is the first end-to-end with deep integration I have seen).

Link to coverage of the announcement

Available now, supposedly, but most of the components are scheduled for Summer 2013 launch – I’d wait to purchase, but definitely get a demo and pilot now if you can to see if it fits your needs – I am sure Salesforce would love to set you up with a trial or pilot… (my Safe Harbor statement, cannot make that commitment so don’t quote me on that; just guessing)

If you follow my blog you know that I am a fan of The West Wing and sometimes I quote it in my writing.

In case you don’t know the reference to Big Cheese Day, in one of the episodes of The West Wing the Chief of Staff assigns the senior staff one day a year when they have to meet with groups that normally would not get access to the white house (usually because their message is not aligned with policy making or because their message is not relevant to a large part of the population).  An example was the people who wanted to build “an animal superhighway” to allow wild animals to cross a highway safely – potentially worth doing, but not something that would appeal to the entire population.

I was reminded of that while listening to the presentations and chatting with users and providers at the Gamification Summit last week.

Just in case you don’t remember, I have written and researched extensively on Gamification last year (was doing that before as well, but we did not call it Gamification back then; we called it Behavioral Economics) and tried to shift the focus from Gaming to Behavior Management.

I believe in the value of gaming dynamics as I believe in using technology in business: it is not the end, or the means to the end, it is simply a tool to be used by smart people to achieve the end.  In the case of gamification, the end result is not to play; it is to identify a behavior, understand what makes it happen, and then use gaming dynamics to entice the user to repeat it.

Anything else – it is just playing; there is no  business value associated with games by themselves.

I came to the gamification summit with the specific purpose of seeing how (or rather if) it had evolved.  I have been observing and researching this market for a while (disclosure: Badgeville is a client and worked with them on messaging and product strategy as well as being sponsored for the research I did last year) and began to get bored with the over-emphasis on gaming over behavior. I saw a blog late last year that talked about an epiphany by the author where he talked how behavior modification is the end goal of gamification and was encouraged… I thought maybe they (as in the so-called Gamification “Gurus”) were getting it — so I signed up to the Summit to find out.

The agenda was a — smorgasbord (to continue with the food theme) of topics.  Some of them were well entrenched in the common intellect of the gamification market (common gaming dynamics and techniques, using gamification for engagement, etc.) while others were more — Big Cheese style: not necessarily endorsed or adopted by everyone, but having potential to become significant issues for the market if and when practitioners begin to mature their implementations.

Anything from how to create better games to the psychology of gaming and pleasure, most of the topics were well presented and about half of them were mature to advanced topics.  All in all, this was a great conference that catered to two audiences: beginners and seasoned experts.  There was virtually none of the attendees that could not find at least 1/3 or more of the sessions to their liking and interest.

Alas, the most interesting part of this event for me was a clear reflection of Gamification (and a likely roadmap to where it is going): there are all sorts of people adopting the technology, from very early and eager to learn to those that have found value and are looking to take it to the next level.  The market for gamification for business, not gaming dynamics – behavior modification, is just beginning to heat up and lots more value will be revealed in the next few years.

Baby, you ain’t seen nothing yet!  I expect to see the next edition of the Gamification Summit to be less “Big Cheese” and more concerted, coordinated message about behavior management - wouldn’t it be great?

What do you think? is gamification something you are investigating? deploying? bypassing altogether?

The best part of my job is that I get to talk to people; lots and lots of people.  I talk to so many people about the same subjects (in this case Customer Service) that I start to see patterns and trends emerge (I was told when I first started working at Gartner that two data points make a pattern and three make a trend – I’d like to think that it takes more than that, but you get the overall idea of how it works).

I want to cover in this blog post the basic trends and patterns that I am seeing emerge and paint a picture of where we are and where we are going with Customer Service.

In the past two to three years you rushed to social channels for customer service (Twitter, Facebook, Communities and more) only to find out the answer was not there (at least not as you expected).  You also worked to build a multi-channel contact center that can anticipate and deliver answers to your customers’ needs over time, but you are stuck somewhere on the road to achieving the customer satisfaction you sought as proof of that model.

Today you are trying to understand how the new social channels and communities, the existing channels, and the shift to effective customer service works all together.

I know all this because you told me when we conducted our research study and you continue to tell me in inquiries, conversations, and when we meet at conferences and events.  This is the state of customer service today.

Now as for the future of customer service (as evidenced by those wonderful data points that make patterns and trends happen), the future of customer service is evolving over time – there is no set model against which you have to build a similar solution.  Not only that, but it changes from company to company, industry to industry, even for specific functions.  This is what makes Customer Service interesting (and as the famous Chinese philosopher said – may you live in interesting times; to which I add – but not so interesting that they are absolutely crazy).

Within this “craziness” I’m starting to see emerging models for the future of customer service.  This is the timeline and projects that matter per my observations and conversations:

Short term (next two years – all about understanding value, fixing what’s not working)

1. Communities and social – the questions I hear most are: what it is, how to use it, what to do to make it work, how to take it from reactive (last 2 years) to strategic, how to derive value from using it.  In other words, how to leverage social channels and communities and their promise to deliver strategic value to the customer service organization.
2. Cross channel – questions that I hear the most: how to move from multi-channel to tracking inquiries across channels and time; how to identify what is one inquiry and the resolution for the same.  In other words, First Time Resolution in a complex multi-channel environment and how to ensure accurate metrics that both justify the work and the investment.
3. Fixing – the topics I discussed the most about this: budgets were cut, innovation did not happen, and social and collaboration / communities was thrust onto customer service to figure it out; how can all this be made to work while improving what we had? In other words, now is the time to figure out how build a better customer service model that works properly.  Let’s start by fixing what we could not fix the past 4-5 years and then add to it.
4. Cloud – As controversial as the use of cloud for customer service is in certain environments, the conversations about how to ensure security and performance in the cloud, how the advent of cloud-based communications and leveraging new vendors and models to replace the hardware and technology that has been there forever (IVR, ACD, etc.).  We also have a lot of chats about the emergence of cloud-based contact centers that can be outsourced and how current vendors and new vendors are deploying cloud-based software for Customer Service.  Overarching question: what shall I do?

Mid-term (2-5 years – all about building the model for the future of Customer Service)

1. Knowledge – once we figure out what we are supposed to do with social and communications, then we can figure out how to adapt to the new Knowledge Management paradigm (been writing about this for the last couple of months in the stone cobra blog).  How to use knowledge in the new world where problems are becoming more complex, answers are always changing, and the reach to “cheap” resources that provide excellence with virtually no lag (read: subject matter experts all over the world and in disparate communities) are becoming the norm, not the exception.  Add automation as a driving force and you have the recipe for disruption.
2. Automation – These are the questions you ask the most: how to take the value of automating partly online inquiries and move them to other areas; how to focus on reducing the number of inquiries to handle forty percent or more of the inquiries; how to provide automation via all channels from a central framework that allows to leverage automation across channels (while, of course, properly measuring interactions and solutions to justify the investment).  In other words, how to make automation a key part of solutions that will reduce cost and focus on providing effective answers.
3. Cloud – More cloud evolution (few finished internal and external infrastructure); more cross-channel (beginning to see first solutions implemented and showing results).

It is almost impossible to predict customer service ten-years out (last time I did there was more visibility into the future, today the pace of evolution makes it almost impossible to see past the next five to seven years – too much is changing too rapidly in a business world sitting on a balance between organization and chaos; more on that some other time).

In addition to the above trends and topics, elements like “Big” data, integration, security, privacy and associated themes that are affecting cloud and technology deployment will continue to exist.  Buildup of the cloud infrastructure within the organization, adoption of automation and remote services across the enterprise, and further “flattening” of the world will continue to affect all these projects.  I will not cover these as single elements in this vision but rather part of a complex infrastructure that can serve customer service as well as the rest of the organization.  This is what is happening to social channels as well as other items I wrote about above.

I can seemingly write about this forever – and I will (not today, don’t worry… almost done).

In the coming months I will repeat the research study we conducted last year, create a more detailed version of this post with examples, best practices, lessons learned, case studies and more details of how it works and how you can make it work for your organization and deliver more information via this blog from my good friends at KANA about the future of Customer Service.

Is there anything else I did not mention above that you would like to see covered?

Any data point, pattern, or trend you’d like to explore further?

Let me know – happy to add it to the list…

Stay with me through the next few months and you won’t be disappointed – I promise.

Disclaimer: KANA is a customer (they have been for a long time) and they are generous enough to sponsor the research I am doing on the topic of the future of customer service; while I will get paid for doing this work, I retain editorial control and the final word on what is said here and in future deliveries and KANA retains the interest of expanding conversations about customer service. Win-win-win (you are the third winner, since you get to read all this at no cost and wit no obligation or commitment).

This is my latest post reflecting on my research of new models of Knowledge Management (KM).

If you have been following along in the Stone Cobra blog, I talked about how we are changing from traditional models of KM to new paradigms based on use over storage, collective versus individual, and cloud over on-premise. I believe there is a tectonic shift in what knowledge is and how we use it, and wanted to give you an idea of where it may go.

A large part of this shift is the change in the value of knowledge – it is nowhere near where we used to define it.For the longest time we defined value of knowledge as to how much you could learn – but that is changing.

Want to know how it is changing? Read my entry in the Stone Cobra blog for more details – then leave me some comments.  If you are interested in reading what I see as the new methods to compute value of knowledge, please let me know in the comments – I will gladly comply if sufficient people ask for it…

Talk soon?

In the penultimate post on the series I am doing at Stone Cobra’s blog on the tectonic shifts in knowledge management, I want to explore the use of Platforms for knowledge.

Alas, since we are in the era of cloud – the use of Platforms MUST have an “aaS” suffix added, no?

In all seriousness, a concept that is “old” (mid 1990′s was the first instance I was able to find) has resurfaced midst advances in cloud and knowledge management.  Knowledge as a Service is something that you should look into if you are redoing your KM initiatives – consider the power of leveraging the knowledge-in-use model we already discussed in a platform — this could be something big!

Check it out, read the post at the Stone Cobra blog and let me know what you think… comments here or there are welcome, unless they are to claim you are the person who invented the term… I provide an answer to that in my post over there.

I attended Convergence for a short time this week (I was unfortunately booked for another event so I was only able to make it for a day and a half).

It was a good show, nearly 12,000 people clamoring to learn as much as possible about Microsoft Dynamics (all of the flavors, not just CRM) – well, clamoring may be a tad exaggerated - but the users I talked to all had certainly interesting stories to tell and were happy to be there (side note: it was in New Orleans, where even if you go to the worse restaurant in town you will be happy — how can they not be happy?  But I digress…)

Two things I learned in the short time I was there, and I think they are important enough to share in this blog.

First, Microsoft is finally (finally!) en route to have a competitive enterprise solution for CRM.

Why I say this? Not only functionality (although the Marketing Pilot demo I saw and the conversations I had showed they did improve the functionality greatly – at least on Marketing and Sales) but also because the implementations are getting done in larger, enterprise setups.  In the old days (what, like 4-5 years ago maybe) if you asked for the average deal size for Microsoft Dynamics CRM (the preferred spelling of their name by their branding people, don’t get caught saying MS CRM or even Microsoft CRM) it would’ve been ~25 people.  That number now is in the low 200s.  The number or larger implementations (1,000+ licenses) that are actually deployed is increasing, as are the stories that I heard.  The performance and scalability that were hounding them in past versions is no longer an issue (according to their clients, not just their marketing department).

The functionality introduced (both via the fully-integrated Marketing Pilot that was done in around 6 months and the recently acquired NetBreeze) was good, complete, and the performance (in demos I saw in sessions and on the show floor) was competitive.  The traction is not yet there, but the pipelines are quite well setup according to their sales people.  If it continues this way, Microsoft will have more than one trick to play – and that is good for the market overall.

It would take an entire other post to talk about their potential (on the balance side: invest time and efforts in customer service — please!) and what they could likely do, so will do that in another post – just not sure when.  If you want a more detailed explanation of what I think of Microsoft Dynamics CRM (you are welcome, entire marketing team) I did this interview with Dennis Howlett of JD-OD.com (video, Youtube).

But I want to make sure I tell you the other thing I learned while there – it was not related to technology, or Microsoft.

During a customer panel today they had a few CIOs and a marketing person.  Apparently the CIO for that particular company could not make it and their marketing person had to step in (I was late to the panel, what with it bring at 9 AM — and I did mention it was in New Orleans, right?).  The coolest part was during the Q&A (they were very interesting people, all very advanced users of technology and they understood quite well the role that CIOs played in the organization as well as the LoB stakeholders).

I can’t precisely remember the question asked (NOLA, early AM), but I remember the precise answer.  One of the CIOs said (paraphrasing): “My job is to create a cloud infrastructure with the technology so that the LoB people can do what they need to do”.  The Marketing person, sitting right next to him, said (also paraphrasing): “I don’t care where the application resides, who owns it, or how it works as long as I can do what I need to do and it fits with IT requirements”.

My ears perked when I heard that.  Why?

We have been hearing ad-nausea lately how the CMO cares about technology and the CIO is done and does not get it — these two people (from different companies) were saying something different  - the CIO was important as the owner of the infrastructure and the LoB person was important for the functionality it required to do their job – but they both wanted to make sure the corporate infrastructure was leveraged and compliance was in place.

A deviation from the mantra of selling to Marketing and ignoring IT — they were both important.

Things that make you go hmmmmm (sorry Arsenio, had to do it).

I asked a follow-up question, the one that I have been fighting over many times the past few weeks: could Gartner’s prediction that the CMO was getting away from IT and spending tons of money in being independent be wrong? How about the overall assumption that the CIO was done, was that also a myth?

This is what I learned: the LoB person said that he needed IT to make sure what he ran (which he did not care where it lived) was compliant, integrated, and leverageable.  The CIO said similarly, he did not care where the application lived as long as the data was under compliance and their control.

This is what is critical to understand as we get 2013 underway: there is no gigantic growth in technology budgets for CMOs – and what has increased is going to make sure what they do is in compliance with the rest of the organization.  There is no decrease in responsibilities for CIOs, to the contrary – there is an increase, but it is very focused on building the infrastructure for cloud to SUPPORT the LoB.

You may say that this was an exception, and you may be correct, but even a broken clock is right twice a day — which means that even as an exception, it is highlighting what few of us have been saying for a while now… CMO’s ain’t becoming rich, and IT still matters.

What says you? Am I wrong? Right? Meh?  Say Something!

Yep, you read that right.

A snap. Simple. Uncomplicated. Two bits and change. a Drachma of work (well, probably the wrong analogy).

And you don’t even need to buy, invest, change, or even do something different.  You got all it takes, most of what it needs (you may need some software – but i am sure you already bought what you needed in the past few years), and the investment of time is minimal.

Wanna know why?

Here is the scoop – there are five categories that matter when it comes to Enterprise Technology.  Any adoption, change, deployment, etc. must consider this five areas (and here is how Social Business fares):

People – you will hear every single pundit in the world tell you how social business is about culture more than anything.  They will say that unless the people (customers, employees, partners, interested stakeholders) can be social there is nothing you can do to become social.  They will cite change management as sine-qua-non for Social Business to exist.  What they won’t tell you that there is no methodology that will change any company’s culture – that takes time and is influenced heavily by external factors (society, political, financial, and many more).  The other thing they won’t tell you is that your people are already social.

They have been immersed in the world of social networks for at least five years (in some cases even longer, remember - CompuServe was around in the 1970′s, The Well was around in the 1960′s).  They know, they understand, they embraced (more than one billion people in Facebook, remember?) them and they want to use the for work.

Change management is not about changing the culture, is about making sure you don’t upset your employees as you embrace Social Business – but they are actually asking why you have not deployed it.  It is not the culture that is behind, it’s management.

Process - Change in process is what makes most of the technologies adopted by the Enterprise cumbersome.  There are nuances and details that you need to tend to whenever any new technology or channel is introduced.  There are integration points, manual processes, legacy processes that will need to changed or improved or even created and more.  But you are forgetting something – the countless dollars and time you spent during the 1990′s and early 2000′s in BPX (where X is any of one of the alphabet letters with a different meaning and BP stands for business process).  You have already done most of the work (I’d say all of it, but there are likely to be undocumented processes created between then and now) and have the documentation.  You already know how to handle it — and more than likely you have processes in place (no pun intended – OK  maybe just a little) to tell you how to deal with changes in processes.

Every single project you have done since then, and even before, has encompassed changes in your processes – you already know how to deal with that.  If that is not enough, remember – Social Business is about a business evolution that happens by adopting Social Media (channels) to — well, do the same you always did in a better fashion.

How is that different from any other project yo have done?

Technology – Ah, my perennial favorite.  According to most vendors and some of the people out there, this is the solution to all your Social problems.  Technology will deliver what you need – whatever it is.  You will hear the business management consultant crowd yell how technology is nothing, strategy is everything – you must have a strategy before you set out to deploy technology – you must! (and, of course, hire them in the process).

As I detailed when laying out my framework for Social CRM – strategy is quite simple (go read, don’t want to go through the whole thing again – thanks — fine, shortly: mission, vision, goals, and objectives – one page).  And it is not a solution; it is a way for you to make sure you understand what you are doing, but not the solution.

You have to keep in mind that this time around, technology is simple, cheap, and easy to deploy.  Thanks to the “cloud” and the simplicity of Social Media, there is not a lot of technology to buy and deploy – and it is very likely you already have it out there.  If you have done anything in the past 2-3 years in Social Channels – you already have the technology you need deployed.

Technology is not complicated this time,how to leverage the technology is where the secret is – but there is nothing you can do to change that — other than deploy the technology, allow stakeholders to use it, and see what develops (with apologies to Polaroid on that “lift”).

Final thought on technology: don’t confuse social with collaboration – but more about that in a later installment.

Measurement - Often forgotten, measurement can be complicated.  After all, you are bringing new technologies, new (or changed) processes, and different ways to communicate to the table.  Surely there are bound to be new metrics to worry about – right?  We always think that, and then we spend countless hours obsessed over the latest and greatest metrics: number of followers, number of likes, number of comments, number of winks – and who knows what else.  We create useless and stupid metrics to track “influence”, “credibility”, “reach”. We talk about social graphs and relationships, Dunbar numbers and weak and strong links, and we find the new uber-fuzzy metric that Management will love to track (think Customer Satisfaction, Loyalty, NPS).  We do all this to try to make sense of the new changes – but we always forget the simplest thing we need to do: correlate those metrics to KPIs (key performance indicators .

If you cannot build a correlation between all these new “things” and the effect they have on the company’s business – they are just noise.  In spite of the noise surrounding social in regards to the above – and Big Data and Analytics – there is nothing new to social business when it comes to metrics.  Find the numbers that make sense to track (which, as always comes down to understanding what you are trying to do in Social Business), correlate them to KPIs (which should be simple, since you have done it before and know what your company’s KPIs are), and prepare reports to detail how Social Business has affected your business.  (If you are tempted to throw ROI in there – please read my piece on ROI vs TTV).

Governance - My favorite subject, seriously, and the one no one understands.  Governance is about what you need to do when you aggregate all of the above into one single location, and how you manage it. Documentation on processes changed, metrics used and their correlation to KPIs, technology decisions for maintenance and deployment, change management that is necessary – and more.  All the new rules, regulations, and guidelines that arise from the use of the above – and their legal connotations (if any, not applicable to everyone but if you are in a regulated or compliance-heavy industry you know what I am talking about) from embracing social business.

If you don’t know what I am talking about, talk to your legal team – they have spent the past few years crafting social media usage guidelines and rules, creating opinions on whether and how a social channel can be used, and making sure that what you are doing in Social does not destroy the company.

The work for governance, under-appreciated as it is, is like the work in technology – more than likely the pieces are there and ready to be adopted – you just need to find them and embrace them (and, yes — you may be missing a few pieces… but the work is not that hard to do since for the most part it has already been done by someone else out there and you just need to find it and adapt it).

There you have it, Social Business in ~1200 words.  Simple, a snap really.

Don’t you think? What has your experience been?