Announcing #crmidol - a guest post by Paul Greenberg

I was delighted when Paul Greenberg asked me to be a judge on CRM Idol 2011. There is so much innovation happening at the moment within small software vendors and start-ups who simply don't get the same exposure as the big guys. CRM Idol 2011 is an amazing opportunity for those companies to get their ideas in front of some of the best minds in the CRM / Social CRM world. Below is a guest post by Paul Greenberg describing the concept behind CRM Idol 2011, the judging panel and the process for entry into the competition (original post here):


Okay, everyone this is the big one. CRM Idol 2011: The Open Season is here and we’re ready to take your companies and find out which one of you in the Americas and which one of you in EMEA is not the next CRM Idol but the FIRST CRM Idol.

The Idea

Most of what we’re trying to do was outlined in the pre-announcement announcement of CRM Idol last week. But it bears some repeating:

Small companies – at least in the CRM software related world – and that means social software world, in this case, too – abound. There are thousands of companies out there that are possibly innovative, possibly commercially viable in a big way, possibly the next big thing. But, as we said, there are thousands of them. And, no matter how great your product is, if no one knows about it, well, then, oops. Not a good thing.

These small companies are all making efforts to get into the ecosystem that could benefit them – one which includes investors, influencers, technology/strategic partners, media connections, etc. While getting support from this powerful ecosystem is by no means a guarantee of success, it can be enormously helpful in getting well down the road there. But, those small companies are often thwarted in that effort by either really bad PR people, or just the incredible amount of companies out there trying to reach into the ecosystem who are pummeling the small amount of influencers, etc. every week with requests to demo or talk.

Now, to be fair to the influencers, they are human beings with lives that aren’t built around supporting this one company that really thinks they are it. All they know is that each of them is getting between 20-50 requests a week to take a demo or conversation with someone who owns or represents a company they’ve never heard of and never talked to yet. In addition to those that they know. Often enough, they are pitched by a public relations person who is either inexperienced or not really good at their job who makes no effort to find anything out about the person that they are pitching to. So the influencer, journalist, venture capitalist gets a generic curve thrown at them that doesn’t even break over the plate – guaranteeing that the email is going to be discarded as a matter of course before the first paragraph is even read. Or it could be that on a particular day the influencer got 10 pitches and had a headache and didn’t want to see any of them. 

As unfair as generic pitches and high volumes of noise are to the influencers in the highly desirable ecosystem we are chatting about here, it is a problem because what are probably a lot of good companies are never given a chance to move ahead because of the difficulties inherent in the process and the vagaries of bad luck on any given day.

Which is why CRM Idol 2011: The Open Season exists.

The concept is simple, small companies out there. If you meet the submission criteria outlined below, you will be given the opportunity, first come first serve, to secure a time slot on a specific day that will put you in front of some of the most influential people in the CRM/SCRM world. They will spend an hour with you in a demo to hear about your technology product – software only – and they will write a jointly signed review of what they saw of you – that will be published in multiple venues as soon as its written. It can be a good review, a bad one, a mix or indifferent. There’s risk on your part to be taken here. But it is something that you need to be aware of. The reviews will go up as soon as the 5 judge sign off on the final content. They won’t be exhaustive reviews but they will be opinionated and fair.

Forty companies from the Americas and twenty companies from EMEA (that means ONLY Europe, the Middle East and Africa) will get a shot at this – again first come first serve (more later on what that means). Of the 40 in the Americas, 4 finalists will be chosen. (NOTE: There will be an APAC edition hopefully late in the year or if not, early 2012, depending on the success of these two events. Sorry, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, et.al. Logistics made it impossible at this juncture.) Out of the 20 in EMEA, 3 finalists will be chosen. Each of the finalists will be REQUIRED to do a ten minute video about their company and the product. Not a repeat of the demo but a video. Note I used the word REQUIRED here. Let me put it this way. If you make the finals and don’t do the video, we will publicly skewer your company. Know why? Because our judges are giving up what little free time they actually have in a summer to do this and it will take us 4 hours a day for 3 business weeks to do it. So if you can’t or won’t put in the effort to do the video, don’t bother to apply. Seriously. We’re trying to help out here and we want you guys all to succeed but it’s a two way street.

Okay, that rant out of the way. Once the finalists are chosen and the videos done, they will be posted online in multiple media outlets. They will be voted on in two ways:

1. Popular vote – see, crowdsourcing is important. All the votes for the one winner from the Americas and the one winner from EMEA will be tallied from the public sites – in aggregate. That’s 50% of the vote.
2. Extended Judges Panels – as you can see below, we may have assembled the greatest panels of judges – both leading vendors and influencers ever assembled in the history of CRM – not to be hyperbolic or anything. Each judge will select a specific winner in each of the Americas and EMEA from the 7 finalists. That’s the other 50% of the vote. The original judges will be voting as panel members.

The winners in each will get a major array of prizes, some of which are below, and be declared “CRM Idol 2011 Winner.”

Not too shabby is it? Vast amounts of media attention even if you don’t make the finals. If you make the finals at all, some prizes to you. The winners get everything that the ecosystem can offer but guaranteed success. But they do get all the accoutrements they need to support their increased likelihood of it.

That way, you small companies out there who have been victimized by bad approaches or just circumstance have the opportunity to bypass all of that and make something happen. It’s up to you to take the reins in hand but once you do, you have at least a serious chance at making yourself successful.

The Criteria

This competition is for small companies in the CRMish/SocialCRMish world. – see the categories below for some guidelines though please feel free to make the case if you don’t see yourself in the guidelines.

1. You have to have software that is commercially available by the time of the demo – that would be in August – again see below. No betas, alphas, release candidates allowed. If we find that you’re not commercially available, and you have a time slot, you’re out and someone else will fill the slot. So please be sure that you can verify the claim if you want to participate.
2. You have to have 3 referenceable customers that, if we care to, we can contact and ask about you.
3. You have to have revenue under $12 million U.S. your last fiscal year. As far as disclosure goes, you have the choice of making the claim that you do – though that will have to be stated in your submission and we’ll trust you or you can disclose your revenue in the submission with the knowledge that only the permanent judges will know what it is. If you make the claim, please be prepared to back it up if we ask. Your call on how.
4. You have to be willing to make a ten minute video if you get to the finals. More on that later.
5. You have to fit a category – though there is some leeway there.

The Categories

The categories that we’ve identified to start are:

1. Traditional CRM Suites
2. Social CRM
3. Sales - Sales Force Automation, Sales Optimization, Sales Effectiveness
4. Marketing – Marketing Automation, Revenue Performance Management, Social Marketing, Email Marketing, Enterprise Marketing Management, Database Marketing
5. Customer Service – all permutations
6. Mobile CRM
7. Customer Experience Management
8. Social Media Monitoring – requires the possibility of integrating with a CRM technology
9. Customer Analytics – including text/sentiment analytics; voice based analytics; social media analytics, influencer scoring, etc.
10. Enterprise Feedback Management
11. Innovation Management
12. Community Platforms
13. Enterprise 2.0 – collaboration, activity streams etc.
14. Social Business
15. Knowledge Management – this one requires the possibility of integrating with CRM systems
16. Vendor Relationship Management
17. Partner Relationship Management

Once again, if you don’t see yourself in this list, don’t worry.  Just make the case as to why you have some customer-facing possibilities and the likelihood is that we’ll be cool with it. We’re trying to make this easier for you, not hard.

The Rules

They are numbered to be entirely clear.

Submissions

1. There will be 40 slots made available in the Americas and 20 in EMEA.
2. The submission will be by email ONLY to: nextbigthing@crmidol.com. (See below to see this again and what to do if there are problems). Any other attempt at submission will be rejected out of hand with the problem exception mentioned below.
3. The submissions will occur starting today – Monday, April 25 and will continue until Friday May 13 or until all slots are filled, whichever is first (watch #crmidol on twitter for updates on that as it occurs). On May 13, should any slots be left, the remaining specific dates and times will be made publicly available and another final round of submissions for those remaining slots will occur from May 13 through May 20. After that the submissions will be closed.
4. Each submission will include the following:
   1. Your company contact and named person contact information Two date and time specific slot requests. ONLY two. If your slots are not available, you’re out of luck until May 14 – and then you can resubmit to any time slots that are publicly announced as still available. Though there is no guarantee that there will be any available slots at that time. (see below for examples of how to submit the dates/times)
   2. The category you feel you fit into - or if you don’t but think that you qualify – why.
   3. A description of what the product is/the company is. Be persuasive here that you meet the criteria, not that you have a great product. This is merely a qualifying discussion. URLs cannot be used as substitutes for this description. The submission needs to be all inclusive. However, they can be used as supporting documentation.
   4. The names of the three (3) referenceable customers – the company, the contact and the way to communicate with them – minimum of email and phone, please.
   5. A statement that says that you meet the revenue requirement along the lines of “our company states truthfully that our revenues in our last fiscal year 2010 were under $12 million U.S”. OR you can state the actual number with the knowledge that the primary judges in each of the Americas and EMEA will treat it as under non-disclosure. But please be aware those designated primary judges below will see the actual figures if you choose to reveal them.
   6. A statement that says, “if (you) make the finals, you are committed to making a 10 minute video for submission and public viewing as part of the conditions for entry.” Word it anyway you prefer but make the commitment clear.
5. If you are accepted, you’ll be notified privately but it will be posted that you’ve been accepted on the Twitter #crmidol stream. The time will only be sent to you privately. Just your acceptance will be posted. Please allow some time between your submission and the posting of it to the hashtag and your private notification, since we all still have to work for a living. 
6. If you don’t include everything specified in the rules for submission, it means automatic disqualification and you cannot resubmit.

The Demo

The demo has few rules. Just be prepared to a. explain your company; b. show your product – live please c. answer questions from the influencers/experts.  Not much more than that. I’m sure many of you are experienced at this already so wed don’t have to tell you this, but just in case… A site for the demos with login etc. will be announced to the timeslot owners in early August.

The Video

The standards for the video will be mentioned to the finalists once they are named. To rest any unease, you won’t be required to spend lots of money to get it done. How much you spend and on what will be up to you as will the content and how you present it. We’ll issue guidelines when the time gets near, including how the video is going to be distributed for posting and voting.

The Judges

Here are the lists of all the judges. As you can see, we have what is likely to be the heaviest hitting list in the history of anything done in CRM when it comes to awards or competitions. Click on their names to get to their LinkedIn bios. They are in alphabetical order.

Primary Judges

The Americas

These five judges will handle the 40 entries for the Americas which consists of the United States, Canada, South and Central America.  They will all be involved in the one hour reviews each of the days over the two weeks and will jointly sign off on each review which will be posted to multiple media sites. They will also solely choose the four finalists for the Americas.

1. Paul Greenberg – Managing Principal, The 56 Group, LLC
2. Jesus Hoyos – Managing Partner, JesusHoyos.com, LLC
3. Esteban Kolsky – Principal and Founder, Thinkjar LLC
4. Brent Leary – Managing Partner, CRM Essentials
5. Denis Pombriant – CEO, Beagle Research Group

EMEA

These four judges will handle the 20 entries from Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia etc.  They will all be involved in the each of the 1 hour demos/discussions from Sept 5 through 9 and will write and jointly sign off on each review which will be posted to multiple media sites. They will also solely choose the three finalists for EMEA.

1. Laurence Buchanan – Vice President, CRM & Social CRM, EMEA, Capgemini
2. Silvana Buljan – Founder & Managing Director, Buljan & Partners
3. Paul Greenberg – see above
4. Mark Tamis – Social Business Strategist, NET-7

Mentors

This is an exciting part of CRM Idol 2011. Each of these fine human beings has volunteered a day of their time – two during the finals and one with the winners – to provide the benefit of their experience to the contestants.  What they will do is noted by their name. This is an awesome idea that Anthony Lye actually cooked up. Each of these mentors has decades of experience in the software and venture capital world and is considered a leader in the CRM space. So if you make it to the finals, you have the benefit of their knowledge and their valuable time.  Amazing.

1. Anthony Lye – Anthony will provide one day for the Americas finalists and one day for the EMEA finalists for consultation on how to best do the content for the contending videos and whatever other pertinent advice the finalists need. Anthony has had years of experience as a senior management person for enterprise CRM and a thought leader.
2. Joe Hughes – Joe will provide one day for the Americas finalists and one day for the EMEA finalists for consultation on how to best do the content for the contending videos and whatever other pertinent advice the finalists need. Joe has been a leader in the CRM space for as long as we can remember and one of the more foresighted when it comes to the value of Social CRM
3. Larry Augustin – This is a prize for the winner of EMEA and the winner of the Americas. Larry who has years of experience as an executive in the software space and has been a successful venture capitalist will work with the winner to prepare them for dealing with possible investors including doing a VC matching with the winners.

There will most likely be other mentors announced as the competition gets closer to the demo dates.  We might try to make some mentors available to prepare you if you need them for the one hour demos but that’s still up in the air. We’ll keep you posted.

Extended Judges Panels

The Influencer Panel

1. William Band – Vice President & Principal Analyst, CRM, Forrester Research
2. Jim Berkowitz – CEO, CRM Mastery
3. Bruce Culbert – Chief Service Officer, The Pedowitz Group
4. Zoli Erdos - Publisher/Editor, CloudAve and Enterprise Irregulars
5. Mike Fauscette – Group Vice President, Software Business Solutions, IDC
6. Josh Greenbaum – Principal, Enterprise Applications Consulting
7. Dr. Graham Hill – Partner, Optima Partners
8. Dennis Howlett - Buyer Advocate
9. Ian Jacobs – Senior Analyst, Customer Interaction, Ovum/Datamonitor
10. Michael Krigsman – CEO, Asuret
11. Marshall Lager – Managing Principal, Third Idea Consulting
12. Kate Leggett – Senior Analyst, CRM, Forrester Research
13. Maribel Lopez – Principal Analyst and VP, Constellation Research  Founder Lopez Research LLC
14. Jeremiah Owyang -Managing Partner, Altimeter Group
15. Sameer Patel – Managing Partner, Sovos Group
16. Scott Rogers – Customer Evangelist
17. Robert Scoble – Managing Director, Rackspace Hosting
18. Brian Solis – Principal, Altimeter Group
19. Dilip Soman – Professor of Marketing, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto
20. Ray Wang – CEO, Constellation Research
21. Mary Wardley – Vice President, CRM Applications, IDC

The Vendor Panel

1. Larry Augustin – CEO, SugarCRM
2. Anthony Lye – Senior Vice President & GM, CRM, Oracle
3. Phil Fernandez – CEO, Marketo
4. John Hernandez – General Manager, Customer Care Business, Cisco
5. Jonathan Hornby – Director, Worldwide Marketing, SAS
6. Joseph Hughes - Senior Executive, CRM Service, Support and Social System Integration Lead, Accenture
7. Charlie Isaacs, VP, eServices and Social Media Strategy Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise
8. Vinay Iyer – Vice President, Marketing CRM, SAP
9. Katy Keim - CMO, Lithium
10. Marcel Lebrun,- CEO, Radian6
11. Mitch Lieberman, Vice President, Marketing, Sword-Ciboodle
12. Chris Morace- Senior Vice President, Business Development, Jive
13. Zach Nelson – CEO, NetSuite
14. Bill Patterson- Director, CRM Product Management, Microsoft
15. Dileep Srinivasan - AVP - CRM & Social CRM, Digital Marketing & MDM, Cognizant
16. John Taschek –Vice President, Market Strategy, Salesforce

The Journalist Panel

1. Elsa Basile – Director, Callcenternews (Argentina)
2. Barney Beal – Managing Editor, SearchCRM,
3. Anita Campbell – Publisher, SmallBizTrends.com
4. Robin Carey – CEO, Social Media Today
5. Neil Davey – Group Editor, Sift Media
6. David Myron – Editorial Director, CRM Magazine, Speech Technology Magazine
7. Valdir Ugalde – Board, Member, mundocontact (Mexico)
8. Ann Van Den Berg – Senior Editor, CustomerTalk (Netherlands)

 

Media Partners

You’ll note that we have 8 journalists on a panel of judges. Well, each of them represents a media partner that will be broadcasting the competition and posting the videos for voting in the finals for the popular vote.  They are an awesome array of the most influential media sites in social media, CRM, and small business as well as local influencers in CRM in Latin America and Europe.  They will be significant in the lives of the contestants, the finalists, and the winners giving each what may be an unprecedented breadth and depth of coverage. Their coverage will be supplemented by posts to the blogs and other sites that are owned by many of the judges so there will be significant reach for all 60 of the initial contenders.  Each of these partners will be getting exclusives from the judges and hopefully some of the companies too so that we can add a quality of coverage that would enhance the value to the SMBs participating. in all areas – CRM, social and small business directly. 

We expect to add more media partners as we continue on throughout the competition.

The current partners and links to their sites (in alphabetical order, like every list here):

1. Call Center News (Argentina)
2. CRM Magazine/DestinationCRM
3. CustomerTalk (Netherlands)
4. Mundocontact (Mexico)
5. MyCustomer.com/Sift Media
6. SearchCRM
7. Social Media Today
8. SmallBizTrends.com

The Prizes…So Far

These are the prizes as of launch today. There are several others in the works that will be announced as the contest rolls out.

All Finalists

All 7 finalists will get to choose one day of consulting from the list of Influencer consultants below. The order of choice will be based on the popular vote on the video which will be kept confidential but used for the choosing. There will be more consultants added to the list as contest moves forward.

The Americas and EMEA Winners

Each winner will get to choose four prizes from the list.  Note – in the case where multiple prizes are being offered by a single vendor – the vendor counts as a single prize with all the items as part of that.

1. Accenture
   1. A full day workshop with CRM leaders in Accenture for possible partnership and/or possible investment.
2. Capgemini (for EMEA winners only)
   1. A half day workshop with Patrick James, Global VP CRM and Laurence Buchanan to explore joint go to market opportunities and help you refine and test your value proposition.
3. Social Media Today
   1. A blog post featuring the winner of the contest to run on both The Customer Collective and Social Media Today
   2. A single blast to the Social Media Today opt-in list (approximately 50,000 names) which will conform to their minimum standards (valued at $10,500)
4. Microsoft
   1. 12 mos. of CRM Online Free for developing extensions to CRM
   2. 12 mos. of Windows Azure Free for developing web-based portals and BI solutions
   3. Access to the Office 365 Beta for building collaborative applications and services
   4. Access to the BizSpark One program -a program designed to connect emerging businesses and their investors with a Microsoft advisor to help them identify unique opportunities and expand its business presence
5. SugarCRM
   1. Free 10 user subscription to SugarCRM Professional or Enterprise
   2. Membership in the Sugar Exchange and free consulting on product integration with SugarCRM
   3. CEO Larry Augustin, a successful venture capitalist in his own right, does a mentoring & VC matchmaking session with the winners
6. Brian Solis
   1. One hour internal webinar on how to use SCRM and social media to your advantage
7. Paul Greenberg
   1. One hour pro bono external webinar on a subject TBD for lead gen, mindshare, etc.
8. Ray Wang
   1. One hour pro bono external webinar on a subject TBD for lead gen, mindshare, etc.
9. Sameer Patel
   1. One hour pro bono external webinar on a subject TBD for lead gen, mindshare, etc.
10. Influencer Consulting– free strategic consulting for 1 day or 8 hours from a variety of judges (in person travel expenses to be covered by winners)
    1. Esteban Kolsky (in person only)
    2. Paul Greenberg (on phone or in person)
    3. Denis Pombriant (on phone or in person)
    4. Mark Tamis (on phone or in person)
    5. Jesus Hoyos (on phone or in person)
    6. Brent Leary (on phone or in person)

The Times, Dates, Hashtag and Email

Okay here’s the hardcore stuff:

1. The hashtag is #crmidol
2. The email for submission is nextbigthing@crmidol.com
   1. If you have a problem submitting to that email send your submission and a report of the specific problem to pgreenbe@gmail.com

Dates and Times Table for the Americas and EMEA

We’ve put together an easy little table with all the relevant dates and times that you’ll need as you progress through the competition. 

Dates/Times	Americas	EMEA
Submission Dates	August 15-19; August 22-26	September 5-9
Submission Times	3pm ET; 4pm ET; 5pm ET; 6pm ET	3pm GMT; 4pm GMT; 5pm GMT; 6pm GMT
Finalist Video Submission Date	September 30	October 14
Winner Announcement	October 17	October 31

A Note or Two

A little bit of unfinished stuff that will sort itself out as time goes forward.

• There will likely be a CRM Idol site (Joomla based) coming in the next month or so that will be an aggregate site for all the media outlets and streams.  However, this remains a work in progress that’s still under discussion.
• There will be more mentors and prizes added and possibly a judge or two.
• For now ongoing news will be found at the twitter hashtag #crimidol.

In Closing

That’s about it. Now its time to bring it. First come, first serve. See you, maybe as the 1st ever CRM Idol, in Vegas, Hollywood. London or on the Social Web. Somewhere anyway.

CRM IDOL 2011 IS NOW OFFICIALLY OPEN

Improving social media monitoring…

As Social Media Monitoring travels through the technology hype cycle it’s clear that many early adopters are experiencing disappointing results. Having heard the stories of start-up businesses like Threadless or GiffGaff harnessing social insight to create real, tangible value (see my post on GiffGaff – a case study of customers in control), many large organizations are often disappointed at the results they are getting from SMM. If you find yourself in the “trough of disillusionment, below are some of the common pitfalls along with some suggestions to improve results and drive value from your investment.

A common complaint about SMM is accuracy. Many SMM tools do not have access to the full Twitter fire hose and so only get a fraction of the full Twitter feed. Most tools also struggle to automate the classification of content  (e.g. “positive, negative, neutral, mixed”) – accuracy rates can be as low as 20-30%.

To supplement this lack of accuracy, many organizations (or the agencies they employ) turn to people to manually read through and classify content. Whilst this might improve accuracy, this is hardly a scalable approach. Dell, for example has around 22,000 mentions per day - a figure that is rapidly rising. Add competitor mentions to that number and there becomes a danger of simply setting up another monolithic contact center to trawl through vast volumes of data and attempt to respond 1:1 to every mention.

So how do you address some of the issues above and start to drive some value from SMM? Firstly, it’s important to accept that you will never get 100% accuracy. The 80:20 rule applies. The SMM tool you purchased is likely to be only a small part of the solution. Human intervention is almost certainly required to “train” the tool – e.g. refining search terms to filter out the noise, interpreting slang and sarcasm etc. In addition, text analytics / natural language processing can be used to improve automation and accuracy levels. In fact Social Media has provided a shot in the arm for the Text Analytics industry and given a relatively old technology a new less of life.

But improving the accuracy of your social media monitoring and classification is not enough. Fundamentally, social media monitoring should not be looked at in a silo. If you are going to use text analytics on social verbatim then why not also use it on other unstructured verbatim sources such as surveys, e-mails, call centre notes etc? Furthermore, when you then start to gain insights from these unstructured data sources it's vital to combine with structured data to analyse and understand the real impact on the business. A spike in social media complaints for example could either be an early warning signal or it might be indicative of an issue that is already causing repeat calls, product returns etc. Again human intervention is required to spot these trends and interrogate your business information sources effectively. The speed at which social media storms or viral campaigns can travel means that humans must spot trends quickly and have flexibility to interrogate multiple and disparate data sources. Rather than thinking of a reactive 1:1 contact centre it might be more helpful to think of an air traffic control room with big screens visually displaying and blending huge volumes of data to allow controllers to make smart decisions.

Finally, make sure you turn insight into action. If customers are Tweeting and blogging about your products and services they are usually doing so for a reason. The reasons can represent opportunities to improve your products or services, protect your brand reputation or create new business opportunities. Either way, it's critical to get to the root cause and address whatever it is that's causing the spike. In other words, to extend the analogy above, you must link your air traffic controllers with the people on the front line, empowering them to make decisions and facilitating the necessary integration into the rest of the organisation e.g. Customer service, product development, sales, legal etc.

One large organization that has achieved success with SMM is Dell. Their Social Media command centre blends technology with human intervention. I won't repeat the case study which has been nicely written up by Matt Wilson here but I will pull out one quote which I liked from Adam Brown, executive director of social media for Dell. Describing his vision for Dell’s Social Media hub he said:

“The goal of the command center is to help decide how the SOS team’s time and energy can best be spent. Help us understand which of these are relevant, which of these are shown as trending information, which of these are things we really, really need to respond to. There’s no way we can respond to 22,000 conversations a day.”

Adam Brown nails the key issues with Social Media Monitoring here – accuracy, relevancy and focus. It will be interesting to monitor the success of Dell’s approach but they seem to be building with scale and integration in mind rather than trying to reactively fire-fight every social mention in a silo.

Gaming the system in social media care

Social Media customer care seems to be a pretty hot topic at the moment. Many clients I work with either have, or are talking about, setting up a capability to monitor what people are saying about them on social networks and respond. At the moment, most customers seem pleasantly surprised to find that organizations are listening to their problems and taking pro-active steps to fix their problems (check out my experience with Virgin Media). But are we training customers to believe that in order to get their best service they should shout loudly and angrily at their friends on social networking sites? Are we encouraging customers to game the system, building up their social “klout” as a currency to leverage against customer service organizations?


On the whole most people are pretty honest and will not go to the efforts described to game the system. But to me the question gets to the heart of how strong your CRM foundation is, whether you view a customer’s social activities in isolation from everything else and whether your culture and organizational structure aligns to fixing customer problems quickly and transparently.


Take the organization that sets up a social media customer care operation completely disconnected from the rest of the customer-facing business. Without any customer data or insight the temptation would be to prioritize service given to customers who light the biggest fires. Customers who shout the loudest and who have the largest number of Twitter followers & social “klout” (neither of which necessarily bear any value whatsoever to customer lifetime value). In this scenario it’s easy to see that if the reward mechanisms make it worthwhile, a small number of customers will learn that to get better service (or perhaps compensation) they should build up their followers and complain vocally and repeatedly. The disconnected organization will simply keep fire-fighting and rewarding that behavior.


With a strong CRM foundation and an integrated approach however, we could see a different scenario. Firstly connecting a customer’s social activities to their CRM profile allows us to view the customer’s history, value and segmentation. We can therefore apply appropriate business roles to deal with the customer within the context of their profile and the interaction. We stand a better chance of knowing whether the angry customer shouting at their friends on social networking sites is in fact a loyalty customer with a genuine problem who needs help, or a serial social gamer trying to cheat the system.


The CRM foundation also covers people and organizational aspects. In particular the shift from inside-out to outside-in. Gaming the system can be prevented though effective and transparent handling of complaints, only possible with the right organizational set-up and culture. This is a lesson that United Airlines seemed to learn after their United Breaks Guitars episode. Following the high profile PR disaster United saw many customers trying to create copycat viral videos and blogs complaining about service issues. They seem (at least from the outside) to have adopted a policy of jumping on these sparks quickly and try and be transparent in acknowledging their mistakes and trying to do what they can to fix the problem.


Customers themselves can also help prevent gaming the system. An empowered community like GiffGaff’s can encourage self-moderation i.e. customers not only fixing each other’s problems but also calling out trouble makers from the community. One of the early mantras of the Internet was that “no one knows you’re a dog”. This is perhaps no longer valid as Google today displays your history online for everyone in the community to see. If this is a topic that interests you I suggest you read Michael Wu’s Building the Community Platform blog and check out this great post by Mark Tamis on “incentivizing community participation”.


I suspect that social customers gaming the system will be an emerging pain point for organizations setting up social media customer care operations. These organizations can make their lives much easier by building a strong community and by building on a strong CRM foundation. What do you think?

Solid Foundations, Cool Innovations – the importance of CRM to SCRM

I went to a Gartner CRM conference in London a few years ago where the theme was “Solid Foundations, Cool Innovations”. The theme stuck with me and I think it is even more relevant today given the rapid rise of Social Media, powerful real time Analytics and Mobile.

Those three topics combined put enormous power into the hands of Marketers. They can segment customers at an extremely granular level, send offers to their mobile devices as they walk into a store, enable customers to share those offers with their social networks…

But of course, powerful tools are dangerous in primitive hands. A fantastic personalized offer to one customer is irrelevant spam and an invasion of privacy to another. I often tell clients that 95% of Social CRM is in fact plain old CRM. That statistic is not supposed to be scientific – whether it’s 70% or 99% is really not relevant - the key point is that it’s easy to get caught up with flashy front ends and whizz-bang features and functions. It’s easy to marvel at just how easy it is to send out location-based offers and just how fast those can go viral. But the challenging part is building your house on solid foundations rather than on quicksand.

As an example, I shop regularly at a major high street retailer in the UK. Every time I visit the store I present my loyalty card at the check-out counter, collect my loyalty points and watch an embarrassed store assistant give me vouchers for women’s make-up. The retailer has over 5 years of loyalty information about me and yet still cannot determine whether I am male or female, or whether I have ever bought make up from any of their stores (I haven’t btw!). Data and the insight that you can extract from it is the cornerstone of your foundation.

Equally important is organizational structure, culture and mindset. I’ve written previously about the challenge of making the shift from “inside-out” to outside-in”; thinking from the customer’s perspective about the jobs they are trying to do and way they perceive value in a relationship. For most large organizations with years of built up silos and “inside-out” incentive mechanisms, this is the toughest of challenges.

Integrated customer facing business processes are the third pillar. Yes – good old-fashioned CRM processes like order-to-cash. The need to process customer complaints, orders, enquiries, leads etc. accurately doesn’t go away just because your customers start talking about you on social networks. In fact the pressure to integrate gets even greater as speed of response and transparency become even more crucial to gaining and maintaining customer trust.

Social Media, Analytics and Mobile without question provide huge opportunity and most organizations are under pressure to capitalize on the opportunity faster and with less budget. But success is much more likely when you build from a solid foundation.

Amazing customer service from Flightcentre!

I thought that I had written my last post of 2010. I thought that by this time I would be in New Zealand on my honeymoon. Sadly the weather, airports and airlines have conspired against me and, like 1m other travellers hoping to get away for Christmas, I’ve been stuck in London for the last few days waiting for a rescheduled flight.

Having spent nearly 15 years working with Marketing, Sales and Customer Service organisations I’ve seen my fair share of good and bad customer experiences. A crisis is often the best way to stress test a customer-facing organisation; it can shake Customer Service to its core. It would be easy to write a post describing how over the last few days I’ve seen many examples of customer service organisations being totally unprepared for a crisis and delivering appalling service to their customers, but I wanted to take a moment to describe one of the best customer experiences I think I’ve seen.

I’ve always said that its people that make the difference within Customer Service. Sure you can buy expensive technology (and that can help) but if your people are not motivated to help customers then your investment is probably wasted (see my previous post “Software doesn’t build relationships; people do”). People certainly made the difference in the recent chaos at Heathrow. Let me take a step back and explain how Flightcentre dealt with the crisis.

I had booked my flight with Flightcentre nearly 12 months ago and had been looking forward to going on honeymoon and catching up with old friends in New Zealand. The fact that I had booked at a high street travel agent at all (rather than direct online) had originally surprised me. But Flightcentre had been able to get me a much better deal than I could find myself online and Dave Lister, the manager at Flightcentre in Richmond had personally visited some of the destinations I was planning to go to and had made some great recommendations on hotels and restaurants.

Fast forward 12 months and on Saturday evening I arrived at Heathrow to find what could only be described as total chaos. A sudden, heavy snowfall had brought the airport to a complete standstill and unsurprisingly I received a text message from my airline telling me that my flight was cancelled. Within 60 SECONDS of receiving that news my phone rang - It was Dave from Flight Centre. He remembered that I was off on honeymoon and phoned me out of office hours to check if I needed any help re-booking my flights. I was shocked. It would have been so easy for the travel agent to simply pass the buck on to the airline and ask me to deal with the airline direct.

In the end we couldn’t find anything to re-book on Saturday night so Dave and his colleague Jois Christie came into their Richmond office on Sunday morning (their day off!) to help us (and of course their other customers) find alternative flights. In the end they spent around 2 hours with us working through different options until we found a flight that (I hope!) leaves tomorrow. Their knowledge, customer focus and passion for helping their customers was truly outstanding. I certainly won’t be booking my travel anywhere else in the future and I hope Flightcentre recognise what great people they have!

My learning from this - you only get moments of customer delight within Customer Service when people make the effort to go the extra mile.

Disclaimer and disclosure: Flightcentre have no idea that I write a blog on customer-centricty. They have not paid or incentivised me in any way to write this post and have not contributed anything to the content.

The fast & easy path to social media success

You could take any number of easy decisions with Social Media, all of which you could get up and running fast. You could, for example try any of the following:

1. Ignore it and hope that your customers will too

2. Outsource it to a Social Media agency and marvel at the pretty weekly sentiment dashboards that they send to you

3. Set up a Twitter account and Tweet out special offers and press releases

4. Hire a social media guru and pay them to find you more Twitter followers

5. Ask your CEO to write a blog

6. Set up a Facebook fan page so that your customers can “like” you

7. Siphon off a small team of contact centre agents and have them monitor Twitter and reply to angry complaints

8. Create a video of a donkey water-skiing up the River Thames and post that onto YouTube

Sure... you could make any of those easy decisions and implement them pretty quickly. But what happens if:

1. Your customers start to use your Facebook fan page to post customer support issues

2. An environmental movement launches an orchestrated attack on your social sites

3. People start to question the accuracy and usefulness of the weekly sentiment dashboards from your agency and begin to “file them away”

4. Your competitors use insight gained from social listening and analytics to actually improve their core propositions and better tailor those to target your customers

5. Your competitors start to provide their customers with tools that actually help them to do the jobs that they are trying to do

6. The small team of agents you set up to monitor Twitter starts to grow into a much bigger team

7. Your customers start to learn that the only way to get great service from you is to shout loudly at their friends on social networking sites

8. No one forwards the video of your water-skiing donkey

An easy decision is not always a sound decision. Just because you can do something fast, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the right thing to do. The speed, ease and transparency of social media bring both opportunity and threat.

GiffGaff – a case study of customers in control

It’s relatively easy these days to find point examples of social CRM in action across marketing, sales or customer service; but few organisations have a holistic Social CRM strategy in place. Paul Greenberg recently wrote a case study on Proctor & Gamble, who seem to come the closest (despite not calling what they do “Social CRM”).

One of the best case studies I’ve come across is a UK-based Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) called GiffGaff. I was lucky enough to recently meet some of their staff who talked me through the business model.

The GiffGaff story is one of David vs. Goliath. GiffGaff are part of the Telefonica Group. They rent their mobile network from O2 and sell pre-pay SIM cards and actively compete against the traditional Telco companies. Unlike most mobile operators with large fire-fighting call centres, GiffGaff have just 14 employees and no call centre. They challenged the traditional MVNO model by handing control over to their customers. Here’s how:

Product co-creation - right from set-up GiffGaff engaged their target market in 2 way dialogue, asking potential customers and early adopters to decide on how best to structure their tariffs. Similar to Dell IdeaStorm, GiffGaff have continued their Ideas page and at the point of writing they have implemented 112 ideas direct from their community.

Community support – the GiffGaff community is perhaps best shown within customer service. All of GiffGaff’s customer service is online. They pro-actively push information out to their notice boards page e.g. service issues. They publish customer-generated tips and tricks and FAQs. They also make extensive use of their community forum for peer to peer support (supported by intervention and moderation by GiffGaff employees when required).The community has radically cut customer support costs compared to the traditional contact centre-centric model. GiffGaff estimated that if O2 could replicate the model with just 25% of their customers participating, they could save c£20m per year.

Payback Scheme - Perhaps the most innovative aspect of the community forum is that users are incentivised to participate through the use of a payback scheme. The payback scheme rewards GiffGaff members for helping GiffGaff out with Kudos points which can either be redeemed for pre-pay credit, or donated to charity (of course a charity of the community’s choice!).

Social Marketing – GiffGaff’s above the line marketing is minimal for a Telco company. Instead they prefer their customers to spread the word on their behalf. Again they use Kudos points as an incentive - customer’s get 50 points each time they e-mail a friend or 500 points for each SIM card they send to a friend that is activated (where 1 point = 1p). That’s not a bad cost of acquisition and advocacy generates 25% of new customer connections.

GiffGaff’s results so far have been impressive and pretty interesting:

• 50% of customer questions are answered via the community (as opposed to online self service or GiffGaff employee moderation).
• The average response time for any question posted in the forum (24x7) is under 3 minutes and 95% of all questions are answered within an hour. I suspect most Telco call centre customers would still be navigating an IVR after 3 minutes, let along speaking to an agent or having their problem resolved!
• GiffGaff‘s NPS score is 75 - way above the industry average and approaching that of Google or Apple. They publish their customer satisfaction scores here.
• GiffGaff have found that the traditional 90-9-1 model of participation (See Michael Wu’s blog for an explanation) has changed with their rewards system. They estimate that they have a  1-25-74 model i.e. a much higher percentage of occasional forum users.
• GiffGaff found that their top ten super-users spend an average of 9.5 hours per day on the community site. Some super users have gone to extreme lengths to support GiffGaff; stepping in to quash negative complaints and building their own status badges for the forum. GiffGaff’s customers even built them an iPhone app.
• Because of the exceptional levels of support within the community, GiffGaff have also found that some users have started to donate their points back to the super-users who have helped out most within the forum.

Now clearly as a start-up, GiffGaff have some unique advantages. They do not have an existing large and diverse customer base or existing investments in call centres. They can afford to target a very specific niche of customers who are happy for their relationship to be conducted entirely online. However, that’s certainly not to say that traditional contact centre-centric companies cannot learn anything from the GiffGaff model.

Disclaimed and disclosure: I have no affiliation with GiffGaff, either as a customer or as a client. They have not paid me for writing this article (or given me kudos points!).