Simple strategies for Social CRM implementations

Social CRM is an emergent strategy for businesses to accommodate their customers' demands in this new age of social computing - a cusp of technology & sociology paradigms - that has enabled them to create & share content as well as connections at alarming speeds digitally across space & time.

The old school method for dealing with customers, derived from practices of mass production & mass broadcasting during the industrial age, is getting pushed to the back by the resurgent social mores of interactions between customers & businesses – both online and offline. A lifetime of understanding relationships with customers in terms of transactions has blinded us to the social world & made businesses unprepared to cope with the new social customer.

Unless "social" technologies by themselves are able to change the culture of the company to achieve shifts in how business is conducted, we need to drive the culture change by other means. The culture change might be to become a listening organization, customer centric organization, helping/influencing buying decisions rather than selling organization or co-creating end-to-end value rather than at point of sale.

The "social" components for CRM systems coming to the market in the recent months might not be able to affect the above kind of shifts by themselves. They can help in accelerating the change of culture in an organization, however merely implementing them will not change organization cultures automatically.

Though we might not be witnessing a "Kuhn"ian paradigm shift, we are in the cusp of two of the Sigmoid curves[1] as put forth by Charles Handy in his book "The empty raincoat" or as it is called in the US "The age of paradox"[2].

Dave Snowded of Cognitive Edge explained[3] during his keynote at the recently concluded CII's KM Summit in India that we are in a phase where we are changing our understanding of how things work/should be and are seeing a lot of new ideas taking shape & further changing the status quo. We are shifting from a systems design view to a social computing view. We are in between two of the S-curves as shown above[4].

In such a phase it is not possible to know what the future will hold. What he says has profound effect on our consulting practice's approach. If we cannot know the future state, we cannot create a roadmap! However, Dave says that we can control the process by which the future will evolve. He suggests[5] using complex systems instead of chaos systems or organized systems approach.

If you come to consider it a moment it sounds true. Most of what we see today in social computing is not something we could have predicted. Wikipedia makes sense in hindsight, it was ridiculed when it began. Most of the current uses of social technologies we are seeing are exaptations, very different from what they were built for. Twitter & Facebook were not built for all the purposes we are using them for today. Social computing is about technology enabled networking of human beings and thus slightly unpredictable because of the human element.

A study on relationship between performance and the amount of structure in an organization[6] brought forth varied results, but the conclusion is that there is definite value in having a simple set of rules for strategy. Two of the findings are as given:

"First, we confirm that an inverted U-shaped relationship exists between performance and the amount of structure. Yet, this relationship is unexpectedly asymmetric – i.e., it is better to err on the side of too much than too little structure. Second, we describe how market dynamism moderates the relationship between structure and performance. In particular, increasing unpredictability is associated with a less structured optimum."

But making things simple is actually very difficult. Its easy to write complex thought pieces as this, however very difficult to put them down in a simple manner such that common people can grasp the concepts.

Graham Hill (one of the CRM gurus & strategic thinkers from Europe) suggests a similar approach for the telecom industry and puts forth his customer lifecycle management in 100 days approach[7] which he describes as:

"CLM (or CRM) in 100 days provides a way to break up larger programmes of work into manageable projects, to manage them aggressively to ensure they deliver on-time, in-full, to-budget, and to harvest tangible benefits from them as quickly as possible. And it works."

Hill's CLM/CRM in 100 days is in turn part of his "Vision, Values, Venturing" approach that he suggests for Social CRM success[8]. Very similar to the agile practices in software development.

Is that what we need for Social CRM implementations? A simple strategy & short iterative cycles of implementations? How do we define & calculate ROI in such cases?

--References--
[1] http://heroesnotzombies.wordpress.com/2008/01/02/the-s-curve/ OR http://books.google.co.in/books?id=v1baPx03VpwC&lpg=PA49&dq=curve%20charles%20handy&lr=&pg=PA49#v=onepage&q=&f=false
[2] http://books.google.co.in/books?id=v1baPx03VpwC&lpg=PR9&ots=xghjkmmXX_&dq=curve%20charles%20handy&lr=&pg=PR9#v=onepage&q=&f=false
[3] www.cognitive-edge.com/podcastdetails.php?podid=93
[4] http://cioinnervoice.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/s-curve-r6.jpg
[5] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Miwb92eZaJg
[6] http://www.customerthink.com/blog/customer_lifecycle_management_in_100_days
[7] http://www.customerthink.com/blog/how_vision_value_venturing_drives_social_crm_success

--Image sources--
[1] http://cioinnervoice.wordpress.com/2009/04/30/the-dark-art-of-it-investment/

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All roads lead to Social CRM; But "Hanoz Dilli Dur Ast"?

Image by libraryman via Flickr

The accidental community around twitter hashtag #scrm has been pretty busy these days.

John F. Moore (CTO, Swimfish) asks a great question regarding Social CRM, as a follow up to Ed Thompson's (VP, Gartner) view of the future of Social CRM in the next 10 years that he shared with Esteban Kolsky.

This is what Ed foresees:

"I’ll look out 10 years. Social CRM will move from 0.1% of CRM application spending to 10% of all spending by then. Still not anywhere near as big as traditional SFA, Campaign Mgmt, Customer Service but vastly bigger spending than today. I don’t think it will be revolution but it will be a big change from today. Personally I think 2020-2030 will see the bigger transformation of CRM applications and processes."

John feels 10 years is too long a period to wait & gives businesses an interim option of Social Support Communities, which, AFAIK, is providing customer service leveraging the power of online communities & other social media. And then John asks a pointed question:

"Will you invest your time and energy on a vision that is a decade away or will you will you choose to invest in technology and services that will make you successful today?"

And then there is the guest post by Anthony Nemelka (co-founder & ex-CEO of Helpstream) on Esteban's blog where he asks pretty poignantly:

"Will Social CRM eventually be viewed as an extension of existing CRM or as just one critical component in adapting to the realities of a Web-connected world? Will companies deploy SCRM as a result of thinking “how can we improve customer relationship management?” or will they deploy SCRM as a result of thinking “how can we transform ourselves into a socially-driven business?”"

Another must read post on Esteban's blog (which is not?).

And this set the gears in my tiny brain whirring! Let me try wrapping my thoughts around this profound debate. For that, lets start at the basics of Social CRM.

---

I agree with Paul Greenberg on this one, Social CRM is a strategy first & the one thing that makes it different from CRM is that it is a reactive one. Customers are talking about the businesses & their offerings, both good & bad. This is not exactly news, its been happening ever since the first business was done by man, the social animal. But the internet did something very disruptive to that age old tradition.

The internet, especially after creating content was easy for every human with a net connection, made it possible to share views with more people, faster. [N.B.: More & faster - pretty key here and remember that ALWAYS!]

So businesses rather provide better customer satisfaction - at all stages of their experience with the business, mostly covered by the buying decision process. This has nothing to do with social media at all! But social media forces the businesses to stay true to that axiom.

Businesses are slowly yet surely losing control over the conversations that are happening around their brand &/or offerings. And its not just the consumers who are talking away to glory. Its the others in the business ecosystem too - partners, distributors, analysts, governments, key opinion leaders, etc. - are all using social media heavily (well, not all over the globe, but pretty much everywhere in the digitally connected regions of the world).

Add another side effect of all the digitization & connectedness - Gen Y. They are a pretty big unknown, but they are slowly unraveling themselves in very interesting ways. Who'd have thunk of a Whuffie?! But the times are a-changing!

So though there is no fundamental (paradigm?) shift in the business axioms, there are very disruptive forces at play.

I believe that social technologies are shifting the equilibrium & it is imperative that the businesses brace themselves for whatever they might face.

Social Support Communities - sounds like a support system for forlorn people, which in all probability is how the customers feel - are the lowest hanging fruits. Forums have existed for quite some time as a means to chat together for the people and have already been in use by the businesses too for some years now. It is no wonder that they are now being touted as Social CRM technologies. I admit there are some value adds over plain Jane forums - like the ability to manage the reputation of the members, build knowledge bases out of the conversations using a mishmash of forums threads & wiki features, many best practices for building & maintaining a lively community using Community Health Index, etc. Or by providing Crowd Service like what GetSatisfaction.com does.

But they are just one aspect of how businesses can leverage social media & communities. There is the aspect of marketing & brand building espoused by the social media marketing agencies & PR alike. Though this field abounds in witch doctors providing you social media as the panacea for all business ills/ailments, there is wealth here too. We just need to use the proper means, but they are all tiresome, not the quick fix solutions of the witch doctors - like get a 1000 twitter followers in a day kind (why bother about all the spam accounts anyway which you will get as followers?).

And then how about recruitment, or rather, addressing your talent market? Its not only about sending out links regarding your openings or tweeting & retweeting about openings, though that helps. Look at this Orkut community of more than 17,500 members that I have been maintaining for the past 6+ years. Here its predominantly the college grads who interact the most & their questions range from when will I get my joining date (those who were selected in campus) to what is the promotion policy of the organization to what do you think of the avatar of the above person in this thread.

Sales is a bit tricky for me. The best use case for me is the one being built by Oracle - more & better internal collaboration among the sales force. Another is getting leads, but this is trickier & needs a separate post.

And to answer John's original question - I will draw up a vision which is nothing about using social media or social CRM, it will be all about really, really wanting to be customer centric, not just paying lip service. And then weave an enterprise architecture which leverages the social technologies.

And here is where things begin to get interesting & we face some confusions & draws in the terms enterprise 2.0 & social business - both of which encompass social CRM, but I believe the vision would still be the one drawn as per my suggestion above.

Businesses need customers to exist. They also need employees to run, unless its a one person outfit. And since both the customer as well as the employee is a human, they can both be affected by the social technologies.

Leveraging the power of the social technologies by business, be they internally or externally is Enterprise 2.0 in terms of technology and Social Business in terms of business.

And Social CRM is a part of both Enterprise 2.0 as well as Social Business, since Social CRM is about the strategies as well as the technologies.

The internally facing social technologies like those provided by Socialtext & Jive software help in better collaboration across the organization & sharing & managing of knowledge.

I have been a beneficiary personally of such an implementation. We have a blogging platform in addition to wikis & forums in our organization. There are various business benefits, but the most lively & intangible boon that you just feel in your gut, yet cant derive an ROI for, is our blogging platform.

You just got to believe me when I say it makes people work together & teach each other and cross pollinate ideas and pass on business opportunities across silos and geographies.

So internally & externally facing social technologies will have an interplay & tango with each other. And as for the strategies, I will only repeat myself - efficient employees can effectively satisfy customers. So prepare your strategies in such a way that you enable your employees to be more social with each other within the organization and with the customers.

And that leads to the second part in the title of this post: "Hanoz Dilli Dur Ast" or "Dilli door hai" or "Delhi is still far" - which is an euphemism for stating that the goal is still far. This can mean two things: there is a long way to go yet, so lets cross the bridge when it comes (to borrow another idiom) or that there is no need to be complacent just because the goal is far. The origins of the idiom are attributed to saint Nizam-ud-din Auliya but the stories differ.

The one that states that one need not worry about the future right away is something like this:

In the 14th century Nizamuddin, a sufi saint, was building a mosque in Delhi at the same time that the sultan Tugaluk was constructing a fortress on the south side of the city and the two were in constant competition for workers. Tughaluk was often out of the city waging wars and expanding the empire while Nizamuddin was expanding his spiritual practice. On one of Tugaluk's military excursions Nizamuddin took away all of Tugaluk's workers and set them to building his mosque. Eventually word reached the sultan as he was finishing a campaign in Bihar and he sent a message back to Delhi that said that he would "deal with" Nizamuddin when he returned. This of course meant that Nizamuddin's days were numbered. But when Nizamuddin heard of Tugaluk's plan he was not concerned. Instead he sent Tugaluk a one line note in Urdu that read "Hanoz Dilli Dur Ast" or, "Delhi is still far."--meaning that Tugaluk had to be in Delhi to exercise his powers. Tughaluk headed back to Delhi while riding on a war elephant and had started to set plans in action to kill Nizamuddin. However, when he was only a day's ride outside the city his elephant was crossing over a bridge which gave way under the animal's weight. Both Tugaluk and the elephant perished and Nizamuddin was safe.

The other meaning comes through because of another legend which states that Nizamuddin kept on saying "hanuz delhi door ast" until the emperor reached Delhi and he had not done anything to save himself.

Like the legend & the saying, it is perfectly fine to either delay the decision or to be forewarned & prepared!

And finally, again, don't forget to read the excellent posts that triggered this long post as well as the excellent discussions happening out there in the comments: John's #SSC vs #SCRM & Anthony's Social Business vs Social CRM.

P.S.: If you are still wondering what is the bottom line of my post wrt the two questions: #SSC is a step to achieve #SCRM & #SCRM is only the public face of Social Business.

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Social CRM: some temporary definitions

Frequently, when I am in discussions around Social CRM, there are a lot of related terms that are often used pretty interchangeably, often leading to huge confusions & thus an inability to grasp the message that is being conveyed.

Social CRM is a new field & its jargons are not yet neatly laid out. However it very imperative that we agree to a few dirty definitions, especially to remove the chance of getting confused with the terms.


Social Media, Social Networks, Online Communities, Social CRM, Social Media Monitoring, Sentiment Analyzer are all different terms. Just want to ensure we understand each other properly when we use the various new terms & jargons. There is no academic rigor behind these, nor do I think these are actually definitions, may be descriptions.

• Tools like Lithium, Jive, Drupal, etc. help build Online communities of consumers for a particular organization, brand or even product/service. They differ from Social Networks or Social Networking Sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, which are public sites allowing people to connect with each other.
• Social Media comprises of both the medium & the content that are generated & shared by the users. So they are also alternatively called as User Generated Content or Consumer Generated Content. There are different types of content on different kind of sites: text (blogs), videos (YouTube), pictures (Flickr), audio (podcasts), bookmarks (digg), presentations (slideshare), etc.

Social Networking Sites like Facebook are trying to become the preferred destination for all kinds of content.

• Social Media Monitoring is the new breed of tools that allow organizations to listen in to the noise generated in the Social Web for any mention about their brand, offerings, industry, competitors, etc. that could provide them early signals/warnings.
• Sentiment Analysis is used in Social Media Monitoring tools to figure out the sentiment behind the content. It is an upstart technology & IMHO, not very reliable despite many claims to the contrary by various vendors. The false positives are too many & human resource deployment is very high. Ensuring continuity in the teams is also coming out a crucial issue.

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Walk The Talk '09, The Lalith, Bangalore

Image by ScorpFromHell via Flickr

Last Saturday I was invited to a panel discussion on Social Media for entrepreneurs where I shared the dais with Professor Suresh Bhagavatula - IIM Bangalore, Sanjay Mehta - Founder & CEO of Social Wavelength, a Social Media Outsourcing company and Vijay Rayapati - Strategist at GizaPage.com.

The event called "Walk-The-Talk '09" was organized by the Bangalore Business Network and had awesome talks from various entrepreneurs.

The panel discussion started off with Sanjay (whom I met on Twitter) sharing some interesting statistics about social media & networks some of which are given below:

• Social Network has surpassed porn as the #1 activity on the net!
• Some timelines w.r.t. getting 5 million users are compared:
  
  
  • Radio: 38 years
  • Television: 13
  • Internet: 4 years
  • Ipod: 3 years
  • Facebook: Added 100 million users in less than 9 months
  • iPhone Apps: Hit 1 billion in 9 months

and for more such stats watch this AWESOME youtube video about the Social Media Revolution.


I started by emphasising on the parallels between the real world networking that entrepreneurs do, like in the current event we were all present & the online networks to increase it in size & speed. I talked about social media & networks mostly from a social CRM perspective, most of which I have already shared on this blog.

I used the threadless.com example to explain how a pure online company makes & sells awesome t-shirts by getting the community to submit & rate the t-shirt designs, pre-order the t-shirts so that threadless.com makes only as many t-shirts as required & how the customers are their biggest advocates since they take pictures of themselves posing in threadless.com t-shirts and thus eliminating the marketing costs too! Talk about customer co-creation & keeping the costs to the minimum!

I also shared a bit about how social media & networks affect the core functions of CRM - Marketing, Sales & Customer Service. And how it even goes beyond that into co-creating offerings & experiences with the customers (on being prodded by Prof. Suresh about Ram Charan's book about the same).

Image by ScorpFromHell via Flickr

Someone in the audience said that they did not understand how can a site where people talk about what they ate for breakfast can help in building a business & I, rather than taking the examples of Comcast or Jetblue, etc., told of my own experience in networkin in Twitter, where I have nearly 2000 people following me & follow a bit more than half as much. I get to learn so much from them, and that alone is worth the effort! Others agreed to it & took it as a great insight.

Sanjay explained about the 4 Ps of social media & I explained about our three phase approach of Listen-Engage-Influence that is supported by Measure & Analyze at all the stages.

At the end of the panel discussion, that overran the time limit by a bit, Mr. Tarun Hukku presented us mementos (no, momento is actually a misspelling, but its quite common and thus some sources refer it as a proper spelling). BTW, in the picture it seems as if I am presenting it to Tarun. ;)

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Bye bye Ganesha!

The festival celebrating the elephant headed God culminates with the ceremonial drowning of the idol.

This panoramic shot was taken in Ramanagaram near Bangalore at the Rangarayaru Doddi Kere.

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SFH blog moves a notch up in Google Caffeine

Image by eyeore2710 via Flickr

You might be aware that Google has previewed a newer version of its search engine, code named Caffeine. There are some major changes under way that affects how websites are ranked.

Though I did take a look by searching for the term "social crm", the changes in the rankings were not easy evident to me.

Now it is easy to compare them side by side using this cool tool that I got to know from labnol.org.

Interesting changes for the term "social crm"! The following are what I found out a while back.

I see Michael Moaz's Gartner blog moving up while Brent's blog has gone down. Surprisingly Paul's ZDNet blog does not make it to the top ten at all! Jeremiah's blog too goes down a notch but he now gets two entries in the top ten!

Oracle seems to be slowly crawling to the top, which is still held by Filiberto Selvas. Most interestingly this blog moves up & makes it to the top 30! ;)

Among the most vocal vendors in social CRM, Helpstream pips both Radian6 & Lithium. Click on the below image to find other changes.

But does this mean much for those in the social CRM game? Or do you want to be discovered via the social web - blogs, twitter, social bookmark sites, etc.? What is your take? Which is higher priority - SEO or Social Search?

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Enterprise 2.0 vs Social CRM - Fight or Tango?

There is either a new storm brewing in the horizon or may be just a mirage, it is unclear as yet. I am talking about the enterprise social software of course, couldn't you figure that from the heading of this post? ;)

With the recent grouping of forces around Paul Greenberg's stake in the ground on the definition of the term Social CRM, especially with the claims of various social technology companies as being Social CRM, there are some confusions and ribbing in equal measures.

The witty, nutty & immensely influential Enterprise Irregulars have joined the fray after Ross Mayfield of SocialText blogged a great megapost on Social CRM iceberg, making it a very interesting discussion in the immediate bloghood. Well, it isn't very popular in the blogosphere since you know ... enterprise software is not exactly sexy ... and so many people do not take such a keen interest in at as they take in consumer software. :)

Ok, let us look at what is defined as Enterprise 2.0 by the fountain of knowledge - wikipedia:

Carl Frappaolo and Dan Keldsen defined Enterprise 2.0 in a report written for Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM)as "a system of web-based technologies that provide rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise".

See? Even wikipedia doesn't have one! But thats still far better than Social CRM since it doesn't even have an entry!

What I want to say is that though the people who follow Enterprise 2.0 & Social CRM understand what it is in the hearts of their hearts, there is not any widely agreed upon definition. In fact I have come to believe that it might be very difficult to define them as yet, this might be because these are still evolving fields.

Please do not get me wrong or misjudge me. I have had experience in implementing & using social software in the enterprises for the past four years. And I do "get" the thing about using social software in the enterprise.

I however like to differentiate between the social software implementations per the audience - internal facing for employees, external facing for customers, partners, etc. in the business ecosystem.

Let us see what the Andrew McAfee, who coined the term, defines it as:

Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.

So clearly the use of social software for customer facing purposes is also Enterprise 2.0. So does this not prove Social CRM to be a subset of Enterprise 2.0?

Not so fast there! Issue is that the term Enterprise 2.0 has predominantly been used to denote the internal facing social software, with internal collaboration, knowledge management/sharing, productivity, agility as the goal. So for the sake of this post let us treat Enterprise 2.0 as the use of social software within the organization. In such a case I believe Social CRM has an area of intersection with Enterprise 2.0 rather than being a subset. But lets not get too tied up with the semantics or get too pedantic. :)

I believe that there is a clear necessity for Enterprise 2.0 and Social CRM to co-exist, since efficient employees lead to better customer experience.

Technology wise too there is overlap in many aspects if you consider the usage of blogs, wikis, forums, microblogging, etc. in both internal facing & external facing aspects. But the way the blogs, wikis, etc. are managed for internal & external use is clearly demarcated and is not advisable to be handled by same people.

There are many differences in privacy, rights, roles, permissions, integration & other perspectives that make a huge differentiation in the base technologies. In an internal implementations you do not bother about the personal privacy, but do take care to provide access rights & permissions based on roles & team/department one belongs to, where one is in the organization structure. The permissions are set either by the user or at a system level by the administrator or even a manager. In an external implementation personal privacy of the users is paramount (Marshall Lager has a great post about that on the CRM Playaz blog). Also, the rights & permissions are set by users based on the degree of separation in their social relationships, not team/department/organization structure.

Additionally, for a social CRM implementation, the kind of integration with other enterprise systems is different from that of an internal implementation. For internal implementations you do not need the feedback loop to be completed by the social media monitoring tools nor do you need integration with the user components like OpenID, OAuth, Facebook Connect, Google Connect, etc. So there are differences in architectural considerations too!

In Cognizant we have various Enterprise 2.0 tools like our ChannelOne forums, Ch1blogs, Cognizant 2.0 collaboration & project management platform, wikis, etc. But they cannot be used for an online customer community involved in customer advocacy, brainstorming, resolving issues, disseminating information, etc. nor can we build a Ideastorm like community or a Coca Cola Facebook community. Nor can the team that implemented the internal tools do the external implementation. Just because a mallet & gavel are related does not mean you can always use them interchangeably. :D

I believe Enterprise 2.0 (internally focused) & Social CRM need to tango, not fight. :)

How about you? What do you think? What has been your experience?

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