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Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Tue, Nov 10, 2009
 This year's North American Gartner CRM Summit highlighted important changes in technology and innovation, many driven by the rise of social media and social networks.
If you divide the CRM market into Operational CRM, Analytical CRM and Social CRM, as Gartner does, then Social CRM has the smallest share of current spending (10%) but the highest share of growth in spending (60%). In fact, Gartner analyst Michael Maoz said that "Networks matter more to your success than any other initiative."
When Jim Davies gave his "State of EFM" address, he too emphasized the rise in social technologies, emphasizing the integration of social feedback within enterprise feedback management, noting that market-research online communities are now a part of many EFM platforms, including Vovici. For Jim, the leaders of the EFM market remain Vovici and Confirmit, and he expects continued consolidation in the industry (Vovici has purchased three companies: Perseus, WebSurveyor and Surveyo, as well as Raosoft web-survey assets).
Not all social technologies encourage innovation, though: research director Gareth Herschel reported that Gartner clients had seen marginal-to-no ROI from investments in blog content analysis, and Gartner instead advocates that its customers learn the language of the Voice of the Customer by asking more open-ended questions in surveys and then text mining the responses. As you innovate, you need to monitor your progress, and Herschel emphasized the need to select 5-9 key performance indicators from the hundreds of performance indicators your organization follows. In a separate presentation, Herschel said that organizations need to engage in meta-analysis, analyzing their analysis process, to make sure that they improve the quality of decisions that they make in the future.
Kathy Harris, a Gartner distinguished analyst, provided a good summary of the conference. She asserted that "CRM is the most fruitful innovation opportunity for your company and your customers"; make sure to use EFM (which Gartner sees as a subset of CRM) as you "embrace your customers in co-creation."
Posted by Brian Koma on Fri, Oct 09, 2009
 According to the Vovici CE IQ study, organizations that have the most loyal customers make sophisticated use of their Customer Relationship Management systems.
Nothing undermines loyalty of your customers more than when your organization demonstrates that it doesn't know who your customers are, what they have bought or how they have recently interacted with you. Too often survey authors ask customers to provide basic details about themselves rather than crossreference that information from a CRM system.
By associating known information about the customer - such as name, company name, product/service history, support interactions and other relevant data - with requests for unknown transactional, attitudinal or experiential data, organizations can engender much higher degrees of customer loyalty. This approach achieves two ends: First, it shows customers that you're treating them as individuals and not as numbers; second, it allows organizations to ask fewer questions but get better data. By no longer needing to ask customers to provide answers to questions which you already have answers to in a CRM system, it's possible to ask fewer questions but get better data by further reducing feedback fatigue. How valuable was this practice? With a 0.57 loyalty correlation, it was second only to having a strategic commitment to customer experience management.
Sadly, many organizations have not yet standardized on a single CRM system across the organization, and those that have fail to integrate other applications with the CRM system where appropriate, enshrining the CRM system as the central data repository for customer information.
Only by appending CRM data to attitudinal information can organizations build a complete 360 degree view of their customer and their customer's experience with the organization. These four practices truly leverage CRM to build customer loyalty.
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Wed, Sep 23, 2009
Summary of my coverage of the 2009 North American convention:
And my Gartner CRM Summit Conference 2008 Recap.
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Wed, Sep 16, 2009
This morning Kathy Harris, Gartner VP & Distinguished Analyst, presented “Innovation: Your New Core Competency” at the North American Gartner CRM conference. Kathy began by asserting “CRM is the most fruitful innovation opportunity for your company and your customers.”
Kathy identified six key drivers shaping innovation in the coming five years:
- Seek out innovation through consumerization and the Web. This is a fertile area as past business models are disrupted. Learn from companies far outside your market space.
- Embrace customers as co-creators in innovation. The future of idea generation includes crowdsourcing, idea marketplaces and innovation “jams”. Many customers want you to serve them better in the future: you need to identify these lead customers from the standpoint of idea generation, build communities and councils to “systematize VOC” and spark customer creativity. "If you don't engage your customers in innovation, someone else will," Kathy said.
- Similarly, embrace your business partners in innovation. Build outside-in networks as eBay has done with 85,000 developers; co-develop, as Novartis has done on public-sponsored research; and build inside-out networks as P&G has done.
- Let social trends pull you into further innovation. Changes in demographics, lifestyles, technology use and refusal all provide opportunities for reconsidering the types of products and services you provide today.
- Innovate with your IT spending. In a Gartner survey of over 2000 organizations last year, 67% of IT budgets were spent on running the business, 19% on growing the business and only 14% on transforming the business. You need to set goals to innovate your IT infrastructure to reduce costs, to free up additional budget for growth and transformation.
- Don’t forget basic CRM best practices. You can’t build innovative CRM capabilities on a shaky foundation.
Kathy Harris' final recommendation: "Continually innovate how you innovate!"
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Mon, Sep 14, 2009
Woven through the presentations I’ve seen this morning at the Gartner North American CRM Summit is an emphasis on the Gartner trichotomy of CRM into operational CRM, analytical CRM and social CRM. In the morning keynote, Gartner analyst Michael Maoz said that Gartner is seeing spending shift from operational CRM to analytical and social CRM.
Maoz reported the following ballpark estimates for the growth between the segments:
| |
Spending |
Growth |
| Operational CRM |
60% |
10% |
| Analytical CRM |
30% |
30% |
| Social CRM |
10% |
60% |
Underlying the importance of the social aspect, Maoz said “Networks matter more to your success than any other initiative.” He emphasized that social technologies now (externally to vendors!) provide consumers more information than those same vendors have internally. He gave two examples to illustrate this:
- He went to the web site of his refrigerator maker to buy a filter, where it treated his search “refrigerator [model #] filter” as an “any keyword” search, giving him dozens of untargeted links, before he was finally able to find the single fridge filter they sold. He decided not to buy it, then went to Google, found three filters on Amazon rather than the one, read user-submitted reviews, found a link to a crowdsourced Howcast video on how to install one of the filters, then went back to Amazon and purchased it. Superior service from the social Web!
- Calling Toyota for a problem with his RAV4. Yes, they had CRM and instantly knew him, knew his car and knew its warranty-replacement history. Unfortunately, the customer service representative didn’t have access to any of the three articles in the New York Times and elsewhere (which included references to internal Toyota engineering documents) that had led Maoz to the conclusion his car qualified for additional warranty work.
Jim Davies, in the “Role of Technology in Improving the Customer Experience”, returned to the CRM trichotomy, using it for a taxonomy of CE initiatives:
| |
Before Experience |
During the Experience |
After the Experience |
| Operational CRM |
Campaign Management |
Knowledge Management |
Survey |
| Analytical CRM |
Propensity Mode |
Real Time Next Best Action |
Speech Analytics |
| Social CRM |
Forum |
Customer Self-Service |
Media Monitoring |
Vendors have too often taken an “after the experience” operational view of Customer Experience, and need to broaden the initiatives they are considering deeper into the analytical and social spheres.
Good stuff, and I look forward to more insights to come.
Posted by Roderick Morris on Wed, Aug 19, 2009
(Used by permission of Forrester.) As the pioneers of EFM, and the ones who named the category, we at Vovici are glad to see that Forrester has recognized the central role that enterprise feedback management can play in extending the capabilities of traditional CRM. Clearly, customer understanding is critical to each of the other segments: - Customer targeting works best when organizations understand the types of customers that are most satisfied and most loyal, as discovered through EFM surveys. One could argue that customer targeting without customer surveying is like shooting in the dark.
- Customer acquisition works best when deploying sales force automation. And sales force automation works best when you have deep understanding of win/loss and rep productivity through transactional surveys. Acquisition is also supported when EFM is used to audit, measure and alert issues in Contract Life-cycle Management (CLM) systems.
- Customer retention is a key focus of customer satisfaction and customer loyalty studies. By using surveys with email alerts and triggers, EFM systems help organizations intervene to improve customer loyalty…not just measure it.
- Customer collaboration has been a particular area of focus for EFM vendors. Vovici integrates with third-party customer forums and customer community platforms, as well as offers our own online community platform or MROC specific to research.
Back at the center of the hub, Vovici has long integrated with third-party BI systems, and—in our Feedback Intelligence product—has a BI system that uniquely combines survey and operational data. There is no more powerful tool on the market for creating highly analytical and segmented reports on the fly. EFM has come a long way since Vovici introduced the first enterprise feedback management system (under that label) in 2004. Expect the pace to accelerate as EFM solutions are more tightly woven into the fabric of complementary CRM applications.
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Fri, Apr 03, 2009
 In your online surveys, you should use demographic and firmographic questions to profile respondents and their organizations. This will enable you to cross-tabulate and compare subgroups to see how opinions vary between these groups.
When possible, place these sections near the end of the questionnaire as they are tedious and intrusive. Sometimes, though, one or two demographic questions must be moved to the screener in order to route respondents appropriately.
Pre-populate from CRM systems where possible, so that information can be updated rather than re-entered. When integrating with CRM data, make sure to ask the question in your survey the same way it is reported by your CRM system.
When trying to compare your survey results to other data, such as U.S. Census estimates, make sure to use similar categories and questions as your sources.
Here are sample demographic questions, many adapted from the 2000 U.S. Census:
Q. Gender
What is your sex?
o Male
o Female
Q. Age
In what year were you born? ____
Q. Marital Status
What is your marital status?
o Now married
o Widowed
o Divorced
o Separated
o Never married
Q. Education
What is the highest degree or level of school you have completed? If currently enrolled, mark the previous grade or highest degree received.
o No schooling completed
o Nursery school to 8th grade
o 9th, 10th or 11th grade
o 12th grade, no diploma
o High school graduate - high school diploma or the equivalent (for example: GED)
o Some college credit, but less than 1 year
o 1 or more years of college, no degree
o Associate degree (for example: AA, AS)
o Bachelor's degree (for example: BA, AB, BS)
o Master's degree (for example: MA, MS, MEng, MEd, MSW, MBA)
o Professional degree (for example: MD, DDS, DVM, LLB, JD)
o Doctorate degree (for example: PhD, EdD)
Q. Employment Status
Are you currently...?
o Employed for wages
o Self-employed
o Out of work and looking for work
o Out of work but not currently looking for work
o A homemaker
o A student
o Retired
o Unable to work
Q. Employer Type
Please describe your work.
o Employee of a for-profit company or business or of an individual, for wages, salary, or commissions
o Employee of a not-for-profit, tax-exempt, or charitable organization
o Local government employee (city, county, etc.)
o State government employee
o Federal government employee
o Self-employed in own not-incorporated business, professional practice, or farm
o Self-employed in own incorporated business, professional practice, or farm
o Working without pay in family business or farm
Q. Housing
Is this house, apartment, or mobile home -
o Owned by you or someone in this household with a mortgage or loan?
o Owned by you or someone in this household free and clear (without a mortgage or loan)?
o Rented for cash rent?
o Occupied without payment of cash rent?
Q. Household Income
What is your total household income?
o Less than $10,000
o $10,000 to $19,999
o $20,000 to $29,999
o $30,000 to $39,999
o $40,000 to $49,999
o $50,000 to $59,999
o $60,000 to $69,999
o $70,000 to $79,999
o $80,000 to $89,999
o $90,000 to $99,999
o $100,000 to $149,999
o $150,000 or more
Q. Ethnicity
Please specify your ethnicity.
o Hispanic or Latino
o Not Hispanic or Latino
Q. Race
Please specify your race.
o American Indian or Alaska Native
o Asian
o Black or African American
o Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander
o White
For related posts, see:
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Mon, Nov 03, 2008
 Brad Bortner has a new Forrester independent report out last month, "Best Practices-The Next Wave In Customer Satisfaction Studies Is CRM Integration: How Firms Move From Measuring To Fixing Customer Problems". Abstract:
A rising tide of customer satisfaction research is also lifting the tide of another type of software enabled solution to harness these insights. They are enterprise feedback management (EFM) systems that combine elements of survey tools with tight customer relationship management (CRM) integration to create centralized repositories of customer insight and allow almost real-time attempts to resolve customer satisfaction problems. These solutions can be either good for market research groups or just another internal headache - depending on how they are embraced. Forrester believes that they represent a rising tide in research, and we advise savvy researchers to embrace them and use them to guide their deployment.
Jessica Tsai provides good coverage of this research for CRM Magazine, with a detailed interview of Brad in "Survey Tools Step Up: Even if customer surveys don't interest you, real-time alert capabilities might".
We at Vovici have been ahead of this curve, integrating EFM with CRM systems since at least 2005. It started out as custom development, then moved to custom development with SOAP APIs, before evolving into configuration using prebuilt libraries as CRM connectors. We also recently announced a partnership with Oracle for integration with Oracle CRM on Demand.
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Fri, Sep 19, 2008
 So when I was looking over presentations to attend at the Gartner CRM show, one of the presentations I chose was Social CRM Meets the Enterprise. I assumed it was a Gartner presentation, and once there was pleasantly surprised to find out it was an Oracle presentation, as we were in the middle of extending our partnership with Oracle.
Yesterday we announced that Oracle has chosen us as a CRM On Demand Inner Circle Partner. Here's Julie Adams, Oracle Vice President:
Our product management team has thoroughly reviewed the partner ecosystem for the most synergistic solutions from our partners. We believe Vovici, as part of the Oracle CRM On Demand Inner Circle Partner Initiative, will provide our customers and prospects complementary value-added functionality in the enterprise feedback management arena.
We've been integrating our EFM systems with CRM systems since 2004, back when most of our clients were running proprietary CRM applications. In 2004, we had a small suite of perhaps a dozen SOAP web service calls that could be used for integration. By 2006, that had grown to an extensive layer with over 100 web-service calls. Now, with the announcement of the Vovici CRM 2.0 Connector for Oracle CRM On Demand, we have taken a few weeks of custom development effort and reduced it to a few days of mainly data configuration.
Why integrate your enterprise feedback management system? To treat your clients as if you actually know who they are when you survey them, to minimize the amount of information they must provide, and to avoid bad survey situations like the one Jim Davies of Gartner related.
Why integrate your EFM system with Oracle CRM On Demand? Because now, not only is it the right thing to do, it's the easy thing to do.
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Mon, Sep 15, 2008
 Summary of my coverage of the 2008 North American convention:
Next up, some excerpts from the Internet Marketing Conference.
Update (10/09/08): Feedback survey on the conference champions "green" web surveys.
Update (10/19/09): Gartner CRM Conference 2009 Recap.
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