Highly Competitive - software industry insights

Symbiosis: Customer Experience and Business Process

Companies continue to struggle with prioritizing the Customer over their business-as-usual, ingrained product and self-focused strategies.  Upper management in many industries seem to be dragging their feet when challenged to quickly and energetically change business practices to better serve customers. These leaders seem to look at the “Customer” as if it were an abstract representation of a value on a spreadsheet -- instead of probably the single most important factor for most businesses.

Now from the customer perspective, which is what upper management should have as top priority, interactions with most companies are becoming more and more a multi-channel journey of multiple touch points that are used to communicate, gain information, compare vendor offerings, seek assistance, make purchases, register complaints, and so on. If companies meet the needs of customers, then those experience journeys will repeat over customer-preferred channels. Multi-channel strategies for customer engagement are imperative because customers are more and more the ones who choose how they will interact with companies and on which channels.

On the flip side, customers don’t see their interactions in terms of “channels” -- just like customers don’t care how or why a company’s business processes fail to provide an overall positive experience with the company. Customers see that they did or did not have a successful interaction and that they did or did not achieve what they wanted. The outcomes of these interactions influence how customers regard companies and whether they will continue doing business with them.

Once a company has made a commitment to becoming customer-focused for its business strategies and operations, there is work to be done:  integration of channels, integration of business processes, and integration of data from customer interactions all become imperative. Integration of channels leads to understanding of touch points in individual channels as well as cross-channel. Aligning business process integration with the customer leads to creating single customer experiences across the enterprise and across communication channels. Integration of interaction data with operational data provides a more complete view of the customer in real time. Individual department and program goals across the enterprise must be also integrated and related to customer experience excellence.

Business processes must become a dynamic, intelligent and highly integrated interface for company interactions internally and externally. Most internal systems in companies should incorporate factors like customer experience and engagement, rather than functioning solely from a product, service or departmental perspective. Processes play a key role in bringing these factors together to achieve customer focus and relevance. Integration internal to the organization means cross-functional / cross-department teams to envision and implement customer strategies, translated into business processes that holistically connect the enterprise.

 

Symbiosis, Integration

Like symbiotic relationships in nature, business-customer symbiosis is founded on the belief that customer goals and business goals can be aligned in ways advantageous to both parties. The relationship that a company has with its customers affects almost every area of the business and every point of interaction with the customer, internally and externally. That’s why effective business processes are so important to enable top-notch customer experiences.

For mutual benefit, the focus for all business processes shifts to customers to embrace what they want from companies, how they view companies and how they want to work with them. Agile business processes connect all parts of the enterprise to the individual points and stages of the customer experience journey. Business processes also encompass other enterprise practices and strategies. Business-customer symbiosis can ensure the integration of both perspectives to the benefit of both parties. Business process ties directly to desired business outcomes – which now must align with customer desired outcomes.

 

Data Fuels Process and the Customer Experience

Happily, companies have a lot of data sources to help them gain insights into their current and potential customers through analytics, real conversations, social media content, customer service interactions.

Data, information and intelligence are the fuel for effective business processes that support and promote successful customer experiences and interactions. By considering business processes and business information in parallel to customer-focused strategies and initiatives, business outcomes are likely to improve.

Customer interactions produce an escalating amount of data related to internal systems such as CRM and call center management, and related to external sites such as corporate websites and social venues. Significant issues impact the ability of enterprises to correlate all the data into the so-called “single view” of the customer:

• Social media data that is primarily content and crucially dependent on context for meaning
• Company-controlled data sources that do not easily reveal customer process or outcomes
• Complexity of integrations needed to bring all this disparate data together
• Pulling data together to reflect the customer perspective rather than the internal systems architecture

Data directly related to customer-focused processes is likely to get closer to providing the elusive customer “single view” where an integrated process spans multiple interactions, touch points, transactions, and systems. The right data fueling processes is an important part of designing innovative business strategies that truly focus on the customer. Deriving timely customer insights benefit the strategic and operational aspects of an enterprise. However, a good many customer interactions or touch points are increasingly shorter-lived due to the proliferation of digital channels and their use by customers. The opportunity for enterprises to meet customer desires and needs is becoming shorter for each interaction and increasingly difficult to capture, analyze and understand.

 

Business Process Management Meets Customer

 Business process management (BPM) can no longer be solely focused on achieving operational efficiency and optimizing the business. Business processes must become more responsive to a focus on the customer, and become well-integrated across multiple systems to do so. BPM is crucial to customer-oriented systems as well as operational systems, and actually provides an essential piece to integrating these systems in order to better serve customer needs. Business processes are key to an agile holistic business strategy that helps customers achieve success with the company’s products and services. An interesting development in BPM is adaptive case management (ACM) that may be leading the way to greater convergence with customer systems such as CRM and call center applications.

An important aspect of BPM is continuous improvement, something that must happen for enterprises to respond to ever-changing markets and customer desires. To bring about customer-focused continuous change, enterprises need to articulate vision for strategies and initiatives from the customer perspective; and then tie process improvement to the customer experience. Working with customer data and analyses, enterprises may benefit from analyzing the ‘reverse engineering’ of outcomes expected by different customer segments, and then use insights to define how the enterprise should operate across process, organization, and technology domains to deliver optimal customer experiences and success.

Enterprises that allow separate solution and process silos for each channel to persist will greatly impede responsiveness to customers and will add to customer frustration by failing to provide one experience across channels. These enterprises probably did not start with a customer experience strategy and likely developed and/or acquired solutions specific only to individual channels without heeding the need for seamless integration of processes.

 

Business Process and Customer Experience Management Technology

Responsive and accurate support for customer interactions through people, processes and practices is a cornerstone of the management that enterprises can apply to enabling positive customer experiences. Enterprises must recognize that ‘management’ doesn’t mean controlling and dictating to the customer what the ‘experience’ will be. It does mean managing how well the enterprise provides a single experience across channels, how well it fulfills the needs and desires of customers based on customer terms, and even how well it delivers high quality products and services.

BPM can be instrumental for designing and maintaining effective and agile processes that are a sophisticated means to respond well to customer needs, while navigating many complex variables moving from customer to customer. Well-designed and customer-oriented processes make a big difference when integrating touch points for a ‘single view’ of customer interactions.

In the 2011 Forrester Wave for Web Content Management for Online Customer Experience, Stephen Powers defines customer experience management (CXM or CEM) software solutions as:

A set of solutions which enable the management and delivery of dynamic, targeted, consistent content, offers, products, and service interactions across digitally enabled consumer touchpoints. Previously, organizations, processes, and technologies to serve the online channels were silo’d, resulting in overhead, inconsistent experiences, and inability to measure results. However, as online initiatives have evolved and matured, so have product offerings to support those initiatives.

Three categories of solutions comprise online CXM: those based on process, delivery, and measurement:

Process-based solutions enable business users to create experiences. Process-based solutions consist of tools that business users (as opposed to IT users) use to create and manage structured and unstructured content for customer experiences. This category includes WCM, digital asset management (DAM), eCommerce, customer relationship management (CRM), marketing campaign management, marketing resource management, desktop publishing tools (such as Microsoft Word), and interactive development environments (IDEs).

Delivery solutions bring interactive experiences to customers. Vendors often tightly couple both WCM and eCommerce solutions with native delivery tiers, enabling businesses to create content and design and deliver experiences in a single package. But other technologies enable experience delivery, including rules- or algorithm-based content targeting solutions like search, personalization, and recommendations engines; marketing automation solutions such as campaign management and offer management; and customer service interaction management solutions that support customer data and history, customer self-service, knowledge management, and customer feedback management.

Customer intelligence solutions enable businesses to gauge the success of experiences. A/B and multivariate testing enable marketers and business users to test out variations of experiences on certain demographics before rolling them out to a broader audience. Web analytics tools give insight into how consumers consume content and interact with experiences. Social analytics provide insight into how consumers engage with companies by monitoring social interactions. 

 

Source: BP Trends

 

 

Process Alignment: Voice of the Customer Meets Voice of the Business 

Enterprises are accustomed to setting success metrics through KPIs related only to internal business process performance and internally-defined business outcomes. Unfortunately these metrics are frequently out-of-synch with customer perceptions of how well the enterprise met their expectations. Enterprise and customer metrics can be mismatched in other aspects of the customer experience:

 For instance the business may define the process cycle time – the length of time the process takes to run – as measured from when the customer places the order to when the products are dispatched. The customer, on the other hand, may well perceive the time taken to be from when they first went on to the website to look for a product, to the point at which the product started working. Clearly there can be a substantial difference between the two measures. 

Ideally we want to ensure that our measures of process effectiveness (the Voice of the Process) are the same as the customer’s measures (the Voice of the Customer), albeit the customer’s measures are informal measures. 

 

Source: BP Trends

 

Juxtaposing customer and enterprise views of process, experience and success through customer journey diagrams will reveal the disconnects between enterprise perceptions and what customers are likely experiencing. Enterprises are still working on finding more ways to capture the actual customer experience since true direct insight is not easily attained. Insight is pieced together with data from many sources including customer surveys, content from social sites, repeat business with the same customer, customer transactions, and interactions with customer service.

 

Symbiosis at the Heart of the Enterprise

Enterprises continue to be challenged to deliver positive customer experiences that are mutually beneficial and crafted from the customer perspective. Instead of designing business processes integrated with a customer experience strategy, many companies just tack on aspects of monitoring customer interactions to existing processes. For many companies, the main focus is still on their own needs, their own problems to be solved by the business process. And frequently when enterprises say they are customer-focused, they really mean they are trying to engineer upsells and cross-sells for their own benefit, without necessarily delivering real value to the customer.

As I continue to emphasize in much that I write, technology alone is never sufficient: enterprises need integrated and agile processes that also recognize the importance of people and practices to achieve goals and positive business outcomes. To become a truly customer-focused organization that enables customer experience excellence, the entire enterprise must be part of the overall experience:

• Starting with Upper management: choose Customer as The strategic focus
• Enable and empower customer-focused people in every part of the enterprise
• Design processes that are flexible enough to change with dynamic markets and customer needs
• Draw on innovative information systems to fuel business processes and provide continuous customer insights for fostering customer experience excellence

Keeping the focus on customer outcomes will help align people, processes, practices, and technology to the continuous changes needed to facilitate optimal customer experiences over time. Neither customer experience excellence nor well-integrated business processes should be after- thoughts for business execution – they are the symbiotic heart of success.

 

 

Related Links:

In Pursuit of Customer Experience Excellence

Information, Intelligence and Process:  Combining Forces to Better Answer Business Needs

The Ever-Expanding Importance of Analytics–True Intelligence for Business

Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

Findability Inside The Firewall – Still Trying To Find The Information We Need

 

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished software industry analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights. Her 25+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt   For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategic Product & Market Intelligence Services

Platform is in the Eye of the Beholder

 

My friend and colleague Phil Simon recently published a new book called The Age of the Platform. I know from conversations with Phil that his new book is a personal journey to explore a very large and significant topic for which Phil has a lot of passion:  how business technology must evolve to provide the value and functionality that businesses need to move successfully and agilely into the future.

  

Exploring on the Edge of Innovation

Like many of us, Phil is an explorer. And he decided to explore a large area of business and technology – the successes and failures of companies that are based on platforms that consist of multiple offerings, ecosystems of partners and customer communities, and cultures of innovation (driven both internally and externally).

He has taken the good kind of risk in putting together The Age of the Platform – he wants to move to somewhere new in his thinking and has shared the beginnings of that process in this book. Innovation comes from taking risks, taking leaps away from where one has been -- to find new places and ideas. Phil shows that his exploration of the Platform as business model also parallels his search for what he wants to do with his life in new phases of experience.

In his forward, Mitch Joel nails what Phil is doing with his own journey:

It’s tempting to stick with what has always worked best for you, but today it’s critical to explore new platforms – and to build your own. As obvious as this sounds, it’s amazing to see how many businesses refuse to experiment with new technologies and media. They’re afraid of new platforms.

 

And Phil, after running through key questions to consider in order to decide if a platform will lead to fertile business growth, has this to say:

If these questions make you feel uneasy, don’t worry. Embrace the uncertainty.

Platforms require it.

 

 

The Age of the Platform

I recommend that if you haven’t already read The New Small, go through it before reading The Age of the Platform. In The New Small Phil talks about businesses that are forward-moving, interested in varying degrees of business innovation, reasonably tech savvy, deeply interested in customer success with their services or products, and take the life of their businesses very personally since they are usually doing something they love. These “New Small-ers” understand that technology should only come into play if it clearly benefits the purpose of the business.

The Age of the Platform provides value to businesses of all sizes that either: do not fully understand certain technology changes that are occurring and how they might impact their organizations; or do not understand how to innovate their businesses to survive and be more competitive – or both.  Reflecting what The New Small revealed, Phil’s discussion of the “change-tolerant business” is quite significant. Phil provides a quote from Robert Charnette: “A highly change-tolerant business can both adapt to and cause market turbulence for its own benefit”. Phil then goes on to explore how “knowledge is power” for achieving the change-tolerant business, especially in these times of:  burgeoning data and content, many new technologies, and many new ways to bring data and technology into a business for its benefit.

While discussing ways that a “platform” mentality can be manifested in businesses of all sizes, Phil provides an excellent case in Hubspot. Hubspot is a source of internet marketing technologies and expertise for small businesses, particularly for inbound marketing and social media. The case was co-written by my friend and colleague Kirsten Knipp, now a VP at Hubspot, who shows that Hubspot is not only a technology platform that integrates with other platforms, but a platform of knowledge and innovation, thus becoming a “virtuous” platform of openness and sharing to benefit both Hubspot, and its customers and partners. I highly recommend a thorough read of the Hubspot case to understand how a “platform” can be put into play for companies, since most companies are not Amazons or Googles.

 

  

You may not agree with everything Phil says in The Age of the New Platform but it’s likely that the book has provoked new thinking about how business and technology must evolve, and also opened up an examination of ideas and functions that may no longer be relevant for businesses that want to sustain competitiveness and innovation. Phil has invited his readers to interact with him at www.theageoftheplatform.com to continue the conversation.

 

  

Disclosure: I’m a friend and colleague of Phil Simon, I’ve read all of his books, and intend to read any new books he writes.

 

Related Links

A Review of “The New Small”

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

‘Big Data’, Intelligence and Multi-faceted Innovation

Internal Disruption–No Longer Business As Usual

Avoiding Chaos, Losing Serendipity?

A Smarter Edgier Collective: Business Technology Professionals on Twitter 

I have a confession to make: I am a Hybrid

 

  

About the author: Julie Hunt is a software industry solution strategist and analyst, providing market and competitive insights. Her 25+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt   For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategic Product & Market Intelligence Services

 

 

Virtual Community: The New Home of Customer Service?

 

Companies have begun to extend customer service functions into the external online communities and forums that they sponsor. Communities offer a dynamic opportunity for collaborative support of customers to answer their questions, to give them guidelines and ideas for solving problems, to discuss new ideas and critiques for the company’s offerings.

However “Community” isn’t just one destination – it’s not limited to venues sponsored by individual organizations. Community is in every social venue that touches the customer and the company: other forums and social media sites offer support and sounding boards for customers of that company.  Companies should understand that an overall Virtual Community can come into play for providing customer service “anywhere anytime”.

Listening to these other social venues or communications channels has become very important to achieving highly responsive customer service/support. Listening may spur the company to join in on the discussion to offer answers and assistance. Or listening may be about clearly hearing what customers are saying and then acting on that feedback by making changes and improvements to offerings, support, marketing, and even strategic company direction.

 

According to Mark Studness, Director of eCommerce at Verizon, the Community Forums have been well-received since rolling out last July, generating more than 10 million page views.

"The Community Forums have spurred interaction among customers because people today expect to be able to find answers to their technical questions online," said Studness. "The feedback we've already received shows that our customers value the personalized peer-to-peer advice and feedback they receive from fellow users."

 

To achieve effective customer service in the Virtual Community, there’s plenty of work to do. It takes quite a bit of management, new processes, new culture and attitude adjustments, to communicate with and support customers, to glean feedback, and to add value to the customer experience, no matter where the conversation is taking place. Customer interactions on the Virtual Community plane must be synchronized with CRM and customer service practices and processes to ensure that all of the appropriate teams are tapped to participate. Strategy, goals and metrics also have important roles.

 

 
http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/enterprise/2010/03/community_management_the_strat.php

 

 

Effective Customer Service Communities

It’s pretty obvious that traditional customer service practices are broken for a lot of companies. Companies are making investments in social connections to customers often with the intent of doing a better job of providing answers and support, and to learn from the conversations customers are having in a variety of social venues. The Virtual Community is taking shape as it encompasses social sites external to the company as well as company-sponsored communities, both for customers and for employees.

Companies wanting to set up their own communities with customer service orientations must first engender an internal community and collaboration culture for employees and partners. Part of the collaborative activities are the empowerment and enablement of most or all employees to be customer advocates, and when appropriate, provide direct customer support. Communities can be silo-busters for enterprises where cross-departmental communication and cooperation are important.

When creating company-sponsored communities with a mind to customer service, Esteban Kolsky provides these guidelines:  

“Treat communities as the most important link between you and your customers since there is nothing that can replace the direct link you can have with them – and the free flow of information both ways...So, how do you make the move? Three things to get started”:

1. Make sure your customers want it – Quite simple, there ain’t no community without people. If your customers are not going to participate, nor do they feel they can get value out of it then the community will not succeed. …Best way to start? start a community alongside the rest of your support structure...Commit time and resources to grow it. then you start shifting people over slowly, finally make it the channel of choice. Sounds simple; it is simple.

2. Make sure your company can support it – Despite claims to the contrary, the most successful examples of community service are those where the company commits time, resources, knowledge and participants to them. If your experts are involved in the community, take interest in it, answer questions and receive feedback from customers the community will grow and become useful to you. If no one from your company ever enters the community, and it builds with its own content and resources, if you seem not to care about the feedback and knowledge built in it, then it will be a failure.

3. Let it be – I know this is hard to understand, but you have to let the content be free. Monitoring content, censoring entries, and controlling what goes where and how it flows through your community is not the way to go…It is likely that you will have to do some policing to get it started, but go lightly and err on the side of freedom. Once the community is up and running, make sure you use reputation tools built into them so the people that matter the most (engineers and outside experts as an example) can be recognized. Communities center around self-elected leaders and they are the ones that will control the content and quality of the community. Feel free to court them – but try not to control them.

 

The Customer Experience

The number one imperative for working with Community venues for customer service activities is to understand that the Customer Experience with the company is the real focus. Most customer service initiatives and practices have been pointed towards increasing agent and process efficiencies, while reducing costs, which benefits the company in the short term while offering limited benefits to customers. Changing the imperative to the Customer Experience does much more to lead companies to real customer relationship management and retention, as well as nurturing customer success, in a more scalable fashion.

 

The emerging view is to create a customer experience strategy focused on the business success of the customer. By being a vehicle for the customer’s success, companies expect to:

 - Extend the life of the customer

 - Develop a proactive advocate for their products and services

- Extract usable value from the customer’s experience that can be repurposed

- Reduce transactional support costs by developing more educated users

- Increase the value of the customer through additional product and service revenue

There is considerable evidence pointing to the success of this approach. A study by Booz Allen found that customer-centric organizations outperformed their industry peers 2:1 in revenue growth and generated profit margins five to 10 percent above their competitors. However, to deliver these results, organizations have to walk their talk. If a company wants to evolve from pushing product to delivering customer advocacy-level value, a shift in thinking and attitude is required.

 

The Customer Experience is only as good as what a company offers for its customer focus: customer-centric processes, reliable quality products, partnerships with customers for customer benefit. The entire company is responsible for positive customer experiences. The entire company can only provide effective customer focus if the internal company culture maps directly to the success and satisfaction of its customers. Again, the Virtual Community that benefits customers transcends delineations internal and external to the company. A major challenge for companies is to provide a consistent customer experience throughout the Virtual Community.

 

Bi-Directional Value of the Virtual Community  

The Virtual Community of interactions with customers provides many ways to enhance and grow positive customer experiences on a continuous basis. These interactions can be quite subtle and frequently can’t be easily measured using metrics that tie to company goals. For example, through the Virtual Community, new customer advocates arise bringing influence from their individual social networks. Tracking such influence is complex and, at times, elusive. However, significant new business for the company may result.

Dion Hinchcliffe writes extensively on the “Social Business” examining both technology and human implications, as in Social Business and Next-Generation CIOs - The Business Models:

Customer engagement on a whole new level. Leading enterprises are now finding that holding customers at arm’s length out of concern for cost is no longer necessary. Better customer service, higher satisfaction levels, and better retention are possible by employing techniques and platforms such as social CRM, online communities, and social media marketing that are especially high value. For example, financial services leader Intuit has been offering co-created customer support via Live Community to millions of customers for years, driving down costs and supporting customers much better than traditional non-social methods.

 

An article on DestinationCRM details the benefits identified by Dr. Natalie Petouhoff in her Forrester study, The ROI of Customer Service Communities:

While Petouhoff says she expected cost savings, the rise in product ideation was a surprise. In the study, she writes that customer service departments are rarely responsible for product ideation, but the nature of leaving commentary in the online community lends itself well to the process -- and can lead to other benefits.

"You wouldn't think 'customer service' when we went down this path," she says. "But because the ideas are in the community, interdepartmental collaboration can take place with them. As a result, customer service has an opportunity to step up to the plate and be an extremely valuable executive player."

In the study, Petouhoff notes several benefits that positively impact company customer service operations. Customers share the “win” from these benefits:

- increase in first-contact resolution

- boost in relevant Web-site content

Two more benefits listed in the Petouhoff study stand out as very important for customers: the already-mentioned new idea co-creation, and this one: improved customer retention and customer lifetime value. If customers are sticking around, it usually means that they are finding what they need and that they are satisfied well enough to continue dealing with the company. It likely means that customer frustrations have been reduced and confidence in the company has grown. Taking improved customer relationships one step further, communities for customer service help customers become more successful with the company’s products and services.

 

Often in the Virtual Community, problems, questions and requests are resolved faster and more accurately for the customer, by fellow customers, company employees, SMEs, and other community participants. When active on the Virtual Community, companies should be attuned to what each customer needs, and then take the appropriate action, which might be proactive, responsive, or passive. Many times listening to and understanding the customer is the best “action”.  The next step is to translate that understanding into a significant component of the strategy and direction of the company to further meet customer needs and sustain competitiveness.

 

  

Related Links

Goodbye Corporate Website – Hello Web Presence Management Framework?

SMB / Mid-Market B2B Software vendors - Findability + web presence + social: attracting the “customer as buyer”

B2B Social CRM for Software Vendors and the Lifecycle of Customer Experience

In Pursuit of Customer Experience Excellence

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

The Effective Intranet – Engaging the Employee as Customer

Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web

Social collaboration in enterprise:The heart–and goal–of Community is “collaborating people”, not collaboration tools

 

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished software industry analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights. Her 20+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt   For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategic Product & Market Intelligence Services

 

In Pursuit of Customer Experience Excellence

 

Competitiveness for many companies is often translated into external activities over which they have little or no control, such as focusing on tactical methods to attack competitors, to convince a customer not to buy from a competitor. These same companies overlook many activities that are completely in their control such as greatly improving and innovating product quality and reliability. Another area that can significantly enhance company competitiveness is working towards customer service excellence. Customer service excellence can produce a blatant ROI: Happy Successful Customers. Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com makes a strong case for focusing on customers, rather than competitors:

When asked what competitors he worries about, Bezos replied that Amazon decided early on that it would be "competitor alert, but not competitor obsessed," Instead, his company is customer obsessed.

"The best customer service means the customer doesn't need to call you," Bezos says... That fixation on customer service appears to have paid off, Bezos says: The company has some of the highest customer service ratings in the retail industry.

 

 Swinging in the other direction, it’s fairly easy to dig up lots of horror stories and statistics on the high cost (quantitative and qualitative) of poorly executed customer service. For example, Genesys came out with a study, The Cost of Poor Customer Service, where consumers were surveyed globally:

Nearly 70% of consumers said they had ended a relationship due to poor customer service alone. Consumers feel the most significant root causes of poor service are:

• Being trapped in automated self-service

• Being forced to wait too long for service

• Repeating themselves

• Representatives that lack the skills to answer their inquiry

On average, consumers in virtually every country walk away from a relationship due to poor service. Overall, consumers end more than 1.4 relationships each year on average due to a poor customer service experience.

                 

The approach to customer service has been changing for many companies, and it clearly needs to change. Companies are facing not only the need to ramp up positive customer experiences whenever customers interact with the company, but now must understand and construct strategies for providing a seamless customer experience over multiple channels of communication. Many new customer communication channels are not even provided by the company. ‘Anywhere-anytime’ customer interactions, frequently driven by the customer, are happening now, and are likely to grow in diversity and occurrence over time.

But companies are not helpless in this “new world” of customer engagement. Companies have full power to create a consistent and differentiated service experience for their customers, across any and all channels. Making this happen is not an easy task, but making it happen can be a solid path to sustained competitiveness, and to providing continuous real value to customers.

 

A Continuum of Customer Engagement

Industry analyst Esteban Kolsky has been writing about the transition of customer communication channels from ones under company management to a proliferation of new modes of interaction, often pushed by customers. Kolsky considers customer-driven communication channels part of a continuum that is currently evolving:

This new continuum arose from the Social Customer becoming demanding, and expecting the interactions to happen on their own terms. No longer do customers want to be transferred from department to department – they want quick resolution by whomever they happen to interact with. They expect to get access to the relevant data regarding their transactions virtually anywhere, in any format. They want to dictate the terms of the relationship as they deem relevant…

…we see organizations today ill prepared across all channels to deal with it. Their people are not prepared to deal with customers and communities accessing all relevant information, their processes are not sophisticated enough to accommodate these dynamic demands for information and data, and the technology behind them definitely is not up to par to support flexible exchanges of information as determined by the customer – not the organization.

From Customer Lifecycle Transactions to Socially-Augmented Relationship Continuums

 

Beyond a continuum of communication channels, the path to improved customer interactions must focus on people, practices, processes, and technologies, with technologies subservient to the first three components. New accomplishments for engaging experiences with customer service functions can include knowledge co-creation that will benefit many, collecting customer intelligence to underpin ever-improving service, and highly relevant personalized exchanges that speed up acquisition of answers for customer questions and needs.

 

                                   

             Source: From Customer Lifecycle Transactions to Socially-Augmented Relationship Continuums 

 

One Customer Experience Across Multiple Channels, Old and New

Guy Stephens writes in a recent post about the influence of social media on customer relationships with companies. Stephens’ wonderfully detailed post is a response to a report from the Institute of Customer Service, Return on investment in customer service: the bottom line report. A few of his observations:

The report points out:

- customer service is moving towards a fundamental shift away from a largely transaction–based cost center to a strategic driver that helps generate value for the organisation

- calculating the ROI in customer service is complex

- a profound change for the customer service world is taking place

(but) the preoccupation remains firmly on the channel, or the mechanics of the channels. The modern day contact centre has been built on the pursuit of tactical efficiencies and expediencies, but its future lies in a far more expansive, challenging and less familiar landscape.…although technology has created many new channels that affect customer behaviour, the traditional channels don’t disappear.

To succeed with all customers, creating and maintaining consistency of experience across and between channels of communication, through many interactions, is the priority. This goes beyond listening well to the customer -- this is about action, enablement and empowerment.

 

                
 
 

Developing Solutions for the Customer Experience Continuum

Recently I worked with software company Sword Ciboodle, collaborating with Mitch Lieberman (VP Marketing Americas and well-known SME for Social / CRM) and several others to co-create a thought piece on the current state and future direction of quality customer service experiences, including the evolving customer engagement continuum, – and the impacts on company success and on the value created for customers. 

Sword Ciboodle, based in Scotland, has been growing its presence in the Americas. The Ciboodle software solutions are all about helping companies provide improved customer interactions and the many ways that this can be accomplished, including traditional customer service. Ciboodle technology powers a customer engagement platform that includes capabilities for CRM, customer intelligence, dynamic process management, and a good start on tapping into multi-channel communication interfaces. Ciboodle also gets into interfaces with social apps, plus sentiment analysis, a built-in community platform, and self-service portals. Ciboodle has a view in mind for the future of customer service and is exploring the customer engagement continuum as the ‘anywhere anytime’ customer interaction venue that is likely to become more important for many companies.

  

Collaborating with a Company That Believes In People-Centric Businesses

Collaborative projects are frequently distinct from one another, so “rules of engagement” should reflect the goals and needs unique to each project. “Rules of engagement” may be explicit or just informally understood. Collaborative communication is best when open and responsive, at a frequency that moves the work along. And companies that believe in collaboration and in connecting people for mutual benefit also end up creating solutions and deliverables that work well for what people want to get done and how they want to do it. All of the above notions have been part of the collaborative experience to create the white paper with the Ciboodle team.

The content of the white paper that we co-created is much richer for having the participation of multiple strong team members. The full team includes these experts who have been with Ciboodle for several years: Clare Dorrian (VP Marketing EMEA), Ian Henderson (VP Presales / Strategic Consulting), Rachel Tait (Marketing Manager Americas), and Lisa Goodwin (Design & Marketing Americas). I greatly appreciate all of the knowledge and insight that they have shared with me, and the great enthusiasm that this team brings to the work that Ciboodle does. Towards the end of the project, newcomer John Merritt (Product Marketing Manager Americas) jumped right in to shepherd the white paper through final production and publication. Then there’s Mitch, whose vision, drive and commitment contributed so much to the content and direction of the white paper.

  

If you are interested in reading the white paper Focusing on the Total Customer Experience (and I highly recommend that you do…), send an email request to:  whitepaper@sword-ciboodle.com  And then please come back to my blog or to Mitch’s blog to let us know your thoughts, reactions, new ideas, and suggestions for improving customer interactions, achieving customer service excellence, and the evolution of the customer engagement continuum.

Mitch has been turning out posts on the white paper topics, including:

The Importance of Positive Customer Service Experiences

Coordination, Collaboration and Co-operation; An Approach to Service Excellence

Creating Graceful and Rewarding Customer Service Experiences

The Dynamic Customer Service Experience Framework

  

My Related Links

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

The Effective Intranet – Engaging the Employee as Customer

Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web

Social collaboration in enterprise:The heart–and goal–of Community is “collaborating people”, not collaboration tools

 

Disclosure:  Sword Ciboodle sponsored and compensated me for the white paper that I wrote with Mitch Lieberman.

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished software industry analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights. Her 20+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt   For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategic Product & Market Intelligence Services

 

 

Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web

 

The notions of web presence and customer engagement aren’t new -- but are gaining in interest as web presence expands beyond the corporate website and as companies must know more about effective means of connecting to customers. Many questions swirl around understanding what engagement is, what defining characteristics should be measured and why, how to align metrics to goals, and which metrics matter the most. Context – or even hierarchies of context – plays a major role for selecting metrics, analyzing the data returned by metrics, and understanding what to do with the data. 

Engagement - like influence - is at heart an abstract. For purposes of customer engagement on the web, engagement can be thought of as the measurement of attention to something, which takes us to the ‘can of worms’ of what constitutes customer attention to a company’s web presence. For each company, what comprises engagement can be fairly unique, generally derived from a matrix of attributes, in turn leading to a matrix of metrics. As web presence becomes more far-flung and sophisticated, the metrics, tools, data, and analyses become more complex.

Which are the right attributes and metrics? For each company, they are the ones that measure actions and events that relate to key business context and goals. Many different domain experts offer many different kinds of metrics from which to choose, any of which could be relevant to individual companies. Once a matrix of metrics has been selected, it’s likely that each organization will need to constantly assess that set of metrics for validity and effectiveness – and that the change of metrics selection will be continuous, hopefully to reflect: actions taken in response to analysis, new markets explored and company innovations.

Jumping into an assessment of customer engagement is not a simple undertaking and will take a lot of work. Monitoring web presence on sites other than the corporate website is still a new undertaking, with the tech tools still evolving. Also in continuing evolution is the understanding of how to interpret data collected and how to use that data to make decisions for solution offerings, customer connections and communication, and business strategy. A company will need to define both the current status and the desired status for what constitutes an ‘engaged customer’, yet another definition set that should continuously evolve.

 

Why Understanding Engagement Matters

Most organizations have moved well beyond clocking the number of hits on a web page. Not only do these organizations have a tall order to provide personalized experiences as well as high quality content on the corporate website, but visitors to the site must be sufficiently engaged to take action. What sort of action is taken depends on the company’s strategy for web presence and customer engagement, further in support of overall business strategies and goals.

Forrester analyst Stephen Powers covers web content management solutions, and to a certain extent, web engagement.  In The Online Customer Engagement Software Ecosystem, 2010 Powers discusses engagement:

Customer Engagement Remains Top Of Mind For Companies

The uncertain economy has increased pressure on companies to engage customers more efficiently, especially via online channels that offer lower-cost ways to interact with customers, enable better lead generation, and increase customer retention rates. This is likely why investments in software to manage customer experiences has held up relatively well in the current economy. 

Our most recent data suggests this trend will continue into the next year. Consider that in 2010, 51% of organizations plan content management implementations, more than one-third will implement or upgrade customer relationship management tools, and one in four is planning marketing automation software investments. 

 

An article in Forbes brings up the tough part of measuring engagement – the highly qualitative nature of engagement, no matter the context:

For the past year or so, the conversation around how to "engage" consumers online has spiked among publishers, media companies, advertisers and agencies. As Michael Mendenhall, CMO of Hewlett-Packard said, "Marketers monitor the front end and the back end so they see click-streams and commerce. ... The difficult part is the qualitative part in between, which is the level of engagement."

The qualitative aspect of web engagement takes us into the messier world of sentiment analysis, which is still a work-in-process, and that of semantic/content analysis. Demarcations are likely to start blurring between what matters for customer engagement on the corporate website and what matters on social sites, also along qualitative lines.

Web analytics domain expert Avinash Kaushik wrote a blog post in 2007 entitled “Engagement" Is Not A Metric, It's An Excuse providing this view on qualitative versus quantitative aspects of engagement:

At the heart of it, engagement tries to measure something deeply qualitative.
Yet most efforts to measure it in our world tend to be hard core quantitative (translate that as: "we have clickstream, let's take our interpretations of what could possibly be happening, now find clicks that can carry the burden of our personal impositions, voila! here's engagement").

The reason engagement has not caught on like wild fire (except in white papers and analyst reports and pundit posts) is that it is a "heart" metric we are trying to measure with "head" data, and engagement is such a utterly unique feeling for each website that it will almost always have a unique definition for each and every website.

 

Since 2007, quite a bit more progress has been made in the how and why of web engagement metrics, but some of the problems remain. Distributed web presence outside the corporate website has added another dimension to the qualitative elusiveness of web/customer engagement. User-generated content in forums, blogs, microblogs, communities must be found, assessed for sentiment and key content. Processes for engaging the author of the UGC must be designed to try to open more communication channels for customers. And then we have to figure out how to measure all of this in meaningful ways.

 

 Choosing Effective Metrics

Not everything that counts can be measured. Not everything that can be measured counts.

-- Albert Einstein

 

So…there are an overwhelming number of individual metrics that relate to customer / web engagement, the customer experience on a particular website, both in qualitative and quantitative terms. Web engagement not only pertains to company-owned web assets but to the many social sites that continue to proliferate on the Internet. Companies must decide where and how they wish to monitor engagement, using metrics and the tools to do so. Before choosing metrics, a clear understanding of the company’s hierarchy of strategies, programs and objectives must be in place.

Not only do high level business strategies impact the selection of attributes to monitor and measure, but other levels of strategies and objectives matter too. Individual initiatives designed by product marketing, marketing and sales groups have specific achievable components and objectives. Web engagement metrics will align to levels of program objectives as well as to the company’s ‘big picture’, essentially a hierarchy of metrics building toward overall business strategies, and toward building future direction. Metrics only have meaning if proper analysis is conducted, results examined against objectives, and if processes for taking action are in place, with decisions and next steps activated. (And then repeat….)

I’m not going to provide an overview of the vast array of tech tools available to assist in monitoring and measuring web/customer engagement. The solution space is in early stages, so there is much still to do to ‘master’ the world of engagement metrics. Suffice it to say, that there is a lot of work going on to develop and refine tech offerings.

In the category of ‘not everything that counts can be measured”: Listening, understanding, acting on  what engaged customers/buyers have to say are among the most important corporate ‘to-dos’ regarding real engagement. Companies must also heed the contextual relevance of any customer-generated content, for real understanding; content cannot be yanked from its context and analyzed in a vacuum.

  

Different Strokes for Different Folks – The Many Faces of Engagement Metrics

I’m going to run through a number of metric matrices proposed by several sources to illustrate different approaches and ways of organizing engagement measurement.

  

>> Web Properties Owned by Organizations

In the Forrester report Marketing’s New Key Metric: Engagement, 2007, four main components are identified as attributes for customer engagement:

Involvement – Measurable aspects of an individual connection to an organization or brand

Interaction – Depth/breadth of an individual connection

Intimacy – Sentiment of an individual towards organization / brand

Influence – Indicators that an individual will encourage someone else to visit, consider, buy

 

 
 
Forrester: Marketing’s New Key Metric: Engagement, 2007

 

Eric Peterson, of Web Analytics Demystified and well-known in this field, published a multi-part blog series in 2006 on engagement (I recommend reading the entire series). Here are a couple of his notions regarding the selection of metrics:

Engagement goals:

(Example) - Based on my knowledge of my site visitors and their long-term usage patterns, my engagement goals are as follows:

• I would like that visitors would view and interact with certain content on my site;
• I would like visitors to subscribe to this weblog to stay connected;
• I would like visitors to maintain a low recency with my content, regardless of whether they’re reading blog posts or viewing pages on my site;
• When visitors are on my web site, I would like them to spend a reasonable amount of time interacting with my content;
• When visitors return to my site, I prefer they remember my domain name and return to my site directly, either via a bookmark or by directly entering my URL into their browser.

Key areas for metrics:

…we had been talking about how to measure engagement on their web site. We’d gone round-and-round on ideas about what constitutes an “engaged” visitor and narrowed it down to a few key areas:

• The visitor views “critical” content on the web site
• The visitor has returned to the web site recently
• The visitor returns directly to the web site some of the time
• Some high percentage of the visitor’s sessions are “long” sessions
• If available, the visitor is subscribed to at least one available site feed

  

More recently, Chris Meares, senior data analyst at philly.com, home of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News, applied his understanding of Eric Peterson’s work in engagement by adapting a white paper called “Measuring the Unmeasurable: Visitor Engagement” by Peterson and Joseph Carrabis.  Meares collaborated with Ryan Davis, the president of Philly.com, and Wendy Warren, the vice president for content, on their formula for measuring visitor engagement. The result so far is:

 

C_i — Click Index: visits must have at least 6 pageviews, not counting photo galleries

D_i — Duration Index: visits must have spend a minimum of 5 minutes on the site

R_i — Recency Index: visits that return daily

L_i — Loyalty Index: visits that either are registered at the site or visit it at least three times a week

B_i — Brand Index: visits that come directly to the site by either bookmark or directly typing www.philly.com or come through search engines with keywords like “philly.com” or “inquirer”

I_i — Interaction Index: visits that interact with the site via commenting, forums, etc.

P_i — Participation Index: visits that participate on the site via sharing, uploading pics, stories, videos, etc.

 

Tracking site visits with this level of specificity is time-consuming - Meares says he devotes about a third of his full-time job to analysis of the engagement equation — but it has produced some interesting information. For instance: “We’re definitely seeing the impact of social media and how it provides engaged visitors.” While Google and Yahoo provide a lot of traffic, the visits that they send to Philly.com don’t tend to be engaged. Only 20.34 percent of visits that come through Google are engaged visits. In comparison, 33.64 percent of visits that come via Facebook are engaged.

 

  

>> Customer Engagement on Other Sites

Over in that other world of web presence and engagement, social media sites, many domain experts and proponents have been working through definitions and metrics for customer/visitor engagement as well. The discussion of attributes and metrics for engagement on social sites has great relevance to those monitoring engagement on corporate websites, since many companies have set up their own social sites for forums, communities, blogging and so on. And of course, these companies pursue monitoring the many sites that do not belong to them.

 

Jeremiah Owyang has written numerous posts in his blog on the topic of what constitutes engagement and what metrics are useful for participants in social media sites. Here’s one version from 2007:

My working definition:

“Engagement indicates the level of authentic involvement, intensity, contribution, and ownership”

 

It’s possible for me to shorten it to:

“Apparent Interest” (and later whittled down to “Interest”)

 

Engagement Formula: 

“Attention + Interaction + Velocity + Authority + Relevant Attributes (variable)”

 

 

  


http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/category/social-media-measurement/

 

 

Social / Customer Engagement – another view

 

 
 
http://emediavitals.com/article/37/emerging-web-metrics-focus-engagement-audience-quality

 

 

 

Related Links

Goodbye Corporate Website – Hello Web Presence Management Framework?

Moving beyond WCM - Web Experience Management software solutions & markets

Time Travel Required: Finding #WEM in the 2010 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management

SMB / Mid-Market B2B Software vendors - Findability + web presence + social: attracting the “customer as buyer”

B2B WEM / WCM Software Vendors Targeting Mid-Market customers: stay where you are!  

B2B Social CRM for Software Vendors and the Lifecycle of Customer Experience

Content Marketing Strategy for B2B Software Vendors: Starring the ‘New’ White Paper

The Ever-Expanding Importance of Analytics–True Intelligence for Business

 

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished software industry analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights. Her 20+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt   For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategic Product & Market Intelligence Services

IT + Marketing: Innovation Through Collaboration in B2B Software Companies

 

I’ve read a lot of articles and posts that have discussed various aspects of the uneasy relationship (in many cases) between IT groups and Marketing groups. The people and process side of this ongoing situation puts me in mind of the obstacles and needs for the adoption of a collaboration culture in software companies. For the purpose of this article, collaboration means: talking to each other, listening to each other, analyzing and planning in concert, presence of mutual respect – no silos, no turf wars. Good intent, good communication -- bi-directional and legitimate. The kind of enterprise collaboration where teams work together for common cause: business success, growth, innovation, getting the work done well.

Whether it’s dubbed “IT working with Marketing”, or “Enterprise Collaboration”, upper management has the same responsibility to encourage and sponsor all types of necessary and differentiating collaboration to achieve business goals in ways that are better, faster, and smoother. Unfortunately for many software companies, upper management is not stepping up to enable and empower useful collaborations, particularly cross-departmental. Upper management in this context means CEO, CFO, COO -- all too often, the CIO and the CMO are not accorded power over the decisions coming from these other roles.

 Ben Horowitz on the ‘Innovation Business’:

The technology business is fundamentally the innovation business. Etymologically, the word technology means “a better way of doing things.” As a result, innovation is the core competency for technology companies. Technology companies are born because they create a better way of doing things. Eventually, someone else will come up with a better way. Therefore, if a technology company ceases to innovate, it will die.

Collaboration frequently is a very good way for software company teams to not only work for company success, but to better innovate. Innovation in software companies should not only be about products and solutions; it should be about how the company itself works as a thriving and growing organism, how it empowers staff to be successful on the company’s behalf.

  

Neither IT Nor Marketing Is A Monolithic Being Calling Its Own Shots…

Contrary to popular belief, the “modern” IT group did not spring up fully formed as an autonomous entity that makes decisions in a vacuum. Obviously an exaggeration, but I think a lot of people have this notion in the back of their minds when considering the role of IT. With a startup, the IT team may be more focused on digital infrastructure: hardware, telephony, internet, internal systems. As the company grows and different kinds of employees are added, IT grows too. If the software company IPOs, then the IT group is heavily involved in compliance, security, ensuring always-on performance, and so on. Internal systems may become more complex and numerous, employees more virtual, hardware and infrastructure demands more sophisticated.

Frequently the result is that IT groups become silo’d, but usually not by their own design. Upper management sets the agenda for IT groups and usually holds responsibility for the positioning of IT as separate from the rest of the company.  In recent years, most IT groups have suffered through significant staff cuts while more has been piled on the remaining staff. Upper management then expects instant change from IT to better support the business -- without sufficient resources – and particularly without a strong collaboration culture in place.

Marketing groups are in the same boat as IT regarding who decides their destinies. Software companies in startup mode have a history of adding Marketing functions in haphazard fashion. Many startups still look at “marketing” as something to slap on when the sales team needs more help finding buyers. The reality is that for most software companies, Marketing is an important component of the Business, just as IT is.  But too often, upper management misses the strategic opportunities to do it right – to build teams working together, instead of separately and frequently in conflict.

 

Strategy, Business and Tech

IT has been the target over past several years in companies that rightfully want IT to be more aligned with the strategic needs of the business. IT has received black marks for not moving quickly, not feeding innovation, and so on. Balance this criticism of IT with the reality that upper management usually has a big hand in the current state of IT affairs.

Eric Brown frequently addresses the future of IT with a strong dose of reality:

What’s missing in most of the articles I’ve run across about reinventing IT or changing IT is the effect the Business has had on IT. You can’t really reinvent or change something unless you know the how and why behind the creation of that entity in the first place.

…at the end of the year, the grades are handed out.  Sometimes IT fails. Sometimes IT over-achieves. …most times, IT gets a barely passing grade.

Is this barely passing grade (or failing grade) due to incompetence or mismanagement? Most times it’s not…most times it’s due to changing priorities that aren’t clearly thought through and/or communicated throughout the organization

 And who creates the constantly changing priorities? Upper management.

Harvard Business Review also weighs in on the future of IT:

The authority and responsibility for IT-enabled business outcomes needs to be aligned. The CIO's dilemma…is the challenge of promoting innovation while increasing efficiency. IT is in the untenable position of being held responsible for this even though their business partners control the decisions that impact their ability to do so.

IT governance is really business governance. In many organizations, IT has led the way in implementing governance over critical decisions related to strategy, business architecture, investments, change, programs, risk and sourcing. Over time, organizations have realized that decisions in these areas need to be coordinated across the enterprise and have elevated and consolidated these activities outside and above IT.

This isn't your grandmother's technology. "Technologies for collaboration, business intelligence, and customer interface all require experimentation and iteration" and a hands-on relationship between workers and their technology. Increasingly, the technology necessary to assemble, deploy and operate technology will be provisioned by external providers freeing up internal IT resources to focus on the meaty issues of coaching users on how to exploit the technology and ensure horizontal integration, security, continuity, and performance across the extended enterprise.

 

Marketing + IT  <>  Business + Tech

For many B2B software companies, Customers are now Buyers, many of whom want to drive the relationship and buying cycle, moving sharply away from the former sales-team-focused cycles. The customer experience with the company has gained importance; many company-centric processes must give over to processes with a strong customer focus. Both Marketing and IT have important roles in customer engagement, with marketing technology growing in sophistication and variety. But in most companies the IT group carries the additional responsibility of working with multiple disparate internal constituencies, with priorities determined by project portfolio management, internal politics, and by decisions from upper management.

When IT resources are not easily available to support time-sensitive initiatives, marketing groups have frequently implemented their own technology solutions as a form of Shadow IT. New approaches to effective customer engagement lean heavily on cloud/SaaS based technologies that are fast to set up and use by non-IT staff. Unfortunately a significant side effect of not including the IT group has led to problems: new data silos, separate operations and analytics – lack of integration with other systems in the company.

As cited in a recent post by Cheryl Burgess, the current and frequent state of finger-pointing and lack of mutual respect between IT and Marketing is summed up by Chris Murphy of  InformationWeek:

IT sees marketing as looking for shortcuts, shortcuts that will come back to bite the organization. Marketing, meanwhile, sees IT slowing them down, not delivering on the operational basics, and not understanding marketing needs.

Burgess also points to an Accenture-sponsored study involving over 300 CMO’s and 300 CIO’s that presented this view of Marketing + IT:

The CMO Council believes there is a global imperative for marketing and IT organizations, which too often have been polarized and adversarial, to find common ground around the business of innovating more efficient, effective and measurable ways to target, acquire and stay intimately connected to customers. The need for greater synchronization, partnership and collaboration between these two groups has never been more critical to their mutual success.

 

The Marketing Technologist: Success More Likely With IT and Marketing In Collaboration

Frequently, companies gain better paths to innovation, collaboration and competitiveness with the presence of business-technology hybrids who span departments and leverage cross-team expertise. The demands of innovation, meeting customer needs, and rapidly changing solution markets are challenging software companies to work much more quickly and collaboratively than ever before.

An important hybrid is the marketing technologist. Scott Brinker has published an extensive and well-crafted piece on the rise of the marketing technologist, describing “technology-powered marketing” where “Marketing must take ownership of the technology in its domain”. Some of Brinker’s observations on the marketing technologist hybrid:

As marketers, you're already responsible for the outcomes based on such technology. The accountability so widely promoted in digital marketing has you in the hot seat for results. It's only sensible that you should have full control over the means and mechanisms to deliver those results.

You must be the driver of marketing technology, not merely a concerned passenger. But if you don't have technical depth, who can help you navigate? …I propose a new role in the marketing department: a marketing CTO or chief marketing technologist. The mission of the marketing CTO is to provide that technology navigation.

 Brinker makes the case for highly functional collaborations between IT and Marketing:

..technology decisions and marketing strategy are intertwined. You can't address one without impacting the other.

 Brinker also profiles the ‘3 Spheres of Marketing Technology’: “All these technologies — the ones we buy, the ones we build upon — can be categorized into three overlapping spheres”:

                    

                    

 

Customer-Focused / Technology-Driven Marketing: Attract More Buyers

In 2008, Booz & Company published its view of the growing integration of marketing strategies with technology, “Not Your Typical Marketing Campaign – The Next Wave of Technology-Driven Marketing”:

Next-generation direct marketing demands a front-to-back rethink of the overall IT architecture, with the ultimate goal of better understanding the customer... In the past, each channel would feed customer information individually into the back-end customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems that processed transactions and held much of the customer data. Using the new architecture, all of those channels now connect to a central integrated engine. This engine, available throughout the network, mediates between channels and the customer data and back-end processing. The central campaign engine also contains the business rules that govern every interaction with every customer.

The single most critical innovation, however, lies in doing away with the typical siloed, channel-specific archi­tecture on which most current direct marketing and campaigning technol­ogy depends. No customer-centric marketing effort can be truly success­ful if the technology is still organized around interaction channels, rather than those all-important customers who naturally interact with the busi­ness through multiple channels.

Each step of the way will require the willingness to rethink your overall marketing strategy, the tactical processes by which you plan and carry out each campaign, and the IT tools you need. You must develop the skills required to design and execute analytic campaigns and, of course, you will need to build the technologies to enable those cam­paigns.

 Most important, from begin­ning to end, the CIO and the CMO must work together as partners to design, build, and test the necessary infrastructure, and to expand it, step by step, throughout your company.

 

Marketing Technology + IT: Marketing ERP?

Looking at the transition from channel silos to a more integrated marketing technology platform brings up the notion of Marketing “ERP” to provision, manage and analyze initiatives supported by marketing tech. Egbert Hendriks @ephendriks introduces this notion (whether seriously or tongue-in-cheek) in a recent exchange on Twitter with Kevin Cochrane @kevinc2003:

@ephendriks RT @niels_goossen: Why Marketing Should Run Its Own Technology -- InformationWeek http://bit.ly/dRaLSs

@phendriks: I agree- marketing is becoming a technology-driven discipline. #wcm #dam #vms #bpms integrate in a marketing "ERP"!

@kevinc2003: @ephendriks what do you see as being a marketing "ERP"? Interested in your perspective / insights

 

From the Booz & Company paper:  the diagram to the right below could suggest a path to a Marketing ERP platform. Also be sure to note the transition from channel silos on left, to a more integrated marketing technology platform on right.

 

 
 
http://www.booz.com/global/home/what_we_think/reports_and_white_papers/ic-display/47189813

 

Indeed, marketing has been increasingly technology-driven, relying on marketing management platforms, analytics (multiple), various software systems for content (WCM, WEM, DAM), BPM, VMS (vertical marketing system), social media, lead gen, mobile/multichannel management. We could also throw in MDM, CRM, data/application integration processes, other reporting.

BUT – at this point, the answer to building out highly effective marketing technology systems incorporating the best of Marketing and IT is not found in throwing more tech at the situation. Nor is creating a new software category going to help.

A better approach is the enablement and empowerment of IT and Marketing working as true collaborative partners, where upper management fully supports the elimination of silos and frees up IT to work on strategic initiatives. Software companies still have lots of people and process matters to figure out first. Innovate how the company works together as teams with common purpose. Collaboration culture can lead to and encourage innovation culture, both of which can lead to business success and competitive agility.

 

  

Related Links

I have a confession to make:  I am a Hybrid

Internal Disruption–No Longer Business As Usual

Levels of Social – and Integration – Cut Across Enterprises

Shallow Thinking Ensures Bad Business Decisions

 

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished software industry analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights. Her 20+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt   For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategic Product & Market Intelligence Services

 

 

A Review of “The New Small”

 

 

 

The subtitle for “The New Small” is: how a new breed of small businesses is harnessing the power of emerging technologies. So first it is important to understand which sorts of companies have become “The New Small” – to be able to appreciate the lessons and guidance provided by Phil Simon in his new book. The New Small are forward-moving, interested in varying degrees of business innovation, reasonably tech savvy, deeply interested in customer success with their services or products, and take the life of their businesses very personally since they are usually doing something they love.

 

The New Small companies do a better job of understanding needs and goals of their businesses – and their customers – before bringing in technology. These New Small-ers want to use tech when it makes sense for their businesses but want to find tech that can provide what they need on an out-of-the-box basis. Then the New Small spend their extra time on customizations – not for the technology – but for the experiences that their customers have with their products and services.

And so in defining the characteristics of companies that adhere to the New Small, Phil also has had the smarts to let the customer stories educate his readers on how the New Small works. Extensive detail is provided in each story to show the business context, how each company embodies the New Small, as well as what worked, what didn’t work – and very importantly, why for each. These real world examples serve to inspire other potential New Small-ers while providing the how-tos.

Phil presents in each story all the salient points to consider when looking at technology as an enabler of the “business of the business”. Risks, rewards, trade-offs are considered, and the questions to ask for decision-making.  “One size does not fit all” when it comes to tech and the New Small – Phil very wisely shows possibilities without proselytizing a sole path to success.

In some ways The New Small is also a very useful compendium of recent publications that cover biz + tech since Phil makes rich use of material from these publications, in context with the different sections of the book. The structure of the book lends itself to a workbook use – in fact I’d love to see Phil add a companion workbook to The New Small, to further aid business innovation through the smart use of tech.

 

Phil Simon’s third book has a special place in my world since I helped bring it into “being”, along with many of Phil’s friends and colleagues. Phil chose to completely own the publishing process and started that process by raising money on Kickstarter to help fund the publication. Phil also had a direct role in the design of the book, and is now busy promoting, which undoubtedly has presented many adventures in further exploring the potential of companies that want to embrace New Small-ism.

 

Related Links:

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

Selling Software Solutions to SMB Markets – Who and How To Target

SMB / Mid-Market B2B Software vendors - Findability + web presence + social: attracting the “customer as buyer”

  

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished software industry analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights. Her 20+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt   For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategic Product & Market Intelligence Services

 

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

 

For the past few years, companies have been exploring initiatives internally and externally that dance around the notion of “social” methods for engaging all of the people in an enterprise ecosystem - to bring about better results for these companies. These social methods have been described with terminology such as “enterprise 2.0”, “social computing”, “web 2.0”, “social media”, and so on. The evolution of these social methods has led now to another term: the Social Business.

I find the term “Social Business” a necessary one:  to remind companies that people are very important to their success: customers, employees, partners, suppliers, and so on. I see the term “Social Business” encompassing what companies might become to engage people - inside and out – to achieve business goals, and frankly, to stay in business. Again looking at terms in common usage: Enterprise 2.0 has been concerned with the “inside” (I call it social collaboration) and social media / web 2.0 have been concerned with the “outside” (external-facing customer engagement). A blurring between Social Inside and Social Outside has begun, partly driven by the adoption of customer-facing social media tools by internal collaboration programs.   

A lot of the conversation for the ins and outs of social these days has focused on technology and practices - and even on “naming conventions” - but People as the focus is what really makes a difference for a business to achieve success. People participating in the “Social Business” are cross-generational: there are lots of people of all ages who are savvy about collaboration, communication, social media, respecting colleagues and customers – none of these activities are the sole turf of any generation. And I’ll repeat: the focus on the value of People and trust in what they can accomplish (not just on tech and practices or processes) is at the heart of healthy companies.

Why does a renewed - and authentic - interest in People matter to a business? From the customer perspective, much has been written about customers now driving relationships with businesses where businesses listen to what customers want, like and don’t like. From the perspective of employees and partners, a great deal of what companies need comes from people:  innovation, creativity, ideas for new directions, passion, enthusiasm, customer relationships, knowledge, experience, judicious consideration, and so on. 

The Human factor always has to be distinctly considered in anything called “social” -- otherwise it’s just a buzzword shell game. First there must be authentic respect for all the people in the enterprise ecosystem; then enterprises can work on building out social practices that consider the human element – afterwards, apply technology and processes where they make sense.

  

Value of Social Business - Inside

In enterprise activities such as collaboration, knowledge management, business intelligence, business process management, adaptive case management, there is a significant role to be played by social capabilities to improve how these activities perform and provide relevance and results. Social business on the inside is also rightfully tied to enterprise collaboration and intranets that are taking on more social media type capabilities. Many software solutions are including social capabilities as methods to improve solution usage and value, as well as do a better job of incorporating the importance of the human element.

For example, Business Process Management (BPM) solutions encompass practices and tools that are evolving and including more people-oriented methods in terms of social collaboration capabilities. Forrester’s Clay Richardson comments:

Enterprise social – and social BPM by extension – is seeing healthy adoption in industries and organizations that have open cultures and have a need to innovate and share ideas quickly. Although it might seem counterintuitive, we’re seeing the greatest adoption of social BPM patterns in the healthcare and public sector – specifically in defense.

Sandy Kemsley, independent analyst and systems architect for enterprise infrastructure, also understands well the people side of business:

Tom Davenport recently wrote about the need to add structure to social in order to bring enterprise value: Transaction systems like ERP and CRM, tools for workflow and document management, and project management systems all made it more clear to people what they need to do next in their jobs. That capability has undoubtedly led to productivity gains.

But work effectiveness also demands that people share their knowledge and expertise with each other. That’s where social media comes in. It makes it easy to reach out to others for help in making a decision or taking an action. And the transfer of knowledge through social media doesn’t require a lot of difficult knowledge management work in advance.

Business Intelligence is another software solution space that is looking at building in collaborative layers throughout the BI lifecycle. The possibilities for new applications of analytics increase with collaboration. Inviting in many-to-many interactions also opens up processes to new ideas from participants. Gartner found that social venues and collaboration help to track and capture outcomes of the decisions made based on BI / analytics:

Gartner's user surveys show that improved decision making is the key driver of BI purchases. However, most BI deployments emphasize information delivery and analysis to support fact-based decision making, but fail to link BI content with the decision itself, the decision outcome, or with the related collaboration and other decision inputs. This makes it impossible to capture decision-making best practices. Solutions are emerging that tie BI with social software and collaborative tools for higher-quality, more transparent decisions that will increase the value derived from BI applications.

Promoting social on the inside draws on the rich value that lies in the many people who populate the enterprise.

  

Value of Social Business - Outside

Social media and social CRM solutions and practices are gaining interest and usage as means to work with customers throughout the customer lifecycle with the company. Social media and social CRM also play important roles for connecting the Social Business-Inside with the Social Business-Outside.

Social media is not just the latest fad in marketing; and to really work, social media is not “one-size-fits-all”.  Enterprises must understand how a go-to-market strategy that includes social media will help with objectives and obligations; then enterprises must figure out which social media to use and why. Social media commitments require an authentic personal touch, both for how customers are communicating with the enterprise, and how the enterprise responds and sustains customer conversations.

Maria Ogneva comments on the social customer and social CRM:

The ability for everyone to engage and be in alignment: Social media is not a silo, and no one department owns it. There must be a process in place by which each message gets automatically routed to the right person, classifying it by type (question, complaint or compliment), content (what it actually said), sentiment, action needed, and influence. This helps automate the triage process, which until now has been mostly manual.

Jeremiah Owyang’s work with brands employing social media to better connect and support customers is extensive and well-known. In his presentation on “Three Trends Companies Must Invest in for Social Business”, Owyang introduces the notion of Rings of Social Influence which include employees as company ambassadors for communicating with customers, as well as these recommended best practices for such employees:   

• Establish guardrails to protect both employees and the company
• Offer internal training courses, (like Intel’s certification program) and recurring training
• Offer an internal water cooler where they can talk in a safe place and plan: Yammer, Socialcast, Community Platforms

And of course companies must recognize the power of the customer voice and consider Owyang’s recommended best practices for customers active in social media:

• For better or worse, customers are already talking about you – how can you aggregate their voices closer to your brand?
• Develop an advocacy program to recognize and reward your top customers.
• Change your mindset to understanding that critical feedback is an opportunity for product and service improvements – then use to increase loyalty and WOM.

 

Social Business Equation: Inside + Outside = Eliminate silos

Many enterprises are understanding the value of social media to better engage and retain customers, to attract prospects, make sales, help customers solve problems: Social Business - Outside. But it seems to be much harder for enterprises to understand social on the inside and why that matters. Enterprises must come to understand that social on the outside won’t be substantially achieved – let alone sustained - if social on the inside isn’t working.

Social on the inside pertains to all company teams that touch customers, prospects, partners, and suppliers – basically the vast majority of the company.  The commitment, usage and value of social on the inside and the outside must be real – employees, partners, customers will quickly figure out if a company is faking it.  With healthy social practices inside a company, the support and growth of social for any interactions involving the enterprise human ecosystem – inside and out – should then be a natural and vital part of overall company strategy.

Here are the big questions:

1. Can the enterprises that need to, change quickly enough to re-humanize?
2. More importantly, will enterprises even choose to change?

This change – understanding and nurturing the value of all the people in the enterprise ecosystem – impacts how the company operates internally, how it does business externally, how the company effectively engages the human ecosystem that is truly needed for the company to survive as a successful business – inside and out.

From this change comes these rewards:  big impact on continuous innovation / relevant product development, drawing the best out of employees, collaborating with customers and partners on future direction and products, listening to all of the people in the enterprise ecosystem to draw on their experiences and expertise for building and sustaining competitive edge >> all contributing to the success and relevance of company.

The strategic decision to become the social business has to come from upper management and boards of directors – it has to be a key aspect of the enterprise – or it won’t happen in any significant or sustained fashion. When an enterprise chooses to become a “social business”, the divide between social-inside and social-outside should blur as more and more as silos within the enterprise hopefully disappear, and as bi-directional connections to customers and prospects, partners and suppliers become more authentic and more immediate.

 

                                                                <<<<<              >>>>>

Jeremiah Owyang has produced a very good starting point for depicting the Social Business Stack, expressed in terms of technology. I’ve added a “reminder” element to his diagram:

 

 
 
 

 

Related Links

Social collaboration in enterprise:The heart–and goal–of Community is “collaborating people”, not collaboration tools

Levels of Social – and Integration – Cut Across Enterprises

The Ever-Expanding Importance of Analytics–True Intelligence for Business

The Effective Intranet – Engaging the Employee as Customer

I have a confession to make: I am a Hybrid – business technology hybrids bring real value to company competitiveness

  

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished software industry analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights. Her 20+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt   For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategic Product & Market Intelligence Services

 

Content Marketing Strategy for B2B Software Vendors: Starring the ‘New’ White Paper

 

For the past several years, multiple studies by different research firms have been conducted to evaluate the most sought-out and influential content for B2B technology customers during decision-making buying cycles, and every time, in every study, the #1 preferred content is the White Paper.

The white paper is the #1 most influential piece of collateral that technology purchasers consult when making or influencing a buying decision for their company, according to a recent survey by Eccolo Media

However, many B2B software vendors still are missing the boat with their use of white papers and have not employed them in ways to engage potential buyers, let alone convert them to customers.

  

In The Beginning…

Technology white papers find their origins in government briefs that were called white books, alluding to the plain white binding that was used. With the transformation to the technology white paper, experts, lead architects, systems designers used these documents to provide authoritative discussions of key ideas or technologies to show thought leadership and future direction. The classic white paper was very technical and dissertation-like, rich with in-depth details and research results.

Then something happened to white papers when many software companies began to generate them as “product collateral”. White papers were hijacked by many product marketing and marketing groups to directly promote products. Content became thinly veiled product brochures extolling the virtues of the software offerings, highlighting information favorable to the vendor. White papers became just another item in the checklist of collateral to generate for a product launch. Little strategic thinking or advance planning went into creating white papers, including the recruitment of a top tech professional to write the white paper. Well, guess what: software solution buyers do not like that kind of white paper.

 When asked what most disappointed in a white paper, poor writing ranked number one.

 One surprise in the findings – the respondents said they're more disappointed when a white paper doesn't contain enough technical information rather than when a paper contains too much.

 

 What Potential Buyers Want In Effective White Papers

Quality Quality Quality

Customers continue to call out high quality writing with accurate and useful content as top values for the white papers that they want to read and use. They want plenty of details (tech / business), which means content has to be: tight, clear, compelling, authentic.

The survey also found that the quality of report writing gets noticed. Some 86% of respondents felt that high-quality writing was at least moderately influential and 51% ranked good writing as either very or extremely influential. By contrast, poor quality writing was the most frequent reason respondents gave for decreasing the influence of a white paper.

 

Less Time to Consume Content

A lot of great content is constantly published on the web, due largely to constant brisk evolution of business needs and corresponding software solutions. Customers would like to consume a large variety of content, so they prefer shorter lengths for white papers. Shorter white papers also allow vendors to generate a constant flow of new content that also keeps pace with business and tech changes. According to most of the studies cited in this article, the ideal length of a white paper is 4-8 pages. (Tech Marketing Best Practices Research Series on white papers states that 86% of tech buyers want white papers under 10 pages.)

 

Buyers are proactive in the use of white papers:

How to Maximize the Use of White Papers in Your B2B Marketing and Sales Process, released by InformationWeek in February 2009. Its survey of 542 professional buyers found that 93% of IT buyers pass along up to half of the white papers they read/download, and that 54% of those surveyed contacted a vendor for more information after reading a white paper.

 

No Registration Please

When marketing groups co-opted the white paper another marketing staple was added: requiring buyer registration to be able to download the white paper. There is a strong buyer sentiment that vendor websites should not require any information from the buyer for any content downloads.  After all, the sales engagement is buyer-driven, with the buyer deciding when and if next steps will be taken.

A recent survey done by Spiceworks (SMB IT management resource site) addressed the issue of having to register for white papers:

We also found a lot of people – more than 75% – DON'T sign up for papers requiring registration, which means the vendor is missing the opportunity to share and disseminate their knowledge.

         How many (vendors) stopped requiring registration as the result of your survey?

A handful so far. The results are pretty staggering. When you remove the "registration wall," downloads go way up. One white paper that was offered without registration was downloaded 500 times in three days!

  

White Papers and Content Marketing Strategies

Potential buyers visit B2B corporate websites with the intent of finding all kinds of information that will help with purchase decisions. Buyers also look for vendor information on other web venues. It is critical for any vendors who see web presence as a key to success to build a strategy for content marketing. A content marketing strategy for B2B software vendors should focus on providing relevant, compelling, and frequently updated information for target markets and customers/buyers. A high quality white paper is a significant business asset for content marketing: quality content holds its value for reusability, engagement, impact, and vendor credibility.

Adam Needles: Content marketing is the architecture behind information exchanged with the buyer before we can get them to ’sales ready’; it is the rationalization of what content that our prospective buyers need at various stages of the buying cycle and via what media and channels; and it is integral to the nurturing process.  Content thus has moved from tactical to strategic.

 

Many B2B software vendors could benefit greatly from building a content marketing strategy around white papers. Don’t just produce single white papers in a reactive fashion, as a product launch checklist item done in a hurry. Plan, create and publish excellent white papers well in advance of any product launches.  B2B software vendors should be publishing white papers with high frequency (since customers want shorter white papers): set the stage for what your company does now and will do in future. Show authentic thought leadership, clear understanding of various customer needs and real problem-solving.

Publishing sets of “companion” white papers is a good idea for vendors targeting buyers with different perspectives such as business and tech buyers, and biz-tech composites. Some white papers can be created to bridge the gap between business and tech, to encourage collaborative definition of needs and problem-solving. Series of white papers that break down a complex topic can be an interesting approach as well. These approaches will show vendor commitment to helping customers understand current technology trends as well as provide guidance for solving problems or for becoming more competitive.

Beyond publishing great white papers is the opportunity for vendors to engage customers in conversations through social media, wherever customers participate. There already is a social aspect to downloaded white papers – customers have a high rate of sharing white papers. Tap into social media for interactive conversations with potential buyers and industry writers. On download pages include links to communities and forums to encourage discussion. Schedule Tweetjams for topics covered in white papers. Comment on blogs that address the topics of vendor white papers, not to directly promote the white paper, but to add to the brainstorm and show command of the topic.

 

Value of white papers for B2B software vendors:

 
 

   

The Right Industry Professional to Create White Papers for B2B Software Vendors

Keeping in mind that customers have made clear that they want high quality content with extensive tech details, it would make sense to work with a software industry professional with strong tech experience, business smarts, and who can articulate complex ideas clearly and authentically. This would be a professional who has worked with customers, understands both business and tech, has the ability to hold the interest of these readers. And of course, this professional has to be a really good writer.

White papers will benefit from a professional who has decent smarts for several software solution categories and who has good hands-on experience on the tech side of software. The business-technology professional should contribute rich insight, produce creative content and original thinking, see unexpected connections and future trends. Direct customer experience enhances an understanding of how tech will help customer competitiveness, and will enable writing from the customer POV.

Another very useful attribute of the right professional would be one who is inter-connected to individuals throughout the software industry: analysts, practitioners, consultants, writers, vendors. A professional who is in constant conversations with other industry SMEs will be up-to-date on key topics and trends, and will have resources at hand for research and confirmation. Quality white papers will result if the professional regularly writes software industry-related articles and blog posts, participates in new product briefings from various vendors and start-ups, and continually monitors several software solution spaces. A business-technology professional who is well-connected in social media can also provide guidance to vendors for content marketing strategies that target white papers and social media.

 

The ‘New’ White Paper:

• Reflecting studies cited: high quality and accurate content, plenty of deep details (tech / business), 8 pages or less which engenders content that is tight, engaging, well-written, inspiring
• Often written from the customer POV, using customer language
• Covers trends that matter: new solution segments – transitions of solutions
• Real takeaways that benefit customers whether they buy the vendor solution or not - vendor is associated with insight to solving problem, doing things in new way that is useful
• Inform, educate at sophisticated level to provide real depth
• Create companion white papers when different customer roles come into play for the topic (business, tech, hybrid/composite)
• Passion in the treatment: blogging has shown that writing about software solutions is more engaging if the writer inserts personality into the work – apply this to white papers when appropriate
• Provoke thought about the solution space: new thinking for addressing needs; provoke desire to find out more;  provoke a conversation that will lead back to the vendor
• Look into employing variety of buyer scenarios to connect customers to relevance of topic
• Infographics, tech details, guidelines, suggested reading, links to other resources (not necessarily on vendor site) – all add to value in buyer eyes
• Format for readability, flow, quick-scanning, engagement
• Publish on the distributed web – not just on corporate site but share on sites frequented by buyers
• Stir the pot: encourage social media conversations through blogs, Twitter, forums, communities, Facebook; also actively contribute comments on relevant blogs
• Not self-serving brochure-ware solely touting vendor offering – but can address issues that matter to buyers that generally could be solved with vendor’s offering

 

Related Links

SMB / Mid-Market B2B Software vendors - Findability + web presence + social: attracting the “customer as buyer”

I have a confession to make: I am a Hybrid

Goodbye Corporate Website – Hello Web Presence Management Framework?

 

  

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished software industry analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights. Her 20+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt   For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategic Product & Market Intelligence Services

 

Time Travel Required: Finding WEM in the 2010 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management

 

A few days ago while reading through various articles about the future of websites and web presence, I came across a post by Thomas Baekdal that started off with a look back to the beginnings of web design:

 Back in 1998 designing for the internet was all about 3 things:

Design for the desktop, where the vast majority was using 800x600, with their browser maximized.

Design a website, a place where people could come to you. With emphasize on getting traffic and have them stick around as long as possible.

Optimize for the many search engines, because that was the primary way people would get to you.

But if we fast-forward to today, none of these really matters anymore. You still need them, but they are no longer the best things to do.

  

The reference to 1998 immediately brought to mind the recent Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management: while the MQ does cover concepts newer than Baekdal’s 1998 list, the basic approach for this MQ is very 1998: it’s déjà vu all over again…

Then I recalled this passage in Jon Marks' post on the 2010 MQ:

Most of these little yellow dots haven’t drifted very far in a year – the report is pretty similar despite the M&A activity that has kept us bloggers busy. So pretty much a repeat of last year.

If I were a police officer, I would be repeating:  Move along, nothing to see here. No offense to most of the vendors in the benchmark, but this MQ does nothing to excite us about the future of websites / WEM / web presence nor does it do much to stimulate buyer interests for finding the right-fit solutions for business needs.  

  

Redux: Moving Beyond WCM - Web Experience Management Software Solutions and Markets

 So I decided to take a look at an article I wrote almost a year ago about understanding WEM (web experience management) markets and solutions: the article includes a reference to the 2009 Gartner MQ for WCM. I wanted to see how many of my reactions to the 2009 MQ would now be different >> answer: none. Which sadly means that not much has changed with this new 2010 Gartner benchmark for providing value to vendors and buyers: 

When it comes to how to select the best-fit Web Content Management (WCM) software, a great deal of confusion continues to haunt vendors and customers alike.  Industry analysts have done little to make this any easier by perpetuating these mistakes:

• Frequently lumping together disparate offerings that target clearly separate customer segments and customer needs
• Failing to segment WCM offerings into solution categories, such as:  Web Experience Management (WEM) for Enterprise, basic web publishing for internal business processes/intranet, mid-market solutions for e-commerce, and so on
• Persisting with the pointless notion that WCM is a functional subset of Enterprise Content Management (ECM), especially in light of the speciousness of the ECM platform; such a notion is even more off-target when considering WEM solutions
• While understanding that WEM solutions are directly tied to interactive/digital marketing initiatives, analyst reports and benchmarks fail to use this understanding as an essential tenet of such reports

  

Looking for WEM?

Web Experience Management has come together as a segment of WCM software solutions and reflects current directions for websites and web presence for certain companies and organizations:

It has been mainly customers who have helped to propel the WCM industry into providing the sorts of capabilities that are really needed for external-facing websites that are central to strategic business objectives.  So a significant segment of the overall WCM market has evolved into Web Experience Management (WEM), for which a much larger solution ecosystem has come together.  Most Web Experience Management platforms have little to do with basic content management or basic web publishing (à la WordPress and TypePad), and even less to do with the so-called ECM (enterprise content management) platform. 

A more complete WEM solution description includes:

• Understanding of solutions for B2B, B2C web/marketing initiatives
• Sophisticated digital / interactive marketing strategies
• External-facing web presence / multi-channel content delivery
• Website essential to corporate business strategy
• Ecosystem of ancillary tools to complete end-to-end solution for customer objectives
• Savvy use of social media, well-integrated into website and marketing plans
• Alignment with interactive/digital agencies

So a Web Experience Management solution is really a composite of several “markets”: 

• WCM solution suite, with usability both for business users and IT personnel (includes behind-the-scenes “content management”, workflow, design tools, and so on)
• Enterprise-quality portal / presentation management
• Recommendations-like technology for social search and personalization
• Web analytics / testing / content monetizing tools
• Rich media and video content management (monetizing components as appropriate)
• Social collaboration / social marketing capabilities
• Extensive integration / interoperability capabilities at several levels of the enterprise infrastructure

 

For buyers in search of WEM software solution vendors, it’s going to take some work to find them in the 2010 MQ. While the 2010 MQ dances around a number of the above capabilities, it never directly addresses WEM solutions, preferring to stick to more of a “classic” (1998?) description of WCM:

Gartner defines WCM as the process of controlling the content to be consumed over one or more online channels through the use of commercial, open-source or hosted management tools based on a core repository. We exclude products such as portals and e-commerce engines even though these technologies have overlapping functions in areas such as personalization, content management and content delivery.

 

 Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management 2010

 
Source: Gartner (August 2010)    subscription or purchase 

 Also available as pdf downloads from CoreMedia and Sitecore, as well as web “display” document on Oracle website

 

 

The Inside-Out Corporation

This particular MQ report for web content management seems to epitomize the work of a corporation more interested in its own goals, and one that is not operating from the customer POV, even though a lot of its revenue is customer-driven. And this particular MQ seems comprised of artificial parameters that only benefit a Gartner agenda. Drawing on my 1998 flashback, this benchmark also seems to be advocating “old school” decision-making processes for tech purchase decisions, focusing on IT rather than business/marketing decision-makers, and on recession scare tactics by primarily advocating big vendors to make the “safe” decision.

In a recession economy, for a company to effect growth, risks have to be taken, and business should be conducted in new ways with new technology paradigms. Companies must make tech purchases based on business goals and needs that contribute to success and competitive edge. Corporate websites and web presence are critical to the success of many businesses: to connect to potential customers wherever they are on the web; to engage buyers - whether B2C or B2B. How a company effectively uses the internet is constantly changing, so corporations need forward-looking solutions – unfortunately we aren’t finding guidance for such solutions in this Gartner MQ.

Evaluations of WEM / WCM solutions are somewhat unique in that they must consider two levels of customers: one is comprised of the buyers of the technology to build websites and manage web presence, and the other is comprised of the target customers that the original tech buyers want to attract/engage with their websites and web presence. Since WEM / WCM solutions impact two levels of buyers, we must look at the technology as a means to an end – it is the “end” that really matters and must be foremost in the minds of solution buyers. Unfortunately this Gartner MQ is not very focused on either the direct buyer of the technology or the customers that the WEM solution buyer hopes to attract.

  

Vendors Offerings Are Part of the Problem

WEM / WCM vendors also own responsibility for the failure of analyst benchmarks to provide clear guidance for buyers. Most vendors adhere to the vague domains of “WCM”, or worse, “CMS”, hedging their bets with offerings that are too horizontal to know if they truly align to the needs of buyers in search of specific WEM capabilities.  WEM is one of few truly segmented solutions in the larger mass of WCM. It’s time for vendors to shake off non-differentiated, broad offerings, to declare real solution segments and target markets (by working with specific industry scenarios and revenue segments). By doing so, vendor solutions will only get better at meeting the needs of specific markets and customers.

I’m frustrated by the continuation of terms like WCM / ECM / CMS – these vague terms just blur a “solution space” that is populated with scores of products from very basic to very complex. Lately there has been a superficial debate that WEM is yet another meaningless vendor buzzword. To the contrary, overly generalized terms like WCM and CMS are the buzzwords that have no real meaning anymore because they include everything and define nothing. WEM is an actual solution with clear purpose and defined capabilities. Whether or not a particular vendor provides an authentic WEM solution is another issue – but to assume none are providing WEM is ridiculous.

 

Back to the Future

Web presence and the various purposes of websites have changed dramatically and will continue to do so. In this MQ, Gartner seems to have overlooked the importance of distributed web presence and new approaches to marketing on the web. New solutions are evolving that are not necessarily based in “classic” WCM.

But what may be the most important factor for a lot of companies is a strong emphasis on the customer-focused web presence for the company. And this may mean that company web presence will show up on other websites, instead of on the corporate website. Additionally a WCM/WEM software platform may only be one of the components of a new management framework for all web presence (management of web content still matters but may not be tied to a specific website anymore).

Content is extremely important to a lot of web marketing plans and strategies, and content is the meat of most social sites, whether it is a conversation thread, a video, a blog post, and so on. So look for WEM solutions themselves to continue to evolve as the means of managing and delivering any kind of content for sites anywhere on the web, through any channel.

Web marketing and customer relationship strategies are changing (and improving) – companies need new solutions and practices to manage the new world. More companies have come to understand that first they must build the web marketing / presence strategy that will accomplish their goals. Then they have to figure out how to achieve the goals of the marketing strategy, which will involve preferred practices and processes, as well as technology.  With web presence evolution, marketing strategies should include orchestration of web presence via other sites, and how to integrate with conversations and content from those external sites.

 

To find significant forward-looking thinking regarding the future of web presence and websites, it may be best to look at the many talented writers and practitioners for website design and WEM solutions technology who understand the evolution taking place right now.  Many writers and practitioners for marketing technology, digital marketing and social media also contribute valuable insight for the future of web presence. Here are a few suggestions to get started:

Web Content, Website design:

A List Apart

Ian Truscott

Paul Boag

Stéphane Croisier

Aral Balkan

Aarron Walter

 

CMS Wire has been featuring many talented writers and recently added a WEM focus (in CMS Wire WEM is “web engagement management” but the capabilities and intent are the same)

 

Interactive Marketing – Social Media:

Jeremiah Owyang and Altimeter Group

Hubspot

Chris Brogan 

David Armano and Edelman Digital       

 

  

Related Articles:

Moving beyond WCM - Web Experience Management software solutions and markets

Goodbye Corporate Website – Hello Web Presence Management Framework?

The Effective Intranet – Engaging the Employee as Customer

B2B WEM / WCM Software Vendors Targeting Mid-Market customers: stay where you are!  

SMB / Mid-Market B2B Software vendors - Findability + web presence + social: attracting the “customer as buyer”

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished software industry analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights. Her 20+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt   For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Market & Competitive Intelligence Services

Disclaimer: Julie Hunt occasionally contributes articles to CMS Wire.