Empirical Rationalism and Other Oxymora
Marketing
CRM Evolution 2010 – Quick Thoughts and Takeaways (#CRMe10)
Aug 4th
I attended CRM Evolution in NYC this week. It was great to catch up with some old friends and many of the vendors I used to brief with as an analyst. It was also good to meet actual customers with actual business problems at the show (a departure from some of the other trade events I’ve been to lately). One significant change since the last time I attended a CRM-specific conference was the level of sophistication of the end users – the category has clearly matured. We are no longer talking about “what” needs to be done, or “why”, or even “how” implement and measure value — the conversations I had with end-users generally centered around really hard customer management problems (i.e. identifying and integrating “socialgraphic” and cross-site information into CRM, building out multi-purpose, multi-channel, shared service interaction centers, etc).
A few quick thoughts and key takeaways from the show:
- Everybody (yes, I do mean everybody I spoke to) is talking about “social CRM” – however, when probed there wasn’t a lot of evidence that social CRM has evolved much beyond twitter monitoring and Facebook connections in the CRM application. If customers are really going to embrace social CRM as a competitive differentiator, vendors need to take a leadership stance on demonstrating business value that can be measured with anything other than a “wow” meter. Greg Gianforte (CEO of RightNow) illustrated an interesting example of social CRM in action (paraphrasing):
If a customer has a problem with their digital camera, they are not going to wait until the next day when the call center is open – they’ll send out a tweet. [Companies need to be able to] take that tweet, open a ticket, solve the issue and send a tweet back.
- This is one use case out of thousands of possibilities. As an industry, we are still in the early stages of the social CRM platforms that are being built today will be implemented down the road. I applaud the work that is being done by the vendors and the thought leaders, but it seems to me that capabilities and thought leadership is still very much ahead of market demand.
- Where the hell is marketing? With all the talk of social CRM, it was interesting to note marketing’s conspicuous absent (both by function and role) from the CRM scene (If you look at the marketing functionality of many CRM apps, it would be easy to counter that this has always been the case). The attendees I spoke to were mostly IT and business analyst types – with some sales and contact center LOB people thrown in for good measure. There are significant challenges in integrating social into the CRM systems. One fast-fashion CxO I spoke to last month told me that the average age in his loyalty database is 25 years older than his target demographic (teenage girls 15-19) –simply put, he’s got a very active community of social influencers on Facebook, but Mom has a death grip on the loyalty card. If social CRM is going to fly, particularly in (but not exclusively to) B2C CRM, the CMO is going to need to be brought into the conversation.
- Maybe “social CRM” is the wrong paradigm? At Tuesday’s keynote, Anthony Lye from Oracle talked about Oracle’s own 50,000 seat CRM implementation. They have implemented a concept he referred to as “implicit CRM” – for example, if there is a service issue, they resolve it once and proactively notify all customers that “look alike”. Carrying this concept into sales he suggested that they integrate internal and external (public, social, etc) data to create “predicative relationships” – that is, information is derived from all available sources to determine likely sales [and presumably service and marketing] outcomes. This concept is not new – Amazon’s got their YMALs (You May Also Like) and many companies have been doing predicative analytics for years – however, this got me to thinking that maybe the conversation about “social CRM” isn’t about “social” at all. Maybe it is about using implicit data/information to drive sales, service and marketing outcomes? Social is simply a channel that creates implicit information – the source of competitive advantage (as always is in) is in analytics, workflow and business processes. Just a thought.
- New entrant into the SMB CRM market place – Jon Ferrara (founder of Goldmine) stopped by the SAP Customer Dinner on Monday night (thank you SAP for your hospitality). I must have missed it when it was announced a few months ago, but he’s founded a new company called Nimble — a new social CRM application for SMBs promising to “transform your community into business opportunity”. I am looking forward to seeing this when it comes out of beta.
I am sure there were other great takeaways from the show, but I leave that commentary to the CRM analysts. Some great quotes/quips from the Show:
“A key attribute of integration cannot be duct tape” – Greg Gianforte
Suites always win, because integration costs effectively go to zero. If you are not careful, you may have 12 clouds to deal with. – Anthony Lye (Oracle)
Trying to build for a homogeneous stack is a dead end – Brad Wilson (Microsoft CRM)
Trust is built between individuals, on behalf of a company – Brian Vellmure (Initium LLC)
Lastly, congratulations to Paul Greenberg for his induction into the CRM Hall of Fame!
How Has Marketing Evolved Over the Past Year?
Sep 2nd
The second-annual Aberdeen Group CMO Summit is next week (Sept 9 & 10) in San Francisco. In preparation for my opening remarks, I thought that it would be interesting to review my notes from last year’s event – one year and (in marketing/dog years) a lifetime ago. Below are some of my observations and key takeaways from last year’s event: More >
2009 CMO Summit Approaching Fast (Sept 9-10) – Comp Tix Available
Aug 24th
The 2009 CMO summit is coming up quickly. This was an incredible event last year and the speaker line-up indicates that we are looking at a repeat performance of last year’s success. I have a couple of passes for qualified delegates. Also, I will be in San Francisco all week if anyone is up for coffee or a drink. Drop me an email or DM (@andrew_boyd) if you are interested in either.
Speaker Lineup for CMO Summit – SFO – Sept 9-10
Jul 31st
We have an incredible line-up of speakers for our second annual Chief Marketing Officer’s summit being held in San Francisco on September 9-10: More >
The Rise of “Searchndising”
May 4th
One of my colleagues here at Aberdeen, John Lovett, is doing some interesting work on the online customer experience. He recently published on report on website search (available for free download for a limited time). I think one of the most interesting things to come out of the report was the notion of “searchandising”, or the convergence of search and merchandising capabilities. According to Lovett, more than half of leading online retailers use search as a merchandising tool and nearly two-thirds (62%) of those continuously fine tine results. The research indicates that retailers utilizing these technologies are more likely to convert browsers to buyers. However, despite the potential, many of the respondents (41%) spend very little time managing search; only 17% had dedicated staff and only a third (33%) spend more than 5 hours a week fine tuning search. This seems like a quick-win with a little time and effort.
