Being Social is human nature, even though decades of Taylorism and Business School Teaching would have us believe there is little place for this in our organizations… but we are reaching its limits because in the pursuit of efficiency  we are losing in effectiveness in understanding and helping customers in their jobs-to-be-done.

We are experiencing a Communications Revolution – what has changed is the way technology is used to communicate, to find and connect with likeminded individuals and groups regardless of distance, together with an evolution of expectations on how, when, where and why and with whom we choose to do so. As the “Social Customer” wakes up and becomes aware of the pressure he can bring to bear individually or through collective action, companies need to adapt their approach to ensure the sustainability of their business.

Customers are voicing their opinions and ideas  hrough Social Media and turning to their peers for information, feedback and support – and are also starting to expect that companies treat them as business partners rather than the subjects of a sale who are pushed through a funnel to the close of the deal. You know – like they’re human beings whose opinions and expectations are taken into consideration.

When I first started looking at social CRM a couple of years ago, I stated in my Twitter Bio that I was excited the potential of Social CRM as an organizational change agent. My level of excitement has grown ever since (although the dark cloud on the horizon is that many believe it is limited to Social Media + CRM).

Why do I believe it is exciting? Because it will generate many new data points that we can use to motivate and pilot our organizations. These data points need to be converted into actionable insights for that to happen – not onlyabout what groups of customers and prospective buyers expect in order to do business with us, but also what they expect from the whole ecosystem, including competitors.  This will require altered or new capabilities to make the organization more agile and pro-active towards their customers.  And that means moving from Fear of Change to creating Value with Customers.

Various frameworks and guidelines exist to help deal with change and which identify the success factors (such as this one by Dr Graham Hill) but here I’d like to refer to this HBR article from1995 by John P. Kotter in which he identified eight stages in the transformation process:

1. Establish a sense of urgency
2. Form a powerful guiding coalition
3. Create a vision
4. Communicate the vision
5. Empower others to act on the vision
6. Plan for and create short-term wins
7. Consolidate improvements and produce more change
8. Institutionalize new approaches

Without going into the details of each step, I believe that social CRM is ideally suited  for kick-starting the first step, which is the sense of urgency by creating awareness about customer needs and expectations – and givedata  the organization straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. This, together with an understanding of how competitors are faring with their customers can be used to motivate and really drive the organization down the path of change. It starts by creating better customer listening capabilities, which can be thru Social Media because the reach is just incredible, but more more traditional methods such as surveys and focus groups should not be neglected.  And following that a move to deeper interactions which are opportunities to learn more about the expectations of your customer segments as well as individuals in increasing detail, so that you can then better identify the capabilities you need to perform better.

In the same way as technology is giving customers the tools to make themselves heard, not only by the company but also by their peers, employees are bringing their own devices to the workplace to connect with others inside and outside of the company in order to get their work done.Whereas before the company vision would be communicated top-down through email or newsletters, the tools and methods from Enterprise 2.0 can be put to good use to promote the appropriation of the vision by employees and keep it vivid between them (and at the same give it with an extra layer of purpose for it to gain more traction…).

As a last item in this post, I’d like to mention Adaptive Case Management. The relationships with the Social Customer  is putting strain on established processes and procedures as more scenari arise in which the nature of work is becoming less predictable and wherein more agility is required within the context and experience expectation of the customer. Such flexibility and agility can be achieved by empowering Knowledge Workers to decide on and carry out tasks in line with the desired outcomes of both the customer and the company, and ACM has the potential to support this. These decisions are supported with access to other employee expertise,and  data and insights that we have gathered through digital capabilties (from our CRM systems, ERP, BI etc. which I won’t elaborate on here).

To conclude – changes in market conditions, especially concerning how new forms of communications and interaction habits are reshaping customer expectations on how they want do business with you, are putting pressure on companies to align closely with these expectations. Dissociated efforts can lead to departmental gains, but without a coordination effort the results will be sub-optimal. To fully realize the potential the organisation will have identify and work on the capabilities it needs and procede through a transformation process to meet the challenges of doing business with the Social Customer.The digital capabilities that are now available are a crucial impetus and then a support tool to drive a business transformation that aligns the company with the various jobs-to-be-done and making it a more attractive business partner to customers.

Photo credit: Salvatore Vuono

So I suggest you go thru the videos one by one, read the company reviews and presentations, take notes and then cast your vote! The voting is open from October 24 through October 31, don’t for get to vote for both your favourite Amercia’s contestant as well as your EMEA one!

The Americas

(in alphabetical order)

Assistly

Assist.ly CRM Idol 2011 Finalist Video

The URL to the video on YouTube: http://youtu.be/LB2EVYaXVxQ

Links to CRM Idol data:

Contestant page: http://www.crmidol.com/contestant/assistly

Judges Review: http://www.crmidol.com/reviews/assistly

Crowd Factory

Crowd Factory CRM Idol 2011 Finalist Video

The URL to the video on YouTube: http://youtu.be/ymbmL_qPuMc

Links to CRM Idol data:

Contestant page: http://www.crmidol.com/contestant/crowd-factory-social-marketing-suite

Judges review: http://www.crmidol.com/reviews/crowd-factory

Get Satisfaction

Get Satisfaction CRM Idol 2011 Finalist Video

The URL to the video on YouTube: http://youtu.be/PH0I9G8d2NU

Links to CRM Idol data:

Contestant page: http://www.crmidol.com/contestant/get-satisfaction

Judges Review:http://www.crmidol.com/reviews/get-satisfaction

Stone Cobra

Stone Cobra CRM Idol 2011 Finalist Video

The URL to the video on YouTube: http://youtu.be/eLGncjiWTFk

Links to CRM Idol data:

Contestant page: http://www.crmidol.com/contestant/stone-cobra%E2%80%99s-apps-service-cloud%E2%84%A2

Judges Review: http://www.crmidol.com/reviews/stone-cobra

EMEA

(in alphabetical order)

BPMonline

BPMonline CRM Idol 2011 Finalist Video

The URL to the video on YouTube: http://youtu.be/klFdNo0RGvM

Links to CRM Idol data:

Contestant page: http://www.crmidol.com/contestant/bpmonline-crm

Judges Review:http://www.crmidol.com/reviews/bpmonline-crm

Workbooks.com

Workbooks.com CRM Idol 2011 Finalist Video

The URL to the video on YouTube: http://youtu.be/aoDBKfEBCjg

Links to CRM Idol data:

Contestant page:http://www.crmidol.com/contestant/workbooks-crm-edition

Judges Review: http://www.crmidol.com/reviews/workbookscom

Zestia (Capsule CRM)

Zestia (Capsule CRM) CRM Idol 2011 Finalist Video

The URL to the video on YouTube: http://youtu.be/DgX9hK0Tr78

Links to CRM Idol data:

Contestant page:http://www.crmidol.com/contestant/capsule

Judges Review: http://www.crmidol.com/reviews/zestia

Vote Here!!

CLICK HERE TO VOTE FOR YOUR FAVORITE CRM IDOL FINALISTS.

Remember one for the Americas and one for EMEA.

 Implementing a new CRM, or other business system – even one with similar functionality to one it is replacing – is fraught with dangers. Experience suggests that without pro-actively managing change, a significant number of CRM system projects fail to deliver the expected benefits and in a significant number of cases, are abandoned within only a few months of going live.
Managing change is not the same as just implementing the new system, training staff how to use it, telling staff all about it and then expecting change to occur. That path almost invariably leads to failure. As the old change management saying goes:

Old Organization + New Technology = Expensive Old Organization.

Effective change management is a structured process that changes how individuals staff do their work, how teams work together to do their work, how management supports the change over the longer-term and how the organization as a whole benefits from emerging changes.
The Principles of Effective Change

Over the years, I have identified six key principles that drive effective change:

• What’s In It For Me?

The prime motivator for individuals to change is ‘what’s in it for me?’. Individual staff must benefit from the change in ways that are important to them. That may mean financial reward, but it is much more likely to mean other non-financial rewards. Just having better tools to do the job can be a surprising motivator. Effective change matches the right rewards to individual staff.

• Involve & Engage Staff

People do not resist change per se, but they do resist being changed by others. If undue resistance is to be avoided staff whose work will be affected by the changes should be involved as much as possible in its redesign. And as front-line staff are usually those with the best understanding of what will work and what won’t, getting them involved improves the chances that the change programme will work too.

• Work Networks Work

Individuals have to see the benefits of the change before they will accept it. But so do their work colleagues. An individual member of staff who sees the benefits of a change, surrounded by a team that doesn’t, will quickly abandon the change. In addition to individuals, an effective program of change should address how work teams and the organisational social networks in which they operate change too.

• Lead From the Front

Change is difficult. If individuals and work teams are to turn the change into a new way of working and then into business-as-usual, they will need to practice their new knowledge and skills. As individuals start to apply what they have learned back in the workplace, they will need help from colleagues, experts and management to develop their experience with the new work. This requires permission from senior management to be less effective at the new work until they master its details. Senior management must be seen to not only talk the new way of working, but also to live it by supporting stuff during the change process too.

• Stay the Course

Many otherwise effective programs of change fail at the last minute. The change is effectively implemented then management moves onto the next big thing. Months later, staff have reverted to the old ways of working, the new system has been abandoned and nothing of the change is left. If change is to stick, it requires long-term support by management, for anything up to 18-36 months after the change has been implemented.

• Don’t Command Change, Let it Emerge

Although a program of change can be planned down to the last detail, that is not how change actually happens. As the old military saying goes,

no plan survives first contact with the enemy.

Change cannot be commanded from above. Instead, it emerges from all the interactions of individual staff, their work team colleagues, their direct managers and others. Effective managers of change are like orchestra conductors; they direct the program of change in ways that the right changes emerge.

These principles apply to any process of change, not just to CRM systems-driven change. Making change happen and making change stick requires a structured, phased  approach to change management.
The Five Phases of Managed Change

The approach to change that I have found works best is based upon five sequential phases:

• Phase 1: Assess Change Capability

This phase looks at the background to the change, assesses the ability of staff to make the required change and identifies the key people who need to become involved as change agents in driving the change. It provides a solid fact-base upon which to build all the subsequent phases.

• Phase 2: Prepare for Change

This phase builds the foundation for the rest of the change programme. It recruits the change team and mentors from within the business and prepares them for their roles leading the change programme. It also plans and launches the first 100-day project of the programme. A longer programme might have a number of overlapping 100-day projects. By breaking longer programmes into a series of 100-day projects the programme can get started quicker, new capabilities can be built earlier and more benefits can be harvested, all of which help the case for change.

• Phase 3: Build Momentum for Change

This phase continues the work started in the Prepare for Change phase. Change is not something that is easy to plan with any security a long time in advance. The changes to be promoted during each overlapping 100-day project will be planned in detail and implemented, depending upon what has already been done previously, the actual situation and the change goals. Effective change is as much about sensing emerging opportunities to drive change and responding to them, as it is about planning change.

• Phase 4: Go Live

This phase is very short. It celebrates the hard work done so far in successfully taking the CRM or other system live. Celebrating success is important for all those who have worked hard to make it happen. It also marks the boundary between the implementation of the system and the upheaval that causes, and the extended period of post-go live support as the new way of working is turned into daily business.

• Phase 5: Maintain the Change

This phase is critical if the change is to become embedded as business-as-usual. It hands over responsibility for change to the change team and change agents. It also supports them as they take on responsibility for consolidating the change. The phase lasts as long as is required to embed the changes in the organization. It may be anything from 18-36 months after the system has been implemented until the changes are truly embedded in daily business.

Managing effective change is difficult, but not as difficult as its reputation deserves. With the principles and practical phases outlines here you should look at your next big change programme in a different light. Use the principles to look at how your manage change. And the practical phases to plan each step on the change journey. Good luck.
Graham Hill
Customer-centric Innovator
@grahamhill

Dr Graham Hill:  A couple of years back I wrote a speculative blog post at CustomerThink entitled ‘How Customer Co-Creation is the Future of Business’. In many ways my prediction was right, Customer Co-Creation IS the future of business, but not exactly in the way I had imagined.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has been around for over 20 years. It is built around using customer analytics to improve marketing, sales and service touchpoints. And it works very well. Or at least it does for companies. But it doesn’t offer much of any value to their customers. And as a result, its effectiveness has started to fall.

Customer Experience Management (CExM) was created about 10 years ago as an antidote to the blatant one-sidedness of CRM. It still uses the same customer analytics, but it applies the insights generated to improve all the touchpoints in the end-to-end customer experience. It is still mostly about companies’ branded experiences, but it does offer more value to customers than CRM.

Both CRM and CExM are designed around passive customers who consume whatever the company offers them. That might work for more traditional customers, but it doesn’t work for today’s informed, empowered, social customer. Social customers want to be involved in co-creating their own experiences. Indeed, they expect companies to actively engage with them during the design, delivery and consumption of the experiences. The social customer knows exactly what they want. Their friends told them so. Woe betides any company that treats them as passive consumers.

Just as CExM was created as an antidote to CRM’s one-sidedness, so Customer Co-Creation was created as an antidote to CRM and CExM’s lack of engagement with customers. In it’s simplest form, it actively engages with customer during the Co-Design of products. In co-design, customers typically contribute product ideas, vote on the best ones and may even be involved in reviewing prototypes.

Companies as diverse as Lego, Ford and Best Buy have used crowdsourcing to co-design new products, marketing communications and even customer service.
Having involved customers in the co-design of products, the next step is involving them in their Co-Production. In co-production, customers take over the production, delivery and installation activities of the company. It’s a bit like self-service, only on a much larger scale. This has wide-appeal to both companies and governments. Although IKEA does it’s own product design, it expects customers to transport them home, and build them from the components provided. And governments in the UK, Germany and the Netherlands are actively engaging citizens in co-producing their own services.

Involving customers in co-design and co-production is a great start, but they both suffer from the same fundamental problems as CRM and CExM. Despite the active involvement of customers, they are still mostly about the company. The customer may receive some personal satisfaction in seeing their co-designed idea implemented, but it is the company that gets all the profit from incremental sales. And the customer may even get a marginally lower price for building their own furniture, but it is the company that reaps all the savings from not having to manufacture and distribute finished products.

If co-design and co-production are just post-modern equivalents of CRM and CExM, created to take advantage of social customers, is that all there is to co-creation? Fortunately there is more. Much more!

Value Co-Creation takes a radically different approach to co-creation. Rather than just involving customers in co-designing or co-producing products for the company, value co-creation creates a platform over which customers and companies can co-create whatever they value together. By understanding who their customers are, what they value and how they interact with the company to get it, the company can create a platform which brings together all the right resources, at the right time, so that customers can co-create more value from the interactions. The company bears the cost of providing the platform, but it creates much more value from increased sales revenues, reduced service costs, increased loyalty of customers and ultimately, increased referrals of new customers.

A good example is British Airways’ introduction of check-in kiosks at Heathrow in the 1980s. When they were first introduced, customers struggled with them. They would try them out, find them too complicated and abandon them for the check-in queue. The skills gap was just too great. So British Airways placed check-in staff next to the kiosks to show customers how to use them. Armed with this new skill, the customer could quickly check-in, avoiding the long queues and leaving them with more time to relax before their flight.
Although British Airways had to initially provide additional staff, they quickly paid for themselves in smaller check-in queues, fewer check-in staff, higher customer loyalty and higher retail sales once customers had gone airside.

By designing a platform-based business model to create more value for customers, a company can create even more value for itself. And it can use the platform to attract other partners too. Companies like Amazon, EBay and Apple have all gone to great lengths to understand who their customers are, what they value, and which interactions they use to get it, and have developed multi-sided platforms to allow customer to create more value for themselves. Their millions of satisfied customers have attracted thousands of partners to their platforms, only serving to attract yet more customers.

Customer co-creation IS the future of business. But not exactly in the way I had originally imagined. Co-design and co-production are currently much in-vogue, but they are just stepping-stones on the way towards platform-based value co-creation. As the old saying goes, “Be careful what you wish for. You might get it!”.

Graham Hill

Customer-centric Innovator

@grahamhill

During the last weekend of June, about four weeks ago, my home ADSL modem started dropping the connection intermittently. The following day I called into my ISP’s (Free Telecom) Customer Support, some basic questions were asked and an appointment was made for a technician to come by and look at the issue. Three weeks later a technician came to the house, did a couple of tests and said the modem was faulty and would be replaced the next week.

This sounds like a perfect Customer Service scenario, right? So I should be a satisfied customer, right?

Well,.. no actually.

On first contact I felt I was being taken for a fool, with questions like ‘did you check that the modem was plugged in correctly?’. I tried to provide auxiliary information such as “sudden drops in the upstream noise margin” which should have given the Customer Service Representative a better idea as to what was the issue, but the CSR gave me the impression that that was way over her head.

Because I had three weeks to wait, I had time to do some research such as in online communities using my Smartphone. I was also able to see the service ticket on the ISP’s support site, but other than read that the ticket had been opened, there was no way to add my own information and or feedback. When the technician finally did come, he confirmed what I suspected and I basically felt that that the last three weeks had been wasted. A week later, no replacement, and the web interface shows that the ticket had been closed. I called the Hotline who told me that the replacement request was ‘still being processed’, and when I requested they help me set up me set up an alternative modem, they were unable to help – “What’s RFC 1483 Routed VC MUX?” the CSR asked me… I am still waiting, one month after the initial call. If only I could have checked up on what was going on and provided input from what I had found…frustrations galore!

So what in their eyes is good Customer Service by the book, to me is a poor customer experience in need of some serious service recovery! A cold call I got yesterday from another ISP is starting to look more and enticing – I’ve been with my ISP for the last 13 years so why do they make it so difficult to stay loyal to them?…

This frustration has given me the food for thought for this post. Customer Service and Contact Centers are organized to contain costs – which basically means calls are kept as short as possible with low to moderately skilled staff, often in low wage countries. It also means that the service provided assumes a the lowest common denominator of what the company thinks its customers are capable of and then provides scripts or workflows to guide both the customer and the agent along the path to resolution. The customer is happy because the issue is resolved, the agent is happy because she can move on to the next call and meet her objectives, and the company is happy because it efficiently limited the impact of providing service to the customer (cost).

So what could we be doing to achieve this state. Below are some of my thoughts:

Identification of skill level Just like in Video Games, there should be an option to choose your level, such as “Beginner”, “Intermediate”, “Advanced”, or even “Insane!” so that you get a different interaction and resolution path based on your capabilities. The risk here  is that self-assessment may be erroneous. Another approach would be to use interaction history to gain a better estimate, or use social media monitoring to construct a profile of the customer on which to base the estimate.

Alternative scripts per identified capability segment Customer service scripts are great tools to guide the agent when helping the customer, but at the same time these scripts are generic, aimed at the resolving common issues. The chances are that the customer is more savvy than the script has accounted for, and would prefer to go straight into the ‘meat of the issue’ because they have already done the basic steps, searched the internet and consulted their peers before reaching out to support. Here as well, it could be interesting to not only monitor socila media, but actually to track what a particular customer has been browsing on your support site.

Agent matching Rather assign an agent to a customer service rep based on whoever is available in a pool, thru identification such as by their telephone number, twitter handle or whatever ID the customer prefers to use to reach out and previous interaction history, we can do enhanced matching based on agent segmentation (personality type, skill level) so as to facilitate the next interaction and to align the customer capabilities with the agent ones.

Agile processes and transparency Being able to adapt to the context as information is discovered will be key to improving the outcome, as well as potentially reduce the time necessary for reaching a resolution. If the resolution path requires that it takes longer than a phone call or an email to sort it all out, it may make sense to include the customer directly in the collaboration process by letting them contribute their insight, findings and ideas thru for example an update form in a webpage, or a dial-in interface that transcribes their input from speech to text and adds it to the case. Accountability to reach an outcome within limits set by an SLA should not only be to a Line Manager, but also to the customer, with the possibility for her to request an escalation in case of non-adherence. Escalation can effectively extend the grace period during which the customer is willing to tolerate a delay in issue resolution. When things really go awry and there is no sight of resolution, the customer is dissatisfied and the company risks losing her for good.

These are just some ideas of how a customer capabilities could be integrated into Customer Support and the list is not exhaustive. The idea behind it is that service could be improved, costs reduced and positively impact the customer experience at the same time. Please Share your thoughts in the comments below, I am very keen on hearing them!

Currently we’re in a phase where we are trying to adapt to this new paradigm, and most notably we are looking at how IT tools can help us adapt to improve the way we interact with out collegues, supplier, partners and yes, our customers(!) in order to optimize business outcomes. Pioneers such as Yammer, Socialcast and Newsgator have found inspiration in the user-friendly interfaces of Facebook and then Twitter and are helping to move the needle from document-centric organisation towards more people-centric. Activity Streams for example are rapidly finding their place in business by facilitating sharing and the exchange of information and ideas. As the next step in the evolution, vendors are now adding features such as letting applications send out messages into these streams, such as a notification that a payment has been processed or from a machine needs servicing.
With it come a host of related technologies deemed necessary to make them fit for working behind the firewall, such as integration with Enterprise Directories, security layering and encryption of sensitive data.

Social Messaging is helping change the way we work, enabling new ways of collaboration, but at the same time it is adding a lot of overhead rather than simplifying communication and facilitating ‘serendipity’. Messages have certainly become shorter and more effective (though it does take quite a bit of skill to decypher the 140 character messages sometimes), but I believe that as these platform gain in popularity, there is a real risk of information overload. Just think back to the Will & Kate Royal Wedding – at one moment there were over 4,000 tweets per second flying around the internet. It is impossible for anyone to follow these snippets of information, other than get a general idea thru engines such as Radian 6 or Attensity that pull out trends and sentiments.

Now I am not saying that this comparable to what happens within businesses (not quite yet…), but we’re slowly displacing the email overload issue to social event messaging overload, whilst losing the advantage of email – namely its asynchronous nature – in the process. You could go for a coffee break or a morning management meeting and miss out on information of capital importance to your business. Your Desktop’s Home Screen or your Mobile Device will show you the events in real time, but what happens when there are so many events that they scroll away and out of sight (which means out of mind…)? This issue will only worsen when you bear in mind that adoption of social messaging is not ubiquitous yet. Currently general uptake is still relatively limited, so imagine what will happen when the trickle of events becomes a river…

Moreover, what will happen when we start collaborating with external parties through your Enterprise Social Messaging system? What will happen when Customers add information to your online community platform or request assistance through a tweet or a Facebook message or whatever Social Messaging system we’ll have in the future? Or what to do with Fedex update about delivery of the goods that were ordered? Or how to manage information collected through an automated interactive scheduler to confirm when you’ll most likely be home to receive the goods? How do you manage security (who can do what, when where and how) and keep track of the context (why)?

Various Knowledge Management strategies have seen the light – again borrowed from the consumer space – such as filtering thru content tagging (adding meta data, hashtagging…), subscriptions to who and what you follow (publish/subscribe model), or group-based selection. What I believe will be he next ‘level up’ will be ‘intelligent’ filtering thru message analysis that uses social graphs, expertise tracking, and context information to rank and prioritize what is shown to whom and how, what is pushed to an asynchronous stream and what is left to gently fade into the flow, and what is flagged as requiring follow-up actions if no resultant activity is detected. Gamification has the potential to play a role here to ensure that we do capture the interactions and the expertise of the employees and construct an effective representation of the social networks that is beneficial to our Knowledge Workers. Rather than have gamification only promote and drive certain desired behaviours, analytics can feed itself on that data to make suggestions regarding who should be collaborating and within which context in order to increase the likelihood of a successful outcome.

What is currently lacking from my point of view in the tools currently proposed by Enterprise Software Vendors is the ability to get the right message to the right person(s) at the right time, whilst at the same time providing them with sufficient context to allow them to make informed decisions. Hence my fondness of Adaptive Case Management and its potential to be used as a collaboration framework and system of record for context whilst at the same time laying a foundation for the Quantum model that will build on the strengths of Knowledge Workers.

ACM is – among other things – used as the glue to maintain the ‘paper trail’ so as to guarantee visibility, traceability and accountability whilst leaving sufficient flexibility to for people to deal with unpredictable and unforeseen events. I believe it also has great potential to incorporate Social Messaging events as part of this ‘paper trail’ and thus provide an elaborate context for more effective collaboration which can then serve as the basis for expertise discovery and context for gamification. The key issue to solve how to route and associate these Social Messages efficiently with the right context – which is where the aforementioned tagging and analytics can play their part.

Social Messaging is currently still very much in its infancy in terms of it being used in a business, because there is no real framework yet that allows it to remain effective as the volume increases. Context-enhanced social messaging, with the possibility to drill down and expand on information and to connect with people on-demand who have the right skillset will be the next hurdle to overcome to retain collaboration effectiveness.

In Paris we were graced with the presence of Marc Benioff – a gifted and convincing public speaker who delivered a well-constructed presentation – let down only by his apparent need to jab his rivals. Marc took us through not only the rapid growth of Salesforce, but also through the entire evolution of business computing. The way it was presented that Cloud Computing is the next level up from mainframe, client/server, personal computing, and the internet. Although I would agree that Cloud Computing has disrupted the way we organize IT by turning it into a utility, changing it from a CapEx to an OpEx that potentially moves the deployment decision from the CIO to the Line of Business – I would challenge that the platform features by themselves correspond with the term ‘disruptive innovation’.

Let me elaborate on that. What we have seen is that the delivery mode may have changed, but what the user sees is still the same contact database and Sales funnel designed primarily to efficiently help management keep tabs on sales activity rather than make the Salesperson more effective. Although tools have been provided to customize the interface (or DIY it thru Force.com), there is little room for example to take into account approaches more aligned with customer buying cycles, such as the McKinsey Consumer Decision Journey. You may counter that argument by saying that the Sales Funnel is a method that has proven to be effective in the past – but then again, how would you know whether you’re not losing a lot of business opportunities because you interacted with the prospect at the wrong time? With the Sales funnel, these would fall by the wayside, with the tacit hope that your Marketing or Inside Sales team will pick them up again when they call back in 3-6 months without any nurturing…Furthermore, if all of your competitors are using the same approach, there is no competitive edge to be gained as this effectively levelling the playing field.

This is not something that is specific to Salesforce however: I’d say that CRM Vendors offer systems that in 95% of the cases all have the exact same features. And as such I believe this is where I think the Radian 6 acquisition makes the most sense, beyond just the social media engagement toolset.

It is not just the listening capabilities of the platform, but also the mindset of this dynamic company from New Brunswick (Canada) that can help bring about a new conciousness about other approaches to CRM systems that better cater to the expectations of the Social Customer . This is where the real disruptive innovation can be had in my opinion. As we come to better understand the relationship between customer activity (not only on social media, but also on other channels such as the phone with a CSR, at events, thru geolocation clustering – anywhere that we can get extra datapoints) and their buying and advocacy behaviour, we’ll need to the flexibility and agility to be able to adapt our systems. And Radian 6 is in a position to provide many more datapoints than Salesforce has ever had access to, so all is needed now is some Sensemaking. Easy peasy!

Oversimplification aside, one caveat that I’d like to highlight is that as were still very much in the early days of discovering how monitoring social media activity can improve business, and furthermore there is still very little awareness as to the capabilities of the various listening and monitoring platforms. Radian 6 does a very good job of scraping the various blogs, twitter streams and so on and putting this in reports, but it should not be forgotten that at best, you’ll get some trends that can be used to steer your messaging in quasi real time – or with a bit of luck discover some hitherto hidden needs. Salesforce on the other hand is about managing data about individual customers – which you can then group into segments with similar characteristics (demographics etc.) so as to optimize your marketing spend for example.

Just to make the distinction more clear, there is a gap between trending “customers” and getting specific social activity about an individual customer to get their context, kind of like the difference between having market intelligence versus having customer intelligence. Radian 6 has added features such as the Engagement Console which allows you to apply rules-based filters to extract events that require attention, as well as mechanisms to assign a reaction workflow to the Response Team, or create tickets in Salesforce’s Service Cloud (whether third-party CRM Systems will continue to be supported remains to be seen…).

An interesting development that was presented at the Radian 6 User Conference in this light is the Insights platform. Even before the announcement of the acquisition, they were working to become a pluggable platform, allowing you to add Best-of-Breed second-pass datacrunchers such as Clarabridge for Sentiment and Text Analysis, or Klout to measure influence and thus potential for Advocacy (or nuisance) in order to figure out some level of prioritization – even though I have my reservations about the validity of the algorithms used…

The Insights platform is where Radian 6 and Salesforce will come together – where the linking and analysis will take place to enrich customer profiles with insights derived from social media engagement as well as from other channels in order to better understand customer contexts and provide adequate responses in line with customer expectations.The missing piece of the puzzle (which I talked about in this presentation I gave at the Social CRM 2011 London event) is collaboration to actually optimize how how we organize in order to meet customer expectations and needs. Furthermore, Insights is an essential part of the package as pouring an unfiltered firehose of social media events into Chatter could inundate it with a lot of static, and lead to it becoming impossible to use effectively.

The question that remains for me is the pricing model. Radian 6 has announced it will continue to function as an independent company, but I am still in the dark as to whether clients will be obliged to go through for example Force.com to get access to the data – and thus need to pay access to the intermediate platform as well. If anybody can shed some light on this, please do so in the comments below!

Too many customer experiences (CEx) are created just for the benefit of companies. Customer are either a target or an afterthought. Many customer experience practitioners don’t see the 900lb Gorilla in the room; the most important touchpoints are not about marketing, sales or service, but about the weeks, months, even years of product usage. Companies need to re-orient the customer experience around what customers’ value, the touchpoints they use to create it and how the company can benefit from co-creating more value together with customers. Doing this opens up new opportunities to earn revenues long after the point of sale.

We tend to see the world in terms of who we are and what we do. It’s a cognitive bias colloqially known as Maslow’s Hammer. So advertising people, who obsess about Brands, talk about the customer experience (CEx) in terms of creating a branded experience. And internet people, who obsess about ecommerce, talk about the CEx in terms of creating a better on-line experience. And CRM people, who obsess about marketing, sales and service, talk about CEx in terms of, yes, you’ve guessed it, more efficient and effective, sales and service.

These are all inside-out versions of CEx. They are only about companies, their consultants and the vendors who service them both. They are NOT about customers. They all pay lip-service to customers, but the customer is not at the heart of their thinking, let alone their doing. They are at best a target, at worst, just an afterthought. It is a lot like waiting on-hold in a customer service queue and hearing a sugary voice intone on the telephone, “your business is important to us”. Sure it is, but not enough to staff the call centre with sufficient people to answer my call in a reasonable time.

Make no mistake, the CEx IS about brands, and the online experience, and marketing, sales and service, but it is about so much more as well. As was recently suggested in an online discussion, “CEx… is the sum total of the interactions a customer has with your company“. That’s close, but not quite close enough. In fact, most of the inside-out versions of CEx are so busy focusing on themselves that they don’t see the 900lb Gorilla in the room. That for the vast majority of customers, the most frequent and most important touchpoints are with the product during the days, weeks, months, even years of usage. For customers, the CEx is mostly about value-in-use.

If customers care the most about value-in-use, then the CEx should mostly be about enabling customers to get the most out of using the company’s products during usage touchpoints. That starts with helping the customer establish a need for the product, helping them to make the right choices and offering them the right sales terms. All the touchpoints the inside-out CEx-ers talk about. The ones of most value to the company. But critically, the CEX is also about supporting them when they first use the product, and then over a lifetime of product usage, up to the point where it is disposed of. These are the touchpoints the inside-out CEx-ers don’t like to talk about. The ones of most value to the customer.

This doesn’t mean bending over backwards just to give customers everything for free. Companies don’t need to become charities. It does mean understanding what customers are trying to do at each touchpoint in the CEx and at what creates value for them during each touchpoint, and then working out how to enable customers to create more value in such a way that the company can create more value too. And value isn’t just hard cash. It can also be knowledge that is used to drive innovation, relationships that reduce the cost of the next sale, even advocacy that drives word of mouth recommendation. The CEx isn’t just about creating value for customers, it’s about value co-creation together with customers.

If companies do this intelligently, it can turn upside-down how they go to market. Rather than just charging customers for outputs at the point of sale then abandoning them to their fate, which is so often what happens, companies can also charge customers for ongoing outcomes during the weeks, months and years of using the product. For example, Rolls Royce Aviation doesn’t sell aero engines any more. Instead, it sells ‘power by the hour’. Customers only pay Rolls Royce when the aero engine is used to fly their airplanes. And the airline may even be paid by Rolls Royce for maintaining the same engines in their own facilities. Its all part of a move towards outcome-based contracting that is sweeping business.

If we want CEx to become more than just another advertising slogan, ‘one touch’ button or marketing cross-sell campaign, we need to start to think about it from the customer’s perspective. And to work out how to co-create more value together with customers. Not convinced? Ask yourself a simple question, “which company would you prefer to do business with? One that is only interested in creating value for itself, or one that wants to co-create value together with YOU!”. It’s a no-brainer isn’t it? It should be for companies too.

Graham Hill
Customer-centric Innovator
@grahamhill

Further Reading:

Merz, He & Vargo
The Evolving Brand Logic: A Service-dominant Logic Perspective

Knowledge@Wharton
‘Power by the Hour’: Can Paying Only for Performance Redefine How Products Are Sold and Serviced?

Irene Ng
Outcome-Based Contracting: Changing the Boundaries of B2B Customer Relationships

I’ll now let him walk you through the contest and the rules, and wish you all the best of luck!

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

The Idea

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Criteria

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

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

The Categories

The categories that we’ve identified to start are:

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

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

The Rules

They are numbered to be entirely clear.

Submissions

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

The Demo

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

The Video

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

The Judges

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

Primary Judges

The Americas

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

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

EMEA

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

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

Mentors

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

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

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

Extended Judges Panels

The Influencer Panel

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

The Vendor Panel

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

The Journalist Panel

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

Media Partners

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

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

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

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

The Prizes…So Far

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

All Finalists

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

The Americas and EMEA Winners

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

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

The Times, Dates, Hashtag and Email

Okay here’s the hardcore stuff:

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

Dates and Times Table for the Americas and EMEA

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

A Note or Two

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

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

In Closing

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

CRM IDOL 2011 IS NOW OFFICIALLY UNDERWAY

Thomas Wieberneit wrote a post last week with a similar title, and we started a good old-fashioned discussion through email to see how Social CRM thinking could enhance the customer experience. One of the key thoughts is that people will turn to their strong ties for advice and discuss options, and their ‘hire’ the brand (which is basically a weak tie) for service delivery in the for of goods, services,and knowledge. Furthermore, rather than “consuming passively”, people are now participating activily in meeting their own desired outcomes, including shaping the service they want using what I label Customer Enablement Technology.

To give you an idea of what this could all look like, I thought up a scenario, and Thomas added to it and I’d like to share it with you here:

Jenny, a Marketing Assistant in her mid-twenties, wants to look good at a cocktail party organised by her employer the following evening. She ask her friends for ideas on dresses through Twitter and a FaceBook status update. Someone suggests she’d have a look retailer JolieRobe’s catalogue. She decides to click through to the website as some of the catalogue photos that her friend showed looked really great. Whilst sitting in front of her TV she pulls out her iPad she goes to the webstore drag & drops a couple of her close IM friends onto the that she thinks have good taste and who can provide her with sound advice.

The webstore has picked up from FaceBook that she wants to attend a Cocktail Party and adapts the interface with an appropiate ambiance and selection based on her preferences – as well as on what the company knows about her and and her friends. With her friends she co-browses a number of dresses and pulls up a 3-D model of herself on which the dress is projected to give her an idea of what it would look like. Through webchat with her friends she decides on a dress and posts the model up on FB, where she get 8 likes and 5 encouraging comments within a couple of minutes. She doesn’t want to buy it online, as she wants to ‘see how it fits and feel the material’ before buying so she decides she’ll pop into a store the next day. The webstore indicates the one nearest to her and indictes the availability, and also offers to put one aside in her size for her to try out.

She thinks she could also do with a haircut and connect her iPad to her favourite hairdesser’s site (she pays them a monthly subscription fee for advice) and starts a call using her Bluetooth headset and 3G connection by tapping on an On-Screen button on the web page. She is greeted by one of the personal stylists (a ‘repurposed’ Customer Service Rep) and shares what she wants to do whilst giving access to to her 3D-model and dresses she is looking at. The agent listens to her and suggest 3 different hairstyles that would go well with the dress, as shows them on the iPad projected over Jenny’s picture that she just took with the iPad’s built-in camera. She again shares this with her friends, who think the one she has chosen is fabulous, and the the agent takes the make an appointment the next day before disconnecting.

The next day, she goes to the local JolieRobe Retail Outlet. The Foursquare App on her iPhone indicates that one of her close friends is in the vicinity and she invites her to come along. In the store, the shop assistant is alerted by the store’s dashboard that Jenny has come in with her friend and checks on what she is looking for through her own Smartphone. Jenny’s profile pops up, together with what was gathered through Social Network Monitoring, as well as other interests that were determined through datamining.

She approaches her with a personalized greeting and walks Jenny to the part of the store that has the cocktail dresses, and hands her the one she was looking it. She tries it on at it fits her well, and is comfortable as well as good-looking. She’s not to sure about the colour, so she walks up to one of the interactive mirrors – basically a 70″ LCD screen stood up on the short side with a Kinect motion detector. The screen reflects her own image, but by moving her hand in a circle, she can modify the colour of the dress. Jenny wants a second opinion and finds that Jane, her best friend is not nearby but online. She usually goes shopping together with Jane and trusts her opinion very much so she invites Jane, who is in front of at her office computer’s webcam onto the store’s screen to share the picture.

The assistant then uses the same screen to show a some pairs of high heels to go with the dress, as well as suggest make-up to complete the picture. After having made sure the dress and heels look good on her “in real life”, she checks it out through the NFC code reader and pays for it through the store’s web interface, thanks her friend and the shop assistant and heads of to her appointment with the hairdesser, who is waiting for her, picture in-hand and ready to dress her hair.

Now Jenny’s all set to make a good impression!

There are many othe possible scenarios we could think of, including letting Jenny and her friends design the dress, provide input to the venue where the cocktail party is to be held, or connect with people who will be going as well to find out what their interests are (small-talk facilitation…). What is important is not so much that we provide the service (which is of course important), but rather that we understand where it fits within what the custoemr job-to-be-done, and how we can create an economics surplus in the value we co-create with the customer in helping achieve her desired outcomes. And if you want to read up on what types of value beyond monetary that you should be concerned about, I suggest you have a look at Wim Rampen’s post on taking customer service seriously.