October 16th, 2009 by dnomura
Back from a great OpenWorld experience. It’s amazing how Oracle has gotten the logistics for this event down to a science. Even Tuesday’s downpour didn’t seem to have much effect, other than the venues scrambling for more rugs to keep people from slipping on slick tiles.
Many have already posted about OpenWorld and the progress in Oracle Social CRM. The tools that help drive more sales through sales user collaboration look great.
Having been in the CRM space during the early days, I remember customers’ sales management expecting promising results from the reporting and accountability CRM systems provided. But I also remember the grumblings from sales reps themselves who preferred to continue using Act! or Outlook. Oracle’s Social CRM tools give reps a benefit to using the CRM system.
As an Oracle Partner, we’re excited to be able to provide a platform that enables an external aspect of social CRM integration for Oracle CRM On Demand and other Oracle and non-Oracle applications. Customers are able to leverage unstructured social media content by integrating it into their CRM workflows. Benefits such as expanded lead gathering, enhanced customer satisfaction, quicker investor relations action and more are achievable.
This isn’t just for getting social media posts expressing a level of buying interest into the lead qualifications workflow, but also those talking about problems or issues into the customer support workflow. We’ve also seen more and more examples of HR organizations finding social media content from current or prospective employees that need to be addressed, in other words they need to get those into a workflow too.
Many departments in an enterprise can benefit from learning and leveraging what’s being said about a company when the author isn’t talking to you, or under any type of survey bias. An important consideration is getting these posts that need action into the appropriate workflow so you can document and take action.
September 9th, 2009 by tbj
We’ve been predicting for quite a while now that mainstream business applications would eventually recognize the impact of social media. With the rate of user growth in social media exceeding that of any other aspect of the internet, any B2B(or B2B2C) applications vendor needs to have a strategy to reach out to users congregating in social media. Whether for customer support, lead generation, or product development, social media data MUST be incorporated in the workflow of business applications.
Today, with the release by Salesforce.com of their ServiceCloud V2, we’ve seen a formal embrace of integrating Twitter with Salesforce.com CRM.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/08/everything-you-need-to-know-about-salesforces-service-cloud-2/
Nevermind the fact that we’ve been quietly doing this for months at Buzzient (;o)); this announcement should serve as as wakeup call to other vendors for the need to have a social media integration strategy.
What Salesforce (and RightNow for that matter) and other CRM companies building internal social media extensions don’t address however is the inherent heterogeneity of complex enterprises. Everywhere there’s Salesforce.com installed in a complex enterprise, I’m willing to bet one will also find evidence of Netsuite, Oracle(Siebel, Peoplesoft, Hyperion), SAP, and other applications. Any social media strategy should also include a way to provide access to that data for on-premise applications as well as products from multiple suppliers. In this fashion, a customer would be enabled to follow a social media post across not just CRM, but also ERP, BI and other business functions. We at Buzzient are committed to making THAT social media marriage come to pass!!!
July 8th, 2009 by tbj
With the recent backtracking by Google on discontinuing the free version of Google Apps for Enterprise, we’ve had a collective reminder of how valuable our data in the cloud can be. I heard through the grapevine of a number of folks beginning to look at alternatives to Google Apps. What should also not be lost in all this is the importance of the DATA in the cloud and not just the Apps. Whether the data is comprised of documents, spreadsheets or social media conversations, it’s extremely valuable. It needs to be protected and maintained for end users. It’s also a valuable source of analytics for companies that are trying to build stronger customer relationships.
The emotional reactions to Google’s scare on Apps reminds me of why we started Buzzient in the first place: we realized that applications might be the first thing people think about when they hear of the cloud, but the real gems are in the data. Making the data useful for business applications and business users is what we’re all about, and can provide a valuable resource for both companies and the customers they serve.
Our original research on Google Apps, including our pricing recommendations which Google adopted can be found here:
15 567_Google Enterprise Installed Solution_GoeldiJonesLo
July 2nd, 2009 by agoeldi
Most social media experts will tell you that we live in exciting times. Marketing is shifting from a broadcast model to two-way conversations, they say. Customer service is not about standardized, efficient processes anymore, but about a personal dialogue with real people, not anonymous call center agents.
That’s actually really great news — if you’re a small business.
Small businesses have always differentiated themselves from the big boys by providing superior, more personal customer service. That’s really not new. What is new is that social media tools like Twitter and blogs enable small businesses to provide personal service for geographically distributed customers, maybe even globally.
Unfortunately, this principle doesn’t really scale well for bigger companies. Sure, it would be nice if even huge corporations could suddenly provide service that is as personal as what you’re getting in the small shop around the corner. But you know what? Big companies are big because they are good at standardization. A big scale business — and the low prices for customers that it enables — is only possible through efficient, standardized systems and processes.
Now, the social media experts will tell you that we live in an entirely new era and that the Internet changes everything. Sure, it changes a lot. But how about the need for scalability?
Let’s look at the two companies that are probably the most successful Internet pure plays in history (so far): Amazon and Google. Both companies were tiny startups less than 15 years ago, so nobody can claim that they’re staid old corporations that simply “don’t get it”.
Now, Amazon certainly provides good customer service. The company is highly responsive, no matter what channel you contact it on. Sometimes you get a response within minutes after you send an e-mail request. But that’s because Amazon has huge customer service centers that use sophisticated software. They don’t enter into “conversations” with you, they handle support cases. The Amazon customer service reps don’t build a “relationship” with you, they answer your questions. It’s maybe faster, but not really less anonymous than what you will get at any large company. And that’s even more true with Google, which has an infamously opaque customer service process.
However, both companies provide a highly customized experience. I’ve found many interesting books and other products thanks to Amazon’s recommendations. And Google probably knows more about me than my mother.
But that’s not because they engage in a social relationship with me. It’s because they have scalable, sophisticated systems that collect tons of data about their customers and handle that information in a very efficient way. That’s generally good for both sides: Customers get a better experience, and the companies can count on increased customer loyalty.
This is exactly where social media marketing (and customer service) falls short today: As long as so much manual labor is involved in monitoring social media and engaging with customers through these channels, it is very hard to scale it. Social media is a tremendously important new channel. But bigger companies can only really benefit from it if it integrates with scalable, standardized processes.
That’s why we at Buzzient build scalable social media systems that can integrate with existing business processes and systems. Yes, social media is new and exciting. But to make it useful, it has to scale.
July 1st, 2009 by tbj
With recent outages in the news from Salesforce.com, Google, and most recently Rackspace, it’s a great time to define what we mean at Buzzient about “Enterprise-Class” social media analytics.
To us, having come up in Enterprise computing companies such as Ingres, Oracle, Sybase and others, working with Enterprise customers means we have to live to a higher standard. It’s not acceptable if the service is down, or data is corrupted; someone could lose their jobs or worse. So, we have to design in all sorts of expensive things like redundancy, fail-over, storage management, that end users don’t really ever see until they really need them.
“Enterprise-Class” means that the brains in the box are more important than the coating of wax on the veneer. As social media gains acceptance with corporations, executives need to think carefully about whether the flavor of the month product really meets their needs long term.
