We’ve emphasized our integration with CRM applications quite a bit. But for many companies the first customer interaction is actually the contact center. Of course at some point during workflow, integrating social media posts with CRM applications for further action could come into play. Enabling the contact center to address the social channel as part of a multi-channel mix gives companies the opportunity to enhance their customer relationships without necessarily having to rely on a CRM system.

As a quick overview, Buzzient captures and analyzes social media posts according the customer’s requirements. Those meeting desired thresholds (e.g. sentiment rating, keywords, specific authors or sites) are forwarded to Interactive Intelligence Interaction Attendant for routing to agent queues according to the customer’s rules (and/or can be sent in an ad hoc manner.) Agents can then respond or take appropriate action on these posts.

Social media doesn’t need to be outside the contact center’s box any longer. Now social media can be routed and treated like email, chat, fax and phone.

We’ve posted a presentation for the Oracle Partner Network community on how we do this, as well as the roadmap for the future:

http://www.slideshare.net/tbjbuzzient/buzzient-presentation-oraclejul262010

The growth in social gaming is a powerful trend; gaming developers, however realize now that it’s not enough to release the game, you also need to manage performance. That’s where Buzzient comes in. We enable game developers to monitor customer service, receive real-time feedback from users, as well as understand overall sentiment on deployed games. This gives developers crucial feedback in determining what new features to develop, or how to improve retention and reduce churn.

Look for more Buzzient announcements and partnerships in this exciting new sector the rest of 2010 and 2011.

It’s very clear to smart retailers that social media is impacting their industry, particularly when it comes to merchandising and customer service.

We look forward to continued work with Oracle in this industry vertical!

http://slidesha.re/aGUIIn

Retail is a logical vertical industry for social media applications; over 80% of US adults are on social media according to Forrester. In response, over 60% of retailers have implemented some sort of social media presence (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace). The real challenge is in monitoring consumer reaction to retail social media storefronts, and finding (a) a way to analyze the results and (b) and way to integrate the results with existing retail applications.

I’ll present my slides tomorrow after our speaking session, but look for more announcements from Buzzient in Retail, as well as with Oracle.

http://secure.lenos.com/lenos/emp/OracleCrossTalk2010/agenda.asp

http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/01/advice-from-founders-who-bootstrapped-their-way-to-success-2/

The most important theme in this article IMHO,  is customer focus. We at Buzzient realize that we’re nothing without our great customers. I wanted to say a quick word of “Thanks” to those companies such as Credit Suisse, Motley Fool, Perkin Elmer, Credit Suisse, Pace University and others who have chosen Buzzient!

And the online verdict was clear: The story is extremely damaging to Goldman’s reputation. Buzzient’s automated sentiment analysis algorithm constantly analyzes online sentiment from millions of posts in real-time. On our detailed sentiment scale, a typical value for a company like Goldman Sachs is somewhere between 0 and 15 — more or less neutral.

However, on Friday the sentiment values suddenly turned very negative. Goldman reached a -20, which is a value rarely seen for large brands.

Things were even worse for certain source types. Many financial blogs provided damning in-depth analysis of the case, which led to even lower sentiment values in the blogosphere.

On a typical day, only a couple of hundred social media posts mention Goldman Sachs. On Friday however, volume suddenly rose to well over 1400 posts, about seven times the normal volume.

Interestingly, post volume remained very high throughout the weekend. That’s highly unusual for business-related topics and shows how strongly the public reacts to these allegations.

By the way: The spike visible around April 7 was related to an exclusive CBS report on Goldman’s business practices. But the sentiment analysis shows that this report was discussed in social media in a mostly neutral way. It was retweeted frequently without an overly negative tone.

Most news stories only cause a short spike in social media activity that lasts for a day or two. The fact that the SEC lawsuit story led to so many negative posts four days in a row (and the fifth day shows no signs of abating) clearly shows that the Goldman scandal strikes a chord. Social media is an excellent indicator for public sentiment in real-time, and Goldman clearly has a problem on its hands.

A common theme I heard from companies was their desire to start leveraging the intersection of social media and support/service/contact center. Of course this isn’t a KANA-specific phenomenon. “Social CRM” is becoming a hot topic and in this context it points at customer service.

Not surprisingly, to this point much discussion around social media has been linked to the marketing/PR groups in an enterprise. Certainly these teams benefit greatly from analyzing and integrating social media content about their brands/products.

However more and more, many of your customers are becoming conditioned to using social media to voice problems or issues rather than picking up the phone or emailing customer support. Plus you can’t control this part of the process anymore. You might say users have to send an email or call when they have an issue, but that doesn’t mean they will.

Unlike traditional support channels, when using social media customers aren’t contacting you directly about their problem. Instead it’s like they’re walking into the town square at noon and yelling about it to anyone who’ll listen. Their online megaphones are vehicles such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, discussion boards. Now if they have a problem a lot of people will know about it, and that carries potential for negative effect on your support perception, brand, etc.

What’s also becoming apparent is that when they’re out there yelling, they’re starting to expect you to be listening. That’s great, but just throwing technology or a team of people at social media monitoring won’t cut it. As with many things in business, it comes down to a combination of processes + people + technology. You need to extend/adapt/modify your support process to include the social channel along with email, chat, phone, etc.

The good news is you don’t have to panic. This is simply a new channel. Unstructured, largely uncontrollable, with lots of sub-channels, but simply new. A way to increase service levels for your customers. Who doesn’t want to provide the best service they can?

Realistically it wasn’t that long ago when email was the new channel for customer service. You incorporated it into your support processes and perhaps moved from phone-only to multichannel support. Same thing when chat came along.

Social can seem intimidating because of all the “sub-channels” involved — Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, forums, communities, etc. There isn’t a single stream coming in like there is via email.

As mentioned, adjusting your business processes to address “social CRM” for support is critical and this should be step one. But as you assess your processes, you can feel confident that Buzzient can help you with the technology to support harvesting, consolidating, analyzing and integrating social media content as an additional channel into your support workflows/systems (such as KANA, Oracle CRM On Demand, Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, etc.) The right technology can help you mitigate the human resource factor in your new processes.

You can leverage Buzzient to help get appropriate posts into an agent queue or create cases/service requests based on automated criteria or on an ad hoc basis. Buzzient can help with the customer engagement over the social channel as you resolve their issues. Importantly, your new processes might also leverage social media to build your knowledgebase with issue solutions users are posting. If you have self-help as a priority, this could become a very valuable way for you to harness social media to benefit customers.

- 6 new customer signings, including a bulge bracket investment bank, leading life sciences infrastructure company, SEO/SEM Agency, University and others.

- Multiple new releases, including the Santa Release (Dec 09) as well as a new dashboard for monitoring top users in social media

What’s also great is that our message around combining social media with CRM applications finally seems to be taking hold. Analysts are now discussing Social CRM in everyday conversations, when 3 years ago we got the “RCA Dog Watching TV” look when describing this vision. Thanks to all our great employees, customers, partners and stakeholders for helping us get here!

More to come…

The focus of this post is to talk a bit more about using Buzzient as a social media integration platform with CRM. There’s benefit to be had from using automation to integrate the social media channnel and content with your CRM system(s) for lead generation and customer service. For many companies this is a tangible and valuable place to start.

Leveraging social media in these cases doesn’t require you to jump into social media as the initiators of conversations (you’re respondents). Participating in social media as initiators is a different aspect you’ll need to think about and assess whether it’s consistent with your business goals. But taking advantage of social media to find more leads to help drive revenue and commiting to proactive customer support to drive enhanced satisfaction can’t help but be consistent with most company’s business goals. Can’t it?

Buzzient provides the technology that enables you to extend your CRM system to the social realm to help you address this new channel in your sales and service processes. The channel and the methods you use to interact might be new, but your lead qualification and customer service workflows are still the foundations.

You probably have workflows in place to address lead suspects/prospects and customer support issues in your CRM system. Perfect. Leverage the time, effort and expertise you have in your CRM investment.

Buzzient as a social media integration platform integrates with CRM systems so you can use the technology “behind-the-scenes” to find, store and analyze lead- or issue-oriented social media posts. The platform integrates this content within the CRM system so users don’t have to utilize a separate application.

Of course there is also great value in social media analytics. Integrating social media with CRM to derive lead generation and customer service value is just one place to get started. Depending on your business goals, you might benefit by starting with analytics. But we’ll cover that in a subsequent post.

Lead Generation

You might have suspects/prospects coming in from email campaigns, direct mail, good old return cards, website activity, trade shows, etc. But are you taking advantage of social media as a lead generation channel?

People are making posts via Twitter or forums or other social media channels about a desire to buy your products, those of your competition and/or products in your industry area. It’s easy to assume authors are primarily talking about consumer goods, but they’re talking enterprise purchases too. Asking the world, “I’m looking for a new xyz, what does everyone think?” isn’t uncommon anymore.

Getting these social media suspects/prospects into the CRM lead qualfication workflow just like your other channels can boost your lead generation results. It’s important to note that these suspects/prospects aren’t replacing the leads you’re getting from current efforts, they’re adding to them. Your reps can initiate and track conversations with these suspects/prospects using the authors’ social media vehicle (Twitter, blog, etc.) without having to leave the CRM system.

Customer Service

Your customer service organization might be addressing support through an online ticketing system, call center, email, etc. But are you taking the next step to proactively support customers who are talking about their problems via social media? Are you leveraging community-answered issues by getting them into your knowledgebase?

Something like “Having such-and-such problems with xyz again, can someone help?” is seen more and more. Perhaps along with a response such as, “Same problem I had. I was able to fix it by doing a, b, and c.”

Proactively getting social media customer issues into the CRM support workflow just like your other channels can enhance customer service levels. Does this increase your queues in the short term? Probably. But is it valuable to you to establish yourself as a company that makes the effort to reach out and support customers? Will solving an issue early (as it’s broadcasted on social media) and getting the solution into your knowledgebase save dealing with many tickets for the same problem later? As with the lead/sales reps, your customer support agents can initiate research with the customer using the authors’ social media vehicle (Twitter, blog, etc.) without having to leave the CRM system.

Of course these examples might require you to adjust your business processes somewhat to embrace social media as a new channel for lead generation and support. But the benefits from increased leads and elevated customer service levels can be worth it.

Buzzient integration includes the ability to communicate with the author of the post via their social media channel, from within the CRM system. This is an important point. The lead/issue came from a social media post, there isn’t a phone number or email address. Only their username. So if they tweeted, talk to them via Twitter. If they posted on a forum, talk to them there. Without leaving the CRM system.

You can see an example of Buzzient’s deep integration into CRM (Oracle CRM On Demand is used for the example) via the demos page, under the Social Media Integration section.

Of course Buzzient Enterprise also provides deep social media analytics. But for companies who are focused on leveraging what’s being said on social media to maximize lead qualification and enhance customer service, using Buzzient as a social media integration platform to CRM is the way to link the social channel with your CRM.