As a Former Forrester Analyst, I attended all the software conferences. Now I only attend the ones that I think are really relevant to my clients. What’s nice about being an independent software and business analyst is that I don’t have to pretend any more to say a vendor is great when they are not and I don’t have to be afraid of speaking the truth.

Why Oracle allowed Benioff to speak at previous OpenWorld’s is beyond me, when they are competitors. But they did. Maybe Oracle didn’t see that they were competitors. I think that they looked down on Salesforce and didn’t see what that the world had changed. It’s not the first time this has happened.

Sometimes even the brightest people don’t-know-what-they-don’t-know. In Joel Barker’s book, Paradigms: The Business of Discovering the Future, he uses the following examples to illustrate how we negate ideas through our own filters or perceptions of the world. When we see the world from our own limited perspective, sound solutions are dismissed or overlooked.

It’s interesting this year that they did what seems to be a last minute change of heart around having Marc speak. What it did is drive all the PR to Salesforce.com, which as we all know, Marc is a master marketer.

I’m not at OpenWorld because there is really nothing new. Oracle’s Fusion has been promised for years. Their customers are frustrated by the user interface, specially when it comes to Customer Service and I don’t think they are leading the social business capabilities that business must have. Their acquisition of InQuira was a good move.  I did attend Dreamforce and I spoke on the ROI of social media and had a great panel with real-world experience of transforming their organizations.

But Social Media is the MOST important thing that has happened to business in 100 years. Companies need software to facilitate this. Maybe that’s why Oracle decided to un-invite Benioff? The handling of this leaves lot’s of room for speculation on why they would do this.

What’s difficult in the connected social network world we live in, is excuses like, “We offered Benioff a different time slot and he choose not to accept it” doesn’t fly in the face of the need for companies to be authentic, genuine and human. This event has been set in stone for a long time. The last minute change up of Benioff’s time slot doesn’t hit the mark with respect to honestly.

It’s a new world we are living in. We are all under a microscope that our behavior as brands gets played out on the big stage called life. And social media is the giant megaphone and broadcast system that reaches millions and billions in a nano-second.

What do you think Oracle should do now? Let it go? Apologize and admit that they changed the time slot because they felt threatened by Salesforce? Make up a different story? Love to hear your thoughts!

Here’s some other articles: New York Times, IT News,

Forbes AllThingsD

Here’s my friend Charlie Issac’s youtube video on Larry Ellison’s speech- that speech may have been the tipping point to the change in the Benioff schedule…

@drnatalie

www.drnatalienews.com

I’ve been asked… a number of times, where can we see these videos that Kathy Herrmann and I wrote? We created them based on our thought leadership with the help and support of Salesforce.com and www.rebelunit.com (RSA) on the ROI of social media… so I thought I would post them here… so that you have access to them at any time!

Video 1: How Social Media Benefits the Whole Company

 
Video 2: How to Calculate The ROI of Social Media

Video 3: How To Build a Business Case For Social Customer

@drnatalie Learn. Share. Grow.

One of the fears of executives is that if they begin to engage in social media, customers will use it to try to take advantage of the company.  While that fear is not unfounded, there are things a brand should consider in this new social media customer interaction world.

Customers Are Talking About Your Brand Whether You Are Listening / Interacting Or Not In working with clients, sometimes they are worried that if they have a presence in social media channels, customers will circumvent the normal channels, i.e., phone or email, and go straight to Twitter or Facebook with a horrible and damaging post. What I’ve seen over the years that I’ve been covering Customer Service, Marketing, PR, etc… and social media is that some customers do use social channels to complain. Whether that becomes a problem has to do with several things:

• Products & Service Issues: Is there something wrong with the products or services you provide that would make customers so frustrated that they’d go to any length to say bad things about your brand? If so, that information has to be provided to the departments within a company that can fix it. Often times we don’t think of Customer Service as an information/feedback distribution center. But what we’ve learned is that customer service and especially social media customer service does provide real-time, often genuine and valuable feedback to a company that they can’t get any other way. A brand needs a way to collect, analyze and distribute that data — and then take the right action to fix the issues so they don’t create brand crisis situations.

• Poor Customer Service Experiences: Is there something wrong with the service that Customer Service is providing? If so, that needs to be fixed. Often times it can be a combination of strategy, technology and execution… Is it that the agents don’t have helpful answers? Address knowledge management, training, cross-channel communication capabilities, etc… Is it that the agents don’t know enough about the customer’s other tries to solve the issue and the experience of trying to get help is blastic-inducing. It could be that the IVR, the website, chat, or that social media interactions aren’t connected to one another so the customer has to restate the problem to each person they interact with.

As customers, we’ve experienced that and we know it doesn’t feel good. If that’s the case, then a company needs to create unified customer interactions, business rules, policies, knowledge bases, workflow and analytics in a common cross-channel platform. Having insight to what a customer has done and experienced across customer touch points dramatically improves the customer’s experience. (And it can drive down costs!)

• Manage Customer Expectations: If there something misleading about the promise the brand is making? Is the marketing not truthful or creating a situation that is a set-up for customer disappointment? Reviewing products and matching brand promises to create realistic expectations is key.  When branding or marketing, don’t over promise and under deliver. It will result in Customer Service nightmare. Often times Marketing, PR and Customer Service groups don’t collaborate. But if they do, you can see where making sure that all departments are aligned — will in the end — not only serve the customer,  but also the company.

Get the Basics Right: If you can say that you are providing the best products/services you can, your PR/Marketing is delivering an accurate promise and Customer Service is deployed in a way that creates great experiences — from the customer’s point of view– then you will be in pretty good shape. Often companies need to address the basics of business. What I’ve found is that when sincere customers go blastic, its because the company is misfiring in one or more of these basic areas.  Lesson learned? Get the basics right.

Beyond the Basics: So if you are one of the exceptional companies that is getting the basics consistently right, then you want to think about how you are going to handle customers who either start or migrate to social media channels to air their frustration. Just like anything in life, there are always the “bullies” who think they can trash a brand in social media to get free stuff, better service, etc.. Unfortunately part of what’s happened is that when customer’s do use social media to complain, companies are providing better service than if the customer used traditional channels of phone, email or chat. Reward behaviors you want repeated.

The Witness Factor: What companies need to realize is that customers are very smart. They figure out very quickly where they can get the quickiest and best results and answers. If your company consistently provides poor customer service in traditional channels, consider that you are setting the company up for bullies to take advantage of the “publicness” of social media.

What I mean by that is what I’ve called the Witness Factor. The Witness Factor is the idea that because something is public — i.e., everyone can see it — that THAT changes how companies treat customers. There can’t be one way to treat customers who call on the phone or email — i.e., poorly  — and then a different way to treat customers who use social channels- better and faster. It’s a clear set-up for bullies to use social media to try to take advantage of the company. They’ll figure that out and use it to their advantage — because they know you don’t want them to go blastic in public.

Know Your Customers: If you have a good system for identifying and really knowing your customers — i.e., contact center solutions, CRM, etc… then you are able to identify who you are dealing with. In researching this topic, I interviewed many clients. I asked them how they deal with these situations. The collective wisdom is that when a company can tell the difference between a real issue and a customer who is using social to take advantage of the situation, they make the better decisions on how to deal with the customer.

Often times companies don’t have good contact center/CRM systems, so they don’t know much about their customers. And they don’t have that integrated with social channels so they can’t connect who the person tweeting is to their contact center or CRM database.  So lesson learned here is to update systems and processes so that you can know and track customers and their interactions for all interaction channels.

Fire Your Bully Customers: One client told me that when they get a customer who consistently complains, they mark that person’s account. They set a limit on how many times they will allow that customer to try to get more out of the company than they deserve. And in some cases, they fire the customer. While that may seem extreme, what they find is that what those type of customer’s want is to take advantage. So rather than trying to please them– reality is you can’t — they decide on criteria that warrants firing a customer. Once these type of “bully” clients realize your firing them, they either leave or they change their behavior.

(Note- I’m not talking about customer’s who really have a problem they need solving. I’m talking about customers who consistently complain to take advantage of a company.) It’s important to identify theses conversations early — so social monitoring your brand is essential. And the second necessity is the ability to take the interaction offline and out of social channels into channels that are less visible to the public. Once you take it to other channels, then discern if the customer’s concern is real or if you have a “professional complainer” on your hands.

Gratefulness is Repaid in Spades: Often times, when customers who do have real issues are helped, they are so appreciative and sometimes even flabbergasted that a company was helpful, that they will return to social channels and will unprompted, they say how amazed they are with your company. There’s nothing like sincere, authentic and genuine compliments about your company in social spheres. You can’t pay for PR like that, especially in a world where Customer Service has now become PR. And especially in a world where social customer bullies are trying to take advantage of the company using social.

Brand Advocacy Matters: The other tip that the companies consistently mentioned was that if you have worked hard to create strong brand advocates, then when a bully starts to go off on a brand, the crowd will do one of several things. If they think its a frustrated customer, they may offer solutions and help to that customer.  That’s great because often advocates or SuperUsers do actually know more that your own agents — they’ve made your brand, products and knowing about them their personal hobby. And if they think its a social customer bully, the crowd will police it’s own social sphere. Often these social customer bullies get a reputation as a brand basher and neither the brand or current/potential clients pay much attention to them — or better yet the crowd calls the bully on their bullying. Creating brand advocates is key.

Let me know if this post has been helpful and please share how you have handled social customer bullies!

Learn. Share. Grow! @drnatalie

This is the third post about the book, I Love You More Than My Dog, as part of my favorite book posts.

Jeanne Bliss tweeted me to thank me for writing about her book. And as we got to talking, she provided me with a link to the first chapter of her book, just for you:

http://www.customerbliss.com/pdf/Chapter%201%20I%20Love%20You%20More%20Than%20My%20Dog.pdf

(may have to copy and paste the URL)

Chapter 1: Your Decisions Reveal:  Who You Are and What You Value!

It’s very generous of Jeanne to provide me a link. I hope that you take advantage of it!

The chapter starts with a quote from Walt Disney:“It’s not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are.”

Walt Disney, The Master of the Customer Experience

Companies that are loved by their customers make decisions differently than other companies.

The common denominator, according to Jeanne, is that these companies bring consciousness and humanity to the decisions they make.  When you make decisions that respect and honor your customers, your customers will grow your business by word of mouth. They will tell their friends, who will they their friends, who will tell their friends…

Remember that Breck Shampoo commercial back in the ’60s that used this as their tagline?

The most important thing a company can do is to form an army of cheerleaders and publicists urging their friends, neighbors, colleagues and strangers to get behind your company.

Have we ever seen this in action? Sure we have… Land’s End for instance. That’s where Jeanne started her customer experience career. The founder of Land’s End, Gary Comer, described Jeanne’s job as:  nurturing the “conscience” of the company through the decisions they made as they grew. And they experienced 20-30% grow per year. Their stand? Long-term growth was dependent on retaining their strong emotional connection with customers.

At that time, the stories customers told about Land’s End, revealed their values. They drove not only customers to the company, but also an engaged and loyal employee base. Land’ End need over 200 employee volunteers to answer all the, “I love you, Land’s End!” mail they received each month.

And have we seen this lately? Yes, at Zappos.com When Tony and Alfred started Aappos.com they didn’t have money for large advertising or marketing programs. They made the conscious decision that the way they would build and grow their business was to provide such great service, interactions and experiences, that they tell their friends, who will they their friends, who will tell their friends…

And 2009, Amazon.com bought Zappos.com for over $922 Million.  That pretty much says it all, doesn’t it.

And its not that these types of companies are perfect. It’s not that every single interaction is perfect. What is so is that they have a huge reserve of gratitude from their customers, that if and when a mistake is made, that customers are willing to be more forgiving. Especially when that tender, loving care is how they deal with the mistake or issue.

As Jeanne would say, “The decision is yours.”

Click here to learn more on Loni Love’s wisdom about Twitter, on the importance of fans/customers and that there is nothing more special than showing you care.

This is wisdom that everyone can use!

Loni Love spoke at the 140tc conference, with me, about how marketing, PR, customer service  and comedy/ fans are very similar. Just likes companies need “fans” or customers, she depends on fans to come and see her perform at shows and on TV. Loni uses twitter as a way to reach out to her fans and build that relationship.

Loni Love Uses Twitter As A Megaphone To Show How Much She Appreciates Her Fans

Loni typically starts the day in Twitter by providing her fans with inspirational quotes/jokes. She then sends out information on her schedule for the day, jokes, as well as links to funny stories. She says that many people find the content fun, uplifting and entertaining and they retweet it! Often fans are inspired by her tweets and they also send out jokes. She sometimes retweets those herself or comments on them.

When did this great comedian start using Twitter? In June of 2009. She currently has over 74,837 followers; at the time of the video in May 2009, she had 8,000 followers. Loving your fans means they grow over time.

TV's doctor, Dr. Drew showing Loni Love the "Luv" For What She Does

How does this comedian’s actions on Twitter relate to Customer Service? Customers want to know they are valued. Loni sees Twitter as the opportunity to do that. Sure Loni is in the entertainment business and you might be in the business of customer service, but there is a common denominator here. And the commonality is this: acknowledging and appreciating fans or customers garners reciprocal appreciation, but in ten-fold. Often times entertainers, like companies, can seem like they are far removed from their fans of customers. Companies have often been categorized as giant, unfeeling monoliths. In part that is because their communication with customers and the public is very stayed, calculated and predicable. It is written, checked and rechecked to the point that it has lost the human touch.

What Loni has experienced by retweeting a fan’s tweet or commenting on a tweet, is that people feel that they have made a special connection with her. She says they are often surprised that she responds and interacts so much! They are delighted and feel cared about when she does something as simple as type something in less than 140 characters.

Loni’s whole purpose in being an entertainer and comedian is to make people laugh. Her goal is to help them forget about their problems for at least a few minutes. Loni loves using Twitter because it is a tool that helps her to spread her passion about helping people to remember to laugh and enjoy life a little more. You may have seen her spreading her humor and love on E! on the Chelsea Lately show.

Loni Love on the E! show, Chelsea Lately

Loni  suggests that when you think about the parallels to what she is doing and customer service, she suggests companies remember that customers are always the number one priority. You can reach out to them via Twitter and show your appreciation for them. Loyalty often comes from feeling “a part of something.” Paying attention to fans or customers helps them to feel vested in what you are doing and in what you stand for. And by showing your passion as a company, your employees will catch the appreciation bug also!

You can follow Loni on Twitter at www.twitter.com/lonilove

Loni’s website is: www.LoniLove.com

And information about Chelsea and her show, Chelsea Lately is at: www.eonline.com/on/shows/chelsea/

Learn. Grow. Share.

Thanks for tuning in!  @DrNatalie

Could it be that easy? Love I mean? The kind of love that you earn when you have nurtured the consciousness and congruence of the heart. Where intention and motivation match. Where you have decided to “be there.” Where you have clarity of purpose. Where you can be real.

You might think I am talking about a romantic relationship. I am. But not the kind that you might think. It’s a kind of love that is rare. That is cherished.

There is an energy that comes from being believed, from being trusted; its like coming home. We all crave it. We all desire it. We want to emulate it. When our intelligence, our creativity, our emotions and humor blend, and is acknowledged by another, we realize our full potential.

Amazing Authors: These are the words of an amazing author, Jeanne Bliss. And the title of this post is the title of her newest book. When I met Jeanne, at the Earth Cafe on Melrose, I met someone who created an indelible mark of kindness and passion that makes people want to be with her. She emulates what she writes about. She is someone you love more than your dog. (Or in my case, my cats!)

What is Jeanne’s book about? She writes about the kind of corporate America we all dream of. Of a place that we ourselves can believe in. Of a place we are seen, heard and respected. Of a place where customers are seen, heard and respected.

Book Reviews: One of the things I wanted to do in this blog is to share the amazing insights from the various authors of books that are creating the shift. So this is one of the first of many posts about amazing authors, their amazing stories and their ability to take words and fashion a story that moves from where we were to where we dream is possible.

Author Jeanne Bliss and her dogs!!

If you haven’t picked up a copy, you need to. And when you read it, don’t just read it, absorb it. Use it as a way of evaluating how you and your company does business. Ask yourself, “Do my customer’s love us more than they love their pets?” And if not, why?

Follow Jeanne on Twitter: http://twitter.com/JeanneBliss

Happy New YEAR! 2010! Dr. Natalie (follow me on twitter.com/drnatalie)

Learn. Share. Grow.

Partial List of Companies In Jeanne’s Book:

1. Rackspace

Image via Wikipedia

2. Griffin Hospital

3. The Container Store

4. W. L. Gore

5. Zane’s Cycles

6.Trader Joe’s

Image via Wikipedia

7. Customer Ink

8. Wegman’s Food Markets

9. Chik-fil-A

10. Harley-Davidson

Is your company on this list? Or mentioned in Jeanne’s book? If not, why not? And what can you do to begin the shift towards being beloved?

Related articles

• An Interview with Jeanne Bliss on the Updated “I Love You More Than My Dog” (smallbiztrends.com)
• Word of Mouth Supergenius Conference – Jul 22,2010 (blogtalkradio.com)
• Amazon.com: Chief Customer Officer : Getting Past Lip Service to Passionate Action eBook: Jeanne Bliss: Kindle Store (serve4impact.com)
• Do authors have to be social? No, but it helps (gigaom.com)

This is the second post about Jeanne Bliss’s book, “I Love You More Than My Dog.” As I read it over the holidays, I became intrigued with the idea that its in the decisions that companies make that determine what their customer’s experiences will be. As Jeanne puts it, ” Your company’s key decisions expose their true purpose, who you are and what you value.”

What’s important about that? Well customers today want to feel that you care about them. That you value their participation in your business. Customer’s evaluate whether you “care” about them from each and every action and interaction they have with you. They evaluate your company based on the interactions with customer service agents, with your website, with the IVR, with your email responses. They evaluate your company based on the experiences they have with those touchpoints.

And unfortunately most companies, when they deployed these technologies their values were focused on the company’s efficiencies. They were not thinking or even in most cases, considering how the technology deployment would affect their customer’s experiences. To them, that either wasn’t part of the decision process or it sounded too much like “motherhood and touchy-feely stuff” to even consider.

What’s happened is that those decisions, 20 years ago, to deploy technology to make the company more efficient has created a backlash from customers. After 20 years of very poor customer experiences, customer are mad as hell, and they are not going to take it anymore. What we see today is a reaction to the decisions made years ago.

Flash forward and what do we see? The backlash comes at a time when the evolution of the Internet is in its second phase, Web 2.0. Where customers don’t just tell 10 or 20 people when they are upset, they tell millions via a giant megaphone called social media.

Customers are mad and they are vocal!!!

Examples? Dell Hell, United Broke My Guitar and Comcast’s Sleeping Technician videos on youtube.com

If you haven’t seen the videos, here’s some links:

United Breaks Guitars: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo

Comcast’s Sleeping Technician: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viw2TVBygBg

So what does this mean to you and your company?

Here’s the five decisions in: I Love You More Than My Dog:

1. Decide to believe

2. Decide with clarity of purpose

3. Decide to be real

4. Decide to be there

5. Decide to say sorry.

The decision is yours.

In this interview, I spoke to Tony about his thoughts on where we are and the future of Social CRM.

Tony Nemelka, Social CRM Expert

Tony started his career at IBM in mainframe sales, then went to watch the PC, client server revolution.

And today he is seeing a new kind of revolution:

• First is the transformation of business to a more social business where customers and employees are thought of as “partners.”  This change in strategy and its accompanying technologies results in changes in business processes introduced by the internet.
• And second is revolution is around the “cloud” or others might refer to it as SaaS.

He sees companies looking to deploy things that are going to offer them competitive advantages. And the questions they will be asking themselves are:

• “Where is the innovation going to come from?”
• “Where is it going to be built? On premise or in the “cloud?” and
• “What tools/ applications will can we use?”

He talked about his experience with the VC (venture capital) world. He does not seem them focusing on funding on-premise technologies or applications. Which sounds like the innovations will be centered around the “cloud.”

Click here to hear how Tony sees the future shaping up:

You can follow Tony on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/tnemelka

p.s. Tony’s lanyard was via http://www.zebra.com/

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To participate in more conversations on Social CRM, follow me on twitter: drnatalie and use the Twitter hash tags: #SCRM #CustomerService #VSCRM #SocialMedia

Learn. Grow. Share.