Brent's Social CRM Blog

Technology For Business Sake – The Return!

2012-05-18T11:31:22-04:00

Back in the days (November 2006) before Facebook had 10 million users, Twitter was mentioned on anybody’s TV show, and the iPhone was even around – I hosted a radio show with my friend Michael Thomas called Technology for Business Sake. It was on Business Talk Radio here in Atlanta, and gave us the opportunity to talk with some awesome folks at great companies, best-selling authors, and people I just thought were pretty cool folks.

The show lasted until March of 2008, which went way beyond the three months I originally expected it to last. But I really enjoyed doing the show, and always hoped I’d be able to do something similar somewhere down the line. Well, welcome to “somewhere down the line”.

I’m happy to announce that Technology for Business (2.0?) is back! Starting this Saturday, TFBS will be back on the Atlanta airways 5pm ET on Newstalk 1160am, WCFO. The show is a partnership between me, the radio station and The Atlanta Tribune: The Magazine, where I write a monthly technology column and sit on the editorial advisory board.

I am extremely excited to be back in the saddle again, and talking small biz tech with the leaders in the space. So even if you don’t live in Atlanta, you can “tune in” to Newstalk1160.com Saturdays at 5pm et, or catch each show in the archive section. And the old show site – BusinessTechnologyRadio.com - will be updated soon….I promise!

So check it out and tell me what you think. And believe me there is plenty of rust to be knocked off. Just giving y’all a warning….

Getting the Big Picture on a Small Budget

2012-05-09T19:29:34-04:00

I wrote my first post for Yahoo! Small Business Advisor yesterday on the challenges of using the myriad of disparte online marketing tools and tactics to build customer relationships today. I mean trying to get the full picture of how successfully a small biz (or any for that matter) is using all this stuff in order to "win friends and influence people" in the age of SoLoMo.

This came about after checking out Yahoo!'s new free marketing dashboard that integrates with Constant Contact, Orange Soda (SEM/SEO/PPC management), Google Analytics and a few other services to provide a high level view of how your marketing initiatives are helping (or hurting) the cause. The dashboard pulls in campaign activities (email, SEM, SEO, etc), website activity, and local visibility info (review sites, local blogs, directories, etc) into a single high level view. It also includes the ability to manage your company's online reputation - and see how your marketing activities may be impacting it.

Some of the services call for the premium editions that costs a few bucks a month, as well as being customers of Constant Contact and Orange Soda. But the functionality is pretty nice - even at the free dashboard level.

So if you have a chance please check out Using the Big Picture to Keep Up with Today's Customer. But you may also want to check out the free marketing dashboard and see if it's worth your while to try out.

The Amazon Effect: Zuora, Citrix and the Acceleration of the Cloud Economy

2012-05-07T10:10:17-04:00

When Amazon started making their infrastructure and IT processes available outside the company firewall in 2006 it was a tipping point of sorts for business consumerization of the cloud. Companies of all sizes leveraged a variety of Amazon Web Services to store data, stream video, run online stores and a ton of other things. And now today consumers and businesses alike are adjusting quite nicely to life in the clouds.

IDC projects worldwide revenues from public IT cloud services to reach approximately $73 billion in 2015. So now that the cloud (in all its many faces) is front and center, more technology vendors are exposing their internal IT architectures and capacity via cloud-based services to “feed the need”. But one thing that could slow down the roll out is the provisioning, billing and metering services that have to be in place in order to manage these offerings.

Having to build this functionality from scratch is not the core part of business for most vendors, and would extend the rollout time for services ready for consumption in the cloud economy. Which is what makes today’s announcement that Zuora is partnering with Citrix to power the meter, price and bill capabilities for Citrix CloudPortal Services Manager. According to the press release, “Z-Commerce for the Cloud solution will integrate seamlessly with CloudPortal Services Manager to provide a powerful billing and payment platform that allows cloud service providers to quickly monetize and grow their cloud services.”

It will be interesting to see how many of these kinds of partnerships will arise as more companies push to cloud-enable their offerings. Services like Zuora’s would seem to be in a great position to accelerate the move to the cloud of technology providers by taking care of an essential part of the offering not central to the core business. And that should accelerate the march to the cloud Amazon put into overdrive a few years ago.

CRM Idol is Back on the Hunt for More Fun and Disruption

2012-04-30T07:00:00-04:00

In the immortal words of Rakim – Guess Who’s Back? And despite what LL Cool J said, you CAN call it a comeback. Yup it’s CRM Idol time again, folks. The 2012 version of CI kicks off today with the launch of this year’s event site. You can check it out at CRMIdol.com. And those who want to check out all the information from 2011 contest can click here.

And according to Paul Greenberg this year’s contest is Bigger and Deffer than last year! OK he didn’t say bigger and deffer (LL did though), but he did say this:

“This is going to be a bigger more exciting year for the industry as we discover some new emerging CRM companies. Last year was great and this year will be infinitely more amazing”.

Below is the official press release from today:

CRM Idol 2012 Kicks Off for Second Year; Founders Excited to Scout the Next Disruptive CRM Companies

April 30, 2012, Manassas, VA. CRM Idol founder Paul Greenberg announces today the second season of competition designed to find the next disruptive, emerging CRM companies. CRM Idol is designed to expose emerging technology companies to a front office business marketplace hungry for new ideas and business processes. Greenberg said, “Last year was great but this year will be infinitely more amazing.”

Finalists in 2011 included Assistly, Crowd Factory, Stone Cobra and Get Satisfaction, which won the competition. One indicator of the interest generated last year was quality of the participating class; other companies have acquired both Assistly and Crowd Factory for significant sums.

The first phase of the competition, which begins today, focuses on recruiting participants who must first prove their fitness for the competition by supplying basic information including company size based on revenue, years in business and availability of products. All products in the competition must be in live use and no beta products will be accepted. For the full rules and to receive an application visit CRMIdol.com.

The competition will focus on companies that provide CRM and related solutions from most major regions of the world including North and South America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa and Asia. Application deadline is 6 PM Pacific Daylight Time, May 25, 2012. The contest runs through December 5, 2012 when winners from the competing regions will be announced.

Media Contact

Aly Saxe

aly@ubiquitypr.com

Ubiquity Public Relations

602.690.0618

Ways to follow CRM Idol news and updates:

Website: Http://CRMIdol.com

Facebook: http://facebook.com/CRMIdol

Twitter: @CRMIdol

Hashtag: #CRMIdol

Now we’re not saying that being finalists in last year’s competition was the reason why Assistly (now known as Desk.com) and Crowd Factory were snapped up by Salesforce.com and Marketo, respectively. Or that another contestant – Connected– acquired by LinkedIn during last year’s contest - played a role in that development. But hey, who knows? Maybe….

And as tough as it was to narrow down the field to the four finalists (three in EMEA) last year, we believe it will be that much tougher this year. So if you think your company has what it takes to be this year’s CRM Idol, STAY TUNED! Make sure you join the CRM Idol Facebook page and follow our Twitter handle to get updates when push them out. We tweaked a few things based on feedback from contestants, judges, mentors and of course the folks in the general CRM community who voted Get Satisfaction and BPM Online winners in 2011.

So be on the lookout for more specifics in the very near future. CRM Idol 2012 is back and open for business…DOG!!!

Guy Kawasaki Wonders Why Amazon Doesn’t Buy Pinterest, I Just Wonder Why They Won’t Let Me Stream Videos from the Plane

2012-04-27T11:30:00-04:00

I’m Just getting back from this year’s SugarCon event in San Francisco. While last year was good, they really upped the ante this year – especially for the industry analysts/blogger/influencer types (BIG shout out to Chris Bucholtz for an awesome job putting this together!). Let’s just say the treatment included, barcaloungers, baseball cards and beer…just for starters. But I’ll be covering more of what happened in another post.

In addition to doing a session on CRM and the 2012 Presidential Election and being a judge (along with Paul Greenberg, Esteban Kolsky and Denis Pombriant) in the App Throwdown contest, I had the pleasure of teaming up with other SCRM Crew members Natalie Petouhoff and Jesus Hoyos, as we joined Guy Kawasaki in a laidback conversation on stage after Guy’s keynote. The session was moderated by SugarCRM’s very cool CEO Larry Augustin.

Guy, Natalie, me and Jesus - picture courtesy of Miguel Angel Narvaez (Thanks!)

Before the session began Larry asked me if I had a question I wanted him to tee up for the group to discuss. And since I’ve been kind of fixated on Amazon.com lately, I thought it would be interesting to talk about which business is more of a model for other businesses to focus on in the era of Social Commerce – Amazon or Facebook. So when Larry posed the question to us I gave my patented answer about how I didn’t join Facebook to buy stuff (and still have no intention to do so even now), but to stay connected with friends and family. But when I go to Amazon it was to buy something…ok some things. And it has been like that from the very beginning.

So for me Facebook is the most powerful social network built for helping us stay connected, with people looking to retrofit ecommerce on top of it, where Amazon is the most powerful online commerce destination, which has been integrating social capabilities (along with everything else it seems) into that commerce engine for years. One was built with commerce at its core and is now synonymous with buying, the other with non-commerce relationship building – which to me is a hurdle Amazon doesn’t have to jump over.

When Larry asked Guy what he thought, Guy shot one out there I hadn’t thought about – he wondered why Amazon hadn’t offered to buy Pinterest by now. He said with millions of people pinning great images of things they like, others may want to buy these things if they could do so right on the spot. To me this makes a lot of sense, and once again would be a way for Amazon to continue integrating social on top of their ecommerce platform in a potentially enormous way.

Now that would be a big deal – or as my old senator from Delaware Joe Biden would say a big, well, you know… For me, I just wanted Amazon to let me access the web, stream videos and share ebooks while I’m flying somewhere. Hey, if you fly Delta you can access Amazon.com for free now. So if you want to buy something while you’re in the air, you don’t have to pay for Internet access to do it. Now I don’t know what impact that is having on revenue, but on its surface removing the obstacle of paying for Wifi is a good move. I know I ended up buying something (ok, some things) on a recent flight. Now would I have eventually bought it at some point while on the ground – probably. But on a two hour flight I spent more time on that site than I normally do, which may have led to that purchase. So Amazon got my money right then and there – taking no chances.

So I don’t begrudge Amazon that celestial purchase. In my opinion it’s a shrewd move on their part. But all I ask – being a loyal Amazon Prime customer – is to cut a deal to let us AP members do more than just go to Amazon.com. Let us also stream videos and borrow books. And if we also have Kindles maybe you can let us access everything. I’ve been an AP member since the beginning. And I’d be willing to pay little extra to get Wifi on the plane. You’ve already made a deal with Delta and/or Gogo, so make a better one for us willing to be a Premium Amazon Prime member – PAPs!

Now that’s social, and a nice upsell opportunity. And I bet you’d add a ton of new Prime members while extending the lifetime of current members. A win-win-win if you ask me.

Ok so I went off on a tangent, but the Facebook-Amazon question is an interesting one. And to be honest Facebook Commerce looks to be growing leaps and bounds. And with the one billion member mark seemingly just around the corner there are many reasons for companies to try to leverage the growing amount of time people spend on Facebook to sell them stuff. In fact my most recent 1-on-1 conversation over at SmallBizTrends.com is with Christian Taylor – founder of Facebook Commerce platform provider Payvment.com. With over 100,000 online storefronts using their platform, he makes a very convincing argument for putting Facebook at the heart of a company’s social commerce initiative.

So Mr. Bezos, if you’re listening… why? Well you’d definitely listen to Guy more than me, but buying Pinterest would be pretty I’d think – that is assuming that they want to be bought at this point. I think the safer bet would be to make a deal so I can sign up to be a PAP – and start streaming videos 36,000 feet in the air.

Radius Brings Sales Intelligence on Small Businesses to All Businesses

2012-04-25T09:49:09-04:00

It’s pretty hard to get good information on small businesses, and very hard to get info on very small businesses, which is why a company called Radius caught my attention. While they’ve been around for about three years, they officially launched their cloud-based sales intelligence service yesterday.

What makes their service interesting is its focus on gathering information on companies with 100 employees or less. And they’ve spent a great deal of time finding sources to pull together to do it, including:

Upwards of 60,000 local blogs
Thousands of news sites
Social sites and review sites like Urban Spoon and City Search
Local public records like liquor licenses, business licenses, etc.

During a conversation I had with Radius Founder & CEO Darian Shirazi last week, he mentioned that they are continuously maintaining half a billion pieces of data on small businsses - and adding 20-30 million new pieces of data each month.

Radius has a nice interface that makes it easy to “find” and then “follow” a local business, and see what people are saying about them. You can even track sentiment trends using the dashboard:

Radius also integrates with Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics CRM, so once you find a business you can have that info moved over into your system as an account, contact or lead.

There’s no actual credit scoring as of yet, but Shirazi said their goal is to eventually be to small business information what Dun & Bradstreet is for the enterprise market.

According to their press release:

Users can customize any search to find specific businesses that meet their criteria. For example, users can search in a city for all the restaurants with a 4-star rating that ran a daily deal within the past two months.
Users can also track the success of recent campaigns, such as previous ads or daily deals to better understand how to work with a customer. They can even see if the company is advertising with another service.

After getting a demo I really liked what I saw. The data seemed to be pretty good – we even found a small business right here in Stockbridge, GA and checked out a few online reviews Radius pulled together. It’s also priced so that businesses of any size can use the service – starting at $39/mo per user.

All in all if you’re one of the ten million sales people who are selling to the under-100 employee business crowd, this is a service you may want to check out. With records on 15 million of these kinds of businesses it’s definitely worth a look.

How a Free Burrito Turned into A $55 Parking Ticket and a Great Customer Experience

2012-04-20T13:51:13-04:00

It’s hard trying to keep up in the Age of Acceleration. Everything is sped up. Everything is enhanced. Everything is scaled up. And while it’s probably not the case that everything has accelerated (but I still can’t think of anything that hasn’t), one thing that has definitely sped up, enhanced and scaled up is customer activities, behaviors and – most importantly – their expectations.

What may satisfy them today probably won’t satisfy them tonight. Like how we’re used to getting free shipping when we buy stuff online, so now we're starting to expect free shipping if we need to return items too– mark my words come next Christmas (if there is a next Christmas and the Mayans were wrong) free returns are going to be a big selling point!

In the Age of Acceleration, many focus on the impact of speed on getting the attention (and money) of potential customers. And you can’t blame for that, as 35-50% of sales go to the vendors who respond first to inquiries, according to InsideSales.com. But where the focus on acceleration may have the most immediate impact is on customer service.

At the inaugural Social Biz Atlanta event in February, Desk.com’s SVP of Marketing Matt Trifiro did a great presentation called The Velocity of Customer Service in the Social Age. Here are a few great nuggets he shared that really drive things home:

A customer who complains and has his/her issues resolved most likely will continue to buy from you. One who complains and doesn’t have their issue resolved most likely won’t
Only 50% of customers will complain. What do you do about the other half who never complain, but just go away after a bad experience?
70% of customer service requests made via Twitter go unanswered
Providing service over social channels will increase the likelihood of reaching those customers who wouldn’t complain via the phone, which helps you keep them longer if you resolve their issue
In this high velocity world a dollar today is worth 12x what it is a year from now.
Engaging with your customers sooner and faster will yield larger revenue to your business.

These numbers and information was great, but Matt also offered up a few examples to drive the point home. Bonobos – an online retailer and Desk.com customer – said they made the move to provide customer service over social channels about a year and half ago, and saw their overall customer request numbers go up by 20%. They also say that 30% of all requests are coming via social channels. So more requests overall, and a significant portion coming from social hammers the points Matt identified.

Matt also highlighted Boloco (not to be confused with Bonobos…) , a retail chain of burrito restaurants up in Boston. Their stated goal is to “over-service” their customers in order to provide exceptional customer experiences. This was illustrated when they did a promo to give away 1000 burritos to the first takers. One young lady wanted one of those free burritos so badly that she double-parked her car to try and quickly run in and get one. The good news was she did snag a free burrito – the bad news is that free burrito ended up costing her a $55 parking ticket. And when she tweeted about it, and a couple of friends responded to her tweet with a few of their own, the CEO of Boloco jumped in and said he’d pick up the tab for the parking ticket.

It was because of the over-service philosophy that he (and the rest of his company) were listening on social channels to provide those exceptional experiences. And because of his actions he gained a number of happy folks on Twitter to share the story – not to mention the five local media outlets who picked it up as well.

The bottom line in the stories and other information Matt shared is that it’s important to keep up with the social customer – who’s adopting and adapting to technology in an continuously quickening pace. And in order to do that, you have to be committed to this philosophy of over-servicing them….by all means (and channels) necessary. And be ready to run because what works now may not be enough in the not too distant future in the Age of Acceleration.

Check out the video of Matt's presentation here:

Matt Trifiro - The Speed of Customer Service in the Social Age from Brent Leary.

IBM Smarter Commerce for Midsize Businesses – Future Trends

2012-04-02T16:11:50-04:00

To help companies understand IBM's Smarter Commerce initiative, the SMB Group and CRM Essentials are working on a series of posts discussing how technology is empowering today's customer, and why companies have to change their approach in order to build strong relationships with them. This is the final post in the series.

Empowered customers are reshaping business today. They want a consistent experience between all channels.

They compare notes and instantly share. And they can champion a brand or sully a reputation with the click of a mouse. In response to these trends, IBM Smarter Commerce helps companies manage and adapt their commerce processes, putting the customer at the center of their operations.

For this post, we had the opportunity to talk to Alisa Maclin, Vice President, IBM Smarter Commerce Marketing. We asked her about IBM’s views on some of the more nascent trends in this area that may not yet be on the radar for most midsize businesses--but have the potential to create significant shifts in how companies conduct commerce.

Q. While it may have been difficult to predict how radically social media or the rise of smartphones and tablets would affect commerce a few years ago, what are some of the technology trends likely to have a dramatic impact on commerce in the next 5 years or so?

We believe that the speed of technological innovation and consumer adoption will continue to accelerate for the next five years and beyond. This acceleration is driving entirely new business models that are changing the landscape between buyers and sellers. The traditional models of B2B and B2C will need to leverage technology to continue to improve efficiencies, while adapting to new models such as Social and Facebook Commerce. The empowered and connected consumer is driving the “consumerization” of business and the empowered citizen is increasingly digitally engaged and networked. For small and medium sized businesses, the opportunity to embrace technology and the connected consumer is now.

Q: Is there a difference in what B2B and B2C businesses need to think about and do?

Yes and no, the lines separating B2B and B2C models are blurring. The empowered consumer looks for the same benefits of mobile and social technologies whether they are at work or at home or on the go. The result is a connected ‘consumer’ that has access to information looking to engage in new ways and do business both locally and globally to meet their needs.

B2B companies need to optimize their digital operations and transform how products and services are created, marketed, sold, delivered and serviced. For example, the influence of ‘self service’ is universal in both B2C and B2B, with 56% of customers demanding increased self service when they do business with a company, according to Forrester Research in 2011. And, B2C companies need to really look at mobile and social as a ‘must have’ to compete and win their customers and keep them coming back.

Q: In addition to the impact of emerging technology, what other trends--economic, social, regulatory, etc.-- do you see happening in the future that will impact how companies buy, market, sell and service?

Economic realities affect how companies operate, especially across the value chain. As the number of supply chain partners increases, the need for accurate, time-sensitive information becomes more acute. Many companies will turn to business intelligence and analytics on key control point indicators, such as orders versus forecasts and inventory in transit versus in stock, to move from “sense-and-respond” to “predict-and-act” organizations.

From a regulatory perspective, product lifecycle traceability in consumer products and other industries is a growing requirement. As product lifecycle traceability in many industries is becoming a major concern, the use of smart devices is likely to become more prevalent for tagging products wherever they are, as well as the containers and modes that are transporting them.

Q: How do you envision these changes affecting midsize businesses? What should they do to prepare and take advantage of them?

These changes will impact businesses of all sizes. No business is immune, and those that think they are will find themselves at a disadvantage. Midsize businesses can start to put the customer – the empowered customer – at the center of their commerce processes by taking these steps toward Smarter Commerce:

Listen to their clients to better understand and anticipate customer behavior and turn insight into action.
Adapt their sourcing of goods and services with a focus on customer demand, and orchestrate seamlessly among their trading partners and suppliers to serve that demand.
Personalize marketing and selling to your customers as much as possible and keep them coming back for more.
Evaluate service processes and learn from customers’ behavior to predict and take action.

Q. Do you think Smarter Commerce provides midsize companies a way to level the playing field--by helping them to establish a “virtual presence” in other countries without the physical infrastructure or physical presence?

Yes, in a flat world and global access at our fingertips – companies of any size can compete to win. But, just putting a virtual presence out there will not be enough. The key is customer satisfaction, which is tied directly to profitability. Data shows that for every customer who complains of poor service a company loses 10. And, it costs 6 to 7 times more to gain a new customer than to keep an existing one.

The way to stand out will be to incorporate customer-centricity into all your commerce processes. This is not a new concept… but in today’s marketplace it is the difference between thriving and going out of business.

Q: What are some of the things IBM is doing to help midsize companies stay ahead of the curve?

You’ll find that much of what we’re doing with our Smarter Commerce initiative is designed to help companies of all sizes to address these market changes. It focuses on three areas organizations need to address – customer insight, strategy and engagement. Companies need deep insight into customer behavior and needs – and the ability to anticipate and predict behavior to take immediate action. This insight, in turn, should drive the development and refinement of their customer value strategy – how to enhance, extend – and redefine value as viewed by the customer – and, the key here, is to do it profitably. And, finally, using that strategy to build customer engagement.

IBM works closely with its Business Partner network to drive this kind of change in the midmarket. For example, working with IBM Business Partner ExactTarget, Skymall was able to deliver more targeted e-mails using analytics-driven behavioral insights. This resulted in recapturing 3-5% of potentially lost revenue from abandoned carts, and helped Skymall to grow email-generated sales by 34%. Another example is RiverPoint, a systems integration consulting firm and IBM Business Partner. They helped The Society of Critical Care run more effective marketing campaigns. Combining IBM’s enterprise marketing management (EMM) software platform with RiverPoint’s best practices EMM consulting has enabled the client to experience a 2.4% positive change in membership attrition in the first year.

This is the final post in a series examining the evolution of the smarter customer and smarter commerce, and IBM’s Smarter Commerce solutions. For more information about how IBM Smarter Commerce is transforming midsize companies’ approach to commerce, visit http://www-01.ibm.com/finder/businesscenter/us/en/its_commerce_topic.wss]

Is Your Midsize Business Ready to Change Before You Have To? Gearing Up for the New Marketing

2012-02-27T09:46:49-05:00

In conjunction with IBM's Smarter Commerce initiative, the SMB Group and CRM Essentials are working on a series of posts discussing how technology is empowering today's customer, and why companies have to change their approach in order to build strong relationships with them. This sixth post in the series was written by Laurie McCabe.

Very few marketers would deny that marketing is in the midst of a sea change. As we’ve been discussing throughout this series, many businesses are struggling to keep up in our increasingly connected world. This rise of social media, a growing avalanche of data, and 24/7 access to new channels and devices that customers can use to learn about, shop for and buy goods and services is radically and irreversibly changing the world of marketing and commerce.

Given this reality, the central question is whether your business is preparing to ride the new wave--or is in danger of getting caught up in the turbulent undertow? In other words, to quote former GE CEO Jack Welch, are you ready to “change before you have to”? And, just how feasible is it for a small or midsize business to get ahead of the curve?

IBM’s 2011 IBM CMO study, From Stretched to Strengthened, took an in-depth look at how 1,734 Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) (including a sample of midsize companies) are thinking about and dealing with these mega-changes. It’s interesting to look at these results, and how one of the midsize companies that we spoke with recently is navigating through this transformation.

Top Market Forces and CMO Concerns and Readiness to Address Them

CMO study respondents of midsize companies are struggling with four major market forces: decreasing brand loyalty, the explosion of data, proliferation of channels and devices, and social media.

Unfortunately, change is difficult--and most CMOs feel ill-equipped to address these new requirements, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Percent of CMOs Reporting Underpreparedness

To me, this level of concern isn’t surprising. Social and technology changes are escalating at a breakneck pace, in an increasingly volatile world. Wrapping your head--let alone a marketing organization--around these rapid, often unpredictable changes isn’t for the faint of heart.

Charting a Course for Change

The good news is that the vast majority of CMOs see three key areas that they need to take action in to address theses challenges by:

Delivering value to empowered customers
Fostering lasting connections
Capturing value and measuring results

What does this really mean? Customers have always wanted companies to listen to them and to act on the input they provide. They’ve always wanted companies to value their time and their recommendations as well as their money. But today, technology gives customers better, faster access to information, people, products and services--giving them more control over the commerce process and enabling them to wield more influence with other buyers.

Customers increasingly expect anywhere, anytime, any-device access to information throughout the commerce cycle--from information gathering, evaluation and selection, to purchase and service. They expect vendors to do a better job of meeting--or even of anticipating--their needs. This means that vendors need to understand not only “the market” but individual customer requirements and preferences, and deliver solutions to attract, interact with, acquire and retain customers on a much more personal level.

In the digital age, this means that CMOs must develop automated processes to tap into multiple channels and customer touch points. And they need new analytics capabilities to gauge and tune marketing and commerce initiatives in an actionable way at a one-on-one level.

In a nutshell, CMOs and marketing organizations need to radically reinvent marketing with automated digital and analytical processes that help them to deliver more value to customers.

Taking a Proactive Approach

IBM’s study also revealed that CMOs in outperforming companies are more proactive than their peers in tackling these issues. These CMOs are investing now to better understand individual customers as well as markets, and using analytics to help them do a better job of zero in on customers’ needs to deliver a better experience and build customer loyalty.

For instance, CustomInk, a 300-employee custom t-shirt company, uses IBM Software for Enterprise Marketing Management, specifically IBM Coremetrics, to improve the customer experience and grow the business. CustomInk relies on a Coremetrics dashboard to monitor daily key performance indicators (KPIs), such as: What percentage of site visitors go to its Design Lab? How likely is a visitor to save a design? How do aesthetic changes improve conversion rates? CustomInk uses these metrics to determine what’s working and what isn’t. For example, if the percentage of customers who save a design is low, it may be because something is broken and the customer can’t load the design. Or there may be an overload of visitors from unqualified sources.

IBM software also provides CustomInk with the ability to monitor key paths through its site on a daily basis. This enables CustomInk to determine where people “fall off” on different paths. The company can see when changes it makes are beneficial, detrimental or neutral to customer behavior. For example, CustomInk has learned that small, aesthetic changes in color or type font, or changes in button styles or colors, can impact movement through the site and affect the drop-off rate.

Perspective

CustomInk drives home the point that a company doesn’t have to be part of the Fortune 500 to ride the waves that these social and technological changes are ushering in. In fact, because SMBs can often act in a more agile and nimble fashion than large companies, they may actually have an advantage over larger companies.

However, any business must start by making a conscious decision to transform their marketing team for this customer-centric world, and develop a strategy that revolves around customer engagement and interactions. Some key questions to get started include:

How can the business use customer interactions to better anticipate and respond to requirements, and improve the customer experience?
What are the different customer and prospect touch points in your organization, and how can they be strengthened?
Do we know where customers and prospects are talking about your products and services, competitive brands and related industry trends?
How do we best bring customer conversations into the company to help us better serve their needs?
How will we measure and analyze the results of what we’re doing?
How can we make the information and insights we get actionable?
What skills and solutions will we need to achieve our goals?

While each company will have different goals, metrics and requirements, one thing is crystal clear: the art and the science of marketing is undergoing a radical change. CMOs and marketing organizations need to take a proactive approach to use them to their advantage.

This is the sixth in a series of blogs by SMB Group and CRM Essentials that examines the evolution of the smarter customer and smarter commerce, and IBM’s Smarter Commerce solutions. For more information about CMO perspectives on several issues, see the full results of IBM’s 2011 IBM CMO study, From Stretched to Strengthened.

Swimming with the Smarter Customer: The Speedo International Story

2012-02-06T07:51:42-05:00

—The following post was written by Laurie McCabe of SMB Group

Recently, Brent Leary and I had the opportunity to talk with Gareth Beer, Ecommerce Manager for Speedo International and learn about how Speedo International is applying smarter commerce philosophies and solutions to better serve its customers. We think Beer’s insights about Speedo’s experience in this area illustrate how important it is for a company to start with a strong vision for delivering a great customer experience--and how to execute to make that vision a reality.

Start with the Customer

Anyone that’s ever been near a pool let alone belonged to a swim team knows the iconic Speedo swimwear brand. But, we do need to supply a bit more background to put this post in context for our discussion.

Speedo International is a subsidiary of Pentland Brands with headquarters and about 200 employees based in Nottingham, UK, and operations around the globe and sales in 180 countries. Up until 2008, Speedo International had been a traditional wholesale business, with retailers serving as its sole sales outlet to customers. The company had no desire to compete with its retail partners, but consumers were clamoring for better access to the full range of Speedo products, in all sizes and colors--which they couldn’t always find in their local stores.

Bringing Speedo International online was an obvious solution to providing customers with better access, but Speedo faced a dilemma common to many companies in this position--the threat of potential channel conflict. But as Beer told us, “Speedo understands that many customers will use the site to search, browse and add to the cart and ultimately buy at a local store.” Speedo’s goal is to give customers a place to search, browse and find information--and then purchase the product wherever they choose.

Zero in on Objectives

In line with these goals, Speedo International needed to create a site with detailed photos, images, descriptions, fitting guides, FAQs and videos of all Speedo products; the ability to purchase; and customer feedback mechanisms. Speedo had a jump-start because Pentland, its parent company, was already running IBM WebSphere Commerce for all of its companies, making this platform the natural choice for Speedo.

So Speedo’s ecommerce team got busy figuring out what analytics capabilities they wanted. They were looking for a solution that “would let us go to another level of thinking, beyond looking at visitors and traffic. We wanted to really understand the customer, how they behave, how they think and how they liked to be interacted with, so that we could optimize marketing, retention and recruitment,” according to Beer. The company also wanted the flexibility to gather and analyze new sources of information as requirements evolved.

After investigating different solutions, Speedo International selected IBM’s Coremetrics for several reasons. First, Coremetrics was available as subscription-based cloud service, and pre-integrated with WebSphere Commerce, which meant that Speedo didn’t need to spend time on technical implementation and integration.

More important, Beer advised us, was that “all the data is in one place and we have a common interface across the 12 Coremetrics modules we use. Other vendors have similar tools, but with Coremetrics, we get the different capabilities we need, from measuring the effectiveness of pay-per-click campaigns to creating personalized interactions with top customers.

Create a Virtuous Cycle

Some of the many ways Speedo uses Coremetrics are to:

Track KPIs for sales, orders, visitors, stock and margins, and its consumer index score, which rates customer experience with Speedo.
Gauge the effectiveness of pay per click campaigns and retargeting efforts.
Get a clear view of who the customer is, how they behave, and how they like to be spoken to.
Set and meet service level agreements to pick, pack and dispatch orders.

As a result, Beer’s team can deliver feedback to business decision makers more rapidly. “We can quickly pick up on trends, what’s working, what’s not, what colors and styles people like or don’t like. Then the business can make better commercial decisions faster,” Beer told us.

Using the Coremetrics Lifecycle module, Speedo also gains a complete view of its top customers, which enables it to do things such as offer more personal attention and rewards, and encourage them to post more ratings and reviews. In turn, this gives Speedo more data to feed back to the business, turn top customers into advocates, and generate more business.

Speedo International has held fast to its pledge not to compete with its retailers on price. However, about 15% of Speedo’s customers pay a premium to buy on the Speedo site. Speedo’s research indicates that these customers buy on direct because of the exceptional customer service experience that Speedo delivers--facilitated to a large extent by WebSphere Commerce and Coremetrics.

A Work in Progress

Speedo International launched a Facebook page about 18 months ago. It uses Coremetrics to make sure that Facebook information jives with information on its estore, and to track how many people go to the estore from Facebook. Speedo can append Facebook images, URLs, etc. with tags which feed into Coremetrics. Using these tags, Speedo can also create special product offers, or have people vote on colors on Facebook, and see how many people come to the estore as a result of these campaigns.

One of the most compelling parts of Speedo’s strategy that Beer discussed with us is to “put any Speedo store on top of WebSphere Commerce, and have one place underneath as a common foundation for all stock and inventory management.” In 2012, Speedo plans to launch a new Facebook store, a new mobile store and create stores in key European countries with localized content, currency and language. The unified WebSphere Commerce foundation will ensure consistency and continuity of the customer shopping experience across these different sites.

Summing Up

Beer summed up his perspective by saying “the business is all about the customer. We need to be in as many channels as customers are in and align them as closely as we can--whether the customer is on smart phone, iPad or in a brick and mortar store. The goal is to have consistency and visibility across these channels and heighten our understanding of the customer.”

We couldn’t have said it better.

This is the fifth of a six-part series by SMB Group and CRM Essentials that examines the evolution of the smarter customer and smarter commerce, and IBM’s Smarter Commerce solutions.