Among the new funding partners, Lithium signed up NEA as [...]]]> On January 5^th, 2012 Lithium Technologies announced it had closed Round D funding to the tune of $53.4 million, adding to the $39 million it had raised in previous rounds.  The proceedings will go towards “completing the suite” and international expansion according to the company.

Among the new funding partners, Lithium signed up NEA as leading partner as well as SAP Ventures.  Existing funding partners all continued their support as investors.

Earlier today I distributed a note to my clients with detailed analysis of this event, here are the main points:

• The main result of this announcement is to take Lithium off the list of companies that will be acquired soon.  The total amount of funding received (close to $100 million) and the expected returns from investors, company founders, and employees makes it a very expensive company to acquire.
• Lithium has focused mostly on the “Social Brand” (marketing) aspects of their product in the past year, and we expect the majority of the investment in completing the suite to go to that side as well.  We advocate a cloud-based analytics solution for the top of their shopping list.  Lithium’s strongest market presence is in support communities, and while it remains committed to that sector, we don’t foresee them completing a support suite before a Social Brand suite.
• We absolutely believe the international expansion is going to bring them a good return on investment for many reasons, but primarily allows them to focus on global brands.

One final point of notice, SAP Ventures as an additional investor in the company brings a very interesting wrinkle to the game.  SAP Ventures is a very conservative firm focused, among other things, in funding potential strategic partners and acquisitions for SAP.  We will see where things go.

We expect no major changes in the short term, acquisitions they will make are bound to introduce changes in the long term – but we cannot predict those.  We foresee an IPO event in the 12-18 months timeframe.

For further questions, please contact me.

Not that kind of Renaissance.  Promise.

Remember when we learned about the Renaissance period in school? Me neither — thank heavens for Wikipedia!

The actual Renaissance was the [...]]]> Please don’t run for the door – you won’t hear Gregorian chants, ye olde english, or be forced to eat boar legs with your hands.

Not that kind of Renaissance.  Promise.

Remember when we learned about the Renaissance period in school? Me neither — thank heavens for Wikipedia!

The actual Renaissance was the moment the Middles Ages were over and we fully began to embrace the Modern Era.  This was the time when Art ruled the way (we did not have iPads back then, nor were there discussions of cloud-anything other than when talking weather events, and Steve Jobs was called Leonardo Da Vinci) for humanity becoming more adept at dealing with the day-to-day problems and building a better future.  Without the Renaissance period and the people with big ideas in it, we would have never had the industrial revolution, cures for diseases that ravaged humanity — or even toilets and sewers (we probably would’ve, just much later – but works better for the post if you imagine no toilets or sewer lines and ravaging diseases).

If you ever spent any time in  Florence, Italy and look at Il Duomo or the other buildings and sculptures and wonder how in the name of what they were able to build that without tools — the ingenuity of the Renaissance citizens was the how.

As it turns out, today we use the term very loosely and haphazardly to indicate a bridge between two moments in history, a time of transition.

By now you are going — well, nothing I can print here.  Let’s move on and make my point.

I was a guest in the radio show “Coffee Break with Game Changers” on 12/28/2011.  The topic of the show as to make predictions for 2012 – something I hate to do, since most predictions anyone can make for enterprise software are bound to take far more than 12 months to be implemented/adopted/embraced and results visible, but I digress.

I wanted to talk about the many conversations I had with Business Unit Managers, CIOs, CEOs and other managers and executives in the past two-to-three months while helping them prepare for 2012 budgets and priorities.  I wanted to contribute all their plans for learning and embracing the change that social is bringing; how it is not about the tools (although the tools have been useful so far to quickly prove value in social channels); how they are eager to find use cases and situations where social can contribute; how they consider Big Data a distraction more than anything at this point; how, in other words, they are getting focused on the results they are trying to achieve in their organizations by bringing in social.

As I was getting ready to spend 10-12 minutes covering all this I was told I only had 1-2 minutes (including my intro) to say what I wanted to say.  I had to come up with a way to express all that quickly — and that is where the title of this post came to mind: 2012 is the year we see the Social Renaissance in sight.

It is the year when we begin to shift from the obscure process of “going social” to the strategy of embracing social channels for collaboration and co-creation.  It is the year when the Social Customer goes from being the squeaky wheel that gets the grease (who is tended to first on Twitter or Facebook regardless of their position and value to the organization) to having one more data element added to their system of record (good friend Paul Greenberg wrote about this recently as well in his two part series on Engagement as the next level for the Social Customer).

It is, in other words, the year when we begin to figure out how to cure Black Plague, build indoor toilets, and lay down sewer lines in our social initiatives.

We are building Social as an infrastructure, not as a revolution anymore.

Looking forward to it?

The truth is that I have [...]]]> Trust me, it sounds better if you sing it with Tony Bennett’s voice and to the melody of “The Best Is Yet To Come” (here is a video of him and Diana Krall singing it — Merry Christmas and Happy New Year present from me to you).

The truth is that I have been thinking about this for a while. I started to put my ideas together about 2-3 months  ago, trying to find a way to help organizations decide what to do in the next few years with Social X and today it call came together.  As they say, “things” always come in threes and this episode of serendipity was led by three events:

1. Read David Armano’s excellent post and presentation on “Social Business in 2012” (Slide 13 covers the hype cycle)
2. Read Ted Sapountzis very interesting post on “Social Media: Have We Finally Hit the Peak of the Hype Cycle“
3. Participated in “The Gillmor Gang” this morning with John Taschek and Steve Gillmor and we talked about the Hype Cycle for Social (John thinks it is over-hyped, go on and watch it)

I had to put this together… I just had to.

Here is the picture, read the explanation after the fold.

Hype and Adoption Cycles for Social - December 2011

There are too many items in this picture, so let me explain a few of them.

The labels on top (early-adopters, mainstream, and long-tail with the corresponding percentage of organizations in each) refer to how many organizations are in each group and at that point in the life of the technology they adopt and embrace it.  The early-adopters are the organizations that see a tactical or strategic advantage in using the technology before the rest of the market.  The most telling tale that this group has embraced a technology? they won’t tell anybody.  You won’t see case studies or slide-decks or presentations at conferences about it: they are too buys leveraging the technology for some sort of advantage to let you know what they are doing (or, quite frankly, they don’t care to tell you what they are doing so you won’t copy them).  The shift from early adopters to mainstream is when you start seeing more case studies, more companies talking about their experiences (good or bad), and more failed attempts to deploy the technology (coincidentally, it is also the time when the HC enters the descent into the trough of disillusionment, but more on that soon).  This shift also signals the start of the “market sweet spot” — that time when we see more vendors offer more complete solutions, more organizations making decisions to purchase, and more implementations that yield lessons to be learned and to grow adoption.  Towards the end of this market sweet spot is when we also see the emergence of the long-tail, the laggards and niche implementations of the technology.

The second element in the chart is the famous Hype Cycle from Gartner (detailed methodology explanation) – a tools that works wonders to explain the path that all tools take when being adopted by organizations.  First, a caveat – each technology travels the cycle at their own speed, and while some may do end-to-end discovery-to-full-adoption in a few months or days, some others may take years or even decades to travel the same distance.  I say this because I want you to be aware that each dot in the HC is independent of each other, not related to each other (in other words, you don’t need to implement Social Media before you embrace Social CRM — although it would certainly help).  The hype cycle itself is quite simple: a technology has a trigger that launches it into the limelight from where it continue to collect “hype” about the usefulness it provides.  This hype grows to the point that is rumored to end world-hunger (OK, maybe too dramatic – but you get the point), at which point implementation  in earnest commences — followed by failures and the discovery that world hunger will continue for now.  That movement ends in the trough of disillusionment, where we learn that most of what we thought the technology did was hype – not reality.  Eventually, with time and patience we begin to learn what it does and how and begin to climb towards enlightenment.  Once we figure it out, we enter the plateau of productivity where it resides forever and ever becoming more and more useful with time — as we learn what it can do and how well.  In other words – no technology is what we think it is, and it takes time to figure it out and even more to do it right after learning the lessons of those who failed before us (thank you those, really).

The third element is the adoption curve.  This shows the speed at which organizations embrace and adopt new technologies – but it only makes sense to use it when you overlay it with the hype cycle.  Using it by itself does not tell the entire story, but you get the idea — as we learn more about how to do things, we get more organizations embracing the technology until we reach a point where mostly everyone is already using the technology and adoption begins to slow down simply because there are not those many organizations left (I mean, once you pass 50% adoption, it has to start coming down at some time — right?).  The overlap is the interesting element here and what generates the fourth element in this chart: the “market sweet spot”.  This is the convergence point when adoption is increasing alongside the lessons learned about how to properly and better use the technology — this is the perfect time to begin adoption and mainstream use of the technologies highlighted as it is also when the chance of success increase dramatically.

Now, what that chart talks to is simple: we are just beginning to see the point where Social Media is reaching mainstream adoption — in other words, adoption of Social Media is in the 20-30% range.

YOU: What? Are you kidding me?

YOU: I mean, everyone in the world knows about Twitter and Facebook, right? Right? There are 800+ million people on Facebook and a couple of hundred on Twitter – that helps, right?

Well, knowing about it and knowing how to use it for business are different things (heck, even knowing you CAN use it for business are different things).  While there is a tad more than 10% of the world on Facebook, the volume of traffic in there that is used for business is below 1% (cannot find the actual stat, but it was well below 1% last time I saw the report about two months ago — even if it tripled in usage, still below 2% and still quite insignificant).  Twitter is different, but also — the volume of tweet used for business is minimal.  In addition, the number of businesses using it for business is very small, but heavily biased in favor of mega-large-humongous organizations which tend to bias our perception when we see it in the news.

In either case, if you go to middle-America (definitely not Silicon Valley or any other coastal area) and ask how many businesses are using it you’d be appalled (if you are from SV or a coastal city) how little usage it has in business.  Go to other countries, you will be so happy to be living here (well, not really — but as it relates to use of Social Media in business at the very least).  And therein lies the rub (and the crux of my argument): until we get sufficient adoption of Social Media for business use (with correlated generation of good and bad cases and lessons learned from doing things right or wrong) there is no point in discussing what Social Business is, what Social CRM can be or how to exercise the collaboration muscle inherent to social adoption.

I mean, come on — get the walking right before you try the Western States ultra — know what I mean?

OK, 1200+ words and you have not been able to get a word in edgewise — your turn.

Tell me why I am so wrong and I don’t get it.  Go on, Ted and David already did in their posts (although technically, since they published before me I guess I disagree with them — but I’d contend that my thought process started before theirs… or something weird like that since I like to be right).  Paul Greenberg (great friend and a personal hero of mine) somewhat trumped my thought process by declaring the Social Customer done (fine, he said the era of the social customer ends — kinda the same unless you want to go to semantics).

Tell me, what do you think?  Am I really that wrong? Behind the times?

Check it out at Moxie’s Blog.

(feel free to leave comments below or [...]]]> I wrote a great (by my standards) post on where Customer Service is going in 2012 and beyond including investment areas, percentage growth by budget, and more — all based on what I am hearing from clients and trusted sources.

Check it out at Moxie’s Blog.

(feel free to leave comments below or there, will answer both).

Back in 2002-2003, while I was at Gartner, I introduced a vision for Customer Service for the next 15-20 years.  There were three stages to this vision, all seemed unrelated and although slightly possible at the time, not necessarily the easiest and most common path.  They were solutions based on technology [...]]]> Who would’ve thunk, huh?

Back in 2002-2003, while I was at Gartner, I introduced a vision for Customer Service for the next 15-20 years.  There were three stages to this vision, all seemed unrelated and although slightly possible at the time, not necessarily the easiest and most common path.  They were solutions based on technology as an aid, not as “the answer”, and focused more on the way customers would use and demand customer service – and organizations would have to respond to that.  The three stages where:

1. Customer Interaction Hub
2. Collaborative Customer Service
3. Secret Customer Service

I introduced them via several notes and presentations between 2002 and 2005, to the best silence I ever heard – followed by disbelief and ridicule.  You see, the concept of the Customer Interaction Hub relied on a cross-channel, centralized framework that needed more channels than those available then (we had email, chat, SMS, telephone, self-service as the leading ones and a couple odd others here and there) and for them to continue to show up if it was going to prove its value.  Back in 2003, the thought of finding more channels was not very serious – I mean, other than ESP who could imagine what other channels we would start using?

The concept of Collaborative Customer Service was already implemented by a few avant-garde technology vendors (most impressive, which my peer and friend Michael Maoz wrote about, was Rational Rose’s use of a community for customer service), but when we hinted that most of the future Customer Service was going to be customers helping themselves and each other, thereby making Contact Centers a lot less expensive and unnecessary – well, that did not go very well either.

We could never be taken seriously with a name like Secret Customer Service – so, we will leave it that (but, trust me, it is the coolest idea and it will be among us in 10 years, give or take… ask me about it if you are interested)

I’d like to go back to the Customer Interaction Hub.  One lonely vendor at the time, eGain, took to the idea and adopted it.  They have been using the concept to guide their product since pretty much the beginning.  Others adopted parts of it, or concepts from it like cross-channel and centralized knowledge repositories as time went by.  End users, organizations, on the other hand were more timid with it.  There was a dozen or so large organizations in the early days (actually,until I left in 2008 I counted maybe 40-50 organizations I helped) that were interested in the Framework and took steps towards implementing it in their Customer Service deployments.  Not certainly ground-breaking nor world changing, but they all had some success with it and led them to modify their operations.

The figure below shows the Customer Interaction Hub as it was introduced, pretty much, back then – without a lot of changes (even today, it still holds pretty much true).

The Customer Interaction Hub

As you can see above, the core concept for this model is to have a centralized Framework where all integration points, all channel management rules, all business rules, knowledge repositories, data flows – everything that flows in the organization for customer interactions goes through this central point.  The idea is that by having a central place where everything happens, the maintenance and operational complexity of multiple channels is eliminated, or greatly reduced.  It even works as stated, based on the few that took on it.  Back then I also wrote that the greatest challenge is not to find the few that will take to this model and adopt it and make it work – hard enough to do at that time – but also to find the ones visionary enough to take it outside of the Customer Service interaction business and use it in other areas of the organization.  If you think it through, this model can apply to pretty much any business and any operations.

Now, the nice thing of building castles in the air and painting visions is that, for the most part, nobody ever calls on you to build them.  I have assisted many organizations and vendors over the years with the concept and how to adopt it and transform it to  their endeavors, have seen various results from those projects – but had not yet seen how this concept can be applied outside of managing customer interactions.  Until recently.

In the past few months I came across Coveo (you may remember I mentioned them as working in a new Knowledge Paradigm back when I wrote about Inquira being acquired by Oracle) and through subsequent discussions, I saw that they have adopted a similar concept to the CIH for their Enterprise Search product.  We had several conversations about it, and they asked me to do a webinar together to discuss this model; I agreed.

If you are interested in finding out more about how the CIH works, how it does its magic, and what the future holds for it – please join me on Thursday, November 17th, at 11 AM PST, 2 PM EST, to discuss the CIH and their product.  If you cannot make it, feel free to contact me if you want to discuss this further – happy to chat.

Thanks for reading.

Zen emphasizes experiential wisdom in the attainment of enlightenment

I am truly interested in attaining enlightenment in when dealing with customers.  This enlightenment is the only way [...]]]> Before you all jump on defining Zen and what it has to do with anything. let me enroll my millions of friends at Wikipedia to explain Zen.  According to Wikipedia:

Zen emphasizes experiential wisdom in the attainment of enlightenment

I am truly interested in attaining enlightenment in when dealing with customers.  This enlightenment is the only way we will succeed at understanding them, knowing them, and serving them properly.  Without enlightenment you have — well, most contact centers today frankly.  It is this art of attaining enlightenment about the customers that Social Channels can serve very well.

Or can they?

We assume that since social channels for customer service generate engagement, interactions, and tons of data that we are using it properly and getting some value out of it.  Alas, no one has taken the time to figure this out beyond the individual case — until now.  I am going to take the plunge and find out about using Social Channels for Customer Service.

My good friends at Sword Ciboodle (they are not only friends, they are also a client) asked me to work with them on a research report on what it actually means to do Social Customer Service today.  How could I turn that down?

We created the survey, set it up on SuveyMonkey (see link below) and went to town.  We are very ambitious, and we have a short schedule.  Although the survey has been around for a week already (I am late to publish this, but been on work-vacation-work-vacation in the UK last week) it closes on November 23rd.

Why are we doing this? Mitch Lieberman from Sword Ciboodle, who is working with me in this project, wrote a post about this project and he said:

One important debate topic, which the survey hopes to shed light on, is whether or not investments in social customer service is “money well spent.” Everyone’s knee-jerk reaction to this is ‘Of Course’ – but when you ask “why”, the answer is harder, and less consistent.

I was asked to write in one paragraph what I thought was the best way to describe what we were trying to find.  I said:

(…) even though Contact Center managers knew they had to do something about Social Media, the fear of doing something wrong, or not getting the expected benefits, made them adopt a wait-and-see attitude.

And what are the waiting for? Someone else to tell them what and how to do.

Well, that is what we are here for.

We will collect all the information we can from as many practitioners as possible and then go to town.  Do you want to know what worked and what hasn’t? What is good, bad, and just plain ugly? How to get started? How much to invest? What does it cost?

All those questions can be answered – if you help us.  Please take the survey (see link below), there are 16 very simple questions and one matrix question that will take a tad longer.  All in all, 17 questions and 6-10 minutes of your time at the most.  In exchange, we will tell you what is going on – and what is going to happen.

Care to help? Here is the link.

(…) this is not a cloud-focused architecture and not the solution that Oracle should’ve sought for their first application destined to the recently-launched “Oracle Public Cloud”.  [...]]]> Earlier today I distributed a note to my clients and research distribution list with details on this event.  I am posting below two excerpts that summarize the key points made.

(…) this is not a cloud-focused architecture and not the solution that Oracle should’ve sought for their first application destined to the recently-launched “Oracle Public Cloud”.  The amount of effort, time, and resources to either integrate RightNow into Fusion or to make it more open and public to fit better in their cloud model is not going to be trivial.

While most of my colleagues saw this as a way for Oracle to offer a cloud-based customer service solution, I cannot concur with them.   I may be a little too strict on my definitions, but RightNow is not a cloud-based vendor.

There are also the few people who thought this was a move by Oracle to counter the acquisition of Assistly.  Far be it from it (and if it was, it failed miserably) as they play in different sub-markets and the cloud market is not yet sufficient interesting for Oracle and their clients.

Oracle should’ve acquired a smaller, but more robust and truer cloud offering that would allow them not to only to compete today but also be prepared for a better solution tomorrow.  While RightNow can deliver a fairly competitive solution for the complex contact center market today, their solution is very dated (more so than Salesforce) and not a true representation of a cloud-based solution; at best a hosted-application.

This deal signals a very healthy customer service market, for acquisitions, and we expect to see more acquisitions happening rather rapidly – especially by SAP and potentially Microsoft.  In addition, consolidation moves between vendors would not be surprising either – as vendors left behind are going to want to grow much faster than organic growth will allow them.

Please let me know any questions you may have.

I wrote that as [...]]]> Back in July, yes – I remember that far back, I wrote a piece on new paradigms on Knowledge Management.  It followed the acquisition of Inquira by Oracle, and was an expansion on the short piece I had written on my blog about it.

I wrote that as an article for CRM Magazine (I was not sure when it was going to publish - but it just did, check it).  I wanted to expand the conversation on where knowledge is going and what we need to do different. I want to explore further, and will in my agenda for 2012+, the idea of knowledge in use versus stored knowledge.

Since not all of you get around to Twitter these days, I wanted to bring this to your attention.  Would love your comments either there or here.

Thanks for reading.

One of the places [...]]]> When I was 19 I took a fly-fishing trip with my brother and a couple of friends.  It was a fantastic experience, Argentina is one of the top places in the world for fly-fishing: they don’t stock fish, all wild and they monitor very closely to ensure it remains that way.

One of the places we went to was one of the most famous points down there (sorry, cannot remember the name) where humongous, old brown trout were known to be.  Brown trout are more formidable adversaries than most other – they fight very, very hard.  Fishing in Argentina is no-barbs, catch-and-release; these fish provide a great challenge.

Needless to say, there were lots of anglers — sorry, fly-fishermen around.

We were surrounding the most typical spots where you’d expect to find these fine animals: deep holes, end of the rapids, under the shade, and many others.  None of us were getting anywhere – I mean, some people captured small fish here and there but none of the rumored “monsters” made their appearance.  We spent three days there, trying different things.  Kept getting small fish, but also wanted to see the large ones that the place was famous for.

As we were getting ready to leave on the third day, this older gentleman came in.  He had a very old rod, had made his own flies (we had the ones that we bought at the store, of course, as did most other people there), and went straight to a spot none of us had even attempted to fish before.  A very quiet part of the river where we were sure there were no fish.

He tied his home-made fly to his old rod and using an unconventional technique began to fish.  Of course, we dismissed him – I mean, we had the best rods, flies, and we knew what we were doing: the guides told us where to go, which flies to use, what to do – certainly he could not get better results.  We proceeded to continue packing and storing our gear and almost as we were going to leave, he caught one of the monsters.  It was an incredible show – lasted almost 40 minutes and ended up with a tired fish who lived to count the tale, and an elder gentleman who left and went back home.

Curious, as probably anyone else would’ve been by now, we asked the locals who that person was and how did he get so lucky.  Turns out the gentleman had been fishing that spot for over 30 years (give or take) and knew the fish, what they ate, how to attract them, how to hook them, and how to win the battles better than the “young-ums” with the expensive equipment.

He was not doing it because it was fashionable, he was doing because it was core to who he was, what he liked to do.

And, here it comes, the same applies to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and the many other public social networks.  It seems of late that we are all “young-ums” trying to get the big fish in the social networks, but none of us got a clue what we are doing.  We have the best intentions, the “best” guides (social media gurus), the best  rods (tools for managing Facebook and Twitter presence), and the best — well, the best of everything.  Yet, none of us can say with certainty that we got what we wanted (well, probably almost none can say what they wanted in the first place – right?)

It is time to step aside, let the older gentleman with the beat-up equipment come in, and watch him do his magic.  One thing he knows for certain: the new equipment and more energy won’t mean a thing at the end of the day.

It is knowing where the customers are, what they are doing, and how we can give them what they need in exchange for anything we want back.  Let him show us and lets stop pretending we know something we know very little about.

I mean, fish – n0t customers, fish.