Beyond the current state of the market, there are two other trends that are directly influencing the evolution of enterprise social technology. First is the external/customer communications. I’ve been discussing with many industry experts and customers the concept that enterprises are becoming the contact center. Not the contact center as we know, but the center customers tap into for information held with knowledge workers. Customers want to interact with brands through their preferred channel of choice, including Facebook and Twitter, but also via other one-to-one social interaction channels such as chat, knowledgebase and e-mail. As I‘ve mentioned to my kids, social interactions are not limited to tools like Facebook or Twitter, but one-to-one conversations at the dinner table also count as social interactions. Hope this analogy adds color to my perspective here.

The second factor driving the use of enterprise social technology is the need to connect distributed organizations. Large (and mid-size) organizations need the proper tools to keep employees engaged as if they are sitting in a conference room across from each other, when in many cases they are located in different states or countries. In a contributed piece to Forbes, I discussed in detail the benefits collaboration technology brings to organizations and their employees.

In 2012, the convergence of these two trends will be unavoidable and enterprise social technology will become the crowdsourced knowledge platform that will ultimately support customer interactions. There are very few companies in the marketplace positioned to take full advantage of external communications channels and internal collaboration platforms to meet existing and new customer demands, become a critical technology to enterprises, and deliver on shareholders’ expectations. I have no doubt that the convergence of these trends will be the wave of the future.

Well, the answer is not really. A report published this year by ThinkJar cleverly noted that Knowledge Management in “early 2000s re-emerged in one critical area: customer service.”  However, any organization staffed by knowledge workers understands that knowledge is produced and used across all processes and functions.

The emergence of the social customer has created more pressure for companies to deliver better products and services as consumers demand flexibility and integration from both online and traditional channels. So, to better service customers, organizations need to tap into knowledge in new ways from the design and manufacturing of products and services to go-to-market strategies. More than ever Knowledge Management is critical in enabling enterprises to improve their products and services, increase operational efficiencies and maintain a competitive edge.

Although this is not a new notion in the marketplace and most organizations have a clear understanding of this concept, it is common that “when an organization deploys Knowledge Management systems they fail to leverage what they have done in the past.” As discussed by ThinkJar,“each new instance where knowledge is necessary is usually accompanied by the creation of a new knowledge repository (such as a knowledge base, content management system, or document storage implementation) or new rules on how to use the existing knowledge. It then becomes a new island of automation – deployments that are disconnected from the rest of the setup and must be supported and maintained independently, thus increasing the costs and efforts of using Knowledge Management.”

To nicely illustrate the paper “Six Steps to Knowledge Management Nirvana,” we created this infographic highlighting how organizations should change their approach to Knowledge Management in the collaborative enterprise.

Guest Author, Esteban Kolsky is the Principal and Founder of ThinkJar.

I am constantly asked, especially this time of the year, what is going to happen next year.  The question comes from everyone I talk to: practitioners, management, consultants, service providers, and system integrators – even other analysts.  And, while it is an interesting exercise to compare notes (we all have our biases and visions of where we are going) to me is far more interesting to aggregate all of them and create a picture of where the industry, the investment, and the growth is going.

The first thing anyone trying to see the future needs to do is to define the market we are forecasting.  While Gartner, IDC, and Forrester (as well as Ovum, Frost & Sullivan, and many other analyst firms that track numbers) put Customer Service around $3.5 Billion, the reality is that there are three markets (or rather, sub-markets if you may) that work differently, grow at different rates, and are even investing in different things.

First, there is the traditional “Call Center” market.  Large B2C organizations with huge call centers make the bulk of this group.  These organizations are focused on making their call centers (some of which have thousands of agents working there in round-the-clock shifts) operate at top efficiency; the interactions they handle, with few exceptions, are simple, easy to solve, and numerous – very large volumes.  They may experiment in other channels, but mostly focused on the call center and not interested in tying them all together (due to the value for the organization in regards to the investment necessary –I hate to call it ROI).

Second, there is the “Contact Center” market.  This is what I used to cover as eService in the early 00s at Gartner and still cover today (in spite of the change of name to Web Customer Service – which is not, since it encompasses more than the web – but I digress).  These organizations handle more complex transactions, and intricate channel management and integration.  The ideal scenario is a multi-channel, multi-function contact center that can handle any interaction between customers and organizations.  Automation remains the ultimate goal for cost-reduction.  Focused on customer satisfaction, not the most efficient operations necessarily, but remains competitive on costs given the latency (email) and multi-tasking (chat) nature of their operations as well as the potential for automation.

Third, there is the “Cloud” market.  This is a nascent market that started about 2-3 years ago; it is seeing more and more startups and established vendors interested.  They focus on a mix between efficient low-cost (leveraging the cloud) and effective high-touch (via cross-channel resolutions) to deliver the best of both worlds: a satisfied customer that is cheap to manage.  The complexity of their operations is varied, and in some instances we are seeing voice being integrated tightly into it, but the early state of the market means that there are not established models or best practices for their implementation.

Now that we have properly identified the different markets – where are they going in 2012? Simple.

Call Centers are investing in, what else, improved efficiency.  Workforce Management and / or Workforce Optimization are key initiatives, together with IVR (speech recognition and better automation) and outsourcing.  Who invests where depends on each organization and how mature they are and where they are going.  Their overall goal is to create a better setup where IVR can take some of the volume away and where they can have either the lower-cost (outsourcing in most cases) or the best agents available (WFM and WFO).

Contact Centers are going to be investing in understanding what wondrous new channel – Social.  More specifically, since we already tried and proven that Twitter is not very good for Customer Service other than escalation and Facebook suffers from lack of volume, communities.  It is not about deploying communities, it is about understanding them and what they can do to help a customer service organization deliver more effective interactions, at a lower cost point (high touch, low cost).  The budget that is left it going to replacements and enhancements to existing implementations.  There is limited interest in cross-channel reporting and management – but no tools that make it easy yet, nor a lot of understanding of what the return value is for the investments; mostly pilots and small projects to figure out cross-channel right now.

Cloud is where the fun is going to be.  As I said earlier, very small market – but with lots of potential.  Right now, mostly experimental.  The lack of a cloud infrastructure in the organization (non-existent internal architecture as well as incipient understanding of the effects of cloud computing in the enterprise) makes it not yet proven or trusted.  However, there are some service providers in this market that have proven over the last few years, there is “something “there.  That something is what we will find out in the next 2-3 years before jumping into it. I see the most potential, both for vendors and organizations, in understanding and adopting this model.  Time and patience are the requirements, understanding is the constraint.

As for investment growth rates (the other perennial question this time of the year) I can say that the Call Center is going to have the traditional 3-6% growth, Contact Centers will fare a tad better at 5-8% growth, and Cloud will have incredible growth in the double-digits (if not triple).  Alas, if you consider its current level of investment, not as impressive in dollars.

What do you think? Is this where your organization is? Are your goals and budgets different from these? Are you building a different model to provide Customer Service?

Would love to know, just post a comment or contact me to chat.

About the author:

Esteban Kolsky is the Principal and Founder of ThinkJar, an advisory and research think-thank focused on Customer Strategies. Follow Esteban @ekolsky.

The customer service industry continues to undergo a transformation through recent consolidations. While these transactions bring great benefits to the companies involved in M&A activity, they can also create service disruptions for customers.

Forrester’s Kate Leggett noted in a blog post that issues around service agreement are likely to arise when companies involved in M&A activity have disparate approaches to product vision, sales strategy, and especially corporate culture. Esteban Kolsky, ThinkJar, emphasized in an analysis that the recent M&A activity signals a very healthy customer service market as vendors seek accelerated growth, and Ray Wang, Constellation Research, cautioned customers impacted by M&A deals to request additional guarantees for service level commitments.

In response to the recent changes in the customer service industry, Moxie Software is announcing a Conversion Program offering six free months for customers that switch to Moxie’s Customer Spaces solution.  The key elements of the offering include:

• Immediate availability to qualified businesses that have existing deployments from other vendors, including RightNow, KANA and eGain.
• New customers must execute their purchase by December 31, 2011 to take full advantage of the program and the six months free offer.

Through this offer, new customers can experience the following benefits:

• Moxie provides a predictable cost of ownership – our pricing options don’t penalize our customers for their success.
• Moxie’s Customer Spaces offer multiple delivery options: OnDemand and OnPremise – our customers have expressed requirements for flexible deployment options to meet their ever-changing business and technical requirements.
• Moxie is CRM agnostic – our solutions provide a variety of integration options to CRM providers or other internal systems.

For additional details about this Conversion Program, please contact Moxie’s customer service at 1-800-474-1149 (US), +44-870-904-1122 (Int’l access), or online.

I am pleased to announce the appointment of Jonathan Schwartz, former president and CEO of Sun Microsystems, to Moxie’s board of directors. Jonathan is a great addition to our leadership team, and his experience in leading a Fortune 200 company will be extremely valuable in fueling our growth and solidifying our position as a leader in the enterprise social software market.

To maintain a competitive edge and address dynamic changes in today’s business environment, companies must recognize the importance of open collaboration to improve business’ efficiencies and drive innovation. Many leading enterprises in the pharmaceutical, digital media and entertainment, finance, and education sectors are working with Moxie Software, taking full advantage of enterprise social technologies.

We look forward to serving our customers and continuing our solid growth trajectory as companies embrace collaborative technologies to facilitate interactions with all their constituencies, driving better business results.  You can find out more details about today’s news in our press release.

In this blog, I want to share my thoughts and vision on what I see coming up on the horizon for enterprise social software, which will help companies drive better business results by providing high-value technology that increase their competitive positioning.

Here are a few of the technologies that will continue to drive value for enterprise social technologies:

• Social Analytics: It will bring deeper insights into social networking data and correlation between users’ behavior and performance that can help companies better train employees for higher performance and leadership. Social analytics needs to focus on making sense out of the noise, and it is important to fine tune and further enhance the recommendation engine to better personalize a social workspace by recommending the right content, people or groups that are most relevant to users.
• Social Knowledge: Knowledge is at the core of social collaboration and bringing people to the right knowledge faster and more accurately is the key to social collaboration. We have seen the transformation of knowledge from a command and control (KM) approach, to crowd-sourcing (Wiki), to community (forums/collaboration).  Moxie Software has one of the top knowledge base solutions in the industry that tightly integrates to our product suite, and I am excited to work with the team to make it the number one social knowledge base in the industry.
• Driving the Social Graph through Integration:  Adoption is key to building a strong community. Moxie Software features a comprehensive integration strategy for reaching into existing tools and systems of record to build and maintain the organizational social graph that provides value to adopters and incentives to increase adoption.  It also delivers intermittent rewards to encourage enthusiasm and consistency, all for the purpose of creating and feeding a healthy community.
• Customer Centricity:  Internal collaboration has always been around internal projects, driving efficiencies, innovation, etc. Now, we are looking at ways to include the voice of the customer in these conversations.  Having a footprint in the contact center with Customer Spaces gives us a unique opportunity to include the voice of the customer within the internal collaboration paradigm – a huge competitive advantage – as the focus is all about the customer.

The enterprise social networking software market is an exciting one, and enterprises want the best applications that bring people to knowledge faster than any other technology, and that can ensure performance and scalability in all areas to handle thousands of users.

As Facebook redefined communications in our personal lives, similar social networking technologies are being implemented across small to large enterprises to fit the new, collaborative dynamics at the workplace. However, many enterprise solutions in the marketplace lack the intuitive, people-centric design and simplicity found in the tools that we use to communicate with family and friends.

These solutions have poor adoption as they are designed based on older, document-centric technology instead of taking into consideration a people-centric approach that facilitates enterprise collaboration by being designed “For the Way People Work,” driving the latest trends around enterprise social software technology.

A recent usability study conducted by the independent firm Usability Resource, which analyzed and compared Moxie’s Software people-centric approach to enterprise social software versus the document-centric approach from Microsoft’s SharePoint, found that online community managers want a people-centric to drive enterprise-wide adoption of social enterprise software, increasing collaboration among employees, partners and customers. The infographic below details the results of the study:

Moxie Software has announced key social media and mobile capabilities to its Spaces by Moxie product suite that was focused on enhancing its customer service application, Customer Spaces. Different from any previous product update, Moxie is taking a holistic, well-balanced, approach executing on a long-term vision, and aiming to break the barriers between employee and customer collaboration, the two pillars of our product suite.

Obviously, Moxie is doing this by taking into careful consideration technology trends and the valuable feedback of our customers. By now, most people understand the power of adding a social component to customer service strategies. Social continues to gain greater prominence, and companies have no choice, but to engage with customers through social channels. By the same token, the need to communicate with customers through their preference channel makes mobile technology support another critical component in delivering a superior customer service.

Based on research conducted by Don Tapscott, author and advisor on media, technology and innovation, and also chairman of Moxie Insight, collaboration is at the heart of the biggest transformation corporations have seen in a century. This transformation is being driven by the maturation of the technology, mobility, a new generation of digital natives who want to work and interact with their favorite brands in new ways.

Along with social, latest mobile capabilities are a key requirement to meet the expectations of the social customer. Video and real-time collaborative technologies are creating big changes to the way companies interact with their customers, driving the need for internal resources to share information in a more dynamic way so customer service agents can accurately address end-users’ needs. It is impossible for enterprises to create an exceptional customer service experience if they can’t share knowledge effectively across the organization to ultimately respond to any customer problems.

Imagine this scenario: Today, when a customer broadcasts an issue on Twitter, companies typically handle this with 2-3 people who are tasked to monitor social media by sending a broadcast or direct message via Twitter.  In most cases, these frontline employees (and therefore the customers they are serving) are isolated from some of the best resources in the enterprise.

What Moxie Software is doing is connecting the people on the frontline to the brightest talent in the company and the best knowledge to solve the customer issue in a collaborative environment using Blogs, Wikis, Ideastorms and Projects.  Moxie Software’s CEO Tom Kelly discusses in this video our integrated approach to developing technologies that facilitate employee and customer interactions.

In response to latest technology trends to meet the demands of the social customer, we enhanced our Customer Spaces applications by adding these critical features:

• Mobile Capabilities for Knowledgebase
  Moxie Software™ is extending its powerful Knowledgebase that crosses all channels of communication to mobile platforms. Moxie Software’s Knowledgebase is now optimized for Apple’s iPad and iPhone, as well as for Android and Blackberry devices. Companies can now deliver via mobile devices the same comprehensive online knowledge repository that provides accurate information to customers, partners and employees.
• Enhanced Social Media Integration
  Moxie Software has further enhanced integration of its social media listening and sentiment analysis with Facebook, Yelp, Flickr and Yahoo Firehose (YQL), adding to its existing integration with Twitter, You Tube, Bing, Blogger, and Digg among others. Also included is the ability to send direct messages back to users on Twitter. By providing companies the most complete access to online social media channels, Spaces by Moxie can help customers protect their brand integrity by delivering the best customer support, and enabling rapid and accurate response to end-users.
• Instant Messaging Capabilities
  Moxie Software is adding XMPP support for chat – an open protocol that will make it easy for popular chat client’s or web service to integrate with Customer Spaces’ chat. This platform is extensible to support other instant messaging protocols, enabling customers to contact an organization via Instant Messaging, and allowing agents to respond to IM within the Agent Workspace. It also provides report and tracking of instant messaging activity.
• Smart Personalization for Better Web Customer Service Experience
  Smart Personalization integrates securely with legacy systems, tailoring content based on end-user purchase histories, support interactions, or other factors making the customer service experience quicker and more relevant. Its self-maintaining design always delivers the most updated and valuable information, while virtually eliminating the need to manage customer profiles outside legacy systems like CRM.

Moxie’s integrated product suite dramatically enhances employee and customer communications, facilitating collaboration between these two sides to truly deliver great services to end-users. This seems like a simplistic approach, almost a no-brainer; however, many companies fail to execute on this basic concept.