I had to think about the difference between a buzzword and jargon. Jargon seems to be the accepted shorthand language people use when discussing a specialized subject they both understand, while buzzwords start life as terms used by marketing people to describe those specialized subjects from the outside. Buzzwords can evolve into jargon, but the evolutionary process can be brutal and the weak are culled from the herd mercilessly.

I don’t have that much trouble with buzzwords – I just try to avoid them if they’re confusing. And they can be. Let me coin a new buzzword – “fuzzword.” That’s a buzzword whose definition is fluid and subject to change without notice, logic or purpose. Right now “cloud computing” is a fuzzword. Not long ago, “socialprise” was also a fuzzword (and I wrote about that, then!). 

Fuzzwords drive me nuts, because they’re used to describe new things in a shorthand way – but since they can be applied to a broad category of things, the audience never catches on to what they mean. Either the end users define them on their own and bring them into the realm of jargon, or these words remain in the realm of marketing, where their impact and usefulness fade with time.

They’re also pretty easy to make up. In response to Ginger’s post, I suggested the buzzwords “Cloudsourcing,” “Tweetalitarianism” and “Analysales.” I suppose I could make up definitions to them, but I would rather not. That could actually make them useable in areas other than marketing.

Thus, I announce the first annual Inside CRM CRM Buzzword Contest. Send me your best original buzzword and its definition; the winner will be picked by my panel of experts (a mysterious group of marketing pros) over whom I exert total and ruthless veto power. You can email them directly to me at cbucholtz@tippit.com; the winner will be entitled to a dinner on me at the earliest time that I and that person are in the same geographic proximity (I’m in San Francisco, by the by). So do your worst, wordsmiths!

“Customers have a choice, and they can, if they prefer, have a technician out to do the install. If I am not mistaken, I believe the cost is $30, which is much less than the actual cost to send out a technician.”

I reviewed the material I had received from Comcast and the $30 option was nowhere to be seen. Anyhow, I hooked everything up on Friday, and because of some fairly confusing instructions (three different brochures helpfully offered “start here!” on their covers), the fact that the company sent one more converter box than we needed (and for which we were going to be charged a rental fee), and some problem associating the boxes with my bill when I called to activate, the total time of install was one hour, 55 minutes, 32 seconds, including 59 minutes, 19 seconds on the phone. Hooking and unhooking various boxes did not require any technical skill, but it sure took time.

The two hours aside, the part of Frank’s response that really stings is this:

“The reason for the shift to digital is it will free a lot of bandwidth, which will allow for a lot more HD, which is in high demand. We understand it may be an inconvenience but it will offer the options for more services and features in the future.”

In other words, I (and many other customers) did this so as to free up bandwidth that, ostensibly, would be then re-sold back to Comcast customers who want HD services. Let me re-state that: I did the work (in my case, two hours of work) to 1) get the service I was already paying for and 2) to give Comcast the ability to sell me more stuff. The odds of Comcast’s ability to up-sell me services at this point are probably easy to calculate.

My original point was that many customers believe their service providers don’t value their time. I think that’s been borne out.

Now, I have to say that some of Comcast’s call center agents are very good at what they do. They seem to be as honestly flummoxed about things as I am and they are profuse with their apologies, and they do eventually get things taken care of if you stay with them long enough. I just wish they didn’t have to get so much practice.

Just today on the Focus Blog I wrote about a great study TOA Technologies did gauging the experiences of customers waiting for installers/delivery people in the cable, telecommunications and satellite industries. Sadly, the numbers are exactly what you’d expect: many people feel that the companies they buy these services from really couldn’t give two figs about their time.

Waiting for the “cable guy” is a weirdly anachronistic activity that all too many of us have to engage in. The numbers in the survey show that 82 percent of us wait for at least a day a year, while 63 percent wait two days or more. When you consider that this amounts to you trading in your scarce vacation days for the honor of sitting and waiting (and hoping the technician shows up and is able to fix the problem), this is something people should - and do - take very personally.

I know I do. Here’s my story: I live in sleepy Alameda, a town of about 40,000 on an island just west of Oakland, California. Until earlier this year, we had our own dumpy little cable company, which was taken over by Comcast, whose first moves were to raise the prices, drop several channels from the package I had, and then restrict our Internet bandwidth (a nugget I pulled out of a technician who came to investigate my complaints and solved them by adjusting the amount of signal from a control box down the street). They also air commercials all over local TV incessantly, so I guess we know where their customer efforts are focused (new customer acquisition).

Comcast didn’t get to where it is by being dumb. By that I do not mean dumb about customer relationships. I mean dumb about doing what’s best for Comcast. The company decided to make half our basic channels digital (for reasons I have yet to hear explained very well). In order to see all the channels you’re being gouged for, the subscriber needs to hook up a converter and an additional box to his televisions – all of them – and use a new remote control. Toward that end, Comcast sent me two very large boxes filled with converters, remote units, cables, and many, many booklets.

So, instead of having to wait on a technician, I get to take a half a day to assemble this collection of stuff – pull out the TV, screw and unscrew multiple wires into multiple boxes, then call to activate them – just so I can continue to get what I’m paying for. Well, that sure beats a technician’s visit! I mean, from Comcast’s point of view. They could save a fortune if they could get the customers to do all their own field support!

From my point of view – y’know, that of the customer – it’s a massive pain. I look at the pile of devices that right now take up most of my dining room table and I can only imagine what this mound of technology looks like to an older, less tech-savvy person. Any money Comcast is saving by having all its customers go DIY is going to be eaten up by calls to the call center, and the result is not going to be happier customers.

I know Comcast’s Frank Eliason is a real social CRM guru (in fact, he’s a Rock Star of Social CRM!), but the stuff I and other subscribers suffer through is not going to be solved by some responsive Twittering. This is CRM sub-1.0 stuff – don’t make it hard for people to use your products and services. Companies do this by failing to create customer-centric processes and instead basing all decisions on what’s best for the company.

The one thing Comcast could have done to make this more palatable would have been to encase my mandatory new remote in that Nerf material. Then I could have thrown it at the TV every time I see a Comcast commercial.

I’ve had a number of interesting debates on who should lead the customer social media interaction in the last few weeks. In part, this question comes up because a great deal of social media was initiated in the Marketing department via listening or brand sentiment programs. What we do know is that all departments benefit- marketing, sales, service, product dev, engineering from the voice of the customer information that results from deploying social media.

And while I know that not everyone will agree, after studying all the various departments that could lead social media, I’m still convinced customer service should lead the customer social media interaction. The reason is that while a sales social media strategy might help sell more products or services or a listening platform might help branding and marketing create more convertible leads, those departments are only interested in their objectives - i.e., more sales or more leads… And that is as it should be.

The issue is that someone needs to be the social media customer interaction brand ambassador. Customer service is really the only customer interaction department… the others don’t really have a two-way relationship with customers. They push materials out… they do need the voice of the customer to do that better, but they (and the technology that supports their function) doesn’t support a two-way interaction. (You could argue that social media now enables a two-way relationship, but as a technologist, I’m looking at the enterprise software - MRM or SFA types of applications - that sales and marketing use to do their jobs.) Customer service technology’s only purpose is to interact with the customer. (It doesn’t always create a great experience, but it is built to create that interaction.)

You might think that I feel that way because I cover customer service and the customer experience. I hope that I have a balanced approach and I’m able to assess things as they are and be objective. I do hear the arguments and reasons for other departments leading the initiative or for owning the customer relationship. Mary Beth Kemp, VP and Principal Analyst and I had a wonderful brainstorm about this topic. Laura Ramos, VP and Principal Analyst and I have engaged in this same discussion. Here’s my thoughts:

Imagine if marketing professionals had to sit in the contact center and answer customer complaints about why their bill is so high or that their cell phone doesn’t get service or that their kid just drank some cleaner and needs helps…. Or if sales people had to figure out why a customer’s router isn’t connecting their new lap top to their new DSL service or that a customer hit “send” on a website and it didn’t seem like anything was happening so they hit it six more times and was charged for six airline tickets instead of one… Neither department’s strong suit is those types of customer interactions — nor do I think they would thrive if they spent their days and nites doing this types of activities.

The best strategy for a company is always to have everyone do what they do best. That’s why the various functions departments got created. Customer service is best suited to be the leader of social media customer interactions because that’s what they do, day in and day out. And with the business transformations that occur because of what social media reveals about a company, the things that don’t make sense about how a company interacts with a customer change. Those changes are empowering customer service to finally have the budget, resources and positional power to do right by customers; to create WOW customer experiences and to engage and enroll customers through genuine, authentic and honest communications.

I just had a great inquiry with a VP Of Marketing, who is leading the social media customer initiative at his company. He saw my ROI of Social Media Customer Service research and was interested in it because he felt that the largest ROI for his company will be when customer service deploys it. As a company considers social media, who owns the social media intiative is one of many questions that must be answered.

So in honor of my fav news broadcaster, Walter Cronkite, “That’s the way it is…”

or it is at least my 2 cents…

Love to hear your thoughts!

@drnatalie or npetouhoff@forrester.com

And thanks to @txglennross for his suggestion on changing the languaging from “own” to “lead” - I love that suggestion and changed my post because of his feedback.

These days, a lumpy pipeline is understandable. A lot of sales reps are investing an inordinate amount of time on prospects deep into the pipleline that are stuck, and may not convert. With fewer people spending money, that tendency makes sense, but it can also lead to a drought of early-pipeline prospects and the failure to devote enough time to the right people during the sales process.

Jill and Bill will talk about who to talk to, how to reach them and the ways that sales managers should manage this evolving process. I encourage you to register, think of some good questions and join us!

“We were strong in B2B, but not as strong in the B2C space and financial services,” he says. “We did not sufficiently mimic the paper experience – I think we nailed that on this release.”

He’s speaking of Echosign 5.0, which came out a few weeks ago. The new version allows users to sign – as in, draw their names on a screen in the same way they’d take a pen to paper – as well as digitally ink contracts. “These are truly written signatures, only you can have them work on a BlackBerry or an iPhone.” The Palm Pre is also part of the mobile mix.

Contracts can also be signed and managed through Zoho and Salesforce.com, and through Google Apps, Google Docs and Adobe Acrobat. The new version also includes a new pdf.-to-html engine. “There’s a lot of value to .pdf forms, but they aren’t really meant to accept signatures,” Lemkin says. “We essentially rebuilt Acrobat to enable .pdfs to be approved and signed in html.”

Echo sign allows subscriptions to start earlier, to close customers who might otherwise be anxious about completing contracts, and feeds data about unsigned contracts to sales reps, who can then proactively work on the final step in the sales process.

Echosign has had a good year, says Lemkin – sales increased by 30 percent from April to May, continuing a trend for the company, and many of the company’s new customers came about “virally” after they signed a document electronically. “Our goal is to acquire 70 percent of our customers virally,” Lemkin says.

Why is Echosign doing well? They’re one of an assortment of CRM “peripherals” that are doing well in the recession by providing very fast return on investment for relatively little expense. “It absolutely makes sense that there’s an acceleration of interest in tools that are instantly ROI-positive,” Lemkin says. The trick is making sure that the prospective users understand the value of the technology in question.

There’s been a push recently – especially in marketing automation – toward making systems easier to use. First came things like campaign management, so the ordinary marketer could use the system without the need for a trained “expert” to translate ideas into actions. Lately, we’ve been seeing approaches that help make process creation easier, so that things like lead routing can be defined easily and quickly and allow managers to react in real time to changing conditions.

Nothing in the “CRM-isphere” exists in isolation, so it’s not a big surprise to see ideas like these hop and skip across to the service side of thing. KANA Software’s KANA 10, a service platform aimed at large enterprises which debuted yesterday, is a good example of just this – it’s a solution that confers that ability to manage processes on the fly to the service side of the CRM equation.

“We’ve adopted the idea of ‘service experience management,’” says Vikas Nehru, KANA’s vice president of marketing. “We want to deliver a good service experience for the customer, and at the same time allow contact center managers to take control of the service experience.”

What does that entail? The new version is a Web services-based solution that leverages IBM’s service-oriented architecture (SOA) portfolio and KANA’s own experience with knowledge management and adds what KANA calls “experience flow functionality.” That functionality is the key to the solution; it provides a drag-and-drop interface for creating service processes, allowing managers to understand what customers need most often and adapt processes quickly to meet those needs.

“The service process – or experience flows – can now be built by service experts, not by IT,” says Nehru. “The business user can make the changes, add tab or delete tabs, and so on. Those changes can be made in minutes, not months.”

The process also allows managers to model the effects of changes to the processes before taking them live so they can “understand the value derived from each process,” Nehru says. That also ought to help them spot unintended problems that might be created by changes before they’re unleashed upon the customers.

The applications’ web services architecture allows existing technology and resources to be linked into a single application, providing a unified view of all pertinent customer information. “We really think we are bridging the gap between business and IT this way,” says Nehru.

This application is another step in the trend of offloading the responsibility for implementing process changes from IT and giving it back to the people who determine, execute and evaluate those processes. No longer do you have to suffer through a bad set of service processes while waiting for IT to get to your project, and more importantly, no longer will customers have to suffer because of your company’s internal inefficiencies in process management. And why should they? Those inefficiencies aren’t their fault.

Other companies in this space were quick to react to the news. For example, another SaaS provider, youcalc, is offering LucidEra customers six months of free service as an enticement to migrate to their product.

Why didn’t LucidEra make it? Some are blaming its relatively high cost; others point that its focus on sales ignored other areas of business that could also provide helpful metrics. Certainly the economy did not help. In any event, the company’s technology will re-appear in time within another product; the company is reportedly putting its IP up for sale.

If there’s any other good news in this, it’s that LucidEra is still supporting its customers, and is said to be working with customers to help them migrate to other platforms. They could establish a model of how to shut down an SaaS service – certainly not the accomplishment they set out to achieve, but one that could be helpful to others in the future.

Everyone knows that social media is going to have a major impact on CRM (the concept and the technology), but as lot of people on the sales side struggle with exactly how that will manifest itself. There doesn’t seem to be any such struggle on the service side of the equation; there’s a group of companies who seem almost overly eager to bring social media into a service context. There’s a real cultural difference between these companies and their competitors, I think; one group defines itself as “customer service solution providers” and the other still sees itself as “contact center solution providers.” One orients its identification around customers, the other around the technology. That’s a pretty telling choice of words.

Anyway, the idea that social media can provide almost a service hotline is really catching on. The fact of the matter is that many people, burned by poor customer service experiences in the past, may click a URL and ask a peer community for help before they dial for help to a vendor. Moreover, because the rapid evolution of communities, experts are starting to make themselves known through the depth of their participation and the usefulness of their comments.

Helpstream is not only acknowledging that fact, it’s seeking to leverage those experts to both improve service and cut the cost of service. First, it’s introduced HelpExchange, a new community intended to help its customers tap into best practices for customer service excellence, many of which it culled from experts in various communities. “It’s really driven by customers,” says Tony Nomelka, the company’s CEO. The exchange currently offers 40 in-depth articles on topics ranging from “Attracting Members and Evangelizing Community” to “Selecting and Deploying Technologies.”

That’s useful – and it shows that Helpstream’s walking its own walk. On top of that, last week the company introduced ActivityStream, a very interesting product that takes some social networking metaphors and uses them to provide a platform for “subscribing” to experts within communities, allowing users to keep close tabs on the most useful participants in conversations, and allowing companies to stay engaged with them and understand the conversations they’re influencing. The platform allows users to see what other participants have worked on in the community and understand their areas of expertise, and make it easier to find answers to questions by flagging other users who have common experiences and interests.

The company also introduced a mashup that allows Helpstream’s customer service functionality into Salesforce.com and Oracle CRM On Demand, so that users interact with the Helpstream portal while service and sales reps interact with them through the CRM interface they’re accustomed to.

This emphasis on the interface is really interesting; as we all know by now, adoption is the No. 1 killer of CRM efforts (you knew that, right? Right?), and letting users employ the interface that makes them feel most comfortable is one way of encouraging adoption. Exactly what that interface looks like – a Facebook page, Salesforce.com’s interface, a customer service interface – is not important as long as the interface allows the user to do what he or she needs to do. It’s a sign that certain vendors are letting go of the vanity around their own interfaces and approaching the issue from a customer-centric point of view – in other words, using CRM to help sell CRM. That’s an encouraging sign.

I’ve written about this in the past, but it bears repeating: All the CRM technology, process refinement, customer intelligence and sales efficiency in the world is worthless unless your company is truly customer-focused, and never more so than when a customer has a service issue. One bad service experience can turn all the relationship-building a company does into nothing more than hollow promises and unmet expectations. It’s like a friendship: It’s easy to pal around when things are going well, but your real friends are there in tough times. And the companies that understand this have the opportunity to turn tough times into long-term loyalty.

In service-intensive industries – cable television, telecommunications, utilities – you’d think that providers would have seized on these opportunities a long time ago. Their customer relationships start with a service call, and any future service calls are likely to be urgent, since these industries represent technologies we’ve grow to take for granted. But even in churn-intensive areas like telecommunications, service has taken a back seat.

Why? “So many businesses are focused on creating the next big thing, the next great product, and fail to see the value of putting the focus on service,” says Yuval Brisker, CEO of TOA. “As a result, a lot of intensely creative people are focused on innovation in products, but very few are given the opportunity to innovate around supporting the customer.”

Brisker’s company works at solving one obvious area with room for improvement – customer appointment management. The goal is to move away from the old model – “Our technician will be there between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.” – and move to a new one where customers are kept informed, the service window is narrowed – and providers end up saving money, too. For example, in cases where a customer must leave during that window, there should be a system in which the customer can call and let the provider know this data, and which allows the data to be routed to service personnel. Without it, a technician may visit an empty house, delaying the customer’s service and necessitating another visit. Each visit can cost between $400 and $1000 – so making sure that every visit goes to a ready customer is important.

“You want a chain of communication to the customer,” said Brisker, “so they know they can make that call and it’ll be heard and acted upon, and so they know when service will arrive.” TOA delivers that in a SaaS solution, with a self-learning capability that updates the system’s reactions based on past customer patterns.

Those are the basics of what TOA is providing, but Brisker sees the opportunity to be much larger. He sees these industries in need of harnessing some of the intelligence they collect about their users and expanding their loyalty-building efforts from service calls to other areas. “For example, we all see the offers made to new customers, but what about the customers who stay with providers?” he said. “How can we make them feel we care for them and the $70 or $80 a month they spend for services? That constituency needs to be taken care of, and there’s a need to acknowledge loyalty in the long term.”

But that again goes to the idea that innovators don’t get directed to customer service, Brisker said. “Service has been relegated to the backwater,” he said. “You just can’t provide a great product and then have creativity stop there.”