2012 Scores 5.2 In Our CRM & Customer Service Initiative Prediction Q1 Checkup –- How Ya Doin’ ?

With my treadmill returning to its traditional use as a clothes hanger as of Feb 1, the profusion of “yellow stickies” around my computer monitor reminding me of “flowers”, “chocolates” and  “small  sparkly things” as we  approach Valentine’s day and our clients’ budgets beginning to solidify for the 2012 year it must be about time to reassess our new year’s resolutions and predictions for CRM and Customer Service.

At Customer Results we aggregated some published predictions from “smart people” with our own client conversations and observations to develop a list of the Top 11 things we believe companies are paying extra special attention to in 2012. (“11 as we leave 2011”, pretty sexy huh !).

We then scored our perception of progress in the 2012 kickoff season, added them up and divided by 11 to get our score of 5.2

The “smart people” list includes Kerry Bodine of Forrester http://blogs.forrester.com/kerry_bodine/12-01-09-forresters_2012_customer_experience_predictions, Gartner Analysts Adam Sarner, Ed Thompson, Praveen Sengar and Jenny Sussin  (www.gartner.com/id=1845220), our friends at Eptica (www.eptica.com) a rapidly growing multichannel, multilingual solution provider for Customer Interaction Management based in the UK, France, Spain, Canada and Singapore and a few industry experts like Judy Mod of Social Gastronomy (www.socialgastronomy.com) .

1. The Relationship Power Will Continue To Move From The Seller To The Buyer / Customer Causing A Need For New Sales Skills And Channels – Score 5 – Both in the B2B and B2C segments customers and prospects are increasingly educating themselves on the web and also on social  media about product options and provider options including talking to others about experiences. This means today’s prospect is often much more educated when they arrive at your “door” and they expect you and your sales people to treat them appropriately with more knowledge about your competitive positioning and to be able to collaborate with you anytime, anywhere, anyhow. The most visible evidence of this we see are the increasing questions being asked about Social Sales in our clients, specifically ”how to make the cash register ring with Social Media.” And the growing evidence from people like Social Gastronomy (www.socialgastronomy.com” that complex B2B sales outcomes improve with strong social media centric approaches. A few leaders get it but the Results trend is strong.
2. It’s Social Sales – Score 4 – We see growing focus on social interactions in marketing and service but are just starting to see the first sales improvement results from social media in our clients. This is at the very earliest “pilot” stages, involves a massive change in sales culture, is causing a large volume of “advisory consulting” projects to occur but the number of people who can actually execute this new world or have formalized processes to help you execute are very limited (a nod to Judy and Social Gastronomy www.socialgastronomy.com who are one of the few out there with us). The B2B pilot projects being initiated are in building customer communities (eg Facebook, Twitter) with customer to customer and customer to company interaction capabilities (DM, IM etc), allowing customers to talk to each other about your products and engage with your sales team in groups driving a tangible impact on sales volumes. The case studies are starting to emerge that say “yes this works” but we will see.
3. C-level execs will officially name customer experience as a top strategic priority – Score 4 – We have seen this as very variable across companies and industries. If the allocation of increased budgets or the elevation of a Chief Customer of Customer Experience Officer is a judge then not much has happened yet. On the other hand if the paranoia about Social and Mobile trends in the “C” suite and the understanding that the power in the B2C and B2B relationship is shifting from the “seller” to the “buyer” is anything to judge then this is definitely happening. We will see if the money follows the talk as the year evolves.
4. Go Mobile – Score 8 – This is definitely a strong trend. Every client we talk to wants as many customer interactions as possible to be available anytime, anyway, anywhere, anyhow on any device. However the hard, proven realized business case benefits metrics are still being fleshed out as we see the capabilities launch from the technology solution providers to actually provide customizable, full feature mobile capabilities with appropriate device sensing and the world of mobile interfaces has a long way to go.
5. Unify Customer Experiences – Score 5 – This is definitely happening as the tools become increasingly sophisticated for companies to provide integrated contact center desktops for multichannel interactions without losing the “knowledge” embedded in the experience. The area where we have seen little movement is the solutions available to do the same thing on a mobile device (phone or tablet) which will be a great accelerator once it becomes prevalent. We are fortunate enough to have two of the market leaders in this space headquartered right here in metro Atlanta, Jacada and Openspan and a strong Mobile technology community due to AT&T Mobility’s operations here  so it would not surprise us if a number of the emerging technologies in mobile virtualization emerge from here.
6. Get Personal – Score 4 – Customers have become very comfortable with personalized experiences in many parts of their life (Amazon.com, the best financial services sites, the best retail operations like Nordstrom and Saks etc). They have learned that giving information about themselves and their connections / social networks to companies will deliver rewards in the best interactions.  We see this as a strong undercurrent with major growth in sophistication as the year evolves. One of the most interesting areas of personalization we see this year is multilingual / multicultural social interactions. Specifically if your B2B or B2C social strategy should be to engage “micro-communities” of customers in discussions with you in addition to your larger community and how this drives a need for deeper understanding of how they want to be “talked to” including language and style. Customers may underestimate the difficulty of this but demand it anyway and will flock to the first few companies to get it right. A few companies are leading the way in this arena.
7. Channel Choice & Continuity – Score 4 – customers want to be able to make their own channel choices and that includes self service channels and talking to other customers. We hear companies discussing this and some execution in the B2C sector but the number of B2B companies providing access for their customers to talk to each other is still limited. And the whole issue of a multichannel conversation is still evolving with respect to customers moving from channel to channel and the conversation remaining seamless (I cannot continue an IM conversation when I get in my car to drive to a meeting so why can’t I just move form voice to voice).
8. MultiChannel Knowledge Management Focus Will Grow – Score 6 – We definitely see a growing number of companies placing more budget on their focus on multichannel knowledge collection, management and analysis of that data. The perceived importance of this was greatly demonstrated by the acquisitions of two market leaders, Autonomy by HP and RightNow by Oracle, in 2011. These acquisitions have opened up market opportunity for newer, independent, multiplatform solution providers like Eptica for clients who are shy of the major players and their intentions and are obviously also driving a flurry of speculation about who Dell, IBM, SAP, Microsoft etc will acquire to also play in this market (we think “the wildcard” would be for Xerox to play here picking up someone like eGain with Xerox’s Information Management legacy and outsourcing strength after acquiring ACS).
9. The Game Will Be Won By Those Who Bring Powerful Data And Predictive Analytics To Truly Understand The Voice of the Customer, Their Behavioral Needs And Become True Business And Life Partners – Score 4 – The tools exist to analyze the exponentially increasing volumes of data about your customers’, the groups or social networks they inhabit, the conversations they have, the feedback they give (text and speech analytics), the behaviors they exhibit and to predict what they will do and how they will respond to particular offers. This is in the earliest stages and still largely dominated by the largest companies.
10. SFDC and Microsoft Will Continue To Rise – Score 8 – Salesforce.com is becoming an ever more important player in the customer experience sector. IN addition to the growing portfolio of solutions (Radian6, Service Cloud, Model Metrics etc) we increasingly hear rumors of a number of client conversations where SFDC is being asked to provide execution services including can SFDC provide resources to help run better sales or service processes and teach organizations to be better sales professionals. We think it is fair to say that only Microsoft knows what Microsoft’s strategy is in the Customer Interaction arena. But suffice it to say Microsoft Dynamics continues to rise in importance in the CRM world and they still have TellMe (one of my favorite self service companies back in the day) in their back pocket and have the interesting relationship with Aspect. If they swooped in and bought Nuance and a few other companies who knows what would be next.
11. Talent Continues To Be An Issue – Score 5 – Despite a global recession and the theoretical large numbers of available people and a growing number of technology professionals available across the world the number of people with sophisticated, behaviorally focused, multichannel Customer Interaction skills is severely limited. The smartest technology providers are snapping up relationships with boutique services companies (like Customer Results he says in a self serving fashion). Suffice to say that few but the largest companies will win  this with their current people and the logic of hiring expensive and hard to retain people doesn’t hold so the best model is to engage retention contracts with specialized providers.