Latest Updates: Web 2.0 RSS

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  Kate Leggett 05:57:09 am on September 22, 2009 | 0 | # |
  Tags: Communities, CRM, Customer Experience, customer relationship management, Voice of the Customer, Web 2.0

  Shopping, with a little help from my friends

  Even in this down economy, Forrester Research projects that holiday sales will reach more than $33 billion this season. That’s a lot of dough, and here are some guiding principles to help shape a successful online shopping experience.

  #1 – Make shopping fun. Entice users even before they are customers by using a consistent UI on all your site. Offer a variety of self-service methods, like visual decision trees that use pictures of products help orient users to their correct product, and guide them down a particular discovery path. Let them search by price range, color or even by personality like gadget geek, mom-to-be or fashionista.

  Interactive sites relying on technologies like AJAX work. You can drag and drop content on a page to where you want to interact with it. Use rollovers, sliders for price range pickers, or a color palette to search for items of a single color to make sites fun.

  Let peer pressure help you out by listing top searches or hot buys are – both which serve as good indicators of current trends..

  #2 – Let Users use their own words. Users don’t always think in the context of company-generated navigational topics. Let users tag content and browse tag clouds.

  #3 – Information on the User’s Terms. Push relevant service alerts or policy changes out. Let users create watchlists so that they can be alerted when an item goes on sale, or falls below a target price.

  #4 – Use the wisdom of crowds. You trust peer advice over company recommendations. Kaboodle, for example, touts “shopping is more fun with friends”. Append feedback forms and ratings to content and act on it.

  You will be more successful if you can streamline the shopping experience, and use community input to validate purchase decisions.
   

• Kate Leggett 02:21:50 pm on July 2, 2009 | 0 | # |
  Tags: Customer Experience, experience management, Web 2.0

  Breaking down the walls – a new approach to customer service

  This week, KANA announced its new ‘Service Experience Management’ platform, and so far the early reviews have been really positive (see here and here and here). What’s exciting about KANA 10 is that it lets customer service managers take control of the service experience by putting tools in their hands for them to be able to craft and deploy the service experience that they want their agents (or customers) to follow. Magic huh? Not really! KANA gives the service managers WYSIWYG tools to assemble a customer service process flow. The building blocks include, for example, standard customer service actions like “send email”, “search knowledgebase”, “open a case”, as well as customer specific steps such as “look up order history” or “track a package.”

  The magic of this tool is that as the service manager is building the process flow, the desktop for every process step is being created automatically with no IT involvement. Each process step presents to the agent the exact contextual information that they need at that particular point in servicing the customer. It’s not a mashup of say 30 different customer service applications – it’s targeted information pushed to the agent to give him the exact tools that he needs to help the customer out.

  The underlying technology is a co-mingling of KANA’s customer service product history in the ERMS, case management and knowledge space with IBM’s service oriented architecture and BPM know-how and even some cool Web development tools from WaveMaker.

  What this product does, is break down the walls between interaction-centric customer service and BPM that is typically found in the back office – it’s for the first time bringing process and governance to the front office. Judging by how customers are looking to use KANA 10, it’s also going to break down many of the traditional barriers between service and sales and even marketing as well. We think the advantages to this approach are numerous. For example, it cuts down on agent training time as agents are guided through the right process, instead of being left to ALT-Tab through all the applications they have open on their desktop. It helps with compliance to company policy (think about the cost of not following SOX or HIPAA regulations). It helps streamline the service experience, cutting costs and improving satisfaction. And it certainly will help boost up-sell and drive loyaly as customers get answers faster, and are treated consistently regardless of which channel or department they initially contact.

  And there’s much more to the product, like predictive analytics that help monitor SLAs in real time and built-in middleware to easily link in existing customer data stores and applications. Email me to organize a demo, or learn more about it. Or click here for a flash introduction to KANA 10 for more details.

  Happy 4th of July!
   
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  Esteban Kolsky 12:11:17 am on November 14, 2008 | 5 | # |
  Tags: CEM, Communities, community, CRM, Customer Experience, customer experience management, customer service, enterprise feedback management, feedback, Voice of the Customer, Web 2.0

  Customer Service is Dead — Long Live Community Service!

  I have had lots of requests lately dealing with social media, and how to make good use of this for Customer Service and CRM – even broadening the scope into the entire enterprise.  Of course, this is related to the “explosion” in twitter, plurk, Facebook, blogging and related tools.  But, is there something else there? is there value in implementing communities?

  Yes, yes, yes, and yes.  This is the future of customer service.

  I have been working with communities, back then called collaborative customer service or forums, for some eight years.  Of course, back then we had little to go on – some forums, communities were nascent at best –  and we could not see how it would work best.  I wrote about it as the intermediate step between Customer Interaction Hub and Secret Customer Service.  Got some interest, did some strategy work, small lab-based deployments but almost no one at that time even attempted to take on it fully.

  Fast forward to today: communities are the rage – an integral part of Web 2.0. We still don’t have a clear path or a well defined purpose, but lots more is happening.  Now if the perfect time to get started – once the concept of community service becomes mainstream (12-18 months from now) it will move very, very fast for you to play catch up.  You can do this now and be prepared.

  The benefits of implementing community service are astronomical.  There are plenty of case studies (Mercury Interactive, Cisco, Microsoft, and more) that have moved either part or their entire support structure to communities or forums and have increased their customer satisfaction, reduced their costs of customer maintenance – even found new ways to increase revenue!  All this by switching from traditional customer service models to community service.  So, how do you make the move?  Three things to get started:

  1. Make sure your customers want it – Quite simple, there ain’t no community without people.  If your customers are not going to participate, nor do they feel they can get value out of it then the community will not succeed.  This is independent of topic, theme, method of operation or anything else.  Plenty of failures exist of communities launched without checking with customers first. Best way to start? start a community alongside the rest of your support structure.  Advertise it. Make it attractive. Populate it with good content. Commit time and resources to grow it.  then you start shifting people over slowly, finally make it the channel of choice.  Sounds simple; it is simple.

  2. Make sure your company can support it – Despite claims to the contrary, the most successful examples of community service are those where the company commits time, resources, knowledge and participants to them.  If your experts are involved in the community, take interest in it, answer questions and receive feedback from customers the community will grow and become useful to you.  If no one from your company ever enters the community, and it builds with its own content and resources, if you seem not to care about the feedback and knowledge built in it, then it will be a failure.

  3. Let it be – I know this is hard to understand, but you have to let the content be free.  Monitoring content, censoring entries, and controlling what goes where and how it flows through your community is not the way to go.  Think Wikipedia and self-regulating content.  It is likely that you will have to do some policing to get it started, but go lightly and err on the side of freedom.  Once the community is up and running, make sure you use reputation tools built into them so the people that matter the most (engineers and outside experts as an example) can be recognized.  Communities center around self-elected leaders and they are the ones that will control the content and quality of the community. Feel free to court them – but try not to control them.

  Final word of advice.  If you read my blog on customer experience management you know that I will advise you to integrate your community into your CEM strategy.  Yet, I will also advice you to make sure that you treat communities as the most important link between you and your customers since there is nothing that can replace the direct link you can have with them – and the free flow of information both ways.

  Are you working with communities? How is it going?  Do you see yoursefl replacing customer service with community service?

   

• Esteban Kolsky 09:16:18 am on November 11, 2008 | 0 | # |
  Tags: Architecture, business, business models, Communities, emerging technologies, future technology, LinkedIn, self-organizing, tech, technology, Web 2.0

  Welcome to the Real World, Neo

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.  I’ll admit it – I love”The Matrix” (not the sequels as much as the original).  It can be used in so many ways to explain technologies and trends.  I am not talking about the aesthetics of “bullet time”, nor whether it could possibly exist.  I am talking about the actual world where the movie takes place.  Sure, there are plenty other metaphors for life as well, but the one that interests me the most is how that alternate universe explains so well where we are going today with our technologies.

  Let’s say that Web 1.0 was about the infrastructure.  We put together the servers, we built the connections, we laid the “pipes”, and we created an amazing infrastructure to connect virtually everyone in this world to everyone else.  We, in Thomas L Friedman’s words, flattened the world. Problem was, we did not know what to do with it.  Sure, we had the standard ecommerce applications, some self-service solutions, interactive connection to easy applications, we created and used static, non-leveraged content.  The basics that you would expect to find in any other connected world.  Except for a sense of community, smarts, and automation. The “sharing” was not real, it was just accessing some static content (or partially dynamic static content) via a dumb-down interface.  Better than what we had, but not the best.  In Matrix-terms, this were the individual machines that were plotting to take over the world.

  Now, let’s fast forward to Web 2.0.  There are lots of definitions out there for Web 2.0 – almost as many as startups trying to make it in it. Tim O’Reilly is credited with coining the term and describing it initially.  We use lots of new technologies, new models, and new applications.  Web 2.0 is about leveraging the infrastructure.  We are moving away from the static content, come-and-find-me model we created in Web 1.0 and we are creating dynamic applications, using distributed architecture models, dynamic and useful content, access and integration levels never before used or seen.  We are, in short, using the network.  Making the network become the application, and the content itself.  We are, in matrix-terms, beginning to create the matrix itself.  Alas, we still don’t’ have intelligence built into the system to self-regulate, auto-manage, or self-organize.  Yet, Web 2.0 (and Enterprise 2.0 by extension) is about using content to make the infrastructure useful.

  Of course, there is a futuristic state of the world that is Web 3.0.  No, it is not defined anywhere that I know, nor am I creating a new term (come on, I just grew the version number by one, how hard is that to do).  I am presenting my version of a likely model we will use in the future of the Internet, applications, content – and how we interact with them and each other.  We built an infrastructure, we created the content to populate it – now we are making it useful.  Truly useful.  We are talking about self-organizing systems, ultimate automation, self-categorization – even intent-driven systems (Michael Maoz and I wrote about this back in the Gartner days).  Think the way computers worked in “Star Wars”, think the way the Matrix operates.  A neural network that realizes there is no corner to far-fetched, no content unusable, no connection impossible.  This – Web 3.0 – is the core of the Matrix.

  Now, I am not proclaiming that we are all going to be batteries in 20-25 years or any time after that.  But, the model fits well to where we are taking our technology world.  As we continue to evolve, you will see some of the things we thought impossible even five years ago become reality.  Self-managing, automated, independent systems that perform flawlessly without us noticing them.  Secret Customer Service (another concept I worked on while at Gartner) finally emerges.  Self-organizing, dynamic communities form ad-hoc to tackle each and every problem.  Computers become more independent, and we become more advanced as a group.  We become a global tribe that has its own heartbeat, and interacts with technology to simplify our lives.

  Sounds interesting? Welcome to the real world – you.

   
• 

  Kate Leggett 07:00:38 am on November 6, 2008 | 0 | # |
  Tags: Communities, CRM, customer service, ecommerce, holiday shopping, Web 2.0

  Social Shopping and Communities

  With Forrester Research projecting that holiday sales will reach more than $33 billion this season, many of us are looking outside of traditional internet shopping experiences to understand what makes Web 2.0 shopping sites successful. Here are some examples that shape a successful community shopping experience for me.

  I am drawn to the visually pleasing sites that entice me, even before I become a customer. They offer a variety of self-service methods to appeal to different types of users – like browsing, or doing advanced parametric searches. For example hi-tech sites tend to use visual decision trees that contain photos of products help orient me to my product, and guide me down a particular discovery path. Other sites allow me to search by price range (like homedepot.com), by recipient, and even by personality like gadget geek or mom-to-be (like thisnext.com).

  I like the interactive sites that rely on RIA based technologies like AJAX. They offer  for example sliders for price range pickers, or a color palette to search for items of a single color to make my shopping experience fun. Check out etsy.com for some examples!

  Let peer pressure help you out by displaying your top searches or hot buys – both which serve as good indicators of current trends. Amazon.com does a good job at this.

  Sites that push relevant service alerts or policy changes to me, or allow me to subscribe to content are true productivity-boosters. One especially useful time saver is to allow me to create watchlists so that I can be alerted when an item goes on sale.  Check out sears.com who does this!

  Sites that I have learnt to trust have brought their user community to the forefront. Kaboodle, for example, touts “shopping is more fun with friends”. These sites tap into this collective wisdom of their user community by appending feedback forms to all content and letting users’ rate content.

  All these strategies and tools help streamline the shopping experience, and use the community input to validate purchase decisions.

  My question to you is are you implementing any web 2.0 shopping on your sites? And what strategies work for you, personally?

   

• Kate Leggett 07:00:25 am on September 23, 2008 | 0 | # |
  Tags: Web 2.0

  I went to my very first “Back to School” event for my daughter who just started kindergarten. Her teacher explained to the parents of the class what the kids would learn this year, her teaching philosophy, then she opened it up for questions, and requested our help with organizing activities.

  What quickly happened is that the leaders quickly asserted themselves – these were the parents that would be the most active in the classroom, organize field trips and special events. What also happened was that topics of interest and concern were brought up and talked through. Small groups broke off from the larger parental body to discuss in detail a special activity.

  When I got home, there was already an email from the classroom monitor summarizing the topics of conversation and calling parents to action. Since then, this Yahoo group has been very active. I receive multiple emails from them every day. And it has almost a 100% participation.

  As a software vendor, I often think how can I make our user community as engaged as this one? Four very simple tips that emerge from my kindergarten classroom example are:

  • Don’t get bogged down by tools or technology to create the perfect medium for your community to interact. Sometimes a simple monthly conference call with a theme or a Yahoo discussion group is all that it takes.
  • Choose the tools that are common among your team members and that they use every day. Our group is successful because it relies on email that everyone uses.
  • Seed the group with a company representative – the role that our kindergarten teacher had in our group – then back away and let members interact with one another. It is the interaction between members that is important. Your role, as the user group creator is to listen, learn and perhaps gently guide.
  • Choose initial topics of conversation that have a broad appeal, then let group self-direct.

  What other basic tips do you have for launching a community?

   

• Kate Leggett 07:00:15 am on August 28, 2008 | 0 | # |
  Tags: social networks, Web 2.0

  Visualizing and Acting On Social Network Connections

  We’ve all seen hierarchical organizational charts – and sometimes wondered why a leader in an org chart is where he is when the troops know that he’s ineffective and everything is done to work around him.

  An alternate view of power in a company is to identify the individuals that have implicit power – these are folks that everyone goes to for information, direction, opinions. This can be done by drawing the direct communication lines between an individual, and all the other individuals that directly interact with him or her. And there are commercial social networking tools that allow you to do this with ease.

  Once you have mapped and correlated an individual’s network with everyone else’s networks in an organization, another hierarchy emerges very quickly – a hierarchy of “connectedness” or “influence”. This lets you trace, for example, the best and least effective communication paths to your senior leadership. You can also identify, who the true subject matter experts are in a customer service organization, and reorganize your knowledge strategy to ensure that all contributions are reviewed by these SME’s.

  What is more interesting to do is to apply this social mapping to your customer base. Once you identify your top accounts, you can map the connections from these accounts to every employee who touches them. Social networking programs contain algorithms that are remarkably accurate in determining the true strength of relationship through the use of parameters such as contact frequency, level of interaction (ex. from a VP or an account manager), type of interaction (ex. marketing, customer service) and level of responsiveness.

  What quickly emerges is another view of your customer landscape. Perhaps you will see that your top customers are not getting the level of attention that they deserve, or that your organization as a whole is spending too much time on a lower value customer.

  This is valuable, actionable information. You can quickly reorganize your account management strategy to focus on the right accounts, and ensure the right level of touch for these accounts. You can also identify the accounts that influence product roadmaps via their connections to product marketing, and evaluate these customers to ensure that their input is in-line with general customer demand. And you can quickly identify problem accounts that take up the most time with your organization, and root cause why they do so.

  So, do you know who the connectors in your organization are? What are your plans to do so?

   
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  Andrew Cohen 07:00:00 am on August 19, 2008 | 0 | # |
  Tags: Evidence, Knowledge Management, Web 2.0

  Evidence Based Support

  I’ve been pretty quiet for a while …mostly listening and reading with interest to ongoing discussion about KM, web 2.0 and more. . Usually I have a lot to say. But recently I just can’t get rid of the feeling that I’m simply responding to cleaver rhetoric, smart arguments, and appealing ideas with no clear evidence to support them. I continually wonder if we really do know whether any of our ideas work. Where is the evidence? I don’t mean anecdotal data. I mean real evidence, intended to prove a theory is wrong or demonstrate that a program is working.

  With this in mind, I came across an HBR series called “To make the best decisions, demand the best data”. Specifically, a paper called “Evidence bases Management” caught my attention. The paper makes an analogy between the evidence based medicine movement, (providing medical care based on clear and convincing evidence for treatments that work), with management, develop and deploying programs and strategies based on evidence for their efficacy. In medicine, the evidence based movement has had dramatic and positive effects on treatment success. But in management, the movement is nascent. Here’s my favorite quote from the article:

  “Executives routinely dose their organizations with strategic snake oil, discredited nostrums, partial remedies, or untested management miracle cures. In many cases, the faces about what works are out there – so why don’t managers use them?” (HBR, Business Decision Making, January, 2006)

  Maybe this quote is extreme. But there is truth to it and we need to change. We are responsible for significant costs in our organizations and have the ability to drive world class customer experience. So many programs in support either have mixed results or results that cannot be interpreted we rarely know what contribution we are making to our organizations bottom line. If we really want to lead our companies, to drive world class customer experiences, we need to manage based on evidence and gather data to tell us how well we are doing. We need to develop measurement programs that model our businesses and operations and tie them to business outcomes. Toyota revolutionized manufacturing by modeling errors in productions lines and developing strategies to address them. The support business is different, for sure. But is the need for clear evidence for or against what we purport to be good any less important?

   
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  Kate Leggett 07:00:11 am on July 15, 2008 | 2 | # |
  Tags: Communities, CRM, efm, enterprise feedback management, feedback, Feedback Management, Voice of the Customer, Web 2.0

  Corporations must embrace community content. Your customers are talking about you right now, and you need to be part of this conversation. If you don’t, you won’t understand what is going on and this lack of knowledge will hurt you. You will also be surprised to see a quantifiable return for investing in community content

  What does this community content do for you?

  • It will help you with product development by turning your customers into resources for innovation. Your customers can vote on product enhancements, suggest pervasive issues to fix, and in this way influence your roadmap. The result is a product that is more in-line with your customer’s requirements
  • It can help you with product support by allowing customers to help one another via customer-generated content for knowledgebases, wikis and discussion boards. Jupiter reported in 2006 that “Customer report good experiences in forums more than twice as often as they do via calls or mail”
  • It can help you during a sales cycle. Communities allow you to identify enthusiastic customers and you can use them to persuade prospects in purchasing your product
  • It can help you in your marketing efforts. You can use the online buzz and conversations with customers to promote your brand or products

  More importantly, community content has a real return on investment (ROI)

  • It reduces the cost of creating content for your corporate knowledgebase – and in translating it into all the languages that your customer base requires. You should calculate the internal documentation, and localization costs for generating this content and compare it to the costs of harvesting community generated content
  • It reduces the need for customers to call in for answers, shifting them to cheaper channels
  • It ensures that the majority or product questions that customers have are addressed. What is the opportunity cost of an unhappy customer who repeatedly doesn’t find the answer that he is looking for in renewal or repurchase revenue?
  • It ensures more satisfied customers. Compare your scores on customer satisfaction surveys before and after leveraging community generated content. Look at answers to questions like “would you recommend the products”, “would you repurchase products”, “how satisfied are you with support”, “what is your impression of our image or brand”
  • It ensures that pervasive product defects are addressed, lowering the cost of support calls and patches. Calculate the number of patches before and after leveraging community advice on product direction and issues to be addressed

  Are you thinking about the ROI of community content? How are you calculating its impact to your business?

   

• Kate Leggett 07:00:42 am on June 26, 2008 | 4 | # |
  Tags: KCS, Knowledge Management, Web 2.0

  Many customer service organizations make irrelevant knowledge-base entries available to their customers because authoring is done by someone who is not on the front lines, interacting with customers. The content is written without an understanding of the language that the customer uses in explaining their problems.

  Adopting a “just-in-time knowledge management” strategy or a KCS (knowledge centered support) approach can help bridge this relevancy gap. If a customer service agent is unable to find the right solution to a customer’s question within a knowledge-base, he or she is able to author a new solution on the fly, right after having helped a customer; the solution is captured with the customer’s point of view in mind, and in his exact words. In this same model, agents can modify existing solutions to make them more in-line with their customer’s words and phrases. The end result is that the knowledge-base entries are easier to find by customers in future searches.

  Solutions are not subjected to an arduous review process, but are reviewed as they are reused by other agents. This ultimately focuses the agent’s energy in perfecting only the solutions that are the most frequently used and ensuring that they use the language and expressions that are best aligned with customer’s needs, while maintaining the knowledge-base constantly updated.

  Another benefit to using your customer’s voice and words is to augment the company-generated taxonomy with an organically developed folksonomy – or collection of tags (think of the flickr tag clouds, for example). Users can tag useful content and the user community can browse these tag clouds. These folksonomies do not preserve the intrinsic relationship between objects, but they echo more closely how users interact with knowledge that they come into contact with. And, these tags help in making relevant content easier to find.

  Are you using just-in-time knowledge? Folksonomies? Is it working for you?

   

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