Ten strong hints your enterprise may not have a BI strategy

You know that you don't have an enterprise BI strategy if

1. Your end users keep pointing to IT as the source of most BI problems
2. Your business executives view BI as another cost center
3. IT staff keep asking end users for report requirements
4. Your BI is supported by IT help desk
5. You can’t tell the difference between BI and Performance Management
6. You can’t measure your BI usage
7. You can’t measure your BI ROI
8. You think your BI strategy is the same as your DW strategy
9. You don’t have a plan to develop, hire, retain and grow BI staff
10. (My personal favorite) You actually don’t know if your enterprise has a BI strategy!

Want more hints and best practices? Take our BI maturity self assessment test. Then if you actually want to compare your BI strategy and BI maturity against other Forrester clients, take our BI maturity survey. Good luck!

BPM Promises "Simplicity" In 2010. Is This "Hope We Can Believe In" Or Still A Pipe Dream?

By Clay Richardson

Time flies when you're having fun - and 2009 was a really fun and successful year for the BPM industry.  Nearly all BPM vendors reported double digit revenue growth over the first three quarters of 2009 and many are already reporting strong pipeline growth for 2010.  Most importantly, some BPM practitioners are beginning to reign in the bloat and complexity traditionally associated with BPM implementations.  

 

Over the past few months I've been on a bit of a world tour - numerous BPM industry and vendor conferences mixed in with customer meetings - listening to customers discuss their BPM hopes and challenges and listening to vendors outline their roadmaps and plans for 2010.  If I translated all of my conversations over the past few months into a tag cloud, "Simplicity" would jump out as the most prominent term mentioned on both sides.  

 

BPM customers and prospects are clamoring for the simplicity of Web 2.0 functionality for their BPM initiatives - and some are actively requesting enhanced collaboration capabilities offered by social technologies. In a previous blog post I highlighted the convergence of BPM, Web 2.0, and social - commonly referred to as "Social BPM". In a recently published report, fellow Forrester analyst Alex Cullen, highlighted Social BPM as one of the Top 15 Technology Trends to watch for enterprise architects and business process professionals.

 

Specifically, in preparing for 2010 enterprise architects and business process pro's should evaluate four key Social BPM components that help simplify and streamline BPM initiatives:

• Process Mashups - Lightweight BPM tools that support rapidly building and deploying structured and unstructured business processes. Process mashup platforms include only bare-bones functionality provided by BPM suites: execution engine, process modeling, Web-based forms, worklists, and administrative functions. Tech-savvy business analysts are using these mashup platforms to quickly deliver process solutions that IT doesn't have the bandwidth to tackle.
• Process Wikis - Process wikis allow distributed teams to easily build and maintain institutional knowledge about a particular business process or collection of business processes. Process wikis provide simple Web-based modeling and documentation capabilities that encourage input and collaboration across all roles that participate in process discovery: end users, process analysts, stakeholders, developers, and architects.
• BPM-as-a-Service- Web-based BPM platforms and solutions that allow users to model, develop, and/or execute business processes in public or private cloud environments. Companies are using BPM-as-a-Service platforms as a cost-effective "try-before-you-buy" approach to BPM.
• Process Personas - In 2010, this will be a key area to watch for BPM.  Leading vendors such as Global360 are simplifying the user experience by providing pre-built templates that provide identified process roles (e.g., supervisor, line manager, etc.) with just the features and functionality they need - no more, no less.

Ultimately, the Social BPM trend and the push towards BPM simplicity are connected to a broader trend towards "simplicity" in society.  To illustrate this, a few weeks back I was driving in my car listening to an NPR segment outlining food trends to watch in 2010.  The host highlighted the movement towards "simple foods" as a major trend that would gain greater momentum in 2010.  The basic premise behind "simple foods" is that there should be as few ingredients as possible in the foods we eat.  After listening to the segment, I thought "Hmmm, that's novel..." but didn't think much else of it.

 

Then a few days later, I tuned in to a Fox News (hey, they do have some news) segment on the excessive amounts of sugar in kids cereals.  I was amazed to learn that all of the cereals in our pantry made Fox's top 3 list of cereals with the most sugar.  To my daughter's disappointment, my wife and I immediately cleaned out the cupboard of these oversweetened cereals and marched off to Whole Foods to buy the "Envirokids Amazon Frosted Flakes" recommended in the Fox segment.  

 

While it was interesting to see that the Envirokids cereal only had half the sugar of the other cereals, what really blew my mind was that Envirokids only had 3 ingredients listed on the side of the box:  corn meal, evaportated cane juice, sea salt.  And according to my daughter (and online reviewers) it tasted pretty decent  - although I also tried a bowl and thought to myself "I already miss my Honey O's..."

 

Why It Matters?

 

Ultimately, society (as illustrated in the case of "simple foods") is demanding greater transparency and control over the makeup of what we buy, bring into our homes, and put into our bodies.  This is the same force driving the Social BPM trend - business users want greater control over assembling, updating, and communicating their business processes, with minimal support from IT.  And many vendors are beginning to heed the call.  

 

Last week at Appian Forum (Appian's annual user conference), I listened in as Appian's CEO, Matt Caulkins outlined the future direction of the company's flagship BPM offering:  I believe Matt used the term "simple" at least two dozen times in his presentation.  And other vendors such as Global360 and Software AG are also investing heavily to make BPM "simpler."

Through the years, BPM's promise of "ease-of-use" and "business empowerment" rang hollow and left business users cold and disappointed.  In 2010 the BPM industry will begin to deliver on this promise by providing concrete methodologies, capabilities, and tools that simplify all aspects of continual process improvement - and Web 2.0 and social will form the foundation of this move towards simplicity in the BPM industry. 

Enterprise architects and process professionals planning for 2010 should add Social BPM to their list of emerging methodologies and tools that will have a significant impact on the enterprise's ability to deliver value and minimize waste.

 

What's Your Take?

 

I want to hear from you.  Let me know if you think the BPM industry will finally deliver on it's promise of "simplicity" in 2010 or whether this is just a pipe dream?   If you're an enterprise architect or a process professional, let me know if you're beginning to explore leveraging some of the Social BPM capabilities highlighted in this post. I'm also interested in hearing your thoughts on the "simple foods" (and the larger societal) trend towards "simplicity".  Post your thoughts in the comments section or feel free to shoot me a quick e-mail at crichardson@forrester.com.

PeopleSoft Seeks A New Place In The CRM Sun With Release 9.1

By William Band

Since the acquisition of PeopleSoft by Oracle in 2004, the PeopleSoft CRM solution seemed to go underground. Relatively little has been heard about the product since that time. However, Oracle has been continuing to invest. PeopleSoft CRM 9.0, a major step forward, was released in August 2006, and the company will soon announce PeopleSoft CRM 9.1.

My take on Oracle's PeopleSoft CRM in the past has been that the product line has a significant base of loyal customers who value the usability and benefits of integration to PeopleSoft's HR and ERP suites. It offered a broad range of functionality across all the major components of CRM, with particular strengths in sales, customer service, and analytics. It had less robust, but sound, capability for marketing, field service, eCommerce, and customer data management.

Although, the solution does not offer a SaaS deployment option, it provided unique support for specific industries such as the public sector, particularly education. It also provided strong support for the financial services, utilities and telecommunications sectors. All-in-all, PeopleSoft CRM was well-suited for existing PeopleSoft customers who need a broad-based CRM platform to build on.

The release of 9.1 demonstrates Oracle’s commitment to deliver an up-to-date solution for its steadfast PeopleSoft customer base. And, it will to capitalize on the industry sectors for which the solution is particularly well-tuned. The most notable improvements include features to improve user effectiveness such as a “Web 2.0” user experience, new collaboration tools, and reduced clicks and page transfers. The product has enhanced functionality in the marketing and customer service areas. And, it offers added additional capabilities that deepen already strong support for the Higher Education and Telecommunications sectors.

Mindful, of the growing popularly of SaaS CRM solution, the PeopleSoft 9.1 release also targets reducing the cost-of-ownership. For example, it features greater ease of application configuration than past releases. And, it has been tuned to improve system performance, and offers greater interoperability with expanded web services.

In an interesting twist for a CRM product, Oracle is taking advantage of its strong presence in the HR community and will offer “CRM-like” capabilities for this audience. PeopleSoft CRM delivers two products targeted at the Human Resources community: HelpDesk for Human Resources for workforce service delivery and the new Workforce Communications. HelpDesk for Human Resources was introduced in 2004 with integration to PeopleSoft HR. Workforce Communications was introduced earlier this year. And in 9.1, both of these products will provide delivered integration to eBusiness Suite HR release 12.1.

Oracle is investing in the right things that customers care about: a “Web 2.0” user experience, collaboration tools, marketing and service functionality improvements, and making upgrades easier. I am sure the PeopleSoft fan club will be glad they now have a fully up-to-date CRM solution available to them.

Telepresence Jumpstarts Video Collaboration

By Claire Schooley

Telepresence is the life-size, true color, no latency video meeting technology that creates a “wow” reaction from participants, especially those who have experienced some traditional videoconferencing that gave poor picture quality, out-of synch audio/video, and added no sense of presence to a meeting.  Here are some factors that make telepresence different:

• Video provides high quality 1080p pictures with hidden cameras placed to achieve eye contact no matter where people are seated around the conference table.
• Audio is full duplex with microphones and speakers that allow sound to come from the direction of the speaker.
• The environment is purpose-built with lighting arrays, speakers, and cameras all configured for the optimum experience.  Conference tables, chairs, and even the wall paint are the same at all sites to convey a uniform sense of presence.
• Managed service and support assure that this expensive system is going to work. Many organizations buy a concierge-type service model so participants just need to push a button to start the videoconference.

These kinds of telepresence rooms show up most often in board rooms and CEO conference rooms. The early traction of telepresence has been in connecting the global offices within an enterprise. However, the future lies in the external interoperability among different businesses and even competitors that use telepresence solutions from different vendors. This is only easily possible today among some vendors. Just as you can use your telephone to call people without thinking about the telephone carriers, companies need to have the same flexibility from telepresence providers.

While telepresence rooms have created the big stir, many companies can not afford such an expensive investment and don’t need such a large video presence.  This is where Telepresence is driving the advent of smaller HD conference room solutions, office units, and even desktop units that give the same high quality images and sound but don’t have quite the same ambiance as the large telepresence room. All units integrate so employees can take part in a multipoint call no matter what size unit they have. 

As my colleague Alex Cullen points out in his recent report, “The Top 15 Technology Trends EA Should Watch”, there has been plenty of buzz around the technology but business leaders are still unfamiliar with it. However, as the telepresence movement re-ignites interest in videoconferencing especially upgrading to HD units, these are the major reasons for the renewed interest in videoconferencing:

• Travel is expensive and it also eats up work time. Once companies make the culture shift to using videoconferencing whenever possible rather than travel, the savings on travel costs is the largest cost saving factor in determining ROI. But the video quality must give users a “you-are-there” experience to be successful.
• Today’s global reach of companies means that workers on the same team are often located in many different countries. Videoconferencing allows them to do things like view a product packaging together, decide on the best colors, and in the end be more productive.
• The new generation of workers is comfortable with video and welcomes the opportunity to collaborate with a stronger sense of presence.
• One of the strongest growth areas is desktop videoconferencing. Spurred on by high quality HD desktop units, large companies are evaluating what knowledge workers will benefit most from this technology.
• In the future with complete B2B and B2C interoperability you can expect:
• Accelerated commerce, globalization and outsourcing
• Less business travel which will impact financially airlines and hotels
• Expanded places where knowledge workers can live and work
• Major changes in business, education, medicine, branch government interaction, and entertainment

Pilots for many of these are underway now. For example, financial institutions are conducting wealth management or mortgage discussions with customers through bank to home videoconferencing. With the explosion of broadband to the home, there’s no reason to go to the bank when you can talk with a mortgage officer from your home HD unit. Medical experts located in facilities miles away can remotely review charts, and examine and talk with the patient remotely, and make a virtual diagnosis. And what about this one -- go out to a virtual dinner with friends located in a different city. Share conversation and discuss the food through the restaurants’ telepresence units!  (I would miss the bouquet of the wine from my friend’s selection.)

Process-centric DQ Services and MDM among top technology trends to watch

By Rob Karel

For the past few years, master data management (MDM) has been a hot topic among enterprise architects and data management professionals. But many of these evangelists have felt like rebels without a cause because their MDM initiatives have been primarily IT driven with minimal business sponsorship and participation.   In other words, the business expects high quality data, but hasn’t taken much accountability in delivering it. 

Data quality (DQ) management, a more mature technology and competency than MDM - and a required core capability for any MDM solution - has also struggled to be embraced by the business as a top priority.  More often than not, DQ has been relegated as a supporting downstream batch application for ETL, data warehousing and business intelligence applications, but not for a broader cross-enterprise data architecture including upstream transactional systems and processes.

But Forrester now sees this trend changing for the better, as highlighted by my colleague, Alex Cullen, who recently published important research on “The Top 15 Technology Trends EA Should Watch.”  A key theme Alex identifies is around Process-Centric Data and Intelligence. Alex believes - and I agree with him - that both MDM and real time data quality services will become critical enablers to support real-time operational and decision-making processes.  

Organizational competency in the definition and implementation of DQ rules, processes and technologies that can effectively cleanse, standardize, enrich, match, and merge critical data is a foundational step to moving towards true MDM:  the real-time delivery and synchronization of a single, trusted view of enterprise reference data to both operational and analytical environments.  Why? Because you can’t bi-directionally synchronize master data if you haven’t implemented the DQ rules required to derive a master record.

Unfortunately in many instances the after-the-fact batch cleansing of data in a data warehouse is often too little too late in ensuring high quality data can be delivered via MDM or otherwise.   This is why we see real-time DQ Services as a critical evolution for data architects to embrace and evangelize: embed DQ validation and cleansing logic within the upstream transactional processes that capture and maintain this data in the first place.   Not only will this of course improve the trustworthiness of the data used for analysis later, but even more transformational – it will improve the efficiency and quality of the upstream transactional processes themselves. 

A simple example:
A “Ship To” postal address is typically captured as part of an order management process.  Before real-time DQ Services are implemented to ensure that the addresses captured meet formatting standards and are in fact deliverable, order fulfillment runs a very real risk of being delayed – leading to potential postage penalties and negative customer satisfaction due to the delays.  But DQ Service can significantly reduce this risk by recognizing these DQ issue while the customer is still engaged in the process and best able to respond.

As further evidence of this trend toward transactional data trustworthiness, in my just-published “Trends 2009: Master Data Management” research I share the results of a recent Forrester MDM readership survey where over 64% of respondents said their planned or implemented MDM solution must support real-time subscription requirements, and not just scheduled batch loads.   Therefore it’s not too surprising that almost 79% of those surveyed that have decided upon an architectural deployment style for their MDM solution selected a Hub, SOA, Federated, or Registry approach since all of these are optimized to support real-time, transactional MDM requirements.  

But don’t expect this transformation to real-time DQ and MD to happen overnight. The complexity and invasiveness of these data services to the streamlined transactions that are managed make many EA’s wary, especially since most organizations still have extremely immature data governance programs.   In the same readership survey, nearly 46% of companies rate their data governance maturity as low or very low, while another 29% rate their maturity average, seeing significant participation from just a few key business stakeholders.   Data governance – an organizational and cultural shift – is the first trend EA’s must follow and evangelize in order to deliver the process-centric data and intelligence their organizations are demanding.

Integrate Communities With Customer Business Processes To Achieve A “360” View

By William Band

A hot topic of debate among customer management thought-leaders right now is the business value of “Social CRM.” My clients want to know how much investment they should make in social computing technologies like: blogs, wikis, forums, customer feedback tools, and customer community platforms. And, they want to know whether and how these new capabilities should be, and can be, integrated with their transactional CRM systems.

In my opinion, there is a lot of hype right now with respect to the business value of the social media and how to leverage this phenomenon to more deeply engage with customers. My own recent survey of 286 companies shows that only 21% currently have established customer communities at present. But, I must admit that the same data also shows that an additional 16% are piloting customer communities, and 26% are interested in implementing them. And, recent research by Forrester’s Natalie Petouhoff on the application of social media to customer service provides evidence of a high ROI.

My colleague, Alex Cullen, just published a report which places this debate in a broader context. The report“The Top 15 Technology Trends That EA Should Watch”, pinpoints that one of the most important technology themes to pay attention to is “social computing in and around the enterprise.” Specifically, he forecasts that customer community platforms will increasingly become integrated with traditional “CRM” applications. This is supported by recent announcements by salesforce.com and SAP CRM with regard to integration with Twitter to enable the monitoring of customer sentiment, and the acquisition of HiveLive, an online community platform, by RightNow. These are examples of early efforts to integrate social computing capabilities with transactional CRM applications in order to extend customer service problem resolution processes into new social media channels.

Businesses are building or connecting with customer communities to gain better insights into customer behaviors and monitor reactions to business actions. Organizations can use customer communities to support market research and product development, accelerate the distribution of marketing messages, provide deeper insights about individuals and accounts for the salesforce, and promote customer self-service to drive down support costs.

Over the next three years I expect a shift from standalone customer communities to communities integrated with enterprise internal systems such as CRM as the quest continues to achieve the holy grail of a “360 degree view” of buyers.

Oracle Finally Takes The Covers Off Fusion Applications

By Paul Hamerman

At Larry Ellison’s keynote at Oracle OpenWorld 2009, the veil of secrecy was finally lifted on Oracle Fusion Applications (Fusion Apps). During the past several months, under NDA, we have had an opportunity to learn about the Fusion Apps strategy and view demos of the various modules. Now we can speak more freely about this product release. Here are some key questions and answers:

What are Oracle Fusion Apps?

Fusion Apps are a next-generation suite of business applications, built with a rich client user interface and embedded analytics. The functionality spans finance, human resources, project portfolio management, sales and marketing, GRC and supply chain/procurement. Modular components within the suite can co-exist alongside existing ERP applications (e.g., territory management, distributed order orchestration, talent management).  

By design, Fusion Apps are not addressing deep industry-specific operational needs. Traditional ERP components related to manufacturing, for example, are not present in the suite. Fusion Apps will use open standards and Oracle integration products to integrate with industry-specific applications.  

What’s all the hype about?

From a technology standpoint, Fusion Apps bring together several evolutionary changes: a rich user experience, configuration flexibility that can be managed by business users rather that IT, collaboration within the application, embedded business intelligence, and standards-based integration. Forrester has referred to this evolution as Dynamic Business Applications. While these features are not unique to Oracle or this product, Oracle is making a major step forward with an enterprise-class suite that embodies these characteristics.

Where do Fusion Apps stand today in the development process?

Although Oracle asserts that the apps are “code complete,” the product is in what Oracle calls “in-house beta.” Customers have been brought in to test applications installed on Oracle premises as part of this program. There are no live customers currently, but early adopters are signing on as we speak.

When will Fusion Apps be generally available to customers?

Mr. Ellison made the statement that the Fusion Apps will be available “next year,” meaning calendar year 2010. Oracle wants to avoid quality problems out of the gate and will choose its GA date carefully. Our best guess is late 2010, after the early adopter program has delivered enough proof points.

Will Fusion Apps be provided as Software-as-a-Service?

Yes and no. Oracle describes the Fusion Apps architecture as SaaS-ready, but its corporate commitment to SaaS as a business model is lacking at this time. Oracle is committed delivering a SaaS CRM product based on Fusion, as well as a SaaS talent management solution. Oracle partners may have an opportunity to deliver broader Fusion Apps as SaaS sooner than Oracle itself. 

Will Fusion Apps be provided as an upgrade path from existing products without additional license fees?

Oracle has promised in the past that Fusion Apps will be available as a migration path for existing customers current on maintenance. For functionally equivalent migrations, in theory, there will not be additional fees, but there will likely be embedded platform components and net new functionality that will enable Oracle to generate additional revenues.

What should customers do now? Wait for Fusion or upgrade within the existing product line?

Existing Oracle apps customers should understand roadmaps for those products, as well as the potential migration paths to Fusion Apps. Upgrading to new releases should be considered by customers based on the business value of those releases, as well as for allowing time to assess Fusion Apps as a longer term strategy. There is no pressure to migrate, but Oracle will continue to try to move customers forward in the existing product lines via the Lifetime Support time frames.

Service-Oriented Analytics: Tapping into the Predictive Smarts of Your Entire Organization

By James Kobielus

Advanced analytics is a key competitive weapon of companies everywhere. Visionary organizations are those that take a future-facing, analysis-driven perspective on new challenges. They do this by grounding management forecasts in solid historical information sets, leveraging and extending companies’ existing investments in data mining and predictive modeling.

To become truly future-focused, organizations must build out their predictive muscles through deepening commitment to these and other advanced analytics technologies, which also include interactive visualization, multivariate statistical analysis, text analytics, and massively parallel enterprise data warehousing. However, enterprises must be careful not to adhere to the common practice of implementing advanced analytics tools in tactical, application-specific silos. One of the downsides of this traditional practice is that diverse predictive modeling teams can find it difficult to share their deep domain expertise, best statistical approaches, and most powerful data exploration and visualization features.

How can companies realize the transformative potential of predictive analytics for business success? For starters, you must get rid of siloes that fragment your data mining initiatives into separate camps. You must also build a bridge between your data mining operations and the teams that manage your text analytics, business intelligence, complex event processing, and business process management efforts. And the key approach for silo-smashing is service-oriented architecture (SOA).

At first glance, SOA may seem like a foreign topic to many analytics professionals, but it shouldn’t be. In the broadest perspective, SOA refers to best practices for encouraging greater reuse, sharing, and cross-platform interoperability among key business resources. Typically, one associates SOA with reuse of one specific type of resource: application functionality that is distributed across heterogeneous, networked platforms. Nevertheless, key SOA principles—such as standards-based service virtualization, reuse, brokering, and governance—are as applicable to predictive models as to any other resource that lives online.

Predictive models empower your product managers, marketing specialists, risk managers, process analysts, senior executives, and other personnel with access to sophisticated forecasting, time-series analysis, and scenario-testing tools. Each model is a statistical encapsulation of your business’ current view of the future in some specific application, subject, or decision-support area. Incorporating the expertise of subject-matter experts, these models allow organizations to gauge the potential impact of future projects, campaigns, and other initiatives, and also to adjust execution of these initiatives in mid-stream.

Predictive analytics need not be a purely blue-sky planning tool. This technology can sit at the core of your SOA strategy, and leading-edge enterprises are in fact doing that. Companies in such verticals as financial and telecommunications are embedding predictive logic deeply into data warehouses, business process management (BPM) platforms, complex event processing (CEP) streams, and operational applications.

What will it take for your company to fully align your advanced analytics efforts with your SOA strategy? Most important, Service-Oriented Analytics requires an executive-level commitment to becoming a predictive enterprise on all levels. From the perspective of your existing predictive modeling teams, this will require an ongoing focus on collaboration across business, function, and subject domains. You should create a culture and offer incentives that encourage modeling professionals to reuse each other’s expertise on problems that cross multiple domains.

Reuse is everything. Here are some high-level guidelines for establishing a reuse-friendly Service-Oriented Analytics practice in your company:

• Reuse modeling best practices:Start by consulting Forrester’s report on setting up a Business Intelligence Solution Center (BISC), which we defined as “an institutional steward, protector, and forum for BI best practices.” Given that predictive analytics is a key segment of BI, you will find it necessary to incorporate this technology into your BISC’s scope.
• Reuse modelers: Cultivate a professional cadre of predictive modeling experts who are more than just wizards in advanced statistics and mathematics. Encourage subject-matter experts in all business areas to undertake predictive modeling projects and to team with modeling experts in other projects, applications, and business units. Provide incentives for modelers to regularly move between business units and subject domains, thereby spreading their expertise throughout the enterprise.
• Reuse models: You should begin to investigate predictive-model governance tools, which support version control, check-in/check-out, and other controls over models created in and imported from diverse tools. Model governance tools—from vendors such as SAS, SPSS, and KXEN--facilitate reuse, consolidation, combination, and cross-synthesis among disparate models. And you should also investigate options for embedding predictive models within BI, BPM, and other operational applications, thereby leveraging your growing analytic asset into new deployments.

As you deploy predictive models into operational applications, you should provide other applications with SOA-based access to them through Web services, Web 2.0, and other standardized interfaces. In that way, you will be creating a critical bridge to your application development teams and be creating a thoroughly Service-Oriented Analytics environment.

Your first steps down this road are clear. Forrester will be happy to assist you in developing a detailed enterprise roadmap for Service-Oriented Analytics. In so doing, you’ll be better able to tap into the future-facing analytic expertise that exists throughout your business.

Podcast: Developing Your Lean Process Improvement Game Plan

Our latest featured podcast is Clay Richardson's "Developing Your Lean Process Improvement Game Plan".

BP&A Senior Analyst Clay Richardson interviews Tom Higgins, CIO with Territory Insurance Office, a commercial insurance and financial services firm based in Darwin, Australia. The discussion covers how TIO was able to deliver value to the business by delivering business process management in a cost effective way – without the usual bloat and excessive overhead associated with enterprise BPM initiatives.

We look forward to your questions and comments.

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Can You Get a Little Satisfaction? You Don't Have to Be Mick Jagger -- Yola.com Did! Case Study #4 Customer Service Social Media

By Dr. Natalie Petouhoff

Remember that great song... "Can't get no... Satisfaction..." Some how I think that is the national anthem of most customers. Why is it so freaking hard to get satisfaction?

I found out it's not really that hard if you have getsatisfaction.com In an interview with the company's CEO, Wendy Lea and her team, I learned a lot about how they are helping companies hear and respond to the voice of the customer...

GetSatisfaction is the brainchild of Thor Muller, Amy Muller and Lane Becker. They wanted to make a difference. They wanted to use software to enable a better world. There in the heart of South Park - they came up with a way to do that.

 

 Thor.........................Amy.....................Lane..........and............Wendy

How can companies use GetSatisfaction? Depending on the customer/user's goal /topic here's how it can work:

Today they have collectively pretty impressive stats: 24,500 Communities, 15,888 Companies, 17,248 employees working together to improve 24,283 products and services. Companies like Zappos.com, P&G, Twitter, Six Apart, Mint, Microsoft and Mozilla are finding value -- and satisfaction by using getsatisfaction.com

Here's the site's home page. Most customers type in the name of a company and the site that corresponds to the company comes up.

Yola.com is one of the many companies that is using getsatisfaction as their solution to interact and serve their customers. It is a company to watch... at least according to Business Week... and they otta know... they track the best of the up and comers...

Yola.com is a on-line website builder that makes it easy to create, publish and host a website. They simplified the process so that the "customer experience" of having a website was much more enjoyable! But as all companies know... customer service is the new sales... so grrrrreat customer service is a must for positive word-of-mouth, continued sales and rapid growth.

So how could a company provide amazing service and not break the bank? Its customer base was rapidly growing-- its target market -- individuals and small businesses could conceivably need alot of help! Yola.com established a customer community at getsatisfaction.com. The result? 2 million customers are supported by only six people! And the community users like it-- 5-to-1 over email support!

CEO Vinny Lingham requests that all employees at Yola.com participate in the community. That makes the community lively-- with support from customer champions- Super Users and customers-- especially when Vinny answers questions himself! As of June 2009 Yola estimates that they have had a 60-70% reduction in customer service tickets since the end of 2008. Vinny was just on the cover of Entrepreneur Magazine -- as being a brilliant business man and lot's of accolades for his ability to raise funding!

Yola's NPS (Net Promoter Score) is also an important metric to its management, its board of directors and its investors. Yola carefully tracks the movement in NPS and provides weekly reports. What's interesting is that right after a crisis- when you would normally think the NPS might go down... Yola has seen the opposite... instead of a dip, they see a marked increase in NPS.

The feedback they get is that customers appreciate getting an instant reply when they report a problem. Customer feel that Yola cares enough to be in communication with their customers and getting regular feedback and information as the company works to solve the issue-- is important to sustaining that relationship. And to top it off-- they love getting an email when the issue is solved. The principle of NOW and continuous communication is testament to the power of social media and to the customer experience and customer loyalty.

Click here to link to the Forrester Case Study on-line!

See.... getting a little satisfaction isn't that hard... you just have to know where to find it! Right Mick? (If you have not seen this rare footage of Mick singing Get Satisfaction on youtube... its worth a click!)

Learn. Share. Grow.

Follow me on Twitter at drnatalie or write to me at npetouhoff@forrester.com

p.s. Here's how customers are using getsatisfaction: They can ask a question, share an idea, report a problem, get praise... and much, much more... log onto www.getsatisfaction.com to experience it!

 

Customers can see other customer's ideas....

 

Customers can see common issues...

 

Customers can see FAQs...

 

Customers can see other customer's praise...

 

Customers can see who is in the community...