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.

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.

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...

 

 

 

Twenty-seven Ways To Reduce The Risks Of Your CRM Project

By William Band

Despite the current economic downturn, the need for organizations to create differentiation through unique customer experiences, strive for deeper insight into customer needs and behaviors, and serve customers cost-effectively has not disappeared. The need for “CRM” is not going away.

However, when I surveyed 133 organizations, using at one least of 24 different CRM technology solutions, I found that the risk of a spectacular project failure is still high. These companies reported over 200 problems, comprised of 27 risk areas in four categories. Thirty-three percent of the problems were related to technology; 27% spotlighted inadequate business processes; 22% were related to “people” challenges; and 18% comprised CRM strategy and deployment issues

Consider these statements as they portray your organization. A “Yes” or “No” answer will spotlight the hazards before they sink your program.

Technology

1. “The CRM solution we have chosen is mature and well-proven in use at other organizations with requirements similar to our company."

2. “The CRM solution we have chosen is flexible and can be easily adapted to meet unanticipated requirements in the future.”

3. “The CRM solution we have chosen does not have any major functionality deficiency gaps relative to our requirements."

4. “We have clearly defined how the data required to support our CRM solution will be defined, transferred, maintained, and governed.”

5. ‘We have determined that the CRM solution we have chosen can meet our specific system performance requirements.”

6. “Our business and IT resources have sound understanding of the CRM solution we intend to implement."

7. “We have a sufficient number of technically competent internal resources available to implement our CRM solution.”

8. “We have done due diligence to confirm that the vendor resources to be assigned to our CRM project have sound technical skills with respect to their company's solution.”

9. “The CRM solution we have chosen uses the most up-to-date role-based UI design principles so that it can be easily adapted to a range of user needs in our organization.”

Business Processes

10. “We have undertaken to define and document the business processes we expect our CRM solution to support.”

11. “The vendor solution we have chosen is flexible enough so that the tool can be easily mapped our business processes.”

12. “The CRM solution we have chosen can with little effort be sufficiently customized to meet our requirements.”

13. “The CRM solution we have chosen is compatible with the technical architecture environment and future strategy of our organization.”

14. “The CRM solution we have chosen has well-proven capabilities to integrate with specific important applications and databases within our organization.

People

15. To be successful, the new business processes and CRM solution we intend to introduce will require little change in the culture of our organization.”

16. “We have a well-defined program to support the changes to the new ways of working in our company including visible leadership and communications from top management.”

17. “The CRM initiative will require little change to the business processes used by frontline employees.”

18. “We understand the challenges of gaining acceptance for the use of CRM solutions and have specific plans in place to mitigate these challenges.”

19. “We are investing sufficient resources to provide adequate training and education for users to support their adoption of our CRM solution.”

20. “We have complete CRM solution documentation and will provide sufficient ongoing help for users to support their adoption of our CRM solution.”

Strategy

21. “We have achieved clear and documented agreement between business and IT leaders about the project objectives for our CRM initiative.”

22. “We have defined and documented the business requirements for our CRM initiative.”

23. “We have defined a CRM deployment methodology based on best practices.”

24. “We have a sufficient number of business and IT resources available for successful completion of our CRM initiative.”

25. “Our schedule for implementation is realistic in light of the experiences of other organizations similar to our company.”

26. “We have put in place a sound cost management governance structure and tracking system.”

27. “We have negotiated a transparent contract with our vendor that clearly defines scope, cost parameters, and service levels.”

SAP Loosens Up For Better Customer Management Solutions

By Chip Gliedman

I talked recently with the SAP CRM management team and partnering with SAP appears to becoming less onerous for vendors of customer-facing complementary software products. Many of these interaction-centric products in areas such as email management, knowledge management, and communication channel management had been forced into a go-it-alone strategy when looking to integrate with SAP CRM and Customer Service installations due to complex partnering rules and high fees. In a recent briefing, SAP appears to have loosened the reins a bit – structuring mutually beneficial agreements with a number of companies (announcements to follow) outside of their traditional partner channels. This bodes well for all three stakeholders in such a relationship: SAP, who broadens the capabilities of its product with well-integrated point solutions; independent software vendors, who can now work with SAP to tighten integrations; and users, who will benefit from co-marketed, tested solutions. As an indication that this is not just trading logos on PowerPoint decks, in at least one case, most of the work to integrate the products is taking place by SAP within the SAP product. Expect more news about the specifics of this new strategy in next few weeks. This is a vast change from prior policies which offered potential “partners” two choices – take it or leave it.

After So Many Years Of Ballyhoo, Semantic Web Still Searching For Killer App

By James Kobielus

Cynics might call Semantic Web a technology looking for a solution. And they might have a point.

Semantic Web refers to a long-running World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) initiative that is working toward an ambitious — some might say hopelessly utopian — goal. At heart, it is a vision for how the World Wide Web should evolve to realize its full interoperability potential.

People vary widely in how they interpret the scope of the Semantic Web initiative. The tech industries are swarming with a wide range of projects, products, and tools that implement different variants of this vision. What vision is that? In the broadest sense, Semantic Web refers to an all-encompassing metadata, description, and policy layer that can, potentially, support universal, automatic, comprehensive, end-to-end interoperability across every macro or micro entity — including data, components, services, applications, and services — on every conceivable level.

Whew! If that’s not the working definition of “pie in the sky” or “boil the ocean” (pick your metaphor), I don’t know what is. In fact, I’m hard-pressed to refer to Semantic Web as a definable market or solution segment. However, it’s not entirely vacuous.

For starters, organizations can implement W3C-developed semantic description standards — such as Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Web Ontology Language (OWL) — to make the meaning of content unambiguously comprehensible to services, applications, bots, and other automated components. Second, there is a reasonably robust market for “ontology” tools to support RDF/OWL-based modeling of application semantics. Finally, there is some incremental adoption of these tools and concepts in established IT segments, such as:

• Enterprise content management (ECM): Semantic approaches can support more powerful discovery, indexing, search, classification, commentary, and navigation across heterogeneous stores of unstructured and semi-structured content. Semantic search — driven by concepts, not mere text strings — is regarded by some as a primary Semantic Web application. Indeed, many Semantic Web vendors are primarily implementing the technology in search engines that leverage ontology-based concepts to improve search accuracy and reduce spurious hits.
• Enterprise information integration (EII): Semantic approaches enable consolidated viewing, query, and update of structured data that has been retrieved from diverse sources. Indeed, most commercial EII environments present an abstract semantic layer that mediates access to heterogeneous data, such as enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management applications, converging to a common presentation-side schema. A handful of those EII vendors have begun to support Semantic Web standards, primarily through third-party software plug-ins.
• Enterprise service bus (ESB): Semantic approaches can facilitate multilayered application, process, and service interoperability across disparate environments. To date, there has been little production implementation of Semantic Web standards in the ESB arena, though some vendors have adopted semantics, ontologies, and RDF to describe the conceptual models implemented by application endpoints, agents, and intermediary nodes within ESB-like middleware approaches such as event stream processing.

But Semantic Web approaches are still on the periphery of these markets. 10+ years into its inception, Semantic Web still has no clear killer app. It’s not clear if or when that app will emerge.