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...

 

 

 

Case Study #1: How ACT! by Sage Software Transformed the Customer Experience By Social Media

The First Case Study in the Series About How to Deploy Customer Service Social Media!

When I published the ROI of customer service social media, everyone had asked me - who is doing social media and what are they doing. To help those who haven't started down the social media path, I put together the 5 Best Practices of customer service social media. That doc is chocked full of ideas you can use today. And to provide more details on how companies have accomplished their goals for social media, I also decided to publish a bunch of case studies! ACT! is the first of many! I hope it helps you to get a better idea of how valuable social media is and its bottom-line affects!

Who is Sage and What Did They Want to Accomplish With Social Media?

Sage North America provides softwar applications to small and mid-sized business. The software covers a full range of business functionality including customer relationship and contact management. Facing tangible and intangible challenges with customers and a downturned economy, Sage was faced with reinventing ACT! software. They wanted gain and retain market share with top-notch customer service. They saw this as the most important component to the brand's success and the company's revenue growth.

To solve these challenges, Sage CRM Solutions product management turned to social media. They launched an online customer service community. This gave Sage executives a more dynamic view into actual customer issues and thereby allowed the whole company to know what needed to be done to transform the customer experience. The community provided a two-way conversation between top executives and customers. There customers told the honest truth about how they felt about the product, the service and shared "what would be better if..."

Executive Sponsorship? Yep- B.I.G. Time!

Executive blogs were a key part of the online community. In particular the GM used his blog to have an open dialogue with customers. When customers raised an issue, the GM responded in the blog, addressed the challenge and even provided his direct contact information if customers wanted to continue the conversations offline. While some executives might be paralyzed by the unknowns of engaging in truly open, authentic, genuine and honest dialogue with customers in a "public" setting like an online customer community, the GM saw it as his opportunity to get closer to their customers.

The results are that the ACT! brand's Net Promoter Score increased by 15 points, web self-service was enhanced and product development now became directly driven by the voice of customers in the community. For more details on this, see the report: Case Study: ACT! by SageSoftware uses Social Media to Transform the Customer Experience.

Let me know what you learned and how it affects your social media initiatives! Be brave. Just do it!

Click here to visit the ACT! community!

Learn. Grow. Share. @drnatalie or npetouhoff@forrester.com

Case Study #2: How Lenovo Implemented Customer Service Social Media Best Practices

The Second Case Study on Customer Service Social Media: How To and The Results...

This is the second case studies in the series on Customer Service Social Media Best Practices! You might be wondering what I meant my ownership. In organizational change management language... there are three stages of project success - awareness, buy-in and ownership. Here ownership doesn't me "owning" like it's mine - not yours. It means taking 100% responsibility for leading and faciliating solid, genuine, collaborative relationships with the whole company to further the whole company's succcess. Here's more details on how Lenovo accomplished their social media goals!

Why Did Lenovo Consider Social Media?

When Lenovo acquired the IBM PC computing division, they realized customers were talking about their products on 3rd party forums like notebookreview.com and thinkpads.com. They felt left out of these important customer conversations. To remedy that, they took ownership and lead the customer social media interactions.

They used a peer-to-peer customer service community to garner world-wide views of the customer experience. The result? They aligned marketing, sales, service and many other departments to accelerate changes and improvements to the customer experience. This alignment lead to a 20% decrease in laptop service call volumes, an increase in customer service agent productivity, a shortened product problem-resolution cycle and an increase their Net Promoter Scores. The net net is a reduce in customer service support costs and an increase in sales!

Why did they decide on social media? The cost of providing customer service for digital lifestyle products is on the rise. As margins on these types of products decrease and their complexity requires more indepth customer service, a couple of customer service calls eats away at the already thin profit. Lenovo knew that social media could help them learn, from the customer's point-of-view, the top issues with service, product features, functions, delays in shipments-- and all from a global perspective.

Lenovo Created Powerful Partnerships and Shared the Responsibility of Social Media Across Departments

In looking at best practices, Lenovo excelled at them. In particular, they determined all the stakeholders and invited them to participate in the customer service social media initiative. They invited the Legal Department to participate from the very beginning. The legal group helped determine the terms of service for the community, reveiwed the rules of engagement, the moderation policies as well as the management priniciple of the community. And they provided the disclaimers for the liability of the information posted to the site. And communnity executives collaborated with public relations and corporate communications to align all the communication strategies.

Lenovo also created powerful partnerships with marketing, sales, product development and engineering. They made interdepartmental collaboration "the way we do business around here." This is unusual as in most companies these functional departments are silo'd entities that don't always get along well. However, Lenovo's executive management provided the leadership and guided the partnership between marketing and service. Marketing owned the sales part of the website and the corporate blogs. The World Wide Service Organization "owned" the technical support website and the customer service online community. And all departments were considered an integral part of the community and asked to provide insights into how their department's operations not only affected the customer experience, but how they could make it better.

What was great was that they looked at the top call drivers in customer service. A good percentage of them were, "My lap top is broken. How do I fix it?" By providing that feedback from customer service to product development and engineering, Lenovo was able to reduce the volume of "its broken/fix it" calls. This contributed not only to contact center cost savings, but also to an enhanced customer perception of the product and higher customer satisfaction. Customers felt respected and listened to. Their feedback was used by the company to make better products, which reduces calls to the contact center!

If you want to know more about what Lenovo customer service professionals did, check out the research report, Case Study: Lenovo Takes Ownership of Social Media to Reduce Customer Service Costs.

Here's a link to the community: Lenovo Community Site

Learn. Grow. Share. @drnatalie or npetouhoff@forrester.com

Teleconference: 5 Best Practices For Customer Service Social Media

If you are wondering who's doing what and how they they are doing it... this is the teleconference for you!

DATE: Tuesday, August 18, 2009

TIME: 1-2PM EST (11-12 AM PCT)

Register: Best Practices Of Customer Service Social Media and The ROI

Overview: As more and more customers are using social media to interact — or worse yet to trash a brand because of poor customer service interactions — customer service professionals need to understand how best to lead and deploy social media for their department as well as their firm.

In building the ROI model for customer service social media, I talked with 20 companies that have deployed social media and the result was five best practices. While there are many things to consider, these best practices provide a framework to begin engaging customers in social media, to determine an ROI and transform the customer experience.

Agenda: Forrester's interviews with savvy executives found that smart companies use five emerging best practices:

• Begin by taking ownership of the social media initiative.
• Determine your customer social media goal.
• Keep a laser focus on the customer experience.
• Understand the fast-changing social technology landscape.
• Build a strong business case for change.

By following these best practices, companies can use social media to enrich customer experiences, reduce customer service costs, and transform their businesses.

I hope you can make it!

Learn. Grow. Share. npetouhoff@forrester.com or @drnatalie

Five Strategies for Customer Service Social Media Excellence

By Dr. Natalie Petouhoff

Hot off the press... Five best practices for social media in real companies!

As consumers are rapidly adopting social media to voice their disdain about companies, many of my clients are wondering how best to harness the power of the "cloud" to transform those customer experiences. In developing the ROI of Customer Service Social Media, I interviewed a lot of end-user companies. I used that information to look for trends for benefits, costs and risks. Another one of the outcomes of those interviews were 5 best practices that these companies used when they deployed their social media customer interaction strategy.  I decided to put together a report that not only summarised the top findings, but also provided detailed information around how the companies deployed these best practices and what their results were to inspire other companies to take the leap of faith and join the social media revolution.

When I talk to firms that have not deployed social media, they are:                        

1. Worried about cultural readiness and ability to adopt to a new way of doing business  
2. Unclear on who should lead the social media customer interaction initiative
3. Confused around the "right" social media software solutions to use   
4. Fearful around proving the business value of social media to executives 
5. Uncertain around whether social media could change the customer experience.

Successful adopters of social media use 5 strategies to capitilize on social media; they:             

1. Take Ownership
2. Determine Their Goals
3. Focus on the Customer Experience 
4. Understand the Technology Landscape
5. Build the Business Case.
   

At first glance there is nothing earth shattering about these. They are the typical things that one should do when you decide to make a project successful, right? The expertise of these companies in the actual execution of these 5 priniciples and that is what makes them such great examples. Here's a couple of examples from the report, Best Practices: Five Strategies For Customer Service Social Media Excellence.

Taking Ownership. Here we are looking at the process of awareness, buy-in and ownership in the sense of taking the leading role in the social media initiative. The Director of iRobot’s Global Technical Support took the leadership role in her organization. She told us she holds weekly cross-functional department meetings to present customer data and feedback garnered by their customer service online community to other parts of the company. She is empowered by executive management to prioritize and assign actions items to team members. The result? Everyone in the company now has actionable information to improve their part of the business. This information is based on customer feedback, with customer service leading the organization to a new way of interdepartmental collaboration, product improvement, reduced costs and happy customers!

Determing Your Goals. No two companies will have the same business objectives for their social media initiative. What's important it to decide what your goals and objectives are. For example, Linksys’ business goals included decreased customer service costs, enhanced business continuity,and increased customer satisfaction and repurchase probability.NetApp wanted to meet their customers’ needs and expectations around online support communities, providing a place where likeminded people could solve problems together; make professional, and even social, connections; and earn highly-prized status among their peers. myFico.com on the other hand, sought to provide education, reduce customer service costs, and provide a destination site for their customers to return time and time again. Comcast’s objectives were to listen to customers, help them when they could, and serve them via the channels that they use most. Intel wanted to reduce the costs of product ideation, resolve customer issues faster, and make sure company decisions were customer driven. What are your goals for social media?

Focusing on the Customer Experience. ACT!’s team, for instance, sought to understand the critical “moments of truth” when customers interacted with ACT!’s products and services. So ACT!’s customer loyalty department mapped the entire customer experience from the customer’s perspective. They found the best way to most effectively appreciate and transform the customer experience was to deploy online customer service communities. With in the community they could have ongoing, honest, genuine, and authentic interactions between the company’s executives and customers, providing the feedback required to revolutionize the customer experience.

Understand the Technology Landscape. Airlines like JetBlue and Virgin America use Twitter to monitor customer reactions to their travel experiences. Some companies have sites on Facebook or MySpace. P&G and Zappos.com are using GetSatisfaction.com to answer customer questions, solve customer problems, increase product ideation, and gather marketing data. Facebook, Blackbaud, & Neilsen are using UserVoice.com to capture and aggregate feedback from users, customers, and clients. ACT!, Lenovo and iRobot have Lithium-based communities. InfusionSoft choose Helpstream for their online community. And many of the typical customer service applications like RightNow Technologies, Salesforce.com and SAP are integrating Twitter feeds into their contact center applications. Intuit built their own online community software platform and embedded links to the community into their software products.

Building the Business Case. As with any initiative, one must weigh the costs, the benefits and the risks. myFico.com deployed a customer community, whereas iRobot deployed an integrated community/contact center solution. Carphone Warehouse is using Twitter. Whether you go big or small, make sure to understand all the costs. In terms of benefits, if you've determine your goals, then you are well on your way to determining your benefits. For instance, iRobot reduced customer service agent phone calls by 40%. Myfico.com experienced not only a reduction in call volume, but had an unexpected increase in sales because of the peer-to-peer recommendations in the community. There are risks with social media. The best way to deal with them is straight on. ACT! found it important during implementation to have weekly cross-functional department meetings to assure alignment and keep the foucs on the customer. Another risk is not actually measuring the "health" of your community. Myfico.com used Lithium's Insight analytic package. Intuit uses Radian 6. And other companies are looking at Visible Technologies.

I know that this is only the tip of the iceberg of what you want and need to know. Make sure to download the whole doc, curl up with a hot cup of tea, sit back and relax. There's alot in this report! And let me know if you have questions!

If you want to hear more about this report, sign-up for the teleconference on Aug 18th, 2009 at 1-2PM EST!

@drnatalie or npetouhoff@forrester.com 

Learn. Grow. Share.                                                                                    

 

                                                                                                 

 

BI Mashup Maturity Model? Oxymoron? Au Contraire Mon Frère!

By James Kobielus

In one of my recent tweets, I commented that Forrester has developed a maturity model for enterprise adoption of mashup-style, self-service development of business intelligence (BI) applications. Indeed, we have, and it will appear in my forthcoming Forrester report, “Mighty Mashups: Do-It-Yourself Business Intelligence for the New Economy.”

Another tweeter--an astute, but sadly, non-Forrester BI analyst--scoffed that “BI mashup maturity model” is an oxymoron. Respectfully, I must disagree. Enterprises are adopting self-service BI approaches for many reasons--principally, to cut costs in a tight economy, to unclog the development backlog, and to speed delivery of actionable, targeted intelligence to decision makers. Also, companies are providing users with BI tools to do interactive, deeply dimensional exploration of information pulled from enterprise data warehouses (EDW), marts, cubes, transactional applications, and other systems. Furthermore, organizations everywhere have adopted browser-oriented BI environments that leverage the full Web 2.0 interactivity and collaboration.

Sitting at the convergence of those trends is BI mashup, which Forrester sees as the new paradigm for truly pervasive decision-support systems. What throws off some people is the term “mashup,” which sometimes gets pigeonholed as simply referring to using, say, Google Maps to display geocoded performance metrics and sundry Internet-sourced data in a browser-based dashboard. Yes, BI mashup encompasses that approach to presenting and integrating diverse data, but its application is much broader.

Just as important, BI mashup is not bleeding edge. Rather, BI mashup leverages the in-memory BI clients, semantic virtualization layers, data federation middleware, automated data discovery, and other next-generation BI tools and platforms.

No one vendor or user has yet put together an end-to-end BI environment that is entirely focused on mashup-style self-service development. However, Forrester sees the BI industry converging toward as mashup-oriented architecture over the coming 2-3 years. With that in mind, we sketched out a BI maturity model that encompasses the following four levels (the first 3 of which are represented in case studies in the upcoming report):

• Level 1: Lightweight presentation mashup against transactional applications: This basic maturity level is for companies that have no prior BI or EDW; have little in-house BI expertise; and are comfortable with allowing casual users to use their browsers to customize parameterized reports from data from packaged business applications.                                                                
• Level 2: Deep presentation mashup against EDW: This level is for organization that do have prior BI and centralized EDWs, but have an understaffed BI development group and/or  power users and data modelers urgently require the ability to mashup and explore historical and current data within sophisticated BI workspaces.
• Level 3: Full BI mashup in federated environment: This level is for organizations that have decentralized, dynamic data management environments, and have the expertise to design reusable, composite data services to seamlessly mashup internal and external information.
• Level 4: Full collaborative mashup with IT governance: This level is for organizations that want to encourage subject  matter experts and operational users to collaborate on analytics created through mashup, but who are also concerned that all mashups be controlled, governed, and monitored in accordance with enterprise policies and best practices.

As I said, it will take a few years before we see a substantial number of enterprise case studies that implement the pinnacle of collaborative mashup with tight governance. Nevertheless, when you follow the evolution of next-generation solution portfolios from leading BI vendors such as SAP, IBM, Microsoft, and others, it’s clear that self-service user-centric mashup, to varying degrees, is a core theme.

BI mashup has such a strong business case that we’re confident it’s more than simply a “down economy” theme. It will almost certainly grow in importance for information and knowledge management professionals as the economy improves.

When Were You (Happily) Surprised By Customer Service?

By Dr. Natalie Petouhoff

I was getting ready to go to the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco on April 1st when I realized alot of the hotels were already booked. Not sure where to stay, a friend suggested I call the Pick Wick Hotel. If you haven't met me before, you know I believe companies live or die by their customer service. They had rooms. Whew! Holding my breath I asked the price. It was $108.00. I asked if the price included a bed. They laughed.

I looked at the schedule again, I saw that Forrester Senior Analyst Jeremiah Owyang was speaking on Wednesday morning. Wanting to support my colleague, I thought I would check to see if they had rooms for Tuesday and Wednesday night. Thursday was Clara Shih's book signing party. Friday I was scheduled to meet with Lithium and Jive. There was more to do than the time allotted. Yes, they did have rooms. Wow! And — drum roll... the price was $84. Every night I added, the price went down. I asked about wireless internet. Yes, they had it and it was free.

Every time I asked a question, I was surprised by the answer. They were fun, nice, and I got everything I needed. The hotel was cozy and I slept well.The conference was great. I'll write more about the conference soon, but what I wanted to focus on was — how surprised I was by the hotel accomodations. I was also surprised that I was surprised.

So my question for you is....

• When was the last time you interacted with a company and were surprised by great service?
• What happened?
• What was surprising?
• Did you call the company back and tell them how happy they made you?

Wouldn't it be an interesting world if we weren't surprised when customer service was extraordinary?

Write me back — I want to hear your stories — about good (or bad) customer service experiences. Don't spare any details. Your examples just may end up in my research!

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.

Meet One-On-One With Forrester Analysts At Our Business & Technology Leadership Forum 2008

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B

William Band
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Customer relationship management applications, customer experience management, stakeholder alignment, enterprise CRM
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Matthew Brown
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Marketing and advertising, enterprise portals, intranets and extranets, information and knowledge management
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Peter Burris
Research coverage for Technology Product Management & Marketing professionals
Enterprise marketing platforms, marketing automation, high-tech, application development
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C

Bobby Cameron
Research coverage for CIOs
IT governance, risk, and compliance; the marketing of IT; serving the business; security and risk
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Marc Cecere
Research coverage for CIOs
Designing IT organizations, changing the culture of an IT organization, IT strategic planning
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Patrick M. Connaughton
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Supply chain management services, supply chain management applications, enterprise mobility, RFID
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Alex Cullen
Research coverage for CIOs
IT organization; IT strategy, planning, and governance; organizational design and change management, IT management
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E

Boris Evelson
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, business intelligence, OLAP, data warehousing
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G

Chip Gliedman
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Customer relationship management, help desk/service desk, customer service and support, packaged applications
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H

Paul D. Hamerman
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
ERP, human capital management, financial management, business performance solutions
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Brian W. Hill
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
eDiscovery, archiving, records and retention management, enterprise content management (ECM)
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Bradford J. Holmes
Research coverage for Vendor Strategy professionals
Tech marketing tools and best practices; government, high-tech, tech marketing strategies
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K

Rob Karel
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, integration technologies, metadata management, extract
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Rob Koplowitz
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information Workplace, collaboration strategy, collaborative platforms, SharePoint
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George Lawrie
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Retail information technology; consumer goods supply chain; pricing, promotions, and revenue optimization; collaborative processes such as trade promotions management and sales; and operations planning
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Sharyn Leaver
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Packaged applications, business process management, ERP, application strategy and selection
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Craig Le Clair
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
ECM, BPM, output management, document processing services
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Pete Marston
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Customer relationship management, sales force management, software-as-a-service, outsourcing
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Kyle McNabb
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, document imaging, eForms and information capture, enterprise content management
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Thomas Mendel, Ph.D.
Research coverage for Vendor Strategy professionals
Product portfolio strategies, mobile services, business service management, data center management
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Connie Moore
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, business process optimization, IT organization, enterprise content management
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Leslie Owens
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, taxonomy and classification, enterprise search platforms, text mining and analytics
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Natalie L. Petouhoff, Ph.D.
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Customer service and support, customer experience, customer experience management, business strategy for customer experience
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Lisa Pierce
Research coverage for IT Infrastructure & Operations professionals
Voice services, telecommunications services by region, remote access infrastructure, networking
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Tom Pohlmann
Research coverage for CIOs
Business models, high-tech, corporate strategy, tech sector economics, product and solutions strategies
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Stephen Powers
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, digital asset management, enterprise content management, Web content management
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Stefan Ried, Ph.D.
Research coverage for Vendor Strategy professionals
Enterprise architecture, Service-oriented architecture, application platforms and programming strategy; application development
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Ted Schadler
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Real-time collaboration tools (instant messaging, presence, document sharing, etc.), cloud-based collaboration and email, mobile collaboration tools and applications, virtual worlds for the enterprise
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Claire Schooley
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
eLearning, information and knowledge management, videoconferencing, Web conferencing, enterprise collaboration, new workforce, retiring workforce
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Scott Tiazkun
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Financial management; governance, risk, and compliance; financial management applications; security and risk
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Zach Thomas
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Human resources management applications, compensation, recruitment strategies, packaged applications
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Tim Walters, Ph.D.
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Web content management, enterprise content management, digital asset management, information and knowledge management
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R "Ray" Wang
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Enterprise apps and ERP, software contract negotiations, software partnerships and ecosystems, customer data integration
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Doug Washburn
Research coverage for IT Infrastructure & Operations professionals
Green IT, IT organization, IT infrastructure and operations, IT management
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Gil Yehuda
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Enterprise Web 2.0 and Social Computing; collaboration strategy, tools, and culture; virtual communities of practice; virtual team collaboration
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Forrester's Business & Technology Leadership Forum 2008

Forrester's Business & Technology Leadership Forum 2008 is coming up soon — September 23-24 in Orlando, Fla. This event is designed to arm technology and business leaders with emerging organizational, process, and technology practices that balance chaos and control to drive new business value. We have a great speaker lineup this year, with keynotes from:

Guest Speakers

• Boyd Beasley, Senior Director, Customer Support, Electronic Arts
• Sandy Carter, Vice President, SOA & WebSphere Strategy, Channels and Marketing, IBM
• Karla Gill, Vice President, Enterprise Workplace Solutions, Marriott International
• Oliver Goh, Business Development Executive, Implenia
• Bob Pearson, Vice President of Communities and Conversations, Dell
• Gene Rawls, Vice President, Continuous Improvement, Wells Fargo Financial
• Donald Toland, Senior Director of Product Strategy, Qwest Communications
• Kenneth Washington, Ph.D., Vice President and Chief Privacy Leader, Lockheed Martin

Forrester Speakers

• Matthew Brown, Principal Analyst, Research Director
• Bobby Cameron, Vice President, Principal Analyst
• Rob Koplowitz, Principal Analyst
• George Lawrie, Principal Analyst
• Sharyn Leaver, Vice President, Research Director
• Connie Moore, Vice President, Research Director
• R "Ray" Wang, Vice President

Of course, the best way to fully benefit from the event is to attend; you can visit Forrester for all of the relevant information. If you're attending, here are some great ways to maximize your experience:

• Check this blog for our in-depth updates from keynotes and track sessions
• RSVP on our Facebook Event page, and network with attendees
• Follow us on Twitter as we plan and launch the event

If you can't be there, you can still stay connected with these platforms. But hopefully we'll see you in Orlando!