The Dimensions of Listening

Text Analytics gives marketers the opportunity to effectively mine the unstructured customer data that they hold. Whilst insight can and must be gleaned from the structured (quantitative, often transactional) data; tools now increasingly exist to work with the other (much richer) 80% of that data.

At last week's Text Analytics Summit in Boston, Charles Schwab, the San Francisco-based financial services firm, presented its Voice of the Customer program which uses text analytics to understand survey responses and is planning to extend the application to analyze text from notes and comment fields in its sales and contact center applications.

Since listening is the key to engagement, we will see considerable growth in this and the related field of speech analytics over the next year...

It Doesn't Matter How Well You Say It...

... Because if you are saying it to the wrong people it simply won't make it past the first hurdle. I am fascinated by the disproportionate amount of time (and resource) we tend to spend in marketing thinking about the message rather than thinking about matching the message to the receiver... I guess this is the difference between coincidence marketing and targeted marketing...

Passion Pays

Max Kalehoff in his AttentionMax blog underlines the singular importance of passion for companies. His main tenet, excellently put, is that competence and flawless delivery are now table stakes and for the customer, passion is the difference maker.

When passion lets loose, you drive focus, cultivate mastery, leverage spontaneity, foster creativity, build intuition and live toward mission. The dots connect. Clarity emerges. Your own bar of excellence sets higher, and you become infatuated with exceeding it.

A great contribution to the debate...

Customer Centricity in Uncertain Times

When the economy slows, consumers become more discerning. As a result marketers need fight harder and smarter to gain advantage over their competitors. A recent survey on CRM (defined as a technological investment) from Gartner showed a 14% increase in spending year over year.

North America remains the largest market for CRM software, accounting for $4.3 billion in revenue in 2007 and projected to reach $7.6 billion in 2012. The strongest growth will come from Asia/Pacific markets, where revenue is forecast to rise from $410 million last year to $840 million in 2012.

Enhancing the customer experience is the key differentiator...

Permission Is The Asset Of The Future

The title of this post comes from a Seth Godin article about the music industry. A very interesting article that you can read here.

He's right of course. As marketing continues to evolve and get smarter about being relevant and - who knows, even anticipated, so are the consumers. Consumers have already created the Channel of Me in which customisation and control is enabled by technology. In my mind, the ultimate expression of this evolution in the customer mindset will be the consumer as a personal data broker. As an individual, I will be able to allow certain parties to see certain parts of my "Private Key" profile. Permission will become easy to grant and to rescind based on my preferences at that given moment... For example, if I am in the market for a car, I will give Ford permission to talk to me, when I have made my choice - the marketing window is closed, if I want to stay up to date with travel offers, I will share a piece of my profile with Expedia etc.

The key here is control. Customers will control their own data in a way not dissimilar to the way they control their media consumption today. Permission will be a sliding scale with limitless potential for nuancing and endless possibilities for monetization...

The Art of Conversation

Joseph Jaffe's new book "Join the Conversation: How to Engage Marketing-Weary Consumers with the Power of Community, Dialogue, and Partnership" continues a homage to Jim Stengel who has (along with his company - P&G) done more to push the concept of influence marketing than just about anyone else. Jaffe details the steps marketers must take to gain maximum advantage of participation in the conversations that are taking place.



I think that 2008 will see a shift from a passive observation of sentiment and buzz to a more active, open, honest and ultimately mutually useful facilitation and participation in the conversations themselves. Active listening....

When CRM Met CGC

I was thinking the other day how CRM has changed over the last few years. The focus of any good program has to be to provide customers and future customers with the tools (content, information etc...) to manage their relationship with the advertiser. Whereas the end-game used to be one to one communications, the new objective needs to be one to one relationships enabling one to many advocacy. CRM meets CGC if you will.

Happy New Year to all.

CRM & Social Media

A growing number of sessions at this year's Gartner CRM Summit are dealing with the impact of social computing on CRM. Web 2.0, and the power of unhappy customers who voice their complaints to the world via blogs, have changed the way companies need to manage the complete customer spectrum. The social and collaborative techniques of Web 2.0 provide a framework upon which to provide rich CRM services that are customized to the individual visitor. Integrating the two worlds is a first step - LoyaltyLabs, a San Francisco-based company that provides customer management for consumer brands, announced it had created Gimme Love an application that application connecting CRM applications to Facebook. One customer, 1-800-FLOWERS.COM is using the application to link its Fresh Rewards loyalty program to the popular social networking site.


CRM = Customers Really Manage.

Competition for Google

In the world of on-line office-type applications, Google has some new, and interesting competitors in terms of the quality and range of browser-based applications offered. A recent Gartner report placed Zoho at the top of its list of "Cool Vendors in Web 2.0," Zoho's Office suite also won PC World's 100 Best Products of 2007 Award. Most of Zoho's products are free (for the time being). It charges for only a couple of products geared toward small businesses. Its CRM system, for example, is free for the first three users and $12 per user per month thereafter. Zoho plans to keep free versions of its products available for individuals. There will, in the near future, be a tipping point for this kind of application delivery.

Google CRM...

Google and Salesforce.com recently announced a partnership to connect Google's AdWords to Salesforce's CRM application. Under the partnership, Salesforce.com will act as the official distribution channel for Google AdWords. AdWords customers will be able to track their Google advertising spend through to leads - eventually being better able to track the true value of specific keywords in terms of their real conversion rate.

More here...

Did You Say Conversation?

The term 'conversation age' used to refer to the 'Salon' period of the 17th and 18th Century France, it has now become the new age of marketing communications (helped along by Jim Stengel). As companies (including mine) continue to strive to participate in in the conversations that our clients customers are having all around them. A bright idea from Gavin Heaton and Drew McLellan brings together 100 of the top thinkers in social media to create an e-book on this new 'Conversation Age'. The book will be an introduction to the tools that enable these conversations and how they are being used to change the the interactions between companies and their customers. They are looking for additional contributors here...

CMOs & Technology-Enabled Marketing

In the 2006 annual survey, the CMO council found that their members' key concerns for the year were to:

quantify and measure the value of marketing programs and investments. Improve their efficiency and effectiveness and, finally, grow customer insight and conversations.

And how would they see technology helping?

CMO's Top 10 Technology-Enabled Marketing Initiatives in 2007

1. Marketing performance measurement dashboard
2. Email campaign management
3. Lead generation qualification or reactivation
4. Customer relationship management
5. Customer intelligence and analytics
6. Sales and marketing integration tools
7. Viral word of mouth
8. Marketing resource/process management
9. Customer networking and affinity building
10. Loyalty and rewards

Source: CMO Council Marketing Outlook 2007

Market Conversations

(optimization is listening)

As Jim Stengel from P&G pointed out recently the future will be built around interactive (conversational) technologies - specifically mobile, word-of-mouth, and customer co-creation of brand experiences. He talks of turning the world's largest marketer into a starter of conversations...

Somewhat earlier, the Cluetrain Manifesto written in 1999, established 95 theses - I have listed the first 10 - the remainder are here:

1. Markets are conversations.
2. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.
3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.
4. Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.
5. People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.
6. The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.
7. Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.
8. In both internetworked markets and among intranetworked employees, people are speaking to each other in a powerful new way.
9. These networked conversations are enabling powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge.
10. As a result, markets are getting smarter, more informed, more organized. Participation in a networked market changes people fundamentally.

Code Name Titan

Steve Ballmer demonstrated Microsoft's new CRM application at the annual Convergence conference last week. The CRM Live application has been made available to 300 members of the company's technology adopters program. The company is expected to increase that number in the second quarter of this year. Microsoft CRM Live is the same application as that code named Titan for release later this year. Customers will be able to run the software as a service (SaaS) application from within Outlook or a browser window. Additionally, partners will be able to build vertical iterations for specific industries.

Brad Wilson, general manager of Microsoft CRM confirmed that usability and interoperability with other office applications will be a central focus:

"In the last 10 years, companies have spent a lot of money on deploying CRM
technology and solutions," , said during a presentation. "It takes too long to
deploy, it's too difficult to align business and IT. Probably the biggest single
issue is you've gone through all this time and expense and people don't use it."

Why The Mobile Is The Biggest CRM Platform Ever

Apart from being the most broadly adopted channel. The mobile offers several advantages for relationship management over any other platform.

In an interesting post on the Communities Dominate Brands blog the authors discuss mobile as the 7th mass media. Inherent in their findings are massive opportunities for relationship marketers.

• It is the first truly personal mass media. IT'S MY PHONE....
• It is the first always-on mass media. The mobile is the ultimate alert and news media, faster by several orders of magnitude over any other media.
• It is the first always-carried mass media.
• It is the first mass media with a built-in payment mechanism. Even on the Internet, payment always required setting up a separate payment system like Paypal or giving long number series of credit card info etc. Hardly "click-to-buy". But on mobile, it is that
• It uniquely offers the media audience the input tool at the point of inspiration.

Listen & Learn

An interesting article from DM News by Michael Grant and Jonathan Margulies discusses how multi-channel marketing is enabled and driven by technology:

• Customer relationship management tools organize customer and prospect contact
  efforts and govern the usage of applicable data across the sales process
• Database segmentation tools provide a foundation for the storage and profitable
  use of customer and prospect data, whether for prospecting or predictive
  modeling purposes; and
• Marketing automation platforms serve as a “highway”
  that organizes the flow of data, resources and strategic intent throughout the
  marketing process.
  

The authors (rightly IMHO) identify the challenge as being to use these tools in such a manner that generates true incremental value. Technology available today can help build campaigns that listen and adapt themselves to better meet the evolving expectations of their audience. The challenge is to design listening strategies that intelligently leverage these capabilities....

Agencies Still Struggling With Marketing Technology

In a recent report entitled "Help Wanted: 21st Century Agency" Forrester analyst Peter Kim comments on ad agencies' role in the delivery of marketing technology:

Today, agencies must deliver technology — in addition to creative — expertise, and many traditional agencies struggle to adapt. In fact, marketers view advertising agencies as least competent among service providers to deliver marketing technology.

Marketing services companies - such as mine - are the best placed to deliver these tools to our clients - who better understands the challenges, has the broadest experience of the different tools and can identify best practices from across industries ? If all that is true (and I think it is), then what is going wrong? The report points out that a bigger share of the overall marketing budget is being allocated to marketing technology and that agencies are competing with internal groups, system integrators and consultants for the right to provide these services.

Technology used to be at the service of marketing, today it increasingly defines it, if agencies are to retain their place - they must accept and embrace this.

Listening Tools

Listening attentively to customer interactions to gain early insight into potential customer issues, up and cross-sell opportunities and other insights is not really new. Using powerful speach analytics bots to detect specific keywords (competitors' names...), emotions or even intonation such as sarcasm provides an important edge.

As Forrester Research puts it "Insight gained from data available today, sitting unused in contact center data warehouses, can supplement (or replace) expensive surveys and customer focus groups to find out what customers think about the company, its products, and its services." I would add its competitors....

Gartner predicts that such approaches will not become mainstream until 2009. Any business that depends heavily on a contact centre must get ahead of the curve. Key movers in this space are: Autonomy, CallMiner, Nexidia, Nuance Communications and Utopy.

The Evolving Face of CRM

The last year has seen remarkable changes in the CRM software marketplace. The market has been characterised by the consolidation of the leading CRM vendors, witness, Epiphany/Infor Global Solutions, Onyx Software/M2M Holdings, Oracle/PeopleSoft/Siebel while the established business software players have started to turn up the heat. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) deployment options along with open source solutions will inevitably lead companies to rethink their approach to the problem

Forrester recently evaluated 13 applications in the enterprise CRM sector. Siebel and SAP came out on top, but Forrester named a long list of strong contenders, including Infor CRM, Epiphany, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Onyx CRM, Oracle's E-Business Suite CRM, PeopleSoft CRM and Siebel CRM OnDemand, RightNow, and Salesforce.com.

The firm predicts the market for software and services will reach $10.9 billion by 2010, up from $8.4 billion this year.

Several factors are driving spending. An Accenture survey of CEOs found that their top four priorities were acquiring new customers, increasing customer loyalty and retention, increasing revenue from current customers, and increasing customer service capabilities - sounds like CRM/CEM to me.

Web 2.0 & Direct Marketing

In the same way that email marketing added “opting in” to “selling” as a objective of direct marketing, the advent of Web 2.0 adds “engaging consumer interaction and participation” to the range of marketing interaction opportunities. The underlying idea is to build and maintain an awareness of your brand, product and service; allowing you to continue to engage with the consumer and leading to relevant and profitable relationships for both parties over time.
Indeed, what marketing discipline could be better prepared or better placed to take advantage of the primary elements of Web 2.0 than good old DM? Think about it, the opportunities presented by an increasingly participative and interactive Internet, such as social networks, feedback, engagement and advocacy are all central elements of customer centricity (The founder of my company, Lester Wunderman will be speaking on this topic at the Forrester Forum on Reinventing Marketing For Customer Centricity in April of this year). Who would know better how to identify your potential consumers, how and where to reach them, how to engage them in a relevant dialogue and, most vitally how to listen to them? The challenges too are familiar territory to the direct marketer, searching is central to web 2.0 but the rising costs and poor conversion rates of search engine marketing and generally poor performance of on-line advertising efforts, can be greatly improved by increasing the relevance of our marketing efforts by varying content (headline, copy, the call to interaction etc) to match the visitors source and their behaviour. How can you do this? By segmenting your visitors and testing/optimizing your content, easily recognizable as core elements of any well executed off-line direct marketing campaign over the last 40 years.