With all the commotion surrounding Enterprise 2.0, social networking tools and video enhancements have received most of the attention in the enterprise software sector, leaving methods like text messaging and SMS on the back burner. Both sides arguing the benefits of Enterprise 2.0 have made convincing statements, and it is certainly true that social networking is extremely beneficial for small businesses, who communicate with their customers on a more personal level. Social networking platforms like Twitter and Facebook, while providing real-time status updates and some collaboration perks, for the most part create noise in the enterprise atmosphere—at least for now.

For those businesses looking to strengthen customer relationships without the distracting clamor of some social and collaboration tools, SoundBite Communications is offering a medium for keeping contact with customers throughout the relationship lifecycle—via via text messaging.

SoundBite provides multichannel communications solutions, and they’ve recently released two products to their SoundBite Engage platform: Dialog Engine, and Agent Text Portal. Dialog Engine enables automated text messaging conversations by implementing custom business logic, while Agent Text Portal allows sales agents to send text messages according to customizable business rules in the platform. Aside from allowing sales teams to stay in touch throughout the sales cycle, the idea is to have more robust conversation with clients, thereby improving the customer’s experience. SoundBite has also released a contact-center specific offering, Contact Center Text Messaging Solution, which improves productivity and lowers telephony costs.

The whole family of products extends the uses for text messaging and SMS, but I’m curious to see how popular this program will become. Surely text messaging abilities are auspicious tools for any salesman’s arsenal—because it’s true, having a means of staying in touch often is invaluable—and multichannel approaches are always good. But text messages can sometimes be invasive, and I’m interested to see how they play out in the enterprise sphere.

Intuit is reinventing itself for the Web, and its latest product is an online version of the ever-popular contact manager. Due in large part to the economic downturn, many companies have released similar offerings this year—Salesforce.com has the Contact Manager Edition, and SugarCRM has Sugar Express—and now Intuit is aiming to get SMBs online with their Customer Manager.

Like the Salesforce and Sugar products, Customer Manager is light CRM for small businesses—a tool to help them store information in a streamlined space instead of across multiple applications. Customer Manager is browser-based and customizable, and information entered into the database syncs with Intuit’s QuickBooks, which is where this contact manager supersedes the Sugar and Salesforce offerings. With the QuickBooks integration, users can see information about financial transactions (see image below), update calendar information, and also import and export information from Outlook and Exchange.

Customer Manager for Mobile is the extension for smartphones, designed for mobile viewing. It provides all the capabilities of the desktop version, but so far is supports only BlackBerry phones (thought Intuit notes they are actively working with other smartphone manufacturers to support other devices). Also, Customer Manager has collaborative functionalities, so information entered and edited from the mobile edition will be updated for employees using the desktop version, and vice versa. Currently, Customer Manager is offering a free month-long trial, and then costs $9.95 a month for up for five users.

Intuit’s new product may be simple, but it is impressive. Of course, it seems a logical step given the large number of SMBs using QuickBooks, and executives at Intuit have stated that this is one of many online extensions we’ll be seeing. The contact management space has certainly been expanding this year, with some definite CRM heavyweights vying for the market, and it will be interesting to see what other products are released in 2010.

Update: Salesforce.com announced at Dreamforce that it will be releasing a contact manager for SMBs as well.

This month, Gartner Research Group held a CRM Summit, and one of the hot topics was e-commerce and its effects on CRM practices. With the proliferation of social networks and smartphone usage, many companies are (or should be) developing mobile-friendly websites and eventually mobile applications. Gartner’s numbers predict that within the next few years, 30% of smartphone users will be shopping on the Internet, 75% of search systems will provide some social search functionality to calculate contemporary relevancy, and about 300 million mobile users will be subscribed to location-based services. Companies need to plan now for the influx of mobile users and e-commerce transactions, and many CRM platforms are introducing mobile counterparts in preparation.

Mobile and social expansion fosters a new community among web users, and one that organizations need to tend. Companies need to focus on an in-depth customer experience—give them options, suggest things they might like, etc.—and acknowledge the importance of user-generated content (UGC). Allowing consumers to review items and services provides helpful troubleshooting information, and it necessary for giving consumers the experience they expect.

Gartner Research VP Gene Alvarez outlined four different types of websites, and indicated at what stage in mobile development each should be.

• Influencers. These are companies like automotive and appliance vendors, and their websites aren’t transaction-oriented, but rather aim to direct customers elsewhere for that exchange. If these companies have mobile apps, they are of similar functionality to their websites, but ultimately they don’t need to rush to the mobile market just yet.
• Informers. These websites disseminate information—like newspapers—and the companies behind them are the ones spearheading the movement for mobile applications.
• Facilitators. These sites belong to service-oriented companies—like banks and airlines—and while they court the mobile market, their customers might be wary of performing these transactions from their smartphone.
• Sellers. These sites sell goods, and as of now the majority of them don’t have applications for mobile transactions. However, Alvarez does note that they should at least be developing some outlet for submitting UGC from a mobile device.

Alvarez termed the effort to cater CRM to e-commerce users as “e-CRM,” and the notion has several aspects to consider. The conference covered the need for companies to consider CRM strategies for mobile users, but there is also the need for CRM companies themselves to put forth similar consideration. Salesforce.com and Oracle have had mobile applications for a while, and NetSuite added an iPhone application to their mobile arsenal this week. Serious players will eventually need serious mobile applications (with good user interfaces and plenty of user options) to stay in the game.

By: John I. Todor, Author of Addicted Customers

Put Your Offering in Context—One Meaningful to Customers

Declining profit margins and limited customer loyalty, these are common concerns of many businesses. When customers treat product like commodities and shop on price or convenience they force businesses to aggressively compete with each other. Unfortunately, this just exacerbates the situation.

How can a business differentiate on value, keep margin high and win customer commitment? Decommoditize! Put their offering in a context that is meaningful and valuable to the customer.

What is context? Context is the interrelated conditions or situation in which something exists; the circumstances that define meaning or value.

How can a company put their offering in a context that is meaningful and valuable to customers? By looking at the offering from the customers’ perspective. 

Mimeo.com is a great example of a company that did just that.

Mimeo.com sells printing. In most instances, printing is a commodity. Printers compete on price. Most printers are struggling and in recent years many have gone out of business. Yet, Mimeo.com has been very successful.

Read more »

By Katherine Jones, Director of Marketing at NetSuite

For years, the mantra for SFA and CRM systems has been to achieve a 360° view of the customer.  The sad truth, however, is that traditional standalone Sales Force Automation solutions are not able to deliver this complete view for the sales force and leave major “blind spots” on key customer activity with the company. 

The important intersection of sales teams and their customers is central to optimizing sales effectiveness. This means that real-time visibility into every aspect of the customer life cycle from initial lead through revenue transactions is vital.  Having this information within one business solution improves productivity and efficiency across the entire sales and support teams.  Without that broader visibility, the sales rep is driving blind and can easily run off the road by not knowing customer purchase, service, or payment history.  However, when businesses rely on a single integrated system, the sales team and its management can obtain more timely, accurate data while reducing the need to chase down information from disparate systems and to reiteratively enter data in multiple applications.

Read more »

John Todor, Author of Addicted Customers: How to Get Them Hooked on Your Company

How do you get customers to scrimp elsewhere so they can splurge on your offering? Offer a relationship that gives them a better experience, reduces stress, and increases the value they get.

This type of relationship leads to customer equity. Customer equity leads to higher profits, greater lifetime value, and the power of word-of-mouth. Yet, most businesses are compelled to compete on price and convenience. Why? They have no systematic process for building customer equity.

The basis of these relationships is trust.

However, according to the 2006 Edelman Trust Barometer, customers rank most companies, executives, products, and marketing in the bottom one third of the trust scale. Many business people feel they stand behind their products and therefore are trustworthy. Guess what? Customers expect quality products and services. This only leads to trust in the product, it does not add trust or value to the relationship.

Read more »

John I. Todor

Customer equity leads to higher profits, higher lifetime value, and the powerful impact of word-of-mouth. Yet, most businesses are compelled to compete on price and convenience. Why? They lack customer equity and have no systematic process for building it.

Customer equity is the value of the relationship that exists in the customer’s mind – it’s emotional or psychological. When customer equity is strong, customers have a greater desire for the offering, are less price-focused, forgive snafus, seek advice on big picture issues, see the relationship as helping them deal with the future, and become advocates.

In today’s marketplace, customers are confronted with abundance, overwhelming choice and aggressive competition for their business. Consequently, most products are seen as roughly equivalent, and therefore are to be bought on the best trade-off between price and convenience. In this mindset, customers are indifferent to brands or relationships. No customer equity accrues.

The differences between most products are not meaningful to customers. It is through the experience the customer has buying and, especially, using the product that the customer gains value or meaning. Experiences create emotional and psychological reactions – negative, indifferent, or positive. The outcome of the experience lasts and impacts the relationship and customer equity.

The customer experience is the vehicle for building customer equity!

Six Ways to Build Customer Equity

1. Shift the Focus of the Relationship
A highly competitive marketplace encourages customers to buy on price and convenience. Yet, customers want trusting relationships. Relationships that deliver meaningful experience and help them deal with their issues. Truly trusting relationships simplify things for customers in an increasingly complex world. Yet, few companies deliberately nurture the right type of trust.

Read more »