This is great stuff on co-creation of value. Take this book, mix it with The Experience Economy, a dash of CRM at the Speed of Light and the future is ours, man!!
! (*****)
This is a groundbreaker, folks. One that you should be reading right now.
Go. Shoo. Go get it now.
It is affecting you as you read this, whether or not you know that. Seminal work on what has been a transition to a new type of economy. (*****)
If this book didn't spend so much time proclaiming its manifesto and explained it a little more, it would be a disruptive innovation unto itself.
It is a powerful and often metaphorically lovely book about the new customer a few years before that customer even knew it was what the cluetrain crew train said it was. A great book but strident as hell. This was a more important book than many realize it was.
Or is. (****)
If marketing is something you do, then this book is something you read. Not only does this dynamic book look at marketing in a contemporary fashion - with the customer at the center - but it also helps you figure out how to (finally!
) measure your activities and results. A genuinely refreshing brace of business thinking in a field that needs it. (*****)
This is a revolutionary book.
I love this book (partially because it validates everything I say :-)) because it recognizes that the "enterprise logic" of managerial capitalism is no longer sufficient to interest a consumer who is trying to control his/her own value. There's so much more..
.. (*****)
This is a you gotta read, read.
Jim is a board member of CRMGuru, has won numerous academic honors, is a real world CRM consultant, runs marathons, and can write up a storm. He thinks out of the box and then provides approaches to how you can. This book is undegoing updating but is well worth it as is.
Get it. Now. What are you waiting for?
Hurry up!! (*****)
The ultimate guide to implementation of CRM.
This book is about as practical as it gets. Just lays it right out and boom, you should have an idea of what you have to consider when it comes to CRM. (*****)
This is the best book on CRM EVER written.
So I say. And it is written by me and so I pass judgment on myself. (*****)
As Donna points out, this is an ironic title.
All contact centers are already "real-time." None the less this is both cutting edge and definitive and reading it is a must (*****)
I'm sitting here at 1:55am Dallas time, post-night-of-tornado-warnings-and-bad-weather-that-mostly-bypassed us. Also another night of a pitching-induced Yankees loss and I'm feeling a little.
...
gloomy...
tired...
but I can't sleep.
Figgered that (I KNOW its figured - figgered is a figger of speech) I would wrap up a bunch of things, throw out some not-so-random thoughts amidst the noir.
.
...
.First, if you remember an entry of a few day ago, I wrote about Verticals On Demand, a company that I think merits a REAL close look. I speculated on Marc Benioff's rumored investment in the company.
Last night I received this email from Matt Wallach, their very smart VP of Marketing and Sales:
Loved your coverage of Verticals onDemand. Thanks for your kind words.
I am writing to officially deny the rumor that Marc Benioff is an investor in Verticals onDemand.
has lots of partners and Marc cannot show favoritism.
Hope to speak to you again sometime,
Matt,
So, consider the rumored investment put to bed (unlike me, dammit). I have no reason not to believe Matt, who seems to be a standup guy.
An add appeared in the Wall St. Journal on Monday that was entitled "Siebel CRM on Demand: CRM On Demand."
It was a simple chart that compared what they called Oracle/Siebel to Salesforce.
com. What it was set up like was something like this:
What made this typical Oracle trash was the last entry in particular - which implied that salesforce.com didn't have secure multi-tenant hosting.
That's just a straighforward lie. While you could make the case some of the entries might be true (salesforce.com is not hosted onsite for example), some twisted (pre-built industry solutions - not integrated into the out of the box offering (nor is Oracle for that matter) but VOD is building verticals on the salesforce.
com platform (see below), but I happened to write a part of CRM at the Speed of Light in 2004 that detailed the physical, internet, server level, data, etc. security depth that salesforce.com had and it was powerful - and that was 3 years ago and its improved since.
Oracle knows that. This is just a lie.
Period.
Let Oracle prove all of their checkmarked claims. I'll print them here and give salesforce.com equal time for the bakeoff.
Monday Morning...
Bruce Richardson is Like Good Coffee and More Cowbell Every Monday morning, I get this free, I don't know what to call it...
newsletter...
bulletin...
at 2:30am CST insomniac hours, I don't really care...
from AMR Research written by Bruce Richardson (that's Bruce Richardson, not Bruce Dickinson who puts his pants on one leg at a time and then produces gold records - who knows what I'm talking about here?), AMR's enterprise applications thought driver. What fascinates me about this analyst is that his stuff is solid as a rock and insightful.
He's not a big Enterprise 2.0 guy. Can't think of any time he addressed the social media issues at all.
But he KNOWS the market space and covers it with intelligence and a thoughtful set of insights.
Last week, in his discussion on the successful earnings report of SAP, he noted one number that stood WAY out to me - 30% of NetWeaver sales were for standalone deals, with no other SAP applications involved. In a separate segment, he noted that salesforce.
com was unbundling their platform from the applications.
As you well know, I've been a longstanding trend-watcher when it came to the platform play of the CRM vendor leaders like SAP and salesforce.com.
I think its smart and a great way to position oneself against the owners of the desktop and to be the leader of the new desktop - the webtop. SAP is using NetWeaver to do the agnostic thing here and clearly is being successful. Salesforce.
com did it with AppExchange first and now this official unbundling of the platform. Rearden Commerce does it with an SOA that attaches 135,000 concierge services. The battle for the hearts, minds, and walletshare of the business world/consumers has moved another step forward.
Read Bruce Richardson and someday you'll be wearing gold diapers - oh wait, that's Bruce Dickinson again. But DO read Bruce Richardson.
I'm tired and I want to sleep.
But I can't.
I'm using the Blackberry 8800 and I have to say that I love it. It does almost everything I want and unlike the Pearl which had a camera that was pretty shabby, this one eliminated the camera and add TelNav GPS which has been genuinely useful though it costs an extra $10 a month.
I'd get it or wait for the rumored 8820 which is the 8800 with WiFi. How cool is that?
I want one.
But that's not why I'm writing this entry actually. If you noticed, day before yesterday, RIM announced that they were unbundling a version of their software/OS from their now very slick prosumer devices and providing true Blackberry services (with the Blackberry rather spartan interface) on Windows Mobile 6.0 devices.
In other words, providing a mobile devicetop (lots of tops floating around at this hour) service set that isn't device-dependent. That is a great strategy and I applaud them for it. Crackberry loyalists should recognize this as a move to spread the RIMjoy that can improve their market position - whatever device you own.
So style trumps utility because you can get Blackberry utility now for real or virtually.
Very good move.
I'm gonna try and get some sleep.
I could use a coupla hours. Wish me luck.
Oh BTW, SAP said, CRM is its fastest growing horizontal applications.
From the mouth of President SAP USA Bill McDermott, no less. Cool.
Its been too long but the time is right now.
I have to cover Rearden Commerce and the only excuse I have for not doing much more than mentioning this rather amazing bunch is a "the dog ate my homework" excuse. I was actually writing something on Rearden a few months ago - I forget exactly how long ago (ummm, convenient memory loss?) and my system went down and I had to rebuild it.
My system that is. Arf. Woof.
In any case, I'm a long time fan of Rearden Commerce for a lot of reasons and their recent announcement on their partnership with American Express is both something comment-worthy on the one hand, a good excuse to talk about Rearden and why I like them on the other hand, and a place where I can mouth a bit on the integration of work and personal life rather than the balance of work and personal life and the smart behavior that companies should be exhibiting by recognizing this, on the third hand (okay, so I'm a mutant...
maybe its a spiritual, or ghostly or mystical third hand. But then, maybe not..
.).
(This headline is an homage to the 60s, BTW.
Can anyone remember the original that went with it? First one to give me the right answer - there are more than one - wins $10.00 gift certificate to Amazon.
com)
Rearden Commerce, on November 13, announced a partnership with American Express that can be called CRM 2.0 - The Right Way.
The idea is simple.
American Express and Rearden are offering the to American Express's (?) 4000 corporate customers so that they can have an array of mainstream and long tail travel services in a coherent web-fed environment.
The premise behind this one (and Rearden Commerce in general) is twofold.
First, that it is understood by intelligent businesses who happen to reside in a 21st century milieu that their workforce is working a lot longer hours than it used to. That work-life balance is not really that but work-life integration. Ergo, the individual employee is going to need to do two things.
One, be more productive and two, be more productive. But both in different ways.
The first "more productive" is the recognition by businesses that providing a wide array of services to the employee, makes the organized scheduling and use of those services that much more effective, efficient and productive.
Isn't it easier, my fine untethered friends, to be able to utilize multiple channels to do things like book travel, line up cars, hotels, etc. and airport parking, PLUS provide the evening's entertainment through ticketing and concierge services and A/V conferencing space ad infinitum or at least ad thousands more servicesum all in one convenient and coherent personalized portalized service-oriented-architectural way? The answer here is a resounding YES!
The second "more productive" has to do with the increasing recognition by employers that since their employees ARE working longer hours and even from home that it is highly likely that employees are going to do personal things from work - the same way they do work things from home. The smart employers are saying, "well, I suppose that means that we should provide make the services easily available to our employees so that they can take care of those personal things more efficiently and thus will be more productive because they were able to do the personal stuff fasterbetter and thus have more time to work at work AND they will like us for not only letting them do it but for giving them the tools to do it better."
Rearden is perhaps the first company to both recognize the two "more productives" and then develop the technology AND procure the services to take care of it.
With an on-demand platform, no less. AND a fully realized . The first one that I've seen that I can comfortably say is a true SOA, not just a bunch of advanced web services that try to link a few business rules to it - typically reminds me of bunch of ugly hair extensions on a bald guy.
And THAT starts the story...
.
According to one of the (how cute!), the market for business services in the U.
S. alone is $471 billion - a whole lotta jack. That also means that companies out there are crying for business services ranging from shipping packages to airport parking to web and telephone services to event planning to insurance services, gift services, couriers, charter flights, and any other of the services that the 135,000 providers that Rearden has direct and indirect access to can provide.
That is a number that Rearden claims, not me exaggerating and knowing them, they can back it up. I'll ask them for a complete list immediately.
The fact is that the while many of the services offered are niche services that are now defined as after the book of the same name, the user-centric approach that Rearden takes makes all that work. By aggregating the 135,000 services that Rearden can reach out to, and taking a user centric approach, the small niches become both successful and profitable as part of a personal value chain or, if you want to call it this, a user ecosystem.
Rather than going to a series of disparate sites to take care of the services that you need for your business (and personal) requirements, you, as a user, have all the services aggregated to a single place for you to view - your very own business services portal door. Plus, based on the business rules and the workflow, changes and alerts can be pushed to your personal "site" so that you can access new services that might meet your profiled needs or learn about changes in your services as they occur.
The suppliers to this platform are part of the Rearden Commerce Network - RCN - you know them; the ones with Anderson Cooper's 360 - oh, waitaminute, that's CNN, not RCN.
RCN means the Royal Canadian Navy - oh wait a minute, that's RCN, not RCN.
Actually, the Rearden Commerce Network is the supplier network. Its members are "attached" to the architecture by industry standard adapters or custom built ones when the industry standard adapters just won't do.
Then the Services Console comes into action. That's where the group and individual profiles are created and permissions/roles etc. are created.
So how the consumer/user accesses the RCN is done by the managers and administrators at the Services Console.
There are other technology pieces but the heart of the whole thing is The Personal Assistant that sits at the center of the American Express offering. This is where "service as a platform" gets transformed to "business services on demand.
" Assuming permissions set in the Service Console, you, as a consumer, or as a group of consumers, set your shopping requirements, booking needs, notifications and alerts depending on your interests. Do you want to have two different set of services - one to handle your business needs like airport parking and travel booking, hotel booking and equipment shipping and the other to handle your more personal shopping needs ranging from online grocery shopping and delivery to notifications that are sent to your friends and significant others about your travel plans? Done.
Do you want the notifications to come to your cell phone, your travel companion's Blackberry, your spouse's laptop. Done. Done.
Done. Done.
Cool model, isn't it?
Yeah it is. But not just cool. Its potentially disruptive and a step forward in the on demand world.
Not only is "software as a service" (Industry-wide) or "service as a software" (NetSuite) but the idea that "service as a platform" ( ) becomes a reality as Rearden Commerce implements a massive offering of ancillary and direct services that are valuable to businesses on a fully realized services oriented architectural platter.
Rearden Commerce rocks. They are just so.
..so.
..CRM/Web 2.
0.
So I apologize for my dog. He won't eat my homework anymore.
I was thumbing through the most recent last night and something stood out that I had never seen before. No, not a zoot suit or a Pee Wee Herman style guide. They were selling clothes (not surprising), accessories (not surprising) and what they called "experiences" (surprising).
The two I noticed were a night of Jazz and a trip to Chorus Line (currently in revival on Broadway). Not TOTALLY what a customer experience is all about but it was notable.
Why?
I then picked up the newest edition of Electronic House and read the editorial that precedes the rest of the magazine in every issue. It was all about "customer service" but from the standpoint of the experience that a customer has at consumer electronic stores and how many, especially Tweeters, are redesigning and revamping their stores to provide a room by room unique electronics "experience" for each customer.
Couple that with my entry of a few days ago on the " and there is somethin' a goin' on that is becoming clearer and clearer.
The tsunami of the social customer and the so-called 2.0 changes (I wish I could figure out a better term that you'd all love and adopt and replace 2.0 with.
I wish.) are hitting so hard that even the more conservative mainstream/traditional businesses are beginning to have to respond - even if its in that awkward way that those not figuring it out often do respond. "Sure, I know what that experience thing is.
Ummm...
.yup..
..sure.
...
.yeah..
.."
NBC?
Not where I'd be looking for a first responder. But the social pressure to provide those experiences a la Joe Pine's mass customization are powerful indeed and no longer able to be ignored.
This is remarkably short for me because I'm heading out to San Antonio to do some training on Applied CRM Strategy for BPT and just finished a webinar on 21st C.
customer strategies for SAP with Pat Bakey, who is SAP's Senior VP for CRM Solutions for North America and an all around good guy.
Off to Dulles.
Sometimes being a CRM guru/thought leader is really just being a CRM butthead.
I'm talking about me here. This is not about someone else.
I'm sitting here recalling two separate and disparate "lyrics" (only one is really a lyric and the other just musical) - one from Good Charlotte in their hit "Lifestyles of the Rich and the Famous" and the other from Miguel De Cervantes masterwork "Don Quixote.
"
"Good actions ennoble us, we are the sons of our own deeds" - Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes
"You say you have problems. That's because you can solve them." - Lifestyles of the Rich and the Famous by Good Charlotte
I'm on a cruise right now.
My wife and I are celebrating our 25th anniversary and we went all out and got the Royal Suite on Celebrity Cruise's GTS Summit - a ship that holds around 2200 passengers and nearly a thousand crew (great ratio). The Royal Suite is magnificent - about 800 square feet with a veranda, several rooms, two plasma TVs (I'm watching the A's - Twins first ALDS playoff as I write this - want to date stamp this? Frank Thomas JUST hit a homer off of Santana in the 2nd inning), a separate dining room, a Bang Olufsen CD/Radio/etc.
player on the wall, teak contemporary walls, a weird sort of jacuzzi in the bathroom that I can't figure out, sculptures, original art, a separate living room, and a full time (for the penthouse wing) butler. The food on this ship is exceptional with world class chefs trained by a guy who has a Michelin-starred restaurant and there are 10 bars all rather unique at this place. There is also a very good gym and jogging track.
The gym has strength training machines and free weights in addition to a substantial amount of cardio stuff.
Plus, we're heading to Hawaii for two weeks.
Hard to complain isn't it?
Not if you're a CRM "guru" it isn't.
The biggest problem with being a CRM guru-type is that I'm ALWAYS looking for what's wrong with the policies and processes of a business. Or right with them.
This is, incidentally, different than a complaint about a customer service representative at an airlines or a telco. We have zillions of stories of that. We also have zillions, well okay, hundreds, of stories about good customer service reps.
The CRM take on this is how baked in is the bad or good service as a policy or process that the company endorses or embeds. I'm not looking for the jerks who do bad or the angels who do good. I'm looking for how the company treats its customers and how well the logic of the company coheres with the logic of the customers they have.
That said, there is also a difference between being a CRM thought leader and being a big butthead. CRM thought leaders extract the crucial strategic value from the good and the bad and either present them in a novel way or easy to understand way or come up with new strategies or concepts that lead to strategies that support both customer and business value. CRM big buttheads are hypercritical and are carrying out their "jobs" when they should be enjoying their lives.
It doesn't mean that you can't do your job - it just means that you (meaning, me) should sometimes enjoy what you have and not try to find the "problem."
I've often said that CRM is attempt to make the art of life into the science of business. You can take that literally or figuratively.
That's up to you. They both apply. But the art of life isn't ALWAYS the science of business.
Business is a part of it. But note, I said a part of it, not all of it.
Yet, I was on the ship two days and I found myself scrutinizing the Celebrity line policies relative to a couple of glitches in the customer service.
The glitches? Lets just leave it at no big deal. Really.
They were nondescript.
What was ridiculous was that I found myself scrutinizing things from a CRM guru's (read: butthead's) perspective. I'm on my 25th anniversary cruise and I'm looking at the science of business, not living the art of life.
Butthead.
Let me add one cliche to the lyrics from Good Charlotte and the poetic statement from Cervantes. Here it is: "Sometimes you can't see the forest for the trees.
"
"Good actions ennoble us, we are the sons of our own deeds"
"You say you have problems. That's because you can solve them."
"Sometimes you can't see the forest for the trees.
"
What being a CRM butthead means is that I sometimes forget what I actually have. I'm sitting here doing something that most people can't afford to do because I've been lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time when it came to CRM and business consulting. I'm on a cruise with someone I've loved for almost 30 years which makes me immensely lucky - someone who stood with me during the best and worst times - and there were some truly worst ones that most of you probably wouldn't ever imagine - and I'm trying to find out what's wrong with the customer focused policy of the cruise line.
That's why the Good Charlotte line. "You say you have problems. That's because you can solve them.
" These are NOT problems. These aren't even business lessons. They are a matter of enjoying a life that many people can't enjoy and being grateful for the fact I can.
It means enjoying the companionship of my wife of 25 years and recognizing that having someone like this (and my family) in my life is what the whole thing is all about to begin with. That's the "forest for the trees."
It also means that I have to continually understand that I am the son of my own deeds - meaning that the good I do does ennoble me but when I act stupidly and forget what the difference is between the "art of life" and the "science of business" that I debase or degrade myself - not a lot, but any is a lot if you aren't doing the good you should.
It's why Cervantes is already a timeless artist while I don't think Good Charlotte will go down through the ages. Though they are pretty profound for a group of 20 year old rockers.
So what's the lesson for CRM folks?
None other than to remember why you do what you do. Why do YOU want CRM for your company? Let's follow the logic for a sec.
All in all, if it's done properly - supersets, sets, and subsets, we are all happy.
Enough. While I actually ENJOY writing the blog in a way that transcends my business interests, for now, I'm going to lay back, watch the game (only 9:10am here - we're at sea currently) and enjoy my art.
I wrote most of this sitting at Dulles airport in D.C. last Tuesday because of a plane delay, not rain delay.
Though incredibly irritating since I had a lot of meetings when I got to SF, it was also a useful time delay, one that allowed me to do things like start to write this blog entry and start to write an article I owe - a semi-technologically focused article on realizing customer value across the enterprise value chain (Damn! That article needs to be finished today!).
I actually enjoy writing for Bob Thompson and Gwynne Young at CRMGuru because not only do I have an incredibly wide audience, which gives my ego some wide and long strokes - but they are wonderful people to work with.
There's something ironic to me about my role in the CRM world. I'm considered a significant industry influencer as some like to call me - and I like that designation.
Just universal enough to let me be analyst, consultant, author, speaker, and moshpit ranter, yet specific enough to cause those who care about the CRM industry to at least say hmmmmmm. All of that is pretty damned cool. At least my ego and superego think so.
But that's not what gets me going about CRM. For whatever reason, the CRM industry is the repository for an incredibly nice group of people - let's just say, at least as far as I can see, this industry is well above the national Nice Average for specific industries. In fact there are some exceptionally talented people who are also excellent people with good souls and good hearts.
Of course, I can think of some of those who are serious jackasses too, but they are shortshrifted with me and ultimately they are outcasts - in my head and heart at least. That's not who I'm concentrating on here.
There are an incredible number of awards in CRM for cool companies, industry leadership, great implementations, exceptional case studies, and all things corporate.
But those are so retro-20th century. What about the core purpose of a customer centric ecosystem? That's the relationships between people and how they interact.
I (and many of my colleagues) have talked about this forever. We call it time and time again, The Experience Economy or whatever. We say that the universe of business is based on the collaborative efforts between the customer and the company.
But we forget, the company is composed of people too. So ultimately, like everything other thing in life I can possibly think of, it boils down to whether or not someone likes you enough to continue to work with you in the provision of the services and products that your business provides. But note the key phrase.
Whether or not someone likes you enough...
So enough already with the awards to what are empheral reflections of human activity. I'm going to start with this particular blog entry an award that goes to the best hearts in CRM - those individuals in the CRM people that are simply exceptionally well liked by their colleagues, clients, friends and if I know them by more than reputation - by me too.
There'lll be many wonderful people not on this list.
I'm limiting the winners to those who not only have I had direct experiences with but also have been mentioned as exceptionally decent by others that I've spoken to. The comments to me about the individuals have to have been unsolicited and at least two. So there will be people who I personally hold dear to my heart not on this list but remember all of those - I DO love you.
But the winners are people where the anecdotal evidence is also very strong that they are wonderful human beings - not just great managers or exceptional business development people or highly skilled consultants. They are people that others deeply care about and admire - despite their positions, so to speak.
Ladies and gentlemen.
Thanks for being here tonight. Turn down the kliegs, dudes! You're blinding me!
!!
There will be three categories with up to five winners in each category.
The categories are:
- Senior Management - These are awesome people with great hearts who hearts have stayed that way as they climbed the corporate ladder. They have to hold or have held the position of Vice President and up at a company - regardless of size and have done something in the CRM world at some point in their career that would be called significant.
- Industry Experts - These are people who are analysts, consultants, independents who have somehow been influential in or influenced the CRM industry in some way.
They're good hearted and smart in what they do or did.
- The Underappreciated - These are those who could be lower on the corporate totem pole but who are accomplished, lovely people in their own right. They might be a manager somewhere, they might be an executive assistant, doesn't matter.
They are warm, wonderful people who are leading fulfiled lives because they are just - good. They are underappreciated by the industry at large and maybe not known, though maybe, but they are loved by those who do know them.
This category is one that says that you can climb the corporate ladder but you don't have to be a jerk to do it.
The people who are chosen here are or have seen senior management in companies that have potentially difficult cultures though not always, and have had the utmost respect of their co-workers, those that report to them, those that don't (or didn't), and others outside their companies. Their skills as management are superb but more importantly, they retained the hearts that good humans have, regardless of where they sat on the upper rungs of hierarchy. This will be the only category for today's blog because I have to actually select people.
While of course, I know all of them, since there are I'm sure other worthies out there I never heard of, these are the ones I (and, if youi remember my criteria from oh so many words ago) and unsolicited others (at least 2) chose. I have a list of 21 people and I'm picking no more than five.
Bruce Culbert - Bruce is the creator of IBM E-business, the former SVP and GM in charge of BearingPoint's CRM and Supply Chain combined practice, did a stint running global services at salesforce.
com and is now running both his own consulting firm and is my major partner in the CRM training company I mention here, . All of those credentials are wonderful as far as business accomplishments go but these aren't awards for business accomplishments, they are awards for showing a true heart and a good nature and the kindness of human nature in a package. What many who don't deal with Bruce don't know is that, while at BearingPoint, a company with a cutthroat culture that had (and may still have) such continuous reductions in force as the disgusting euphemism for layoffs and firings is now called that were so regular that the staff dreaded every single Friday because they knew that a RIF was coming.
Can you imagine a better argument for a 4 day workweek than that. You had to dread a possible firing on a Friday just to get to the weekend - turning a weekend from a rejuvenation time to 2 days of stress relief and exhalation. Bruce, at BearingPoint was able to create a cujlture that was an island unto itself within the BearingPoint corporate hell, that both protected his staff from the dread and fear, sometimes by taking the blows himself and by having those who reported to him just plain like him.
AND they performed like gangbusters as a unit. During the time I was doing some consulting work for BearingPoint, I can't tell you the countless times that the staff members would say, I'd never be here if it weren't for Bruce. But let's take this one step further.
What a lot of his business associates may or may not know is Bruce's (and his amazing wife Sue's) bigger than life hearts on the homefront. His home is a haven for kids who have had broken homes, young parents not quite up to the responsibilities yet of full parenthood, mentoring young, ambitious business kids and just what is always theologically called Good Works. Even just entertaining, they touch a huge swath of people all the time.
Which is why he deserves to win the Good Heart, Hot Soul Greenie first award. Congratulations to a great person. Not just a business leader.
Eric Greenberg - I didn't even know Eric 2 years ago. He is the Executive Director and Co-chairman (along with moi as the other co-chair, I can proudly say) of the Rutgers , one of two research centers in the United States focused around CRM. Eric is both an incredibly hardwoking and smart executive director and one of the most humble and self-effacing good people I've ever met anywhere doing anything.
He is so humble that I once asked him about his business prior to Rutgers and found out that this not-even-40 year old had founded a call center company that, reached, prior to him selling his interest to his partners had 35 centers and 5000 employees!! He doesn't tout it, trumpet it, even talk about it, but he retired to do something else with his life when he was in his mid-30s.
What he wanted to do with his life is why he is the next winner of the Greenie. The thing that Eric wanted to do is simply this - good. He wanted to do something good in the world that would have lasting effect and draw on his incredible business success.
He did two things as a result. Became a teacher/professor at Rutgers in the Business school and created the CRM Research Center which is reaching its second anniversary with a stellar cast of leaders who have been industry heavyweight thought leaders (like me - at least the heavy weight part), senior business leaders in CRM and a core faculty group that are moving the center into a leading institution. But ask Eric about this and you'll hear a truly humble person who is just trying to do some real good for real people in the real world, not just float on a stupid yacht and have be ordered by the court to do something charitable (That's Larry Ellison from Oracle I'm talking about by the way).
Eric is truly one of the good people who doesn' talk about it. But I do and he wins a Greenie for it.
Mei Li - Mei is the Vice President of Public Relations for and a beautiful soul (the rest of her ain't bad either).
Aside from being one of the most accomplished PR people in the CRM business bar none, Mei is also one who is beloved by a group that simply doesn't show the love to anyone very much - the press. People who could classify as old school, or cliched as hard bitten reporters, editors, and analysts sing Mei's praises not because she is some great PR person (though she is) but because she has a heart the size of California (NetSuite's headquarters). I've attended several NetSuite events in my day and I've never seen so many press who simply are close enough to her personally to give her hugs and kisses.
This might not sound like a lot but two things to that. For the PRESS to do it is astonishing given their necessary though not all real public personas. And second, what I'm going to tell you IS astonishing.
When my wife was going through chemotherapy in 2004, Mei called me up and told me that she was going to take time off and fly out from California to Virginia to help me take care of my wife while chemo was ripping my beloved up. If I hadn't insisted on her not coming, she would have been at the airport the next day. She is that good a person.
When I flew the next year to a NetSuite event, at the end of the event Mei handed me a green (very trendy accessories store) bag with among other things two absolutely beautiful scarves in it. She simply said, This is for Yvonne. (my wife for those of you who don't read my frequent references to her).
She had knit the scarves herself. THAT and all those people who truly love who don't normally love anyone but their own families, gets her my third Greenie.
Steve Olyha - Steve is the Senior Vice President in charge of Global Sales for .
He was recently promoted from his role as the GM and SVP for the coimbined CRM and SCM practice at Unisys because of his remarkable ability to drive business in ways that Unisys, the megamonster of a corporation, can barely comprehend. He did the same thing at CSC for their CRM practice and he has simply been an enormous success. He is as conservative as I am liberal and politically we agree on very little except one thing which I won't reveal out of respect for him - though I'm glad to agree with him on it.
While his business success is astounding, even more so is his generous nature. He has worked his butt off to make the Rutgers CRM Research Center successful and to even make sure that he had the time to teach a class of these aspiring business leaders of the future (maybe). When he was promoted to his new position, his former reports told me that they were thrilled for him and going to miss him greatly.
They loved working for him. He has taken his executive assistant, Michelle Hastings, with him from CSC to Unisys and through all his incarnations showing his personal commitment to her not just because he knows she is highly competent, but because he sees her as a friend and colleague too. He is that way with all those he works with and those who report to him.
Not only remarkably successful in business but a success as a human being too.
Jeff Pulver - Jeff is the VP of Marketing (and so much more) at , one of my corporate candidates for either player or winner of the platform wars that we're now seeing. Jeff is one of those people, nearing 40, who has just been a leader whereever he goes and is just plain cool - and seen that way by his colleagues, his reports and friends.
I've known him since he was a manager at PeopleSoft, a VP of Marketing at Epiphany, the VP of Marketing at Siebel and now in his current position. I have known and met dozens of people in the industry who either know Jeff, worked for Jeff and the universal feeling is that this is a great guy who is fair honest and loves a good time. He was brilliant at Siebel while Mike Lawrie was there and was one of the main people for changing their image to a company that people were beginning to like and get excited about - of course until Tom Siebel stepped back in and screwed it up again.
But I'm going to tell you a Jeff story that goes way back that shows you the nature of the man. When he was at PeopleSoft, I was in charge at a different company of getting a partnership with PeopleSoft. During the course of my work toward that, I became friends with a very underappreciated person at PeopleSoft who did a great job but because PeopleSoft had an oddly rigid salary structure, was being underpaid despite her incredible competence.
I decided I wanted to hire her away from PeopleSoft but to protect the fragile partnership negotiations I had to talk to her manager to make this happen. That person was Jeff. Here's the deal.
He knew the capability of this individual; he knew she was being underpaid; he knew he couldn't do much about that given the structures and strictures of the salary levels; so he LET ME HIRE HER because he saw it was best for her. Not for him. Not for PeopleSoft.
For her. This is Jeff Pulver. This is why countless people respect his terrific skills but love him for his truly giving nature and and he is thus, the recipient of the fifth and final Greenie in this category.
Congratulations to All of You. Please exit to the left of the stage, except you Steve, you can go to the right if you want. You've earned it.
This might have seemed easy but it was amazingly hard to choose. I had a list of 21 people who could have won this and more than 40 who, if the external validation wasn't a criterion, could have been a winner too. There are a large number of great people in CRM who don't get recognized as the great people they are and I'm going to do it.
I don't care if you call me stupid or silly or ridiculous for personalizing CRM but its about time that CRM and personal qualities became something other than The Great Oxymoron. Now CRM and recognition of personal qualities are going to be The Greenies Hot Souls Awards
I still tend to be that way. Long lazier periods which then go into heavy overdrive on doing something until it gets done. All of you who would like to interpret my psyche please feel free to email me and let me know who my "inner self" is.
I'd say "inner child" but I think that my child is an outer one, visible to all who look or who would rather not. That said, on with the story.
Slimming Down
That said, last week (about 10 days ago) I all of a sudden clicked into a "slim down my life campaign" which meant a bunch of things (wondering how this relates to CRM aren't you?Heh. Heh.).
First, losing weight - I've gained around 20 pounds in the last 8 months due to all kinds of stressful sorts of things going on in my life (too much info?). Second, it meant slimming down how I traveled.
I traveled with a 5.0 pound laptop with a 2.5 hour battery life, no built in anything (coupla USB ports and that's about it) and a heavy quasi-organizable bag that was loaded with adapters, PDAs, cellphones, PSPs, IPods - 60GBB thick IPods (4th generation.
How retro) a bluetooth card, a firewire card, a modem card in those rare instances (never) that I would need it, a sound card that was better than the built in system which sucked, a wireless G card and countless cables that were there just in case that I literally never used once. The total weight was like 19 pounds or so and the cables etc. were a bloody irritating mess.
But to add fuel to the flames, I also was (and am) involved in 7 CRM related organizations that get my services for free, because I believe in social responsiibility to help where I can and in helping friends if they ask, write 35 articles or more a year for 15-20 publications - most for free - some as large as 10,000 words, some as small as 650 words, and have my own consulting practice which is just me where my multiple clients have me write white papers or consult on go to market strategies or improvement of position or mindshare strategies or speak at events> I co-own our wonderful, lovely training/research/consulting company which in a few short months of existence has established a significant branded presence in the market far beyond what we expected at this point. I also am keeping up this blog several times a week. I'm about to start my "You Are What You Eat" CRM and customer experience-related podcast.
I continuously do favors for friends at an individual level and get about 5 emails a week from strangers asking me for something and when those strangers are students in particular, I don't turn them down. (except one student who actually asked me to write her thesis. No joke.
) Plus my actual travel has been over 55,000 air miles this year already and will be more than double that by year end judging from opportunities coming my way to speak (4-5 requests a month, I would say). Plus I have to deal with significant health problems with my family that as many who know me know, have been draining.
Lest you think I'm complaining, I'm actually not.
I love my life and I love being busy and I love getting "rock star" treatment on occasion when I go somewhere and people seem to think my opinions are important and I've recently been told that I'm a great person to give clients "a whack in the head" because of the way I do that. An interesting compliment. In a manner of speaking, I get paid to be the New Yorker I am.
My life is blessed with a wonderful family and great friends and a helluva business. AND I've written a book on CRM that is in 8 languages and through 3 editions. So I'm a very lucky person, indeed.
But it can and it does get to be overwhelming to me (and everyone) sometimes.
Okay that's the scenario that led me to this realization around 10 days ago that it was time to slim it all down and minimalize things.
First Steps in the SlimDown
I began to work out and immediately dropped 4 pounds of water weight in about 3 days. Now its work, but its working.
I decided to slim my travel down considerably too. My laptop and all associated crap was too unwieldy, bulky, tangled and heavy.
And the laptop, a 3 year old Toshiba tablet was giving me grief. So I went out and bought a (I hate to say it) Sony VAIO VGN-SZ120, which is the retail version of the Sony VGN-SZ140 - a dual core laptop with a 13.3" screen, built in everything (DVD, bluetooth, wi-fil a/b/g) and with the extended battery 10 plus hours of battery life - all in a 4.
0 lb package (God I hate Sony but those engineers can make great hardware - of course, as typical, they didn't bother to find out how the customers wanted the systems populated so they have an incredibly annoying amount of trial software packages and beyond the operating system, useless software on the system - with an occasional exception). With this system I didn't need any of the cards I carried and DVD drive was internal and it was fast and VERY light with a screen big enough for me to do my work on the road in a way that I wanted to. YAY!
!! I then went out and bought and IPOD Nano (the 4gb variety) so I could slim down the IPod I was carrying.
Why would I need a 60GB IPod when the Nano which carried 1000 songs was there? Who needs more than 1000 songs when they are traveling? So YAY again.
I was slimming down, minimalizing and reorganizing things. So far so good. But SO expensive.
But that didn't matter. Life had (and has) to change and since I was loath to give up the work I was doing - though priorities are being reordered on THAT too, I had to at least reduce the feeling of burdensome tangle and weight.
Heading to Even More Coherence - Great Customer Experience
I also decided it was time to throw out, give away or sell my 12 laptop bags on Ebay and buy one that made sense and was nice and slim and fit all that I would need to carry at the same time. I did considerable research and kept hearing about the travel laptop bags of so I decided that, despite being pricey, I would go with them. I decided to buy this particular combination (and a PSP pouch): 
. Here's how it went:
- I made a call and left my number because I had a bunch of questions on sizing and ordering the bag.
There were an incredible number of laptop sleeve slzes and I needed a special delivering dispensation
- Within five minutes I had a call back from Tanya, a Waterfield Designs representative who was incredibly friendly, incredibly patient and a totally knowledgeable person that made the conversation in which I asked about 20 questions completely enjoyable and informative. In the conversation, she helped me, with a series of detailed questions that she just knew (wasn't reading - or is a great actress) figure out which sleeve I needed for the laptop including things like "do you have an extended life battery?" I then needed to make sure because I had a meeting of the PACE (Performance Against Customer Expectations) Consortium meeting at (check them out - awesome company) in Baltimore the next day, that I could get the "signature required for overnight delivery via Fedex" piece of the agreement waived.
I did. There were several other "customization" questions that I answered so they could produce MY bag not just the (I take no responsibility for the name of what I bought).
- In the course of our conversation Tanya told me something VERY interesting.
Oddly we were talking about the kind of buckle that I wanted on the bag. I had a choice of what is called a paraglide buckle which is less likely to open easily than the other which is aluminum and is literally the same buckle as the seat belt - but then of course can catch on something and open easily - but looks kind of cool. Tanya told me that people love their bags so much that if after three years or so or whatever they want to replace the buckle (aluminum with a paraglide buckle) because they got sick of the buckle but love the bag, then they send in the bag and for $28 for the buckle and $15 labor they can do that.
And THAT got me to thinking about personalization and mass customization in the way that Joe Pine and James Gilmore define it, because I've been queasy about the benefit of mass customization as most people use it in the day where co-creation of value that is meaningful is the mission critical individual benefit of business relationships between company and customer. Hold that thought while I finish this part.
- I ordered the bag, paid the extra in shipping.
In about 3 hours I had an email from Gary, founder of Waterfield Designs (a former bike messenger who analyzed his own travel experience and made a business of it) which was automated but in a mail-merged personalized kind of way) with my order information detailed including my specific delivery request, tracking number, specific items shipped and broken down by cost and a total.
- The next day as I was walking out the door to my meeting, it showed up at the house at 8:15am, when our regular Fedex driver who is a dead ringer for Cheech Marin and a GREAT guy, dropped at the door for me
I would be dealing with these guys if you're willing to pay the price. All in all it cost me $378.00 but it seems that its worth it and the experience was wonderful.
Go Gary! Go Tanya!!
Finally It Makes Sense - Mass Customization
Remember that thought I asked you to hold in list item #4 in the last section. The switching of buckles for the customer at an entirely reasonable price given the cost of the bag. Couple that with the customized service and the list of questions to improve my "personal bag" and it gets to my business point - albeit in a long winded kind of way.
I speak with Joe Pine II on occasion and he is a great guy (HUGE Yankees fan BTW. Like me in fact) and brilliant in his conception. Basically, he and Mr.
Gilmore are the creators and the best evangelists of the idea of the Experience Economy which is, to me, one of the foundation books for 21st century capitalism. I agree with about 90% of it and given that they wrote that in 1998 and I never agree with anything but my own ego, that is an amazingly prescient book and a remarkably high percentage of any book to get me to agree to. In they often speak of mass customization.
This concept pre-Pine always disturbed me because in my thinking we are past the age of mass customization which meant, as far as I could understand it, more, better modularized parts and services - according to the way that I thought about it. Shoshanna Zuboff points that out in her book " that she thought that it followed old business standard logic that it meant producing more variety and providing it to the customer. She (a good woman too) and he (a great guy) disagreed on how to approach this new customer.
Joe's thinking on mass customization is defined on page 72 of his book where he says it "means efficiently serving customers uniquely, combining the co-equal imperatives for both low cost and individual imperatives present in today's highly turbulent competitive environment." This means modularization of both goods and services. Shoshanna, on the other hand thinks that the entire logic of managerial capitalism has to be thrown over for one of distributed capitalism where the new enterprise are flexible federations of companies working to provide that individual value.
So that mass customization in her eyes doesn't work. I have to admit, given my liberal inclinations, I still don't like the term. But I'll tell you what.
Even though Joe and Shoshanna don't agree in their writings, they fundamentally are on the same track - though I think that Joe's name for it, the Experience Economy is much better than the Zuboffian "Support Economy."
Here's my thinking
Ultimately, 21st century capitalism is required to provide the means for both the co-creation of value between the customer and the company and what provides meaningful value to the company and the customer. You've seen .
It isn't a matter of just providing product, but tools and expertise fromt the company so that 1. the customer can get the personalized experience of creating a new gaming experience that is meaningful to them in the result and during the process of creating a mod for a game. That is meaningful value and the company's responsibility is to design the support for that.
The game company by providing the game engine, authoring tools or even source code, drive increased revenue because people will buy the game for the tools, not just the original game itself - often because of the "AWESOME" experience of the creation of the new mod for the game. In the case of Waterfield Designs, there is a visceral pleasure in the ability to make the bag that they provide what you want it to be and because it is an "analog" product - meaning not bits and bytes - it is something that has modular pieces that make it cost-efficient for the company to do it while providing me with a pleasurable kind of excitement about getting something that maps to my "slimming down" process. They modularize pieces and part of what they do is provide a level of service that is absolutely superb - meeting a need that I have.
But that isn't the same thing as say, what makes the 17 year old mod designer who doesn't travel excited. He loves the ability to share what he developed with his buds and THAT amazing mod makes them excited to purchase the game to design their own mod. In other words, we are in a state of transition.
SZ is right when she says we're learning as we're going but what is clear are two things - first that value now resides in the customer (The Support Economy) and profitability resides with the experience (The Experience Economy). And the road to the transition to the newer forms of business logic (The Support Economy) to the "theatrical" e.g.
both literally that, and deeply emotional and meaningful in some way experience (The Experience Economy) lie through the alliance between the customer and the company in co-creating that value ( ).
And thus the Great Synthesizer does it again!!
! )
All that from a conversation about a paraglide buckle.
BTW, no joke.
The bag really does rock!!
As you've probably noticed, I really loved Singapore when I went there last month (check out the link ).
An entire country committed to "Service Excellence" which translates to me to the improvement of the customer experience in all facets of life from the "front line worker" (taxi driver, waiter/waitress, store clerk) to the most senior of management and government official. If you take a look at Story 2 i the entry I link to above, you'll note I had nothing but nice things to say about the that I stayed at there - one that I would recommend to ANYONE who goes to Singapore for anything whatsoever. The staff are remarkable people who could well be associated with the Ritz Carleton's "Ladies and Gentlemen Serving Ladies and Gentlemen.
" mission. In fact, they were such good people and so attentive, they could usurp the slogan. I'd give them permission, but I have nothing to say about it.
So imagine my surprise when last night I got the following LETTER (no not email, actual posted snail mail letter) from the Sheraton Towers in Singapore based on my filling out the questionnaire on service quality that they provided for their guests.
Read this letter
I will, of course, follow up with an email to them to discuss my concerns which were only on the quality of the food being okay but not great. The food was fine and not something I was complaining about.
I gave it better than average (I think) ratings but not much better, yet here's this letter from the Director of Food Beverage discussing how concerned they are and can they follow up. Not only "yes, you can' but it is my pleasure to be associated with an institution - a whole country and a solitary hotel - that actually cares this much. Thank you for the experience.
It was amazing and I'll see you again soon. I'm sitting in the Sarasota FL Hyatt on Sarasota Bay hotel in my room..
.zonked. I'm tired, having been up since 4:00am and on the road early so I could miss the traffic on Route 28 in Manassas VA that would have, if I had hit it only a half hour later, aided me in my quest to most likely miss my first plane of 2006 - but I did avoid traffic and thus had loads of time to kill.
While doing so I was thinking about the presentation I'm giving tomorrow morning at 8:30am to the University Continuing Education Association (UCEA) which is labeled by them "CRM and the 21st Century Non-Profit: You Gotta Have Heart, But You Need Cash and Volunteers Too" and has absolutely nothing to do with that subject whatsoever since these are marketing execs for continuing ed at universities from around the country. So I relabeled it, unbeknownst to all but the director and coordinator of the event : "CRM + Student for Life = Adult Continuing Education X Revenue." That will be a trip.
But while throwing something entirely unexpected (but, of course, far more germane to the crowd at hand) is gonna be a fun thing, that's not why I'm kind of sleepily (at 2:45pm, no less) writing this blog entry.
While thinking about the presentation on the leg of the flight from Charlotte, NC to here in Sarasota, I came up with a thought based on the 4 Principles of CRM that I'm going to be presenting and always do (see slide below). You know what I think we're doing with CRM for better or worse?
We're taking that lovely, though often uneven, artistry each of us practices of living day to day, behaving ethically, acting persuasively, thinking rationally and reasonably, and enjoying life's experiences and trying to turn it into "CRM The Science of Business." The problem that we've had historically doing that is that in the interests of the bottom and top lines of corporate "necessaries", we've ripped life's elegance out of the whole thinking about it and replaced it with analytics and technology and systems. That's what makes it sad and not all that interesting to a lot of people.
But what is very nice, very promising about all this, is that because of the transformation of society that is currently going on with all these new generations growing up in an unprecedently powerful and empowered way - AND with the recognition that time is all we have on this planet, the new "customer" which pretty much means you 'n me, will no longer stand for the diminution of elegance and or thus the degradation of the beauty of the experiences. They may not put it in those terms, but it is no coincidence that we social creatures are turning more and more to communities online or otherwise (I'll be writing about a PEW Internet study I just ran across on social networks and the internet in a day or two). What that means is that either business logic and the direction of CRM changes or you can kiss those customers' goodbye.
The elegance of a single individual's life is on the way back into the equation and no analytics or metrics can replace the way that the individual desires that elegance, that sense of beauty in ALL facets of his/her life. - That can be personal, where the artistry continues to reside or in the business world, where the pseudo-science of CRM - which keeps falling back to its cold and left-brained 1990s style business logic, now has to be replaced by that same artistry. AND that, bunkies, means the mutual collaboration between humans to get a desired satisfying result for all the humans concerned - be they on the corporate side or on the customer's end.
Isn't that what we want in all things, anyway? Happiness in its multiple forms?
I know I do.
Sorry for the extremely long delay in blog entries, (never again) but I was in the midst of an affair - a hot sweaty one.
No, you pre-voits, not with another woman (or man for that matter); I am totally in love with my wife - but with a city-state. Singapore, where winter means 85F and 98% humidity on a dry day.
But what I found was that it also means a commitment to service excellence that is national in scope - for real. Not just for lips.
Don't get me wrong.
I loved Hong Kong's vibrancy, its liveliness, and its attempts to improve the visitor's experience, but, hey, I'm easy I guess. And fickle. I told Hong Kong I loved her, but when I came to Singapore, Hong Kong became just a one night stand, Kowloon a brief but fond memory.
But Singapore, ah Singapore...
now here, I'm looking at a loooong commitment - I hope. Because the customer experience is not only alive in Singapore, it is growing so fast, its actually just outright hot.
The Whole Country is Committed - The Whole Gosh Darn Thing
No joke.The mandate extended to every person in the country, not just some small group or just a vertical industry or two. Every-single-person.Some of the salient points with my favorite in bold:
- Remaking Singapore includes remaking our mindsets.
e.g. not being afraid to fail, being willing to try new things, giving people a second chance, adapting to changing job market, etc.
- e.g. SIA, Changi Airport (e.
g. ICA staff), also find them in the hotel, retail and F B sectors
- All three parties - companies, service staff and customers - have a role to play in improving service
- Companies must show leadership and adopt service friendly policies, systems and processes
- Emphasize service training for workers - not just for frontline, but also managers and supervisors. Management must walk the talk.
- Service jobs are honourable and can serve with pride and professionalism e.g. Ritz Carlton's mission: Ladies and Gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen
- Our people too can deliver good service, even as life in Singapore gets better
- Government agencies will get together to promote good service.
- Not just for tourists.
News RSS