Part 2 of this 3-part series. Here I’ll highlight three products that I think demonstrate a laser-focus on the ROI story in an expanded Enterprise 2.0 context. In part 3 we’ll talk about the similarities and differences between Social CRM approaches and Enterprise 2.0. Sorry for the long post. I’m way over my 1000-word per post self-imposed limit, and yet I’m not going to do justice sharing details about these tools, but I’m sure people will add comments if I missed a detail or two.
Here are the three vendors I wish to talk about briefly. They have some overlap, but are sufficiently different that I’m not going to compare them — I’ll just mention some aspects of their ROI story so that we can discuss some issues and questions about Social CRM and Enterprise 2.0 in the near-term and long term.
- InsideView
- Helpstream
- Lithium
InsideView helps salespeople sell by giving them insight derived from the social Internet. If your sales people sell more, your business makes more money. If a product can help you sell more, you’ll buy that product. It’s just that simple. How do you know if this product will help you sell more? Try it out. There is a free version which you can get at the Appexchange on Salesforce.com and a pro version too. The free version delivers enough features to help you understand if this tool is valuable to you. For some of you — it will be good enough. If you find yourself wanting more, the upgrade to the pro version is $99/month per user (and there are volume discounts for large installments). The ROI calculation is simple. If the tool helps you sell more product, you’ll gladly spend less than the cost of one client dinner once a month. Give it a try for two or three months. If it’s not helping you, cancel the license. You hardly spent any money on it.
InsideView is not a collaboration or KM tool like any of the E2.0 platforms that enable workers to share information. Rather it is an insight gathering tool that pulls information from many sources and brings them to the CRM environment – where many sales people spend a good part of their day. The insight leverages information available thanks to Web 2.0 tools like Twitter and LinkedIn. It also searches business databases and the Internet, and it bring the information to the salesperson in context of their CRM tool — so there’s no popping in and out of screens. The ROI story is simple and you can pretty accurately predict if this is a product for you or not.
Helpstream leverages the social Internet to help your business provide customer support. Many business spend a lot of money on customer support; and for good reason. Support is very important to us customers — in a competitive, elastic environment we’ll find another vendor if we don’t get the support we need. In fact, these days we might even post a video on YouTube explaining why we are upset. But customer support can be a very expensive venture. In recent years many US companies have moved their support operations overseas in an attempt to cut cost. In many cases this move resulted in more dissatisfaction. So any way to provide great customer service, while lowering the cost of delivering that service will have a very easy ROI story. Customer care shops know their per-incident costs and most measure the details of successful and failed post-incident retention processes. So the calculation can be done on the back of an envelope. Reduce support cost = obvious ROI.
Most business provided different levels of support for different kinds of customers. Some customers are more expensive to support, and some are more valuable to retain. In order to keep customers off the phone and on the web, many companies publish FAQ and direct customers to read pre-written answers. Some companies can rely upon a healthy community and provide support forums where customers can ask questions, and in many cases other customers can answer them too. If your company hosts these, you may notice that the support environment is still rather complex. Customers don’t always find the channel you want them to find. And supporting all that content is, itself, a job – especially if each support channel is a separate technology island. Enter Helpstream.
Helpstream provides a unified approach to customer support that leverages social behaviors. Helpstream gives you a self-service portal to allow customers to find the help they need, and contribute help if they choose to. In addition to providing an online support forum, Helpsteam integrates with popular CRM systems such as Oracle and SalesForce.com. They do a lot more too, check out their site for details.
What this means to companies who are looking at social tools for customer support: Don’t solve the problem by creating another problem. Take a holistic and integrated approach to add “social” (a.k.a. 2.0) features with your existing 1.0 infrastructure. Customers don’t want to know how you manage multiple support channels and your IT folks don’t want rip their hair out managing multiple infrastructure either.
Lithium is one of the top players in the Social CRM industry. They power communities for many large brands and have extensive case studies in a wide variety of CRM areas. Their recently updated marketing information provides a crisp story around three use cases: Support, Innovation, and Promotion.
The support and ROI outline is somewhat similar to Helpstream’s. I’m not going to compare features here. I’m just talking about the use case and the ROI story. Saving money by providing better, socially leveraged support is simple to understand. By providing a forum that allows customers to engage with their company on-line, in a forum, the company can defray costs (phone reps, customer loss, etc.) and increase visibility into their support needs (via analytics). Other customers can kick-in and help their peers. The company can take content from one issue and reuse the solutions, publish FAQ, provide helpful feedback to new product development initiatives, and integrate the on-line conversation (which is taking place anyway) with their traditional CRM channels. Lithium has some online video-game DNA in their background and this carries though in their deep understanding of reputation scoring in a forum environment.
The Innovation story is a bit less crisp to convey because some people resist the conversation about soft-value items (ideas), or challenge that serendipity has a place in strategy. Some companies believe in voice-of-the-customer innovation forums, some don’t. We’re not going to solve this one here. For those who do — Lithium provides a state of the art product to help manage that process. Moreover, there is a very fine line between support and idea. Sometimes a customer problem is really a new idea in disguise. Don’t ask your customers to figure that our for you. I don’t think that the Innovation ROI story is as easy to sell as the Support or Marketing story. But I have read of couple of fantastic case studies where innovation forums have yielded new products and big businesses. And these are inspiring.
One of the cute stories of an innovation success powered by a Lithium forum is the Roomba vacuum cleaner robot. This goes back a few years, but its charm has staying power: iRobot learned that many customers viewed their little Roomba’s as mechanical pets. This started a side business in personalizing their robots with fabric “skins” — Like the ones sold at MyRoombud. It’s fair to say that the marketeers or engineers at iRobot never thought about this sister-marketplace that would boost sales and product loyalty. But it turned out to be a great and lucrative idea.
The third use case Lithium talks about is Promotion, which seems to include many elements of both direct and interactive marketing, as well as energizing. Product marketing is a very expensive venture. Reducing the costs — or increasing the effectiveness of a marketing effort has a direct ROI benefit. Most businesses measure lead-costs. They know how much they are willing to spend to get 1000 new leads, they have a pretty good sense of their lead-conversion percentage. And they know their average deal size. So any effort that brings in new leads, increases the lead conversion rate, or enriches the profitability of a deal is quite simple to measure. Lithium helps in multiple ways — technically (boosting SEO to your product site) and emotionally (providing a way for customers to be your advocates). Bottom line — every Lithium customer knows what they are paying for and what they are getting for it. That makes the ROI story very easy to understand.
So in this long post, we shined some light on three companies who leverage social behaviors and tools in a way that changes the way some parts of an enterprise operates. They also have ROI stories that any anti-social accountant can understand. In the next post we’ll discuss how this is related to Enterprise 2.0 and what we can learn from these examples.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Gil – Interesting grouping of solutions, and as always, great discussions – this Social CRM wave is an interesting phenomenon.
We’ll see where it goes, although everyone is about 2 years behind my predictions from 2002/2003
– the connection of social media to marketing has been pretty obvious, as much as some people shudder at “ruining the purity of the social conversation” – nevertheless, it’s there, and people are making some great progress in integrated marketing.
In all seriousness, back in 2002/2003, I was heavily diving into social networking, and one of the most obvious “enrichment” aspects of social information was in the CRM and direct sales applications (see Death of a Salesman, Birth of Relationship Intelligence from 2004 – http://voicethread.com/share/95816/).
Being able to provide salespeople (OR marketers OR product managers, etc.) with a much greater depth of information about their prospects or customers, while somewhat creepy (“those pants you bought from J. Crew last week at $19.99 look great on you, sir”) if taken to extreme, it can certainly help enrich the conversations between people that happen, as there are more points or connections of reference between people. Computers are supposed to eliminate the burden of data collection, and making sense of it all, right? Give an already gifted salesperson even smarter tools, and heck, we might even power ourselves out of this economy!
I wrote a lengthy description of similar scenarios in the context of InsideView and relationship intelligence last year (see http://www.biztechtalk.com/2008/04/aiimalert-insid.html) – might be thought-provoking for your readers, if ever so slightly dated.
My position remains – “we ain’t see nothin’ yet” (but we’re getting real close to driving serious business benefits in a sustainable way, out of social networking, conversations, and engagement).
And of course, for those sitting on the sidelines, you’ll NEVER see any ROI if you aren’t experimenting and eventually actively/daily using these solutions. Sit and wait and let your competitors run away up the curve, if you like, or get into the game and make it happen. You might think it’s still “early adopter” stages, but 5-7 years into the curve, how much longer are you going to wait?
Best,
Dan
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Great summary! ~1450 words –> 7 words. Nice.
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