Jenny SussinFor the record, I considered putting an image of guts here but I recognized it was too disgusting and couldn’t expect anyone to read the blog post with guts in their face.
So you might be wondering, the guts of what? This previous week an effort on the part of myself, Michael Maoz and Adam Sarner was finally published and it gets into the guts of peer-to-peer customer community software. (Gartner clients see Critical Capabilities for Peer-to-Peer Customer Community Software.) This piece of research gets into the insides of peer-to-peer community software, outlining what clients are looking for and how good of a job some popular vendors in the space are doing at providing both what is considered to be an industry standard and that which is innovative.
A little sneak preview you ask? Then I will comply…
…you asked for it! Alright, alright. So in the note we identify four capabilities and then break each of those down further until we can differentiate one gut splattering from the next. The four critical capabilities are: content creation and curation, member management, knowledge management system and agile social platform. For the actual, clean dissection of these capabilities, you will have to read the note, but I can tell you this: even the strongest community vendors have room for growth in the area of agile social platform.
So here is the action item I give to you coming our of this research and having done a bit of detective work surrounding the Total Cost of Ownership of Social CRM for Customer Service SaaS solutions (Gartner clients): know what you’re looking for, know what you can and can’t live without based on your business use case, and ask questions! In speaking to a variety of vendors, I do believe that most if not all are sincere in wanting to deliver the best product they can to their end users, but like my landlord once scolded me, “if I don’t know something is wrong, I can’t fix it.”
College Jenny had bigger things to worry about than mold on the ceiling, like laying out on the docks of the river all day.
And now I have an ask of anyone reading this. What are your biggest gripes with community functionality? You don’t need to list the product you’ve used, keep it general. We’ll open it up to internally-facing and public-facing communities you’ve been a part of. If there are no responses, I will assume everyone is 100% happy with the software they’ve used in the past or are using now.
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Category: customer service marketing social crm social media Tags: 360, communities, community, crm, customer, gartner, gartnercrm, media, peer, peer-to-peer, social, social media, software
