Michael Maoz

Watching the fortunes of the Fortune 500 gyrate in the chaotic machinations of world trade, you have to wonder if there is any advantage to investing in only one leg of a customer strategy.

The biggest names in software have been touting sales force automation (SFA) applications for years, and one of the fastest rising software companies of the last five years even named itself after this class of application. But is there any evidence that SFA is a differentiator to a business? Has it helped a company escape the downturn? Anticipate the downturn? Profit from the downturn? Or is it just the great equalizer, the low-bar to stay at parity with the competition? And if so, what is the fuss all about? And what is, then, a better determinant of business success?

We have been writing for 12 years that SFA is one of many dimensions of a customer strategy. We have written and presented over a thousand times that good understanding of customer intentions, personalized (or ‘persona-tized’) marketing messages and excellent customer service were equally important.

Just about every client realizes that it is the ‘before’ and ‘during’ and ‘after’ of the customer interaction that counts – not one in isolation. What the customer expects largely determines how they will ‘consume’ an experience. And you either shape these expectations or they get shaped for you by blogs, forums, and the buzz in the market.

And then there is the element of new media – Twitter and Facebook and SMS and web communities that operate entirely beyond corporate control, where no sales force can easily go.

We as organizations are so poorly designed to approach the challenge comprehensively (multi-channel, multi-department, and ‘outside-in’) that only a radical rethinking of the problem will shake senior management into making the required changes in how we go to market.

Any good examples of large enterprises who have done this are welcome, and in future blogs I will share some as well!

Thankfully, one of the flights I was on last week was mercifully short; otherwise the negative yammering of the two sales executives behind me would have possibly sent me over the edge.  Each gentleman (I must be kind) was a regional sales manager for an engineering firm. One was going on and on about an underling who was failing to meet customer requirements on a project. To listen to the manager was to hear a litany of complaints about the man he was going to fire. Well, maybe fire.

There were a few things I did not hear discussed. One was any mention of a sales force automation tool. They weren’t looking at any commitments explicit or implied in the sale of the project that was sitting in a system of record. They weren’t following the narrative of the project from first pre-sale through to post-sale implementation. The second omission was any use of facts or metrics. What, exactly, was the client upset about? What was the reason the account manager was not responding as the manager would like? What exactly did the manager want from his subordinate?

If it sounds like this is a hierarchy with only one way communication, it is because that is how it sounded. The subordinate executes and the manager dictates and sits back. There were few metrics, and little that was documented, and nothing to show that there was open and frank (fact-based) conversation with the manager, customer, and account manager. This was the Old School that we hope will one day burn down.

We all know this, but sales force automation tools are not the answer to any business problem. Like a scalpel in the hands of a surgeon, they can assist the right person following the right process. But for many organizations, they are just sharp objects unskillfully handled and yielding little benefit.

Hey: and keep it down in Row 17 A/B!

Last night’s flight from Toronto to New York was buffeted by the waning turbulence of Hurricane Ida, but aside from a delay and tumultuous descent, I arrived. It was late, and my aging Blackberry was having a senior moment as I tried to dial the car service to pick me up. Attempts to revive the chipped and graying device failed. I looked for a payphone. Fahgettaboutit.  But glancing around me I saw that just about everyone from the janitor pushing a mop to the cop directing traffic had a cell phone. As I am a friendly guy and fairly innocuous of demeanor (business suit, computer case, carry-on bag) and sociable, I decided to just ask someone if I could make a quick call.

It was a beautiful moment. There was a young goateed man with a blandly cosmopolitan look flipping through his iPhone, waiting for whomever to arrive. He seemed sufficiently bored and unhurried, so I asked him if he would mind if I made a quick local call on his phone.

MURDER! I’M BEING ROBBED! HELP ME!

No, he didn’t say any of those things, but his eyes froze in a mixture of fear and loathing that someone would want to touch his personal device. It is not that he saw me as one enormous H1N1 virus shrouded in a clever disguise. He just could not grasp that anyone, likely anyone except someone very, very intimate with him, would be allowed to touch, to hold, to manipulate his personal device.

Something I’ve been observing around the world came into focus for me. Many will say, “duh.” But I can be slow about a lot of things modern. I hear folks speak of there personal digital assistant by name. I see them cradle the device while they walk, and talk. They lay it aside there plate as they eat, or rest it gently on their lap and gaze at the lambent throb of the display. 

It isn’t a phone; it is an extension of personality. It is customized with skins and apps and aggrated content and feeds. It is a massive investment of time and focus. It is an extension of the path from TiVo and Xbox and WII and Lego. It is Solipsism wrapped in a veneer of social. And it is fascinating.

Let’s communicate…. but don’t touch my device. It will be interesting to unravel the business implications.

There we have it – Claude Lévi-Strauss passes into history. The man who interpreted myths was himself almost of the stature of myth. I hadn’t thought of him for 30 years and suddenly the newspapers are temporarily aflutter with news of his passing.

As I read through the summaries of his works I wondered what he would have made of the Facebook and Twitter revolution (and they are revolutions, no?).  In the 1962 work, The Savage Mind, Lévi-Strauss looked at those who are spontaneous (the Bricoleur) and those who look at the entire process and engineer it (the Engineer).  Maybe this is what we are seeing in microblogging – today it is a raw (another Lévi-Strauss concept) medium driven by emotions and reflex. It is a lot about tinkering with Tweets to see where they will lead. Businesses are wary, because they are uneasy with sociology and ethnography and spontenous. They want – and need – to engineer processes and work to create business value.

As time passes and our facility with Twitter and other instant posts increases, the business will gain more reassurance about the gains in customer insight, customer experience, and customer convenience. We are still very much centered on the Bricoleur, with the Engineer standing in the wing, watching and learning.

All I wanted was to order a replacement cartridge for my ink-swilling HP OfficeJet 5610, standard issue. I went to the site where our company has a corporate account. Nice search feature. But I wonder how much this cartridge costs versus a competitor? Now THAT would be interesting. But 692 reviews of a product that has been on the market for years and years? And not one that says, “Don’t buy it here, it is cheaper at ACMEPrint.com!”

I’ve been saying that an element of social networking is the working out of the logic of Marshall McLuhan’s “Medium is the Message” – we cannot help but interact with media. It isn’t the content. Content is the accelerant. We must look at email, SMS, Feeds, Tweets, Facebook, Salon, The Huffington Post. Resistance is futile.

I’m looking forward to a rigorous study that compares the amount of dead ending rat hole social threads, group-think, least common denominator and plain drivel on the one side with the true measurable value of the resulting ‘insight’ on the other.  Or is it going to take another million posts to discover people want to plug the hole in their coffee cups? Now there’s value.

Can anyone suggest who the best companies are at really extracting the value of networks? We have over 200 examples collected today, but they are still a small sample. And do you know of good software that helps analyze massive amounts of posts about a company that helps to detect emerging business patterns? Let me know!

Yesterday I had the honor and pleasure of interviewing a surpassingly fine USAF lieutenant. Though I can’t say much about the conversation itself, I do wish I could capture the dignity and devotion to her mission that poured through her words and gestures. She was surprised to hear I was once in the military, but hid it well except to relax a bit more into the details of what the Air Force is doing to improve the lives of service personnel.

As the conversation rolled on, there was something I could not put my finger on, something about demeanor and attitude. I started to think of the many executives I have spoken with and why this conversation seemed to soar above the rest. It was the lack of guile, the simple statements of fact and the avoidance of any talk about hierarchies and chains of command, ownership, promotion of the ‘me’ and utter absence of jargon. Instead it was a search for facts, a hope to capture the challenges faced and a desire to explore the various options for solving the challenges. There was teamwork and joint effort and common ground.

There are many moments when you just know that a project is going to succeed, and they usually are struck through, these moments, with a sense of good fortune in the right people with the right motivation. Yesterday was such a day, and were I able to bottle that devotion, I am sure we could run many more IT initiatives to good ends.

Disclaimer: The following will not escape the impression of self serving. Cynics should move on, but, you know, fools rush in….

For the past six days I have been locked in an ever-more-involving review of my research by my peers.  This is a piece of work that involved an assessment of software. My position was challenged because it seemed inconsistent with other research I had already published.  Another and another and another analyst entered the fray.

We examined my data, and created spreadsheets testing the inputs. We looked at the assumptions I had made.  It turned out that the research was on target, but the perception that it would create could potentially be  incorrectly applied by our clients. We debated different approaches until finally we found a way to depict the assessment in the way that lent itself best to practical application by our clients. 

The point is: it was not debate-for-the-sake-of-debate: it was a critical assessment that went beyond just getting the facts right and into how our clients could make informed decisions. And it was exciting, fact-based, rigorous and collegial and opened up new avenues of research. It was analysts taking on the role of advocates for our clients. It is a passion you see in all great companies, and one I see around here at Gartner every day.

I often am asked if I really experience the customer service stories that I talk about during conferences. I answer the question with a question: “Haven’t you got a story that is equally improbable but true about a service experience?”

That usually wins me another great anecdote to tell at another time. My most recent was five minutes ago booking a rental car. I opened my corporate policy statement on rental cars, got the Corporate Account Number to give the agent, and then called the call center. I had just rented a car to travel on client calls to New York and Boston the week before, booking with the same company. They had no record of my reservation and no information on my billing information, name, address, or preferences. The local pickup spot is closed in the evening. I live in a rough neighborhood. The agent quoted me rates that did not match my corporate policy, and terms and conditions that had nothing to do with those I’d received the time before and the time before that.

It will all be OK. I’ve learned that this company has good reason to keep no information about the customer in the hands of agents. They don’t have a proper contact center with security policies and privacy measures, and they don’t have a CRM system or analytics to figure out a pattern (like: oh! did you move from the spot you have been picking up cars the past 12 years?).

The last thing they would want is to show customers that they care, or that they recognize their economic value, or to engage proactively. Better to flood the media with advertisements, and get into search engines and sponsor events. Keep filling the marketing funnel and the let the leaky sales and retention bottom of the funnel fend for itself.

What was I saying? Anyway, I often am asked if I really experience the customer service stories that I talk about during conferences. Did I already tell you that one? Oh. Sorry, let me start again……

I am still on the fence about Twittering. I’m even becoming more reluctant to post a blog. First off: for every point of view I might proffer, there may be a logical counter-point. Yet, there is something much darker out there in the blabbersphere: a bit of the passive aggressive. The little voice, half informed, given an electronic pulpit for an always-on congregation.

Eventually we may work out these festering septics with some more elegant, effective antiseptics, but until then, let’s watch each other’s backs. And give each other the benefit of a doubt. When in doubt, don’t spout.

Enough for an alliterative and Onomonopoetical Friday. Here is to kindness.

I was in an endless loop of telephone branching logic last week, uncertain whether to Press 2 for this, 3 for that, 4 or 5 or…. Then I forgot what Press 2 was for and got into another branch of logic and dead ends. I finally did what I often do: I tried #0, then *0 – and got a live person who tried to connect me with the proper department. She couldn’t explain what my correct choice should have been, but did transfer me and wait until the call was picked up.

This got me to thinking about the same company’s web presence and “Social Media” efforts. They are spending a lot of time, and tying up a lot of resources, setting up communities. Communities are all the rage. One simply must set one up! Listen to the voice of the customer! For most companies it is more about following the crowd, and the crowd wants you to know that you can natter away 24/7 on their site.

Meanwhile, in the voice response, and call distribution, and email response part of the customer service experience, organizations are unable to provide that experience of immediacy. Wait, search, try, fail, repeat, try, fail, repeat.

How long before your customers catch on that your social networking effort is bogus? Until they figure out that weaknesses in your customer service experience point to your true colors?

Here is a great exercise for your social networking / community sites: have someone suggest that they set up a map of your phone system so frustrated customers can navigate your phone system. Think about it: why enlist highly-paid personnel, or use sophisticated software to unravel the roots of your telephone routing issues when you can use the power of the community to map your system, rate the system, comment on what, exactly, is wrong from their perspective, and then rate you for your efforts? The fact is, when you enlist them in the effort, you acknowledge that it is not simple and you empower them to make a difference. And you can rate your effort from your customers’ eyes.

Social networks can have some real power even without solving a problem: the act of opening up to customers and acknowledging areas of challenge is important. Sometimes the best way to earn trust is to show your flaws.