Michael Maoz
VP Distinguished Analyst
13 years at Gartner
26 years IT industry
Michael Maoz is a research vice president and distinguished analyst in Gartner Research. His research focuses on CRM and customer-centric Web strategies. Mr. Maoz is the research leader for both the customer service and support strategies area and customer-centric Web… Read Full Bio
by Michael Maoz | January 24, 2012 | 2 Comments
One of the many pleasures of the role of driver in a carpool that transports high school students to-and-from school is the glaring clarity of their insight. Today’s gang-of-four conversation started with:
a) “I know, right? Who needs all of that @#%$ from Facebook. They’re only doing it to make money.”
b) “Yeah, they’re like Google. All that new stuff is such a &*$!@ waste of time. I don’t want to see your stupid dog every time I search on you.
c) “It used to be so cool at first. When are they going to do anything new that does what I want it to do? It used to be so much more fun.
The average age of these four young people is just under 16. They are jaded. I didn’t see THAT coming. They wouldn’t dream of unplugging Facebook, but they are much more cautious. They can’t search without Google (“Bing? That’s lame.” – yes, I had to ask), but neither does it have the ‘cool’ feel that they associate with Tumblr. Full disclosure: I do not really know what Tumblr is for.
Their bottom line is that social media is about companies making money off of their activity. And while you might say, in their vernacular, ‘duh!’ – you would be way, way off base: there is a fine balance, and those born into social media can smell a dead fish or phish faster than any CIO or head of Marketing. They always sensed adults out there were scooping up money. And in the same way that they don’t care that gold refining demands earth-destroying levels of cyanide or building their favourite i-device requires mountains of plastics and sweatshop- feats of labour, they ask in return only that they perceive there is something wonderful in it for them.
All of that brought me, on the ride home from the school campus, to the world of the average CIO. You could possibly spend as much (or more) time looking at the large enterprise application suites from the major software vendors. I am not calling anyone out, but none of them have Customer Engagement Platforms, or whatever you might want to call them. The core systems are boring. They are hard to change. Within them it is difficult to model a customer process and then configure for that. They lack engagement tools. You want to share the interface in real time? There’s a bolt-on app for that. Want to collaborate with a colleague? There’s an API into that. Want to view the customer community in real time? Just swivel your chair over here. Basically, it is an IT Flea Market in a technology world that demands the equivalent of Meccano. We want our Spykee mini robot kit for CRM!! Simple, graceful, engaging and affordable. (http://www.meccano.com/models/spykee_mini_robots/ - in case you have no children or nephews and think I make this stuff up!).
CIOs are on the hook for innovation, but finding the right gears to pull it together is not easy. For every writer that contacts me to remind me that ‘it is NOT about the technology’ I have to remind them that they have not witnessed fetal surgery. Go watch Hanmin Lee in action and THEN say it isn’t about the technology. His theatre of action enables physicians to perform feats of magic. So: YES – people and process – but meanwhile, for most organizations, we are supplying functions like Social and Customer Support with junk food right out of Savoy Truffle - Montelimart, Ginger Sling and a pineapple heart. If you know enough about music of a certain time period you will have already begun humming and your lips will form, despite your effort to repress them:
“You know that what you eat you are. But what is sweet now turns so sour.” From an IT perspective, it looks good: nice box, nice company, nice conferences, job security, great toolkit. But is it really addressing the emerging needs of the departments you support?
Bottom line: CIOs are going to have to work in a more public way, in a more “Social” way, to pressure big software into delivering a new generation of enterprise applications that meet the needs of the Engaged Enterprise. After 20 years of gavage, most of us have customer-facing tools that leave us more like caged geese than Usain Bolt.
Speak up – and thank you for your steady stream of responses. Your insights are very helpful to us. Are we off base? Are the major suite suppliers delivering the apps you need for this decade’s challenges?
Ah – and if you happen to be a Gartner client, I’ve laid out the research focus for our team over the next 12 months on Gartner.com - http://www.gartner.com/resId=1897114 .
Category: Analytics for Social CRM Applications CIO CRM Cloud Gartner Customer 360 Summit Innovation and Customer Experience Leadership Social CRM Social Software Strategic Planning Tags:
by Michael Maoz | January 20, 2012 | 3 Comments
During a briefing last Friday afternoon a software provider in the Social CRM space (is anyone NOT in the “Social” space?) put up a slide about their ‘social analytics’ capability. It said:
“There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don’t know.”
Ok, this is a Friday afternoon and they are quoting former US Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. This is why I generally don’t take Friday afternoon briefings. I have to resist the urge to behave like Steve Ballmer at his Sales Kickoffs back in the late ‘90s. So they went on to the next slide and the next slide, but my mind was stuck back at Rummy. What was bothering me? So I said, “Could we go back to the knowns thing?”
They couldn’t say no, so they said yes with an almost visible thought bubble over their heads that read “NO WE CANNOT GO BACK!!!” – but they did.
So, I asked, “If there are known knowns, and known unknowns, and unknown unknowns, isn’t something missing?” I wasn’t trying to do a Google Interview. I was just curious by the piece that was missing. After about 30 seconds of uncomfortable fidgeting and the clock ticking I asked, “What is missing are the unknown knowns.” It’s just math. But it is one of the biggest challenges for us as businesses.
The unknown knowns. There are WMDs! Are there? SaaS is less expensive than licensing on premise. Is it? Always? Think about the number of times we ‘know’ something to be true, when actually the truth is unknown. About the customer, or prospect, or development project, or measurements we have put in place. When the world was more Semiotics driven – we were product and texture and pricing focused, and marketing was on top – we felt in control. But it’s now all services and words and the structuralists rule. Well there are still exceptions like Steve Jobs and Marc Benioff and Keith Richards. For the rest of us in business we are looking at words, and patterns, and the sentiments and meaning: explicit, implicit and latent. Testing for the truth in our accepted view of what is out there as ‘known’ is one of the most important challenges for businesses as we splinter communications across devices and social media, and engagement channels of our own build.
Social analytics, customer analytics, business analytics will emerge as the glue that holds successful customer initiatives together and 2012 may be the year analytics really begins to touch the front office in a very direct way.
What do you think?
Category: Analytics for Social CRM CIO CRM Gartner Customer 360 Summit Innovation and Customer Experience Leadership Social Software Strategic Planning Tags:
by Michael Maoz | January 18, 2012 | Submit a Comment
The 18 presentations that need to be brought to editing for our upcoming conference, Gartner Customer 360 Summit (http://bit.ly/wBQyzi) are now safely behind me, as are the case studies. More immediately ahead is today’s Gartner Webcast ( http://bit.ly/zjtcIY ) that looks at “Using Insight to Create Customer Centricity.” If you have time at noon EST, listen in. We have about 600 people signed up, and we’ll be Tweeting and doing a Q/A as well.
During the preparation for the Webcast there was a deep discussion about the role of data, and how it is refined into information, which in turn is further distilled into true knowledge, served in a form useful to a customer or someone in sales, marketing, logistics and/or customer support. It took me back to something that Isaiah Berlin said in his definition of ‘judgment,’ and in his case he was speaking of political judgment. But it applies more broadly to the challenge for the enterprise:
Judgment is ‘a capacity for integrating, multicolored, evanescent perpetually overlapping data.’
And whether you are a CIO or the head of Customer Care, you can feel this in your bones. Data is flowing in from QR codes and embedded devices and NFC and mobile phones and the website and from community and from internal sources. How do we create sense out of what can feel inchoate and chaotic? How do we filter out the extraneous bits from the vital bytes that could mean business insight? How do we neutralise for bias? How do we achieve understanding on a semantic level and a business-outcome level?
At Gartner we continue to focus on the Intent Driven Enterprise, or building a business (or university, or government!) where antennae are always listening, contextually, for meaning and opportunity and intent. And then that is mapped to the enterprise intent for that group, segment, or individual. From there we build out knowledge. Gathering the data that is required to get to insight is only possible when there is a sense of what outcomes we want. How do those DNA strands sequence themselves just so A-C-T-C, dideoxynucleotides lining up and forming that perfect you? We kind of know now, but it was a mystery for a long time.
Václav Havel, who left us one month ago today, was once asked how did a group of students and dissidents manage to achieve what they had in the Velvet Revolution. What he said was, “The more we did, the more we were able to do, and the more we were able to do, the more we did.” That perfectly heuristic approach of thinking, taking action, repairing and improving, and moving forward, is what every CIO wants to happen in the enterprise. It is what each of us wants as a human being. It makes sense.
Turning these ideas on data – information – knowledge – action is what it is all about. If you happen to be a Gartner client and want to see what the team I am a part of is writing about in this area, you can check out what I published this morning: http://bit.ly/yj6w1I. We’ll be drilling into all of the issues around customer engagement and experience from every relevant angle.
See you soon in Orlando, and as always: thanks for the kind emails.
Category: CIO CRM Gartner Customer 360 Summit Innovation and Customer Experience Leadership Social CRM Strategic Planning Twitter Tags:
by Michael Maoz | January 10, 2012 | 1 Comment
Two weeks away from work. That is an anachronism that made me think of my parents. In their prime they worked a combined 100-110 hours a week, and that did not include commuting. When they did arrive home, work was gone. Work was just that – it was hard, and there may have been nobility in it, but it was a lot. They trusted their company to do the right thing on their behalf, and they believed in the products and services from the bank and insurance company and appliance store. They lived in a small town and there was no place to hide. If you lied, cheated, stole, failed to live up to your promise – well, word got around. I thought about that when I read the online edition of the Washington Post from my iPad one morning at The Brooklyn Water Bagel in Delray, FL. The writer, Vivek Wadhwa, said that Social has lost its sizzle (http://wapo.st/AdIf9p ).
What got me to laugh, aside from the restaurant’s clientele, which one of my children defined as the newlywed and nearly dead, was how much social software and concepts seemed to be (and yes, I have always wanted to say this) ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny. At school I was not a sharp enough knife in a very sharp drawer of knives to ever really get that expression, but now I think I do: the Social Endeavour is leading us in stages that have the shape of things past. Why? Because for all of the Madison Avenue advertising and carnival barking, the reality of the small town was that the local business had no choice but to engage with the customer. The customer could communicate at City Hall, and the coffee shop, and in the local paper, and at the PTA meeting – basically they could project themselves – or ‘scale’ the message.
I think this is where we are now. We are scaling globally to act ‘locally.’ Social may or may not ‘sizzle’ this year for IPOs or corporate agendas, but we are on an inexorable path to deliver tools to the employee and to the customer to help each understand the other. I have been calling this the Intent Driven Enterprise for the past ten years, mostly to deaf ears, but not entirely. The idea is that customers sometimes do and sometimes do not know their value to the enterprise, and quite often the enterprise fails to capture and make available the value of the customer to those people and channels where decisions are made during an interaction. The failure to align the customer’s intent with the business intent – and all of the corporate and social information that such an interaction entails, results in asymmetry. The engagement fails one side or the other. But when we get it right, we are returning the relationship to a form last experienced in the small town.
I hope that the ardor for ‘Social’ does not dampen in 2012. If it does it will be the Igby Goes Down of the enterprise. If you did not have teenagers in 2002 you may have missed Clare Danes and Digby as he failed to deal with the complexity of growing up, but unless our plans for Social mature, you’ll get to live it for yourself. There is still a tremendous amount of work to do. I have two presentations at our March Customer360 Summit in Orlando, http://bit.ly/AnxS5V that expand on this: one that looks at how marketing and customer service will emerge as best friends, and why, and a second looks at the future of customer service and the Contact Center/multichannel interaction. I hope that I will get to discuss this with some of you then.
Examining how your organization/business/government/utility/school will succeed in providing an engaging experience that is profitable to you and rewarding for them will eventually be seamless. It will be driven by principles of the Intent Driven Enterprise. Thanks this week to Jeff Hagen of General Mills for allowing me to look at how his global organization is advancing customer engagement – and the mutual benefit that it is yielding.
Ah – why did I say that two weeks away from work is an anachronism? For the past decade I can’t say that there is a beginning or end to work. I walk the streets of Manhattan and I’m watching customers at the Apple store or Barney’s. I’m at a restaurant waiting for a table and I’m observing consumers on their devices. I’m on a plane or in the lounge and I am meeting other IT professionals and exchanging ideas on how their businesses operate. Am I working? Am I on vacation? Does work begin or end so neatly anymore for you? Would you really want it to? That is a whole other day’s conversation.
As always, I enjoy your emails and posts.
Category: CIO CRM Cloud Gartner Customer 360 Summit Innovation and Customer Experience Leadership SaaS and Cloud Computing Social CRM Social Networking Social Software Strategic Planning iPad Tags:
by Michael Maoz | December 15, 2011 | Comments Off
Yes, I’d like world peace, an end to disease, hunger, oppression and ignorance even more than I’d like IT and the business (marketing, sales, service, logistics!) to work with shared goals and objectives. The good news is that the world is more peaceful than at any time in the past 100 years, we are becoming less violent, and the worst hunger is shrinking. If we can do that, we must be able to unify IT and the business. It is already happening in leading companies, tracing back to the beginnings of Lands’ End, and IBM under Gerstner. It is a force that is spreading. Customer Strategy is emerging in steady, heuristic circles, into the board room. It isn’t the “Occupy” movements or the wild Spring of 2011 – they were dramatic manifestations of a trend towards the denouement of the institution. All institutions – Universities, governments, and business – know that the punitive patrician padlocks of authority are rusted, and light floods the processes and strategies that guide them. This light is magnified by social media, mobile devices, location services harnessed to a renewed sense that there is no us separate from a them. There is in the end only a “We” who exchange value freely and openly. It is certain that several unanticipated setbacks will stymie the pace of this change – malware, privacy infractions, crass commercial invasions, fear of the new. We know where we begin, but we never know where we will end a journey.
Speaking of journeys: I am off to spend time with a wonderful person who is a part of the Great Generation. Not yet 90, he lived through economic depression, war, great joy, the birth of a new nation, great sorrow that would have crushed others, small recoveries, greater joys that never eclipse sorrow but keep it from capsizing the ship – and is still hopeful. I recommend to anyone in this business who is not spiritually dead to spend time with the fading remnant of the oldest generation. Then the dross of our petty feuds, software vendors quibbling over maintenance, new Cloud Models, claims and counter claims, or IT teams under the ‘gun,’ – you are never under the gun unless you ARE under the gun. A new sense of balance will return to you.
This has been a remarkable year. I thank our clients for opening their doors and asking advice, but often in the asking reveal tremendous heart, passion, and dedication to the craft of IT and process improvement. You are such heroes, perhaps in a confined context, but great nonetheless – so thank you again. I started the year in Connecticut, but found myself, like so many of my wonderful colleagues, in cities large and small across the world. I try to engineer a three-year sweep of the world. This year was Boston, New York, Chicago, Austin, LA, San Francisco, Denver, London, Glasgow, Paris, Tel Aviv, Sydney, Gold Coast, Melbourne and about six others. Next year will take a different course. But uniformly, Gartner clients are unbelievably good people, and the source of our best ideas. Wow.
May you experience calm, peace, and success in 2012, and we’ll see you next year.
Category: CIO CRM Cloud Innovation and Customer Experience Leadership SaaS and Cloud Computing Social CRM Social Networking Strategic Planning Tags:
by Michael Maoz | December 11, 2011 | Comments Off
The role of a technology analyst is an interesting one in that it is equal parts technologist, process consultant, and psychologist. The closest match in psychology would have to be Alfred Adler, thefin de siècle Austrian who looked at how our early social exposures, choices of work, and love experiences form our world view. He talked a lot about how we create myths for ourselves, and how our judgement is clouded unconsciously by those myths. In his practice he helped his clients come to unravel some of the debilitating threads of the narrative they created for themselves, as a way to help them see in new ways about the reality in front of them. That is a lot of what analysts are called upon to do – help clients see beyond the IT and Process myths that they have been clinging to and suggest new patterns of technology adoption and Process Design.
I bring this up because a fair number of readers regularly point out that X, whatever process “X” is, is often confused with technology. Examples might be CRM, Social, Peer-to-Peer Support,Customer Service, or Social Network Analysis. They might go on to suggest that technology is never the solution, and the problem is always bad process design. Here’s the thing: technology matters, and it matters a lot. Without location-services, WiFi, NFC, HSPA+, HTML5, VoIP, SIP, UCC and Cloud Application Development Platforms, and the like, many interactions would be impossible. Full stop. We’d be back in the 1980s and the IT director would have hair like one of the Thompson Twins.
It is usually essential to first nail down the process and then go for technology, but not always. Often times we have to place small bets and see what happens. Like introducing gamification in the buying or marketing process. Or inserting QR Codes or deploying Google Goggles. Is anyone sure of where these technologies and concepts will lead? Would you prefer to ignore the possibilities inherent in them?
Getting past the trauma of 1996 – 2004, when many of us fell for the next big thing in Client/Server business applications, with the mistaken notion that business could only get better if we deployed a new sales force automation system, is not easy. And many of the same magazines and consultancies that offered the snake oil of “SFA technology equals better relationships” are back. The fear is real, but aren’t we better prepared now? Don’t blame the technology, and don’t ignore the technology. During the period around 2008 when businesses were suffering the most (and there may be no small degree of whistling past the graveyard today), no one blamed the CRM-focused software for the drop. But here we are in a shaky recovery and I have read several journal articles attributing better business results to the software. When things get worse it is not the software, but when things improve it is? Interesting.
So on we go, prepared, realistic but willing to take some risks to realize rewards: Social, Mobile, Analytics/Big Data, Cloud-Applications supporting (supporting!) a customer-centric organization and customer-centric processes. Cart behind horse. Horse collar, shaft, pole, fifth wheel: Form following function. Technology yoked to process. I’ll be talking to many of you this March in Orlando (http://www.gartner.com/technology/summits/na/customer-360/index.jsp ) and in London in June at our conferences. I’m looking forward to it – the ‘buzz’ is getting louder already.
Category: Analytics for Social CRM Applications CRM Cloud Gamification Gartner Customer 360 Summit Innovation and Customer Experience SFA SaaS and Cloud Computing Sales Force Automation Social CRM Social Networking Social Software Strategic Planning Tags:
by Michael Maoz | December 7, 2011 | 3 Comments
We’ve published the updated “Concise Social CRM Vendor Guide, 2012,” and if you are a client you can find it here: http://www.gartner.com/resId=1867115 . If you are not a client, here is the scoop: we are tracking over 100 vendors in the space. The loudest hype around social CRM is over, and now organizations are rolling up their sleeves. Those who wanted to ‘listen’ to Tweets and posts and forum answers have done it. Those organizations left the hype of social media monitoring behind two years ago.
Where have we gotten and where are we going? From a market perspective the wave has crested. The vast majority of vendors are niche players: they don’t own an operating system, or a database, nor are they a development platform or infrastructure platform. They are not the system of record for a large enterprise. Bottom line: that likely makes them outsourced R&D for larger software companies that possess those elements, and not the most compelling stories for large growth companies with a 15 year lifespan.
Where are clients from an enterprise perspective on ‘social?’ Well, in our CEO Survey, #7 of the top ten priorities is, “Becoming more open and collaborative with customers,” and that can be seen as a vote in favor of ‘social.’ Boards of Directors do not mention “Social” or collaboration in their top 10 priorities. But when we drill down into Customer Service and Support, and into Marketing, Social and Social CRM are very much a part of the dialogue. The vocabulary has changed in the past 24 months from high level and conceptual to more granular and wrapped around top-line revenue growth and lower costs. Another way to say this is that “The Business of Social” initiative that folks on our team like Carol Rozwell and Sue Landry are overseeing is right on the money – it’s about data, facts, and measurable outcomes.
We are going to be fleshing out our ideas in presentations, Case Studies and Workshops at our Gartner Customer 360 Summit, 14 – 16 March in Orlando, FL. (http://bit.ly/rw6WON ). I’ll be running guiding two of the conference tracks in our program on “Differentiating the Customer Experience.”
Track A: Customer Service and Support
Track B: Customer Experience Management
You’ll have 18 chances to learn how to make the customer experience world class. But just as important, and fun? You’ll have a chance to network with your peers and share experiences on how to go from good, or great, to even better. If the past 12 years are any indication, I know I’ll see a lot of you there.
Keep your stories coming – they are always wonderful to hear.
Category: Analytics for Social CRM Applications CIO CRM Gartner Customer 360 Summit Innovation and Customer Experience Leadership Social CRM Social Networking Social Software Strategic Planning Tags:
by Michael Maoz | December 2, 2011 | 2 Comments
Shakespeare’s character in Henry the Sixth says something to the effect of “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” Transform kill to ‘remove’ and that might be the remedy for the snail’s pace of innovation in most corporations – remove the current generation of CIO. Not that it is entirely their fault. They serve admirably and are excellent stewards of the business. They are smart and capable and able to execute.
The reason that the CIOs must go is that they are like the TV managers of Phil the weather forecaster in the 1993 film, “Groundhog Day.” Phil (Bill Murray) is disgruntled and kicks and bridles against the stupidity of his managers, but eventually gets the picture: if he stays in this job, he is going to have to show up every year and cover the same inane story to please the commanders of the status quo. And this is where corporate IT is today.
Let me step back: This week I had the good fortune to spend a couple of days interacting with several high tech teams from a start up. One in particular just knocked me out. The young CEO was demonstrating his next generation product – slick interface, open system, Cloud-architected, scalable, highly Social – when I just had to stop him mid-sentence with a question:
“How many developers did it require to build this?”
“We were just four guys.”
And that is when it hit me, again: 98% of corporations do not have “Four Guys,” – I.E., woman and men with the talent, vision, and freedom/drive to build new and innovative technology. I have had this argument with businesses before – many times. Even in a company with 1,000 IT staff, or 5,000, or 50, I will say: you don’t have three innovators.
At first blush it sounds cheeky – a little insolent – to say this to a CIO. That is not the intent at all. The CIO is caught in a dilemma of innovation versus conservatism. CIOs are our IT J. Alfred Prufrocks, best summed up by: “ - Do I dare
Disturb the universe?” And if they dare, by whose authority and with whose support? Where do they find the resources with the skills? We have eviscerated corporate IT, sucked the bones dry of their hematopoietic compartment. I asked the group of developers and product marketers in the room the other day – from the start up – why they had risked a start up and not gone to work for a solid corporate IT department. Their faces fell. It was as if I had insulted them.
What is that when young, creative IT savvy people eschew the idea of working in corporate IT? These people are clever, ambitious, post-enterprise. They have never been inside of a ‘department.’ To them that is like living in a Roach Hotel. A place the weak or gullible go to die. Houston, we have a problem. The issue is not about brains. Corporate IT has brainy people to spare. But they may not have the right skills, and the right initiatives under way. Just look around your organization – do you have a small, agile team that could build/procure, set up and manage a social enterprise system? Could they create processes for end-customers to participate in an ongoing idea-exchange with the enterprise and be real partners in co-creation? Then why are they not doing it right now?
The challenge is not software, and not hardware, and not budget – it is a leadership crisis that only mindful boards of directors and CEOs can re-mediate and set right. The time is now, the customers are waiting, and a new generation of precious young talent can’t approach you because you are surrounded by a sandbar of predictability versus deep water and a current of innovation.
In businesses where innovation flourishes, the difference is often driven by the CIO. It can happen, and when it does it is electric, and businesses thrive.
Category: CIO CRM Cloud Innovation and Customer Experience Leadership SaaS and Cloud Computing Social CRM Social Networking Social Software Strategic Planning Tags:
by Michael Maoz | November 21, 2011 | 2 Comments
On Sunday the most influential newspaper on the East Coast of the United States ran an article about Mobile eCommerce. It quoted compelling statistics from the largest computer company in the world. The quote was to the effect that in October 2011, 10% of eCommerce was transacted on mobile devices, and that this would have enormous impact on in-store shopping this holiday season.
For those of you who live outside of the United States, the day after the U.S. holiday of Thanksgiving is a runaway frenzy of shopping Saturnalia known as Black Friday. Retail stores open their doors anytime from Midnight Thursday and 6AM Friday, often to stampedes of shoppers. Think of Pamplona’s running of the bulls, but in this case it is the bulls who would flee from the aggressive humans.
But I digress. When I read the statistic that 10% of eCommerce was conducted by mobile devices in October, something just did not sit right. As Kermit the Frog would say: “10% – REALLY!” I did what I often do when vetting statistics. Being one of a cautious nature, I remind myself that “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics”. Who knows who really said that first. Doesn’t matter. What do I do? For backup on facts, I SMS my children, and ask them to text their cohorts. This can yield about 50 answers from six US States and three countries in about one hour. All from mobile/internet/social/shopping savvy consumers. So I put the question to them: “How much stuff do you buy from your smartphones, iPhones, iPads – or whatever mobile device you have?
Are you ready for this? They broke down the ‘statistics’ in about 30 minutes. First, none of them bought anything of any value like shoes, clothing, jewelry or anything else off of a mobile phone. They sure did a huge amount of comparison shopping, but little to zero buying. Second, they said that “eCommerce” probably meant “in a few countries in Europe and the United States.” Third, and presciently, they said, “does that include iTunes and mobile apps?” Wow. Holy. I went back to the “Statistic.” It said 10% of eCommerce was on a mobile device. It did not say that 10% of the money was via a mobile app. But it was in an article discussing in-store shopping. So, sure: there are gazillions of mobile apps bought, songs bought. Was that the point? Misleading but perhaps accurate.
Chalk this one up to any other consumer good you consume: Caveat Emptor – let the buyer beware. I say that with Pete Townshend’s 40 year old anthem, We Won’t get Fooled Again, from Who’s Next, playing in my head. Here is a suggestion: before you fall too deeply in love with statistics about mobile eCommerce, connect up with your key buyers and see what they have to say. So far I haven’t seen too much sharing of information by buyers who are rushing to make quick purchases. Nothing like the social sharing about hotels, or items on Amazon, Zappos, or online sites. This will be a fascinating season to watch, primarily in the U.S. where the mass hysteria of ‘holiday’ shopping transcends the more sedate tone in other parts of the world. As someone very concerned with Customer Service and Support issues, I find it mind-blowing how little thought has been given to customer support for consumers on mobile devices. If the data about eCommerce and mobile is even remotely correct, there will be a lot of unhappy customers out there.
Let’s keep our ears and eyes open, and record as much information as we can, because we are approaching, but likely have not arrived at, a turning point in mobile eCommerce. For that I look to my colleagues like Gene Alvarez and Michael Gartenberg, and to you.
Category: Analytics for Social CRM Innovation and Customer Experience Leadership Social Networking Strategic Planning eCommerce iPad Tags: Black Friday, Mobile eCommerce
by Michael Maoz | November 17, 2011 | 3 Comments
Name a three letter business acronym with more negative associations than CRM. Only ERP rivals CRM for the concept of failure, frustration, cost and unfulfilled promise. ERP is the discipline of managing your stuff, while CRM is about managing relationships with customers. Why is there so much rancor about CRM? We have been hearing the litany of derision for a decade: you can’t manage the customer. Correct, but where in the definition does it say you are managing the customer? The aspiration, which requires perspiration, is to manage the relationship.
The challenge in ‘managing’ the customer relationship is that no one in the corporate office wants such a messy job. Managing growth, profitability, costs and competitiveness is the language of the executive suite. Minions to the C-Suite work to targets. Compared to those measurable management disciplines, managing the customer relationship is squishy – like nailing Jello to a wall. Yet we have no choice – manage we must. What does it mean to manage? It means to direct an effort with a degree of skill and focus. It comes from the Latin “manus” – or ‘hand’ – like in ‘manual’ or the original usage in Italy: maneggiare. That gives us an idea of the intent: be hands on.
Social Media initiatives serve to underscore this requirement of being hands on in guiding the customer’s experience with the organization. Ideally we’d like figuratively to hold each customer’s hand and insure that they have an acceptable experience with our business or institution. That can be expensive to scale. So we put processes in place, deliver information, simplify steps, aid in decision making, selection, set-up, handling of billing, delivery, payment and inquiry. It is all hand-crafted. CRM can’t be purchased because it is not a technology. As a business discipline, it is designed by you as the advocate for your customer. Technology is laid in behind the process, and analytical tools are put in place to measure efficacy, and feedback systems are put in place to test process integrity. CRM is an evolving, heuristic discipline. Social media are terrific in accelerating the evolution of our customer processes. They give the organization a willing cadre willing and ready to provide advice and insight on what works and doesn’t work with your business processes. But can we listen? Yesterday I was on the phone with my bank. Why? Because I was checking my account and there was a message that said, “Inclearing checks….. $312.72.” I’d never heard of this term ‘inclearing’ and so I typed it into the Search bar on the bank’s website. Nothing. So… of course: Google. Immediately the answer popped up. I checked the bank website: nowhere could I suggest that they add this search term. I called them. Hey: I’m an analyst – I can’t help myself. I suggested that they add the term. bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. I could tell that all electroencephalographic activity had stopped in the service agents brain. “Thank you, sir, for your suggestion.”
We have to be at least as good as Google. Google listens without any human listening. But for customer experience improvement, a CRM discipline is the only option for a business to succeed. And that might explain why CRM is the top business term that clients searched Gartner.com for in 2011. “Social” has given new life and urgency to CRM.
Category: Analytics for Social CRM CRM Customer Centric Web Innovation and Customer Experience Leadership Social CRM Social Networking Social Software Strategic Planning Tags:
