Michael MaozIf you are a practice lead at one of the world’s ESPs – external service providers – you are very happy that this blog has a minuscule readership. This is just among us, so you have no worry of it going viral or appearing anywhere. The message is: we are on to your inside joke of supporting your clients’ efforts to move into a new generation of software as a service (SaaS) and modern Cloud architectures. We get that ‘Social’ and Social CRM are aimed to transform your client’s business using yesterday’s thinking. Like you put yourself behind a Mosin-Nagant when you could step up to a Pro-Series 2000 HTR with parallax compensation. That is: old but very good technology and process at a time when things have changed.
Why change? The real sweet spot of your business is skimming off as much of the traditional spending on IT software and services and gear, and that is the big $3.5+ Trillion spent across the world. That number compares to just $5+ Billion spent on SaaS software, including Social. OK: we are in a world of transparency – is that so? Could you show us the numbers? How much have you – the partners and leadership – invested in retooling yourselves and your innovation centres and your consultants to understand the new social processes and the new Cloud infrastructure and the new metrics. I recently read a little-seen research piece on how to staff for the new Social rules in the customer service centre (if you are a Gartner client, http://www.gartner.com/resId=2111015 ) only after we failed to turn up any advice from any of the monster-size consultancies.
Net: isn’t it time to move beyond the fancy Marketing studies and high level thoughts about the impact of Social on the Customer Strategy? Isn’t it time to build aggressively so that you have a sound, scalable Cloud practice? Marketers need you. Customer Service organizations need you. There has to be a financial model that will get you to push off from the mooring of the status quo.
Comments Off
Category: Applications CIO Cloud CRM Innovation and Customer Experience Leadership SaaS and Cloud Computing Social CRM Social Networking Social Software Strategic Planning Tags:
