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!

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.

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.

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!

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……

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.

Instead of the birds and bees it was the wolves and the sociopaths, and future university recruiters and corporations reviewing their resumes. The basic discussion was: “What’s better, a picture of a garden hose in your mouth with beer pouring down a funnel, or you tending a garden in Guatemala in an impoverished village with a sweet comment about how you are tutoring for free during the mosquito-infested summer?”

“But dad, I’ve never been to Guatemala!”

“So what? Are you going to put it on your college application or resume? No. But it creates a great impression!”

And so they embarked on viewing their profiles as ways of shaping how they would want an anonymous lurker (employer, recruiter…) to perceive them.

OK, I’m exaggerating, but not by much. It is pretty basic that we are fools to think that the musings, personal data paths, postings, transactions and connections that we perform as a part of any activity passing through a social network will be captured, aggragated, and shared with people and organizations we don’t want to share with. And as business owners and government officials and university officers, we’d better think about this.

And yet there are so many Pollyannas who don’t believe data is shared without our permission. Welcome to the world of the HTTP referrer header, ladies and gentleman. And just wait until your customers and non-customers ask for your internet Bill of Rights (First discussed, I think – but correct me please - in 2007 by Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington). What might be in it?
 We, the customer, control the elements in our profile, and no one else. • We get to delete any and all of our social and personal data. • We decide if you can track our movements. • We get to decide who has access to them.

That’s just the beginning. Until then, we’d all better get to thinking about where we expect the issue of surreptitious data gathering to go. Your customers are watching.

Yes, after listening to all seven interactive voice responses (IVR, or Inverted Version of Reality), I tried the one that sounded like it might not lead further into a rat hole of sub-menu. The choice yielded a pleasant voice that told me unusually long wait times of 12-16 minutes were to be expected, but I could enter my number and they would call me back.

It all worked out, and I won’t bore you, and the eventual human was terrific and polite. But let’s focus on the customer point of view and not just our own. In this case it was a simple change of number from a Sallie Mae client. It cannot be the most isolated or rare an occurence, but the system is designed from the inside out, and not from the outside in. It might even reduce queue times. Even the best of companies can learn from the voice of the customer, but we need better ways to ‘listen.’ Did you listen to this, Sallie Mae? I’m trying to do right by the both of us.

Both of ‘my’ banks could replace their website banner with the title: “Don’t try to find the phone number of your local branch.” We’re new in town. My daughter and I tried an experiment: she set off in the car for the local branch bank using her iPhone app as mapping, and I tried using the bank’s telephone system to reach the branch. Who would make contact first? Well, six minutes later my daughter called from the lobby of the bank, and I was still stuck speaking to a voice response unit (”SPEAK TO AGENT!!!!!!!!!!!!!” “I’m sorry, did you say “inspector grant?” “SPEAK TO AGENT” “I’m sorry, I’m having trouble understanding your response..”

The irony is that a few months back I was on a plane between NY and San Francisco, sitting aside the Chief Innovation Officer for one of the banks who is giving away all of that bonus money. She was on her way to Japan where they are doing an ultra-cool, cutting edge mobile banking pilot. This could revolutionize banking she said.

I asked: could it help me find the phone number of my branch? Could it tie the mortgage bankers to the investment advisor? Could it alert corporate that a customer has moved and initiate a campaign to ensure they stay customers? No, she said, we have separate initiatives for that. This is an innovation project.

Imagine: innovation. In Japan I’ll use my phone to scan barcodes of items and then pull up the website and do one stop shopping from my phone and it will come to my door. Maybe just what we need. But why would I do that with your bank that offers undifferentiated service versus another bank? That made her smile: “Because we all offer the same level of service.”

I just stayed quiet on that one.

The good news was that the customer service number was right on the bill. except that it is all spelled out in letters rather than numbers and my mobile device doesn’t match up numbers and letters on the keys. I felt like Matt Damon’s character, Colin, in the film The Departed typing blindly into his mobile phone, hoping I could match the alphanumerics. Tata: success! The customer service rep was very friendly. I told him my situation. He suggested he would email the sales person to ask him what he recalled offering me. I politely asked him: “What did you have for breakfast on June 19th?” and I think that startled him. “Excuse me, sir?” Well, I said, I am doubting whether a sales person who made me an offer seven weeks ago for a package with this many components will recall the offer. It’s like asking you what you had for breakfast six weeks ago.

My very polite service agent asked if I would like to dispute the charge and change the service plan. I had a simple suggestion: why not open the voice recording of our conversation? I didn’t want to dispute anything – I heard the message back then, “This call is recorded for quality assurance purposes.” So: just click on the .WAV file and we can both listen to the conversation together.

“um. We only record calls at random, and we don’t associate them with any customer record.”

My question is: why not? They obviously have tens and tens of millions of dollars to pay actors to yuck it up, or use their sex appeal in television commercials, so why not spend a fraction of that on their existing technologies? Why force the customer into a “dispute?”

Sometimes the simple, customer-centric approach to customer service and customer experience may do more than the brute force of marketing, and I think this may be one of them.