• On average, over 40% of customers resolve their issues in the online community
• Of those 40%, 30 – 50% also solve the problem there – which means an overall reduction of 15%+ of all service cases.
• The average ROI on a peer-to-peer community has been 100% within 15 months. Try that with your ERP or SFA or HCM!
• Overall customer satisfaction grew, while time spent interacting with the Brand went up

If you want to see an in-depth case study and are a Gartner client, you can check out some new research at: http://www.gartner.com/resId=1910415  .

We will have several more of these at our Customer360 Summit this March in Orlando (http://bit.ly/gLhUKZ ).

I had a great call with a client this morning where we were discussing forums and knowledge bases and her company’s next steps. I said that now might not be the best time for her to discuss results because the program was still midstream. She laughed and said, “You know what? I don’t know if we’ll ever be out of midstream.”  I am always touched by the IT folks who work hard for companies that can hardly recognize their effort, who look forward at the possible and are not handcuffed by the past.

John F. Kennedy, who was my idol by reasons of proximity temporal and physical, said, “For time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.” And it is truly a mystery and a testament to people’s dedication and commitment that they often work so long and hard for rewards that largely accrue to others. We need all be grateful that they do.

Thank you all, as always, for sharing your stories – successes and challenges.

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 .

“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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I had the privilege to Keynote a CRM Summit on the Gold Coast after meeting clients in Sydney. A poll of audience hands raised showed 80% lines of business leaders and 20% IT. Once one untangles the regional sense of humour (like the organizers insisting I wear a business suit and tie onstage and then discovering no one in the audience had either), it is easy to plunge into very granular discussion about the tools, frustrations, and business value measures that drive customer experience initiatives.

It could in part be the distance from the United States vendor hype machines, but in the region leaders just want to get things done. There is clear frustration at how stymied marketing and Customer Support feel in bringing more real-time marketing into the customer service process. Yet everyone said the same thing: software as a service, and Cloud Computing, were like log-jam clearing for CRM. Rather than queue behind logistics and finance and sales, Customer Service professionals are deploying products to support CRM processes with minimum help or involvement from IT. There is keen desire for local data centers and a fear of placing customer information in the United States, but these are minor issues.

The region is in the throws of a massive focus on customer excellence, and I heard at least ten separate success stories, some of which we hope to highlight at our European CRM Summit next year.

Thanks, Oz. Our Gartner Symposium starts here next week, and if you are not already registered – get over here! http://bit.ly/sosTpL

Or maybe things have changed. We have learned to like doing other people’s (the corporation or government’s) work. We’ve come to think of it as our own work. We print our own itineraries, get the rental car, check and bag groceries, work those kiosks, select our content on all media channels and watch them or read them or listen to them when we want. We search for answers in self service virtual assistants like Siri and a hundred other intelligent voice agents. And now we have advanced Gamification experts to trick, goad, spur us on to believing it is all fun. Whoppy, I helped the IRS collect my money, and a Tax-form company make a billion using their online tools. And we also freely transfer our intellectual capital to them so everyone can use their website.

We love doing everything ourselves. We need to feel needed. We want to show our coolness. But maybe we as businesses need to step back and evaluate our tactics in Social X. Gamification is pretty blatant in some places. Back to Shirky, and his work in Cognitive Surplus, there is the idea that, what the hey, we’ve got plenty of spare bandwidth anyway, we might as well participate. It is empowering. And, we might add, what else is there to do? Read a book? Why do that when Wikipedia and a Reader Forum can summarize and evaluate what your peers think about it instead?

But be careful because there is a small, small chance that rather than customers feel that THEY are driving the ‘self service’ process of providing their input (We LOVE it!), that instead they may perceive that you are inducing them through manipulation (or the polite concept of Gamification). Lucky for most of us that consumers are too poorly educated to have read Vance Packard’s works and to have absorbed the message, and in particular his work, The Hidden Pursuaders. Whatever you do, keep it far from their view, on the top shelf or locked away in the liquor closet.

The Social / Customer participation trend may be a permanent, accelerating part of consumer culture, but make sure you have written your Minority Report (as in the Philip K. Dick short story, or 2002 Film) just in case there is a customer backlash. Then who’s the chump?