How Many Software Companies Monitor Their Software as Well as Tesla Monitors its Cars?

The unfolding story of how the New York Times’ negative review of the Tesla Model S may have actually been faked is a cautionary tale for software vendors.  Basically, there is enough instrumentation and feedback built into the Tesla S that Elon Musk was able to “shred” the review, as Dan Frommer writes.  The graphical plot of exactly what was happening with annotations is particularly damning:

It’ll be fascinating to see how the NYT responds.  Hard to imagine how they do anything but investigate Broder and ultimately move him along elsewhere.  To do much else would imply very little journalistic integrity.

My question for you is that since you’re reading this blog and are likely somehow involved in high tech hardware or software at some level, how does your product compare in terms of how well it can monitor what your users are doing with your product?

I’m fascinated with the idea of closing the feedback loop for the good of customers.  Yes, it’s great Musk can catch the NYT in a bogus review, and perhaps you will catch a reviewer too, but the potential for improving your customer’s experience is of much greater value to your product.  This may seem like a Big-Company-Only idea, but I’m pursuing it with a vengeance for my SaaS bootstrap company (CNCCookbook) because I need precise feedback that pinpoints where I can do the most good for my users with the scarce resources I have available.  I can tell you from experience that the tools are available and straightforward.  You can have the data for very little effort invested.

The next thing I am after is to automate responses to that data.  I’ve been reading the blog of a company called Totango with some interest.  They essentially want to provide SaaS automation for a Customer Success team.  Various folks have written about the importance of Customer Success and I’m also a big believer.  My thoughts at this point are to start out relatively simple.  I want to understand the early lifecycle of my products and be able to trigger automated actions based on that cycle.  For example:

Step 1:  Installation

Monitor the first time the customer has successfully logged into the product.  Offer increasing amounts of help via emails once a day until they achieve this milestone.  The emails can start with self-service help resourcs of various kinds and eventually escalate to offering a call or help webinar.  The goal is to get the customer properly installed.

Step 2:  Configuration

This seems like part of installing, but in fact there is significant post installation configuration needed for CNC Manufacturing software.  Same sort of thing: provide daily emails with increasing levels of help until the system determines that the user has properly configured the system.  Also, this is an opportunity to collect information.  We provide canned configuration for the most common cases and finding out what the next tranche of cases to target should be is very helpful.

Step 3:  The Path to Power Usage

It’d be great if everyone who signed up for our 30 day free trial actually got to see and understand all of the features that set our product apart.  I’ve seen some other products like Dropbox (Full disclosure: they give me another 250MB of storage if you use that link and then sign up. If you’d rather I didn’t get the extra storage, use this link instead. If you sign up, they’ll give you a link where you can get 250MB free too.) walk customers through a usage maturity exercise.  They’ve somewhat gamified it by giving out some of their “currency” in the form of extra storage if you complete the tasks.  My goals here would be to get everyone to see as many of our unique functions as possible during the 30 day trial.

Step 4:  The Holy Grail: Referrals

If all this goes well, the customer gets through the Trial, understands the unique capabilities of our products, and likes the product well enough to buy it, then the final stage in this incarnation is to ask them to refer others they know who might like the product.

That’s a pretty simple roadmap for how to create some closed-loop feedback of telemetry and drip email that improves your customer’s experience.  So I’ll ask again:

Is your company setup to monitor your users as successfully as Tesla monitors its drivers?  Why not?  I’ve used a lot of software where it is pretty clear they’re not monitoring much at all.  I’ve even talked to some of them to encourage change, and they seem receptive.

If you have a story about what sort of work along these lines you’re doing, please share it in the comments below.  I’m very curious.  I think we have the potential to personalize the experience for our customers like never before.

Gaining the Wisdom of Crowds in a Bootstrapped SaaS Company

When you’re bootstrapping a small company, sometimes it’s hard to do the things larger organizations take for granted, like making sure you’re listening well enough to your customers.  On the other hand, you can take advantage of your nimble nature and the availability of some great technology to do some things that even a lot of larger organizations don’t manage to pull off.  At CNCCookbook, my small Manufacturing Software company, I’ve had to think long and hard about how to register the wisdom of my Crowds to make sure the company is on the right track with its products.  Lest you think small companies with fewer employees than you can count on one hand don’t have Crowds to learn from, CNCCookbook gets over 1 million visitors to its site every year and we’ve had over 15,000 machinists use the software to date.  We count some of the world’s largest manufacturers on our Customer List as well.  In short, there’s plenty of Wisdom to be had from our Crowds, it’s a matter of finding the right ways to capture it and put it to use.

Having come from a Social CRM background at Helpstream, the value of harnessing the Wisdom was not lost on me.  It was something that had worked well for me throughout my career and something I very much wanted to do well with at CNCCookbook.  Here is a brief history of how I went about it and which tools, techniques, and technologies were put to work to do so.

Phase 1:  Forums and Web Analytics

Right from the very start I deployed a set of User Forums which I called the “G-Wizard User Club” (CNCCookbook is our company and web site, G-Wizard is the software brand that labels our products).  Much as I miss the sophisticated capabilities we had at Helpstream (they haven’t been rivaled by any product since), I had to make do with what was available and what fit my budget.  I knew I wanted a SaaS-based service.  However easy it might be for me to install and administer phpBB or some other Open Source bulletin board, it would be one more thing for me to do.  As the sole person working in the company at this time, I made the decision to focus as much of my time as possible on things that were uniquely differentiated for our company.  Deploying phpBB wouldn’t even come close, so I went with an alternative that was both a SaaS service and ad-supported called ProBoards.

It has worked reasonably well, and served its purpose.  I moderated membership and got a lot of mileage out of the boards.  They continue to be popular to this day, and we have not quite 2000 members there today.  To make sure every User was aware, I also instituted an in-app button to take open the browser and take them to the User’s Club.

You can see there’s more than just the User’s Club there on that Login Bar, but it started with just the User’s Club and grew to encompass a number of resources every User needs to be aware of.  While our app doesn’t run in a browser (it’s an Adobe AIR app as disconnected running is often important to our audience), it behaves in every other way like a browser-based SaaS app and we have embraced a lot of the design concepts for such apps, such as seamless access to the important parts of our web presence and incorporating that presence as a first class citizen of our navigation structure.

Another critical source of the Wisdom of Crowds is your Web Analytics.  We use Google Analytics, and there is a wealth of information to be gleaned.  For example, our User Guides are entirely online and we can see from the Web Analytics which parts of the product are more interesting than others just by watching the traffic patterns.  As we do each new release we write a blog post that discusses the new functionality in the release and again this provides a framework for using Web Analytics to understand what’s going on with the product.

In app access to Getting Started Resources, our Support Portal, and the User’s Club Forums…

Phase 2:  Blog Comments, Social, and Surveys on the Web Site

CNCCookbook started as a plain old web site and went for quite a while like that.  We had an area where articles were presented in a quasi-blog format, but it wasn’t really a blog.  It didn’t take long before we’d outgrown that format and it was time to add a real blog based on WordPress.  If I had it to do over again, I would recommend that every company simply start with WordPress and eschew the plain old web site phase.  It’s a fantastic content management system that has a rich ecosystem supporting it.  In keeping with my SaaS philosophy (why would I spend my scarce time maintaining a commodity like WordPress instead of focusing on what makes our company different?), we signed up with page.ly to host WordPress for us.  We spliced the blog into our plain old web site using DNS Made Easy, a SaaS DNS service that’s been excellent.

This transition marked a big step up for us in a whole lot of ways.  There were obvious SEO advantages that were very visible in the Google Analytics reports.  It became much easier to manage our content and we did a major upgrade to the site’s look and feel (it’s getting close to time to do another, I think).  Best of all, we now had comments on every post and could deploy a host of social widgets to help harvest as much feedback from our audience as possible.  One of the first things I did once WordPress was up and running was to go out and survey key sites to see what sorts of plugins they were using with WordPress.  My approach was to use a variation of a Blackjack card counting strategy I had perfected to decide my Social Widget strategy.  I’ll say more about the Blackjack in a future post, but suffice to say I analyzed the widgets used by a number of top marketing blogs on the theory that these people should know.  I went to companies that clearly had lots of experience with conversion and A/B testing like Unbounce.  I went to specific marketing gurus like Neil Patel’s Quick Sprout blog.  It was an excellent way to focus my efforts and populate the CNCCookbook blog with what I think are an excellent set of Social plug-ins to maximize engagement.

Having done that, I turned to Surveys.  While it was kind of an expensive luxury, I bought two different tools.  I wanted a survey tool that would be innocuous and unobtrusive.  I hate visiting a site and getting hammered with a full stop “please answer our survey” ten seconds after I get there.  At that point, I have formed no opinion but a negative one about the damned survey.  At the time, KissMetrics had an awesome tool called KissInsights that would slide up from the bottom of screen in a very low key way.  That tool is now sold by Qualaroo and works great.  It’s biggest issue, and the reason I don’t use it for all my surveys, is it is limited to simple surveys.  So, I also subscribed to SurveyMonkey.

I use the Qualaroo tool to derive a Net Promoter-style feedback score on the overall product (ours is very high) and I use the Survey Monkey to do more detailed surveys aimed at understand the details of my audience.  For example, I have done surveys of which CAM software they use or which CNC control is on their machines.  Not only is this invaluable data (sort of like surveying which PC, OS, or browser a PC software audience uses), but it makes great content to publish on the blog.  Some of my all-time best traffic articles are just the results of such surveys.  Apparently others also want to understand the Wisdom of Crowds.

Phase 3:  Ideation and CRM

For Phase 3, I wanted some Social and Conventional CRM.  It was time to get a Trouble Ticketing system going.  I chose a vendor called UserVoice for several reasons.  First, it comes with a very nice Ideation App.  Ideation gives my audience the ability to suggest new features and vote on them, like Dell’s Ideastorm.  This is an extremely powerful capability for a small organization to use to focus scarce development resources.  The results will often surprise you.  Ideation is one aspect of what we had at Helpstream, so it was nice to get some of that back.  Second, it’s SaaS.  And third, I got a great deal on it via AppSumo.  BTW, AppSumo has yielded several good deals for my bootstrap venture.  I’ll warn you in advance, they’re very spammy in their email and you really have to know what you’re looking at when you consider the products they push, but if you are patient about wading through some spam and have a clear idea what your business needs, you’ll find some great deals to keep the overhead down.

One of our products, G-Wizard Calculator, is much more mature than our later products because it has a 2 year head start on them.  While I still have a lot of ideas about where I want to take that product, it has a solid conceptual foundation.  What I mean by that is that it is ready to be steered to a much greater extent by customers.  Ideation tools are a great way to do this as they force customers to ration their votes.  On our site, they get to use 10 votes, and can vote no more than 3 votes on any given idea.  Submitting a new idea uses up a vote.  Once the votes are used, they have to wait until the fait of an idea is decided, they are either implemented or rejected, at which time they get the votes back, or they can redeploy the votes.  This scarcity of votes gives a clearer signal of what really matters to your tribe.  Any time I am preparing to do a new release of the Calculator, I always start with our Customer Support Portal and look over the Ideation results.

Phase 4:  In-app Feedback and ET Phone Home Telemetry

This brings me to our current stage of evolution–In-application Feedback and Telemetry.  In keeping with our theme of making the product behave like a web application, we added a Beta Survey popup such as you see above.  This has been a very useful way to monitor our progress from Beta to release-ready.  After spending 10 days focusing development entirely on issues raised in the Beta Survey, we’ve been able to move to 81% of respondents scoring the app during the last week as either “3 – I could use this” or “4 – GWE rocks!”  For the period older than 1 week, the score was only 47%.  Clearly, users were able to tell us what they needed that was missing from the app.  We intend to continue for a while longer until we see a point of diminishing returns and then we’ll declare the Beta done.

In addition to the Beta Survey, we also receive what I call, “ET Phone Home Telemetry.”  This is basic telemetry on which parts of the app are actually being used and how well they perform.  For example, the centerpiece of the application is a complex 3D graphics simulation that shows how the machine tool cutter will move as it executes the g-code program loaded into GW Editor.  We monitor and report back the longest runs so we can get an idea of how the system is performing and whether we need to do more work on performance.  We also track usage information like how many times the user has logged into the app.

The technology that makes the in-app telemetry and Beta Survey easy is something called “Mandrill” that is offered by the MailChimp people.  Rather than having to build back-end server infrastructure that loads all this data into some form of database using an API, the app simply emails it back to us with Mandrill.  The volumes are such that it is very straightforward to collate the information in Excel for analysis.  Building a full-on database application for a 2000 person Beta test would have been needless complexity and time taken away from our focus on doing what differentiates our software.  Mandrill is what MailChimp calls “transactional email”.  I take that to mean email generated by machines, rather than by people, and that’s exactly what we’re doing here.  MailChimp has a Freemium model, and at our level, Mandrill is essentially free.  Not only was it very easy to implement, but it doesn’t cost us anything.  For bootstrappers, that’s a hard combination to ignore.

Conclusion

Just because you’re bootstrapping and have minimal budget and resources is no reason to ignore the Wisdom of Crowds.  In fact, I’d argue that having the Wisdom of Crowds helps you to allocate your scarce resources where they will really matter.  Towards that end, what we do differently at CNCCookbook as bootstrappers is build as little software as possible.  We want to focus every line of code written on problems that you simply can’t get solutions for elsewhere.  Problems that are unique to our audience of CNC machinists.  The more of those problems we can solve, the more value we bring to our customers.  Everything else is just overhead.  Towards that end, we have relied heavily on SaaS, on the Amazon Cloud, and on our ingenuity to lash together the available off-the-shelf technologies to give us the ability to deliver an overall User Experience that is arguably better than almost everywhere I’ve ever worked.  This despite every where else having vastly more budget and resources at their disposal.

I’ll give one last plug to SaaS and the Wisdom of Crowds.  We do as much testing as possible, but again, as a bootstrapped organization, we don’t have large numbers of testers.  Our software quality is therefore a focus of three things.  First, unit testing is important.  Whenever complex new subsystems are added to the software, we make sure there are unit tests.  I personally believe in single stepping the debugger until I’ve seen all the lines of code executed and verified the intermediate results are good.  Unit Tests not only help tee up the execution of all the paths, they also ensure that down the road we can validate intermediate results as changes are made.  Second, we release often.  I don’t like to change too many things without doing a release.  This means that the amount of testing per release is relatively contained to new functionality and our scarce testing capabilities can be focused.

Lastly, we use what I call a “feathered” release methodology.  Each time we release, there is a 7 day cycle.  On each day, we expose an additional 1/7 of the user base to the availability of the release.  Customers that insist on having the latest and greatest can change a setting so they see every release immediately, but most stick to the default.  This ensures that if anything is too badly broken, we’ll hear about it before a very large fraction of the installed base is exposed to it.  In this way, we’re also using the Wisdom of Crowds to help safeguard the quality of our software, and it has worked extremely well to date.

So, whether you’re a bootstrapper or a big company, think about how you could take advantage of the Wisdom of Crowds.  Not only will it make a big difference for your software, but it’ll show your audience that you care and that they have a voice.

Those Special Customers Developers Love (Well They Should Love Them!)

Do you have any special customers that your developers hate?

These are the customers that can mysteriously break your products over and over again, even though perhaps thousands of others report no problems.

How does this work?

First, understand the psychology of bugs.  Developers don’t consciously create bugs, they come about as errors of omission, misunderstanding, distraction, and incomplete thinking.  Sometimes they’re a result of interactions between complex connected systems that the Developer does not understand or did not foresee.  Most Developers are pretty conscientious about not wanting customers to see bugs, and about getting them fixed quickly.  At my last startup, the Developers were part of the Customer Service crew, which gave them an even keener sense of the customer’s perspective.  Believe me, they wanted their bugs to stop hurting these customers!  BTW, I use that language of “bugs hurting customers” on purpose, because that’s what it feels like to Developers when they get to experience the customer’s pain firsthand.  I highly recommend it!

Yet, we still have bugs.

Second, consider how it all looks to the customer.  The first thing you have to do before you can put Developers on the phone is to get them to quit taking bugs personally and assuming the customer is wrong.  The customer reports a problem, and the immediate assumption is it is the customer’s fault somehow.  At least that’s how it can feel to your customers.  In reality, the Developer doesn’t literally think of finding fault, but they know the customer is doing something different, something they didn’t think of, and they have to get to the bottom of that as soon as possible.  In the worst case, it feels like a witch hunt to your customers when it shouldn’t.  If customers understood why the questions were being asked and why were they asked in that certain special Developer bone headed way, they would understand more.

Getting back to those special customers, they are the ones that do things differently than the vast majority, for whatever reason.  For example, if I talk to a customer that works in IT, I always take a mental deep breath.  These are the sorts of folks that will customize their browser’s security levels, erect additional firewalls, and do almost anything else to really customize their machines to work the way they want them to.  The vast unwashed are going to run their machines pretty much as they come out of the box.  So, the IT guys see some bugs that the vast unwashed don’t, simply because their configurations are different.

If I’m in a crowd with my wife, trying to find seats, I always follow her.  She’s left-handed and she will make different decisions than the vast unwashed, who are largely right-handed.  We will magically wind up getting to a shorter line or finding the better seats that are still available.  If you know a left-handed person, try following them.  It isn’t just a matter of picking left instead of right.  They perceive all of the cues around them just a little bit differently when making their decisions.

Look for people with different hardware.  They’re travelling the less traveled road.  They will find things your mainstream may not.

I have known dyslexic people who did the most amazing things with software.  I have seen problems uncovered through random behavior.  To a certain extent, I have also seen concentrations of bugs as indicating not just that an area of a product is buggy, but that it has poor User Experience.  Why?  Because areas that have poor User Experience cause people to do all sorts of crazy things as they try to guess at how to work the feature.  Hence it flushes out the bugs.  Always consider UX as a possible source of bugs!  And while you’re tracking these bug concentrations, recognize that unnatural locuses of bugginess are either indicators of Bad UX, Bad Architecture, Bad Developer, or something really really hard that you’d better invest more systematic testing in.  Let’s call these “Areas of Special Interest.”

I unwittingly became one of those “Special Customers” for KISSInsights during the last week (cool service I will have more to say about in a later post).  I had a problem with my account they kept trying to fix and couldn’t.  I escalated all the way to the CEO.  Not only did the problem not get fixed, but problems like making me a premium customer for a month for free were apparently being broken.  Both sides were becoming increasingly frustrated.  Then we discovered the real issue–I had two accounts.  They were fixing the older one and I was viewing the newer one.  DOH!

So what’s the moral?

1. Embrace your special customers.  Reward them.  They are like gold because they’re finding bugs that others haven’t found.

2. Seek out people who experience the world differently when using software.  I don’t know if you can go to the extent of trying to make sure your testers include South Paws and Dyslexics, but OTOH, maybe it’s a good idea.

3. Keep an eye on bug concentrations as a potential early indicator of Bad UX, Bad Architecture, or an Area of Special Interest.

4. Make sure everyone involved recognizes that positives that come of an effective quality process.  Never focus on blame.  Reward progress in discovery, correction, and avoidance.

Dim Dim: The Risk of Being a Salesforce Customer

My title is a bit of a play on ReadWriteWeb’s title about the Risk of a Free Service, but I raise the issue in all seriousness because I think we should be looking not at the seller (hey, at this price, this was not exactly a sale from strength) but at the buyer.  Dennis Howlett, in writing about the transaction, is doing a little bit of looking at the buyer, but I want to go further.

The way a company handles the customers of an acquisition is an indication of how they may someday feel about their own customers.  When you buy the company, you bought the customers too.  Sure, it’s all fine and well to argue that you bought the technology and not the customers and it’s not your fault that the customers don’t fit in with your plans and so won’t be treated well.  But when you hear that rationale, ask yourself,  ”What happens if I’m a customer of such an organization and suddenly I don’t fit in with their plans either?”  There’s not really a difference, particularly not if you are a just one customer among many of a large company.  If Salesforce was going to do what I’d want it to do if I were a Dim Dim customer, they’d be grandfathering me in and extending me full benefits of being a Salesforce customer.  They’d be welcoming me to the family instead of disinheriting me.  I’d be 10x more likely to want to buy something from them if they did, and I’d be 10x more likely to sing their praises and those of Dim Dim going forward regardless.   Unless I miss my guess, Salesforce is going to be doing a lot more acquisitions, so take note of the tone they’re setting.

There are really two kinds of successful businesses out there:  There is the business that would do anything for its customers, and then there is the business run by the numbers that is without soul or pity for their customers.  I won’t be disingenuous by claiming the soulless kind doesn’t work, neither will I argue that one is better.  We have big and successful examples of companies that do as they please with their customers–Oracle and Microsoft have both been accused of such more than once so it should be no secret.  We also have examples of companies who have put their customers above all else–I like companies like Zappo’s and Nordstrom or maybe Amazon and Apple (in a curious way, they do care, they just think they know best).  Some of Hurd’s problem at HP may have been putting a numbers guy in charge of a culture driven more by ideals.  We will see whether Apotheker is a better fit.

When the pure numbers companies make an acquisition, it’s pretty clear how things will work.  Fellow Enterprise Irregular Naomi Bloom has a wonderful post out about fairy tales in the land of HR software that describes some of the goings on you should expect:

- We (the acquirer) will continue to support all product lines fully:  Of course we really won’t, we can’t afford to, but we don’t want to tell you that too soon.

- We (the acquirer) are delighted with our new colleagues and expect to retain all of them:  Even if we do retain them, and we won’t, they will be disempowered and will be bent to our culture and management.  Expect many to leave as soon as the handcuffs are off.

- Our customers can expect to see only improvements in their support, product roadmaps, and overall happiness as a result of this event:  Well, maybe, if it’s a technology acquisition.  If it is a market share acquisition, we are reducing the competitiveness of the market so that we may extract more profit while delivering less.

To those Fairy Tales, meaning if you hear them you should see them as red flags, I will add that if you see one of your vendors acquire a company and fail to welcome its customers with open arms to the family the way you would have liked to have been treated, that’s a red flag too.

There’s another thread I want to pick up on before I leave this one.  When we look at the two types of companies, ironically, making the customer King often leads to excellent profitability and shareholder value, but focusing on short-term numbers tweaking does not.  One of the disappointing things for me is how often products that were once great and companies can fade into obscurity.  I asked one of my favorite mentors one time what he was proudest of about the company where we had worked together.  His answer was very telling–his biggest accomplishment, he felt, was in creating a great culture.  This was a company that cared foremost for customers, and that culture resulted in an employee base that was very resilient to adverse conditions and very talented.  Later, the company got numbers focused and it has since lost that culture and most of those people.  Culture is the currency for a company that cares about its customers, but what is the currency that makes a big company out of one that cares for numbers?  Looking around for that answer I can only conclude that it is monopoly, customer lock-in, and the inertia that comes to all things big.  These are the only reasons for customers to put up with a company that cares more about its profits than about the customer.

Last point:  I read with interest Chris Sellend’s (lots of us Enterprise Irregulars with something to say!) prediction of a coming Social-Media-in-Marketing backlash.  Riffing on @pgillin, he calls for a Social Marketing Hangover.  I think folks calling for this backlash are right, but perhaps not in the way some of them are thinking.  Think about the two kinds of companies then think about what Social is.  The answer is obvious (to me at least):  companies that have a culture that cares about customers can be wildly successful with Social while customers with cultures that only care about the numbers are doomed to fail.  There is some question in my mind about whether they should even try, though there is a sentiment that feels opening themselves up to customers will let the customers rehabilitate them. 

The real tragedy is it will never occur to the number crunchers what is wrong and the pundits will watch the train wrecks and simply conclude Social was more hype than reality.  The customer-centric crowd won’t notice anything big either except that they can suddenly do what they do best a whole lot easier.

WordPress and the Dark Side of Multitenancy

Quite a bit of hubbub over WordPress’s recent outage.  A number of high profile blogs including Techcrunch, GigaOm, CNN, and your very own SmoothSpan use WordPress.  Matt Mullenweg told Read/WriteWeb:

“The cause of the outage was a very unfortunate code change that overwrote some key options in the options table for a number of blogs. We brought the site down to prevent damage and have been bringing blogs back after we’ve verified that they’re 100% okay.”

Apparently, WordPress has three data centers, 1300 servers, and is home to on the order of 10 million blogs.   Techcrunch is back and talking about it, but as I write this, GigaOm is still out.  Given the nature of the outage, WordPress presumably has to hand tweak that option information back in for all the blogs that got zapped.  If it is restoring from backup, that can be painful too.

While one can lay blame at the doorstep of whatever programmer made the mistake, the reality is that programmers make mistakes.  It is unavailable.  The important question is what has been done from an Operations and Architecture standpoint that either mitigates or compounds the likelihood such mistakes cause a problem.  In this case, I blame multitenancy.  When you can make a single code change that zaps all you customers very quickly like this, you had to have help from your architecture to pull it off.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for multitenancy.  In fact, it’s essential for many SaaS operations.  But, companies need to have a plan to manage the risks inherent in multitenancy.  The primary risk is the rapidity with which rolling out a change can affect your customer base.   When operations are set up so that every tenant is in the same “hotel”, this problem is compounded, because it means everyone gets hit.

What to do?

First, your architecture needs to support multiple hotels, and it needs to include tools that make it easy for your operations personnel to manage which tenants are in which hotels, which codelines run on which hotels (more on that one in a minute), and to rapidly rehost tenants to a different hotel, if desired.  These capabilities pave the way for a tremendous increase in operational flexibility that makes it far easier to do all sorts of things and possible to do some things that are completely impossible with a single hotel. 

Second, I highly encourage the use of a Cloud data center, such as Amazon Web Services.  Here again, the reason is operational flexibility.  Spinning up more servers rapidly for any number of reasons is easy to do, and you take the cost of temporarily having a lot more servers (for example, to give your customers a beta test of a new release) off the table because it is so cheap to temporarily have a lot of extra servers.

Last step: use a feathered release cycle.  When you roll out a code change, no matter how well-tested it is, don’t deploy to all the hotels.  A feathered release cycle delivers the code change to one hotel at a time, and waits an appropriate length of time to see that nothing catastrophic has occurred.  It’s amazing what a difference a day makes in understanding the potential pitfalls of a new release.  Given the operational flexibility of being able to manage multiple hotels, you can adopt all sorts of release feathering strategies.  Start with smaller customers, start with brand new customers, start with your freemium customers, and start out by beta testing customers are all possibilities that can result in considerable risk mitigation for the majority of your customer base.

If you’re a customer looking at SaaS solutions, ask about their capacity for multiple hotels and release feathering.  It just may save you considerable pain.

Podcast: From Soviet Era CRM Command and Control to Social CRM

I recently did a couple of podcasts with Phil Wainewright to talk about the evolution of CRM from its original command and control origins to the Social CRM that companies like Helpstream are delivering today.

I have to say it was a lot of fun working with Phil on the podcast.  I’ve also got another one coming with Brent Leary.

To hear (or read) the 2 ‘casts with Phil, try these links:

-  From Soviet-Era CRM to the Social Fabric of the Web

-  Bringing the Service Ethos to Sales and Marketing

Enjoy!

The Experience Portfolio: Thinking about Customer Experience Strategy

Recently I was talking with Paul Greenberg and he presented me with a particularly elegant concept that he called the “Experience Portfolio.”  He was talking about the collection of factors that influence the overall customer reaction to the transaction they’re consumating with a vendor.  The Experience Portfolio consists of products, services, experiences and tools.  He talks about the balance between these components in a recent blog post and asks some interesting questions:

How do you think about this when you are developing your Social CRM strategy?

Do you break out the likely effect of the products, services, experiences and tools on the overall experience?

Do you weigh the likely impact of each “functional area” and look at how the ordinary is going to affect the overall experience.

Paul didn’t use the “Portfolio” concept in the post, which was a shame, because I found it to be very evocative of the kinds of tradeoffs that have to be made to optimize a strategy for balancing the components.   Investment portfolios are designed to play off different investments to maximize the returns while minimizing the risks.  Each investment is chosen not only for its strengths, but for its ability to offset the weaknesses of some of the other investments.  Investments must be chosen wisely, because there is not infinite capital to allocate among the various choices.  Putting too much capital in one place may work well for a time but ultimately fail spectacularly.  This concept of the need to balance and allocate scarce resources to produce an optimal outcome comes up over and over again in business, so it should be no surprise that we have to deal with it in terms of our CRM strategies, Social or otherwise.

Let’s look again at the components of our Experience Portfolio.  Think of each one as a place a business can invest in to maximize the likelihood of Customer Satisfaction (or whatever you’re trying to maximize for your customers):

Products:   What you are literally selling.  Zappo’s sells shoes, the hotels in Paul’s blog post sell rooms, and McDonald’s sells hamburgers.  Service companies sell Services, BTW, and we should not confuse their “Service Product” with the ancillary Services in our second category.

Services:  Something else that comes along in addition to the Product that the vendor made happen using People.  Zappo’s is legendary for the Service that comes with their Shoe Products.  The Ritz Carlton adds Service to their Room Product.  A public accounting firm may make a practice of hiring accountants that are especially personable or perhaps more likely to resonate with a particular demographic as an illustration of Services on top of a “Service Product”.

Experiences:   Experiences are the most intangible.   Paul’s examples involve Hotels that have gone out of their way to convey a hip atmosphere.  Clearly Apple conveys an Experience, and not just Products with Services.  So does Starbucks.  Many companies offer little or no Experience.  Think of the most generic possible retail products and outlets.

Tools:  Software and other tools used to help optimize, shape, or deliver the other three components.

To get back to Paul’s three questions, let me briefly answer and then expand.

1.  You have to think about the Experience Portfolio when defining your Social CRM strategy, or any other CRM strategy for that matter.  It has to inform how you think about your product, your brand, who you are selling to, and how you go about servicing, marketing, and selling.

2.  You should be making conscious strategy decisions about each one of the four Experience Portfolio components.  Otherwise you won’t have optimized you portfolio except by accident.

3.  You have to weigh the impact of each component in making your decisions, and you should understand how to measure that impact in practice as well in or to determine whether the strategies and weightings you’ve chosen are working.

How should we go about using the Experience Portfolio to help inform our decisions?   A full explanation would make for a nice Business Book and this is just a blog post, so let me borrow from Paul’s Hotel examples and from my earlier musings about Michael Porter’s Competitive Strategies.   Let’s use 3 hotels as our examples.   Each hotel has decided to optimize for one of Porter’s 3 successful competitive strategies.   One, Motel 6, will compete on price.  Another, the Ritz Carlton, will position itself as the very best hotel “product” that is available anywhere.  The last, and I think I’ll use Paul’s Allegro hotel since he liked it.  The Allegro is using the Porter strategy of positioning for a particular niche or demographic, in this case it is people who have an acute aesthetic sense and desire to be hip.

Now let’s go through the experience portfolio:

Product: 

-  Motel 6 has to deliver the absolute cheapest product bar none.  It is entirely focused on good enough not to be a total turn off, but no better.  Spending any more means not being able to pass on the savings to the customer.

-  The Ritz Carlton needs the best possible rooms.  It can’t afford to cut corners on the rooms at all.  The bed, the bathroom, the storage, comfortable seating, and every other aspect of the “Room Product” have to be the best that there is.

-  The Allegro needs to offer a room that is good enough for their niche audience, but no better.  Moreover, if there are aspects of the room that are relevant to that niche, they should be dramatically better even than the Ritz Carlton.  In this case, you get the très chic decor, but the room itself is pretty small.  Paul’s other experience, at the Hudson, made the room so small that they went below “good enough for the niche audience” and created a problem.  They didn’t balance their portfolio properly and underspent on the Product.

Services:

-  Motel 6 will be good enough on Services as well.  The rooms have to be clean, and check-in and check-out needs to be quick and easy.  That’s it.  No concierge.  The service help concentrates on being invisible.

-  The Ritz views Service as an essential part of the product, which is often the case if you’re going to deliver the Best of the Best.  As such, this is a huge focus for them.  They go to elaborate lengths.  Even the people who are just there to clean the rooms are selected for the friendly outgoing personalities.  Everyone you see greets you.  The hotel will go out of its way to do anything you ask, and they’ll spend time thinking of new things to offer before you ask.

-  The Allegro should be focusing on the service levels their niche expects, but without standing out.  They should be thinking of Services that may be uniquely attractive to their demographic.  Since all the decor is very contemporary, let’s assume for example they might benefit from the very best in-room Internet capabilities.  Perhaps you should have Social Media access to their staff rather than having to call.  Perhaps your reservation gets you a personalized web page “concierge” that let’s you get access to all the kinds of things this niche would care about.

Experiences:

-  Motel 6:  Free coffee and danish is a big deal if you’re at a really nice cheap hotel.  Maybe a pool.

-  Ritz Carlton:  From the Old Wealth ambience to the High Tea (if you like tea, you’ll like the Ritz’s) to the locations chosen for Ritz Carlton hotels, you will not be disappointed.

-  The Allegro:  Sounded like they had their experience dialed in perfectly to appeal to their niche.

Tools:

-  Motel 6:  The purpose of any Tool is to let them deliver rooms cheaper.  Self-service on the web would be one example.

-  Ritz Carlton:  Has to be very careful that Tools are not percieved as cheapening the experience.  The Ritz would use tools behind the scenes to ensure the quality of the experience and to enable their people to deliver a better experience than they could without tools.  They would be unlikely to ever force a customer to use these Tools unless customers specifically wanted to do so, but for those customers that want access they would ensure the experience with the Tools was the best possible. 

-  The Allegro:  Good enough not to disappoint their niche, but perhaps quite innovative where that would appeal to the niche.  With a contemporary motif, there is a lot of opportunity to do interesting differentiation with the tools.

Conclusion

This approach to allocating scarce resources to the Experience Portfolio is pretty compatible with the comments I saw on Paul’s post:

Natalie got into an ugly situation with the Westin because someone there pulled a clever marketing trick to appeal to demographics that wanted a bike with their room, but failed to follow through on the Experience Portfolio.  The bike was a tactic, not a conscious strategy, and wound up making things worse for them.  She was absolutely right to be annoyed about it.

I take Mitch Leiberman’s post to be that at some point, you may have maxed out the Experience Portfolio along one dimension without creating a differentiated offering.   When that happens, try reducing the investment on one of the dimensions and refocusing it elsewhere to create a more optimal overall experience.  Classified ads are the same every you look.  Giving more font control or some such wasn’t really going to be worth the effort, so Craigslist broke the mold by investing in other portfolio categories than the “Product” specifically.

Wim does an excellent job of taking the tactical (just seek “engagement” for engagement’s sake) and casting it into a strategic frame:  Either gain insight through feedback or create a more personalized experience using engagement.  The nature of the personalization should be informed by your overall strategy for differentiating for your customers.

Esteban recognizes that customers make choices that are influenced by context, intent, expectations, and the subsconscious.   Have you taken care with your Experience Portfolio investments to properly align those inputs (context, intent, etc.) so that what your customers perceive when forming their impression of you are what you want them to percieve?  If not, you’d better hurry to achieve that alignment.

The Customer, as Social CRM, is the Fourth Pillar of CRM

A collection of excellent blog posts from the Social CRM community are converging on what I think is the real secret of what Social CRM is all about. 

There has been much talk about the “Pillars of CRM”.  Traditionally we have Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service as the three pillars of CRM.  Clearly the world has changed.  I talk at some length about how in the first of a series of blog posts we’ve taken to calling Helpstream’s “Social CRM Manifesto“.  Give that article a read for a good introduction to how the Customer has come to be in Control, a development which impacts every aspect of how companies deal with Customer Relationship Management.  We’ll be publishing the Manifesto as a series that all hangs together and tells the story of Social CRM, at least the way we see it at Helpstream.

Getting back to the excellent series of posts, the first one I read was by Esteban Kolsky and has the wonderful Hawking-esque title, “A Brief History of CRM.”  He’s pushing the idea that Feedback is the Fourth Pillar.  For me, making Feedback that Fourth Pillar is close, but no cigar.  CRM as its practices today is at heart a command and control system, and Feedback as a role for the customer fits into that World View perfectly (it should, Esteban knows one heck of a lot about CRM!).  My problem is that it is way too passive a description of the role the Customer will play in our brave new world, and some of the comments on the post are also uncomfortable for that reason.  We will no doubt define Feedback in a way that seems more active, but it just doesn’t do it for me.  Make no mistake about it, the Customer is in Control.  Ignore at your own peril.  This is why I am so fond of using Paul Greenberg’s short definition of Social CRM which is that it is what companies do when the customer is in control of the conversation.  That’s why I say the Customer themselves are that Fourth Pillar.  They now have a seat at your table, more on that in a moment.

Esteban and I have been trading Tweets on whether Social CRM is really a new paradigm that changes everything, or whether it is more like a new channel or refinement to CRM.  This of course is an argument that erupts at the beginning of every paradigm shift.  It is uncomfortable when things don’t fit the old model and the established priesthood wants to make things fit.  Ultimately, this is semantics.  When the Social CRM revolution is over, it will be part of CRM.  We don’t need to rebuild the whole wheel.  But for the time being, it is productive to consider the two separately.  Make no mistake: Social CRM is not about replacing CRM at all.  It is productive to insist that Social CRM be integrated with CRM, but not to view it as a subset or adjunct fifth wheel to CRM.  The reason is that any subset or adjunct might be viewed as optional.  It might be viewed that CRM will inform the adjunct what to do and how to operate, not vice versa.  Neither one is true, and the fundamental changes the web has wrought in the power of the customer make that clear.  That’s why I keep harping on it as paradigm shift.  Social CRM will change CRM much more than CRM will shape Social CRM.  When that change is complete, that will be the time to put away the banners and place Social CRM strictly under the CRM banner.  Until then, we have a lot of work to do to get organizations to understand the transformative power that Social CRM makes available.

The next great article I came across this morning was Enabling Social CRM is a Convergence of E2.0 and CRM.  This one really expands on the idea that the Customer needs to become an integral part of the Enterprise.  That’s my Customer-as-Fourth-Pillar idea in a nutshell, and is captured with this great quote:

Should it be such a leap to suggest that in order to truly engage the customer, we should invite them into our Enterprise?

Amen!  Now that is what engagement is all about.  That makes sense to me.  The best practitioners of the CRM art actually understood this before Social CRM came along, but so few actually did anything about it, that I continue to rebel against just viewing Social CRM as “more of the same.”  There are profoundly different ways to think about it.  In this case, Esteban himself is eloquent in a comment on this post (that’s why I know our argument is just semantics and he really does “get it”):

And the biggest shift we are seeing is not on technology, people (enterprise), or process – it is in the society and the customer.  The customer model we used for the past 2,000 years or so is no longer the norm.  We can setup any technology (easy, really) to support any processes we want, and train our people to do things in many different ways. But in doing all that we are not really looking at the source of all this change — the customer.

Absolutely positively 100% true, true, true.  And that last part about it not being just process is where you just have to feel Social CRM in your bones.  You either want to engage with your customers, giving them a seat at your management table as your real Fourth Pillar, or you don’t. 

If you don’t, you’re going to apply the old CRM ways and view the new Social as just a set of tools or a new channel to tack on.  This is not so bad.  I read a great story that describes exactly that model this morning too.  It describes a case where someone got terrible customer service, Tweeted about it, and suddenly they got excellent service.  What’s wrong with that picture?  Why did I have to Tweet in the first place?  Why did the company in question place me in a position of having to tell an unhappy story through the powerful megaphone that is Social Media?   Yes, the story ended well for the Tweeter, but in the end, a bad story got told.  In fact it got told not just in the Tweet but in the blog post.  It’s clearly better than a pure-CRM model, but viewing Social CRM as an “escalation mode” where you do what it takes to satisfy the screamers is just not the way to approach Social CRM.

Enough said.  The best news is that we live in a world where Social CRM is rapidly moving more and more mainstream.  The Social CRM conversation is refining and distilling it all down very quickly.  The players in the CRM market are making acquisitions and partnerships (we partner with Salesforce and Oracle, for example) and realizing that Social CRM is not optional.

What do Customers Want, and How Can Social Media Help?

The Twitter #scrm group is a wonderful place to pick up new threads around the whole Social CRM movement.  But as I’ve remarked before, it is so tough to wring a conversation out of Twitter’s fabric (this is a problem for Twitter, not those valiantly trying to have the conversation), that I generally watch without trying to join in. 

Recently, there has been a great back and forth on customer loyalty.  Does it exist anymore?  Don’t people just buy on price?  Can Social Media affect loyalty?

What had been troubling me about the discussion was its fairly one dimensional nature.  Loyalty either existed or it didn’t.  Blogger Glen Ross put it into a better context for me, by writing about customers that are loyal, versus customers that will always buy the cheapest offering no matter what the service levels are.  Exactly!

I was immediately reminded of one of my all time favorite business books, Michael Porter’s classic on Competitive Strategy.  If you’ve never read the book, you should, because it crystalizes competitive strategy in an extremely powerful way.  In this case, Porter says there are three ways that companies can compete:

-  On price

-  By having the best product

-  By focusing on a particular underserved market segment

Porter is at great pains in the book to point out that businesses have to pick just one of these focuses, and that they cannot afford to try to straddle the fence.  Resources are scarce and all the wood must go behind the winning arrow to succeed lest some competitor do a better job appealing.

If we turn that around to the customer’s perspective, and ask ourselves how it applies to customer service and how Social Media can help, it makes total sense.  These three competitive positions reflect 3 broad categories customers fall into.  They buy for value, quality, or because they are part of some special needs market that isn’t seeing the love.  Companies that successfully tap into the right competitive strategy and focus are simply connecting with one of these broad customer types.

There is a continuum of service experiences companies can provide that range from just enough service to avoid destroying the brand to Four Seasons and Ritz Carlton level pampering. 

Companies on the first part of the continuum are all about the cost savings.  For them service is a necessary evil.  BTW, their customers are very likely the ones who only care about price and service is a necessary evil for them too.  That doesn’t mean bad service can win or survive for this segment, BTW.  It means that at best, service done well for the value segment is service that creates no negatives.  Investing to create positives for this audience probably does not have the same benefit as returning that investment as further cost savings.  Really bad service destroys the notion of value, which is paramount.  If I can’t get the value from the product because of bad service, then no matter how cheap it was, that product cost too much and I”m going to talk about by disatisfaction.  Ironically, the value sellers may have less room for bad service than the other two categories because they already refuse to invest much in service, having passed that investment along as savings.  Hence they have little margin for error.

At the other end of the spectrum, service is part of the customer experience.  It is part of the product you are buying because it is the best possible product.  You’re going to Zappo’s not only because they have the great shoes you want, but because their service makes the “product” of buying shoes that much better than your other shoe buying customer experiences.  I liked Denis Pombriant’s recent description of this kind of service:

Customer experience has come to mean a literal experience had by a customer with a vendor, product or service rather than a product or service cultivated — through value add — to be an experience.

One has a sense that the “literal experience” side is very much reactionary.  It’s all it really can be in the case of a value sale.  The process of delivering service is one of reacting to service needs of customers in as inexpensive a way as possible that avoids doing too much damage.  The other end of the spectrum, the Zappo’s/Ritz Carlton end, is the service that is “cultivated through value add” until it becomes something uniquely valuable itself.

The focused competitive strategy deals with the needs of an underserved market.  It is often a vertical market, rather than a broadly horizontal market.  Yes, the major motorcycle makers may all have off-road bikes, but there are makers dedicated strictly to the off-road market.  That’s all they do, and it is a passionate focus.  They can afford to do better than a maker that wants to cater to all.

Moving back to Social Media and Social CRM, we can see how to mesh up our strategies there with these competitive strategies:

The value player wants to provide service that minimizes the negatives enough that costs are conserved and can be passed on to the customer.  Spending any more than that means they have to raise prices to pay for better service.  Spending any less than that on service means they have to raise prices to pay for marketing, refunds, and whatever else is needed to repair the damage.  The customers are pretty tolerant.  They just need answers when they have a problem that they don’t have to work too hard to get (the link is a hilarious Customer Service story by Zoli Erdos, BTW).  Social CRM is extremely effective at lowering service delivery cost while getting the customer the information they need.

The “most differentiated product” player wants service to be a part of the differentiation.  Prompt, attentive, and friendly service that does the unexpected in the customer’s favor is the order of the day.  Social Media is again, very effective at delivering personalized service experiences.  It’s also effective at helping customers to get together with one another.  Being a part of the group is often something this segment desires, which is why Porsche, Ferrari, and similar marques have owner’s clubs and driver’s course and other “team” activities for their customers.  This is where brand is so important because often brand is not just the indicator of value (that’s thinking for the value segment), but is instead a signalling device that says, “I’m a member of this group.”  Hence that polo player looms as large on the breast of you shirt as the big gold Rolex does on your wrist.  These sorts of customers want to display their affinities, and what better place to do that than Socially on the web?  They will also want more access to your experts and perhaps even celebrities within the organization than you can provide except by means of the Social Web.

The focus category also fits very well.  After all, what underserved community wouldn’t like a special place just for them?  A place that engages in the way they want to think about your products and markets, and that only engages that way, instead of making their world a tab on the side of some larger world they’re not really interested in.

So then what is Loyalty in the context of each one of these categories?  It should be easy to see that the category will determine the nature of the loyalty to an extent.  Loyalty is a measure of the conviction the customer has that your product is a good fit for their mode of buying.  For Walmart, loyalty is a conviction that the best prices can be had in those stores.  That conviction means they tell others about the great purchases they made there.  Like other forms of loyalty, it is emotional, not rational.  Most value customers do not have total awareness of prices from every venue for every product.  They have to let their guard down once in a while, and they will do so wandering the halls of a place like Walmart because they’ve gotten enough deals in the past that they would like to believe all the deals around them are good deals (BTW, they’re not!).

For the differentiated product customer, Loyalty is a conviction that the product is the best.  They are willing to pay more for it as a result and will defend that decision to the death.  It’s always entertaining to watch a value enthusiast (Corvette) locked in a discussion with a differentiated product enthusiast (Ferrari).  The former will remark that their car goes just as fast and costs 1/4 as much, so only an idiot would spend that much on the Ferrari.  The latter will shake their head and somewhat look down their nose at the pooly informed value buyer who thinks they know the soul of an automobile by reading a few road tests in magazines.  They know in their bones that there is more to their Ferrari than the 0-60 times.

I could spell out the meaning of Loyalty for the focused niche customer, but you get the idea.  In each case Loyalty exists and can be accessed by an appropriate strategy.  In each case there is a price to be paid when the company lets their customers down on expectations.  Remember that the same person may be a value buyer for some things, a best product buyer for others, and a focused niche person on still others.  I recall trying to buy a Fax machine one time.  I could care less about a Fax machine, but we had to have one for my startup.  So I was a value buyer.  I had always kind of thought Fry’s was a value seller (they aren’t really, they’re an underserved market seller for Geeks) and I was terribly disappointed when I went next door to Staples (which is a value seller) and saw the same Fax for less money.  Fry’s was never the same for me after that.

Customer Service Segmentation in a Social World

Esteban Kolsky writes a great account of Paul Greenberg’s keynote for CRMe09.  By all means, give it a read to get a sense.  Paul has always done a fabulous job of boiling down what’s really important whenever he writes or talks about CRM.

The part that caught my attention was the discussion of segmentation.  It was only a short paragraph, so I’ll repeat it here:

First, Paul rightly mentioned how each of us want to personalize the experiences, and expect the organization to deliver that. The solution is not to personalize on a one-by-one basis but rather to use segmentation wisely.  And that segmentation should not be done on financial value, but rather on the concept of Referral Value.  I would have spent more time talking about segmentation as critical to the success (which I think it is).

This one got my attention because it goes to the heart of a very sensitive yin and yang Social CRM has to delve in to:

-  We must personalize the Social Experience so it is authentic and compelling.  An un-authentic experience is going to do more harm than good.

-  We can’t afford to personalize the experience for everyone when there are so many.  We have to pick and choose using some segmentation strategy.

These two are at odds with one another, at least they seem to be.  Yet, I am not easily comfortable with the notion of segmentation.  For want of a better word, segmentation just seems deflective.  Recall that deflection is the practice of trying to push customers away so they service themselves.  It cannotes the Bad Old Days of Customer Service.  Deflection is anti-Engagement, and Engagement is the watchword of Social CRM.

I recently went back over one of Paul G.’s posts on creating that personal connection, and I remember thinking, “This is perfect, but how many companies will be able to execute it?”  And then I realized it really doesn’t matter if the company can execute or not.  Companies have become peers of their customers.  If a peer can’t execute they’re soon forgotten about and new peers take their place.  Companies really don’t have a choice but to find a way to execute.  It isn’t that the market is unforgiving (though it certainly can be), it is that the market is indifferent.  It is so hard to get the market’s attention these days through any means but word of mouth that you simply can’t succeed otherwise.

Which brings me back to Esteban’s thoughts of segmentation.  Perhaps there is some sanity there, a way to succeed if only it were executed well and with care and respect for the customers.

Segmentation is all about rationing your available engagement to the places where it will do the most good.  Sorry, rationing is a strong word, but that’s what it is.  If you had unlimited resources relative to your customer’s needs, you would not need to ration. 

Now before we talk further about how to segment, let’s consider that Social CRM does tremendously extend our resources.  My customers at Helpstream tell me very commonly that their agents are able to handle 3 times as many customers as they could before Helpstream.  The beauty is that Social is a one-to-many or many-to-many interaction.  If I close a case for a customer, I have only helped that customer.  If I help someone in a Social forum, I have not only helped that person, but I have created visible public content that can help many others.  At Helpstream we routinely measure that Social Help can be worth as much as 16x more than writing another incremental Knowledge Base article. 

So before you consider segmentation, consider how much more powerful you Customer Service will be if you can convert as much of the effort spent today on cases as you can to Social Interaction in your Community.  Those 3x and 16x Social Force Multipliers leave you a lot of headroom before any rationing is necessary because you already have the resources in place to engage.

That’s a beautiful thing, but let’s continue under the assumption that at some point we still do not have enough resources to achieve the best possible Social Engagement without some sort of triage help from segmentation.

How might segmentation actually work in a Social World? 

In the Customer Serviec 1.0 world, segmentation was based on the value a customer brought to the organization.  Your best customers got better service.  The definition of “best” could be derived from your CRM system through a complex organization-centric equation that weighed factors such as:

-  How much business have they done with us in the past?

-  How much business will they do with us in the future?

-  Are they in a happy state of mind or have there been a series of crises such that we had better tread carefully?

-  Are they an important reference for us?

Interestingly, the last two points are very Social in nature.  Maybe there is hope after all!

Esteban talks about the new segmentation as being based on the concept of Referral Value.  That’s interesting to contemplate.  Perhaps it is a function of Social Reach.  Can our Social CRM system dynamically determine the Social Reach of an individual?  Is there some score based on how many channels they use (blogger, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and how often they speak?

Here is a crude Straw Man attempt to create a set of Referall Value segmentation criteria.  The idea is to segment based on the avoidance of negative word of mouth and the maximization of positive word of mouth:

-  What is the Social Reach of the person?  (Measured by channels and followers of those channels)

-  What’s their Social history?  How much ink do they have out there?  (Never mess with the United Guitar Man again, people!)

-  Do they comment on products?  Have they commented on our products?  Recently?  How broadly?  Positive or negative?

-  What is their Org Credibility in Face Space?  e.g. Does their LinkedIn profile or our CRM record show they are powerful in the Real World?  They could be a 15 year old kid otherwise.

Of course we should also be grabbing some of the original segmentation metrics (such as how much business they’ve done with us) and blending those in as well.

This is all doable, and ultimately, perhaps essential, though we are some ways from needing it urgently today.  My problem is that while I can engage in the academic exercise, I am still deeply concerned about too little engagement moreso than I am about too much and any need to ration engagement.

Today companies are behind the eightball.  They need to prove good intentions.  They need to over-perform on the engagement front.  Many of the more famous brands from a Customer Service standpoint have made over-performance a powerful tool.  Zappo’s goes to insance levels of engagement.  Nordstrom once refunded a customer for a set of tires even though Nordstrom doesn’t sell tires.  There is that crazy notion again that being successfully Social pays back more than it costs, even in situations like these.  That same unfair advantage of being positively Social works negatively.  The cost of getting a segmentation strategy wrong is very high, and we have not yet clearly established the minimum norms needed for customers that segment low on the scale.  This latter is as important as the segmentation itself and leads to what ought to be the subject of another discussion: 

What are the minimum norms of engagement needed in a Social World?