By Chris Bucholtz

When you work with CRM all day, you start to look at your interactions through CRM-tinted glasses. Sadly, much of what you see encapsulates the way CRM is either misused or ignored.

For instance:

Dear business that sends me too much junk: I appreciate that your email marketing system is integrated with the same list you use for direct mail, but I fail to understand why you insist on calling me “Christophe” in emails as you did in your direct mail. A 10-character field for “first name” probably seemed sufficient, but there are some of us who have longer names. You’re telling me you care more about the size of your data fields than you do about my name – and, if you actually knew me, you’d just say “Chris,” anyway.

While my mailbox and my in-box brings me daily reminders of this little CRM fail, I’ve never really done anything about it. But maybe I should.

If, as customers, we want businesses to be customer-centric, shouldn’t we as customers should start pointing out these failures where they happen?

It’s all well and good to point out how clueless businesses are, but the reality is that running a business is an all-consuming task at times. Maintaining the processes that make a business work may not leave time for managers to step out of their roles and try to see the business the way the customers do.

So, fellow customers: let’s start speaking up.

I’m not talking about offering complete re-designs of complex processes. No amount of well-intentioned advice will ever salvage Comcast’s customer service system, for example. What I’m suggesting is the mention of small things that can make a big difference.

It could be as simple as suggesting change to a website to make checkout faster, or a tip to improve personalization of customer communication, or expressing a desire to shift delivery times to coincide with periods of the day when your workforce is less busy and better prepared to receive merchandise.

The adoption of these little suggestions is a good thing for both you and for the business you buy from. For you, you get a better experience as a customer, and you get the good feeling that comes when you are heard and acknowledged. The business builds better relationships and can rightly claim to be moving in the direction of customer-centricty – and if what they’re doing makes you as a customer happier, it’s likely to make other customers happier as well. It also helps the business escape the foibles of failing to view its actions through the eyes of the customer.

And, if the business chooses to ignore your suggestion, that says something, too.

The other side of this is that we customers need to be much more vociferous when companies do the right thing for us. Sending an email or a letter when customer support does a great job, or when a sales person makes extra calls to round up the products we need in time, or when a clerk chases us down to give us our change, should become a regular response – it has an impact on the business that’s out of proportion to the action, but can also help reinforce that behavior across the entire business. And it also tends to reward the employee who went above and beyond the call of duty for us. Such employees embody the ideas of customer relationship management, and they deserve to be noticed – perhaps even more than the CRM screw-ups and failures that we tend to dwell on.

By Chris Bucholtz

I have long advocated the idea of CRM vendors behaving like CRM users – in other words, using the ideas that the discipline that CRM represents to run the business of selling CRM applications. A lot of vendors fall short of this; their internal needs trump the needs of their customers, and thus they default back to the behaviors that software vendors have been using for years. I just don’t think using a 1980s-style selling approach is appropriate any more, especially for CRM; if you want my full opinion on this, take a look at this post from last year that goes into it in depth.

One aspect of avoiding this tendency is choice. Vendors that refuse to take steps to broaden their customer’s choices are clinging to an old model; they’re saying, “our customers can’t handle options – they’re too simple to make choices.” It’s like they’ve adopted their philosophy from that Devo song, “Freedom of Choice:” “Freedom of choice is what you’ve got/Freedom from choice is what you want.” Except that was a satirical song about consumer culture; your business is not a confused customer buying trivial items. You’re a business buyer with specific needs, and you need the freedom to choose what works best for your business.

What does choice look like? Well, it can take the form of an interface users can personalize, or it could be deployment models that allow businesses to select from the cloud or on-premise or vendor- or partner-hosted versions of the same application based on their businesses, or it can be even more technical.

For example, SugarCRM quietly unveiled Sugar 6.4 today just in time for IBM’s big Lotusphere show. This is a release targeted primarily at developers, but there’s no reason to limit the options for anyone who works with a CRM application. One of the things that’s included in the new release is DB2 support. Buisiness-wise, it makes sense as an extension of SugarCRM’s partnership with IBM. But there’s more to it. Adding support for database is not an easy thing to do, but it’s necessary if you are serious about the idea of choice – and choice needs to be extended to all people who interface with the CRM application, including the developers who work with it behind the scenes.

One of the common CRM mantras is that you need to allow people to do business with you the way you wish to do business. If you’re a CRM vendor, that should mean understanding what your users need to work with your product in the best, most productive and most profitable way – thus, adding a database to the list of things the application supports is very much in keeping with the idea of a CRM vendor embodying CRM ideas in its product.

Of course, the pursuit of choice can be an infinite effort, and so vendors have to be careful about where they devote their energies. But this is an elemental aspect of how vendors should care for CRM customers. If your vendor insists on making the choices for you, realize they don’t have your best interests in mind – they’re out for themselves.

We all know that customers are evolving. Your customers are demanding a more peer-like relationship with you; they’re buying after doing their own research, and they’re asserting their need to understand their choices. You need to sell to this new breed of customer; it seems logical for CRM vendors to sell in the same way to their customers. After all, if CRM vendors can’t keep up with the changes in customer behaviors and needs, what chance do those vendors’ customers have?  Can you really keep pace with customers demanding greater choice without offering choices within the CRM application?

Some of this is clearly philosophical, I know. But if you ask developers what they prefer – a single, locked-in path or a selection of capabilities that allow them to customize, personalize or integrate in the way that best solves the specific problem at hand – the answer ought to be clear. And it will set up better tactical answers to business issues, making your CRM implementation more effective.

By Chris Bucholtz

This is the fifth year that  I’ve compiled a list of the best CRM blogs, and the trend is clear: more and better blogs on the topic of CRM are out there than ever before. In 2008, it was a struggle to find 20 good blogs on CRM; now, there are so many good ones that picking the 20 best is a difficult chore. But the cream rises to the top – using the criteria of content quality, consistency and influence, our list represents the 20 must-reads for anyone hoping to be on the cutting edge of CRM thinking.

We try to present a mix of theory and practical advice. One clear lesson that can be drawn: if you’re an independent business owner (as many of the non-affiliated analysts on our list  happen to be), your blog serves as a combination of calling card, curriculum vitae and cocktail party conversation. It works very well for many of these bloggers, and their sustained success – on the Top 20 list an in their businesses – show how valuable a blog can be.

We also have our share of big-firm analysts, journalists, service specialists, marketing folk and whatever Marshall Lager is. (Kidding, Marshall!)

We disqualified our own blog, of course, and we also kept away from other vendor’s blogs. We also tried to narrow the focus to CRM bloggers, vs. those shifting to collaboration, marketing automation and other CRM-like technologies and practices; that’s a function of the growing number of CRM blogs, not of any diminishing of quality of bloggers covering those spaces.

So without further delay, here’s our list of the 20 bloggers who made the biggest mark on CRM in 2011:

1. Pgreenblog and CRM: the Conversation

How do you outdo yourself as a perennial top CRM blogger? Take the community you’ve built (virtually as well as through tireless face-to-face networking) and create a remarkable contest designed to expose up-and-coming CRM vendors. Paul Greenberg, the author of both of these blogs, drove “CRM Idol” by enlisting help from all over the CRM spectrum; this effort dominated the middle part of the year in his blogs. That gave many small CRM vendors premium placement for their videos and the reviews done by Paul’s expert team of judges, exposure that outstripped anything these companies could afford to generate on their own. By understanding that innovation comes from the small, hungry companies – and by providing a chance for that innovation to shine through – Paul rendered a great service to the entire CRM world, and he used his dual blogs to do it. The contest also helped move the ball toward the realization of Paul’s vision of a Social CRM world; much of the innovation demonstrated in the contest is pushing hard in that direction. So, now that Paul’s effectively described the Social CRM future, now he’s working to make it a reality. Thank heaven he uses his powers for good and not evil.

2. Beagle Research Blog

If you’re confused about acquisitions, feature additions and strategic decisions made by CRM companies, you can bet Denis Pombriant was confused, too – briefly. Then, while the rest of us were still scratching our heads, Denis went over and wrote a blog post that made perfect sense of the day’s news. You may not always agree with him, but if you don’t it isn’t because Denis is provoking you; he can take bold positions without being brash or abrasive about it. He’s also the go-to guy for putting CRM in a macroeconomic context; just as Brent Leary excels at digging down to get to the needs of small business, Denis is great at elevating his analysis to a global scale, often touching on themes of sustainability and energy. Denis also keeps a busy schedule of trade shows, so if there’s an event you wanted to attend but couldn’t, check the Beagle Research Blog – Denis is probably at the show, and he’s also probably explained the major announcements.

3. ThinkJar Blog

With his tongue-in-cheek faux-egomaniac persona front and center, Esteban Kolsky seasons his commentary with both a sense of humor and a brutal honesty, which makes his blog unpredictable in a way no others on this list can be. He’s not really a egomaniac – he actually is as smart as he says, and his knowledge spans the CRM space. He’s not interested in CRM by itself – he’s interested in the entire business software ecosystem, because only by building the complete solution can businesses realize the full potential of the technology available to them. An ex-Gartner analyst, he often offers his takes on the acquisitions and strategic moves made by the big players in CRM, but then he’ll turn around and get much more tactical in his next post. Esteban’s blog is a genuine grab-bag of information, but every time you reach in you’ll pull out something of value delivered with an insider’s insight.

4. Brent’s Social CRM Blog

Brent Leary pushes the definition of what Social CRM is by talking about the larger ecosystem, but he doesn’t do that as a big thinker pontificating about his grand ideas. He’s a small business guy at heart, so if he’s talking about CRM or about any other related technologies – ERP, marketing automation, lead management, or whatever – he’s talking from the context of what they can do to solve business problems. Brent also models smart blog behavior for his clients; the blog is chock full of videos, sound files, graphics and other goodies he collects as he hustles and hurries through the Social CRM world, often with some fairly weighty guests. And, like Paul Greenberg, he sees a lot of value in exposing innovators to the greater world; Brent’s CRM-ISH awards honor companies doing things related to CRM, an area where there’s plenty of innovation just waiting for a boost.

5. 1to1Blog

Ginger Conlan and her team provide readers with a year’s worth of object lessons and expert insight drawing from the experiences and expertise of writers Tom Hoffman, Mila D’Antonio and Cynthia Clark and from a tremendous array of guest bloggers. They’ve struck a great balance between humanity and expertise – the reporters’ observations set off the experts’ well-crafted ideas to provide a readable balance that also carries plenty of value. The blog and the topics it covers demonstrate how the lines between CRM and marketing are blurring in the age of social media, and how this communications revolution is accelerating the impact of customer experience on the bottom line. Best of all, the blog is updated at an almost daily pace – the crew of writers and special guests are prolific and if what they’re talking about today doesn’t hold an immediate lesson for your business, just wait 24 hours. Chances are good the next day’s content will be immensely helpful.

6. The CRM Consultant

Perhaps the most effective tutor of prospective CRM buyers (and those looking to upgrade their existing systems), Richard Boardman draws from his practical experience as a consultant to help head off implementation failures long before implementations ever start. A strong proponent of spending time in the planning stages to define requirements, set goals and behave in practical and productive ways during the early stages of CRM decision making, Richard provides thoughtful useful and eye-opening advice in the form of multi-part guides to these preliminary steps. The sad thing is that he comes to this information from seeing so many businesses fall into the same precise traps; by becoming a expert on what causes failure, he’s also made himself a skilled tour guide for those seeking a path to success. Managing costs, working with consultants, convincing the CEO – Richard provides advice for these very common components of implementing and managing CRM, and then some. If you’re engaged with a vendor or a consultant, you need to be engaged with Richard’s blog, too.

7. Value Creator

Weighing in from the west coast is Brian Vellmure, whose blog reminds me of a versatile camera lens: it zooms in on small, pertinent social CRM details, and can zoom back out to capture the big picture of how the innovations applied to business are changing the world in broader, bolder ways. He’s not limited to talking about the nuts and bolts of CRM – in fact, that’s not his territory at all. Brian is more likely to talk about the environment, the attitude, the strategy and the psychology of how businesses relate to customers than his is about the technology they bring to bear. This year was a busy one for Brian – including a switch of blogging locations – so he had fewer posts than in the past, but his inclusion of the slide decks he uses for speaking gigs should provide food for thought (and should also help you see what a good slide deck for a speaking gig looks like!).

8. A Title Would Limit My Thoughts

Although he holds a significant position at Sword Ciboodle, Mitch Lieberman also maintains this blog for his own independent musings. Mitch isn’t afraid to ask a big question and then let it hang without an answer – some things we don’t know the answer to yet, after all, and Mitch is sanguine enough to avoid acting like he knows the answers all the time. However, he does bring a wealth of wisdom to the blog in the form of well-considered thinking and the voices of other experts when they can help shed light on a topic. Mitch did a great job of talking about the value and the strategies around social media and customer service – as well he ought to, working for Sword Ciboodle – and he did it in great depth and detail. Regardless of the technology you end up using, if you plan on delivering state-of-the-art service, you owe it to yourself to check Mitch’s blog to figure out the best ways to do it.

9. Michael Maoz

Analyst blogs face some challenges – when you’re paid to give expertise to your customers, how much of that expertise should you give away via your blog? Michael shows how it should be done: there’s some great nuggets of data, but the blog deals primarily with Michael’s informed opinions and attitudes about what’s going on in CRM, customer service and social business. No, wait – the blog delivers Michael’s attitude-informed opinions. When it comes to social media and social business, he’s refreshingly free of the euphoric optimism of other observers and appreciates the social revolution for what it is: a hard, long and potentially costly slog to a new way of doing things which shares some difficult similarities with other business revolutions from years past. The nice thing about a mature voice like Michael’s is that it has some context to compare what’s new now with what was new then – and can inform you on past lessons that can you can draw from without making the mistakes that defined those lessons yourself.

10. CRM Search Blog

Chuck Schaeffer is one of the smartest CRM people I know. The former CEO of Aplicor, he’s turned his talents to CRM Search, and in the process built quite a cast of fellow bloggers. In addition to Chuck’s insightful posts about what’s going on in the CRM industry, you also get the likes of Marshall Lager, Blake Landau, and Denis Pombriant on a regular basis (although I had to knock points off for allowing my drivel into the blog on occasion). Chuck understands on a fundamental level what vendors do right and what they do wrong, and he has the ability to intuitively spot vendors’ strategy changes and to explain what they mean. Best of all, Chuck has an insider’s knowledge but no longer is beholden to anyone. If you’ve taken a peek at the in-depth and bluntly honest analysis on CRM Search, which is very much in keeping with the tone of this blog, you understand why the CRM Search blog does a service to readers while making CRM vendors a little nervous.

11. A Software Insider’s Point of View

While Ray Wang’s blog is a little less engaging than the author in person, that still makes it better than most blogs. And, from a pure content point of view, it’s hard to beat Ray’s take on things, from social business to developing a business strategy. Frequently peppered with insights from Constellation Research’s work, the blog is a mix of big thinking and in-the-trenches business news analysis. You’re as likely to get an analysis of Lithium’s latest round of funding as your are to get a comparison of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to the needs of developing a high-level business strategy. Ray also includes a series of interviews with disruptive business leaders – that is, disruptive in a good way. There’s also plenty of Constellation news – hey, this is essentially the research firm’s company blog – but you can work around those posts to find lots of little acorns of knowledge. Want to find a data point to convince your boss to go all-in on a social strategy? Visit this blog, read, and pay attention.

12. Wim Rampen’s Blog

Wim has mastered the twist-ending approach to writing a blog. He’ll often start with a premise – “The Customer is Always Wrong,” to cite one popular post – and start delivering on that premise – only to turn it around and demonstrate why “conventional” thinking leads to folly (in the case of the above-mentioned post, the reality is that businesses define “right” and should be working harder to help customers get to that definition of “right”). That makes for an entertaining read; Win’s nearly 15 years of experience in CRM makes for an informative read. He’s also mastered the art of being a “social” blogger, doing more than his share of reading of other’s work and bringing back ideas and links to his readers (while adding his own take). Doing this results in a lively comments section populated by some of the big brains in CRM and Social CRM. Wim’s insight on customer service, social media and value-co-creation make this valuable reading, and Wim’s behavior as a blogger and member of a wider community make it instructive for anyone looking to develop their own social behavior as a professional.

13. Social CRM Ideas

Mark Tamis didn’t get off that many posts this year, but the ones he did pen took swings at enormous ideas – business process management, social messaging, the meaning of Salesforce’s acquisition of Radian6, and so on. He also gave a platform to a few guest posts from Graham Hill, another well-respected voice for customer collaboration, and he devoted a lot of space to CRM Idol. But perhaps the most interesting thing Mark did was to give a reason for Social CRM that could reach business leaders. Back in November, he wrote that Social CRM was exciting, in part, “Because it will generate many new data points that we can use to motivate and pilot our organizations.” Mark sees reluctance to change and a chronic inability to manage change as dangerous and widespread barriers to fully realizing the goal of customer-centric businesses, and his ability to articulate Social CRM’s value not in grandiose marketing-speak but in terms that decision makers can internalize easily is evidence of the incisive thinking that the hallmark of his blog.

14. Michael Fauscette

Another terrific analyst’s blog, this one is far-ranging and gives Mike Fauscette the opportunity to connect the dots behind his general areas of coverage to provide context for his more precisely-focused customer analysis. But even if you’re not an IDC customer, Mike’s blog gives you great context for the trends that are impacting your decisions. For example, in November he wrote about the concept of innovation management – a topic certainly not limited to CRM but one that has major ramifications in the era of Social CRM, the evolution of the social business and the introduction of myriad new technologies. Same goes for his breakdowns of the what it mean to have a social business, or the underlying tactics needed to create successful collaboration – Mike can connect the dots that explain why you need to do things and the factors that make those things necessary, even if he doesn’t tell you how to do them (but, hey, isn’t that your job anyway?).

15. The Customer Relationship Management Blog

A newcomer to the list, Lauren Carlson, the main voice of this blog, scored bigtime with a satirical post back in July sending up the “unreliability” of cloud applications (as opposed to on-premise applications, which NEVER go down. Right?), but her regular posts are on target and as informative as that one was funny. In baseball, she’d be called a “spray hitter” – her posts are all over the place in terms of topic, but she deals adroitly with all of them. She also talks to some of the brightest luminaries in CRM to gain inspiration and information for her posts, so in many cases what you have is a smart writer adding a new angle on ideas from other smart people. In the Social CRM era, that’s really helpful – the way ideas are phrased may resonate differently with different business people, so Lauren’s fresh takes on these ideas have great value. There are also a host of guest posts from people with practical experience, making this a useful grab-bag blog. Stick your hand in there and see what you pull out.

16. Customer Service Stories… and Other Thoughts

Customer experience is a great buzzword and an inconsistent reality. Barry Dalton is both infuriated by this and the benefactor of a lot of fodder for his blog, which focuses on customer service and the object lessons that real-world attempts to help customers provide. Often, those attempts are hamstrung but improper deployment of resources, bad assumptions about customers, and processes that have gone hopelessly out of whack, but few businesses seem committed to attacking these problems head-on until their effects are brutally clear. If you’re developing a customer service component to your CRM efforts, read this blog, and if you run across something that sounds like your business, start ringing the alarm bell. Barry also delves into more strategic ideas, like customer self-service and the effects that increasingly effective service have on customer expectations and behaviors. It’s a fun read, too – that’s part of Barry’s service to his readership.

17. CRM en Latinoamérica

The most influential voice for CRM in Latin America, Jesus Hoyos’ blog is in Spanish – but it’s readily translated into English thanks to a nifty little button on the page, and the topics Jesus discusses are directly translatable, too, regardless of your geographic location. What’s great about Jesus is that he strikes a precise balance between content creation and content curation – he’ll lay out an idea, and then provide numerous links, lists and other data available on the web to back up his idea and provide additional inspiration. Jesus is another regular on the CRM show circuit, and his many presentations make their appearance on the blog, along with videos and photos – he really understands what a blog can be. An advocate of social CRM, he’s first and foremost an advocate of picking solutions that fit the business needs of the people using them. In Latin America, with a range of different customers of varying degrees of technology sophistication, that’s an essential strategy – and it’s a strategy that Jesus does a good job of exporting to the rest of the world.

18. Forrester Blogs

While they are tossed into the dogpile of analysts that make up Forrester’s somewhat unweildy stream of posts, Bill Band and Kate Leggett make their impact felt through their timely, thorough and readable posts. Bill’s the classic SFA/CRM analyst (with great posts this year about the Forrester Wave results and Forrester’s guide to mobile CRM best practices), while Kate pays attention to customer service primarily, but their coverage areas overlap a little. That makes for some great posts; Bill excerpts his analysis, and Kate creates great lists of rules, strategies and philosophies that are immediately useful for anyone trying to evolve their service organizations. They both understand the value of social media in CRM and service – and they use Twitter effectively to notify the world when their posts appear. Follow them and you’ll be able to read their work as it appears instead of paddling through the larger Forrester blog stream.

19. B2B Lead Roundtable Blog

Adding some additional voices has only made this blog stronger. Brian Carroll of Marketing Sherpa fame is all over the process of collecting leads and ushering them through the pipeline. That’s not as easy a task as it used to be – nowadays, the technology that enables us to collect more lead data also increases the expectations for sales productivity, and thus sales pros are stuck in an ever-steepening spiral of increased quotas and performance metrics. Brian and his team – which includes J. David Green and Andrea Johnson – provide useful advice for managing this steep expectation curve, and they also are skilled at relating to sales people. Part of the beauty of the site is the way it treats archived webinars – not only does the blog talk about the topic, but it breaks out the specific elements of the conversations and gives times. That allows time-pressed viewers to go right to the point in the webinar that most interests them – a very reader-friendly feature that points out how sales benefits from CRM ideas in more ways than just on the bottom line. Between the video, the webinars and excerpts form Marketing Sherpa’s reports, this should be required reading for CRM users focusing on the sales side of things.

20. Third Idea Blog

Although I wish he’d post more, Marshall Lager covers a lot of ground when he does write, and he covers it very well. Few CRM writers give their readership as much credit as Marshall does. That means he talks about complex concepts and vendor maneuvers with both authority and amusement – and he clearly assumes you’re in on the joke. See his insightful and unsparing disassembly of Oracle Open World 2011 – he has little need to fill you in on the soap operatic details of the show and proceeded right to explaining how those activities actually harmed Oracle’s business. Marshall also uses the blog to promote events like CRM Idol or the SuperNova Awards, and his status assures his inclusion among the judges’ panel. And, if you want to know which CRM events are worth following, keep an eye on Marshall’s blog; his analysis of an event indicates that it’s the place to be (for better or worse). Also, I can safely say that Marshall is the only member of the Top 20 to have referenced the Buggles in the last year.

By Chris Bucholtz

If stand-up comedy and CRM punditry have one thing in common, it’s the fact that talking about airline travel is a hack move. Cheesy. Low-effort. Played out. Not as easy as shooting fish in a barrel – it’s as easy as looking at fish in a barrel (to steal a joke from Todd Barry, who is a stand-up comic and who, as far as I know, has never resorted to mocking the airline experience).

But I am nothing if not a bit of a hack – I mean, an airplane nerd, and thus I have a free pass to re-visit all topics aeronautical. I was moved to bring the subject up by a recent column by Jason Perlow. Basically, Jason advocates that business travelers check their luggage for the good of all humanity in the subtly-titled “Business Travelers: Check Your Damn Bags, Please.”

That goes back to something I’ve been saying about the concept of consistency in the customer experience (like I did here last week). Airlines are horrible at this – and the bag thing is the most visible example of this.

Several years ago, the airlines were suffering from terrible press for the deteriorating rate of on-time flights. There were more flights then, and congestion played a part in that, but so did “turn-around” – the ability of crews to shoo the passengers off, clean and service the plane, and load the next batch of passengers. Much analysis was done and one of the things that was detected as a possible means of speeding up turn-around was to discourage carry-on luggage. Carry-ons slow the boarding and de-planing process, and things get even slower when the plane reaches capacity and bags have to be passed up to the front of the plane to be loaded into the hold.

Then, a few years later, a new set of business drivers came into effect and demanded that airlines find new ways of extracting money from customers, and one of the key means of achieving this was to charge for checked bags.

What did that decision do? It brought all that luggage – and then some – back into the cabins and the overhead bins. It also extended turn-around times, which wasn’t as big a problem for the airlines since the number of flights had dropped and airport congestion wasn’t as severe as it had been.

But what about the customer experience? In neither of these scenarios did the people running the airlines ever consider the customer experience. It was all accountants and efficiency experts and executives who only fly first class and who have the special cards that let them put their luggage wherever they wanted. The average customers’ experiences meant nothing to them.

(And how good are these airline executives at squeezing dollars from the customer, anyway? After all, they charge you to put your bag in the hold, but they don’t charge for the overhead space, which is scarce and convenient, as Steven Cherry pointed out. Isn’t that where you can make the most profit?)

That’s why getting on and off a plane is now an arduous task. I have seen short, old people nearly crushed when some clod yanks his 40-pound bag out of the overhead above them. I’ve seen people with oversized duffel bags on their shoulders turn abruptly in the aisle and drill fellow passengers behind them. I’ve seen children bashed upside the head with the handles of rolling suitcases (because you just have to use the handles, even on the 40-foot journey from your seat to the door). But airlines should take note of this unintended carnage and try to figure out how to keep the last memory of the customer’s interaction with them from being a blow to the head or a flattened foot. That means sticking more stuff in the baggage compartment.

But consistency is important. If an airline realizes how important the customer experience is and changes its baggage policy, it can’t be done by imposing a penalty on customers for having carry-on baggage. It has to be something consistent with expectations while also improving the experience – a gentle move toward checked bags, not a demand of the customers to behave differently because the airline wants them to.

I have to think this is part of why Southwest scores highly in terms of customer experience – there are always plenty of carry-on bags in their cabins, but no one’s compelled to stuff two weeks of clothing in their carry-ons, making things a little less chaotic at the end of a flight.

And airlines don’t always disregard the customer experience. Just today I spotted a Tweet with this photo – apparently, Jet Blue had Chris Isaak play live at its terminal in New York, which is just a great idea for the holidays. I bet the passengers who were there are much more likely to talk about this little enhancement to their experience than they will about any luggage hassle they encounter.

The end result should be about making your airline – or whatever kind of business you run – a better experience for your customers than your competitiors. Making your policies more customer friendly is one way; offering little bonuses like entertainment during crowded and potentially frustrating times of the year is another. In all cases, think about the customer’s experience, not your accountant’s.

By Chris Bucholtz

There’s a term that has been stuck to me at times that makes me cringe, although it probably also helps me get paid better. The term is “thought leader.” That sounds as if people reading my stuff have thoughts that can be led, like I’m some kind of intellectual and metaphorical dog walker and y’all’s brains are on the leashes. “Thought leader” makes me think of something out of “Village of the Damned.” I assure you that I am not, in fact, a small telepathic British child with glow-in-the-dark eyeballs.

And yet the term is prevalent in technology. Ick. I prefer “influencer,” because I like to think that people sharing ideas can and do influence others. There are a mess of CRM influencers out there (often branded as “thought leaders”) who have contributed a lot over the last decade toward making CRM more successful, more universal and more accepted as they way businesses manage customer relationships. (I’ll call some of them out in our year-end list of the top 20 CRM blogs of 2012, which is coming soon.)

Today, Michael Brito wrote a blog post called “New Thought Leadership is Needed for Social CRM.” Not only does it perpetuate “thought leaders” as a phrase, it makes a serious error in its urgent pleas for the next wave of ideas about social CRM (SCRM).

To make it short, Michael says that the “thought leaders” (ugh!) of the last few years have stopped offering new ideas. They’re cheerleading for their past ideas rather than contributing innovative thinking, and thus it’s time for a new group of innovative thinkers to come on the scene.

The world can always use more innovative thinkers. But to say that the influencers in SCRM need to be replaced is a bit silly. Here’s why.

SCRM is not a wholly-new discipline. It’s built on the foundation of CRM, which took almost two decades to turn into what it is today – a reliable and in many cases undeniable necessity for maximizing the productivity of the sales, marketing and customer support force. SCRM takes advantage of the social media revolution and provides a new series of channels of communication between the business and the customer – but data still has to go somewhere to be stored, sorted and distributed, and that somewhere is the CRM system. Suggesting that you can have SCRM without the CRM foundation is like saying you’re going to have a hybrid car without the drive train and chassis – in both cases, you aren’t going to get far. To bridge the CRM-to-SCRM chasm, you’d better know CRM.

Those pundits who aren’t vaulting far enough into the future for Michael’s tastes know that. SCRM is an enormous jump for businesses – especially those whose CRM operations weren’t up to snuff before the social media revolution was upon them. The percentage of actual customers using CRM as a share of the number of potential users is amazing – internal noodling here suggests only about 15 percent worldwide – meaning that there are a lot of people who need to learn a lot, starting with the basics. “The basics” have changed with social media’s arrival, but there are still basics that need to be learned.

What we face is a phenomena I dubbed “the slow revolution” back in April of this year. That’s a situation where social media is causing thinking to race ahead, and technology is almost keeping pace – but the organizational ability to absorb, understand and react to these changes is significantly slower. Thus, when there are revolutionary breakthroughs in thinking, the pundit class can sprint ahead, but the people charged with implementing these new ideas trudge through the task at a much slower speed simply because it takes longer to “do” change than it does to talk about it.

What Michael really expresses in his blog post is a desire for more “how to” from the influencer class and less “what to do” – but he’s never going to get that. The people who are figuring out how to do things in SCRM are not pundits but business people. They are figuring out very specific things about their businesses and how SCRM fits into their unique customer audiences and internal practices. These are real and genuine competitive advantages, and as you’d expect, many people who are succeeding with SCRM are not eager to share that with their competitors.

There are case studies out there, however, that point at the ways SCRM succeeds. Again, they aren’t written by the pundits, who speak to broad cross-sections of business, but by the businesses themselves (or, in a case like this one, by the vendor and the implementation partner). The thinkers think (and blog), while the doers do (and use what they’ve done to run their business). It’s all about what you get paid to do.

Those businesses who are choosing to be “doers” in SCRM have a lot of work ahead of them. So do the latecomers to “traditional” CRM – and the distance between the beginners and the cutting-edge practitioners gets greater every day. That’s why I have no problem with influencers looking perhaps not five years out for the next revolution but maybe one year out to see how the revolution we’re in plays out, or even looking over their shoulders to help slower businesses catch up.

Suggesting the current crop of thinkers should step aside for a new generation of thinkers assumes that there’s a new generation ready to take over. A new generation will assert itself – individually, over time, and as business, customers and technology evolve. In the meantime, pay attention to the people whose advice has gotten you this far, and realize that putting ideas into action takes much longer and demands more patience than explaining those ideas in the first place.

By Chris Bucholtz

One of the things social media allows us to see clearly and instantly is that some people don’t get social media. I see this every day in the CRM Outsiders Twitter feed (we’re @CRMOutsiders, by the way). Many of the people following us and being followed by us pre-date my arrival, including one gentleman who hails from the south Florida area.

I’m not going to call him out by name, but his handle is important. He’s an exec at his company, so when he signed up, he used the name and the company as his handle. If he were me, he’d be @ChrisSugarCRM.

There’s no secret what company he works for, and yet I’ve never seen a post about the company. However, being that we are a continent and four time zones apart, prime time for him is still work time for me. Thus, I have seen lots of commentary on sports, most of it spouting obscenities like a Tourette’s syndrome-afflicted merchant marine with a bad case of the Mondays.

During the NBA playoffs, there were allegations made about Dirk Nowitzki’s mother that would make a hardened veterinarian blush. Dolphins football brings a profane and homophobic running commentary. Even the Florida Marlins, as self-evidently awful as they are, were the subject of an assortment of posts that featured proctological references to batting helmets, challenges to their sexual identities and one reference to Hanley Ramirez resembling an, ahem, lower simian attempting to have romantic relations with a football.

At first these Tweets offended me, but they are so over the top they started top become funny. It’s also not often you get such a great example of what not to do with social media: identify yourself with your business, and then act like an absolute boor.

However, he’s still plugging away, his business still exists, and he’s obviously outlasted any social media manager the company may have had. His Twitter persona is different from his real-life persona – it’s got to be, otherwise he’d be busy flogging his resume in search of a new company he could utterly embarrass on Twitter.

Personas are an interesting thing, especially in the social media realm. The person we portray ourselves as in Tweets is different than the person portrayed in LinkedIn, or Facebook or wherever you may be, and that persona is different than the one you have in person. If you’ve ever read an angry screed on some social media site written by someone you know to be a bashful nebbish in real life, you can grasp this phenomenon.

From a CRM point of view, this raises some interesting questions, like this one: Should you create a different social profile for people based on the personas they adopt in different social media settings? How do you manage your interactions with all these personas? And how do you identify the personas that are most lucrative for you to foster relationships with?

I wrote about this idea a long time ago - so long ago I refer to CRM 2.0, rather than social CRM. The idea is still a bit out there (and immersive role-playing environments like Second Life seem to be fading in popularity, not threatening to subvert real-life reality, dimming the idea of personas a bit), but it does make sense to shift your business’s efforts to the channels where people are more likely to buy. If discerning between their personas helps with that, perhaps it’s something to track, even if it’s only to vary the way you respond to conversations in different venues.

At the same time, it’s important to keep track of the personas that represent your company. The same person who’s a respectful, articulate gentleman on the corporate Twitter account might be an out-of-control wild man on a developer’s forum or vertically-oriented site. Let everyone in the company know that there’s an image you need to project when you’re associated with the company – as in, when your handle or user name is identified with the company – and that, while you don’t want to deny their personalities, you also need for them to realize they’re representing the entire company. If what you’re communicating on social media wouldn’t be appropriate in front of customers in the office, it’s not appropriate in front of customers in social media – as in, potentially thousands of customers or could-be customers.

By Chris Bucholtz

Let’s face it – most people have but a passing notion about the cloud. That’s thanks to marketing people, mostly, and their nearly pathological need to take today’s hot buzzword and attach it to whatever it is they’re selling.

This is not exclusive to technology; five years ago, the real-world analog was the word “extreme,” which started out as a prefix for things like snowboarding, base jumping and street luge. Soon, we had extreme soft drinks, extreme down pillows and extreme pencil erasers.

The difference here is that “extreme” has no real definition in this context, but “the cloud” does. Even so, thanks to marketing mammoths like Microsoft, Salesforce, Oracle and others, the term “the cloud” has been slapped on many non-cloudy things to the point where the average SMB user – ostensibly, the fellow who could benefit most profoundly from cloud computing – is at a loss as to what it actually is.

I liken the cloud marketing tragedy to the metaphor of the blind men feeling the elephant – each describes an animal very different from what’s really in front of him based on the unique body part he’s feeling – trunk, tusks, tail, feet and so on. In this case, however, the companies doing the feeling can see just fine, but they choose to describe the cloud based on the one aspect that they are “feeling” – and usually, it’s the part of the cloud that makes them money. Some companies contend the software’s the cloud, others say the hardware’s the cloud, still others look at the services that ties things together as the cloud.

None of them are “the cloud” by themselves. Some aren’t cloud at all (I’m looking at you, ad agency who threw together Microsoft’s TV commercials). Some are cloud-like, but are really traditional distributed SaaS vendors. We’re planning to help define for users what the cloud – and especially the public cloud – really is, and what a modern cloud-based application looks at. To do that, we’re enlisting a lot of our friends among the expert community, starting with Esteban Kolsky. And, we’re enlisting you.

To get the ball rolling, and to set a baseline for our understanding of the cloud in a CRM context, we’re polling our readers to see where their understanding of the cloud is, and to get their takes on some cloud-related issues of business value and perception. It’s just nine questions long, and once you’ve completed you’ll be among the first people to see the new white paper on the cloud by Esteban. To take the survey, go here;  I’d appreciate it if you could click the boxes and help us understand how well the cloud is understood.

One of the key features of this survey is that we’re asking users, pundits and deployment partners the same questions. I suspect that there will be some questions where the different groups will give very different answers – those areas of divergence represent opportunities to further educate CRM users about the cloud.

It’s an exciting opportunity – and one that should have been seized upon long ago. I’m still looking at you, Microsoft’s ad agency.

By Chris Bucholtz

Yesterday, Nucleus Research issued a paper (read it for yourself here) that made a fairly encouraging claim: for every dollar spent on CRM, companies were seeing a return of $5.60 in benefits.

That’s a very interesting number, although it’s a number in an area of research that can be very hard to gauge correctly. Companies that make immense investments in CRM and then squander it through poor planning, shifting goals and adoption failures and unlikely to talk about it much, for career security reasons.

The sample group of 70 companies included businesses that had worked on case studies with Nucleus Research; “the ROI they saw varied from a few percentage points to triple digits,” said Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of research at Nucleus. “We saw there was a lot of opportunity and variability in the results.”

The study suggested several possible reasons for the $5.60 number. The cost of deploying CRM in the era of SaaS has driven down costs; the emphasis has moved away from simple automation and toward worker productivity; and CRM is being used by more people within the organization, who can take advantage of the ability to “push” data to them as needed.

Those are three important reasons, but I think there’s one reason that’s omitted, and it’s inherent in this study. Rebecca says the people in the case studies “sit down with us wanting help with streamlining processes, improving what they already have, and understanding what they’ve already achieved.” That kind of information is great in making the case for CRM internally, she said, which helps keep momentum for CRM efforts going. Then, “they want to track ROI going forward.”

This may be the hidden lesson in this study. The $5.60 number is interesting, but what’s more interesting is that the businesses who reap this reward are the ones who remain engaged with their CRM initiatives throughout the entire cycle – they plan, implement, and deploy, but then they keep evaluating what they’re doing through activities like talking to outside agencies like Nucleus Research. And they make changes accordingly.

These are not businesses that viewed CRM as an IT project, or a fire-and-forget point solution. They understand it to be an ongoing process, and one that at times can benefit from the perspective of outsiders. If you’re willing to make that investment in energy, attention and money, you’re far more likely to get the ROI you’re hoping for.

And, said Rebecca, in a number of cases the businesses examined had initially deployed CRM in pilot projects within small groups in the organization to understand how processes worked and how to best employ CRM. Businesses that lay the groundwork this way (and which have the resources to do so) are more likely to find success and a positive ROI.

That’s not intended to devalue what Nucleus has done – studies like this are exceptionally useful, and the next such survey’s likely to be even more helpful and enlightening now that a baseline has been set. This was the first such survey of Nucleus’ customers, and Rebecca said she “strongly suspects we’ll continue this in the future.” That’s a great idea, especially since many of those examined were experiencing growth as they introduced new iterations of CRM technology. Tracking how these companies benefitted from lessons learned would be very interesting indeed.

In the meantime, just having a number to throw out there as an ROI average – even qualified as an ROI average for companies who are actively engaged in ongoing CRM strategic planning – is a great place to start. “You might see CIOs ask, will a CRM investment pass the $5.60 test,” postulated Rebecca. “If it doesn’t look like it will, it might be best to re-work the project timeline.” Will that go-no go number go up or down with time? Only another study will tell.

By Chris Bucholtz

The auto repair industry can’t boast a history of great customer relationships. Part of it is customer-based – no one’s really in a great mood when their car breaks, and it’s hard to deliver a great customer experience when the customer’s in the midst of a bad experience. But a lot of it is because of the auto repair industry’s own issues – bogus repairs, misleading estimates and the general attitude that customers are ignorant about their own cars can lead to an adversarial relationship between customers and repair shops.

Larry Bloodworth is dedicated to making sure that’s never the case with his shop, Certified Transmissions in Draper, Utah. He has some things going for him; perhaps most importantly, he loves fixing transmissions. He started doing it as a hobby, and 37 years ago he went into business.

He’s also a huge student of the concept of the customer experience. I first got to know him through a discussion of “The Experience Economy” by Pine and Gilmore – how many auto repair shop owners can discuss that book?

Taking the concepts in the book to heart, Larry created a customer experience around getting your transmission repaired – which, he admits, does not usually start as a good experience. He says, in the past, the customer’s initial reaction was akin to someone engaging a funeral home. “No kidding – there are amazing parallels in the (customer’s) demeanor, sales psychographics, sales cycle,” he says. “Nobody is happy when they walk into a typical transmission shop.”

So, Larry says, that meant the first step was to avoid being the typical transmission shop.

“We moved to our current location for, among other reasons, to change not only the customer’s experience, but our work environment as well,” he says. “We used to have the typical shop front office that was cluttered, out of date, and parts laying around. Less than optimal, to say the least.  Now, everything the customer sees, touches, hears, and even smells, are all small parts of our overall marketing plan, which centers around the customer’s experience.  If we are putting ourselves out to the public as being the best choice, everything has to match.”

The office, Larry says, used to be “DOA.” Not any more. Instead, he’s turned it into a gearhead’s classroom, with displays on how the transmission works and what can go wrong. “We call it ‘edutainment,’” he says. The experience goes from one of dread to one where the customer learns something.

But it doesn’t stop there. After the car goes into the garage and the customer goes home, the experience continues. During the repair process, the staff shoots short videos about each repair, showing damage or worn parts and the repairs the shop is making. The videos are e-mailed to the customers, continuing the education process and also helping to foster a sense of transparency and trust. “We can have the world’s best online marketing, a remarkable CRM system, and all the bells and whistles in the world, but it all boils down to trust.  We have found through the simple elementary school exercise of what we call our ‘Show-N-Tell,’ virtually all fear and uncertainty disappear.”

None of this happens by accident. The business’s processes are well planned. For example, the shop takes customers by appointment, because the chief cause of delays in calling customers with updates on their repairs is interruptions from walk-in customers.

“Having a system in place is critical to customer satisfaction,” says Larry. “The more thought-out and automated, and less dependent on somebody remembering what to do to give the customer a ‘wow’ experience, the better.  That’s hard to pull off in any custom made-to-order service business.”

That was where Certified Transmissions’ CRM application (which just happens to be SugarCRM – although I learned this only after starting to write this post) proved helpful. “We knew nobody does business like us and so there’s no way to buy an (out of the box) system to fit our business.  I knew we had to buy something as close as possible to what we wanted, then had the flexibility to hire people cost-effectively to mold the software around the way we do business, not the other way around. It’s mass customization for a local service-oriented business.”

Developing a strategy boiled down to charting the customer’s journey through an interaction with Larry and his team. “It started as a hand-drawn flow chart that I eventually had a contractor on Odesk convert into a Vizio flowchart,” he says. “It’s extremely hard to put into writing, but rather easy to draw the flowchart for the first time once I had the time to focus.  I had been a one-man customer service department for most of my career and there was never a need to teach anybody or put it down in writing. When I realized I had to train others to do what I took for granted, I realized how hard it really was to teach, and drawing a flowchart seemed easier than trying to describe it in actual words. Additionally, as I later discovered, a flowchart is easier to teach.”

The impact has been better business, and a relationship with customers that’s more rewarding for both sides. “Our image now is that of a new car dealership.  We look so professional, we quite often get asked if we are a franchise,” says Larry. “That’s a compliment.”

For a peek at Certified Transmissions’ operations, take a peek at the Larry’s YouTube channel. Then ask yourself: if a company in as customer-unfriendly a business as auto repair can do this, why can’t your business?

By Chris Bucholtz

A few years ago, I did a webinar with some respected thought leaders in the area of sales about the impact data was having on selling. No one was willing to use the term “data-driven selling” – that was too much for sales people’s sensibilities. But the guests were willing and able to admit that the new way of selling revolved around relationships and the only way to increase sales productivity while at the same time building stronger relationships was to rely on data – and, more specifically, rely on data that was organized and ready to use.

Fast forward to the deja vu I experienced in August this year, when I had a chance to moderate another webinar, this time with Tony Hughes, SugarCRM’s country manager for Australia and New Zealand. Tony’s an author – he’s written a couple of books on selling topics, including the well-reviewed the Joshua Principle: Leadership Secrets of RSVPselling. Tony is all about the relationship in sales and so it was no surprise to hear Tony say that the key to selling still resides in the sales person and the need to establish trust and value in the prospect’s mind.

But, with my CRM hat still perched atop my head, my mind keeps drifting back to the data. The information you know about a customer is the secret weapon that helps you build rapport and leapfrog ahead of your competition (who are also desperate to gain that relationship advantage). Sales departments are really in a data arms race, based not around who has spent the most but around who has spent the best on technology to arm their sales staff with that precious data.

But it’s not just about the technology and the data. As my other writing specialty has demonstrated, it’s not the plane but the pilot who wins the fight – selling skill plays a major role. The sales person is still the make-or-break variable in the sales equation. Tony made that point eminently clear in tracing how sales has evolved into what it is today. The relationship and the sales person’s need to cultivate it is one of the few constants.

Before the webinar, Tony wrote up his thoughts in a white paper that we were proud to publish under the CRM Outsiders banner. It’s called “The Evolution of Professional Selling;” you can get a copy of it here and, once you’ve downloaded it, you can participate in our brief survey to determine just how exactly sales pros are selling today. Not only will your participation be helpful (we’ll publish the results, so you can get a feel for where you are along the evolutionary curve) but the first 200 to take the survey will get a copy of Tony’s book in the quickly-becoming-quaint print format.

Selling will always be more an art than a science, but it’s a poor artist who doesn’t take advantage of the science around him to create better art. Check out Tony’s white paper (and webinar, and book while you’re at it) to see how neatly technology and sales talent can dovetail together.