The Evolution of Customer Community

Community: a group of people sharing common characteristics, common history or common social, economic, or political interests, often located in close physical proximity to other members; interactions are usually face-to-face. 1

Online Community: Same as above, with two big caveats, the proximity is virtual and interactions are digital. The small caveat is that online the commonality among members might not be as significant, but are just as real (like shared product, service or technical interest).

It is not New, but it is Different

What should be evident is that the idea of a community is not a new concept. What is new, however, is the transition from physical proximity to virtual proximity. In the purest of context, virtual communities began about as quickly as the Internet itself, predating the Web or fancy graphical interfaces. Virtual communities progressed from bulletin boards to forums and now we have something even better. What we have now are enhanced graphical capabilities and multiple device support; the user experience is better. One problem remains; integrating communities with the rest of the business. Too often, communities are sets of isolated conversations lost in the vastness of the web.

           Communities should be used to bridge the gap from social media conversation to digital interactions with a purpose? Today many organization are trying to figure out how to leverage social conversations and these new connections to deliver a better customer experience. Customer communities are great way to accomplish this goal. As much as we would like to do it, taking  the online conversations people are having about your company in Facebook and Twitter and dumping them into a CRM system just does not provide a whole lot of value. As you have learned with forums, your customers really do want to connect with you and while the basics have not changed, customers expect more as does your business.

But. In order to really leverage the benefits from social, you have to bring together people, processes, and technology necessary to listen, guide, and engage your customers in the digital world. That means paying attention, understanding who your customers are, and providing them with relevant information for the appropriate stage in the customer lifecycle. In that way, you can truly leverage the capabilities of social media to deliver the kinds of customer experiences that will keep them bringing their business back again and again.

Communities provide a smart way to build engagement in a way that provides your customers with navigable issue resolution, as well as to provide feedback and insights to you and your team.

A customer community allows you to collect and analyze data, derive insights about your customers that will then allow you to provide them with relevant, appropriate information at key points along the journey. Today’s forums, or customer communities, can be strongly linked to social networks in order to maximize insight, streamline campaigns, and drive organizational shift to bring your company into the social age. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

(This post is written as we announce our recent work in building a bridge between SugarCRM and Get Satisfaction)

The Next Chapter Begins

Every once in a while you meet a person, or a group of people who have an idea or an approach that just causes a subconscious head-nod. As you watch and observe, they carry themselves with confidence, approach work and life with energy and passion.  Problems are analyzed, dissected, solutions designed and then the real work begins. This is DRI: a team, group of people a family really, with a big heart, big ideas, more importantly, the ability and know-how to execute.

I could introduce the cast of characters, professionals, humans, friends and peers. That, however, would be self-serving and will happen organically over time. Members of the team cut their teeth in the open source ecosystem, but there is more (much more) to it than that. The shared passion is problem solving, affection for technology and innovation; creative ways to solve the hard problems. Providing value at each stage, to every client, every day is critical. The focus moves beyond what needs to be done and why, to how to execute the vision. It is about goals, objectives, experience, strategy and our customer’s, customers.

What Part Will I Play

I will be building and leading the US team. I will do my best not to break what is already working. I am not here to change anything; I am here to show the US market what we can do. The work was started in Portugal and we realized this is only the beginning. DRI is now a Global organization; DRI Global. I am part of a team, we live, learn, share and collaborate. The countries served now number 5 and it will grow beyond, carefully, measured, with caution and a deliberate approach. We are small, execute with precision and make decisions quickly.

To put a label on what we do is important, but I do so with caution.  It will include solutions labeled CEM, CRM, SFA and CMS. Further, it would be great to simply add prefixes like Social, Mobile and a suffix or two like Platform and Intelligence. Sorry that it feels like buzzword bingo; something I am trying very hard to avoid. What if the approach was bottom up; design and build a platform that solved for the specific goals and objectives required by a business? What if the focus was helping businesses to understand what jobs their customers want to do with their products and how technology can help?

We are not going to build everything from scratch, quite the opposite really. We will build on top of solid products, supported by great companies like SugarCRM, IBM, Acquia, Knime and Talend, just to name a few. In the world where outcome driven innovation is the powerful model moving forward, it is the space between the applications that is the hard part. The space between engineering and support, the space between sales and marketing or the space between the organization and the customer, these are the challenges. You may know this space by other names; social CRM, collaboration, workflow, integration or business process.

I am looking forward to this chapter with excitement – feel free to give me a call, send me a note or reach out on your favorite social network to see how we can help! Yes, we are hiring. (If you made it this far, here is the press release)

Mitch Lieberman – Managing Partner DRI US

Is it all just too easy?

I was fortunate this past week to be able to attend a Cloud conference put on by the 451 Group, down in Boston. While I have fine tuned my focus during the past year, less on the infrastructure side, and more on the business application side, this was time well spent. I believe that from a maturation – ability to offer measurable business value – perspective, Cloud, Open Source, Social and Enterprise 2.0 are growing up together.  Sometimes they act more like siblings during a long car ride, suffering from “Are we there yet” and “Look at me, look at me”.

Even given my slightly different focus, I do try to stay true to the brief description I have on Twitter, “I am passionate about the intersection of people, process and technology”. Luckily, SugarCRM, where I currently hang my hat, sits right in the middle of that that triple witching point:

• People/Ecosystem – Customers, Employees and Partners,
• Process – Who speaks, When they say,  How to engage, What channel,
• Technology – Open Source, Clouds, SaaS, Social (Yes, Social is technology)

Just because you can, does it mean you should?

Ok, now to the point – my theory is that the technology has made it is just too easy to do make bad choices – a crazy, maybe, silly statement, but tell me I am wrong – I dare you. There is a place and a time for the Nike moment – “Just do it” and then there is the ‘take time and think about what you are about to do’. What is the correct balance? Just because you can, does it mean you should? Some are probably saying that about this blog at the moment.

Back in the day (sorry, I love that phrase, my 18yo pulls it on me all the time), when you wanted to get something done, you had to do the ole ‘budget justification’, think through it, present to senior team members – Yes, ask for money, too! Part of this was also a required “Check with IT, I am not sure what you want to do is part of the standard”. This last one was especially hard for the Open Source applications.  Combine a pent up demand, economic pressures, getting tired of the perception of IT blocking progress with SaaS, Cloud and Online Social Media channels – and it is a perfect storm and excuse to just IGNORE the IT dept.

So, before anyone beats me up too much, this is not what I am suggesting, just saying what happens, what I have seen happen and the end result. I have seen many companies take the route of using SaaS – Take a Look at Phil Wainewright’s Blog He talks to Conformity – An interesting company who has the business model to help clean up this mess, but I am not going to deep here, just a reference to justify this post.

My key point is that it all just to dam easy. The ease of spending $20 to get a server in the cloud – yes, I said $20, standing up a system, setting up a blog, putting together a YouTube account, FaceBook group, Newsletter, Forums, Chat, Twitter. Awesome, let’s hope all the choices are successful, lots of people, lots of prospects, lots of eyeballs – Maybe some customers too. That would be great, right? Way too many times, I have heard the statement – “Hey that would be a great problem to have” – Really? Unless of course it is your problem to solve. Remember, once you are on a channel it is much harder to leave.

I do have to ‘tip-toe’ a bit, after all I do work for SugarCRM. A company that does make it very easy to get started, and take advantage of a structured CRM application. I am all for making things easy, but job one is success!  I also believe this is much more prevalent with respect to Social Media applications – too many people saying “Just do it”.  Is anything really free, no, as people and time are the most expensive part of running a business.

I am suggesting that a little bit of planning – just a little – is time well spent – Just sayin’