Leveraging Web 2.0 to Improve Collaboration With and Among Customers

The SSPA Research ‘topic of the month’ for November was web collaboration, and when I surveyed members to see what they wanted me to write about I expected Web chat to be the top vote getter, but turned out “Leveraging Web 2.0 to Improve Collaboration With and Among Customers” was the most popular choice. I just published a report on this topic, and thought since it was a Web 2.0 topic I should recap a truncated version here.

With many companies launching ‘voice of the customer’ initiatives, input from customers is becoming more sought after than ever before. As support organization push towards Value-Added Support, direct input from customers is critical to delivering service offerings and products that not only fit customer needs, but help deliver more business value and better enable customer success. But capturing customer feedback isn’t always easy, and relying on surveys as the only mechanism to gather input will soon exhaust the patience of some customers. Finding new ways to collaborate with customers, and encourage peer-to-peer customer collaboration, is a good strategy to collect the necessary input, as well as build stronger relationships with customers overall.

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What’s cool in the RightNow November ’07 release: knowledge syndication widget

RightNow Technologies announced their latest version this week, RightNow November ’07 (also debuting their new naming strategy for quarterly releases).  The release, which went GA last week and had been in beta for a while–there were customer testimonials at their August customer summit–has three significant additions:  expanded language support, a redesigned customer portal, and a very cool knowledge syndication widget.

IBM’s acquistion of Cognos is good news for niche BI vendors

Boy, it sure is a good time to own stock in providers of business intelligence/analytics software.  Talk about mega-trends.  As SSPA members have been very vocal about, companies have spent 10 years creating huge data stores of customer information, but can’t leverage it to do anything.  The big enterprise application vendors recognized this and began acquiring standalone BI vendors to bring a needed dose of business intelligence to their transaction-heavy application suites.

Let’s look at some of the major acquisitions along the way:

Meeting the needs of new customers doesn’t mean abandoning your old ones

I’m always on the lookout for things that happen in my daily life that have applicability to service and support, and there’s an idea that has been occurring to me every morning when I read the paper and today I decided to bring that idea to you.  As much as I have written about evolving support operations to meet the requirements of new customers, such as embracing customer forums and non-phone channels, this doesn’t mean abandoning the support processes that your existing customers have come to expect.  In other words, doing new things doesn’t mean you have to abandon everything that has worked in the past.  If you do, you run the risk of alienating your existing customer base and giving them reason to churn.