Countdown to TSW: Partner Advisory Board Meeting

Tomorrow TSIA’s Technology Services World Conference in Las Vegas at the Mirage kicks off with my Innovation Tour of the Recognized Innovator Finalists at 12:45.  Today we are heads down in final preparation, and we also held our very first in-person meeting of the newly formed Partner Advisory Board (PAB). Lydia Zaffini, our senior director of partner programs, and I chair the PAB, which consists of senior executives from Astea International, Compuware Corporation, Pretium Partners, Consona CRM, RTM Consulting, Convergys, ServiceMax, Coveo, ServiceSource, DG Associates, Sykes Enterprises, IGLOO Software Inc., Verint Systems Inc., and ISOdx Solutions LLC.

I opened the meeting with a discussion of major trends for 2012, including the impacts of Consumption Economics on technology buyers, pending 2012 budget cuts and of course, my favorite topic of the moment, mobile and video (more on that in my blog tomorrow!). We also had a presentation from Julia Stegman, our new research vice president for the brand new discipline being launched at this conference, Service Revenue Generation (SRG), on service revenue trends.  Diane Brundage, our senior vice president of sales, and the executive sponsor of the PAB, led the group in a very interaction session on building better relationships between TSIA members and partners.

Cindy McCombe, TSIA’s director of marketing, gave a very informative session on marketing plans, including the new world of marketing via social media. It was great to hear input from the partners on which social media channels (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter) each of them is using, some with great success, some not so much. Webcasts and white papers continue to be effective ways to reach people, but both are changing. Some partners are having good results with shorter webcasts (bite size chunks packed with content as opposed to a one hour presentation) and ebooks (electronic content perfect for smartphone and table consumption as opposed to traditional PDFs of reports).

I’d like to give a personal Thank You to all the partner advisory board members for giving up part of their weekend to attend the meeting, as well as a big Thank You to the TSIA team members who made time to attend the meeting and make presentations.

I’ll be back tomorrow with updates from Day 1 of TSW! Hope to see you there!

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Intelligent Search Market Overview Launches March 29th

My latest research opus, a Market Overview of Intelligent Search, is about to see the light of day. I kicked off this project last fall and thought it would be a 2 month project.  7 months later, I’m finally delivering the report. What took so long?  Good question.

It turns out that navigating the vendor landscape for search tools was even more complicated than I thought. A full third of my TSIA member inquiry volume last year related to search technology, and short lists of vendors began to include both knowledgebase and self-service search experts AND enterprise search specialists. As I started digging, these two worlds are also merging with an emerging search market: social search.

Merging Markets Create Intelligent Search

I started by surveying a dozen search vendors that spanned these three markets to find out what was “bleeding edge” in their world, and I compiled a list of the 20 most innovative selection criteria for search, spread across several categories such as displaying search results, content maintenance, integration, scalability, deployment model, and product breadth. Next, I had each vendor fill out a form indicating which of these 20 features they offered, along with details on prepackaged integrations and scalability. The following search vendors/TSIA partners participated in the study: Attensity, Baynote, Clarabridge, Consona CRM, Coveo, InQuira, KANA, nGenera CIM, Q-go, and RightNow.

The report, which addresses search needs of technical support, professional services and field service operations, goes live to all TSIA corporate members on Monday, March 29th. This Thursday I am doing a members only webcast to preview my findings, which includes the matrix of features by vendor. To register for the webcast or for more information, TSIA members should access the link for their service discipline:

• Support Services Registration: http://www.thesspa.com/webcasts/index.asp#intelligentsearch
• Professional Services Registration: http://www.tpsaonline.com/webcasts.asp#intelligentsearch
• Field Services Registration: http://www.afsmi.com/events/webcasts.asp#intelligentsearch

In my 2009 Member Technology Survey, intelligent search was one of the bright spots, with high planned spending. For companies launching a search for search, this report will help you create the RFP by understanding what really differentiates products today.

I look forward to seeing you on Thursday’s webcast, and thanks for reading!

CRM’s Last Gasp: Why Service and Support is CRM’s Last Chance for Success

If I were asked for a list of things I wanted to believe in, but had to admit were pure fantasy, the top three would be Santa Claus, world peace, and the “360 degree view of the customer.” Over the years I have heard a million presentations tout the promise of CRM, including a lot of abstract concepts about improving the customer experience that simply don’t jive with most company’s CRM reality. When SSPA, TPSA and AFSMI members talk about CRM, there is usually a bit of contempt in their voice, and in most cases CRM is something IT selected–and to some degree shoved down their throats–with little or no business user input.

We all know that CRM covers the disciplines of marketing, sales and service, but a dozen years into the CRM revolution, there remain few examples of cross-enterprise CRM implementations. Sales, and SFA (sales force automation), was the first priority for many companies when it came to CRM, and this SFA focus drove success for Siebel, Salesforce.com and other SFA-centric CRM vendors. Marketing has certainly had its CRM time in the sun, with CRM vendors buying analytic platforms and data warehouses in the last 2 years to better enable demographic analysis and accurate upsell/cross-sell. But what about service?

If anyone can understand the value of the 360 degree view, it is the service and support organization, with goals and incentives largely built not around revenue and profitability, but customer satisfaction. Support has a vested interest in understanding the 360 degree view of the customer–it helps them diagnose and resolve problems much faster if they have the whole universe of the customer (products purchased, implementation dates, versions, patches downloaded, self-service attempts, service history, etc.) at their disposal.

These thoughts had been bouncing around in my head for a while, but they became top of mind after a recent conversation with Michael Tarbet, Vice President of Americas Sales for Consona CRM. We were talking about Consona’s acquisition of the SupportSoft assets (including remote support and self-healing), and how adding this technology to the Consona CRM suite, which includes full CRM capabilities from Onyx, and best-of-breed knowledgebase, search and community tools from Knova; created the industries first truly “service centric” CRM suite.  In fact, in my recent Web Collaboration market overview (“Ten Distinct Modules Comprise this Popular Support Technology“), Consona CRM was one of only two vendors (the other was Alcatel-Lucent’s Genesys) to offer all ten functional modules.

With the majority of legacy CRM implementations becoming more infrastructure than applications, companies look to their existing CRM system for basic incident tracking and entitlement/service contracts. But not much else.  It is exciting to think about implementing a service-centric CRM suite that includes best-of-breed tools for all areas of service and multi-channel support, including value added service tools like proactive monitoring and remote fixes. I’m pleased to see a CRM vendor put a lot of effort into improving the service side of their suites…which have gone largely unchanged since the first Web-based UIs were introduced in 2001 or so. And I’m also happy to see a CRM vendor specifically investing in tools for high tech firms, since the telco and financial services industries have received the bulk of CRM vendor attention for the last decade.

I look forward to Consona CRM’s roadmap becoming a reality as the latest acquisitions are merged into the enterprise platform. Can a service-centric CRM suite change the minds of technology buyers to invest in CRM once again? Will support take the lead and create the 360 degree view so it finally goes from fantasy to reality? My fingers are crossed.

Thanks for reading!

Consona Starts Consolidation Between CRM and Remote Support with SupportSoft Asset Purchase

Over the last 2 years I have made recommendations to many multi-channel service vendors that they consider partnering or acquiring some remote support technology.  To me, it makes perfect sense.  Today’s remote support tools allow access to a wide array of operating systems and devices, including Mac, Linux, unattended servers (creating a market for B2B remote support), mobile devices, the list goes on and on.  And, as the home office and home theatre begin merging, remote support tools will be able to diagnose and resolve all sorts of consumer issues.

So I was thrilled to see the announcment on Monday that Consona had acquired the remote support software assets from SupportSoft.  SupportSoft was an early leader in remote support, with innovative capabilities far beyond remote control:  diagnostics, self-healing scripts, etc.  In fact, I did a case study on SupportSoft’s success at BellSouth back in 2002.  In the last couple of years, SupportSoft reinvented itself as Support.com, a 3rd party support desk for consumers and SMBs, and no longer wanted to be in the enterprise software business.

Remote support technology is primarily used by the communications, consumer hardware and software, and IT support industries.  But, as platforms expand and new device and OS support is added, the business case for remote support expands.  As an example, I read last week that another remote support vendor, LogMeIn, had signed a deal with Ford to include LogMeIn’s remote access feature in a new dashboard control allowing owners of Ford F-150, Super Duty, E-Series and Transit Connect trucks and vans to access applications and files on any interent connected computer. This technology will soon be a basic part of our daily lives.

I’ve done a lot of webcasts about remote support, and one thing I’ve found is that the ROI for remote support is much higher when the tool is deeply integrated with the support architecture.  Here’s a graphic from one of those webcasts: