Social CRM

According to Forrest research, global spending on Enterprise Web 2.0 will be 4,646 million dollars by year 2013 (Global Enterprise Web 2.0 Spending Forecast by G. Oliver Young, June 23, 2008). Many companies are jumping on the Enterprise 2.0 bandwagon and hoping to become the next MySpace or Facebook in the enterprise space. Buzzes about Enterprise 2.0 have been around since the introduction of Web 2.0. However, according to McKinsey surveys on the business use of Web 2.0 technologies, only 21% of respondents are satisfied with the Enterprise Web 2.0 tools.

How can you make sure your Enterprise 2.0 application or tools will be well accepted and adopted by your end users? By looking at some successful Enterprise 2.0 applications now in the market, I think there are three things they do really well:

1. Focus on what values your product can bring to its target customers.
This is the rule of thumb for any product to be successful in the market. If we look at some of the Web 2.0 tools, such as Blogs, RSS and Wikis, they are becoming very popular in the enterprise space because companies have a good understanding of their values for business. In the enterprise space, users care more about collaboration and improving productivity. If your products or applications can clearly articulate and deliver its value to an enterprise, from running Email campaigns, to collaborating on a presentation, it will have its place in the market.

2. Foster viral adoption.
We cannot overlook the social aspect of Enterprise 2.0. Therefore, enabling viral adoption in an Enterprise 2.0 product/application will play a big role in the success of the product/application. This is a lesson that we can learn from Facebook, MySpace and Linkedin in the consumer space. How many times did each of us receive invitations to join someone’s social networks, to become someone’s friends, or to be added as a connection? Let the informal network within the company work its magic. Coworkers and colleagues will be connected because they choose to be part of the social network, not because their bosses ask them to do so. Take IBM BeeHive as an example, the ‘Hive5s” are branded as the “key viral ingredient” by Toby Ward in his blog. (You can find more information about the Hiv5s on his blog). According to Toby, since Beehive’s launch last August, more than 35,000 IBMers are registered users of Beehive.

3. Make sure you can impress your early adopters.
Your early adopters will be the one who give the product a life. They will be creating contents for the followers, sending out invitations to their coworkers and making sure that their social networks are the most active ones. They are intelligent and proactive. Once they see the value in your product, they will be your champions. In addition, the quality of the content they create is indicative of what kind of following they will have. It is important that their voice is heard and their needs are met; so take advantage of their enthusiasm, allow them to leverage the viral aspect of the product to attract new users.

Above are my observations and suggestions. Let me know if you have any feedback.

Ching

We will be having sessions at Oracle Open World about Social CRM Applications. We would like to discuss what you are interested in hearing versus us coming up with topics that may win your hearts or bore you to death. It would be great if you could leave a comment to let us know what you would like to hear.

Oracle Open World
September 21 – 25, 2008
Moscone Center, San Francisco
http://www.oracle.com/openworld/2008/index.html

Regards,

Tara

We are pleased to announce our newest team member, Rob Knight. Rob will be responsible for integrations for Social CRM Applications. We are fortunate to have Rob join our team as he brings deep technical knowledge and extensive experience with customer implementations. Please welcome Rob to the Oracle Social CRM team.

So we continue on the theme of Social Intelligence (SI) with the basic premise that its primary purpose is to add personal value to the elective user such as a sales rep. For a definition of Social Intelligence see http://blogs.oracle.com/socialcrm/2008/07/social_intelligence.html

In this post, let us address a few simple questions: 1) How do you keep that elective sales rep coming back; 2) make them feel that they have some control and; 3) adjust the application to their knowledge of the industry, territory or present events.

Why is control important? I have never met a sales rep that likes being out of control of their destiny. As much as sales reps are naturally social, they are natural control freaks. At least the ones that consistently make their numbers are.

Sales reps cannot control the past; they live in the present and they would really like to control the future so they can take home bigger commission checks. As far as SI is concerned, they can and should control the levers that predict their future.

Let us say that a loan officer at Bank of Sky believes that a customer’s “net asset value” is more important in recommending certain loans to customers than the loan officers at Bank of SubPrime. The executive team at Bank of Sky may have an importance of “high” to “net asset value,” while Bank of SubPrime may have an importance of “medium”. That in itself gives the each bank the ability to add value to their loan agents (sales reps). What about if the loan agents of Bank of Sky believe the importance of “net asset value” should really be “very high”. The loan officers of Bank of Sky should be able to override their executives with their anecdotal knowledge by changing the value from “high” to “very high”; over time the “hidden” predictive model will move to “very high”, as more and more sales reps express their anecdotal knowledge through their control.

Another example are insurance agents. An agent that sells insurance in New Orleans may decide that a “flood area” designation is more important to their colleagues in Los Angeles. However, the Los Angeles agents feel that “earthquakes” are very important. The agents in each of the Enterprise Social Networks could decide the importance of each attribute, or they should be able to add new attributes to be considered. In this way, not only are they exercising more control, but they are also adjusting the industry model defined by their employer.

What the examples above have shown is the ability of the sales rep to have significant control of how their company does business and how the predictive engine will behave towards them. Indeed, the individual sales reps, can in effect, override their executive team who set guidelines that are often too generic for business or worse, out of touch with reality. The knowledge of the crowd is very powerful, more than that of any executive.

What keeps sales reps coming back? Social Intelligence that learns from them and adjusts to them thereby, providing continuous personal value in changing markets.

I hope you found this useful.

Regards,

Francisco

I would like to introduce you to our guest blogger, Charlie Berger, Sr. Director of Product Management for Oracle Data Mining Technologies. The predictive analytics capabilities of Oracle Data Mining power Oracle Sales Prospector. Charlie will be providing insights on predictive analytics as a guest blogger for Oracle Social CRM blog so please come back to check out what he has to say.

Oracle Data Mining’s Predictive Analytics Power Next-Generation CRM Applications

As a consumer, I’m sure that you have all received telemarketing calls. They usually arrive during dinner. “Hello, I’m calling from … I’d like to make you aware of our new program. By accepting our special offer, you can take advantage of all of the benefits….”. The script generally continues to point out the many rewards and conveniences that will be yours if you accept the special offer.

The problem with this approach is that 99% of the time, you are not at all interested nor have any need for the product or the service being offered. Sadly, your name appeared on a “list”. You were selected to receive the phone call and “offer” because you probably bought a product somewhere else and now someone in marketing thinks that you might be a candidate for their product and offer. Often, very little else is known about you. Traditional mass selling involves many calls being made with the hope that pitching a generic “offer” will generate a sufficient number of positive responses. This broad mass marketing approach requires a large number of suspects to yield positive net results. In truth, it only makes the majority of customers who are not interested in your “offer” (99%) very unhappy.

On the other hand, if the “offer” happens to be for the right product or service, come at the right time and is accompanied with the right supporting information, then it is an entirely different scenario. You might actually take the time to listen and consider the proposal. You might even thank your sales person for helping to anticipate and satisfy your needs.

The key to this presenting the appropriate offer, to the right person, at the right time is predictive analytics. Oracle Social CRM’s Sales Prospector is an example of the emerging next-generation of intelligent applications that embed data mining and predictive analytics. Sales Prospector automatically mines past customer demographic and purchase data, find patterns and relationships that it captures as a “predictive model”, and then applies that model to suggest next-likely products, associated probabilities, expected sales cycles to close, and references that are most likely to be of interest to the prospective customer.

Businesses already possess volumes of data about their customers. However, without predictive analytics, this data is left underutilized. Predictive analytic models capture the many relationships among numerous pieces of information and, based on previous purchases and activities and can find patterns, relationships and probabilities. Predictive analytics can provide sales people with candidate offers, the likelihood that a prospect will accept the offer, expected purchase amount, time frame to close and customer references that would most likely resonate for the prospective customer. A sales person informed with what a customer has purchased previously and recommended “best offers” of what they are most likely to want to buy makes shorter sales cycles, happier customers and ultimately greater profits.

Oracle Data Mining provides the “analytics inside” Oracle’s Social CRM Application and are integrated into a next-generation application that automatically unlocks this customer intelligence. Oracle Data Mining (ODM), an option to Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition, provides twelve in-database machine learning algorithms that enable automated harvesting of “new information, predictions and insights” from CRM data. Sales Prospector leverages this analytical horsepower to deliver predictive analytics and new insights to sales people. Because the data, models and results remain in the Oracle Database, data movement is eliminated, security is maximized and information latency is minimized.

Oracle Data Mining provides in-database predictive analytics that support strategies described in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) article Competing on Analytics [http://www.revenueanalytics.com/pdf/CompetingOnAnalyticsHBR2006.pdf].

Oracle Data Mining is also the analytical engine behind Oracle Open World’s Schedule Builder that provides recommendations to Oracle Open World Attendees. More on that and the analytics that power Oracle Social CRM in future blogs.

Charlie Berger

Like most things in life, success in social networking usually depends on what you put into it. If you keep your updates frequent and relevant then they’ll be more interesting to others. But putting your life out there can have risks too.

I found out about some of these while talking to a colleague from an IT security consultancy (we use them to independently assess our security practices). However as he explained the security risks with social networking sites are not necessarily technical. Indeed the rapid uptake of social networking applications has led to the biggest current growth in security attacks.

The problem isn't necessarily that social apps themselves are full of security flaws, it’s just that the sort of information that social networking encourages you to share can also be used to access more than you expected. As the David Porter stated in a BBC article on these dangers entitled: Cyber thieves target social sites:
"It is remarkable that people use social networking websites to publish details about their lives, loves, jobs and hobbies to the entire world that they would not dream of sharing with a stranger in a bar, such data is invaluable to identity fraudsters."

A simple example is your personal history. Most social networking sites want to know something about your past (schools, jobs, etc), and by sharing these you make it easier for friends and colleagues to find you. However harmless looking items such as your first school or the town where you were born are also often used as security questions by other sites. At one point I found that of the four security questions I was asked by my online bank, the answers to three of them could be found out from my public profile on one social networking site.

There can be other social engineering vulnerabilities too. For example after landing that job you've been after for ages it's natural to put the news out there. but knowing your name, title, and that you're a new starter at BleedingEdgeInc is enough information for some effective identity theft scams. New starters often need to ask for help and no-one knows them enough to verify whether a caller is who they say they are. So a call to the HR or IT help line of your new company pretending to be you could get access to all sorts of info about the company's systems.

None of these risks are reasons against using social networking apps (and as Brian Krebs warns by not using social networks you can be at risk by letting someone impersonate you!). They are reasons for putting some good basic practices in place. There are many sites out there with sound advice, for example security company Sophos say this about Facebook settings. I find four simple rules help me:

• Don't publish anything you wouldn't be happy to tell a stranger. Assume everything you publish will be public.
• Don’t put information on social networking sites which is also used to identify you on other sites such as security questions. Either give different answers to security questions (when asked for your first school''s name give your first pet’s name, or something like that), or just don’t publish the information in your profile.
• Don’t accept friend requests from anyone you don’t know.
• Limit the visibility of your personal information so it's only available to people you know. Don't just accept the default privacy settings.

I think it's nicely summed up by Paul King in the BBC article I referenced earlier: "There were a lot of benefits to using social networking sites ... and the downsides should not put people off using them...It's about trying to manage risk rather than avoid risk", and managing risk is what what we do all the time. There was a talk at the recent Black Hat security conference with the great title Satan is on my Friends List, so just be sure it's the devil you know.

My name's Rob Knight and I join the Social CRM product management team from the Application Expert Services (formerly Siebel Expert Services) team here at Oracle. For the best part of a decade, I have been involved with many different aspects of the Siebel CRM application, including integration on both a transactional and a bulk level. So I have seen deployments using batch and messaging solutions including middleware such as IBM WebSphere MQ.

Being a Siebel Technical Architect has meant working on wide ranging issues, including the performance challenges of high volume and high population environments. In these situations, rich features or complex processes sometimes have to give way to efficiency and simplicity - not always an easy message to get across.

So, I am onto my new role with the Social CRM applications. I am looking at how the new Social CRM applications can be integrated with a myriad of different data and functional sources spanning internal business information sources and external ones. Internal sources of information would be your existing sales and provisioning systems to capture data, such as closed opportunities and shipped orders, either on-premise or not.

These new ways of visualizing and working with sales information will need mechanisms to keep them fresh. Poor or inaccurate data will lead to all sorts of potential problems and not just for the users of these applications, but their customers and prospects as well. I certainly form a low opinion of someone who tries to sell me something I already have or they have already told me I do not qualify for.

Effective data integration is required to prevent these potential issues as well as ensuring the collection of this information is completed timely. My goal is to address just that using a combination of Oracle technology and the support of our partners, both new and old.