Siebel: Integrating Twitter

If you have not yet seen the demo of Twitter integration with Siebel on Dipock's blog, it is probably a good time to see it. Available there is a demo video that lists out three basic steps to integrate Twitter search in Siebel. For those of you who have a slower internet connection, here are the steps:

1. Create a calculated field that uses a iFrame to retrieve Twitter search results based on Account name, URL will be something like "http://search.twitter.com/search?q=siebel crm"
2. Expose the field on a separate applet and display the results in a view

Simple enough to allow the user to search for the account and what not, but how will we make this "actionable"? There comes the use of Siebel's powerful Virtual Business Components (VBC) functionality. Twitter exposes APIs that can fetch search results in atom format. A simple transformation followed by conversion to property set and voila, we have results in a format fit enough to be displayed in any view that you like. The steps you ask?

1. Create VBC and applet based on VBC
2. Write supporting script/business service to make sense of the search results, to retrieve Twitter search results using API at http://search.twitter.com/search.atom
3. Transform and map the values to VBC fields
   

Not exactly as simple as the previous idea, but the biggest advantage is that you can use this data for subsequent actions - may it be creating a follow-up activity for the Tweet, creating a Service Request to address the complaint raised or just to track the conversation thread for the particular user/tweet.

Although these steps are listed with Twitter in focus, the same will be applicable for any Social media which expose APIs in atom/xml format. The process itself is not entirely different from your regular interface to an enterprise app, but yes, the treatment of how exactly you leverage the Social media effectively certainly is.

CRM @ The Speed of Light - 4th Edition Excerpts

CRM @ The Speed of Light has been a successful, popular book for all things CRM. If you have not read that, consider doing it now. Or better still, wait for the next edition. Paul Greenberg, author & CRM Guru says it is rewritten from scratch. "Raw" excerpts for a couple of chapters on his blog.

New from Gartner: 5 Low-cost CRM Strategies

After all, this is a period of recession - organizations want to cut costs and will be increasingly cautious about investing in any new venture. So, Gartner’s five low-cost CRM strategies will probably be accepted with open arms. I have not read the complete report, but the main points are below (the detail itself is mine, pardon the intrusion)..

1. Customer communities
   The inclusion is no surprise, engaging customers and building longer term relationships may not cost organizations much. At the low end of the spectrum, this may simply need people to manage the relationships in the social world. Of course this data should flow on to the CRM & Analytical systems for any intelligent deduction, but hey you cannot start everything at once! Setting up corporate accounts may not cost anything (for mostl of them, till date), but making sense out of this data and converting it into actionable items is worth considering for further investments.
2. Analytics
   Data, you have everywhere but does it answer questions like “what is happening with my customers?”, “where am i doing good/going wrong?”. This is where Analytics is going to be crucial. With a few new things coming up, people may start using Analytics better to start leveraging the data.
3. Segmentation
   I have to admit that this is a surprise for me; maybe I am not keeping up with the “trend”. Keeping track of the customer groups that deliver the highest value is an on-going process and better ways of segmentation will help organizations focus on what is important right now.
4. Process redesign
   Streamlining business processes may not need much investment, but certainly would need people buy-in. Any or all out-of-sync processes that may need frequent oiling for a smooth run could be targeted for improvement.
5. Organizational redesign
   For some reason I think this was just added as an after-thought, maybe it is just that 4 looks so incomplete :).. Scott Nelson, managing vice president at Gartner, who presented these strategies says organizations should use this time to move from being product-centric to being customer-centric.

Overall, this is a good framework to maintain a status-quo on significant investments in IT and at the same time take steps to improve customer experience. Nothing exceptionally new I am afraid, but what is left unsaid here is the roadmap to start achieving the objectives.

Read More on techtarget

Social Media in Action

Here’s one of the stories I came across recently that demonstrates the power of social media tools to really “listen” to the customer. In an impressive story of CRM in action, Gaylord resort chain gained a fan in Lauren McKay at CRM Magazine and will surely pickup other customers along the way.

At the end of the day, what did surprise me eventually was not that Gaylord used twitter. After all, a lot of folks including Dell, SAP, Pepsi, Oracle and a host of others are quite active on Twitter. The fact that Gaylord could make use of a isolated tweet sometime in the past and provide customer service based on that should classify as an achievement. In the above case, Gaylord listened to a single (but valuable) customer and was agile enough to leverage that information at a later time.

A large part of that service certainly comes from the people over at Gaylord, but I believe they are getting required support by IT. There may be some level of integration between Twitter and their customer management application, and it is a good example of what can be done to CRM applications. More than a few SaaS vendors have long made the integration part easy, but without building a business framework to realize value out of that exercise may leave the people disenchanted about the power of Social CRM.