Customers.com Technologies

Aldrich Review of Loomia Recommendation Engine

Susan Aldrich is our long-time search, findability, and merchandising expert. For the past two years, she has been focusing her attention on recommendation engines. That's because these platforms have become an incredibly versatile tool for both B2C and B2B marketers. Once used primarily to boost sales on a Web site (other people who bought this, also bought this), recommendations are now used to provide a personalized experience to small groups of customers, or even to individuals. They are used to support outbound email marketing and other campaigns. They are used to support multi-channel interactions. They are used to provide personalized Web experiences, and to improve navigation. And they are used to ensure that the offers you receive — whether via email or Web serendipity — are the ones you are most likely to welcome and act upon.

This month's in-depth product review is of the Loomia Recommendation engine which is available as a SaaS offering. Loomia's customers include the Wall Street Journal, ABC.es, Thomson Reuters, Time, Harvard Business Review, Travelocity, Fancast, DailyCandy.com, BlogTalk Radio, Audible, and Panasonic.

One criticism Sue has for this current implementation of Loomia is that it doesn't yet support customer segmentation. On the other hand, there's a lot you can do using the built-in business rules and analytics. Another drawback is that there are few tools for marketers to do the tweaking themselves. On the plus side, Loomia is a full service organization and does a good job of continuously tweaking their clients' recommendations to generate better and better results for customers and for clients.

Here is Sue's product review:

Loomia Recommendations
Customized Solutions for Deep Content, Video, and Ecommerce
By Susan E. Aldrich, Sr. VP and Sr. Consultant, August 19, 2010

Updated In-Depth Review of Salesforce.com's Service Cloud

To date, Salesforce.com claims that nearly 9,000 customers have licensed Service Cloud, four million user licenses have been purchased for Customer Portal, and approximately 100 customers have licensed Salesforce Knowledge. Very few customers have licensed Answers, a community/user forum application that was introduced last February with Spring '10 release.

Support for social media got our attention. Service Cloud, of course, supports Chatter, SFDC's application for collaboration among an organization's internal users. For example, you might use Chatter to track and communicate the work to resolve a case, exchanging technical information and status among level one and level 2 CSRs, developers, QA personnel, and even the account executive. However, Service Cloud, and, in fact, all of Salesforce CRM, does not support external, public social media. SFDC has been talking about Salesforce for Twitter and a Salesforce for Facebook or a Facebook Connector for quite a while, but these are not actual products with warranties and support. Rather, they're free, downloadable apps from AppExchange that have been developed by SFDC personnel outside formal product development. SFDC told us that these are "managed." That is, they are built to accommodate and support upgrades and they cannot be modified by the organization that downloads them. To be sure, they are useful apps, and we gather that a few thousand organizations have downloaded and deployed them. Take care in using them.

Our report on Service Cloud Summer '10 updates our report on the Winter '10 release of Salesforce.com's customer service. We had described Winter '10 as a "release 1" offering with basic knowledge management capabilities, limited search, basic escalation facilities, and virtually absent analytic functionality. In Spring '10 and Summer '10, Salesforce.com has made many significant improvements to Service Cloud. Analytic functionality in Service Cloud 2 Summer '10 has been improved significantly. Certainly it's no longer a release 1 offering.

Service Cloud and its Answers, Customer Portal, Entitlements, Salesforce Knowledge, and Salesforce Mobile add-ons provide a very broad range of cross-channel, cross-lifecycle case management, knowledge management, and social media customer service capabilities. These applications are positioned to address the requirements of high volume B2C contact centers that provide support for complex products as well as B2B contact centers. Within this positioning, Service Cloud's case management capabilities and Salesforce Knowledge KM capabilities support assisted-service and, through the Customer Portal and Force.com-based public Web sites, support self-service. In addition, Service Cloud's Answers application supports a level of peer-service or social service.

We've performed this evaluation of Service Cloud Summer '10 using our new, more general, customer service framework rather than the framework for evaluating knowledge management-based customer service offerings, the framework we used to evaluate Service Cloud Winter '10. The new framework places less emphasis on knowledge management and search technologies and places more emphasis on the channels and customer activities supported. Service Cloud is much more than a KM-based customer service offering. Its strengths are in case management and customer activity support. As a result, it earned better grades both because of its improvements and because of the changes in our evaluation criteria. Most of the new and enhanced capabilities in Spring '10 and in Summer '10 have not been made in knowledge management or search technologies. Salesforce.com still has work to do in those areas.

Bottom line, Service Cloud 2 Summer '10 has no major limitations, no showstoppers. We recommend that you consider it for your organization's case management, knowledge management, and account management requirements. If your organization's customer service experience is built on your contact center, then Service Cloud 2 could very well be your best fit.

Salesforce Service Cloud Summer '10
Significantly Improved Cross-Channel, Cross-Lifecycle Customer Service
By Mitchell I. Kramer, Sr. VP and Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, August 5, 2010

Recommendations: Baynote Collective Intelligence Platform

By Susan E. Aldrich
Sr. VP and Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group

Baynote is the fourth in our series of recommendation solution evaluations using our Recommendation Evaluation Framework, Version 1. The first three solutions we reviewed, Avail Behavioral Merchandising, RichRelevance, and Omniture Recommendations, have an ecommerce focus, especially retail ecommerce. Baynote is tackling a much broader market, targeting telecommunications, media, and manufacturing, and also digging into applications such as search and navigation, customer service, customer support, intranets and extranets.

In the customer experience realm, retailers tend to be in the lead in technology, and recommendations are no exception. So it’s no surprise that people think of recommendations as a commerce function: “other people like you who looked at this, ultimately bought that.” But recommendations have the potential to provide the core technology for simple personalization. Simple, at least, for the Web teams in charge of implementing and the marketers in charge of managing. So Baynote’s broader focus certainly makes sense in terms of market needs, and the company’s success with retailers indicates that their technology and services are definitely competitive.

nGenera Knowledgebase Incorporates Social Media, Wikis, and New Analytics

nGen KB 9.0 Gets Top Grades

Our report this week is our evaluation of nGenera Knowledgebase (nGen KB) 9.0, the new version of the knowledge management-based customer service offering from the nGenera Customer Interaction Management (nGenera CIM) business unit of nGenera Corporation. The evaluation is an update to our September 24, 2009 report on nGen KB 8.3, the previous release.

nGen KB has a customer base of approximately 600 accounts and a product history that dates back to 2003. nGenera CIM offers two deployment options for nGen KB: on-premise and “on-demand” (single tenant and multi tenant hosted). Note that your nGen KB deployment requires Microsoft technologies—Windows, IIS, and SQL Server.

nGen KB is a component of the nGen CIM Suite which also includes nGen Chat, nGen Email, nGen Answer, nGen Click to Call, nGen Phone, nGen CoBrowse, and, new in 9.0, nGen Community and nGen Social Media.

9.0 is a major new version, major in its numerical designation but, more significantly, major in its new and improved capabilities. Key are:

• Social media support—social media as knowledge sources and interaction channels and analysis of social media content
• New knowledge sources and search sources including Wiki and external databases
• New self-service UI
• RSS support for subscriptions to and notifications of Knowledgebase changes
• New analyses of social media and new packaged reports on those social media analyses

On the Customers.com report card for customer service, nGen KB 8.3 had earned good grades. Analytic functionality was the only area where some improvement was needed. In nGen 9.0, nGenera CIM has addressed the issues with analytic functionality very well. Our only issues are in supporting mobile devices and in supporting Facebook as a knowledge source and interaction channel. nGenera CIM told us that both would be addressed in future releases. To be fair, 9.0 is the product’s initial social media release. On the other hand, supporting mobile devices is a more urgent requirement.

We had recommended that you “seriously consider” nGen KB 8.3; we strengthen that recommendation for nGen KB 9.0. This is a very good customer service offering.

nGenera Knowledgebase 9.0
Excellent Knowledge Management, UI Content Management, and Analytics
By Mitchell I. Kramer, Sr. VP and Sr. Consultant, July 1, 2010

Our Customer Service Suppliers' Quarterly Update

Customer service is a great research beat. It never goes out of style. Customers are never going to run out of questions and problems. Delivering answers and solutions will always be the key to customer satisfaction, loyalty, and profitability—for companies of all sizes, in every industry, in every geography. I’m staying with it.

Across my five years of research in this practice area, customer service has changed and evolved, delivering answers and solutions across more phases of the customer lifecycle, using new channels, and leveraging new and improved technologies. I’ve changed, too. You may remember Web self-service, cross-channel, cross-lifecycle customer service, and KM-based customer service. This specialization was important at the time because all of us had such a narrow view of customer service—using the contact center to deliver answers to questions and solutions to problems that customers have in installing and using your products and services. I felt that I had to get your attention by giving customer service names that connoted something about channels and/or technologies.

No longer.

Now, we call it “customer service” and it encompasses all channels, all phases of the customer lifecycle, and all customer service technologies. In my research, I want to help companies deliver customer service at the right time, on the right channel, using the right technologies to answer questions and solve problems.

With this week’s 1Q2010 Customer Service Company and Product update, I’ve begun my sixth year of quarterly reports on customer service. In our 1Q2010 Customer Service Company and Product Update, I continued to see four key trends in customer service: social media, assisted-service, mobile computing, and cloud computing. Think of these trends as new tactics in the customer lifecycle, as new channels, as new and improving technologies for delivering answers and solutions.

In a nutshell, 1Q2010 was a steady quarter for customer service. Customer growth was about the same in 1Q2010 as it was in the very good 4Q2009. And it was the same for financial performance (because customer growth is the key driver for financial performance). Overall, product activity was light, but Attensity Group, nGenera CIM, and RightNow made significant product announcements. Overall, company activity was light, too, but Attensity Group launched a subsidiary to serve the federal market, RightNow introduced an innovative new product subscription agreement, and Salesforce.com formed a partnership with VMware to deliver Java development and a Java infrastructure to its cloud computing platform.

Customer Service Company and Product Update, 1Q2010
A Steady 1Q2010 for Customer Service
By Mitchell I. Kramer, Sr. VP and Sr. Consultant, June 17, 2010

IBM WebSphere Commerce Version 7.0 Evaluation: A Big Report for a Big Product

This week, we publish our product review on IBM WebSphere Commerce Version 7.0. It’s a big report. It’s a big product. In this report, “We recommend WebSphere Commerce as the B2C ecommerce platform to organizations that have the time, skills, and IT resources required to harness its size, power, and flexibility. WebSphere Commerce is large—large enough to provide everything you need for B2C ecommerce.” We’ve made similar recommendations in our product reviews for previous versions, too. WebSphere Commerce has always been the ecommerce platform with the richest, most flexible functionality, but it has never been the ecommerce platform for the faint of heart or for the light of IT resources. 

But version 7.0 and 7.0 Feature Pack 1 (which was introduced in the middle of our publishing process) include features that really can shorten and simplify implementation time, staff, and cost. The B2C starter store and its mobile implementation are the keys.

The B2C starter store is a comprehensive implementation of WebSphere Commerce functionality delivered through a Web 2.0 UI. Merchants can reuse the ecommerce resources of B2C starter store within their sites or can base their ecommerce implementations on them and customize their features to support their ecommerce processes and their brands and styles. It’s huge step forward from the old and dated Consumer Direct starter store of many previous versions. The Mobile implementation of B2C starter store contains a subset of the functionality in the B2C starter store optimized for common mobile HTML Web browsers.

Updated Evaluation Framework for Customer Service Products

We’ve updated our evaluation framework for customer service products. Market trends and product specialization were our motivations. Ease of use and speed were your requirements. You can use the new framework to evaluate any customer service offering.

The two market trends that prompted us to do this update at this time are the rise of social media and the increased usage of mobile devices like iPhones.

Customers, especially consumers, look to social media to get help from other customers for ratings, reviews, and references when they want to buy products and services and for support when they’re having trouble installing and using them. Suppliers and merchants, very much aware of these social conversations, have been building their own presences on social media (think Facebook Fan pages) so that their customers might look to them for social help. Suppliers and merchants are also monitoring social conversations to get ahead of customer requirements and customer issues.

Consumers and business customers alike are using their mobile devices as portable computers, wanting to use their full capabilities, not just to get SMS status updates. iPhones, Blackberries, and the like have the computing power, and their networks have the speed and the bandwidth to drive full-function browsers. Full function browsers are the platform for customer self-service and even Web chat-based assisted-service. 

Recommendations: Avail Behavioral Merchandising

By Susan E. Aldrich
Sr. VP and Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group

Our analysis of Avail Behavioral Merchandising is our third review of a recommendation solution using our Recommendation Evaluation Framework, Version 1. The target market for Avail Behavioral Merchandising, as for RichRelevance Recommendations and Omniture Recommendations, is ecommerce, especially retail ecommerce. As is often the case, retailers are in the lead in adopting a technology that has so much impact on the customer experience—and on their bottom lines. Recommendations not only deliver the most interesting content in general, they can deliver the most interesting content specific to this visitor in this context. And for a merchant, delivering the most interesting content means enticing customers to buy more now, rather than get frustrated or bored and leave. Avail’s clients typically see revenue increases ranging from 5 to 30 percent per visitor. Not surprisingly, Avail has had very strong growth in the ecommerce market.

Avail Behavioral Merchandising is among the more mature recommendation offerings, on the market since 2001. This maturity is apparent in its UI, which has advanced features such as preview and test capabilities. Avail Behavioral Merchandising also has some unique capabilities that open new possibilities for merchants to work together, including collaborative merchandising and syndicated merchandising. Avail Intelligence is based in Sweden and has mostly European clients, a demonstration of its multinational and multicurrency capabilities.

IBM WebSphere Commerce Version 7.0, Strengthening a Strong Offering

IBM WebSphere Commerce Version 7.0 is the new and current release of the ecommerce software platform offering of IBM Corporation. This is a major new version that was introduced on October 30, 2009. It includes a wealth of new and enhanced capabilities. The scope and scale of improvements is so broad and so deep that we’ve focused this report on what’s new and improved in the offering. The best new capabilities are:

• The B2C starter store starter store is a comprehensive implementation of WebSphere Commerce functionality delivered through a Web 2.0 UI. Merchants can reuse the ecommerce resources of B2C starter store within their sites or can base their ecommerce implementations on them and customize their features to support their ecommerce processes and their brands and styles.

• WebSphere Commerce Version 7.0 has an implementation of the B2C starter store for mobile devices. It offers a completely reusable appropriate subset of the capabilities of the Web starter store.

• Dialog activities is an event-driven marketing and merchandising facility that supports the delivery of SMS and email messages in response to customer activities.

• Social commerce facilities support social media, social profiles, ratings and reviews, and photo galleries via widget-based access to social service providers. They support marketing, merchandising, and community building.

• Integration, a key strength in previous versions, is even better in Version 7.0. Improvements include additional Web Services (exposing all WebSphere Commerce functionality), continuing SOA transformation, improved integration with WebSphere MQ and WebSphere portal, and improved facilities for integration with distributed order management systems.

• Analytic functionality is provided by Coremetrics. Instrumentation is automatic and comprehensive. Many predefined reports are packaged.

Investing in Personal Recommendations

By Susan E. Aldrich
Sr. VP and Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group

Recommendations are hot—just ask the vendors of recommendation solutions. Recommendations are hot—according to the potential buyers we surveyed early this year. All of our respondents are interested in deploying recommendations at some point, and almost half plan to deploy in the next 18 months.

What are recommendations for? That's a simpler, and possibly harder question. Our respondents have clearly heard the message that recommendations help revenue and improve the customer experience. Interestingly, most North American respondents also see recommendations as a tool for personalization—for the user experiences of both customers and employees. Europeans, famously less exuberant [though not, as we see from the financial news, more rational] think the jury is still out on personalization.

Exuberant Americans will take their recommendation technology any way it's served: home grown, commercial on-premise software, or SaaS. Europeans, who shipped most of their cowboys westward over the past three centuries, do not want any home grown software, thank you very much; leave that "do it my way" impulse to the cowboys. Our European respondents really just want recommendations technology the way technology is supposed to be delivered, via commercial on-premise software. That SaaS thing, hmm, not so sure about that. This reluctance is a shame—what could be better than having a vendor striving to win your love and esteem daily? Even after you sign the contract? The beauty of SaaS, with the loving client care, ease of implementation, and low up-front cost will win the skeptics over eventually.