Customers.com Technologies

Empowering Your Subject Matter Experts to Engage with Social Media

By Patricia Seybold and Susan McKittrick

In B2B marketing, experts' content lures prospects and drives online engagement…but the marketers who run these marketing campaigns, by and large, usually aren’t the technical experts in the content areas that interest their company’s customers. It's often hard for marketers to get the real experts in the company to participate in social media conversations; these SMEs are too busy and/or they undervalue the results that can be obtained by commenting publicly and/or contributing their own perspectives to the topics of interest to customers.

That's why we became interested in a social media curation and commenting platform that's designed to help professional subject matter experts become social media curators and commenters. ConnectedN focuses on your experts' needs to:

a) Identify interesting content from trusted sources

b) Highlight or comment on that content on a branded microsite

c) Get legal/marketing approvals for any content or commentary that needs it

c) Redistribute links to highlighted content and/or the expert's comments on third-party content to a variety of social media sites (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.)

d) Control the time(s) of the day/week, etc. that they devote to reviewing and commenting on potentially relevant and useful content

ConnectedN’s Content Curation for Social Media Engagement
Enabling Busy Subject Matter Experts to Deliver Valuable Content to Clients and Prospects
By Susan McKittrick, Analyst and Senior Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, March 24, 2011

Customer Service Supplier and Product Update Report

This week’s report concludes our sixth year of publishing Quarterly Customer Service Updates. It’s been a great ride for us, for our suppliers, for their customers, and, we’re pretty sure, for their customers—the folks that call the contact centers, access the self-service Web sites, and participate in communities and social network to get answers to questions and solutions to problems.

We’ve taken a different approach to our 4Q2010 report. As usual, we examined the quarter’s customer growth, financial performance, product activity, and company activity for each of our eleven suppliers. We also awarded Customers.com Customer Service Stars—suppliers that demonstrate excellent, balanced, and improved performance across these dimensions for the quarter. Attensity Group, Moxie Software, and Salesforce.com earned Stars for 4Q2010.

What’s new and different is that we examined performance across the four dimensions for all of 2010, looking for excellence, balance, and improvement for the year. We have the data. Why not use it?

Rebranding Doesn’t Change Our Positive Recommendation for then nGenKB, now Moxie Software Knowledgebase

This week, we present our evaluation of Moxie Software Knowledgebase Winter Release 2010. It’s an update to our July 2010 evaluation of the then nGenera Knowledgebase (nGen KB) 9.0, the knowledge management-based customer service offering from the nGenera Customer Interaction Management (nGenera CIM) business unit of nGenera Corporation. That evaluation was an update to our September 2009 report on nGen KB 8.3, the previous release. And we had recommended that you “seriously consider” nGen KB 9.0. We have the same recommendation for Moxie’s Knowledgebase. This still is a very good customer service offering.

 What’s new? Most significantly it’s Moxie Software and the Moxie brand. During 2010, the then nGenera Corporation was reorganized, relocated, and, on September 15, rebranded to become Moxie Software. The milestones and details of the process are in the report.

Moxie Software is positioned to capture the action and the interest in social networking and collaboration. The new “Moxie” leverages and extends the old nGenera. It leverages the knowledge management experience, expertise, technology, and products of its 10 years as nGenera and Talisma with extensions into social networking and collaboration.

Knowledgebase is a component of Customer Spaces, a suite of applications which also includes Email, Chat Reactive, Chat Proactive, Click to Call, Phone, Social Media, CoBrowse, Community, and Answer application modules. Customer Spaces is one of two components of Spaces by Moxie. Employee Spaces is the other component. Customer Spaces is a customer service offering. Employee Spaces is a collaboration offering, collaboration within an organization.