Customers.com Technologies

The Next Big Thing: Content Curation

 By Patricia Seybold

Information over-supply and customers’ short attention spans have created the perfect storm of demand for a new genre of tools. Our customers are swimming in a sea of undifferentiated, unfiltered information. Every brand owner wants to provide authoritative information on the topics our customers care about. But our own internal experts now vie with third-party experts, passionate fans, uninformed bigots, and a cacophony of noise for customers’ scarce attention. It’s not enough to provide authoritative information on our Web sites. We also need our content to turn up everywhere our customers hang out. And we can’t rely only on our own internally-generated content. Customers trust third-party sources and each other more than they do the brand owner.

In this new world of content overupply and shorter attention spans, marketers now have three goals in providing the right information at the right time to customers and prospects:

1. Be perceived as authoritative and trusted.

2. Provide high quality information and resources, including valued and trusted third-party experts’ and customers’ contributions.

3. Provide a constant stream of timely, fresh, and valuable information to all the places and channels that customers frequent.

This is a tall order! Therefore marketers now need tools and services that make it easy for them to find, filter, aggregate, and curate targeted content that will appeal to their audiences.

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. 

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.

IBM’s Enterprise Content Management Strategy; Bigger than SAP?

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

You'd expect anything with "enterprise" in its name to be pretty big. IBM's Enterprise Content Management platform is breath-taking for its breadth. First of all, it redefines the meaning of "content." IBM expands the definition of content to include all types of records and archives (paper!), tweets, audio, and video. IBM's platform also provides a broad set of services covering all the ways organizations interact with unstructured information. IBM's ECM platform embraces services to store, analyze and annotate content so that some structure (metadata) can be imposed on it and value extracted from it, mine it to extract insights and correlation, classify it, report on the sentiments expressed therein, search it, organize it for discovery and compliance, provide business process management services, manage digital assets, and deliver information to portals and other agile interfaces.

IBM's picture of its ECM Platform is so broad and deep it calls to mind SAP's enterprise resource planning. If you're still thinking of content management as a few tools to help you with revising and publishing articles or Web pages, you are so last century.

As you'd expect from an IBM vision, ECM is a layered architecture. The ECM Platform is comprised of multiple repository technologies, the ECM framework, and user interfaces.

Your New Framework for Evaluating B2C Ecommerce Platforms

By Patricia B. Seybold
Founder, CEO and Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold 

Our Customers.com Technologies' guru, Mitch Kramer, has just released a new framework that you can use (and he is using) to evaluate Ecommerce platforms. If you are among the many companies that hope to upgrade your ecommerce capabilities in 2010, we'll make your job easier. First, you can use our new streamlined framework to be sure you are covering all the bases. Second, you can use our RFP template based on this framework to get apples-to-apples comparisons of the platforms you're considering. Third, you can use the blank evaluation matrix to do your own evaluations of the platforms you're considering. Fourth, you can rely on our detailed and objective evaluations that will be delivered in the coming months on the following platforms:

• ATG Commerce Suite

• Demandware

• E4X FiftyOne

• Elastic Path Commerce

• hybris Commerce

• IBM WebSphere Commerce

• Venda

If there are other platforms you'd like to see us evaluate, please drop Mitch a line (mkramer@customers.com). If you'd like to share your evaluations with us, we would love to see them.