CLP case studies: Dell and Microsoft

Some organisations have identified the importance of listening to customers including GM, Microsoft, Adobe but Dell is a shining example of how to listen to customers and then utilize it to its advantage.

Michael Dell is spearheading this initiative inside Dell to make sure customer chatter on internet is taken seriously and responded to. After Dell branding took a serious beating about its customer service, Dell turned to internet to control the rapid viral decimation of its brand.

Step 1 of its strategy to control this was to get irate customers to gripe to the company directly and not to the whole internet. Dell has found out that potential customers research on internet by spending 99% of their time. Only 1% of time is spent on buying. So potential customers make up their mind what to buy and where to buy based on their research. This is where power of CLP exists.

Here is the article on the story: dell

Microsoft has also taken its initial stride into CLP area by rolling out connect.microsoft.com. It needs more work but it is a start.

I like Intuit Turbotax site for its focus on helping customers with its community feature.

CLP is the way to go. Customers expect it and companies need to take it very seriously.

We live in an interactive world which is getting connected and is getting very chatty.

Contact us to know more.

 

Introduction to Customer Listening Portal

Customer Listening Portal

What is it?

Customer Listening Portal(CLP) is an Enterprise customer feedback gathering and sharing system , living within enterprise firewalls and integrated with its Line-Of-Business systems; yet accessible by external customers on a role-based access basis. It delivers a customer community portal around a company’s product and enables the company to gather, manage and respond to its customers. With emphasis on an integrated information set from company’s perspective (sales, marketing, support, product information being available from internal data sources), company is in better shape to involve and serve the customer.

CLP is an integrated information hub for the customer information within an enterprise. It facilitates a two-way conversation between enterprise and the customers. It is a place where customer feedback, complaints and issues can be collected and customer opinion can be sought. Enterprise on a whole can now have a dialogue with the customer so that a customer transparency is achieved.

It is also a portal where internal customer-centric information can be integrated and presented in one interface for your employees. So, on a customer account page, one with enough privileges can see sales, marketing, pricing, support, warrant etc details for a customer.

Why Customer feedback matters?

 

Capturing and monitoring customer feedback has become a critical process for companies that are concerned about retaining their customers. Beyond retention, these companies are looking to move satisfied customers to the level of loyal customers.

For the majority of companies, loyal customers can represent 80% of revenues and are defined as those who continue to buy from you year after year, stay with the company through its thick and thin; and recommend your products and services to their friends. Thus customers become the evangelists for the company without any cost.

The primary feedback goal for these companies it to make it easy for their customers to provide feedback when they want to and to make it easy for the company to solicit feedback when they need it. These same companies have found that they must provide multiple touch points for their customers to provide feedback to them so they can constantly stay in touch with their most important asset. CLP was designed to help these companies attain their goal of putting the customer first by utilizing their enterprise assets and knowledgebase.

Customer feedback should be a shared resource throughout your organization. You may be using it for product strategy and direction, and Your sales and marketing team can use it to develop marketing programs to gain better insight as to your sales prospects.

Your customer service group needs it to understand how customers are using your product so they can better support and proactively respond to them.

Your engineering or development team needs to understand what problems they are solving for your customers.

Ultimately, customer feedback needs to be visible to all parts of your organization.

Enterprises today need a solution which makes it easy to integrate customer feedback with other systems like Help Desk, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Demand Management and IT Governance, Portfolio Management, Requirements Management and others.

Burntsand’s Customer Listening Portal solution makes these integrations possible. This solution framework is implemented with Microsoft technologies like Office SharePoint Server, SQL Server, ASP.NET and make use of web services or other APIs for integration. The customer feedback can be “pulled from” and/or “pushed to” other enterprise systems through custom APIs or web services.

 

Some Benefits of CLP:

·         Convert Satisfied customers to Loyal customers

·         Gather customer feedback on-demand

·         Create virtual focus groups

·         Manage customer feedback and negative comments

·         Create a community of customers and employees where they can have a dialogue which can be managed

·         identify growth opportunities

·         Overhaul pricing strategy based on customer whispers

·         Get your customer and market pulse from these conversations

·         Figure out features for next products

·         Re-segment your product categories

·         Identify competition and adjust competitive positioning

·         Establish a true single view of a customer from sales, marketing, support and engineering perspective in a role-based secure access model

·         On-demand customer information on a single interface within a selected customer’s context

·         Manage your warranty support

·         Better opportunity for cross-sell and up-sell

·         Shorter sales cycles because availability of timely and pertinent information

 

 

Mark Logic User Conference

I attended Mark Logic User Conference last week in SFO. We are discussing a partnership with Mark Logic and so I thought I would go check it out. I was impressed with the user turnout and passionate support the attendees showed towards the Mark Logic Server.

I did get to attend a few presentations during this, particularly:

• Exploiting Office and OpenXML with Mark Logic Server
• Dynamically Integrating Event Data to Model and Analyze Business Processes
• Keeping Users informed with Alerting
• Launching Video Search at CQ

Though I need to bring myself upto speed with a lot of technical details about Mark Logic, I came away with appreciation for this XML based information storage and discovery product.

A lot of enterprises produce variety of content from brochures to legal documents and need dynamic information aggreation for various business needs. With OfficeXML paving way for Office intgeration with Line of Business systems, a content based intgeration can be made easier by looking at Mark Logic.

Advanced Analytics, MashUps and subject-centric portalsites are some of the applications which can benefit from this content-driven architecture.

Currently Mark Logic is being used by Media and Publishing industry which is often content heavy. But it can be extended to enterprise scenarios to give some help to marketing, engineering, PR, legal and HR departments in their content-hungry or dynamic publishing needs.

Food for thought.heh?

 

 

Customer Listening Portal solution published

I published Customer Listening Portal solution that we are offering.

Check out the link: https://solutionfinder.microsoft.com/Solutions/SolutionDetailsView.aspx?solutionid=f2d0ed1186514a3197512079ae306a7e

 

This is part of our Applied sharepoint thought process. We want to solve real business problems by pro-actively thinking about some of industry challenges and then applying some technology frameworks to solve those.

CLP basically uses MOSS 2007 with allied Microsoft technologies to enable companies to respond to the online customer feedbacks.

drop me a line if you want to know more..

ciao