Best Practice: the Community Blog

Brian Oblinger is a Customer Success Manager at Lithium, applying his 7+ years of experience in community management and moderation to help customers get the most out of their communities.

He is a dedicated member of the Lithosphere and goes by BrianO there. You can follow him on twitter at @brianoblinger.

Last week I shared some tips to help new Community Managers hit the ground running, but what if your organization hasn’t quite made it that far and are still in the process of evaluating community platform vendors? Do those in your organization that have been tasked with evaluating vendors know what to look for?

In a recent article on crmoutsiders.com, Chris Bucholtz warned about the hazards of buying CRM systems from vendors that don’t believe in what they are selling. At Lithium, we take great pride in our 10+ years of experience and successful delivery of social CRM products and services. In fact, we are so proud of what we have accomplished alongside some of the greatest brands in the world that we fly their flags triumphantly alongside our own. Here are just a few more reasons why Lithium should be at the top of your list when evaluating social CRM vendors:

• We’re not just another software vendor - Some vendors might sell you software in a box and then disappear. Not us. We are extremely interested in understanding the nuts and bolts of your business and partner with you to create a solution that that affords you a solid jumping-off point as well as plenty of flexibility to execute on your social initiatives and reach/surpass your goals.
   
• With you every step of the way - Our Client Services are centered around your needs. We are here to help you hone your social strategy, launch your community with the aid of a seasoned Project Manager, and provide perspective through the experienced eyes of our Customer Success Management team. Need a Moderator to keep an eye on the content in your community? We have that too.
   
• Uptime, not overtime - Just in case you were wondering what kind of army of IT Professionals you are going to have to assemble on your side to make this thing work – the answer is no more than you already have. We host and maintain the Social Customer Suite in the cloud for you so that you can concentrate on success rather than technical mumbo-jumbo. Our Operations group has an amazing track record of vigilance and responsiveness to make sure that your community is always open for business.
   
• We’re flexible – Every customer has different needs. We thrive on the fact that no two days are the same around here, which is why we are always working on new strategies, ideas, and technologies to keep you ahead of the game.
  
  Have an interesting idea for a new contest on your community? Drop a line to your Customer Success Manager to receive valuable insights.
  
  Looking to spice-up your community with an extra-special look and feel? Hit up the Lithium Developer Nation section of the Lithosphere to chat with our engineers or even other customers that have the same ideas as you.
  
  The list goes on…

• We don’t just sell it, we live it - It may sound cliché, but it is true. I got my start by posting as a normal user on a Lithium-hosted gaming community. I worked my way up the ladder as a superuser, then a moderator, and finally a community manager before being brought aboard as a Customer Success Manager.
  
  My story is far from unique, as many members of the team have similar backgrounds. We have seen community from every perspective and know how to help you make the most of it for your organization.
   
• Don’t take our word for it. Ask our customers - Even if you are new to the Lithosphere you may have noticed that we are pretty darn proud of this place. That is because this community embodies many of the best practices that we communicate to our customers every day.
  
  We love demonstrating that we can walk the walk as well as provide a place for anyone to come and talk shop about our craft. Within these walls you will find a wealth of information to help you decide if Lithium is right for your organization.
  
  Feel free to reach out and ask any questions you may have to our other customers. We are confident that you’ll like the answers you receive. 

Image courtesy of spreadshirt.com

Brian Oblinger is a Customer Success Manager at Lithium, applying his 7+ years of experience in community management and moderation to help customers get the most out of their communities.

He is a dedicated member of the Lithosphere and goes by BrianO there. You can follow him on twitter at @brianoblinger.

For many organizations, it might sound something like this:

“You’re hired! Now go run our entire social program! Be sure to make us extra social-y!”

Or this:

“We know that you’ve been working in <insert department name here> for the past few years. Do you think you can run a community thing for us? By the way, that’s not really a question. You can start today.”

Or even this:

“We saw that you have a twitter account and have been responding to customers. When was that added to your job description? Oh, it wasn’t? Well, keep up the good work. Can’t wait to see the weekly report every Monday morning!”

No matter how you arrived on the community management scene, there are some things that you should know to help you get started. In a recent post on prdaily.com, Janet Aronica laid out 10 tips for the new community manager that ranged from tactics to tools of the trade. That got us thinking about some additional things we’ve learned in the last 10+ years at Lithium around Community Management, and naturally, we thought we’d share. 

• Audience, Culture, and Voice – For anyone entering the community management space, it is extremely important to understand both the internal and external audiences that you will be interacting with on a daily basis. Once you get a sense of the culture that permeates from within each, you can begin building a voice that resonates with key influencers. With each status update, tweet, post, and e-mail, you are not only working to build your organization’s brand, but also your own personal brand.
  
  As a Community Manager, others will look to you as the face of the organization. As such, it is critically important to gain the trust of those you communicate with and build a reputation that suits the culture of your peers and external audience. The stock you build each day will become increasingly important down the line.
   
• Understand the Brand – Often times there is a disparity between the way that an organization starting out with a community initiative perceives its brand versus the way customers perceive the brand. Social interactions with your customers will bring those disparities to light, and as a Community Manager it is your job to communicate back into your organization what your loyal customers really think about your products/services and affect change.
  
  Your community will tell you what they really think. You just have to listen, respond, and act accordingly.
   
• Who owns this thing? – Although you may be the one appointed to oversee the day-to-day operations of a community and make sure that things run smoothly, it is important to pay attention to feedback from your users and allow them some say in what goes on in the community.
  
  Dictatorships coupled with harsh moderation tactics don’t go over well in the social space. Instead, work with your users to ensure that they are getting the most out of the community and have a positive experience. Granted, there is a fine line between working with your users to create a positive place and letting the inmates run the asylum. Do your best to strike a balance that works for the majority of your user base (hint: you’ll never please everyone).
   
• Build Your Case – Chances are that you won’t go very long without being required to regularly prove the value of the community to key stakeholders within your organization. Set forth a reporting plan from day one that captures metrics, anecdotes, and ROI information.
  
  Create and regularly update an easily-digestible 1 or 2-page report that you can hand to anyone in your organization at a moment’s notice that displays the value of the community (to help you get started, Lithium provides a robust set of metrics including the Engagement Center, which displays key metrics in a dashboard format). Don’t allow yourself to be caught in the scramble when the CEO suddenly discovers the community and wants to know why he/she is spending good money for customers to complain about your products/services (from his/her perspective at first glance). It is your job to educate folks internally.
   
• Ask For Help – Don’t know where to go from here? Aside from successfully advising Community Managers for the better part of the last decade, many members of the Customer Success Team at Lithium have years of direct community management experience under our belts to pull from. We would be happy to help!
  
  Additionally, we have spent a great amount of effort to make the Lithosphere one of the best resources on the web for Community Managers. Feel free to take a look around, ask for help, and connect with other Community Managers right here.

Prentice Welch is one of Lithium’s Customer Success Directors, providing best practices consulting and helping our customers get the most out of the Lithium suite of social business applications.

You can find him frequenting the Lithosphere, where he is PrenticeW.

At this year’s LiNC, I had the pleasure of attending the first ever, LiNC Social Strategist Workshop. This was a whole afternoon led by well-known industry analyst Jeremiah Owyang, partner at the Altimeter Group.  Here, we brought together nearly 20 leading community practitioners and social strategists with Jeremiah to discuss issues relevant to their changing roles.

After surveying over 140 corporate social strategists, Jeremiah and his team were able to offer a unique perspective on the state of “social business” as it stands today. 

Sitting in on the presentation were key social strategists from some of the largest brands around: HP, Verizon, and Yahoo to name a few (excuse me while I bend over and pick up those names I just dropped  ). 

While Jeremiah’s presentation was full of useful data with which any budding social strategist can use to benchmark their efforts (please find the presentation and key supporting reports attached to this article below), the key takeaway was the notion of achieving “escape velocity” – essentially building your social program in such a way that it can scale with the needs of your business without relegating you to managing the so-called “social media helpdesk”.

What do you, the social strategist, need to do in order to promote your brand, hold other groups within your organization accountable and scale to meet the growing demands of the business and your customers?

In a word: PREPARE.

Below is a template to follow when getting ready internally to launch and effectively manage your social efforts:

• Planning
  • Program Charter – ensures alignment and consistency, optimizes resources across the organization
  • Roles and Responsibilities – Executives, Legal, Support, Product, IT Key Roles: Strategist and Community Managers
  • Policies – Created with the help of Legal, shared across the enterprise, used to educate and enforce rules of engagement
  • Roadmap – Short, mid, and long term strategy roadmap with key business objectives and benchmarks to measure against
• Resources
  • Budget and Headcount - See attached report, “How Corporations Should Prioritize Social Business Budgets”
  • Education – Plan to capture and share best practices, regular internal social council meetings or “un-conferences”, employee certification programs
  • Research – Competitive analysis, where are your customers spending their time online today?
• Processes
• Monitoring – understand what your customers and others are saying about your brand
• Measurement – get the right data to the right people. Executives care about things like revenue, reputation, and CSAT. Business Stakeholders care about things like share of voice, support response, and insights. Community managers care about engagement metrics like number of users, views, or posts.
• Collaboration – creating the business processes required to enable different business units to coordinate their efforts to serve the needs of your customers
• Software and Services
• 'Social Business Stack' – Social Networks, Monitoring and Analytics, and Social platforms that allow the publication, aggregation, and digital curation of your user generated content.

Based on Jeremiah’s presentation and the feedback provided by the group in attendance, we are still quite early in evolution of the social business lifecycle. There is still much to be learned and many more best practices to be developed in the coming years. 

Tailoring the framework above to the unique requirements (impediments?) of your business will give you the best chance of achieving the level of scale required for your social efforts to succeed.

Joe Cothrel is Chief Community Officer at Lithium Technologies.  He is Lithium’s top expert on community and social best practices and has helped more than 300 companies execute successful social efforts.

He is active on Twitter @cothrel and is a regular contributor in the Lithosphere where he is JoeC. 

On August 10, I'm moderating a Lithium webcast with two guests I'm pretty excited about:  Laura Buchanan at FutureShop, and Melissa Parrish at Forrester Research.  I thought I'd use the Best Practices blog to give you some background on Laura and Melissa in anticipation of our event.  Today, I'll talk about Melissa.

Melissa Parish is an Analyst who focuses on social media and mobile technologies for the interactive marketing professional. She a recent addition to the Forrester team, and what's interesting about her background is that she brings a wealth of experience as a community and social media consultant and practitioner, working with companies like Time-Life, Coca-Cola, American Airlines, Meetup, and the early social networking site, Bolt.com.

Melissa's experience places her very well to provide guidance to Forrester's customers on what it takes to create successful social media and community efforts.  Many tech analysts shy away from, or downplay the importance of, organization and execution in the success of these efforts, focusing instead on features and functions.  An analyst who was puzzling about this fact once asked me, what is it about this technology that requires so much knowledge to get it right?  But it has nothing to do with the nature of the technology, which is a software solution just like other software solutions. It's the nature of the opportunity the technology is designed to address.  Melissa gets that. 

I think it's also useful that, within her experience in social media, Melissa has worked with both communities and other social media efforts.  It seems to me that there's a lot of people who can talk to you about social media and acquisition, or social media and transactions.  There are relatively fewer who can talk to you about social media and engagement, or social media and relationships. Without that, as my colleague Karen Orton says, social media isn't the new marketing -- it's just the new advertising.  And while advertising is still important of course, you can believe that social media won't stop there.  And if you're responsible for social media in your organization, you shouldn't either.

The topic of Melissa's recent report, Community Management Checklist, is a good example of how she's attacking the execution question head-on.  If you're a Forrester client I encourage you to download the report and review it in detail.  If you aren't, I've summarized some of the key points below.

Melissa breaks down community management into four steps: Planning, Alignment, Launch, and Maintenance.  As you can tell, the report skews toward companies who are just setting out on this journey; fair enough, since that's were most companies are at today.  But there are some key points in here that even mature social efforts will benefit from.  If you're running a mature community, you'll benefit from the hearing how communities today are getting started. 

In a phrase, it's a different world today than when communities were starting out 5 or 10 years ago.  If you've been doing this a while, one of Melissa's steps probably leaps out at you as new: Alignment.  In the old days -- still, admittedly, today for some companies -- social and community efforts were silos that got little attention or support from other functions. Today that's rarely the case.  Social has more mindshare among executives and managers today -- they know it needs to be done right, and they want to hear "what happens when."   Melissa has a nice chart in the report that lists key internal stakeholders and where you need their input in the planning stage.  Later in the report she lists those same stakeholders and what they will need after your up and running ("Internal Stakeholders and Their Feedback Touchpoints").  I hope in future reports she can delve deeper into this topic, because there's lots to say here.  In mature efforts, social is not just a channel that these stakeholders feed with input on the front end and then consume feedback on the backend -- it's really a process integration effort in which these functions are interacting smoothly as necessary with customers in social channels according to predefined protocols that assure consistency.

Another table in the report, "Prepare for Community Management," is just as valuable.  In this table, Melissa addresses the resource requirements and typical workflows required for organizations of different sizes and structures (small versus large, direct versus matrixed, etc.).    It responds to the questions I get most often from customers: How many resources will we need?  How should we organize?  I have some cavils with this portion of the report -- in my experience, the goals of the community (marketing, market research, support) are a bigger driver of resource requirements than company size or type.  But there's a virtue to boiling it down to a simple framework.  (When people tell me, "its more complicated than that," I always remind them that anyone can identify complications. More rare are people who can say, "you know, it's really about these three things."  Or course, you have to be right about those three things..

I've talked to Melissa about her report and I'm excited about ideas she has for drilling down into some of these areas in future reports.  But the Community Management Checklist is a great start.

Take a minute to register for the webcast.  I think it will be a terrific session.

Paul Gilliham is Lithium's Director of Customer Marketing,  responsible for customer engagement marketing, social media and Lithium's own community, the Lithosphere.

He is a regular blogger for Lithium and in the Lithosphere you'll see him as PaulGi. You can follow him on Twitter at @lithosphere or @bladefrog

At LiNC this year, I had the opportunity to talk for quite a while with Business Online Director of SEO, Ray 'Catfish' Comstock. Catfish - as he is universally known to pretty much everyone  - is one of the pre-eminent specialists in the field of search engine optimization, and a regular speaker at conferences throughout the US.

I cut this great discussion down to about 6 minutes so it's pretty easy to consume while you're having your coffee or tea break!

We have all the interviews on our YouTube channel - InSocialCRM - check it out and I hope you enjoy them!

Paul Gilliham is Lithium's Director of Customer Marketing,  responsible for customer engagement marketing, social media and Lithium's own community, the Lithosphere.

He is a regular blogger for Lithium and in the Lithosphere you'll see him as PaulGi. You can follow him on Twitter at @lithosphere or @bladefrog

At LiNC this year, I got the opportunity to sit down with our Chief Community Officer, Joe Cothrel to talk about what he does, the role that community plays in the new social network, and how the role of the community manager is changing.

LiNC 2010 - The Changing Face of Community Management from Lithium Technologies on Vimeo.

This is part of a set of video interviews that I recorded with our guest customer speakers, analysts and social luminaries, as well as Lithium team. I hope you enjoy them.

Paul Gilliham is Lithium's Director of Customer Marketing,  responsible for customer engagement marketing, social media and Lithium's own community, the Lithosphere.

He is a regular blogger for Lithium and in the Lithosphere you'll see him as PaulGi. You can follow him on Twitter at @lithosphere or @bladefrog TT3K4TQ6G673

Last week I got the opportunity to talk with Sean O'Driscoll, CEO and Co-Founder of Ant's Eye View. Those of you who attended last year's Customer Conference will remember the great keynote that Sean gave around the Most Valuable Professional (MVP) program at Microsoft.

At this year's LiNC he will be running a track session with Lithosphere superusers Laura Buchanan from Future Shop and Mark Hopkins from Lenovo talking about how to engage with users in an Advocate Program.

As a precis to this year's session, Sean gives us some background on the MVP program, why Microsoft started it and what benefits they saw arising from the engagement with users.

Remember you can watch all our videos in HD on our YouTube channel

When you are first getting started, it can be daunting when you open the doors to your community and the flood fails to arrive. Sometimes communities, for one reason or another, start with a trickle rather than a flood. To build that trickle over time, you may need to pitch in and help out in during a lull in the flow.

I've talked a bit in the past about the importance of seeding activity as opposed to seeding content. The main point is that members don't engage with communities because of the great content that is there, they engage because of the great people that are there - which is why we have a measure of Liveliness as one of the key factors in our Community Health Index. Quite a few may arrive because a search engine has directed them to a solution to a particular problem - but if the answer they need isn't already there, why will they post questions? Because they see evidence of other members who can and will answer - they see activity.

Promotion is still the number one way to drive traffic and members, but sometimes you need a little more to get folks posting in the beginning. So here are some strategies we've picked up on how to build that activity, broken down by two key components: Content and Frequency.

Content

You know your content best, and who your audience is and what they are interested in. But some approaches can work better than others. One good way to deliver content that promotes engagement and participation instead of just consumption is to involve the community members with each other - in other words, don't tell your audience about you, tell them about them!

Some types of content that works well, in order of general effectiveness:

• Posts by other users or users' peers (don't forget direct outreach to known users!)
• Quotes by users or interviews of users' peers
• Stories from or about other users
• Issues reported by users (and the resolutions that were provided)
• Statistics or information about users
• Stories about yourself, as a peer (if you happen to share the same interests/experiences)

Also, do not forget to respond to posts by users! A quick reply with a positive acknowledgement can go a long way to bringing the user back to post again. If your goal is support, though, be wary of answering questions in the community too quickly. An authoritative answer to users' questions can have the unintended effect of stifling conversation rather than encouraging it. In these situations it is good to have separate groups acknowledging new posts (Welcoming Team) and answering questions (Support Team). The Support Team should then refrain from responding for 12-24 hours to allow users the opportunity to answer the questions themselves, and only step in when users are really stuck.

And lastly, a reminder to be transparent and not to pretend to be someone you are not. You will almost always be found out if  you do, and if you use the methods above there really isn't any need. Ultimately, the risks just aren't worth it.

Frequency

When seeding content, what is important is frequency over time. 10 topics posted on one day or in one post are less effective that 10 topics posted across 5 days in 10 posts. The goal is to try to balance your need for content in each discussion board you have with the need for the content to appear fresh when users visit. Larger posts should be segmented into multiple smaller posts, and seeding activities should be spread out over multiple days. The ultimate goal is to ensure that each discussion board has 5-10 posts per day on average (including user posts). Build yourself a reservoir of posts you can use to fill in the gaps when user participation is lower than desired. Over time, as user participation builds you should be able to phase out this activity.

Of course, the fewer boards you have to fill, the easier it is to keep them appearing active! So remember to start with a small structure, but one that appeals to the widest audience.

Like so much about community success, keeping a community active is about planning and preparedness. Make sure you are ready to help out when activity is slow!

Photo by tillwe

In general I like guest posts, they provide an opportunity for some other folks to have a voice without committing to a full blog of their own, or to reach a different audience than they normally do. Better still, I love it when guest bloggers enjoy it so much that they come back again for more! So it gives me great pleasure to welcome backDan Ziman, returning with some takeaways from the Gartner CRM Summit:

It's amazing that it takes so long to recover from time out of the office these days. It used to be just recovering from the travel part, but it's become far more difficult because time out of the office just means there's more to catch up on by the time you get back.  It's taken me over a week. But, now that I've had (ahem) a few hours to reflect back on my time there and dozens of conversations I had with other attendees. Not to mention, some cooler weather to revitalize my senses.

What struck me at this conference was the wide range of experience and knowledge levels among CRM professionals when it comes to social marketing and Social CRM. Only a small minority of conference attendees appeared to be deeply engaged with social marketing, tweeting, or blogging regularly. However, the majority or people I talked to were seriously pondering "what to do". They know they need to do more social-somehow, some way. It seemed to strike a personal commitment and it seemed increasingly important to meeting their business objectives.

Here are the top 3 recurring questions and comments I received:

1)  How will a community initiative map to marketing objectives?

A:  In B2C industries, how important is real-time expert product assistance? It's huge. It leads to improvements in customer satisfaction and loyalty, but most importantly, a visitor completing a purchase. How often do you ask (or get asked) about experiences with particular products? If the community is part of an ecommerce stage/purchase, assisting customers in the midst of a new customer filling their shopping cart, it might be the difference of the cart being left behind. In both B2B and B2C enterprises, web visit duration and reducing bounce rates are critical in determining whether attention is being captured. If your community is being linked by others, your SEO ranking will improve, and returning visitors will enjoy the added customer experience and engagement with your online brand.

2)  I'd rather not let customers post negative opinions on my site. 

A:  Guess what? It will exist on the web regardless. You'll be far more successful with more engaged customers by embracing their feedback. Show you care. This is not just listening-you can use these opportunities to take action and make improvements. That's what your customers are *really* looking for. Is it that people *want* to complain, or is it that they simply want to be heard? Yes, and more.  Would you prefer they complained somewhere else and then purchased from your competitors next time? Or, worse yet - would you prefer they returned your product, which is now a loss, and you have no idea why? Branded communities on your site will give you much more control and insight in addition to keeping visitors browsing and clicking on your domain's web pages.

3)  I think we could just build this ourselves.

A:  Yes, you could, but to get a usable application, it will take you thousands of hours of R&D, QA and user-testing. Do you have those technical resources available? How will you address upgrades and APIs to key enterprise applications?  And, guess what?  That's not even the issue. It's the best practices & industrial strength proof points which will dictate success or failure. Ask anyone who's been successful with communities. Having the right expertise is the key to managing growing and engaging communities. A vibrant community with incentivized participation allows everyone to build their reputations and it fosters true brand advocates.

Hopefully this helps a few of those folks looking for answers. The real question you should be asking yourself, though, is "What business objectives can I address with social marketing and Social CRM?" Starting with clear business goals is your best bet to running a valuable customer community.

Thanks again Dan, you're welcome back anytime! If you're interesting in hearing more from Dan, you can follow him on Twitter at @lostintheflog.

Photo by Omar Omar

Travel for me is always bittersweet venture - I love to get out of the fishbowl from time to time and see what others are doing and talking about, but it's tough to take time away form my customers and the community, (not to mention being away from my family).

That's why I always love to be able to host guest articles from others here at Lithium, who travel to far off events and shows and bring back all the goodies for us here at the home office! So here's our own Dan Ziman, Director of Marketing at Lithium, with what he's brought back for us on the Gartner CRM Summit wrapping up today:

What's hot?   Scottsdale - it's 100 degrees today. What else? Social CRM. It appears to be on everyone's mind and mentioned in nearly every presentation and workshop at this year's Gartner CRM Summit.    

I was thrilled to see all the Lithium customers mentioned throughout keynotes and track sessions that have paved this vision...Starting with Customer Champion award winners iRobot, Barnes & Noble, Research In Motion (RIM), and Motorola.

In conversations with attendees of previous Summits, I learned that three years ago, Gartner told everyone that the social media and social networking storm was approaching and it was time to start looking into what your customers are doing online. Seemed logical, but there were skeptics. Now, when I ask attendees, where is your company relative to addressing customer experience and the social web? Overwhelmingly, the response is "we're working on it."

What else is happening?

1. Go where customers go. The conversation is moving from the service agent-to-customer (the 1:1 channel) to what is our customer saying about us online. The challenge for companies is offering an enhanced service or experience which directly leads to an add-on sale.  It's not that your company has lost control, it's simply that you have to go somewhere else (other than phone or email) to have the conversation. Furthermore, customer to customer interaction, positive or negative, is the way customers live online. The customer network already has power. Are you leveraging that power or putting up a hand (stop sign!)?
2. Strategic resources are needed to engage. Ask not only what technology is required, but also what business and IT functions are required to make this happen? Is this an on-premise solution or can SaaS handle my needs? If I go the SaaS route, how will I deal with integration? If I talk with IT, are they going to try to build it with open source and how can I trust our CIO to understand the business needs? Since you're dealing with your most important asset -your customers-spend time to bring the team together, secure executive sponsors, create a cross-functional social media center of excellence, and, most of all, be flexible. This is an evolutionary  experience running in many directions, thus, your organization needs to develop a structure that can bend and roll with the flow.
3. Not just the external channel, assess your internal processes. If we're answering customer questions or helping to resolve customer service issues that aren't coming into the call center, how will I document and know that the question/issue has been resolved? What KPIs should I put in place to know that we're doing a good job? The successful customer communities are developing a knowledge base far faster than the customer service group. Businesses need to find ways to harness this view to improve documentation and accelerate innovation.
4. Mobile experience. It's interesting to watch everyone walk out of the sessions when the first activity is checking email and sending text messages to friends, colleagues, and family.  Mobile browsers have improved significantly along with all the new mobile apps. However, it's not just a matter of access to an additional channel. Mobile integration requires a new business process and new strategies;  it's moved far, far beyond just a phone number.

So, the big message is: "what was tomorrow is today".  Reality is setting in and investments in the customer service experience will improve customer satisfaction, retention and deliver new revenue opportunities.

Thanks a lot Dan! Now if I could just convince him to bring back souvenirs for my kids, I'd never have to go anywhere at all!

To read more comments about the event, check out Twitter hash tag #gcrm or the Gartner web site - http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=838231

Did you attend? Let us know your thoughts!

Photo by Robert S. Donovan