Bay Area CIO/IT Executives Meetups: Blog

Customers.. How to deal with them? Especially now - they come and comment on your products and services everywhere! And… ask service/support questions - EVERYWHERE:  on Twitter, Facebook, their own blogs, etc.. Is it possible for companies to provide reasonable support at a reasonable cost across all these new (and old) channels?

These and many other questions were discussed at a meetup for Silicon Valley executives this week.

Panel discussions were moderated by Esteban Kolsky - the Founder and Principal of ThinkJar LLC, a research and consulting organization focused on multi-channel Experience Management.

Our panelists were:

Kira Wampler, Online Engagement Leader, Small Business Group, Intuit

From the beginning of her career, Kira Wampler has been passionately dedicated to customers. She had to given that her first job out of college was co-founder and president of her own company. She learned quickly that if you don’t serve your customers, you don’t eat! Nearly fifteen years later, Kira continues to bring her passion for customers to life at Intuit by driving community, social media and online engagement efforts that small business owners succeed. Prior to her current role, Kira helped launch Intuit’s community for budding entrepreneurs and developed Intuit’s Small Business Group’s policies, strategy and testing efforts around Word of Mouth Marketing. Kira received her MBA from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and can be found on the social web on Twitter @kirasw.

Waladeen Norwood, Program Manger, Social Media, Consumer Support Organization

Waladeen Norwood recently joined HP in the Global Unassisted Support Organization as a Social Media Program Manger working on developing strategies for supporting consumers over new social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter. Before joining HP, Waladeen consulted for Broadjam.com, one of the largest Web 2.0 online communities for independent musicians. While completing his graduate studies, he helped Broadjam.com develop strategies to grow its song metadata business using wiki crowdsourcing methods.

Natalie Petouhoff, Senior Senior Analyst, Customer Service at Forrester Research

Natalie serves Business Process & Applications professionals, Customer Experience professionals, customer service and social media professionals as part of the business and process applications group at Forrester. As a leading expert, she is often quoted in the press and on television on how the top companies provide great experiences and retain loyal customers. She reviews customer service vendors and provides leaders with guidance on how to integrate social media applications and platforms into the contact center and the customer experience. Her research on customer service best practices via the FastForward Innovation Framework includes six areas around people, process, and technology, as well as integrating organizational change management as part of an initiative to reduce risk and ensure higher ROI for the investment. In addition, Natalie’s model on the ROI of social media is helping companies justify this as part of their enterprise technology and customer experience strategy.

Natalie has more than 20 years of leadership experience in management consulting and systems integration firms, including PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting, Hitachi Consulting, and BenchmarkPortal. Her years of practical experience in industry were gained at companies like General Electric, Sony Pictures, General Motors, and Hughes Electronics. Natalie is also the author of four books:

•Reinventing Your Contact Center: Managers Guide To Managing Multi-Channel Contact Centers
•Integrating Your People with Process and CRM Technology: Change Management That Provides An ROI
•CRM: The Bottom Line to Optimizing Your ROI
•Recruiting and Retaining Call Center Employees
Natalie’s articles appear in BusinessWeek, CRM Magazine, Customer Interactions Solutions, CustomerThink.com, Fast Company, The New York Times, and Peppers and Rogers 1-to-1 Magazine.

As accomplished public speaker, Natalie is a keynote speaker at events including, Destination CRM Evolution Conference, ICMI Conference, Call Center 2.0, Shared Insights Self-Service Conference, SOCAP, and Pepperdine’s Business Forum.

Here is a video recording of the first hour of this panel:

“ Excellent topic and Great speakers. It was an wonderful opportunity to meet with Anthony Lye, SVP Products, Oracle. Thanks Tatyana for organizing this event. ”
“ A great opportunity to learn about this moving target of Social CRM. There is a ton of info and mis-info out there. It’s especially beneficial to exchange ideas in person and not just in the cloud. ”
“ Insightful comments from Chris Carfi, Tony Nemelka, Anthony Lye, Lyle Fong, Esteban Kolsky, all experts in CRM. Very useful to hear what enterprises are doing — or not doing — to incorporate social media in their CRM efforts. Thank you, Tatyana! ”

Feedback says it all!

Greatly anticipated panel discussions on SCRMdefinitely met expectations!

More about the panel:
Moderator: Esteban Kolsky

Esteban Kolsky is the Founder and Principal of ThinkJar LLC, a research and consulting organization focused on multi-channel Experience Management. He currently helps clients determine how to design, implement, and manage better experiences for communities and customers across all channels, including the new media and social channels. He also conducts research on SCRM and Communiities, which is distributed through his blog “CRM Intelligence and Strategies”.

Esteban has over 22 years of experience in the Customer Service and CRM space, spending more than ten of those years working as a consultant and advisor to some of the largest global organizations on their strategies for Customer Service, CRM and Experience Management. He also spent eight years at Gartner as an analyst writing about the future of CRM and CEM, including coining the concepts for Enterprise Feedback Management and Collaborative Customer Service, two of the hottest trends in social media.

Lyle Fong, CEO and Co-Founder Lithium

Lyle Fong is the CEO & Co-Founder of Lithium Technologies, the leading provider of Social CRM solutions to power the customer network. Working with market leaders such as Best Buy, Sony, AT&T, Research In Motion Limited (RIM), Univision, and PayPal, Lithium is delivering the next generation of customer relationships, combining the power of online customer communities with the broader social web and traditional CRM business processes to inspire customers to innovate, promote, and support on the company’s behalf.

Prior to starting Lithium Technologies, Lyle co-founded GX Media, where he was the CTO. He drove the development of Gamers.com, which was rated the #1 independent gaming portal by Nielsen NetRatings. Lyle was instrumental in raising a total of $15M in funding led by CMGI, negotiating multi-million dollar technology licensing deals with Dell, Sony, AltaVista, and Ziff-Davis, and spearheading the spin-off of Lithium Technologies. Lyle was also the driving force behind the creation of technologies for professional gaming, including a global rankings system, tournament engine, and a real-time match reporting and spectating system. These technologies were the key success factors behind the AMD PGL, the most successful and highly acclaimed professional gaming league to date with over 100 million media impressions, and also numerous tournaments for Sega.

Anthony Lye, SVP Products, Oracle

Anthony Lye is the senior vice president of CRM, responsible for the Oracle CRM and Siebel CRM On Demand businesses worldwide at Oracle. Previously Mr. Lye was the group vice president of CRM Products at Oracle, responsible for Oracle’s CRM product strategy and product management for CRM in the applications development organization.

Prior to joining Oracle in 2006, Mr. Lye was the group vice president and GM of CRM products at Siebel Systems. Anthony was responsible for Siebel’s vertical and horizontal CRM application technologies. Mr. Lye managed and directed all of Siebel’s enterprise application strategy, product marketing and product management.

Prior to Siebel, Mr. Lye spent six years as president and CEO of ePeople, a company he ran with help and investment from David Stamm, founder of Clarify and Steve Goldsworthy, founder of Vantive. Prior to ePeople, Mr. Lye was the vice president of marketing at Categoric Software in the enterprise event management business, was senior director and general manager at Remedy Corporation for five years for global major accounts, strategic alliances and Remedy’s international business operations. Mr. Lye also worked in product marketing at Tivoli Systems and was a management consultant focused on distributed systems at Arthur Anderson, now Accenture, in the financial services vertical in London and New York.

Anthony Nemelka, Social CRM Pioneer and former CEO of Helpstream

Tony Nemelka is the co-founder and former CEO of Helpstream, Inc., a venture-backed Software-as-a-Service company located in Mountain View, California. Tony was the visionary behind Helpstream when he and co-founder Dan Hardy set out to design and develop a radically new software application for customer service and customer relationship management – now referred to as Social CRM.
Tony’s vision of infusing business processes with social technologies made available via the Web, and leveraging online communities to drive more effective interaction and engagement between companies and their customers, resulted in one of the first commercially available and highly acclaimed Social CRM products in the market – Helpstream. Tony served as Helpstream’s CEO from January 2006 through July 2009.

Prior to Helpstream, Tony was Vice President of the Asia Pacific region at Adobe Systems, responsible for sales and services across a region that includes both the fastest growing and most technologically sophisticated markets in the world — China, India, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, and Australia. He lived in Japan for several years where he was Founder and CEO of Epiphany Japan and General Manager and President of PeopleSoft Japan. He speaks fluent Japanese and some Chinese. Tony started his career at IBM, spending 13 years marketing a wide variety of hardware, software, and services across multiple industries from 1986 through 1998.

Christopher Carfi, Author of The Social Customer Manifesto and Thought Leader in SCRM

Currently, I’m a co-founder of Cerado, Inc.
We work with companies to help them to understand what their customers are thinking (by doing crazy things like going out and having conversations with those customers). We also help our clients understand what their competitors are doing, so they can thwart them at every turn. Most of our customers turn to us for services such as Win/Loss Analysis and Competitive Intelligence*.
I’ve spent the last six or so years working with organizations to help them better connect with their customers at a real, non-synthetic level. Hence the interests in things like blogs, wikis, and social networks.

Photos from the event:

The main point has been proved: SCRM is REAL!

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Photos from this event: