It was a privilege to be able to sit in on two very well-attended Social CRM panels at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco last week. Sameer Patel and Oliver Marks moderated the first panel, “Lowering Customer Service Costs Via Social Tools.” Panelists included Lois Townsend, director of social media strategy and operations for Hewlett-Packard; R Wang, partner, Altimeter Group; Steve Woods, CTO of Eloqua; Todd Shimizu, director communities for Juniper Networks and Treb Ryan, CEO of Opsource. Clara Shih, CEO of Hearsay Labs, moderated the second panel, “Customer Support in the Facebook and Twitter Era.” Panelists included Dr. Natalie Petouhoff, senior analyst for Forrester Research; Wendy Lea, CEO of Get Satisfaction; Bob Warfield, CEO of Helpstream and Phil Fernandez, CEO of Marketo.  Suffice it to say that between the two panels, the audience was able to hear from a very experienced and talented set of business professionals, including industry analysts, executives from companies using Social CRM and vendors. 

There were some very nice Twitter threads covering these sessions and both Ben Kepes from the  CloudAve blog and Esteban Kolsky wrote nice articles about the events – I invite you to check these out.

What follows are my notes and thoughts on the most salient points of the two panels:

ROI

There was quite a lot of discussion among the panelists about the ROI of Social CRM initiatives – a carry over, to some degree, from the conversations coming out of the E2.0 conference in Boston earlier this year. There was general consensus that, unlike many general-purpose E2.0 initiatives, Social CRM has the potential to deliver true, quantifiable ROI.  Ray Wang struck a cautious note about when we can expect to see an ROI, stating that the scope of the initiative will determine (to a large degree) time-to-value. While companies like HP and Juniper agreed, I am reminded of what Brent Potts told Geoffrey Moore when asked what Social CRM costs: “not that much." Companies like Eloqua and OpSource shared stories about very quick time-to-value. This makes me wonder – might a good strategy be to start small? Maybe the best option when starting out is to secure an early beachhead and build a solid value proposition.

Culture

Though there was much agreement that customers who are already engaging with social media are driving Social CRM, by and large the panelists talked about the culture change required to internally adopt Social CRM. Phil Fernandez talked about how Marketo had an early community initiative that never got off the ground until he simply made it a mandate. Treb Ryan spoke about how making Social CRM a cross-functional initiative facilitates adoption as people learn how employees are seeing the value, followed by their desire to “jump in.” Natalie Petouhoff spoke about the need to develop a “C-level” position to drive culture changes – in her words, “every company needs a Chief Customer Officer.” Natalie went on to explain how she has talked to companies that have actually seen employee morale improve as a result of Social CRM. Could culture barriers be overcome by putting employees closer in touch with customers?

Compliance

There was also an interesting discussion about the risk of allowing employees to engage freely with customers in customer communities. Lois Townsend spoke about how HP overcame resistance from its internal compliance department by taking the approach “we are not asking if we should do this, we are asking how we should do this." Taking this approach allowed for internal buy-in without risking having the project stymied. Todd Shimuzu reflected on Juniper’s simple approach to directing employees with his mantra: “Just Don’t Do Anything Stupid.” Natalie Petouhoff asked rhetorically, “Who can recall any truly alarming incident where an employee acted exceedingly inappropriately in a community?” Maybe having employees acting ‘human’ in communities makes the customer feel as though real people are listening.

Customer Service and Marketing

Clara Shih asked the question “Is Social CRM about defense or offense?” – meaning, is this about lowering costs and answering questions or is this about driving revenue?  Phil Fernandez spoke to how Marketo started its Social CRM project with its eye towards delivering customer service in a cost-effective way. However, he explained how the company is now implementing Helpstream’s new Social Marketing module to help leverage its customer community for lead generation. Most panelists agreed that some ambiguity exists about who owns the customer community, while general consensus was that Social CRM is driving both customer service and marketing to work together.  If customer demand for Social CRM drives companies to realize that “it’s all about the customer" (as Natalie Petouhoff states), could we then see a joint effort for customer service and marketing to develop methods of driving improvements in customer loyalty, retention AND revenue generation?

It is good to see that the E2.0 movement is beginning to spawn Social CRM panels that feature discussions about the realities of making these initiatives either succeed or fail. And it is also good to see the industry begin to move away from the “why” and towards the “how."   If you were at the conference, we would love to know your thoughts.