In addition to heading up sales and marketing at LoopFuse, Matt Quinlan is also in charge of “customer success,” which made him a perfect candidate to answer a few questions for the Helpstream blog. We got the low-down on how LoopFuse’s Helpstream community helps keep their customers happy, why Matt thinks customer communities will eventually be as important as having a company Web site and how he defines the “R” in CRM. Read on for more, and share your thoughts and reactions in the comments or via Twitter.

1. As LoopFuse's VP of Field Operations, you're responsible for "customer success." What does that phrase mean to you and how has your Helpstream-powered community helped you achieve it?

While it may sound trite, success is a happy customer. It's really that simple. A happy customer will provide insightful/thoughtful feedback. A happy customer will tell her friends about LoopFuse. A happy customer will introduce LoopFuse into her next company as a result of her experience at her current company. While you can build complex models and metrics to measure customer success, the reality is that you can define the current state of 99% of customers with a :) or :( emoticon. My job is to ensure that our customers have everything they need to be successful with their LoopFuse implementation. In the early days of a company this is typically one-on-one assistance. However, as LoopFuse continued to grow it became increasingly difficult to scale that kind of interaction. By deploying Helpstream we have been able to provide the assistance our customers need in an interactive, searchable, digital environment without sacrificing the quality of interaction.

2. What do your customers seem to appreciate most about the Helpstream community you created for them?

Because LoopFuse OneView is offered exclusively via SaaS, we decided to integrate Helpstream directly into our product to provide a seamless user experience when a customer is looking for documentation, asking a question, providing feedback, or opening a support ticket. Each screen within our application has context-sensitive help articles that are directly linked from within the interface. Once they have clicked through into our Helpstream portal our users are particularly impressed with the global search feature which simultaneously searches knowledge base articles, questions, ideas, and even the general Web.

3. What would you say to other companies that are debating whether to implement a customer community?

Think back to 1997 when your organization was debating whether to implement a website. While this debate seems absurd today, many people just didn't believe that their organizations needed a website or would benefit from one. Today, websites are no longer a publishing medium, but a communication platform that enables a multi-directional conversations between customers, partners, prospects, and the company. You are going to do it. Your customers will demand it. The only questions that remain are when and how. Helpstream provided us with a turn-key community, knowledge base, and support solution that allowed us to focus our efforts on content creation and customer service rather than wasting time building a piece-meal solution.

4. What is your take on the state of the CRM industry and the burgeoning field of Social CRM?

The CRM industry has experienced a sort of renaissance that has been fueled by two primary forces. First, the market has made a dramatic shift away from traditional on-premise CRM systems and towards on-demand systems that are delivered purely as a service. As a result, the capital expenditure associated with launching a CRM system is now approaching zero, which has lowered the barrier to entry for SMBs. The second force is the explosion of technology that has been developed around CRM systems to augment, extend, and improve the value that CRM provides. For example, LoopFuse automates the delivery of qualified leads directly into the CRM system, enabling the sales team to leverage LoopFuse without changing their work habits.

5. Beyond the benefits of Social CRM at the customer service level, how do you see it aiding and supplementing the sales and marketing processes?

While the traditional CRM system was primarily for the benefit of the company, Social CRM solutions, like Helpstream, alter the very nature of the relationship between vendor and customer by providing a bi-directional conduit that empowers the customer to engage and participate in a community rather than passively consuming content. This is practically the definition of the R (relationship) in CRM.

About Matt Quinlan

Matt is responsible for sales, marketing and customer success at LoopFuse. Prior to LoopFuse, he was vice president of marketing and community at Appcelerator, leading the company's brand awareness, community development and user adoption programs. Matt founded the JBoss evangelist & sales consulting team, the open source middleware leader. After JBoss was acquired by Red Hat, Matt started Red Hat's "Rockstar Program," through which he was responsible for the recruitment, training and evaluation of all customer-facing technical talent. Prior to JBoss/RedHat, he spent eight years as a professional consultant for Tallan and Interwoven, writing custom software solutions for startups and Fortune 500 companies alike. Matt is a graduate of Purdue University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in computer science.