::.. Timing ..::

:: 2002/04/18 ::

Collaborative CRM on the rise

A recent market study, undertaken by CRM vendor Kana suggests that e-mail and on-line customer interactions are continuing to increase.

The economic downturn has hit companies hard, which has led to longer response times on telephone help systems, and a decreased proportion of free "800" support numbers. Jupiter Media Metrix recently reported that the number of companies responding in a timely manner to customer service e-mails hit an all-time low of 22%.

This study's key findings suggest that consumer behavior will continue to include a willingness, even an eagerness to use faster, less costly media:
+ 56% of consumers said interactions over the Web or via e-mail represent their most positive customer experience
+ 33% of consumers indicated that slow response times are the key contributor to a negative experience
+ 20% of respondents decided not to purchase product as a result of slow response times.

My take:

It is relatively easy to initiate an IM or web-based chat session as a means to resolve a question with a product or service vendor. There is little or no cost involved for the user, and if there is a delay before someone responds, the multitasking nature of computer-based work means the customer can do other things while waiting. In contrast, sitting with your phone in your ear -- listening to jangly Hawaiian music while waiting for someone to take your call -- is a quite different proposition. It is difficult to perform other tasks while waiting, and in particular, your phone is tied up while waiting. Of course people will gravitate toward real-time messaging solutions, given the problems and costs inherent in telephone support.

I believe Gartner is perhaps hedging too much when predicting that 40% of those companies that have introduced CRM solutions will have to rethink them, based in part on customer behavior and perception shifts, like those outlined in the Kana study. My sense is that nearly all of what has been contrived to date -- with the exception of people using advanced collaborative CRM solutions -- will need to be rebuilt or replaced. The explosive growth of real-time communication will translate into a consumer-driven revolution in customer relationship management thinking.


:: Stowe Boyd 4/18/2002 05:37:00 PM [link] ::
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The Instant Message Client as Collaborative Portal

The April 1 announcement by E*Trade about "another innovative channel to its diversified suite of financial products and services" through Yahoo! Messenger is not an April Fools prank.

The press and analyst commentary about Yahoo!'s Messenger 5.0 feature, IMVironments, generally has been way off point. It's not about the cutesy backdrops or Dilbert cartoon skins that can grace your Messenger client. It is about desktop real estate.

Many IM users keep their IM clients up and running constantly. AOL got hip to this and started to sell ad space on the AIM client last year (May, I believe). But the E*Trade IMVironment is taking a new tack -- one that opens up a very hot area -- the IM client as a collaborative portal.

The E*Trade IMVironment is very sophisticated -- this is not wallpaper. The enhanced client has several panels, like a portal interface. There is an active (20 minute delayed) stock market quote panel with the option of sharing any quotes you request with your IM buddy -- which requires that your buddy use the E*Trade IMVironment, too, of course. There is also a "Watch and Listen" panel through which streaming video and audio channels can be accessed (three radio channels, "Market Flash," "E*Trade Financial Radio," and "Investor Minute," and a single video channel, "IM The Money" -- is that last a pun?). And of course, an active panel that includes three clickable icons -- "Special Offer," "Find an ATM," and "Visit Us in Person" -- all of which entice the user to click through.

The E*Trade IMVironment is spot on -- well-designed, easily used, and relatively non-intrusive. It meets E*Trade's expressed goals, convenient access to financial information for users, as well as their strategic aims -- selling more services.

Abstracting from the E*Trade and Yahoo! specifics, what is happening here is something much more compelling, using the IM client as a portal to a wide variety of information. And since the IM client is inherently a collaborative medium, this suggests a means to virally influence behavior through IM user's networks of buddies.

Imagine that I IM you through Yahoo!, and I am using the E*Trade environment. You will be sharing the environment with me, so if I request the current stock quote for Starbucks you will also see the result (through the sharing feature). Other environments could support co-browsing ("I think that tie would go with your Armani suit, pal"), shared video (we could watch a movie together, and chit chat throughout), document collaboration, e-learning, whatever.

The IM client -- the base medium for real-time interaction -- is destined to absorb all the slow-time collaboration media into it. And just about any form of information that can be pushed, massaged, twiddled, or tweaked will soon find its way into the real-time stream.

Consider a site like NetFlix presented through such an interface. Along with the obvious searching for DVDs to rent, I could watch previews with friends, I could archive the movie recommendations of buddies who I have co-browsed with, I could push recommendations via something like file transfers, and I could share my reviews and ratings interactively. Clearly, NetFlix -- and others -- should rapidly move into this space, for three simple reasons: 1/ people use IM all the time, 2/ the clients are open on the desktop all the time, and 3/ people are social, and like to do things together.

I can imagine a near future when a company could use IM environment (like the E*Trade example) as its principle means of interaction with clients, with the traditional website serving as a data source for IM environment-based browsing. Expect fast advances in this area for e-CRM sorts of applications, as well as the mass marketing of services and products.

I hope the nice people at Blogger figure out how to support blogs as IM environments. Every time I updated copy for Timing, it would open an IM session with each of my readers, with the newest content presented. And of course, I could immediately chat with readers. Coming soon to an IM environment near -- actually surrounding -- you.

:: Stowe Boyd 4/18/2002 11:39:00 AM [link] ::
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Instant messaging aftermarket: Real-time snap-ons

The February announcement from IMLogic regarding Microsoft's licensing of the company's IM archiving technology for a soon-to-be-unveiled generation of advanced corporate IM sent shockwaves through the real-time communication community.

First, the big boys -- Microsoft, AOL, and IBM -- are on the march, which will rapidly change the dynamics of the market for the bit players.

Secondly, the possibilities for an aftermarket for specialized modules in the market is becoming apparent, and not just because of the high visibility agreement between IMLogic and Microsoft. Other announcements -- AOL's announced relationship with PresenceWorks, Kana's licensing of Jabber, and other similar press -- point the direction for a vibrant and growing aftermarket.

I met with IMLogic's president, Francis DeSouza, at the recent Instant Messaging Planet conference in Boston, and he outlined his vision for a family of snap-on products, built above the Exchange instant messaging infrastructure, providing capabilities such as indexing, archiving and retrieval. In the future, other more extensive capabilities are on the horizon, enabling IMLogic's customers -- Fortune 500 firms, in general -- to add more sophisticated corporate capabilities on the basic Exchange IM architecture.

PresenceWorks has offerings that also interoperate with Exchange, although there has been no announcement about Microsoft licensing them. PresenceWorks "Buddy List for Outlook" augments Outlook by adding a presence indicator to each contact. This buddy list presence indicator is built on the same technology that is used in the company's Email Signature product, where a sender of email can include an HTML icon that indicates presence on any or all of the consumer IM services. (This of course requires entering the various service IDs, which is significantly easier in the signature product that the laborious effort involved with entering the data for all your Outlook contacts. Still, on a corporate basis, with a shared address Exchange directory, this one-time cost would be easily amortized.)

PresenceWorks has announced a partnership with AOL, to use the technology as an element of AOL's plans for integration of AIM presence into enterprise information technology infrastructure, like user directories and related areas.

Both IMLogic and PresenceWorks are offering pieces of the puzzle for large corporate users, who in principle would like to be able to communicate and interact with partners and customers in real-time. We will see much more of these companies, and their competitors, in the upcoming months.

:: Stowe Boyd 4/17/2002 05:09:18 PM [link] ::
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Communicator Inc stakes claim to the financial services IM market

Tony Kontzer reports in an April 8 2002 InformationWeek piece (full story) that Communicator Inc has quietly snuck up on the corporate IM space for financial services, with a neat hat trick.

A consortium of eight banks -- CS First Boston, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Salomon Smith Barney, and UBS Warburg -- will be rolling out multi-company IM network based on Communicator's IM Hub product (www.communicatorinc.com).

Kontzer mentions SameTime and the Microsoft/IMLogic partnership, but clearly Communicator Inc has stolen a march on the other majors with this consortium.

My take:

Communicator is a new competitor in the space, differentiated by security and financial services focus. The Communicator management team has an impressive background in the financial services space.

There appears to be some technical linkage between email and IM Hub product design (probably to resolve namespace and authentication issues) -- suggests possible alignment or conflict with where IETF is heading in IM interoperability.

Communicator's emergence definitely demonstrates the maturation of the IM market, and we should anticipate that verticalization will accelerate.



:: Stowe Boyd 4/17/2002 04:20:50 PM [link] ::
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Trillian to enter enterprise IM market?

In an April 5 article (Is Trillian Moving to the Enterprise?), Bob Woods interviewed Cerulean Studios co-founder, Scott Werndorfer, who suggested that his firm is contemplating a server-based product offering for the corporate market.

Trillian (see Cerulean Studios), like other IM pirates, offers IM interoperability so that users can avoid the obvious alternative, which is to keep multiple IM clients open on your desktop at all times. Trillian, in effect, emulates multiple sessions on your behalf -- necessitating having accounts on all the services, but providing a single, merged buddy list. (Note: although I am calling Trillian's creators "pirates," I don't mean that they are criminals -- simply that they are doing something that the big boys don't want to happen.)

The enterprise market is a very hot and dense space, due to Microsoft's saber rattling about "next generation corporate IM" and AOL's dual attack (announcements with PresenceWorks, as well as a secure AIM (see Secure AIM Services). Added to existing players, like Bantu, Jabber, FaceTime, and SameTime, Trillian has a serious challenge ahead.

The company has gotten a lot of airplay based on the David and Goliath spin, with AOL every few days shutting off the newest attempt of Trillian's hacker/programmers to sneak into the AIM system, and then responding with yet another hack of the system.

Ultimately, the government will have to step in, for the common good, and mandate an open protocol for interoperability across the various IM systems. The Internet Engineering Task Force has serious proposals in this area, and various telephone giants are beginning to introduce cross-SMS text messaging interoperabililty -- the trend toward open IM is one of inevitability.

Can Trillian differentiate itself, other than as a convenient gateway for interoperation, in the extreme here-and-now, before the bigs finally give in and allow cross IMing and presence detection? Personally, I think there are a number of interesting add-ons to Trillian's offering -- such as logging and archiving, cross-service chatting, and so on -- that would be attractive. More to follow.


:: Stowe Boyd 4/17/2002 10:37:59 AM [link] ::
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About the author, Stowe Boyd

I am an avid student of the world of software technologies, and their impacts on business and society.

I worked in the researchy side of computer science for most of the 80s, after getting a masters in computer science from BU (where I also taught for 5 years), almost exclusively in the area of collaborative programming environments -- my first grounding in collaboration, with the first people to be wired: programmers.

In the late 80s, I migrated into products -- Meridian Software and Verdix (now Rational), software tools -- and then became interested in collaboration technologies in the wider business context. Since 1994, I have consulted with dozens of the best- (and least-) known firms in this sector: Lotus, IBM, Staffware, FileNet, Microsoft, Novell, Fujitsu, InConcert, Computervision, and many other large firms (along with Abuzz, Zaplet, DigitalWork, Engenia, Ikimbo, Fracta, Tacit, and other start-ups). My writing has been published in many venues including Lotus Developer Journal, KM World, Knowledge Management Magazine, Knowledge Management Review, Cutter IT Journal, Enterprise Reengineering, and many other places.

For the past two years, I served as EVP at Ikimbo, a real-time applications company based in Virgina. Ikimbo's award-winning Agenda product is an extension to instant messaging technology that links that medium with enterprise applications.

My focus in the early part of this decade has been real-time communication and collaboration, and that forms the backdrop for my newest project, A Working Model. Timing is a public weblog of my take on the growing market for real-time software and related services, such as instant messaging, real-time collaboration, and related topics and technologies.



:: Stowe Boyd 4/15/2002 02:39:24 PM [link] ::
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Return to Web Land

A few years ago, I developed an on-line zine called Message from Edge City-- and I invested a considerable bit of energy into the whole exercise, reviewing dozens of collaborative services and products.The whole thing went sideways when I took on a new job, and got swept into a period of relentless travel. Some months later, I tried to log into my site to update, and ... the service had gone bankrupt in the dotbomb disaster! I never even got an email. I bet they closed it down in the dead of night, and moved all the servers before the landlords seized them for bank rent.

Anyway, I haven't had an excuse to resurrect the themes and tropes of Edge City until stumbling across Blogger. So, anyway, here it is.

Brace yourself.

:: Stowe Boyd 4/15/2002 07:08:18 AM [link] ::
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