Customers.com® Research from Patricia Seybold Group

Customers.com® Strategies

• Best Practices
• Customer Experience Test Drives
• Customer Scenario Examples
• Industry Case Studies

• CRM
• Customer-Centric Ecosystems
• Customer Communities
• Customer Experience
• Customer Insight / VOC

• Customers’ Moments of Truth
• Customer Scenario Mapping Methodology

• Online Strategy
• Social Networking & Web 2.0

See more Customers.com^® Strategies Research

Customers.com® Technologies

• Product Evaluation Frameworks
• RFP Templates
• Product Profiles
• Product Reviews
• Product Updates
• Implementation Issues

• CRM
• Customer Experience
• Customer Communities
• Customer Service

• Ecommerce
• Knowledge Management
• Portals

• Green Engineering
• Recommendation Platforms
• Search
• Self-Service

See more Customers.com^® Technologies Research

Authors

• Susan Aldrich
• Mitchell Kramer
• Ronni Marshak
• Susan McKittrick
• Patricia Seybold
• Other Authors

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• Customers.com^® Strategies
• Customers.com^® Technologies
Advisory Service

There are five common internal organizational pitfalls that plague most projects in which customers are actively engaged. If you want to be truly successful in planning and executing customer-centric projects, you’ll want to plan ahead to avoid these mine fields.

Here, we offer advice on how to mitigate these pitfalls, identifying the ammunition you need to get others to support the project, the resources required to get through each sticking point, the activities you’ll want to take to ensure success, and the success metrics that let you know if you have, in fact, succeeded in overcoming the obstacles in your way.

3Q2011 was quiet quarter for customer service.

Customer growth was mixed but mostly down for the quarter. Only two of our suppliers—Moxie and Salesforce.com—improved in both new and repeat customers.

Mixed financial performance resulted. IntelliResponse, Moxie, and Salesforce.com had big financial quarters.

3Q2011 was a quiet product quarter. Four of our ten suppliers did not make any product announcements. Two others announced only new product features. RightNow delivered the regular, quarterly release of its customer experience suite. eGain and Salesforce.com announced several new products.

Company activity was low in the quarter. Seven of our suppliers did not make any company announcements. Salesforce.com made another significant acquisition, its third of the year. The biggest company news was Oracle’s acquisition of RightNow, the third of our customer service suppliers that Oracle has purchased this year!

Social-service continues to be the hottest trend in customer service. We call it social-service because it’s about customers using social networks to get answers to their questions and solutions to their problems by monitoring and searching social media.

We’ve begun a research series on social-service. Our first evaluations will be completed soon.