Bob Thompson

There's a fascinating discussion in the LinkedIn group "Building the Customer-Centric Organization." Over 100 comments were generated debating what "customer-centric" really means and what kind of relationship customers want. Some contend that consumers increasingly have the attitude "just give me my stuff and leave me alone."

I disagree, but that's just one more opinion. Only good research will answer a complicated question like this. With impeccable timing, Forrester Research provided me a complimentary copy of a new report Brand Engagement The Consumer Way, which provides a more nuanced answer.

In short, it depends!

Consumers engage to get deals, learn

In brand interactions, "More than half of US online consumers who interact with brands they like do...

Hard to believe it's been 3 years since I last wrote about KANA, when it launched the Service Experience Management solution as part of KANA 10. To be candid, I haven't paid much attention because all the real action in the industry seemed headed to the Cloud.

But recently KANA has been acquiring a number of companies, which CMO James Norwood says is how they intend to be the "undisputed customer service leader." Recent acquisitions of note:

• Overtone, a social media and customer listening platform (April 2011)
• Trinicom, a small vendor based in the Netherlands selling cloud-based customer service solutions to the mid-market. (April 2012)
• Ciboodle (from the Sword Group), which focused on contact center customer service (July 2012)

Forrester analyst Kate Leggett sums up recent activity in...

Dick Lee asks a provocative question in his new white paper: What's next after customer-centricity?

He sums up customer-centricity as follows:

The common implementation-level model coalesced into a structure implementers could grab onto and follow. Theory aside, becoming a customer-centric company meant an amalgam of customer-driven business strategies, customer-aligned process, CEM, CRM (customer relationship management) technology - and a dollop of highly targeted marketing, often supported by marketing automation technology and marketing analytics.

What Dick seems to be saying is that customer-centricity is a mashup of different ideas. Start with a little CRM, season it with CEM, then add process management and analytics as side dishes. Voilà - you've got customer-centricity!

While it's true that these concepts are all out there...

Salesforce.com just announced a new online community offering to enable enterprises to create private communities for customers and partners. This is essentially an extension to Chatter, which thus far has been focused on internal collaboration for authenticated users.

Although the press release says that Salesforce Communities was "unveiled," the reality is that this was a pre-announcement. Some might call it vaporware. Limited pilots will be available this fall, and general availability is planned for the 2nd half of 2013.

That's right, a year or more from now. Wow.

My speculation is that this move was a reaction to Microsoft's recent acquisition of Yammer. Although starting with internal collaboration a la Chatter,...