Let me paint you a typical problem in a home office scenario: You are working at home finishing a document you need for your meeting on Monday morning, click on Print – and nothing happens.  Try again, still nothing.  You go through your standard “repair” techniques: turn the printer off and on, unplug the connecting cable from the printer and the computer, reconnect it, save your work and restart the computer; still nothing.

It’s time to go to your favorite search engine. You type some keywords (printer, printer model, error message if any, words “not working”) and find 1,250,000+ links.  You click on some of them, and get pieces of the information you need. Your printer’s web site says you need to reset the printer, your computer’s website talks about upgrading drivers, and the operating system’s support site talks about parameters in the registry.

Who is right? What shall you do?

I had an excellent lunch with my friends at Simplybox (great company, killer idea, well implemented enterprise collaboration- not a client) on Wednesday and we had a sensational discussion on solving problems.  They are going through a growth phase and are trying to position their product better based on their customers feedback.  We discussed several things, but we ended up talking about the title of this post.  As we began to discuss the different things that the product can and should do an idea came to me — which I’d like to get your input so I can understand it better and see if I am right or wrong.

Software is not a solution, we all know that.  Software is a tool, an aide to solving a problem.  The question that always arises is what is the problem we are solving. The best way to look at this is to say that there are two types of problems: pain-points and inefficiencies.  Bear with me for some definitions, it is important to distinguish them.

I had an interesting day today following the live-tweets from the SAS Inside Intelligence Analyst Event.  There were some very interesting tweets that came along, like this one from Ray Wang (Enterprise Analyst with the Altimeter Group, and the most prolific tweeter for the event with around 15% of the total tweets):

Finally, I thought, organizations are starting to understand the value of data and that we can begin to use it for strategic needs.  Then Dan Vesset (IDC Analyst and author of a terrific paper entitled Decision Management: A Strategy for Organizationwide Decision Support and Automation – must be an IDC customer or pay to read it) tweeted what I consider best news from the Event:

It is certainly quite interesting to hear people discuss “The Social Business” as if it was a brand-new invention, something that we never thought of before.  These are the same people that are claiming that now the customer is in control and we have to turn our businesses to them and vow in their general direction each time they exercise use of the megaphone that social networks have placed in their hands.

The concept of social business is not new and it has already been “implemented” by plenty of organizations in history.  The organizations that realized early in their life that being “social”, relating to the customer and giving them what they want and need, has hefty rewards have already been social for quite some time.  Most people would cite here examples like Ritz Carlton, Harley Davidson, and some other beloved brands – and they are right, of course.  Alas, companies like Amazon, that integrated reviews into their business model way before we had social networks of massive consumption, and MMORPG and MPORPG, the original social networks, should be mentioned as well.

On Wednesday February 17th I attended the event where Salesforce launched the private Beta of Chatter.  Leaving aside the fact that you need an event to launch a private Beta, it was a good opportunity to see the progress that Chatter had made since the announcement at Dreamforce 2009.  If you recall, I thought it was interesting from the platform perspective – not as an application.

During the past three months they have been solidifying both the concept and the product.  The good news? The product they launched into Beta is basically the same they introduced at their event — more refined and easier on the eye.  Having an improved user interface for the entire line does not hurt them either.  The bad news? There is still some work to do — and it is not on the product side (well, there is some work to do on the product side, but since they have no competition on what they are offering, yet, that’s not the bad, bad news).

Read on for more details on what, and why, they need to do in the next few months

I wrote a blog post at TheSocialCustomer.com trying to define what a Social Business is.  I am quite certain I am far from done with the definition, but there is one part in the post that I want to expand a little bit more: customers’ expectations.

I wrote that for a Social Business (actually, it really means any business with aspirations to leverage social channels) you have to over-deliver to customer expectations.  I did not say you have to meet them, I did say you have to exceed them.  Some of my peers in the #SCRM Accidental Community were not too thrilled with the idea (apparently, not sufficiently upset to comment on the blog post either) of having to exceed expectations, telling me that meeting them should be sufficient as long as it is done in a consistent basis.

I disagree, and here are the three reasons I disagree:

I had very interesting conversations and strategy sessions with my clients lately, and noticed peculiar things in the market as well — all of them around the same issue: Platforms.

No, I am not talking about the shoes of the 1970s we loved so much, I am talking about the intermediate layer of the cloud model – Platforms used to deploy applications.

If I mention Genesys to ten analysts in the customer service or CRM space nine of them to tell me they are a telephony company, and one probably won’t know who I am talking about.  I was one of the nine when I first started with Gartner: to me Genesys was the software arm of Alcatel, and you could not have one without the other.  In other words, Alcatel led with voice and telephony products, and if the client wanted a software product, they would offer the eService Suite from Genesys.

Somewhere in the mid-2000s this began to shift.  I remember in 2004 when I was doing the research for the ERMS (email response management system – email automation tools for Customer Service) Marketscope I was very pleasantly surprised to see their offering was actually — good.  Not market leader at the time, but good.  It continued to get better and better over time, and the other components of the eService Suite were also getting better.  In 2007, the last year I conducted the research for the eService Magic Quadrant, they had actually qualified for inclusion and were rated fairly well (unfortunately, the report was never published — but that is a long story and requires time and drinks).

On Tuesday January 12th we had discussion on the convergence between SCRM and Enterprise 2.0.

My introduction to the topic summarized what I see as the main issue: SCRM and Enterprise 2.0 are heading in the same direction (customer-centricity), talking about the same issues (engagement), using the same technologies (collaboration), and solving similar problems (culture, politics, adoption) — yet, we pretend we are talking about two very separate, different things. Not only are they very similar, but whether you are collaborating internally among users, or externally with clients, without reaching out to the other constituency it won’t work.  Clients and users are closely tied in a Social world.

It seems that 2010 is the year where Social Media really takes off; everybody is writing about how in 2010:

• You will definitely be able to get an ROI from your Social Media investment
• Social Media is going to take off
• You can craft your Social Media strategy and make it stick
• Your Senior Management will finally recognize the value of Social Media
• Social Media will change your organization/change your business functions/make you money/save you money

I am not linking to any of them because they are all so horribly wrong on their assertions that Social Media is what matters that I don’t want their authors to think I am singling them out.  This is an industry-wide problem.

Let’s get it straight:

Social Media is about tools and tactics, you can never set a strategy for it, and it has very short term life and results.

Social CRM is about strategically setting long-term goals for working better with your clients, and improving your organization in the process.

Social Business is the long-term, strategic process of reinventing your organization to collaborate with employees, partners, and customers.

I have been accused of spending too much time on definitions and splitting hairs on terms.  Why do I insist?  Let me explain with an example.