Crossing the Membrane: Improving customer experience by combining E2.0 and SCRM strategies

Building a Social Business entails engaging customers via Social CRM to gain actionable insights and employees via Enterprise 2.0 to leverage those insights into better experiences. Customers and employees are rigorously separated by a 'membrane' today, limiting opportunities for engagement.  We tell you how to make that membrane porous.

Esteban Kolsky is the Principal and Founder of ThinkJar, an advisory and research think-thank focused on Customer Strategies.

He has over 22 years of experience in customer service and CRM c onsulting, research, and advisory services. Most recently he spent eight years at Gartner, focused on Customer Service and CRM research. While there he coined the terms for EFM (enterprise feedback management) and CIH (customer interaction hub). In addition, he wrote on the social networking topics that led to today’s revolution and assisted Fortune 500 and Global 2,000 organizations in all aspects of their CRM deployments.

Mr. Kolsky is currently researching and advising vendors and organization how to extend customer interactions from the CRM niche to the entire organization in their efforts to become Social Businesses. 

ThinkJar is a Customer Strategies think tank and advisory organization committed to helping vendors and end-users improve their customer strategies with customized advice and personalized research services. 

Traditional Research and Advisory powerhouses do a good job targeting and serving the average organization. Organizations using enterprise applications today are nothing close to an average organization. Ever increasing competitive pressures, shortening release cycles, and the break-neck speed of technological innovations (even in our down economy) make the information produced by the powerhouses stale at best by the time it reaches the necessary hands. In addition, the deluge of information created by the social evolution makes the job of researching new technologies and business issues impossible to accomplish on a part-time basis.

The answer has been Strategic Consulting days with one or more of the research analysts in these research organizations. While this is a good way to collect a large amount of information in one day (strategically done as a two-way communication where both parties grow their knowledge), it is hard to plan the perfect timing for these events to occur as the need and the data could change dramatically in a very short time, and the analyst may not be available to provide the necessary update. Even then, the information used is not customized, tends to be recycled from existing presentations, and changing the content of the deck is hard to do, usually only adding slides to the existing materials – not customizing it.

We are here to change that by providing customized and personalized information as necessary to make better decisions and succeed where others failed.

Mark Tamis has been active in Enterprise Software for most of his active career (EAI, Enterprise Portals, Collaboration, Knowledge Management, Content Management, Business Process Management, Enterprise 2.0), mainly with US companies such as Attachmate, Plumtree, BEA Systems and Oracle.

Mark is based in Paris, France and has various degrees in International Business, Management and Marketing from French, Dutch and English Business Schools. His multi-cultural and multi-industry experience puts him in a unique position to transfer insights between different markets, countries, cultures and companies.

He is currently researching how Social CRM can be used to organise companies to become "Social Businesses", how to enable the establishment of a deeper engagement between customers, employees, partners and suppliers to meet the desired outcomes of all involved.

Net-7 is a network of consultants and managers specialized in Information Technology and Communication. Its members have Executive Board-Level experience or are subject-matter experts and combined provide a complete range of operational and strategic competencies to reinforce your organisation with the necessary skills when you most need them.

Ne-7 provides expertise in Business Development, Marketing, Customer Service and Support, Customer Relationship Management, IT Consulting, Finance and Professional Coaching.