Solving the Social CRM Equation

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Solving the Social CRM Equation

Action items, best practices, and other data from

a global survey of CRM decision-makers

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Executive Summary

Abstract

Data from a global survey of over 1200 CRM decision-makers reveals how organizations are combining enterprise social applications (ESA) with customer relationship

management (CRM) to better manage the customer experience. This white paper presents a digest of the data, with concrete recommendations, action items, best practices, and other information to help IT and/or business CRM decision-makers understand how your peers in similar organizations are succeeding with Social CRM, to assist in formulating, assessing, or adapting your own enterprise social strategy and choice of enterprise social application(s).

Understanding Social CRM

The rapid adoption of social media by business and other organizations is transforming customer relationship management (CRM) into customer experience management (CEM) via Social CRM. Social media gives companies many more channels to reach customers (who these days are nearly 60% of the way through their buying process before they formally make contact). It also lets the customer be heard more clearly, helping organizations respond quickly to potential customer service and satisfaction problems before they escalate into the social media storms that can badly damage a brand or reputation.

In recognition of this, many organizations are developing an enterprise social strategy (ESS) to harness the power of social media using one or more enterprise social

applications (ESA). Such efforts are most often first focused on improving the

organization’s CRM processes, i.e., “Social CRM.” CRM and social media are made for each other.

To understand how organizations are combining enterprise social applications with CRM, Microsoft commissioned Crimson Consulting to conduct an extensive primary and

secondary research study of CRM decision-makers worldwide to discover their

experiences with and attitudes about their ESAs in that context. The primary research comprised 16 in-depth interviews of CRM decision-makers, and a detailed on-line survey of over 1200 of their peers worldwide, all of whom already have an Enterprise Social Strategy.1

What you will learn from this white paper

Above all else, the survey results show that Social CRM doesn’t just happen when you put an enterprise social application alongside your CRM system. Social applications involve the entire enterprise and need to provide a collaborative infrastructure that extends beyond CRM.

Instead, the survey found respondents focused on their need for an ESA that integrates with enterprise applications beyond CRM.

Why perpetuate another silo, when breaking down silos is what both CRM and social media are about?

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This white paper is designed to help you, as an IT and/or business CRM decision-maker, understand how your peers in organizations like yours are implementing Social CRM, to assist in formulating, assessing, or adapting your own enterprise social strategy and your choice of enterprise social application(s). It offers a distillation of the experiences of companies like yours with leveraging the power of social media for CRM.

Throughout the paper we drill down into the data so that you can more closely compare your Social CRM efforts and attitudes to your peers, based on comparisons to

organizations like yours by size, industry, technology style, and other parameters. Assess your organization’s position along these axes and determine your relative position in enterprise social application adoption.

If you find your company in more leading categories than otherwise, companies like yours tend to be well along the adoption curve. This means there are more examples out there to look at, including success stories, shortcomings, and experiences that can accelerate your efforts.

If you find your company in more lagging categories than otherwise, companies like yours tend to be a bit behind, but don’t worry. This simply means that you have more opportunity to take advantage of the experiences of others.

We’ve organized the data into four sections.

1. Action items and recommendations: based on your peers’ experience, what should be top of mind for your enterprise social strategy?

2. An introduction to Social CRM: why is it catching on so fast, and what are the chief obstacles to success?

3. How does your company compare to others in terms of ESA adoption, the criteria used to select and judge an ESA, and attitudes about CRM vendors: 4. Appendices for those who wish to delve more deeply into the data, including

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Action items & recommendations

Although the specifics for any one organization in our sample vary widely, there are some very solid commonalities in the data that can be summarized in the form of seven recommendations for action. Regardless of where you are in your enterprise social strategy, these are considerations that should be top of mind or near it.

MOVE QUICKLY

If you’re not already investigating how social capabilities can complement your

customer experience strategy, you need to get started. During the interview screening process we found very few candidates with an enterprise social strategy that were not already involved with an ESA proof of concept (POC): only 14 percent were still in the planning stage; almost 90 percent of eventual respondents were already evaluating a POC or had completed one.

14%: ESA Planning/ Research but no POC commitment 43%: ESA POC in place or scheduled 28%: ESA Selection in process or selected but not deployed 14%: ESA Deployed

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THINK STRATEGICALLY, NOT TACTICALLY

Start with an enterprise social strategy (ESS) that comprehends strategic integration with key enterprise applications. Avoid ending up with siloed point solutions, disgruntled users, and a low return on investment (ROI). As the General Manager of Sales at a business process outsourcing company said in his interview: “It’s important that organizations not just have an enterprise social application but an enterprise social strategy, which has to be pretty rock solid.” Another interviewee, the Senior Manager, Sales Systems and Operations at a software company, noted that “Your strategy has to be supported at the highest level; executive sponsorship and usage is crucial to

success.”

AVOID SILOS

Avoid piecemeal implementation of enterprise social applications that creates silos within groups or departments. This can be hard to do, because so many ESAs are cloud-based and thus easy to deploy on a small scale for an informal proof of concept without considering higher-level corporate goals (or even necessarily touching base with IT). Develop a strategy that enables you to start small without losing sight of larger organizational needs, based on a solution that expands gracefully to include more people and data sources over time. Point solutions that cannot scale to support the entire business can become costly when they reach their limits, and disappoint users on the way.

COMMUNICATE USER VALUE

Organizations reported that user acceptance was one of their leading selection criteria. Clearly define to users the value the enterprise social application(s) will provide. This communication drives acceptance. Consider offering incentives for adoption, or even limited mandates (e.g., combining the ESA with a must-use application like time-keeping).

As expected we found that CRM decision makers who are “ready to deploy” are

significantly more optimistic about user adoption than those that are already deployed. The exercise of defining value will help avoid hearing a comment like the one offered by the VP of Marketing Operations for a software company: “I’m not sure if people have really seen the value [of our CRM vendor ESA]. I don’t know if I truly see the value.”

FOCUS YOUR ESA INTEGRATION

Social media applications are not an end in themselves, and although CRM is often the initial focus of an ESS, there will be other applications that an enterprise social

application must integrate with for widespread adoption to take place. In our survey we found that the applications for which ESA integration was considered most important included ERP and in-house (custom) applications, desktop email, and desktop

spreadsheet applications. In fact, one senior director of sales operations commented: “[My sales team] didn’t want to migrate away from Outlook and then have to log into a separate cloud-based CRM system to do live chat”, and another VP Sales who actually disabled their ESA app “We found there was a disconnect between people who were talking on Chatter but not necessarily adding any value to the knowledge base that we needed to gather on our customers.”

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ESTABLISH CLEAR CRITERIA

You must be able to clearly define the criteria for selecting and implementing an ESA and their relative importance. Regardless of company type, our survey found that CRM decision-makers consider two criteria significantly more important than others: user acceptance and demonstrable ROI. Beyond that, the relative weight of various

considerations can vary widely depending on company needs (e.g., B2B versus B2C). When evaluating an ESA, work with vendors to determine how they can help educate users and measure success to support your program.

DEFINE ROI

The single biggest challenge in social media for the enterprise is the ability to demonstrate the ROI of an ESS. The survey clearly reveals a significant shortfall in respondent satisfaction with the demonstrable ROI of their ESS efforts. This critical metric must be defined as a part of your overall Enterprise Social Strategy, and should relate directly to how the ESA will deliver value to the users. This means that it must be clear how ESAs will be used, how they will improve performance, and how that

improvement will be measured. This is critical to driving social media beyond “low-hanging fruit” or isolated, homogenous internal groups.

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Introduction: What’s Driving Social CRM?

From the beginning, the vision for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has been about developing effective relationships with customers and gaining their loyalty to your brand, product or service. Despite that, until recently, the major focus of CRM

deployment was on the internal business processes used to manage these relationships. The fundamental question was: how do we coordinate our customer relationship across sales, marketing, customer service and support? Answering that question has taken over twenty years, creating in the process a vibrant market in tools and processes to help an organization to hear clearly and speak with one voice when dealing with customers. What has been missing though, is a clear understanding of how customers experience the relationship lifecycle. Now, that is changing with the advent of Social CRM.

“Social CRM” boosts customer experience management (CEM)

As CRM continues to empower the business, the dramatic growth of social media is empowering customers and giving them an even louder voice. It is also tending to make them more independent: a recent study showed that buyers are almost 60 percent of the way through their buying cycle before first “official” contact with a company.2_{Much of that pre-contact process is conducted through social media, and so}

is a lot of post-purchase activity, especially when things go wrong—and then the whole world may hear of it!

Social media is accelerating the ongoing transition from customer relationship

management (CRM) to customer experience management (CEM). This is not another

acronym, there are hard economic facts behind it. An analysis of leaders and laggards in the Forrester Customer Experience Index from 2007 to 2011 showed that the cumulative total returns

of the Customer Experience Leaders portfolio was 128% higher than the Laggards, and 27% higher than the S&P 500.3_{So it’s no surprise that CRM decision-makers are}

turning their attention to the increasing weight of customer experience, and CRM

vendors are responding to the opportunity with focused “Social CRM” applications: it’s a matter of the bottom line!

Social CRM is the front line of enterprise social strategies

Most organization enterprises today are exploring or deploying collaborative

technologies. Social media expands the capabilities of these technologies to include direct customer and prospect engagement. Many enterprises, especially larger ones in business-to-consumer (B2C) industries, already have or are developing an enterprise social strategy (ESS), a blueprint for not only accelerating the erosion of barriers between internal work groups, but also engaging better with customers and other

2_{CEB, The New High Performer Playbook, Arlington VA, 2012 and}

http://www.executiveboard.com/exbd/sales-service/the-end-of-solution-sales/index.page

3_{http://www.watermarkconsult.net/blog/2012/02/01/the-roi-of-a-great-customer-experience/}

“I think management realizes that we’re going to have to do the social thing one way or the other; we just have to define how we’re going to do it.” -- VP CIO, manufacturing firm

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external stakeholders. One major obstacle our study found was that Social CRM applications have yet to deliver good monitoring tools.

Nonetheless, Social CRM is on the front lines of an enterprise social strategy simply because social media and CRM are synergistic, and because of increased awareness of the sales and support downsides of not being plugged into the customer’s social world. There are enterprise social applications (ESAs) available, many of

them cloud-based, that claim to bring social capabilities to CRM, including the ones from established CRM vendors that are the subject of this white paper. The result is a lot of experimentation as users and vendors work to figure out Social CRM. Our research study focused on that effort.

The Social CRM equation

ESA + CRM

≠

SCRM

What is already becoming clear, from the experiences of leading Social CRM deployers, is that just adding an enterprise social application to your CRM system will not give you Social CRM. Nor, as revealed in this study, are decision-makers interested in a “bolt-on” enterprise social application for their CRM system; they are looking to their CRM

vendors to get it right. They want tools that integrate with all the business applications their users depend on, not more silos.

What our research shows is that social CRM is following the same developmental path as other disruptive technologies, and that decision-makers expect social capabilities to become features of their entire enterprise application landscape. Our research strongly implies that CRM decision-makers are looking carefully at their vendor’s roadmaps in expectation of this evolution.

Milestones on the road to Social CRM

In the meantime, however, IT and business decision-makers are struggling with tools that, thanks to the consumerization of IT and social media itself, are often difficult to control. Many, especially cloud-based ESAs, are easy to implement as a casual proof-of-concept for a cohesive internal community (too often, a fancy phrase for “silo”), so a given company may have multiple, independent trials in different departments. Only later do most of the early adopters find that ease of implementation is not the same as effectiveness or ease of use, that the CRM systems—and their users—don’t have a common focus or vocabulary, and that it’s impossible to demonstrate a convincing ROI to the executive suite.

“We have no methodology for figuring out whether the customer is still engaged with us or not.” -- VP Marketing, email service provider

Lack of integration can “create a situation where you’re just monitoring another little icon on your desktop.” -- General Manager Sales, business process

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When the bloom comes off the rose, not only will many of these efforts have squandered precious organizational time and resources, they will likely have poisoned the well for many users, too, who will be rightly suspicious of new social CRM initiatives. As we’ll see, user acceptance is one of the two primary criteria among CRM decision-makers for judging the success of social CRM, so this is more than a mere speed bump.

Demonstrable ROI is the other primary criterion. Without this, the necessary buy-in and support from LOB and executive managers is hard to get. As this study shows,

customers aren’t satisfied with their Social CRM ROI—they’re pretty sure it’s there, but are having a hard time proving it, which is slowing adoption.

Five Questions Answered

 How fast is ESA adoption going for companies like mine, and am I ahead or behind the curve?

o How fast are ESAs catching on among companies like mine? o Where are companies like mine in their ESA deployment?

 What are my peers looking for in Social CRM, and what are they getting? o What criteria do my peers use to select a CRM vendor ESA and how

satisfied are they?

o Which enterprise systems do my peers most want their CRM Vendor ESA to integrate with?

 What choices are they making? Which CRM vendor’s ESA are they deploying or likely to deploy?

o Which CRM vendor do my peers think is the most credible as a supplier of applications for their enterprise social strategy?

How fast are enterprise social applications catching on among

companies like mine?

Another way to put that question is: “How long do I have before my competitors are reaping the benefits of Social CRM?” The answer is: not long. 70 percent of respondents thought it likely or extremely likely that at least 50% of their users will be using an enterprise social application as their primary internal collaboration tool by the end of 2014. Moreover, analysis found this to be a remarkably consistent response regardless of company size and industry; that is, there were no significant differences across these parameters.

However, respondents in organizations that have selected an enterprise social application but have not yet deployed it (the third in the four steps of an enterprise social strategy, defined in the survey as “ESS Status”) were significantly more likely to

anticipate rapid adoption than those in companies in the other three stages. This is a

particularly interesting result in regards to organizations in the fourth stage of their ESS strategy: deployed. It suggests that the optimism of “ready to deploy” is often

tempered by the reality of actual deployment and operation. This is as expected for a still-immature market where best practices, and the capabilities needed to support them, are not yet fully understood. We shall see other signs of this as we go on.

“I’m not sure if people have really seen the value [of our CRM vendor ESA]. I don’t know if I truly see the value.” -- VP Marketing Operations, Software Company

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Where are companies like mine in their ESA deployment?

Here, the real question is “where are my competitors?” As we’ll see, the results show that many of them are already working on their enterprise social strategy, and many of these are already involved with a proof of concept. Taken together with the answer to the first question, this implies a need to urgency.

As noted in the Introduction, we broke down enterprise social strategies into four stages:

 ESA planning / research but no POC

 ESA POC scheduled or in-place

 ESA selection process ongoing or complete but not deployed

 ESA deployed

Analysis turned up interesting differences by organization size, business technology style, and industry: enough of them to help you zero in on where organizations like yours and decision-makers like you are in their Social CRM efforts.

ESA ADOPTION STAGE BY ORGANIZATION SIZE

Overall, there’s a lot of social media momentum in companies of all sizes, but one size of organization stands out. Very large enterprises (5,000+ employees) are significantly more likely to have deployed, selected, or be in the process of selecting, an enterprise social application. Below 5,000 employees, there were no significant differences in POC status, but the proportion that is still in POC or scheduled is larger. As well,

organizations of any size are equally likely (actually, unlikely) to be engaged in only research or planning.

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ESA ADOPTION STAGE BY INDUSTRY

Three of the seven industry categories in this study show significant differences in ESA Adoption Stage: Healthcare, Government/Local/Education, and also Financial Services (for different reasons). Manufacturing, Professional Services, Retail, and

Media/Hospitality/Other were quite similar in their adoption profile.

READING THE CHART

Although all industries were equally likely to have deployed, chosen but not deployed yet, or be in the process or selection of an ESA, Healthcare and

Government/Local/Education were farthest along: more than half of the companies in these industries had already selected or deployed an enterprise social application. Both were significantly more likely than any other industry to have selected but not deployed an ESA, the third stage of ESA adoption.

However, Financial Services appears poised to catch up fast, being directionally more likely than any other industry to have a POC in place. This conclusion is supported by other data, as discussed later.

CLOUD ATTITUDE

Cloud attitude among respondents is interesting here especially as support for other findings. The correlations our analysis discovered between ESA adoption and cloud attitude, and between cloud attitude and industry, underscore the lead that Healthcare and Government / Local / Education hold. They are more likely to be Cloud Committed, a category significantly more likely to have already deployed an ESA. By contrast, Retail and Financial Services are more likely to be Cloud Planners, which are significantly more likely to be in the planning and research only phase, and significantly less likely to have deployed an ESA.

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What criteria do my peers use to select a CRM vendor ESA?

The survey and interviews looked at the criteria by which a company selects an ESA or judges its success. These may be functions or benefits. Analysis found significant or interesting correlations for industry, technology style, and respondent role. There were no significant differences by size or cloud status.

PRIMARY-ESSENTIAL CRITERIA

Two criteria were significantly more important than any others: User Acceptance and

Demonstrable ROI; there is no significant difference between these two, although user acceptance is directionally more important. So important is user acceptance that some companies use incentives to encourage the use of an ESA, or even mandate it. “You don’t

spend millions of dollars to not have people use the software,” said the VP Sales EMEA at a professional services firm where use of the company’s enterprise social application was mandated by amending employee contracts. Other firms may choose to “mandate” use by making the social application the gateway to a familiar, necessary task, like

“We offered incentives – money and recognition – to employees who contributed the most success stories to our forums”. VP

Marketing Operations, Software Company

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Demonstrable ROI was also very important, being especially desirable for executive buy-in, but the survey revealed a small but significant shortfall in respondent satisfaction with these criteria compare to its importance. Unless measured and managed, this shortfall may become an obstacle to Social CRM progress.

OTHER INTERESTING DIFFERENCES: INDUSTRY, SIZE, AND

TECHNOLOGY ATTITUDE

Financial services stands out, rating support for B2B social sales significantly higher than any other industry. It also favors applicability for multiple business groups, internal collaboration, and crowd-sourcing. There are also indications (directional) that

 Healthcare rates interoperability with existing apps higher

 Manufacturing rates demonstrable ROI higher

 Retail rates forums higher

As for organization size, although it’s not a significant difference, you can see immediately a directional indication of the enthusiasm of mid-to-large organizations noted in Appendix B (Demographics): they appear more interested in all of the criteria listed.

A similar situation exists for technology-leading organizations, already mentioned in connection with customer service. They are directionally more likely to rate all the criteria higher than followers or laggards.

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Which enterprise systems do companies most want their CRM

vendor ESA to integrate with?

ESA integration is essential for all the applications surveyed. The primary applications are ERP and in-house applications; secondary applications were desktop email and desktop spreadsheets.

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The only categorical difference that stands out here again involves large mid-sized organizations (500 – 999 employees): they are significantly more likely to rate ESA integration with desktop email as more important and directionally more likely to rate ESA integration with financial applications and desktop spreadsheets as more important. We see this as additional evidence of enthusiasm in this sector.

Which CRM vendor ESA are my peers choosing? Which vendor is

most credible?

The survey also probed which CRM vendor enterprise social application respondents had chosen or were choosing. In this context, ESA simply means “tool” or “tools.” These could be something like Microsoft Yammer, or more customized solutions based on platforms like Microsoft SharePoint or various solutions from IBM and Oracle. Due to its commanding position in enterprise software, especially office productivity applications and corporate email (an important integration point), Microsoft holds a commanding position here, followed by in-house applications.

“They didn’t want to migrate away from Outlook and then have to log into a separate cloud-based CRM system to do live chat.” – Senior Director Sales Operations, professional services firm

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However, the data also reveal that the choice of ESA is largely independent of the choice of CRM vendor. We surmise that this is simply a symptom of the relative immaturity of ESAs, especially as regards Social CRM, as they mature from point solution to feature.

Additionally, Microsoft was identified as the CRM vendor that survey respondents think most credible as a source of applications for their enterprise social strategy, followed closely by IBM and then Oracle.

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Appendix A: Respondent desires,

challenges, and best practices

While developing the survey instrument, Crimson conducted in-depth interviews with 16 CRM decision-makers to zero in on their major concerns and make sure these were covered in the online survey. Here we present highlights of these interviews (many of them already called out in the text) arranged under three heads:

 What do CRM decision-makers like you want in Social CRM?

 What challenges do CRM decision-makers like you face?

 What best practices do CRM decision-makers like you recommend?

What your peers want from Social CRM

Interviewees wanted ESAs to break down the communication and information silos across the organization, but most importantly wanted them to work effectively where they are needed most. They require:

INTEGRATION WITH ENTERPRISE APPLICATIONS, ESPECIALLY

ERP AND EMAIL

“They didn’t want to migrate away from Outlook and then have to log into a separate cloud-based CRM system to do live chat.” (Senior Director Sales Operations,

professional services firm)

DEEP INTEGRATION WITH CRM, NOT A “BOLT-ON”

If the ESA doesn’t fully integrate with the CRM solution, it can actually reduce the amount of information available. “People were sharing knowledge in the [chat tool] and figuring they’d done their job—but none of that knowledge was getting into the CRM system and so couldn’t be reported on.” (VP Marketing, email service provider) Lack of integration can “create a situation where you’re just monitoring another little icon on your desktop.” (General Manager Sales, business process outsourcing firm).

INTERVIEWEES WANT SOCIAL METRICS AND ENGAGEMENT

MEASURES

In particular, they want to know where customers are in the current sales cycle, and be able to research them easily.

“We have no methodology for figuring out whether the customer is still engaged with us or not.” (VP Marketing, email service provider)

What challenges your peers face in Social CRM

USER ACCEPTANCE OFTEN NEEDS INCENTIVES OR MANDATES

“We offered incentives – money and recognition – to employees who contributed the most success stories to our forums” (VP Marketing Operations, software company) “The main adoption driver was changing everyone’s employment contract to make use of these tools part of their job. You don’t spend millions of dollars to not have people use the software.” (VP Sales EMEA, professional services firm).

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EXECUTIVE BUY-IN AND USE

“Your strategy has to be supported at the highest level; executive sponsorship and usage is crucial to success.” Senior Manager, Sales Systems and Operations, Software Company

EXECUTIVE FEAR OF NEGATIVE POSTINGS

“Some companies fear negative comments, but it’s really just keeping a finger on the pulse of your customers. Social lets you nip things in the bud if it’s done right.” VP & CIO, manufacturing firm

Social CRM best practices mentioned by your peers

START WITH STRATEGY TO AVOID WASTING EFFORT

“It’s important that organizations not just have an enterprise social application but an enterprise social strategy, which has to be pretty rock solid” General Manager Sales, business process outsourcing company

LOOK FOR SUCCESSFUL EXAMPLES TO COPY, AND CLEARLY

DEFINE ACCEPTABLE AND UNACCEPTABLE USE, TO HELP DRIVE

ADOPTION.

“Adoption [of our ESA] was almost all training and examples of what other people had done. People especially wanted to know what was and wasn’t acceptable use.” Vice President of Marketing, manufacturer

Appendix B: Study methodology and

demographics

In October and November of 2012 Crimson surveyed over 1200 CRM decision makers (Business and IT-focused) worldwide with an enterprise social strategy regarding their attitudes about the adoption of Social CRM tools. All of them had to either have

deployed, or have plans to deploy, enterprise social applications. The candidates were screened from an original population of almost 35,000 IT professionals and sampled to produce a cross section of the customers of the four leading CRM vendors: Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce.com, and SAP.

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Quotas were also imposed on country, industry, size of business, social adoption status, and respondent role to produce, as far as possible, a representative sampling of global opinion on social CRM. The result, as discussed in this section and elsewhere, is that the demographics of this study are not only internally consistent to a high degree, but dovetail with a variety of data cross-sections based on one of the above parameters. To aid the development of the on-line survey that provides the quantitative data to be discussed below, Crimson conducted sixteen (16) in-depth interviews of IT and business decision-makers who qualified. Quotations from those interviews and other qualitative data will be found throughout this paper, attributed by title and industry; a full table of interview participants may be found in Appendix A.

DEMOGRAPHICS: WHAT KINDS OF COMPANIES ALREADY HAVE

AN ENTERPRISE SOCIAL STRATEGY?

Here, however, we simply summarize the demographics of our global sample—by definition, only companies who already have an enterprise social strategy—with a focus on “scene-setting” correlations among those six parameters.

Size

Respondents are well-distributed among mid-size and enterprise companies as measured by employee count.

 Very Large (Large Enterprise: 5000+)

 Large (Enterprise: 1000-4999)

 Medium-to-large (500-999)

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Industry

Study participants also represent a broad cross section of major industry categories:

 Financial Services

 Government / Local / Education

 Healthcare

 Manufacturing

 Media / Hospitality / Other

 Professional Services

 Retail

As we will see, this also implies different balances between internal and external communication needs (e.g., B2C industries are likely more concerned about external communications than B2B).

ESA Status, Technology Attitude, and Cloud Adoption

The ESA Status of respondents correlates nicely with their Technology Attitude; data from both imply that enterprise social application adoption happens rapidly once an Enterprise Social Strategy is in place. In addition, Cloud Adoption Attitude parallels

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ESA STATUS

The survey characterized the stage of respondents’ enterprise social application adoption into four categories, here listed in order of maturity:

 ESA planning / research but no Proof of Concept (POC)

 ESA POC scheduled or in-place

 ESA selection process ongoing or complete but not deployed

 ESA deployed

However, during the screening process we found very few candidates with an enterprise social strategy that were not already involved with a POC: almost 90 percent of

eventual respondents were already doing a POC or had done one, and only 14 percent were still in the planning stage.

ROLE: IT AND BUSINESS DECISION-MAKERS

79 percent of respondents are IT decision-makers (ITDM) and 21 percent are business decision-makers (BDM). There is no significant difference in proportion by CRM Vendor, even though this parameter was selected during the screening process independently of CRM Vendor. We found only minor Social CRM attitudinal differences between ITDMs and BDMs during analysis, which is actually good news, for cooperation between IT and business is essential for success, given the scope of any reasonably effective enterprise social strategy.

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Appendix C: Details for interview

participants

Title Industry ESA Status Country

Director of Digital Technology and Innovation

Media Deployed USA

VP Marketing Email service provider Research, no POC in

progress UK

VP CIO Manufacturing Deployed USA

CIO Manufacturing Deployed USA

General Manager

Sales Business Process Outsourcing Deployed AUS

VP Global Sales

Operations Software Deployed USA

Marketing Manager Software Deployed Germany

Senior Director Sales

Operations Professional Services Deployed USA

Senior Manager Sales

Operations Telecommunications Planning, no POC in progress USA General Manager

Operations Initiatives Financial Services Deployed AUS

Vice President of

Marketing Operations Software Deployed USA

Chief Information Officer and Chief of Staff

Healthcare Deployed USA

Senior Manager, Sales Systems and Operations

Software Deployed USA

Vice President

Marketing Manufacturing Deployed USA

Vice President Sales

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Appendix D: Statistical terminology (how to

read charts, etc.)

Ranking

Results are ranked on a relative basis using a statistical analysis of the responses4_and

illustrated as shown in the figure. Responses are placed into statistically significant groups, indicated by different colors, which should be interpreted as follows:

1. The first member of each group is statistically distinguishable from the first member of the following group. So here, “User acceptance…” is significantly more likely to be rated “Essential” than “The flexibility…” 2. Each individual member of the group is statistically indistinguishable from

the first member of the group. None of the four criteria after “The flexibility…” can be ranked relative to “The flexibility…”.

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The groups are therefore ranked based on the first member of the group, rather than the individual responses within the groups.

Rating

Responses involving importance or satisfaction are rated on an absolute basis to assist in comparisons between questions.

IMPORTANCE

Results based on Importance are rated on a scale of 1-5 according to value of the mean, and interpreted on the basis of our experience in one of four categories as shown in the Table:

4+ Very Important-Essential Items with this rating are essential to the

program, process, or product. These are baseline items, without them the program or process is seriously deficient, weakened, unlikely even to be considered.

3.5-4 Important-Desirable Items with this rating are desirable for the

program, process, or product. Presence of all of these items ensures a competitive or effective program or process

3-3.5 Marginally Important-Potentially Useful Items with this rating are potentially useful for the program, process or product. Presence of some or all of these items can ensure a competitively differentiated program.

<3 Unimportant-Not Required Items with this rating are not required for the

program, process, or product.

SATISFACTION

Results based on Satisfaction are rated on a scale of 1-7 according to value of the mean, and interpreted on the basis of our experience in one of four categories as shown in the Table:

6+ Satisfied-Excellent Items with this rating are delivering excellent user

satisfaction. Most products or programs strive, but do not achieve this level. Recipients are unlikely to switch to a replacement.

5-6 Satisfied-Expected Items with this rating are delivering expected user

satisfaction. Most successful products or programs have selected key items that achieve this level. Users may occasionally look for a replacement. 4-5 Slightly satisfied-Needs Improvement Items with this rating need improvement. It is rare

for even successful products or programs not to have some items at this level. Users will continue using but look for a replacement, or ask their vendor to improve.

<4 Unsatisfied-Not satisfactory Items with this rating are not satisfactory. Successful products or programs will have no items at this level. Users will stop using, actively

(26)

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Significant and directional results

Throughout this paper we use terms such as “significant,” “significantly,” “directional,” and “directionally.”

Significant means definitely different. Direction means not significantly different, but the data is tending that way and in our judgment might rise to significance with a larger sample. Direction is also indicated by words like “perhaps,” “may,” and “likely.”

Neither a significant difference nor a directional difference is intended to be a substitute for the judgment and expertise of the reader. These results are designed to support your experience not substitute for it.

About Crimson Marketing

We help executives achieve market leadership

Crimson is a management consulting firm focused on marketing. Our clients include Adobe, Cisco, eBay, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Seagate, Symantec and Verizon. We are experts in the marketing of technology solutions.

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