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Trendspotting

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February 2007, Issue 64

Nucleus Research offers these insights . . .
	Bloggers Beware Blogging may seem an attractive opportunity to express opinions, promote products, and share ideas with the largest audience in the world. But how effective are they? Nucleus Research's recent survey of 135 IT decision makers may surprise you. The firm found that only half the respondents actually read blogs—and those who do read only a blog or two per week.
	Knowledge Management Meets Web 2.0 If you think knowledge management sounds scary, who can blame you? After all, it conjures bad memories of the late 1990s, when it drove up spending while yielding little ROI. But times have changed. KM technologies and concepts are now melding with Web 2.0 to deliver filtering, alerts, wikis, and agents—tools that are popping up as the latest way to wring more value from CRM and other systems. Seamless integration with the office desktop isn't far behind. Agent, filtering, and collaboration technologies will become more prevalent in CRM, ERP, and other applications—as will additional features designed to make the apps more intuitive and easier to use. Look to vendors like Invisible CRM to bridge the gap between desktop habits and successful CRM. Invisible CRM synchronizes on-demand systems with online desktop applications to provide salespeople with a familiar platform that automatically updates, locally stores, and easily transfers customer information to improve employee productivity, increase the accuracy of customer information, and strengthen campaign management. With the slogan "change the software, not the people," Invisible CRM is doing just that.
	Give Your Site Fresh Eyes There's more to Web sites than content versioning and publishing. Indeed, you may want to take a closer look at how your Web site supports customer and partner interaction. Ask yourself: How easily can customers learn about us and get what they want? And how can we manage our Web site more cost-effectively? A number of developments are driving both E-commerce and traditional corporate sites to rethink their Web site strategies. For example, Vignette's continued innovation in usability for business users—together with a customer-interaction module designed to deliver a dynamic experience to every visitor—could make upgrading worthwhile. Also on the E-commerce side, on-demand players continue to offer a TCO significantly lower than what traditional vendors promise. They're now poised to break through with large-scale deployments.
	Do-It-Yourself Market Research With easy-to-use, on-demand tools like WebSurveyor, savvy marketers can gather data and reap insights on customer satisfaction and behavior on an ongoing or even transactional basis—rather than just compare last year's survey results to this year's. Although customer-survey data is interesting, it's not valuable unless it's actionable. Solutions like WebSurveyor are designed to help decision makers quickly and easily survey customers. Things really get interesting when you add innovation like WebSurveyor's CRMSurveyor to the mix. Integrated with Salesforce.com, CRMSurveyor can automatically ask customers or prospects a set of questions when a service request is completed or a sale is transacted, then feed the responses back to the CRM application for analysis. Using E-mail alerts and dynamic dashboards, management can quickly see when a problem develops, analyze win/loss ratios, and get ongoing daily feedback about how the team is doing.