CRM Tiger

Imagine No Points!

2010-08-31T18:19:00.000-07:00

Once again one of my newer favorite voices on SCN has caused me to launch the ultimate response to his question:
http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/20660

The post was about why have the number of active contributors measured by points dropped and do we care. My answer is I would love to see that number drop to zero. Whoa.. you mean no contributions on SCN? Actually what I mean is that points are no longer rewarded period.

Y'all know if you are reading this how points evolved on SCN. The problem is that in order to move the community forward we need to grow beyond points for contributions. We must acknowledge to grow quality contributions we need to eliminate the point motivations.

Now everyone is going to say points are a currency or points motivate people, or without points things would stop happening. Guess the sky won't fall if we got rid of the points and figured out a new system of exchange.

What I propose is that you need to earn the right to ask by sharing. The system is simple to consume/retrieve content you need credits. Each consumption to unlock the content requires 1 credit. When you join the site you get a monthly allowance of credits to view content. This is prevent gaming of earning the credits. To earn credits you can do the following:

- Answer a question
- Rate an answer or other content
- Provide content in forum of a blog or wiki or article
- Participate in community driven events online or in person

Credits can also be traded or given to other members as needed. You might give a fellow member a credit to view the content that you just created.

Sweet now we have community where you have to participate in some fashion to gain full access. Technically this would be probably hard to implement and keep track of, but this would give the incentive to participate without asking people to achieve any type of artificial goals.

Like my favorite song title "You get what you give" this would truly require all of us to participate in order to get a benefit.

I'm posting this on my personal blog, because honestly this is more of a revolutionary statement, than working within the system.

Let me know what you think.

Radio Silence

2010-04-07T18:19:00.000-07:00

For the last three weeks, it feels like I have gone into radio silence mode without much explanation. I thought I blog real quick what has been personally happening with me so those of you following me know what's happening.

For a quick recap let's review my 2010 so far:

January 2010 - My son Zachary(2nd child) was born on the 12th. It's been a busy household adjusting to two kids

February 2010 - Calm before the storm. We finally get into a routine with Zachary and Emily and life is flowing with the new normal. Little did I know that things would change again in about two weeks

March 2010
The first big issue is that Zachary has bad reflux and is not gaining a lot weight and has a ton of spit up. We find out after his two month appointment. I end up taking a half day off work to help my wife deal with the reflux issues after his doctor appointment. Good news now is that it seems to be under control now and he is finally showing more weight gain.

The second piece is that I found a new opportunity and will be leaving my current employer and be joining a new company. As I get more settled in that position I will talk about the transition as my job role will be changing from what I am currently doing at my present employer. As you can imagine it's been very busy winding down my old position and getting ready for the new position.

That's the short summary of what has been happening and I will post more later in the future.

Take care,

Stephen

Rainy October

2009-10-29T18:26:00.000-07:00

It feels like I need to build an ark with all the rain happening around here lately. It almost parallels what I have been up to lately, so let's do a recap
- Future of SAP CRM webinar
- ASUG Virtual Education Summit session recording
- Vacation in San Diego
- ASUG Virtual Education Summit chat session
- SAP Teched Phoenix for the SAP Mentor Program
- My daughter's 3rd birthday

Yeah that is probably more than enough with everyday life. Which reminds me also I'm also helping my wife get ready for our second child due in January.

Green/Sustainable CRM

2009-07-08T19:42:00.000-07:00

So eventually I'm going to blog on this topic on SCN. However until all my research is done, let's outline a few concepts:

Drive to eBusiness

Sales

e-Commerce real time retail availability

Prevent consumers from making unnecessary trips by providing up to date in store inventory.

electronic mailing

Send out all communications via electronic methods

webinar based selling

Conduct followup "sales visit" using web conferencing and reduce number of physical trips

paperless discounts

Eliminate all paper based discounts, including coupons and rebates.

Marketing

Communication preferences

Keep customer preferences up to date and gear people towards electronic medium. Only use physical marketing materials when preference expressed

electronic mailing

Once again use electronic channel to reduce junk mail etc. Offer different types of e-goodies to replace traditional promo items given out

improve targeting

Reduce physical materials by better segmentation and analytics

Service

e-Service requests

All documentation regarding service etc.. in electronic format. Paper copy optional

self service / improve scheduling

Allow self service scheduling of appointments + early cancel mechanism via web.

remote diagnostics

Provide more remote troubleshooting capabilities when possible.

Consumer Habits
Default to electronic channel, paper on request only

End of June

2009-06-30T19:15:00.000-07:00

Wow it is almost the end of June and things have gone by so quickly. I'm looking back at this month and realizing that I have about 4 works till my Anniversary trip with Karon and 8 weeks until vacation.

I'm looking forward to vacation as I'm going back to San Diego with Karon and get to take Emily out there with us. Karon and myself love San Diego and went there on our honeymoon. It will be special to take our daughter out there to see everything out there.

I'm also have been gradually working on getting the room that acts as my office in my house ready to be painted. Unfortuantely there is a lot of junk that needs to be moved out, packed up and some of gotten rid of. However I have a few weeks to get the room fully ready, and by the end of this week I plan on packing/moving another bookshelf out, plus empty most of the closet.

Well I probably should get going here, but I will post more later on some CRM related topics when I think of something good.

Take care.

Thank you and other thoughts

2009-06-10T19:17:00.000-07:00

I wanted to follow up and once again thank in generally everyone who sent their congratulations and thank yous after the SAP Mentor News. I'm impressed with how friendly/welcoming all the SAP Mentors have been. The group itself is quite impressive, so it is quite a honor just to get to associate with this group of people :)

I think I have been given a great chance to learn, but also help other people grow. Here is what I would like to try to accomplish during my year term as a SAP Mentor.

Community Goals
- Further build the CRM online community by encouraging blogging, wiki gardeners and participation beyond answering questions in the forums.
- Continue to grow the CRM online knowledgebase(wiki, blogs, and wikis) so that common questions can be found easily and discussions grow more technical
- Attempt to bring people who won't participate on SCN due to "noise/other issues" to participate, even if on a irregular basis
- Spread the word about SAP Mentor Program and the value of participating in the SCN community to help better enhance/maintain/install your SAP software implementation.

Personal goals
- Get to know/communicate with other SAP Mentors and SCN community members on a more regular basis, including those outside of my area of expertise
- Organize some type of community call for CRM open to all SCN community members
- Further develop my CRM knowledge understanding
- Have fun while trying to accomplish all the goals, and not take myself or anything way too seriously.

Feeling Better and SAP Mentor

2009-06-09T19:21:00.000-07:00

Well it has been interesting last couple of days. I'm now feeling almost 100% after getting sick last week, which is good considering I'm done with the meds prescribed. The weekend was interesting as my wife's car has been in the shop since Saturday and hopefully it will be finished tomorrow. In addition my father broke his arm on Saturday and is still trying to recover from that issue.

The last couple days have been busy as we over at my parents on Sunday to visit my dad. Monday night I headed over again to help getting his wireless setup and moving some furniture. Tuesday was taking care of the household, and tomorrow if it doesn't rain I'm hoping to cut the yard again. Thursday is the wing ding at Bass Pro near my house, so the week is pretty jam packed.

On the work aspect of life I found out on Friday from a phone call that I was selected as a SAP mentor. I had the first welcome call this Monday, which was pretty interesting. I'm still working on my prep work for the welcome call. I have a rough draft done for now, but need to formalize part of it. In addition I'm finally starting the last phase of my user conversion projects. All I can say is that I don't enjoy spending several hours in excel preparing all the source files for the conversion. Don't ask my why I'm doing it, besides the fact that it just needs to get done. It beats waiting for project requirements, but that is another long story.

So if I haven't been as "active" lately it because things have been quite busy. The good news is that I'm finishing up my backlog so things will get back to "normal" again.

A few personal thoughts

2009-06-05T19:53:00.000-07:00

Normally this blog tends to focus on the CRM related aspects of my life. However let's a take a quick detour and go through the last week or two.

This week has been quite interesting. I started out the month with trying to establish a regular workout routine, only to have that stopped by getting pretty sick. Now keep in mind whatever I had was there before I worked out on Monday evening. I ended joking to Karon about getting a doctor's appt for wednesday and good thing. By dinnertime on wednesday I had about 101.8 fever, but I broke it over night. Luckily doc gave me some good meds to fight the sinus infection, but I must say I'm just still not a 100%. I'm definitely a little crankier than normal, and not as focused. Doesn't mean I can't get stuff done, but need to definitely "organize" in order to move forward.

I also found getting sick helps your weight loss goals. I have been supporting Karon on her biggest loser challenge and I'm about a few pounds away from my 10% weight loss goal. My ultimate goal is 15%, but that is a long term by end of the year or further away. Don't ask my trick, but the simple solution is don't eat ice cream everyday(only once a week), don't eat deserts every day and eat smaller portions. Add some exercise either outdoors or in the gym and eventually you should "lose it". Yes I have been using the iphone app to help with this phase.

Well I also found out some news that may turn out to be interesting. Can't really say, because as I twittered I'm pretty darn confused at this point. Weird part it is on two separate items, which eventually I'll figure it out.

Well I'm tired and need to sleep. I just want to get back to feeling normal and I'm not 100% there.

Catching up

2009-06-05T19:50:00.001-07:00

A quick recap of what's been going on/keeping me from blogging:

- Karon's Birthday on Memorial Day
- Got sick earlier this week
- Playing 1vs100 on the xbox360 - pretty cool
- work, without it I can't blog lol...

I'll pick a topic for the next post.

Take care,

Stephen

iphone, bacon salt, and "iPope"

2009-05-21T19:04:00.000-07:00

It's almost the long holiday so let's take a look back a few topics:

iphone - still enjoying it and it gets useful each day more often
bacon salt - just arrived at the house today, thinking of ways to use it
iPope - At this point does blackberry, palm, nokia and motorola give up? I mean the Pope will have his own iphone app. No word on whether you can get your iphone blessed, by your local parish priest. Take a look at http://tinyurl.com/pxyonf

More details at 11.

Behind the what's the bdoc blog

2009-05-14T19:15:00.000-07:00

https://weblogs.sdn.sap.com/pub/wlg/14308

You can tell I got pretty motivated to post a "ranting" blog on SCN about a question that was asked. Well here is the background on why I posted what I did:

I have been hanging around on SCN for about 4+ years since March of 2005 under my current id. I lurked for about a year or so before then, when I worked for my old employer. The main reason drew me to SCN was the content available. SCN was a radical concept for SAP knowledge sharing that who knows why it took SAP so long to come up with such a site, but lets not digress in that direction. It was useful when I did my first CRM 40 implementation as both the technical and functional lead.

Now in the beginning I was a like a lot of people and really posted answers to questions on SCN hoping to get the points. I honestly wanted to get one of the t-shirts and try to "show" off that I could answer the most SAP CRM related questions. During this early stage after a while I almost dropped from contributing at all. The problem was there was too many people who award nothing not even 2 points for a contribution and way too many people "gaming" and getting points for not putting a lot of effort in. During this lull I contributed off and on, but I really did not reboot my participation until about Fall of 2007.

In the Fall of 2007 we started our big revamp of our SAP CRM system. Now if you do not know, I'm the only guy working the SAP CRM system full time. Yep I do everything except basis and security for the system. In our shop we have one other person who has ever taken a single CRM configuration course and nobody has worked on CRM in a configuration/technical role. That part makes it interesting, because I can't really bounce ideas off other people. I would say sometimes when designing solutions I'm like Dr. House and need a team to shoot down my answers or offer solutions that I will shoot down.

So during this big revamp project, I really start to participate in SCN by blogging a little and answering questions. The reason why I answer questions is because the question is something that I know I will need to figure to do my work. 80% of all the questions answered by myself on SCN fit that category and 20% are the ones I answer to just to keep my brain sharp.

As we went further into this revamp with just myself, a basis guy and our security group do the major heavy lifting, I knew I needed to transform my CRM 40 knowledge to the next version of CRM(52/2007 at that point). So basically I read, read, experimented with a sandbox and just plain absorbed everything I could find about the next release. The reason is that I knew that I was not going to get to attend a training class(there were none, and even if there was one, my company would not pay) and I was not going to get any outside consulting assistance.

To explain how crazy our upgrade was take these facts in account
- The product was only in ramp-up/restricted release for about 4 months
- We did not use a single SAP consulting resource or SAP ramp-up partner resource
- There were no classes on CRM 52, nor were there any documentation beyond the OKP(which if we didn't bought the upgrade would have not have worked).
- We went LIVE with an upgrade to CRM 2007 only 3 months after CRM 52 upgrade and had the same small team.
- Our basis resource had never touched a CRM system before and never had done any type of CRM upgrade prior to this project. I had to do a lot of coaching to get him familiar with the CRM lingo.

I proud of this project because it was completed successfully and we basically did mission impossible. After this project I decided to continue my active contributions to SCN. One of the blogs that I did was the Contact Center Simulator Blog for CRM 2007. It is even more popular than my first and most favorite XIF adapter blog. This lead to me exchanging e-mails with John Burton of SAP who in my opinion is the ultimate SAP CRM interaction center guru. Those e-mails led me to getting involved with the SAP CRM CVN.

I still continued during the rest of 2008 to blog one or two times more and then pretty much focus on answering peoples questions about CRM 2007. I wanted to help other people not make the same stupid trial and error mistakes we made when we first started. I also wanted to build my network of CRM 2007 users so that when I would get stumped, I could talk to people doing the same thing.

As time progressed, I realized that a lot of same stupid questions are being asked in the CRM forums over and over again. SAP during this same time frame really started to push the CRM area on SCN. This was finally nice as CRM for the first two or three years on SCN was a wasteland ignored by SAP mostly and most content if any was customer generated and mainly contained to the forums. This lead to me thinking about once again a project to establish FAQ's for CRM forum in the wiki. We had tried this back in 2005 but it went nowhere. So I started as part of this a conversation with Marilyn Pratt on SCN about mining the forum for knowledge nuggets. I actually made some technical process, built the mining equipment if you want to say that, but did not have any fellow miners.

Over the last part of the year I continue contributed and finally back in January, Marilyn recommended that I would be a CRM forum moderator. By the end of the January I was "ordained" an SCN moderator for the CRM topic and began my mission(trust me I'm more offended by the religious parallels than you are). At first I just tried to figure out what I should do and how to work the tools. Like anyone new or first on the job you have a bright layer of enthusiasm that has not been replaced by the cold harsh reality. My goal was to steer the CRM forums to a better level of contributions and participation.

The first task was housekeeping, in general it was trying to get people to play by the rules. This took about a month to really "clean up/organize" the current postings to eliminate the noise.
The second task was to try to direct content contribution. I came up with two ideas, stickies for posts that should get an answer and thread for posts that should be in the wiki. The stickies have been used at my discretion and have generally been effective. The posts for wikis have only see a couple of contributions by one top contributor.

I'm somewhat disappointed because even among those who answer questions frequently they won't join in and do anything else. I even posted a challenge thread for people to share who they are and I have had only one person attempt to respond. So I do have a level of disappointment as I really want to transform the customer/partner/general participation on CRM in SCN into something so much greater. The SAP folks are doing their part, I feel that the customer community is not doing our part.

So I get this post on "what is a bdoc?" and I'm about ready to fly out my chair. I mean can't people read the rules, can't people take some effort, but no people don't want to do anything for themselves. So to prevent any bad things from happening I locked the thread and left it. I tend to just "lock threads" when they aren't worthy of being there, so that if the person repeats the behavior we have a record and two so nobody else can clutter things up. Nobody still has ever e-mailed yet with why did you lock my thread. The first person who does so will get a kind response back, since I know they actually care enough to ask.

Finally to let off steam, I put myself in the person's situation and think what should they do, so the blog ends up being my way of politely saying try to think for yourself for once, or at least google/search for your question. I know a lot of people won't/can't learn in my fashion or have worked with the product since 2001, and everyone was new once. However there is a responsibility to study your material before asking the expert/teacher on what to do.

Now that you have the full back story, I hope you have a better understanding on why I wrote the blog.

iphone, woot, and bacon salt

2009-05-14T19:13:00.000-07:00

A few random thoughts for tonight:

iphone doing great so far, battery life is my main issue, but overall experience is turning me into an apple fanboy

Woot & Bacon Salt - Another woot off today and finally ordered the hopefully tasty bacon salt. There are some inventions that mankind can not top.

Well I might post more while waiting for that boc

Social CRM Followup

2009-05-11T19:57:00.000-07:00

Back in march I was probably a little harsh on the social CRM strategy from SAP. After seeing it grow for a couple months, I have the found twitter feed to be somewhat interesting. A lot of the content however is links to blogs, which was lousy on mobile until I got the iphone.

SAP decided to add another interesting blog to this whole area:
https://weblogs.sdn.sap.com/pub/wlg/14261

The only problem I have now is yet another CRM resource not on SCN.. that is blocked by the corporate firewall. Yes facebook, twitter, blogs are blocked even if they deal with SAP CRM. Luckily for me I have mobile web access via my personal cell phone.

The same problem however with vibrant customer participation I think is still there. Vijay Vijayasankar and myself are working on a solution. The hint is that organization is not there from the general community side within SCN/BPX. There needs to be more than people answers questions on forums for points to have a community.

iHype or not

2009-05-11T19:34:00.000-07:00

I must admit that I'm a cheapskate and never want to overpay for the latest gadget. In this case I waited out for the iphone 3G and only broke down three days after I could renew at the "new customer price". I will post later about my thoughts on the iphone, but for now lets talk about the customer experience getting there.

First issue I had was the fact that my wife wanted, no actually needed a new phone. She was using a "hand-me down" LG, due to the fact that her phone broke and she didn't want to pay full price for a replacement. Her goal was to get a new phone with a qwerty keyboard. As you know mother's day is recently and so is her birthday towards the end of the month. I wanted to be a good husband and try to get her something new.

My first problem is that I couldn't spend a lot over rebate. She told me that she would wait if it was too expensive. AT&T had "qwerty" dumbphones for about $200 after rebate unless you wanted a panatech. My strategy was then to someone leverage my upgrade eligibility to get her a new phone and still get an iphone for myself.

I called AT&T and asked them what I should do, saying that I don't want to pay full price, but want to get her a phone still. Basically I was told the only option was to wait until her phone was eligible. I understood this, since they mark down the phones by $100 to $200 and then charge you probably about $10 to $20 a month more for service over the life of the contract. I was frustrated so I decided perhaps I should try the corporate store again.

My last experience with the corporate store was great. In fact so great that I basically thought it would not be a problem. Instead I get the most helpless person, in the store. The sales guy basically said corporate tied his hands and he could do nothing, call up the line again. I thought this is strange. If I'm at the AT&T store owned by AT&T why can't one part do what another part of the company can do. I'm like most people it's simply AT&T, I don't care about your structure, I want "one face" to me.

Anyway I end up calling the 611 line again and get a guy who actually listens. I tell him my general story and what I want to and the fact that I don't expect a full discount, but can you meet me halfway in between. The gentleman was pleasant to deal with and basically was example of how to do customer correctly. He could have not have solved my problem, but I would have been still somewhat satisfied, because he took the time to listen. I need to send a comment back to AT&T thanking them.

So we ordered a Samsung Propel for my wife and now it was time for me. Well the website for AT&T could no longer let me upgrade online. After dealing with the one guy in person, I really did not want to go back to that store. I was very leery of another experience of someone who acted helpless and didn't want to do anything. I ended finding another corporate store, that recently moved due to a freeway being being put where the building stands.

The store was slow when I went in(which is usually not the case for AT&T) and immediately I was greeted and told the guy I wanted to upgrade to iphone. He immediately just pulled up the account and started the process. He was very friendly and was another great example of how to interact with a customer. When I get my customer feedback survey, I will make sure he gets high marks from me.

In the end I got the iphone last Saturday and my wife's phone arrived today via UPS. We both generally happy with the new devices. The moral of my story is that listening to the customer is probably job #1 in order to get the sale or retain that customer. In addition procedures to prevent fraud/etc. can't be too inflexible where it will cause the customer to want to leave. If I could get the "special deal" via the phone, why can't it be done via any channel. Multichannel is not effective if can not handle normal exceptions.

Goal to Problem

2009-04-15T19:13:00.000-07:00

I wanted to talk about this yesterday, but my latest facebook addiction consumed more of my time. The topic today is about whether we from IT practice CRM when we deal with our customers?

Now I personally work in a very laid-back, informal shop. The CRM guy part of me, says that we need to apply what the business is doing, with what we are doing with IT. So if I'm not using those practices via the system, I should be at least applying the concepts in practice. I try to take every question with serious consideration, even if some give me a chuckle at times. The problem is how do you provide a great "user experience", with limited resources.

The goal I have to is to provide "white glove" help with every question. I want to make sure that even if we do not solve their goal, we provide a solution to their problem. I bet you are confused about the goal part. Well every user comes in a with a goal and a problem. The goal is what they think is wrong and the problem is what is really wrong. What we have to do is try to get our "customer" to understand that the problem should be their goal. It is an interesting challenge.

As part of that strategy, the obvious should be fixed unless the resource constraints prohibit that action. I personally hate "known bugs" that could be resolved with a just a little extra effort. I dealt with something the other day, where I had to give a work around. The reason being is because the effort was not made to eliminate the known error. It was an error that training can fix, but lets face it, people forget instructions even on things they do daily. In this case, this was an application they might not use on a daily basis, which makes it even worse.

My solution was to provide the information and try to provide a degree of empathy with the user. That takes care of my customer centricity, but due to the informality, there is no tracking on this. It drives the CRM part of me crazy, because you can only learn from support situations by reviewing every support call and doing proper analysis.

So I'm ending this blog with question, how can I implement better CRM practices in my IT support of CRM without requiring a whole project? If only I had SAP CRM 7.0 with ITIL pre-delivered, then I could just fire it up and run with it. However I bet in CRM 2007 I could whip something up, to help with the basics. Now it is time to review the service ticket.

Are we social by being one way broadcasters?

2009-03-04T20:40:00.001-08:00

Sorry folks, but I don't buy into SAP launch of the CRM with "social media". I mean honestly the twitter feed is less than revealing, my wife posts more photos in a day than what they have done in the last week, and the you tube videos are "cute" at best. I mean they don't even tag the photos in the flickr set, so who knows who is there, unless you are there.

No I'm not jealous that I'm not at the conference. I much rather be here in St. Louis converting about 40 sets of data in our CRM system in colder weather. However the weather is nice, but I guess I will have to settle for no visits to Disney right now.

Personally the whole lack of social online ecosystem, is that is not customer driven enough in the CRM space. BPX/SDN/Consulting for Free or whatever you want to call it, doesn't have a lot of customer created content in the CRM space. Yeah a lot of people answer forum questions, but that is easy enough to do. It takes a lot more effort to do more. Yet the crazy SDN folks are trying to get people to a "second level" of participation beyond content contribution. Seriously when you can get more than 10 people in the CRM area outside of SAP interested in more than answering questions for points, then we will talk about the "third level".

Now that my rant is over, another time I will have to explain why I can say this lol... Then again as wise man once told me on the internet nobody really knows that you are a dog.

CRM and Tigers??

2009-01-11T12:48:00.000-08:00

The question you may is why CRM and tigers? It's an easy answer that explains my blogging here. First part is that I work fulltime as a CRM system analyst supporting SAP CRM. The second part is that I'm a Mizzou grad whose mascot is the Benegal Tiger. Combine the two backgrounds and you have me.