Dubai is done, time to fly home

I had a terrific time with the delegates at the most recent GCCRM customer experience management training, which I did with fellow partners from Shanghai and Dubai (via Ireland). The folks in the room were bright, senior execs charged with either CRM or CEM responsibilities at their companies, confirming the trend I noted in London earlier this year that "experience management" is increasingly part of the title of senior managers. In fact, I'm seeing it more often in titles that I've seen CRM in titles.



This may be a sign that companies appreciate the strategic importance of CEM, while simultaneously demonstrating that their faith in CRM as a strategic initiative may be flagging. That's a shame, because CRM is indeed strategically helpful (except in rare instances where it's only a platform for sales efficiency).

I was particularly struck by the diversity of the companies. We had banking, oil, grocery retail, hospitality ... and by and large the evaluations were really positive, for which I am grateful.

I'll post a picture up here when I get a copy from Alice Tse, the coordinator, who as usual did a tremendous job with the event.

Now, I'm off to dinner, and then I hop on a plane back to DC sometime very close to dawn. I haven't slept well the last couple of nights because of jet lag. Now that I'm heading back, I can feel the double-whammy jet lag already!

First, Dubai, next Colombia

I'm in Dubai, getting ready to teach another round of the CEM Certification course that I've put together with my GCCRM global partners (see the link on the right). We've got folks from automotive, pharma, banking, hospitality -- it's going to be great, and a terrific opportunity to do cross-cultural strategizing with the people here in attendance.

We're staying at the Crowne Plaza Dubai, which is a popular stop for the local government folks every Thursday, and which sports Irish, Italian and Polynesian food. There's even a McDonalds on the first floor. (You can bet I'm photographing their merchandising on a break. I took a bunch of pics of Burger King when I was in Montreal -- that's worth a couple of blog postings by itself!) My colleague Sampson does a touchpoint/brand value assessment of McDonalds and Burger King in the course. It's fascinating.

Check out the May 20-21 lineup for a customer experience global summit here. We've got a terrific front-line team! And I've put together a private blog for all attendees. We hope to have over 100 in attendance, which should make for an invigorating session, and a blog with some staying power. (You need a high number of blog readers to ensure sustainability. The number varies with the blog's focus and the level of topical concern of the audience, so you can't generalize. If we get between 20 and 40 registered bloggers, we'll be good.)

Google + Salesforce = Microsoft + Yahoo?

The buzz about salesforce.com's integration of Google apps into its platform has gotten people thinking about the value of a potential merger. 

Google thinks big. Salesforce thinks big. Both companies have cultures imbued with the concept of "network returns" and "wisdom of crowds". (Google leverages it in different ways, largely through analytics. Salesforce leverages it in their application programming interface and code exchange architecture.)

My first thought was that Google's brand offer is broader than sf.com's and so the Google brand wouldn't be made "bigger" by such a merger. Microsoft needs a company like Yahoo. Yahoo definitely needs a company like Microsoft. The complementarity in culture and market is really strong for them, and makes both brands bigger.

The key rationale I could see for the Google/sf merger: Google might feel it could use some of sf.com's software/platform. If Google feels it can win 18 months of development time by not reproducing what sf.com already does, then the merger might in fact help Google in the broader business application market. Certainly I think Google would be better off throwing programming resources to improve/use an existing platform such as sf.com's, than building another one themselves. 

So, this may not be an issue of brand-building. If Google and sf.com get together, it would be more about winning time-to-market as Google goes after the broader business market. They might want a piece of software-as-a-service CRM (sf.com's sweet spot), but that may just be secondary.

Which begs the question: If they merge -- as opposed to being merely tightly integrated partners -- can the salesforce.com brand flourish? What do they get from such a merger? I gotta say, they're doing OK on the web app platform side. Growth is good. Brand is strong.

About the ONLY rationales I could come up with: mobile computing, and global market strengthening. 

Which leads us, inevitably, to China and India. And to Shirley Young, who's on the sf.com board. Her experience in Asia-Pacific is outstanding. Her Fortune 500 experience is strong. She's also on the board of TeleTech Holdings, a customer management company with strong business process outsourcing revenues. The question I'd want to explore: Is she, like so many others recently, in the conversation about China becoming a stronger target country for sales, as opposed to merely an outsourcing market? Shirley's profile in China-USA cultural relations is strong. She worked on GM's strategy in China (a hybrid of labor arbitrage and target market strategies). 

I can't help but think that sf.com wants half a billion new seat licenses. 

In Montreal

I'm inside yet another hotel conference area in a fantastic city. But of course so far all I've seen is the hotel, which looks just like every other hotel in North America. So, Montreal will have to wait until I get through my part (although I may skip out to dinner in old Montreal with my client contact tonight).

My client, a service agency of the Canadian government is doing a three day session on CRM and I'm contributing to the CRM strategy training on Day 2. Today is Day 1 and I'm listening in (both in French and in English) on the plans, vision and challenges facing the agency. A stellar group of people, good leadership skills, some systems in place (especially in acquisitions), but still a need to define and execute on key performance indicators, especially client satisfaction.

More of an update later ...

UPDATE: The training day went great, especially in the morning session. The afternoon session's time probably could have been better spent just interacting with each other about applying the morning content, and then a group nap. This has been an intense few days for these folks (and for me). 

And the prize goes to ...

I'm heading off to Montreal to deliver a customer strategy training with the Canadian government tomorrow, but I wanted to give a shout out tonight, very briefly, to Sampson Lee, a dear friend and colleague who heads up GCCRM (http://www.gccrm.com). Sampson (pictured on the far left, above) has again put together a tremendous program in Shanghai on customer management. I was privileged to be a trainer to a solid group of marketing professionals at the InterContinental Pudong (which provided me excellent support as well for a cocktail party I put together for TRIUM, HEC-Paris, NYU-Stern and the London School of Economics alumni).

Sampson has the largest portal in China dedicated to customer management issues, and consults to top Chinese companies. His partners are consultants from around the world, and his activities increasingly are global in scope, with trainings being held around the world, and comprehensive customer experience studies being executed across many cultures and continents.

But with all this activity, Sampson, along with his business partner Alice Tse, still manages to put together an annual awards ceremony to global companies best representing leading customer management strategies and cultures. And, he makes a donation to Operation Hope, a child-focused charity.



Here are some pics, the one above is from 2004, when I participated in a huge awards ceremony in Shanghai, giving an award to China Merchant Bank. The first one in the posting is from just a few days ago, again in Shanghai, where Dialog Telekom, the leading telecom in Sri Lanka walked away with many awards for their incredible customer-focused solutions, service and support. (Hello to Ayomal and Sandra!)

BIRGO Davidson!

A key reason to select a particular business partner is to win some unique advantage: share in their pipeline, build on their expertise, innovate your offering. But for some kinds of "partners", the real advantage is reinforcing your brand. Nike and Apple are these kinds of partners. They are different sectors (apparel and electronics), but they own a very similar kind of space in our brains. (BMW and Apple also are partners, for the same reasons.) This proximity of brand location strengthens each brand. Often these kinds of partners are called "constellation partners".

I've been thinking about the Davidson College Cinderella story in their run-up to the NCAA Final Four, which they executed to perfection until the final seconds of a game against Kansas. Just getting to the Elite Eight was great, though, for a school of 1700, of which half are women. All the students are incredibly bright and well-rounded. I know -- I went to Davidson and magically got accepted (they never noticed that I was only pretending to be as wonderful as the other kids ... ).

Davidson was a demanding institution, but with its Honor Code and eating house system, it offered an ethical and social system that reinforced its humanities-oriented curriculum perfectly.

I never followed its sports. Until this season.

Now, I feel -- really, honestly feel -- even more proud of the school, if that were even possible. NCAA tourneys are dominated by big schools, with big players, who are segregated from the main student body, held to different standards academically, and who bring the schools untold amounts of money in various ways. Davidson: small program, smaller players, and they are expected to do their homework and maintain their GPA. And, from all reports, the Davidson Wildcats team is filled with smart, capable students who do math and econ as well as they dribble.

I mention all this because a key part of our experience of brands is whether we are proud to be associated with them, and passionate about talking them up. If they are great brands, or great companies, we bask in their glow. In fact, BIRG (basking in reflected glory), or BIRGO as I prefer it (basking in the reflected glory of others), is a term of art in marketing and branding circles. It describes the phenomenon of appropriating a brand to be part of one's own identity, when that brand is loved or respected. A classic study showed that college students, after their teams lost, would describe the team using the word "they", but when the teams won, would describe the team as "we". It's unconscious. But it's real.

So, in the midst of the Davidson NCAA magic, I found myself thinking that we did well. In reality, I had nothing to do with it.

Let me bask a bit longer, though. Please. I'll return to reality soon enough. In the meantime, you can Google "BIRG" or "CORF".

Back from Singapore

I spent three days doing a training in Shanghai (along with an international Customer Management awards program), then went to Singapore to teach a CEM and new customer management models with UNI Strategic, who did a nice job of putting together the sessions.

I had a great group, I think a perfect fit for the seminar: experienced, facing challenges, and looking for organized ways to improve their customer engagement.

As I was flying back, I finally had a moment to pull the plastic bag off my latest issue of Harvard Business Review, and there was a perfect article on customer management issues in service companies. It goes to the heart of business model trade-offs that define/support the brand, and therefore the profit model, that companies must choose.

One point made in the article is that services companies -- and they include Wal-Mart as an example -- have to make choices about what they will excel at, and what they will not emphasize. Again, this is a theme we covered. But recall our Wal-Mart in Germany case study, and how it showed that Wal-Mart's traditional strengths either didn't work for them, or were undermined by a poor customer experience design, or both. The question I pose is this: When you are designing a customer experience strategy, to what extent must you build in globalization? Can you create a "branded experience model" that works globally, or must you vary the model depending on the local conditions (hierarchy of values, etc.)? If you vary it locally, to what extent do such variations undermine your brand?

Got some examples? How is Carrefour doing it? Tesco? Apple? Procter & Gamble?