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The spirit of the popular uprising – so much in the zeitgeist that Time Magazine named the Protester as its person of the year for 2011 – is, in its own way, also affecting customer service.

There’s certainly no shortage of technological revolution affecting the way organizations serve their customers. For example, much of the industry buzz in 2010 and 2011 revolved around the impact of social customer care (net: low volume, high brand impact) and the continued adoption of SaaS-based customer service (net: still gaining momentum but migration taking longer than most thought).

Looking forward, we will see product announcements, articles and analyst coverage galore around the impact of mobility on customer care as a growing majority of users seek assistance using their smart, connected phones and tablets.

A less obvious revolution has also been gaining momentum that may, in the long run, have a profound impact on customer care strategies.

For the first time, consumers are taking service into their own hands, applying the “over the top” strategies that we’ve seen threaten industries such as telecom (Skype, Google Voice), cable (Hulu, Roku, Boxee) and even book publishing (Lulu).

Building on years of pent up consumer frustration, a new class of organization has emerged, offering consumers a DIY solution to the pain that they often (rightly or wrongly) associate with calling toll free numbers.

It’s not news that many consumers simply want to talk to an agent when they call a service line. This is especially true today, given the rising number of self-service options available online. Of course phone self-service is, and will continue to be, a very useful offering; it can be frustrating, though, when speaking with an agent feels like the right answer to a particular problem.

The popular GetHuman initiative, created by Kayak CTO Paul English in 2005, was one of the first well-known services to provide consumers an end-run around frustrating aspects of customer service, in this case the IVR.

As you probably know, GetHuman provides shortcuts for getting to an agent for most major toll-free numbers. The site rocketed to 40,000 daily page views within a year of its launch. While this represents less than one tenth of one percent of the people calling for customer service each day, it clearly shows that the site touched a nerve.

Naturally, others followed suit. DialAHuman (2008) and Get2Human (2008) sprung up to provide similar live agent short-cut compendia.

Around the same time, a few companies started to attack a related consumer frustration – waiting on hold. Fonolo (2007), Lucy Phone (2009) and Fast Customer (2011) allow consumers to connect directly with agents by actually waiting on hold for them. In their case, they spoof IVRs by emulating user input and then connect callers when an agent comes on the line.

Evidently enterprise adoption of courtesy callback solutions from vendors such as Virtual Hold is taking too long.

At the leading edge of a new wave, Insidr (2011) attempts to connect consumers to people who have “worked in big companies and are willing to help when the company can’t or won’t.” They’re targeting the frustration associated with what sometimes feels like rigid policy enforcement and empowering by reducing information asymmetry (most consumers don’t know what companies are willing to do to retain them).

Interestingly, the average bounty paid by consumers for Insidr tips is around $8, roughly the cost to the enterprise of the call that might have just been averted. This is mostly a coincidence but shows that some consumers are actually willing to dig into their pockets to resolve service issues.

These are just three examples of organizations that have emerged to allow consumers to start to take matters into their own hands to reduce customer service frustrations.

It’s worth spending time revisiting each of these organizations a few years into their existence to see if they’re delivering on their consumer empowerment missions or have lost steam or shifted focus / tactics.

Additionally, we should consider how these services are changing the way enterprises think about serving their customers – are they shining a light on weaknesses and forcing a re-prioritization of investment decisions or are they largely being ignored or stone-walled?

Finally, we should explore ways in which the tactics employed by these companies could be leveraged inside large organizations to accomplish their goals.

Alas, these are subjects of future posts. Meanwhile, let me know what you think and, obviously, which other organizations and related “over the top” trends should be included here.

* I couldn’t resist using this title because it invokes a reasonable metaphor and, frankly, sounds pretty catchy. I certainly don’t intend to suggest that consumers’ frustrations with customer service are in any way correlated to the general outrage with financial inequality, etc., being protested by the OWS movement.

Today, under the headline “The End of Hold As We Know It”, Fonolo introduced a commercial offering that representing new packaging and pricing of its services. The starting point is a package that includes its “deep dialing,” Web access, mobile interface, virtual queuing and post-call survey offered for a monthly fee of $99 to serve up to 10 agents. A second package is designed to serve up to 40 for $399 per month. It adds the ability for customers to schedule a callback, manages “pre-call questions” (to assess the purpose of a call more accurately) and the addition of “multiple widgets” to be added to a company’s Web site to help customers initiate a conversation with the company. These offers define the “$10 per agent per month” pricing proposition that promises to be a disruptive force among cloud-based customer care contact center providers in the coming year.

Fonolo founder Shai Berger explains that, while the large accounts have been the primary focus of the company’s marketing, sales and product development efforts, it has long been aware of demand from small-to-medium sized companies looking to take advantage of the “virtual queuing” technology, at a minimum, and then add more features and functions at a reasonable price. It also encountered demand from individual departments or business units in large companies, who sought a low-cost way to provide their customers or clients with direct access to knowledgeable customer service agents or telephone sales reps.

The offer recognizes that small-to-medium businesses, as well as business branches or subsidiaries of large corporations, recognize the rich sets of resources that reside in various service clouds. Competitive factors have helped them overcome concerns over security and lack of control associated with cloud-based deployments. So has the ability to offer customers some features and functions (like virtual hold) that they would otherwise not be able to offer. The new Fonolo offer adds economy and simplicity by making an offer at a single monthly price that doesn’t vary by minutes of use, ports in service or number of transactions.

Taken together, the price, simplicity and certainty (lack of variability) stands to be very disruptive in the Conversational Commerce space.

This Report made available courtesy of Empirix. Contact Pete Headrick (pheadrick@opusresearch.net) to receive a copy

For more information on becoming an Opus Research client, please contact Pete Headrick (pheadrick@opusresearch.net).

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The union with Oracle will provide more global resources for RightNow (based in Bozeman, MT) to expand geographically. As part of Oracle’s formidable roster of resources in database management, CRM and enterprise-wide collaboration, the foundation for better engagement models for marketing, customer care, sales and support are all within Oracle’s reach. I, personally, thought some deeper relationship with Interactive Intelligence was in the works. Now I wonder whether it will all happen under Oracle’s nameplate.

The latter app, Mobile Voice Control, provides companies with the ability to employ Dragon Speech recognition to speech enable popular applications. It is the same resource that is integrated into Siri, Price Check by Amazon, Ask for iPhone and many other speech enabled mobile services.

The complete Mobile Advantage Portfolio will add more natural language processing under the name NaturallyMobile and stronger authentication mechanisms employing the capabilities of Nuance’s line of voice biometric based speaker verification. The objective is to provide its enterprise customers with foundational resources to support a better mobile experience for their customers.

I agree with the company’s researchers, product managers and general management with the belief that the combination of strong authentication, accurate speech recognition and better language understanding supports better conversational commerce. Opus Research’s sees conversational commerce as grounded in “Trust, Transparency and Convenience.” Nuance has distilled a parallel set of objectives for Mobile Advantage by supporting “discovery, accessibility, connectivity and simplicity.” If done right, they amount to the same thing.

Nuance is pushing ahead with the development of a platform and service architectxure with the working name of “Prodigy” to capture organize the components of a better mobile customer experience. The Mobile Advantage portfolio is the starting point. It brings together voice control with call steering while taking into account understanding and recognition of each individual’s intent. DragonGo! is an excellent precursor product for a high-quality customer experience. It combines accurate speech recognition with an engine that does a good job of imputing the speaker’s intent and then linking directly to a mobile resource that addresses the user’s need.

The number of targets is comprehensive (around 200), yet constrained, in that it has deeper integrations to popular, relevant destinations like Yelp!, Google Maps, Fandango, OpenTable. It recognizes the difference between an instruction and information that can be used for form filling. It also provides for user iteration. If it delivers query results from Yelp! when Google Maps would be more appropriate, it allows for the user to move a visual carousel to the more appropriate resource.

It is not hard to imagine how an enterprise customer care app can be adapted to the Dragon Go! approach. It is all about recognizing the customer’s intent and delivering the right resource and doing as much as possible in a user-controlled (aka self-service) model.

This simple tactic seems almost self-evident as people discover how to use mobile apps or Web sites to get information from airlines, insurance companies, hotel chains, retailers and others. Indeed, there is not a business of any size that has not started to pursue a “mobile strategy” or at least put out their first app for the iPhone.

But the product planners at Genesys have observed that most mobile efforts are only beginning to incorporate all the knowledge and resources baked into the company’s customer service and contact center fabric. What’s more, only a handful have made it easier for customers to use their smartphones to “escalate” their issues by initiating or transferring their conversation to the right resource (be it an IVR, Web site or customer service agent) without leaving their app or having to re-establish their identity and the general purpose of context of the call.

From a functional point of view, Genesys wants corporate customers and developers to recognize three sets of best practices. The first on the list is “Contact Me” addresses the way that phone calls can be integrated in a smartphone app, including call initiation (click-to-call), that uses the smartphone app’s intelligence to deliver the context of the call or, if it makes more sense, detect the availability of an agent and schedule a callback.

Second set of best practices, “Connect Me,” address is the result of the integration of smartphone-based processing to leverage Genesys IWD (intelligent Workload Distribution) and Conversation Manager. Its purpose is to put mobile customers in touch with the right resource over their choice of communications modes: voice, text or Chat.

Genesys’ third set of best practices surround “Know Me.” This is where Genesys will help its customers take advantage of the smartphone’s ability to authenticate its owner and create the sort of trusted communications link required to deliver highly personalized customer service. Under the “Integrated Mobile Customer Care Apps” umbrella expect to see deep integration of Genesys 8 (the company’s core call routing and customer interaction manager), IWD, Conversation Manager and UC Connect.

Given the level of interest and preliminary effort that Opus Research is observing as companies build their “mobile strategies,” adoption of the Genesys approach could be quite fast. We’ve already seen precursor products at Groupama, the French insurance company. Leading firms in banking, travel, insurance and telecommunications will not be far behind as they move past their first mobile apps to this, more integrated, more empowering approach.

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Emily Yellin, who moderated the Webcast, lays the foundation for an informative set of essays. One of her core observations is, “Companies are finally starting to realize that customer service creates unique opportunities to make their products and services better, their customers, happier, and their bottom lines healthier.” This is a very important first step toward creating the sort of engagement model that promotes better interactions between and among companies, their customers and their prospects.

The document has viewpoints from articulate representatives from several disciplines, spanning CRM, public relations, customer care and customer advocacy. It is well worth the read.

SugarCRM is “cash flow positive,” having recorded seven consecutive quarters of record revenue. They have counted 9 million software downloads and have 800,000 active users. It is expanding its global reach by adding 8 languages to the 14 already in production. Its mobile wingspan has moved beyond the iPhone to run their mobile apps on Blackberries, Android-based devices and the iPad, including the addition of an “offline mode” for road warriors to sync or update information even when they are in a disconnected state. What’s more, the Open Source approach makes SugarCRM a platform for innovation embracing “Activity Streams” (meaning the ability to import metadata and what used to be called “feeds” from a variety of social media platforms and Web sites) and a slew of customized applications.

In addition to speaking, Doc, Drummond and I were in attendance to gauge how well the SugarCRM version 6 suite of software might support the cause of VRM (Vendor Relationship Management). At a high-level of abstraction, a highly flexible CRM resource, such as SugarCRM, could be an ideal VRM platform. SugarCRM could be tailored to serve as a repository for personal data, an aggregation point for information on the individuals, shops, stores, merchants or service providers with whom an individual might want to carry out business. It also has embedded mechanisms for sharing information among peers and trading partners (along with the rules and instruction sets one might want to apply as conditions for such sharing).

That said, to convert SugarCRM into SugarVRM would amount to major surgery – like a sex change and the marketplace is just not ready. Social CRM maven Paul Greenberg cited figures in the $14 to $16 billion range for enterprise spending on CRM systems and software. Greenberg also mentioned that spending on “Social CRM” resources are probably more than $1 billion at this point. That figure would include spending on the offerings of pure plays like Lithium or GetSatisfaction, as well as the community building, “listening” and analytic offerings from classic CRM, including Oracle, Salesforce.com, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics…); and customer care platforms like RightNow, Cisco, LiveOps and others.

I came away from Sugarcon more convinced than ever that following the path from CRM to “social CRM” and “social commerce” does not arrive at VRM. During the opening session, Doc Searls (Twitter handle @DSearls) was sitting next to Paul Greenberg (Twitter handle: @pgreenbe) in the front row. That led Brian Vellmure (@CRMstrategies) to tweet: “@pgreenbe & @dsearls sitting together is a metaphor 4 future of biz.” The meeting of the minds was documented when Doc posted this frequently retweeted item: “”We live in a customer ecosystem. Not a corporate ecosystem.”

Yet, for all of the talk of CRM getting more customer-centric, it is VRM, not classic CRM that will put individuals in the center of activity. That was what Doc noted in his keynote and Drummond and I discussed in the closing panel. The take-away, as we designed it was that VRM is a “companion” to CRM (and vice versa). In addition to Doc, Paul Greenberg and Brian Vellmure, attendees who chose the “Social Business” track were treated to the perspectives of social CRM luminaries Estaban Kolsky (@ekolsky), Brent Leary (@brentleary), Natalie Petouhoff (@drnatalie) and Mitch Lieberman (@mjayliebs). Each brought very common-sense advice to application developers and practitioners alike as we oversee siloed CRM systems morphing into better platforms for community-building and customer engagement.

Many of the speakers paid homage to the Cluetrain Manifesto, which Doc Searls co-authored with Chris Locke, David Weinberger and Rick Levine. Natalie Petouhoff mentioned that she frequently uses quotes from the book – which is now 12 years old – to articulate the objectives that “social CRM” and “social commerce” advocates are moving towards today. The market is, by most accounts, at the “early adopter” stage of a normalized adoption curve.

The point being that social CRM has had a gestation period of over 10 years to get to this point. We’re about three years into the ten-year awareness and adoption cycle for VRM and its major components. Thus our panel at SurgarCon 2011 was designed to serve as a “heads up” for those attending. Be aware of VRM, the Personal Data Ecosystem (PDE) and the power of the individual as you evolve your strategy for social CRM and social commerce, lest you miss out on engaging and perhaps even alienate your best customers and prospects.