Lithium was a major presence at our Conversational Commerce Conference (C3) last February. Its executives and one of its customers (FICO) described the power of promoting conversations between (or among) employees in marketing, customer care or other departments and individuals with specific questions or issues that they need to resolve. At the time, we saw Lithium tackling issues that were largely internal for companies who had to sort out tensions between the Marketing Department (with “brand” and “message” top of mind) and Customer Care or Contact Center personnel who saw themselves often play the role of customer advocate.

Lithium bridges the gaps by creating a social communications platforms where customers, prospects and enterprise employees can join in forums to resolve the issues that originate directly from customers or prospects, rather than alpha bloggers or angry Twitterers. The additional investment (which brings Lithium’s total capitalization from outsiders to $101 million) will fuel new hiring and investment to enable global expansion. According to Lawler’s report, the company plans to double its 200 current employee count and expand its global reach beyond North America and Western Europe, targeting Asia and the Pacific Rim.

As the saying goes, “Money talks!” and Lithium’s message in the social business domain has been that “customers don’t want to ‘Friend’ you, they want to get something done.” Opus Research would add that it starts with a genuine conversation, not a someone railing or whining on Twitter or Facebook. Lithium recognized this fact from the beginning and it is being rewarded by investors who see the concept’s global potential.

As Jorge Blanco, VP Product Marketing-Contact Center Solutions, explains, “We are at the earliest stages of helping companies connect their disassociated experience.” Yet many customers (or prospects) find it unforgivable for companies to “disconnect” media from one another. In Blanco’s view, this is especially true when they make the transition to real-time conversations, especially voice communications with contact center agents.

As we noted a year ago, when Avaya announced its programs and products to support the transitional contact center, Avaya had set out to provide software and resources that “orchestrate the user experience” based on the rich set of context received via a number of channels. This year, Blanco encapsulated Avaya’s efforts by asserting that “We are at the earliest stages of helping companies connect their disassociated experience.”

At the heart of today’s product announcements is the Avaya Aura Contact Center Version 6.2 (AACC 6.2) which is the third major rev of its core contact center technology. The emphasis on end-to-end customer experience awareness and orchestration, which naturally shifts attention to the tools needed to create and support new applications (Avaya Aura Orchestration Designer) and the resources that provide for monitoring and analytics for fine tuning applications (Avaya Aura Performance Center, which will be coming out later this year). In addition, the operations and administrations capabilities of the Avaya Aura Control Manager are being expanded to have purview over the whole stack of contact center and “experience management” features and functions.

Another noteworthy development is the transformation and evolution of the Avaya Experience Portal (which is the re-branding and repositioning of the Avaya Voice Portal). Blanco notes that, even though many people continue to refer to it as “the IVR” the Avaya Experience Portal is adding video (as demand grows) and provide for more multimodal features and functions, especially as they add enhanced routing and outbound services.

[Opus Research provides deeper description and analysis of the Avaya announcement in a forthcoming Advisory.]

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.

CRM platform providers are ready to incorporate more personal “metadata” with their “megadata.” They’ve added more tools for analysis and reporting to support their sales, marketing, workforce optimization and product development efforts. Our mission is to keep customers in the equation. At Sugarcon, we see an opportunity to connect the dots between the data that’s under the control of CRM systems and the business rules of the large marketing firms and newly emerging systems, protocols and policies that will put individuals in control of the terms and conditions under which their personal information, data, preferences and the like can be shared or used by others, including the companies with whom they are carrying out business.

Today, new technologies put marketing folks, who measure success by CPMs, CPAs and CPCs, against the support fabric who care about building engagement models predicated on trust. They install monitoring and analytic systems that are used to anticipate your next action. The result often feels like “serendipity” as the firms you do business with seem to “understand” you and anticipate your next move. I called these “feel good” tactics that are “destined to fail” because they treat people as “consumers” not loyal or respected customers. Meanwhile today’s CRM technologies put marketing and advertising people on a collision course with the support folks who strive to build engagement models and build trust and loyalty between and among customers.

On February 2-3, 2011 in San Francisco Opus Research will convene the Conversational Commerce Conference (C3) as a venue for raising and resolving the issues exposed in the clash between Marketing and Support. As with the Meeting of the Waters, both disciplines will ultimately be assimilated into a torrent of talkpaths, interactions, queries, responses and transactions. Still the time as come, in these early days, to foster discussions that lead to mutual understanding – or at least an agreement to co-exist.

The idea of C3 began when I gave a talk at a CRM+VRM gathering organized by Project VRM and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. In it I observed CRM systems now monitor and capture input (metadata) from an unprecedented number of sources and use analytical engines to impute your intention, get more prescriptive and manipulate your tastes, preferences and activities. But, as I note in this post, they are *not* doing a very good job of listening and building meaningful conversations with customers.

Over at Internet2Go, Greg Sterling provides his insights into our goals for convening C3. In brief, it will be like no other conference because we’re bringing together a diverse group of executives from multiple disciplines and business focuses to address their real world issues. On the podium, you’ll find folks from Cisco, RapLeaf, Yelp, iCrossing, Marchex, Innovation Interactive/360i, Edelman, Creative Realities, Acxiom, the MMA, Empirix, Lithium, Get Satisfaction, Orange Labs, Air2Web, Oodle, Closely, Vendasta, Praized, Comcast, Fair Isaac Corporation, Weber Shandwick and others still to be formally announced.

As Greg notes, we’ve eschewed “social media fluff” with a list of topical sessions that include:

* Where Does Support End and Marketing Begin – and Vice Versa?
* The ROI of Social Conversations – What Metrics Should Apply?
* Shaping the Conversation: Search, Reputation and P2P
* A Parallel Universe: Social CRM for SMBs
* Customer Care in a Mobile and Cross-Platform World
* The Age of the Individual: From CRM to VRM

The day-and-a-half event will also feature provocative case studies from Cisco, Marchex, Lithium and Get Satisfaction mixed with panel discussions.

There are still a few speaking slots available. To inquire about them or to sponsor, contact Pete Headrick (pheadrick@opusresearch.net). Otherwise, visit the C3 Web site to see the latest speakers and sessions. Or Register Now, to get our early bird rate.

As described, the new service lets Lithium customers choose the page to monitor, select phrases to “listen” for and conduct analytics regarding the frequency of mentions or use of the selected phrases. The service makes use of the Facebooks FQL API which means, as Ms. Franciso points out, the bulk of the information in Facebook remains private.

A video that illustrates the new service is available here.

Advisories are available to registered users only.

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

These Fusion Apps will be “fused” by Oracle’s Fusion-branded middleware and now, thanks to the high-profile acquisition of Sun Microsystems, they can be tightly bound and hermetically sealed in a new line of servers that’s called Exalogic, which Ellison – who has often been dismissive of the concept of “cloud computing – terms “The Cloud-in-a-Box”. On stage was a cabinet with the Exalogic name and both Sun and Oracle’s logos. To conform with Ellison’s definition of an “elastic compute cloud” (which is inspired by Amazon’s EC2), it Oracle’s flavor of virtual machine (VM) technology running and two “guest” operating systems – Sun’s Solaris and a new version of Linux. To make everything run more quickly and smoothly, every box also runs a Oracle’s proprietary cache management system called “Coherence”.

In his keynote, Ellison made it clear that the new server is designed to outperform IBM’s family of servers on price and performance. At the same time he made it clear that, while it will carry the Sun and Oracle brands, the cloud is designed to be “elastic” (meaning highly scalable), “virtual” (meaning that it can be offered as a service and the corruption of one instantiation won’t pollute another), and that it “conforms to standards” (though he called “Oracle” a standard, along with Linux). There’s a schizophrenic nature to the new platform. On the one hand, it is packaged in a way that is designed to accelerate the speed of deployment of enterprise apps and will also rid apps of latencies, even at high volumes of activity. If Ellison’s assertions are accurate, the new platform and forthcoming Fusion Apps could accelerate the cause of RC as well.

As Sean sees it few, if any, companies companies are unaware of social media. Research that we’re conducting here at opus confirms that. Yet just as few have moved beyond Experimentation, largely because there are genuine cultural and technical challenges to putting plans into effect, integrating internal resources and ultimately fully engaging with customers. As he put it, “Believe me, your customers don’t want to ‘friend’ you, they want to get something done.”

Sean was followed by Barry Paperno, who launched and now nurtures the community of people using MyFICO (the community tool of the company that maintains your FICO credit score). Barry was able to describe some of the cultural and operational barriers that he encountered while fostering his community in what he termed “a very conservative company.”

My take-away, which is a theme Opus Research will be analyzing more thoroughly in the coming months, is the challenge of dealing with a natural tension between “Marketing” and “Support” as companies define their transformation to an engagement model. We see profound opportunity to leverage existing self-service and agent assisted services infrastructure by defining work flows that transcend the lines of demarcation between Web sites, IVRs, live agents, mobile networks and even face-to-face, in store conversations.

The point that Lithium and its guest speakers exposed is that every company that, thanks to high-profile implementers like Zappos or highly-successful low-profile community developments by the likes of FICO, the pendulum of power is swinging toward the customer. It’s going to take years, but the path to useful engagement models is becoming better beaten and both technical and cultural challenges are better defined.

Today RightNow “unveiled” RightNow CX for Facebook, a product that will be generally available in November. It comes as a response to requests from customers and end-users alike for an easy mechanism to mash-up formal support capabilities into a company’s presence on Facebook. The product is a Facebook App that, when installed, creates a “Support” tab on a company’s wall. When visitors (be they customers or prospects) click on the tab, they can avail themselves of a number of options, including self-service, “crowd service”, or live agent assistance, all based on RightNow’s core CX platform.

The product is unique in its tight integration of a presence on Facebook with resources commonly associated with the contact center, including access to the knowledge base and contact records that inform agents and customer service reps. Agents can respond directly to the wall postings or send messages directly on Facebook (Webchat is expected to be supported with formal release in November). They can also use the RightNow’s infrastructure to escalate an issue and attach high-priority to particularly “hot” issues.

We’re still in the early days of a long march to better engagement between firms, their customers and their prospects. For both cultural and technological reasons, companies customarily take baby steps toward better “listening” and customer engagement. By packaging lots of features and functions behind an “app” that ostensibly just adds a “Support” tab to the company wall, RighNow makes this small step for an enterprise into a great stride toward better customer engagement.