Google+ Pages Are Open for Businesses

Google+ Pages Are Open for Businesses

If you're a business that uses social networking, it's time to add Google+ to your campaigns. The software  giant said commercially oriented Web pages on its service were open for business.
Using Google+ Pages, companies can deliver content, build a community and reinforce a brand. Google said 20 businesses, including Macy's and Pepsi, have set up company pages in its trial period, and the service is now being made available to other businesses. Previously only individuals could set up a page.

The  + Brand Badge

Other business based pages currently include CNN's Anderson Cooper 360, Angry Birds, Burberry, Dallas Cowboys, Good Morning America, The Muppets, Toyota, and Zen Bikes.

On the Official Google Blog, Senior Vice President of Engineering Vic Gundotra wrote that Google+ Pages now allow members to "hang out live with the local bike shop, or discuss our wardrobe with a favorite clothing line, or follow a band on tour."

Customers and fans visiting a company's or product's page can recommend it with a +1, or add the page to his or her circle. A +1 is the Google equivalent of Facebook's Like button, and a circle is a user's own set of relationships, enabling direct conversation between circle members.

Bradley Horowitz, Google+ vice president for products, told The New York Times Monday that he expects to see a "+ brand" badge in corporate advertising and products. This would include, he said, a + Pepsi on every one of its soda cans and in its TV spots, along with other social media references, such as the Twitter hashtag, plus, of course, the old-fashioned Web site address. As with Facebook's corporate pages, Google will be able to provide the demographics of visitors to + Pages.

Direct Connect

Gundotra also noted that potential customers can reach company pages on Google+ via its search engine, and then add them to their networking circle. One way to promote that, of course, is to make those pages available to Google search, and they will come up as part of the results when the brand is searched.

The other is through a new feature called Direct Connect. A user searches for a company or a band, but with a + before the name. Thus, + Angry Birds takes the user directly to that game's Google+ page, and lets a user add it to their circles. Currently, Direct Connect is still being rolled out, and doesn't yet work for every Google+ page, nor can every user access  Direct Connect. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company said it would add these capabilities over time.

Businesses started using Google+ from the beginning in June, but the software giant removed businesses from regular accounts until now, when it could set up pages designed for businesses.

Google+ opened its social network  to any user in September, following a field trial of less than 90 days. To date, the company said, more than 40 million users have signed up for the service -- a huge wave of membership, but one that is still small compared with Facebook's membership of more than 800 million users.

Low Facebook Customer Satisfaction May Boost Google

Low Facebook Customer Satisfaction May Boost Google

Are users satisfied with e-business  on the web? A new survey tries to answer that question -- and discovered that Google+ may be in a position to overtake Facebook.
According to the 2011 American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) E-Business Report, conducted in association with customer -experience analytics firm ForeSee Results, Facebook has the lowest score of any company measured. The score, 66, is three percent over last year's survey, while Google is one of the highest-scoring companies.

'No Longer a Safety Net'

ForeSee Results CEO Larry Freed said that, while it's not possible to project how Google's new social -networking service, Google+, will do in the marketplace, he noted that Facebook is vulnerable. "An existing dominance of market share like Facebook has," he said, "is no longer a safety net for a company that is not providing a superior customer experience."

The top rung for customer satisfaction with social media is occupied by Wikipedia, whose 78 percent score is one percent higher than in last year's survey. Second place went to YouTube at 74 percent. But it's a tough job satisfying customers in this category. The report described social media in general as "one of the lowest-scoring industries," with only airlines, newspapers and subscription-television services scoring lower.

Social media is only one area of e-business covered by the survey. It also measures customer satisfaction with portals and search engines, and online news.

In portals and search engines, Google has an 83 percent satisfaction rate, an increase of four percent, but Microsoft's Bing is moving up fast. Bing now has an 82 percent score, a substantial seven percent increase from last year. ForeSee said 80 or higher is considered "excellent." It also noted that Bing's market share has nearly doubled in the last year, to 17 percent from nine percent.

'Anybody Is Vulnerable'

So while Facebook's users could be open to a new social-networking service such as Google+, Google's search engine needs to keep a wary eye on the approaching Bing. According to Freed, Google's customer-satisfaction score last year was three points higher than Bing's. "Bing is showing it can challenge Google in terms of revenue, market share, and customer experience," he said.

Among news sites, News Corp.'s increasing troubles haven't yet impacted its FOXNews.com site, which showed an 82 percent customer-satisfaction rate. The second highest is ABCNews.com, which increased three percent this year to 77 percent. HuffingtonPost.com makes its first entry into the survey at 69 percent, and NYTimes.com comes in a 73 percent, a four percent drop. The survey noted that it measured satisfaction with the Times at the same time the company was implementing its pay wall.

Information Technology Intelligence Corp.'s Laura DiDio said it's not just Google or Facebook that have to keep a constant eye on their competitors. "Anybody is vulnerable in this market," she said, adding that, "no matter how successful, there is always a competitor coming up."

CEO Followed Two Loves to Success

No matter how hard Dave Alberga trained, he'd routinely be "thrown a beating" whenever he entered a mountain biking race.
Frustrated, the CEO of Active Network, who at the time in the 1990s was working at a technology company, asked a friend what to do. His friend's advice? "Give up."
That wasn't exactly what Alberga, a 48-year-old graduate from West Point and Stanford, had in mind. Alberga had tried to balance his passion for competitive sports like biking with his desire to succeed at business. But Alberga's friend told him he wasn't wired to multitask and do both and should focus on one thing that combined his love of sports and business.
The chance came in 1999, when Alberga got a call from a venture-capital firm looking for an executive to head up a small but fast-growing business that processed athletic competition registrations. Alberga knew this was exactly the kind of company that could blend his interests in athletics and online commerce. "This is the closest ever to get, as I can't be a professional athlete," to integrate sports in his life and career, he says.
Growing Fast
Now Alberga and Active Network are turning into small-business winners. Just 12 years after being founded, Active Network is the fast-growing leader in the push to take registrations of mainly outdoor events online. The San Diego-based company, which generated revenue of $289 million over the past year, launched an initial public offering last week and now has a market value of $180 million.
Active Network also has some big-time corporate backers: Walt Disney's ESPN and Barry Diller's IAC/InterActive own stakes.
The company is best known for providing the electronic back-office systems used by race organizers to allow competitors to sign up, pay and receive updates on competitions ranging from 5k's and 10k's to marathons and other endurance sports. Active Network handles the registrations of some of the nation's best-known races, including the Marine Corps Marathon, the Chicago Marathon and San Francisco's Bay to Breakers race.
Organizers say Active Network is the answer to their nightmare situations of receiving thousands of crumpled registrations forms, loose checks and wads of cash and trying to keep track of it all.
The Bay to Breakers race has used Active.com for more than 10 years. The latest race, completed in May, sold out its registration with more than 55,000 registrants, says race organizer Angela Fang. Using Active.com allowed her to process the thousands of payments, something that would have been much more costly and cumbersome to deal with otherwise, she says. While the race added a $5 service fee for the Active service, runners appreciate the convenience and think the charge is reasonable.

Salesforce Buys Radian for monitoring social networks.

More emphasis is being placed on social CRM by Salesforce as it buys Radian, which monitors hundreds of millions of social-media conversations. Radian6 monitors Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other sites, and Salesforce expects the acquisition to extend the value of its Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Chatter and Force.com offerings Salesforce is increasing its position in social CRM  by buying social-media monitoring firm Radian6. Radian6 monitors hundreds of millions of social-media conversations every day on behalf of such companies as Dell, GE, Kodak, Molson Coors, PepsiCo and UPS . The acquisition involves about $276 million in cash and $50 million in stock.
The environments monitored in real time by Radian6 include Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs and other online communities. Salesforce said the acquisition will extend the value of its Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Chatter and Force.com offerings by providing business  intelligence and capabilities related to social media.
'New Norm of Customer Engagement'
Radian6 CEO Marcel LeBrun told news media that his company's technology is "built for the new norm of customer engagement -- real time, two-way conversations that include social channels."
The company's products include a monitoring platform that helps analyze social-media campaigns and an engagement platform to help companies connect  with online community members. These are intended to improve marketing and selling products, maintain customer service, and manage online reputations.
Radian6 said more than half of the Fortune 100 companies use its products. In its announcement, Salesforce pointed to a shift to what it calls Cloud 2. In Cloud 1, according to Salesforce, technologies were leveraged to be inexpensive, fast, easy to use, and available on the desktop. In Cloud 2, the company said, technologies are "social, mobile  and open."
Among other utilizations, Salesforce plans to use Radian6 to help create a bridge between public social networks, such as Facebook, and its private Chatter social network for enterprises. Chatter feeds will now contain information that reflects comments on Facebook, Twitter, blogs and other environments.
For Force.com, Salesforce sees Radian6 as offering an opportunity for developers to build the social web into apps.
Integration with New Service Cloud
Social media for the enterprise has emerged as a major emphasis for Salesforce's new products. Earlier this month, for instance, it announced "the next generation of social contact centers," Service Cloud 3. It positioned the updated software -as-a-service platform as "customer service for the social era."
Service Cloud 3 was designed to let organizations more completely engage with customers in social communities such as Twitter or Facebook. To facilitate that, the platform included integration with a Radian6 app.
A key selling point of the new Service Cloud upgrade  is that it allows companies to scale up quickly to analyze millions of conversations that involve their products or service. Real-time reports and customizable dashboards offer social-channel analyses, customer-conversation  analyses, and social dashboards for identifying trends.
Comments in Facebook, for instance, can be filtered by the number of friends a commenter has, assumedly indicating how influential that person is. Facebook names can also be tied into customer records.
Facebook wall posts and comments can be converted into cases with Service Cloud 3, and Twitter conversations can similarly become cases -- with agents joining in the conversation.

Analytics, Storage and Cloud Skills Will Be in Demand on Business intelligence

As economic recovery boosts IT hiring, specialized skill sets will see the most action. These include business analytics, storage and cloud computing. Tim said data needs to be analyzed to be useful, and Jordan said data storage is always a good place to be. And CIOs who can deliver continue to be in demand
IT careers are heating up again -- at least in some sectors. So what are the best IT careers for 2011? Is it the mobile market? Enterprise security? Business analytics? The good news is, experts say there is plenty of action across the board for technologists with specialized skill sets.
Is betting on business  analytics. Tim, a spokesperson for Big Blue's business-analytics division, said businesses and governments alike are grappling with the challenge of making sense of this data deluge to turn it into new opportunities, increased performance, and faster, better decision-making. Gartner reports business analytics is a top 10 priority for companies in 2011.
"The power  of business analytics is transforming this information into a strategic asset. Although having the best, most complete and up-to-date information is useless if you can't make sense of it," Powers said. "Data unanalyzed is data wasted. Therefore, businesses and governments need two very important things to make this happen: The right technology, and employees with the right expertise and skill sets."
Storage, Virtualization and the Cloud
Jordan, president and CEO of Insider Search, focuses on another area of IT: Senior level sales, marketing, engineering, consulting and management talent -- with a specific focus on data storage  and infrastructure . He sees plenty of activity on those sectors in 2011.
"Storage has always been a great place to be, because no matter how bad the economy gets, storage is always a sizable chunk of any IT budget. Every organization needs to store and manage their critical data. Storage administrators, architects and consultants will always be in high demand," said.
"Two other key areas of massive potential growth are virtualization  and cloud -computing-related technologies. It's often said that 'virtualization is the gateway drug to the cloud,'" he added. "In the future, more and more companies will move toward virtualized environments and utilize cloud architectures. It's a good idea to get on board now as the train builds momentum."
A Fresh Look at CIOs
Steve, a managing director at global  search firm Chase, said the CIO position continues to grow in breadth of demands, complexity and responsibility to a wide range of senior executives. Because of this, he said, great CIO talent is still in demand, along with several first-level managers.
"IT jobs are especially in demand for people who can deliver to the complexity of the business -- more for less, effectiveness and efficiencies, compliances, risk management, proactive business alignment, and service-level expectations," said. "Skills in strategic planning, business analysis and process improvement, project management, infrastructure services, security and risk management are in demand."
Jack, vice president and chief delivery officer for Avandex, said communication , collaboration and data access within the enterprise will drive greater reliance on positions such as computer-systems analysts and IT specialists who ensure the implementation and efficiency of the technologies that help to run our businesses every day. He concluded, "The best IT careers will be those that allow for the chance to engage with people on a global level -- learning cultures throughout the world through collaboration with teammates located at various offices."

10 Questions for CRM Systems' Milintec

Milintec CRM spoke with this about the service challenges facing large enterprises and the company’s differentiation between personalization and a customer-centric approach.

Dwayne Ruffin, senior vice president of product Management at CSG Systems, has a lot on his plate. Charged with overseeing the evolution of the company from a provider of fairly standard customer management tools for the telecommunications, cable and satellite industries, he not only must help his customers deal with new communication channels; he’s also got to help them understand that customer expectations are on the rise and standing still is not an option. His customer companies are struggling to find new revenue while introducing new services; to maintain and improve customer service means introducing new strategies and technologies. That was what motivated the company’s acquisition of Quaero in 2008.

Ruffin spoke to Milintec CRM about the service challenges facing large enterprises, the difficulty of meeting customer expectations and the company’s differentiation between personalization and a customer-centric approach.

Milintec CRM: Your traditional customers have been in the cable, satellite and telecommunications businesses. Those industries often get pretty tough grades from consumers. Are the players in those areas starting to understand what a competitive advantage painless service could be?

Ruffin: I think they’ve gotten it for a long period time. The challenges rest in the inability to normalize behavior across disparate systems. When you look at cable operators and, definitely, in the telco space, through acquisition they acquire a lot of systems, and a lot of work is required to rationalize those systems. If you’re not effective at it, you’ve got customer data that resides in many different places. Trying to bring that together and make it meaningful from a customer experience or a rep experience has been a challenge. If you look at cable, and look the J.D. Powers surveys, those who have a tendency to score high have some consistency in the systems that sit beneath that desktop presentation. They’ve got one billing system, they’ve normalized how they provision customers, there’s an enterprise data warehouse, and there’s one place to go as the source of information for customers. I really do think that their challenge has been bringing the infrastructure together from an IT perspective to serve the business, and those who have done well have scored high.

Milintec CRM: How will social media begin to impact what you do and what you provide your customers, as well as how your customers envision their relationships with their clientele?

Ruffin: I think social media’s impact is really centered around personalization and convenience. I think our customers understand that the consumer ultimately will determine consumption of services, moving away from putting together a bundle and pitching that bundle and hoping that it sticks. I think they’re seeing clear indications in other markets, and I won’t use the Apple disintermediation of content as an example because it’s overused, but they understand that they need to be supportive of the ways that consumers will ultimately leverage entertainment and communication. A lot of the constructs that you see in social media – the collaboration components, the recommendation components – we haven’t seen advertising to date, but I think that’s soon to come. The valuations of these companies that play in the social space are indicative of the expectation that you’ll be able to leverage them from a commerce perspective. They’re taking all of those things into account. When you hear about interactive television, or when you hear about the ability to collaborate with tools like polling and chat on the television, as well as on the Internet and mobile sides, they clearly understand the desire of the end consumer, to be much more collaborative and much more selective in how they consume content, moving away from subscriptions to more of a one-off selection. They’re evolving to support that.

The pace has been slow, to be completely candid. What we need to do in order to support those environments is to make sure that our customers have visibility into all the things consumers are doing with their services. No longer do you just need to understand those things that transpire at the billing engine. You need to be aware of things that are happening outside of billing. They’re happening on Web pages, they’re happening in the network in terms of how consumers are actually leveraging those services.

Milintec CRM: It seems like often customers have more access to company information than call center agents. What has the impact of the widespread availability of information on the Internet meant for you?

Ruffin: Our opinion is that our customers need to make sure they apply tools in a systematic fashion so that all the intelligence associated with promoting the right products to consumers doesn’t reside between the ears of an agent. There’s lots of turnover in call centers. What you really need are tools that can prompt the agent and give them the flexibility to respond to the customers’ intent. The tools should know first and foremost everything there needs to be known about competitive offers in an area. You know that that consumer, especially if he’s yours, if he’s gone to a competitor’s Web page, you make the assumption that he’s been shopping, you apply some analytics to determine what might be a better fit in terms of his services. That would incorporate all the things I talked about in the previous question like understanding not only the billing relationship or what services a customer currently subscribes to but what he is actually doing with those services so you can right-size them. Many of our customers are moving in that direction — make sure that they have a systematic approach to that. We’ve made a heavy investment in leveraging our channels. CSG is more than a revenue-management or billing company. We’ve deployed lots of applications that help our customers interact with their end consumers. What we were lacking prior to a recent acquisition was the ability to make those interactions smart and intuitive and operationalize those interactions so they were systematic. That’s really why we acquired Quaero — to bring those pieces together. Our customers, to varying degrees, have leveraged tools, but I’ve yet to see many of them operationalize those things and make them systematic. We think that’s a potential opportunity for us.

Milintec CRM: Large organizations are not that inclined to switch vendors for service support software unless they really have to. What have you seen as the motivating factors that have led customers away from other products and to CSG?

Ruffin: We haven’t seen any customers defect and move toward enterprise CRM or a Siebel-like application. My belief is that’s because those applications often lack domain knowledge of a specific vertical. That’s where we’ve had a lot of success. What we know about, the business of our customers, is reflected within our applications. You’re not talking about a commercially available application that has to be retooled to support the business. What we do first and foremost is make sure that we have the knowledge of the industry baked into that application. Additionally, I think what customers are really looking for is — they want a lot of flexibility, but at the end of the day you have a lot of pieces in your infrastructure, and if they’re not synced up then you’re not getting the business benefit that you need. We pride ourselves in being able to evolve our applications, but within synchronization with other applications. When we release code and it’s specific to a business problem; we’ve already made sure that doesn’t break anything else downstream.

Milintec CRM: Can you describe the shift the company is making from personalization toward a more customer-centric approach, and explain how those two terms have different meanings?

Ruffin: What we did with our revenue management environment was to deploy a system that has the customer record at the heart of it. It allows you to manage the business processes that couldn’t otherwise be managed. I use an example where provider X is your service provider in Buffalo, New York. If you move to L.A. within that same provider footprint, the provider should have knowledge of that. We made the application very customer centric in that all services, locations, past experiences and so on are tied to that record. As that record moves from one location to the next, everything comes with it. It makes it very easy for our customers - and let’s face it, they’re becoming few, they’ve been going through consolidation and will probably continue to consolidate, so the probability of you moving from one geography to another but remaining within the same provider footprint is very strong. So when we say customer centric, it’s really been with that piece in mind so all the actions that you enable are aware of that customer and what that customer represents to the enterprise.

Personalization keys more off the preferences of that customer. So personalization means you’re taking very specific actions based ion either what you would derive the intent of that customer to be or what that customer has told you their preferences are. That can span the gamut from want to be advised of marketing activities, I want to be advised where the tech is on the day of install, I want to indicate to the provider that my preferred method of communication before the tech arrives is to call me 30 minutes prior to install, call me at my office because my office is only five miles from home and I don’t want to spend all day sitting on the couch waiting for you. If you don’t reach me there, I want you to send me an SMS, and if the SMS doesn’t work, I want you to go ahead and send me an email. All the while, I also want to be able to go to the web and understand where that tech is up to the minute. So when we talk about personalization – I gave you an example that’s very operationally focused. We also have examples that are marketing focused in terms of you wanting to be aware of new service introductions, ways to extend the product, etc. We’re really talking about driving our behavior based on what the customer prefers vs. drawing some assumptions around what is best for the customer.

It amazes me to this day how much money is spent trying to draw inferences from customer activity instead of actually letting the customer tell you what’s important to them and using that information to manage the experience.

Milintec CRM: How critical is knowledge management to this notion of service based on the immediate needs of the customer?

Ruffin: You’ve probably heard a lot of conversation around things like authentication and entitlement. They’re really wrestling with the idea that, I have a captive audience, so to speak, I’ve got a customer who has a monthly relationship with me via a subscription. I can continue to add value to that customer by making sure that they can use that subscription to move their content or their entertainment to many devices – it might be their PC, and it might be a mobile device. The classic example I always use is, I have a relationship with my cable provider. As part of that I have a subscription to a sports tier that entitles me to watch Nuggets games from my couch. Why can’t I do that when I’m traveling and in a hotel room and there’s nothing on TV and I prefer to watch a Nuggets game? They’re struggling with how to monetize those things and clearly they have some carriage issues to negotiate with the content providers.

Milintec CRM: You mentioned the replacement of personalization - which was based on up-selling and cross-selling. But clearly, those functions aren't going away. Where does sales go in your vision of the service transaction?

Ruffin: Personalization includes up-selling and cross-selling based on unique insights or instructions from the customer. In an ideal world, the operator would have gathered or inferred the customers preferences via direct and indirect channels. Sales is the key component of service – sales can have many dimensions; new sales, up-selling and right-sizing the offer based on the customers’ consumption patterns. At the end of the day, our customers are telling us that it is increasingly difficult to maintain a customer if you don’t respond to their interaction and consumptions patterns.

Milintec CRM: Have your customers been able to quantify the cost savings of well-managed services? And, for those who have, is this something that leads them to you, or is it something they discover after becoming a customer?

Ruffin: All of our products are built on the value proposition that they will provide business benefit to the customer. Most products are gearing toward bottom line improvements. Our customers understand the value of allowing a world-class operator to manage its services in a self-regulated environment. Our business was built on reliability and repeatability – Our customers seek out and stay with CSG because of these two factors.

Milintec CRM: Since service is gaining in its importance as an aspect of CRM, does CSG have plans to reach beyond its current focus into other verticals?

Ruffin: Yes, much of our focus is geared toward applying our solutions in unique ways in other verticals and geographies.

Milintec CRM: What is the one service challenge that you'd most like to see overcome in the next year?

Ruffin: Without having to purchase or rent another set top or recording device, I’d like to see the Web brought to my living room viewing experience. Search and recommendations are staples of the Internet experience – it shouldn’t be an enormous leap to bring that to a screen larger than 17 inches. For now, I would be satisfied with an Internet guide that allows me to search, preview, and catalog content on my TV.

CRM for call conference pricing

This is a  service outsourced solution provider specializing in call center and  services for a wide array of industries and organizations; ranging from apparel brands, to celebrity fan clubs, to pharmaceutical companies.
As a single point of contact we develop and manage of integrated programs for consumer and business markets.
Our services are designed to meet even the most demanding client needs. We are committed to providing top-quality services at very competitive rates and we pride ourselves for being extremely responsive and available to our clients. For example, since we have full centers in both the east and west coasts, this can decrease client shipping costs and quickly distribute products.
this makes it possible for our clients to reduce expenses and capital expenditures, improve customer experiences and maximize revenue growth - among many benefits. The broad range and depth of our services, enables clients to better focus on their core competencies.
Primary Service
Product s 
Warehousing and Distributions
Teleservices
Contact Centers (Telephone, Fax, Email, Web Chat)
Inventory Managements
Order Processing / Managements
E-Commerce Implementations
Returns Processing / Reverse Logistics
CRM Application Development and Integrations
Marketing Program Managements
Clients have the flexibility to take advantage of our complete customer lifecycle offerings, or select individual services to complement their internal capabilities. Whether it's helping our clients acquire, engage, fulfill and retain customers, this does whatever it takes to meet program objectives.

An Innovative Approach To Client Service
This support the growing need for established businesses, ecommerce companies and organizations to take advantage of emerging market opportunities in a cost efficient and scalable manner.
By introducing innovative business processes and employing "best-of-breed" technologies to the call center and fulfillment worlds backed by integrated capabilities, this company established a truly unique solution. The success of this approach was validated in our first year of operation, where we established significant relationships with several Fortune 100 companies.
Over the last twelve years, we have greatly expanded our client base, solution offerings and resources. Since we realize our clients live in a challenging and dynamic environment, this is constantly innovating and investing in our capabilities while at the same time adding to our talented employee base. In all respects, we maintain unique client partnerships. A number of clients even have offices at this facilities.

CRM Business intelligence software

CRM Business intelligence software
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