anjalicutek
Anjali Khurana
Customer Relationship Management of Google : Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products,[6] and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program.[3][7] The company was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, often dubbed the "Google Guys",[8][9][10] while the two were attending Stanford University as Ph.D. candidates. It was first incorporated as a privately held company on September 4, 1998, and its initial public offering followed on August 19, 2004. The company's stated mission from the outset was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful",[11] and the company's unofficial slogan – coined by Google engineer Paul Buchheit – is "Don't be evil".[12][13] In 2006, the company moved to their current headquarters in Mountain View, California.
Google runs over one million servers in data centers around the world,[14] and processes over one billion search requests[15] and about twenty-four petabytes of user-generated data every day.[16][17][18][19] Google's rapid growth since its incorporation has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions, and partnerships beyond the company's core web search engine. The company offers online productivity software, such as its Gmail email software, and social networking tools, including Orkut and, more recently, Google Buzz. Google's products extend to the desktop as well, with applications such as the web browser Google Chrome, the Picasa photo organization and editing software, and the Google Talk instant messaging application. Notably, Google leads the development of the Android mobile phone operating system, used on a number of phones such as the Nexus One and Motorola Droid. Alexa lists the main U.S.-focused google.com site as the Internet's most visited website, and numerous international Google sites (google.co.in, google.co.uk etc.) are in the top hundred, as are several other Google-owned sites such as YouTube, Blogger, and Orkut.[20] Google is also BrandZ's most powerful brand in the world.[21] The dominant market position of Google's services has led to criticism of the company over issues including privacy, copyright, and censorship
Google's founders have often stated that the company is not serious about anything but search. They built a company around the idea that work should be challenging and the challenge should be fun. To that end, Google's culture is unlike any in corporate America, and it's not because of the ubiquitous lava lamps and large rubber balls, or the fact that the company's chef used to cook for the Grateful Dead. In the same way Google puts users first when it comes to our online service, Google Inc. puts employees first when it comes to daily life in our Googleplex headquarters. There is an emphasis on team achievements and pride in individual accomplishments that contribute to the company's overall success. Ideas are traded, tested and put into practice with an alacrity that can be dizzying. Meetings that would take hours elsewhere are frequently little more than a conversation in line for lunch and few walls separate those who write the code from those who write the checks. This highly communicative environment fosters a productivity and camaraderie fueled by the realization that millions of people rely on Google results. Give the proper tools to a group of people who like to make a difference, and they will.
GMAIL and IRM (Inbox Relationship Management)
Facebook , Twitter and other social networks have everybody’s attention right now. Facebook crossed the 400 million member mark with those members sharing over 5 billion pieces of content each week. Twitter users are sending 50 million tweets each day. And while social networks continue to grow in importance for business purposes, the number of interactions taking place over them still pales in comparison to the 247 billion daily messages sent by 1.4 billion email users, according to a 2009 Radacati Group study. Even as social becomes more entrenched all aspects of life, the Radacati study expects email usage to more than double by 2013 with 507 billion daily messages being sent.
As the numbers above demonstrate, email (along with the telephone) has been the main relationship building tool for business people. Each of us has sent and received hundreds of thousands of messages over the past two decades, making our inboxes a very important database of customer/prospect information. And this information is what drove most CRM vendors to create integrations with Microsoft Outlook - to make it more appealing for hundreds of millions of Outlook users to use their applications.
As Microsoft Outlook has had a definite impact on functionality and adoption, Google’s Gmail is beginning to impact CRM as well. It hasn’t been around as long as Outlook, but Gmail is the 3rd most popular (but fastest growing) online email service with over 170 million users. According to a study performed by email marketing service provider MailChimp, Gmail users have the highest open and click-thru rates for marketing emails sent to web email addresses.
From a CRM perspective, Gmail has a lot to offer – beyond the large (and growing) number of users. The service allows you to store huge amounts of email and the attachments embedded in them, and as you would expect the search capabilities are excellent. You can easily access your email, contacts, and calendar and other information from pretty much anywhere… from about any device. But what I think is the most interesting is how Google is creating frictionless, organic opportunities for Gmail users (as well as users of other apps) to build more meaningful business relationships.
Email Interactions Foundation for Deepening Relationships
A few things can happen as you exchange emails more and more with other Gmail users. Google picks up on the frequency of these exchanges and can automatically enable instant message communications over GChat. If the people you interact with use Google Reader to manage RSS subscriptions you can see what kinds of content they’re reading and sharing with others. Also, if those fellow Gmail users you exchange emails with have YouTube channels, they are shown at the top of your YouTube homepage and you are given the opportunity to subscribe to their channels.
The inbox relationship is also the driving force behind Buzz, the social network service Google rolled out a few months ago that enables Facebook/Twitter-like information sharing with those you interact with via Gmail. Buzz is not groundbreaking, but once again it offers a frictionless mechanism to learn more about those you’re we exchange emails with. It extends the inbox relationship and creates more collaborative opportunities with content-sharing tools we’ve become accustomed to in social networks.
We’re also seeing third party developers creating social apps to further enhance our inbox interactions. Rapportive recently created a Gmail add-on that allows you to see information on what social networks email senders are on – even allowing you to see their latest tweets on Twitter. Gist is a service that allows you to import your Gmail information, as well as other data sources, in order to analyze the strength of your relationships in order to help you focus your efforts on the important business relationships. With the growth of the Google Apps Marketplace you’re seeing CRM providers (Zoho, BatchBlue, etc.), email marketing services like MailChimp, and a host of other service providers tying their applications to Google.
Social Search – Focus on Efficiently Finding Information Sources
While it’s important to capitalize on (and grow) relationships we’ve already established, the focus of many is finding new relationships to compete, thrive and survive in today’s market. People are turning to social networks in order to build new relationships in order to drive new business. There are plenty of tools out there that assist you in connecting with people, like Google Friend Finder – a service that helps you find new people to follow on Twitter.
What is apparent is that customers and prospects are searching for trusted information sources to build relationships with. Ironically as more people engage on social networks, and creation tools make it easier to pump out informational content, the task of finding trusted sources becomes more difficult due to information overload.
While Google is rolling out things like their Friend Finder app, the recent purchase of social search vendor Aardvark is really intriguing. Everybody knows that Google is the king of web search, but what’s interesting about Aardvark is their search functionality is focused on helping people find the right person to answer an information need. A different approach to the traditional search result of links to web pages based on key words.
With more people on social networks creating content to brand themselves as experts in their craft, services like Aardvark can help people connect with real subject matter experts right at the moment they need them. Not only does this provide realtime opportunities to get questions answered by knowledgeable professionals, but it helps cut down the time it takes to build mutually beneficial relationships – and cut through the growing number of self-proclaimed authorities.
Conclusion
A major challenge driving many businesses (particularly small and mid-size companies) to CRM today is figuring out how to leverage social tools and online services to improve customer acquisition and retention. CRM vendors like Salesforce.com and others are integrating social networking functionality into their services to provide their customers with more tools to cultivate business relationships online. Social networks like Facebook are also adding capabilities to make their platforms more business friendly, providing more opportunity to engage with their 400M users.
While not offering a CRM application of their own, or traditional social network platform, Google will still have a significant impact on how companies will develop and implement CRM strategies. Even as we spend more time interacting on social networks, the vast majority of business interactions take place over email – Gmail will see its share of email interactions grow as well. Just as important as the number of interactions, the depth of interaction creates deeper, more direct, meaningful exchanges.
With the recent re-write of Google Docs to improve realtime collaboration capabilities, Google is creating a path for people to up their collaborative opportunities and grow relationships. With mobile device and applications proliferating, interactions are growing infinitely which should help create even more opportunities to build meaningful relationships.
In the midst of millions of business interactions taking place over Gmail and search, Google stands in a unique position to assist a large number of businesses with their business relationship building activities. As they did with Buzz (important privacy issues aside), they can roll out new services to hundreds of millions of Gmail users – making it really curious to see how they integrate and offer Aardvark to Gmailers.
It will also be interesting to see how traditional CRM application providers tap into Google APIs (and users) to integrate their offerings. And in addition to the Google Apps Marketplace, what impact their Data Liberation project will have on how far Google data travels between third party developers, and impacts relationship building quality and efficiency. Finally, will Google Analytics be used to help to gain a better understanding of how all our interactions are impacting our relationship building efforts and bottom lines – like it is currently helping us analyze website traffic and AdWords campaign ROI.
In the final analysis Google’s impact on CRM in the “Social Age” will be pretty significant. It doesn’t have the traditional domain expertise and enterprise knowledge of mainstream CRM vendors, but its reach goes well beyond most of theirs. Facebook has more than double the users Gmail has, but business people still live in email, and their most important (and frequent) interactions take place there. So it’s with this combination of scale, business usage, low( or no) cost apps, and platform which makes GRM a unique development to watch in the CRM space now and in the future.
Principal Competitors:AltaVista; Ask Jeeves; Inktomi.
“We started digging around and realized this has a lot of potential,” Roberts recalls, but he says that even then he knew it had to be campuswide or it wouldn’t happen at all—no point converting just students to Gmail and keeping faculty and staff on the legacy system. So the decision was made: ACU offered Google Apps to students in April 2007, setting a September deadline—the start of the school year—for shutting off the old email client.
Eighty percent of students opted into Gmail the first day, Roberts says, and they offered zero pushback. The only resistance was with faculty members who had years and years of messages archived. Yet, by the end of autumn, the entire university was Google-oriented. Roberts says that he couldn’t be more pleased. “[Usage] has taken off very quickly,” he says. “It’s ingrained itself in the culture of how we do things at ACU.”
The technology department originally had email as its top-of-mind priority. Yet, as ACU experimented with Gmail, Roberts says the other benefits of Google Apps became clear. Essentially, the university replaced the email administrator with a developer capable of creating custom university applications for Google Apps. Professors now share Google-hosted presentations with students. Students share Google Docs with teachers. Faculty members use the collaboration capabilities to share budget documents with one another. All told, Abilene Christian saves nearly $100,000 a year.
“It’s like what Apple has done…in elementary school to disrupt the PC market. It’s the same thing at the application layer with Google,” states Jeffrey Kaplan, founder of software-as-a-service (SaaS) consultancy ThinkStrategies. “Education is the best place to change long-term behaviors.”
But the classroom is only Step One. In what many are calling the “consumerization of business technology,” there has been a noticeable willingness to consider business adoption of consumer-oriented technologies.
And who’s driving this push? Consumers, of course—the ones who work for you. A new wave of employees is entering workplaces with iPod headphones in their ears, Facebook profiles on their computer screens, and smartphones in their hands. This generation, more adept at technology than even senior-level executives, is making demands for computing in the workplace to be on par with the sophisticated computing they have in their homes.
Kaplan draws a comparison: “Three to four years ago when I asked CIOs about the use of [instant messaging], which was a consumer phenomenon, they said no way would they allow that kind of stuff in corporate environments.”
Kaplan matches that example up with recent “consumerization” movements toward social networking and cloud computing. While some organizations seem willing to open enterprise doors to Facebook, Amazon Web Services, and Google, others are slow to capitalize on the benefits—still worried about security and married to traditional computing. Some vendors have endorsed integration with Google AdWords and Google Apps; others are competing with Google, positioning themselves as a more-secure option.
Within CRM, Salesforce.com has perhaps the tightest Google Apps integration, the result of a relationship dating back to 2003. The cloud superpowers announced the SalesforceCRM for Google Apps product in early 2008, and at a subsequent December event called Cloudforce, revealed that 5,000 customers have started using the combined offering. The previous integration of Google AdWords and Salesforce.com has helped, as well, but the significance now extends far beyond search, according to the keynote delivered by Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com’s cofounder, chairman, and chief executive officer.
“Cloud computing brings us all together because it’s a model that adapts regardless of the size of implementation or the size of the company,” Benioff said. “We’re not an island—we realize there are other clouds emerging.” (That may be an understatement: The very same day, open-source CRM provider SugarCRM released an updated edition that trumpeted new access to cloud-based third-party data.)
But Google remains the biggest cloud in the sky, as Salesforce.com knows firsthand. Chuck Ganapathi, Salesforce.com's vice president of product marketing, estimates that the number of leads being generated each month by his company's Salesforce for Google Adwords offering has reached 300,000—leads that get fed directly into participating Salesforce.com accounts when a sponsored Google listing is clicked. Ganapathi describes the output as a "tremendous amount...of marketing…that will at some point get converted into customers."
It’s the “at some point” that’s causing some grief. In February 2007, software and platform provider Etelos was one of the first to board the Google bandwagon, with Etelos CRM for Google Apps—essentially a CRM tool available on the iGoogle landing page. When monetization became an issue, Etelos refocused its vision, spending more on developing its platform.
“There are definitely some constraints you get when you start running many versions of an application within someone else’s framework,” says Danny Kolke, the company’s founder and chief executive officer. “There are some issues there with trying to provide an optimal experience inside someone else’s interface.”
Kolke says that developers originally saw lucrative potential in the Google Apps platform, but it hasn’t panned out. “Most of the users are iGoogle users and iGoogle is free,” he says. “They’re looking for an app that’s free so they can do light lifting, and aren’t interested in using heavy CRM.” For many months, he says, Etelos was known as the “CRM for Google” company, and getting partners to look beyond that nickname has been a struggle.
The industry may be reluctant to admit that some users are looking for “light CRM,” but it’s unavoidable. Small businesses, especially ones accustomed to running some level of CRM out of Microsoft Excel or Outlook, find Google Apps appealing. First, it’s hard to compete on price when something’s free. Second, Google Apps provide collaboration capabilities not found in Outlook and Excel.
Hunt Services, a small organization in Phoenix that serves as the go-between for physicians and pharmaceutical research, has used Google Apps for close to a year. Amanda Drake, Hunt’s director, says that not having to pay a fee was the main appeal—saving on overhead is a solid benefit for her small-but-growing company. But the centralization and collaboration efforts are the real payoff: Drake says that she used to spend hours in Outlook emailing Microsoft Word documents and Excel spreadsheets to coworkers, but those days are past. Google Calendar is now the hub of Hunt’s business—it’s where employees schedule events, set alerts and tasks, and store notes about different clients. All client contact information, in fact, used to be walled off on the main computer—not everyone had access, but now they do.
Having tried the Holy Trinity of Google Apps—spreadsheets, calendar, and documents—Drake got additional functionality by clicking the “What’s New” link at the top of one of the Apps pages: That’s how she found Google Sites—a Web-page creation application that’s now critical to Hunt’s relationship with clients.
“Every time I post an opportunity onto those sites, when I sign in, it’s in the form of a document—some kind of paperwork that the physician will have to sign. I post it directly to the site, share that with the doctors, and they click that link. They don’t have anything to figure out.” Drake says that sharing forms online reduces paper and mailing costs—and saves time, too. Above all, Drake says, the collaboration capabilities delivered by Google Apps have revolutionized Hunt’s workflow: Essentially, people can work from anywhere as long as they’re signed into Google.
Hunt has not yet transferred its email over to Gmail—dealing with the legacy system has been too much of a monster, Drake says, but she’s hoping to tackle it in the near future. Her only pain point involves Google Calendar: The “notes” section often won’t hold all of the pertinent information, requiring the creation of multiple calendar entries.
Still, Drake says she’s very pleased—and doesn’t expect to outgrow the solution soon. Neil Pearson, the controller of Hunt’s sister company Hope Research, agrees, but does report one particular snafu: “Every couple of weeks or so, [Google Apps] tends to go down,” Pearson says. “It’s a nerve-wracking 45 minutes.” Small businesses might be willing to weather such intermittent hiccups, but multinational conglomerates are less forgiving.
In fact, floating all that proprietary data around the cloud in the first place has some people justifiably nervous. The issue was best brought to light by enterprise software analyst Josh Greenbaum, who wondered in a series of blogposts last summer about the content stored in Google Apps. Depending on your interpretation of the company’s Terms of Service, he wrote, it could be argued that any data and information created, shared, and stored on those applications belongs to Google—not exactly what the average corporate compliance officer wants to hear.
“Fundamentally, I think Google is either being stupid or malicious: either way they’ve got to [do] more to protect their user’s [sic] content,” Greenbaum wrote in a September 24 post.
After Google unleashed its Chrome Web browser that same month, more security issues surfaced regarding how the browser’s search data is stored and what exactly Google does with it. Greenbaum wrote at the time that “this latest nonsense from [Google] is further proof that you get what you pay for—and if the loss of privacy and security are the price of free, I’m ready to pay for my Web-based services.”
And with more than 1 million companies having selected Google Apps to help run operations, including Google itself, the company has taken pains to address the security concerns. At a recent conference, David Girouard, president of Google Enterprise, emphasized the security built into Google Apps, including SAS-70 certification, third-party validation of its data protection, and the strength of its service-level agreements (SLAs). Those SLAs originally promised Google Premier Edition users 99.9 percent uptime for Gmail; at the end of October 2008, Google extended that SLA to include Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Talk. The company’s $625 million acquisition of email specialist Postini in July 2007 is another sign of that commitment, adding enterprise-caliber messaging, archiving, and encryption technology.
Despite the positive security measures, hecklers continue to make noise. In fact, the SLAs themselves recently came under fire in the blogosphere, and the popular TechCrunch blog drew special attention to the SLA’s definition that “Downtime for a period of less than ten minutes will not be counted.” (Would your boss think it “counted” if you were the one who put into the cloud a mission-critical application that had nine minutes of downtime?)
And yet Google continues to make inroads. To highlight Google Apps’ success at enterprise-scale companies, Girouard cited biological engineering firm Genentech, which almost immediately ballooned from a single Google Apps user to 15,000—and slapped Google Analytics on top of that—all the while adhering to its own high data-security standards.
But if cloud-based productivity suites are simply replacing Microsoft Word, Excel, and so on, does that really change the playing field for CRM? It may not seem so at first glance, but “office productivity applications” happen to be where the day-to-day activities of any CRM-loving company take place. Once you successfully migrate those activities to the cloud, and enable them to interact, communicate, and share information with your CRM systems, a wonderful metamorphosis takes place: Suddenly, your office productivity applications become CRM applications.
Salesforce.com has clearly embraced Google productivity, but other CRM players have given nods to Google in terms of interface and development. Many have picked up on the trend of dashboards and homepages, either explicitly linking information to a module built for the popular iGoogle Web page or living up to its spirit with similar widgets.
Sage’s fall 2008 release of SalesLogix 7.5, for example, includes a dashboard full of widgets; users can customize the look and feel with familiar drag-and-drop moves. And, believing that many customers were using Google’s online email service, a few Italian developers created DolceGMail on SugarCRM’s SugarForge platform, allowing users to add Gmail contacts, emails, and attachments directly into SugarCRM.
Google Maps is a player, too. Outpacing pioneers such as MapQuest, it’s become a mainstay on cellphones, dashboards, and Web sites, and has found fertile territory at the heart of enterprise mashups to guide salespeople and field reps to customer locations, define delivery routes, and embed geolocation into operations.
The beauty of the cloud is that users don’t have to get stuck with one solution. Kaplan says that Google’s recent security upgrades affirm cloud computing’s viability. “The beta version just wasn’t up to snuff,” Kaplan says. “Now they’re beginning to demonstrate they have those capabilities.” He goes on, “One of the other things is the IT department is no longer seeing SaaS as just a threat, it’s seeing that it does satisfy their business users and can help with IT management.”
The cloud architecture itself is changing, according to Gartner analyst David Mitchell Smith. “What people tend to fall into is oversimplifications,” Smith said at a recent panel. “‘[The cloud] as the only answer’ is an oversimplification. There will be a series of platforms behind the scenes—and that’s going to be where disruption happens.” He went on, “Some companies are ahead of the curve, like Salesforce.com. Some that are not talking about the cloud may be losers.”
Whether the CRM industry sees Google as a threat or an opportunity is a complex question. “Google is a faceless entity people aren’t sure how to deal with,” Kaplan opines. “It will have to overcome that if it is serious about becoming more business-oriented.” He explains that, whereas a company like Salesforce.com in the B2B market is successful in creating a corporate culture and a public face to support that focus, Google’s approach results in a minimized public persona. The superpower is viewed differently for those reasons. People are less apt to find a support number for Google and call up a service rep.
It’s also difficult to compare Google to any other software company. In The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, author Nicholas Carr points out that Google’s founders were once quoted as saying that the company’s ultimate goal is to pursue artificial intelligence—and what some might call a pipe dream is an idea that only becomes possible in light of the data flowing through Google’s pipes.
“As we spend more time and transact more of our commercial and social business online, that database will grow ever wider and deeper,” Carr writes. “Figuring out new ways for people—and machines—to tap into the storehouse of intelligence is likely to be the central enterprise of the future.”
Google runs over one million servers in data centers around the world,[14] and processes over one billion search requests[15] and about twenty-four petabytes of user-generated data every day.[16][17][18][19] Google's rapid growth since its incorporation has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions, and partnerships beyond the company's core web search engine. The company offers online productivity software, such as its Gmail email software, and social networking tools, including Orkut and, more recently, Google Buzz. Google's products extend to the desktop as well, with applications such as the web browser Google Chrome, the Picasa photo organization and editing software, and the Google Talk instant messaging application. Notably, Google leads the development of the Android mobile phone operating system, used on a number of phones such as the Nexus One and Motorola Droid. Alexa lists the main U.S.-focused google.com site as the Internet's most visited website, and numerous international Google sites (google.co.in, google.co.uk etc.) are in the top hundred, as are several other Google-owned sites such as YouTube, Blogger, and Orkut.[20] Google is also BrandZ's most powerful brand in the world.[21] The dominant market position of Google's services has led to criticism of the company over issues including privacy, copyright, and censorship
Google's founders have often stated that the company is not serious about anything but search. They built a company around the idea that work should be challenging and the challenge should be fun. To that end, Google's culture is unlike any in corporate America, and it's not because of the ubiquitous lava lamps and large rubber balls, or the fact that the company's chef used to cook for the Grateful Dead. In the same way Google puts users first when it comes to our online service, Google Inc. puts employees first when it comes to daily life in our Googleplex headquarters. There is an emphasis on team achievements and pride in individual accomplishments that contribute to the company's overall success. Ideas are traded, tested and put into practice with an alacrity that can be dizzying. Meetings that would take hours elsewhere are frequently little more than a conversation in line for lunch and few walls separate those who write the code from those who write the checks. This highly communicative environment fosters a productivity and camaraderie fueled by the realization that millions of people rely on Google results. Give the proper tools to a group of people who like to make a difference, and they will.
GMAIL and IRM (Inbox Relationship Management)
Facebook , Twitter and other social networks have everybody’s attention right now. Facebook crossed the 400 million member mark with those members sharing over 5 billion pieces of content each week. Twitter users are sending 50 million tweets each day. And while social networks continue to grow in importance for business purposes, the number of interactions taking place over them still pales in comparison to the 247 billion daily messages sent by 1.4 billion email users, according to a 2009 Radacati Group study. Even as social becomes more entrenched all aspects of life, the Radacati study expects email usage to more than double by 2013 with 507 billion daily messages being sent.
As the numbers above demonstrate, email (along with the telephone) has been the main relationship building tool for business people. Each of us has sent and received hundreds of thousands of messages over the past two decades, making our inboxes a very important database of customer/prospect information. And this information is what drove most CRM vendors to create integrations with Microsoft Outlook - to make it more appealing for hundreds of millions of Outlook users to use their applications.
As Microsoft Outlook has had a definite impact on functionality and adoption, Google’s Gmail is beginning to impact CRM as well. It hasn’t been around as long as Outlook, but Gmail is the 3rd most popular (but fastest growing) online email service with over 170 million users. According to a study performed by email marketing service provider MailChimp, Gmail users have the highest open and click-thru rates for marketing emails sent to web email addresses.
From a CRM perspective, Gmail has a lot to offer – beyond the large (and growing) number of users. The service allows you to store huge amounts of email and the attachments embedded in them, and as you would expect the search capabilities are excellent. You can easily access your email, contacts, and calendar and other information from pretty much anywhere… from about any device. But what I think is the most interesting is how Google is creating frictionless, organic opportunities for Gmail users (as well as users of other apps) to build more meaningful business relationships.
Email Interactions Foundation for Deepening Relationships
A few things can happen as you exchange emails more and more with other Gmail users. Google picks up on the frequency of these exchanges and can automatically enable instant message communications over GChat. If the people you interact with use Google Reader to manage RSS subscriptions you can see what kinds of content they’re reading and sharing with others. Also, if those fellow Gmail users you exchange emails with have YouTube channels, they are shown at the top of your YouTube homepage and you are given the opportunity to subscribe to their channels.
The inbox relationship is also the driving force behind Buzz, the social network service Google rolled out a few months ago that enables Facebook/Twitter-like information sharing with those you interact with via Gmail. Buzz is not groundbreaking, but once again it offers a frictionless mechanism to learn more about those you’re we exchange emails with. It extends the inbox relationship and creates more collaborative opportunities with content-sharing tools we’ve become accustomed to in social networks.
We’re also seeing third party developers creating social apps to further enhance our inbox interactions. Rapportive recently created a Gmail add-on that allows you to see information on what social networks email senders are on – even allowing you to see their latest tweets on Twitter. Gist is a service that allows you to import your Gmail information, as well as other data sources, in order to analyze the strength of your relationships in order to help you focus your efforts on the important business relationships. With the growth of the Google Apps Marketplace you’re seeing CRM providers (Zoho, BatchBlue, etc.), email marketing services like MailChimp, and a host of other service providers tying their applications to Google.
Social Search – Focus on Efficiently Finding Information Sources
While it’s important to capitalize on (and grow) relationships we’ve already established, the focus of many is finding new relationships to compete, thrive and survive in today’s market. People are turning to social networks in order to build new relationships in order to drive new business. There are plenty of tools out there that assist you in connecting with people, like Google Friend Finder – a service that helps you find new people to follow on Twitter.
What is apparent is that customers and prospects are searching for trusted information sources to build relationships with. Ironically as more people engage on social networks, and creation tools make it easier to pump out informational content, the task of finding trusted sources becomes more difficult due to information overload.
While Google is rolling out things like their Friend Finder app, the recent purchase of social search vendor Aardvark is really intriguing. Everybody knows that Google is the king of web search, but what’s interesting about Aardvark is their search functionality is focused on helping people find the right person to answer an information need. A different approach to the traditional search result of links to web pages based on key words.
With more people on social networks creating content to brand themselves as experts in their craft, services like Aardvark can help people connect with real subject matter experts right at the moment they need them. Not only does this provide realtime opportunities to get questions answered by knowledgeable professionals, but it helps cut down the time it takes to build mutually beneficial relationships – and cut through the growing number of self-proclaimed authorities.
Conclusion
A major challenge driving many businesses (particularly small and mid-size companies) to CRM today is figuring out how to leverage social tools and online services to improve customer acquisition and retention. CRM vendors like Salesforce.com and others are integrating social networking functionality into their services to provide their customers with more tools to cultivate business relationships online. Social networks like Facebook are also adding capabilities to make their platforms more business friendly, providing more opportunity to engage with their 400M users.
While not offering a CRM application of their own, or traditional social network platform, Google will still have a significant impact on how companies will develop and implement CRM strategies. Even as we spend more time interacting on social networks, the vast majority of business interactions take place over email – Gmail will see its share of email interactions grow as well. Just as important as the number of interactions, the depth of interaction creates deeper, more direct, meaningful exchanges.
With the recent re-write of Google Docs to improve realtime collaboration capabilities, Google is creating a path for people to up their collaborative opportunities and grow relationships. With mobile device and applications proliferating, interactions are growing infinitely which should help create even more opportunities to build meaningful relationships.
In the midst of millions of business interactions taking place over Gmail and search, Google stands in a unique position to assist a large number of businesses with their business relationship building activities. As they did with Buzz (important privacy issues aside), they can roll out new services to hundreds of millions of Gmail users – making it really curious to see how they integrate and offer Aardvark to Gmailers.
It will also be interesting to see how traditional CRM application providers tap into Google APIs (and users) to integrate their offerings. And in addition to the Google Apps Marketplace, what impact their Data Liberation project will have on how far Google data travels between third party developers, and impacts relationship building quality and efficiency. Finally, will Google Analytics be used to help to gain a better understanding of how all our interactions are impacting our relationship building efforts and bottom lines – like it is currently helping us analyze website traffic and AdWords campaign ROI.
In the final analysis Google’s impact on CRM in the “Social Age” will be pretty significant. It doesn’t have the traditional domain expertise and enterprise knowledge of mainstream CRM vendors, but its reach goes well beyond most of theirs. Facebook has more than double the users Gmail has, but business people still live in email, and their most important (and frequent) interactions take place there. So it’s with this combination of scale, business usage, low( or no) cost apps, and platform which makes GRM a unique development to watch in the CRM space now and in the future.
Principal Competitors:AltaVista; Ask Jeeves; Inktomi.
“We started digging around and realized this has a lot of potential,” Roberts recalls, but he says that even then he knew it had to be campuswide or it wouldn’t happen at all—no point converting just students to Gmail and keeping faculty and staff on the legacy system. So the decision was made: ACU offered Google Apps to students in April 2007, setting a September deadline—the start of the school year—for shutting off the old email client.
Eighty percent of students opted into Gmail the first day, Roberts says, and they offered zero pushback. The only resistance was with faculty members who had years and years of messages archived. Yet, by the end of autumn, the entire university was Google-oriented. Roberts says that he couldn’t be more pleased. “[Usage] has taken off very quickly,” he says. “It’s ingrained itself in the culture of how we do things at ACU.”
The technology department originally had email as its top-of-mind priority. Yet, as ACU experimented with Gmail, Roberts says the other benefits of Google Apps became clear. Essentially, the university replaced the email administrator with a developer capable of creating custom university applications for Google Apps. Professors now share Google-hosted presentations with students. Students share Google Docs with teachers. Faculty members use the collaboration capabilities to share budget documents with one another. All told, Abilene Christian saves nearly $100,000 a year.
“It’s like what Apple has done…in elementary school
But the classroom is only Step One. In what many are calling the “consumerization of business technology,” there has been a noticeable willingness to consider business adoption of consumer-oriented technologies.
And who’s driving this push? Consumers, of course—the ones who work for you. A new wave of employees is entering workplaces with iPod headphones in their ears, Facebook profiles on their computer screens, and smartphones in their hands. This generation, more adept at technology than even senior-level executives, is making demands for computing in the workplace to be on par with the sophisticated computing they have in their homes.
Kaplan draws a comparison: “Three to four years ago when I asked CIOs about the use of [instant messaging], which was a consumer phenomenon, they said no way would they allow that kind of stuff in corporate environments.”
Kaplan matches that example up with recent “consumerization” movements toward social networking and cloud computing. While some organizations seem willing to open enterprise doors to Facebook, Amazon Web Services, and Google, others are slow to capitalize on the benefits—still worried about security and married to traditional computing. Some vendors have endorsed integration with Google AdWords and Google Apps; others are competing with Google, positioning themselves as a more-secure option.
Within CRM, Salesforce.com has perhaps the tightest Google Apps integration, the result of a relationship dating back to 2003. The cloud superpowers announced the SalesforceCRM for Google Apps product in early 2008, and at a subsequent December event called Cloudforce, revealed that 5,000 customers have started using the combined offering. The previous integration of Google AdWords and Salesforce.com has helped, as well, but the significance now extends far beyond search, according to the keynote delivered by Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com’s cofounder, chairman, and chief executive officer.
“Cloud computing brings us all together because it’s a model that adapts regardless of the size of implementation or the size of the company,” Benioff said. “We’re not an island—we realize there are other clouds emerging.” (That may be an understatement: The very same day, open-source CRM provider SugarCRM released an updated edition that trumpeted new access to cloud-based third-party data.)
But Google remains the biggest cloud in the sky, as Salesforce.com knows firsthand. Chuck Ganapathi, Salesforce.com's vice president of product marketing, estimates that the number of leads being generated each month by his company's Salesforce for Google Adwords offering has reached 300,000—leads that get fed directly into participating Salesforce.com accounts when a sponsored Google listing is clicked. Ganapathi describes the output as a "tremendous amount...of marketing…that will at some point get converted into customers."
It’s the “at some point” that’s causing some grief. In February 2007, software and platform provider Etelos was one of the first to board the Google bandwagon, with Etelos CRM for Google Apps—essentially a CRM tool available on the iGoogle landing page. When monetization became an issue, Etelos refocused its vision, spending more on developing its platform.
“There are definitely some constraints you get when you start running many versions of an application within someone else’s framework,” says Danny Kolke, the company’s founder and chief executive officer. “There are some issues there with trying to provide an optimal experience inside someone else’s interface.”
Kolke says that developers originally saw lucrative potential in the Google Apps platform, but it hasn’t panned out. “Most of the users are iGoogle users and iGoogle is free,” he says. “They’re looking for an app that’s free so they can do light lifting, and aren’t interested in using heavy CRM.” For many months, he says, Etelos was known as the “CRM for Google” company, and getting partners to look beyond that nickname has been a struggle.
The industry may be reluctant to admit that some users are looking for “light CRM,” but it’s unavoidable. Small businesses, especially ones accustomed to running some level of CRM out of Microsoft Excel or Outlook, find Google Apps appealing. First, it’s hard to compete on price when something’s free. Second, Google Apps provide collaboration capabilities not found in Outlook and Excel.
Hunt Services, a small organization in Phoenix that serves as the go-between for physicians and pharmaceutical research, has used Google Apps for close to a year. Amanda Drake, Hunt’s director, says that not having to pay a fee was the main appeal—saving on overhead is a solid benefit for her small-but-growing company. But the centralization and collaboration efforts are the real payoff: Drake says that she used to spend hours in Outlook emailing Microsoft Word documents and Excel spreadsheets to coworkers, but those days are past. Google Calendar is now the hub of Hunt’s business—it’s where employees schedule events, set alerts and tasks, and store notes about different clients. All client contact information, in fact, used to be walled off on the main computer—not everyone had access, but now they do.
Having tried the Holy Trinity of Google Apps—spreadsheets, calendar, and documents—Drake got additional functionality by clicking the “What’s New” link at the top of one of the Apps pages: That’s how she found Google Sites—a Web-page creation application that’s now critical to Hunt’s relationship with clients.
“Every time I post an opportunity onto those sites, when I sign in, it’s in the form of a document—some kind of paperwork that the physician will have to sign. I post it directly to the site, share that with the doctors, and they click that link. They don’t have anything to figure out.” Drake says that sharing forms online reduces paper and mailing costs—and saves time, too. Above all, Drake says, the collaboration capabilities delivered by Google Apps have revolutionized Hunt’s workflow: Essentially, people can work from anywhere as long as they’re signed into Google.
Hunt has not yet transferred its email over to Gmail—dealing with the legacy system has been too much of a monster, Drake says, but she’s hoping to tackle it in the near future. Her only pain point involves Google Calendar: The “notes” section often won’t hold all of the pertinent information, requiring the creation of multiple calendar entries.
Still, Drake says she’s very pleased—and doesn’t expect to outgrow the solution soon. Neil Pearson, the controller of Hunt’s sister company Hope Research, agrees, but does report one particular snafu: “Every couple of weeks or so, [Google Apps] tends to go down,” Pearson says. “It’s a nerve-wracking 45 minutes.” Small businesses might be willing to weather such intermittent hiccups, but multinational conglomerates are less forgiving.
In fact, floating all that proprietary data around the cloud in the first place has some people justifiably nervous. The issue was best brought to light by enterprise software analyst Josh Greenbaum, who wondered in a series of blogposts last summer about the content stored in Google Apps. Depending on your interpretation of the company’s Terms of Service, he wrote, it could be argued that any data and information created, shared, and stored on those applications belongs to Google—not exactly what the average corporate compliance officer wants to hear.
“Fundamentally, I think Google is either being stupid or malicious: either way they’ve got to [do] more to protect their user’s [sic] content,” Greenbaum wrote in a September 24 post.
After Google unleashed its Chrome Web browser that same month, more security issues surfaced regarding how the browser’s search data is stored and what exactly Google does with it. Greenbaum wrote at the time that “this latest nonsense from [Google] is further proof that you get what you pay for—and if the loss of privacy and security are the price of free, I’m ready to pay for my Web-based services.”
And with more than 1 million companies having selected Google Apps to help run operations, including Google itself, the company has taken pains to address the security concerns. At a recent conference, David Girouard, president of Google Enterprise, emphasized the security built into Google Apps, including SAS-70 certification, third-party validation of its data protection, and the strength of its service-level agreements (SLAs). Those SLAs originally promised Google Premier Edition users 99.9 percent uptime for Gmail; at the end of October 2008, Google extended that SLA to include Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Talk. The company’s $625 million acquisition of email specialist Postini in July 2007 is another sign of that commitment, adding enterprise-caliber messaging, archiving, and encryption technology.
Despite the positive security measures, hecklers continue to make noise. In fact, the SLAs themselves recently came under fire in the blogosphere, and the popular TechCrunch blog drew special attention to the SLA’s definition that “Downtime for a period of less than ten minutes will not be counted.” (Would your boss think it “counted” if you were the one who put into the cloud a mission-critical application that had nine minutes of downtime?)
And yet Google continues to make inroads. To highlight Google Apps’ success at enterprise-scale companies, Girouard cited biological engineering firm Genentech, which almost immediately ballooned from a single Google Apps user to 15,000—and slapped Google Analytics on top of that—all the while adhering to its own high data-security standards.
But if cloud-based productivity suites are simply replacing Microsoft Word, Excel, and so on, does that really change the playing field for CRM? It may not seem so at first glance, but “office productivity applications” happen to be where the day-to-day activities of any CRM-loving company take place. Once you successfully migrate those activities to the cloud, and enable them to interact, communicate, and share information with your CRM systems, a wonderful metamorphosis takes place: Suddenly, your office productivity applications become CRM applications.
Salesforce.com has clearly embraced Google productivity, but other CRM players have given nods to Google in terms of interface and development. Many have picked up on the trend of dashboards and homepages, either explicitly linking information to a module built for the popular iGoogle Web page or living up to its spirit with similar widgets.
Sage’s fall 2008 release of SalesLogix 7.5, for example, includes a dashboard full of widgets; users can customize the look and feel with familiar drag-and-drop moves. And, believing that many customers were using Google’s online email service, a few Italian developers created DolceGMail on SugarCRM’s SugarForge platform, allowing users to add Gmail contacts, emails, and attachments directly into SugarCRM.
Google Maps is a player, too. Outpacing pioneers such as MapQuest, it’s become a mainstay on cellphones, dashboards, and Web sites, and has found fertile territory at the heart of enterprise mashups to guide salespeople and field reps to customer locations, define delivery routes, and embed geolocation into operations.
The beauty of the cloud is that users don’t have to get stuck with one solution. Kaplan says that Google’s recent security upgrades affirm cloud computing’s viability. “The beta version just wasn’t up to snuff,” Kaplan says. “Now they’re beginning to demonstrate they have those capabilities.” He goes on, “One of the other things is the IT department is no longer seeing SaaS as just a threat, it’s seeing that it does satisfy their business users and can help with IT management.”
The cloud architecture itself is changing, according to Gartner analyst David Mitchell Smith. “What people tend to fall into is oversimplifications,” Smith said at a recent panel. “‘[The cloud] as the only answer’ is an oversimplification. There will be a series of platforms behind the scenes—and that’s going to be where disruption happens.” He went on, “Some companies are ahead of the curve, like Salesforce.com. Some that are not talking about the cloud may be losers.”
Whether the CRM industry sees Google as a threat or an opportunity is a complex question. “Google is a faceless entity people aren’t sure how to deal with,” Kaplan opines. “It will have to overcome that if it is serious about becoming more business-oriented.” He explains that, whereas a company like Salesforce.com in the B2B market is successful in creating a corporate culture and a public face to support that focus, Google’s approach results in a minimized public persona. The superpower is viewed differently for those reasons. People are less apt to find a support number for Google and call up a service rep.
It’s also difficult to compare Google to any other software company. In The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, author Nicholas Carr points out that Google’s founders were once quoted as saying that the company’s ultimate goal is to pursue artificial intelligence—and what some might call a pipe dream is an idea that only becomes possible in light of the data flowing through Google’s pipes.
“As we spend more time and transact more of our commercial and social business online, that database will grow ever wider and deeper,” Carr writes. “Figuring out new ways for people—and machines—to tap into the storehouse of intelligence is likely to be the central enterprise of the future.”
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