Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: Big Data

  • Living the Salesforce dream

    Living the Salesforce dream

    The history of Salesforce.com tracks the evolution of cloud computing. Founded by Marc Benioff and Parker Harris in a San Francisco apartment at the 1999 peak of the dot com boom, today the company has over 100,000 customers with a market capitalisation of 21 billion dollars.

    While founded as a sales Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) service, Salesforce’s range of products has extended across a number of other business functions such as business intelligence and customer support.

    Dreamforce is the company’s international major conference which in 2012 is expected to attract 90,000 attendees to hear what is planned for the platform as they expand into new fields.

    Along with Salesforce are 350 partners exhibiting their services that plug into Salesforce’s system. As we saw at the Xero conference, the community of developers and support companies are as important to a software company’s success as its products.

    One of the notable things about Salesforce is the company’s hunger for acquisitions having taken over twenty-four companies in the last few years. It will be interesting to see how Salesforce are integrating those startups.

    Salesforce are probably the company at the forefront at adopting social media into their products as seen with the acquisitions of companies like Facebook advertising platform Buddy Media and the Rypple  social performance review service.

    The move to mobile is changing how businesses interacts with customers, this is one of the challenges for Salesforce.

    Just as Salesforce has tracked the rise of cloud computing, the company is now tracking the evolution of Big Data and social media.

    The Dreamforce 2012 conference should give some insight into how the company, and other industries, are adapting to the challenges presented by the mobile web, big data and the social workplace.

    Paul travelled to the Dreamforce conference courtesy of Cloudforce.

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  • Finding the perfect customer

    Finding the perfect customer

    With the rise of social media we’ve spoken a lot about customers’ ability to rate businesses and overlooked that companies have been rating their clients for a lot longer. The same technologies that are helping consumers are also assisting companies to find their best prospects.

    A business truism is that Pareto’s Rule applies in all organisations – 20% of customers will generate 80% of a company’s profits. Equally a different 20% of clients will create 80% of the hassles. The Holy Grail in customer service is to identify both groups as early as possible in the sales cycle.

    Earlier this week The New York Times profiled the new breed of ratings tools known as consumer valuation or buying-power scores. These promise to help businesses find the good customers early.

    While rating customers according to their credit worthiness has been common for decades, measuring a client’s likely value to a business hasn’t been so widespread and most companies have relied on the gut feeling of their salespeople or managers. The customer valuation tools change this.

    One of the companies the NYT looked at was eBureau, a Minnesota-based company that analyses customers’ likely behaviour. eBureau’s founder Gordy Meyer tells how 30 years ago he worked for Fingerhut, a mailorder catalogue company that used some basic ways of figuring out who would be a good customer.

    Some of the indicators Fingerhut used to figure if a client was worthwhile included whether an application form was filled in by pen, if the customer had a working telephone number or if the buyer used their middle initial – apparently the latter indicates someone is a good credit risk.

    Many businesses are still using measures like that to decide whether a customer will be a pain or a gain. One reliable signal is those that complain about previous companies they’ve dealt with; it’s a sure-fire indicator they’ll complain about you as well.

    What we’re seeing with services like eBureau is the bringing together of Big Data and cloud computing. A generation ago even if we could have collected the data these services collate, there was no way we could process the information to make any sense to our business.

    Today we have these services at our fingertips and coupled with lead generators and the insights social media gives us into the likes and dislikes of our customers these tools suddenly become very powerful.

    While we’ll never get rid of bad customers – credit rating services didn’t mean the end of bad debts – customer valuation tools are another example of how canny users of technology can get an advantage over their competitors along with saving time in chasing the wrong clients.

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  • Other peoples’ platforms

    Other peoples’ platforms

    “We have successfully established an online business, but we have run into problems with Ebay (indefinite suspension – unfairly I might add)” wrote Ralph*, an old client.

    “We are pretty desperate, as this is now our sole business and we are now without an income.”

    The Privately Owned Web

    Ralph’s problem is typical of thousands of businesses that rely on one Internet service. Some months back we looked at “Nipplegate”, the story of a Sydney jeweller who had her Facebook page closed down because of her anatomically correct dolls.

    All of these services are privately owned with their own terms and conditions along with their own corporate objectives. If you choose to use their product, you have to follow their rules – just like a shopping mall management can order you off their premises because they don’t like the colour of your socks.

    The most glaring example of this is Wikileaks where Amazon, Paypal, Mastercard and Visa all threw the whistleblower site off their services for allegedly breaching their terms of services in various obscure ways.

    The Terms of Service Trap

    A business’ Terms of Service usually feature clauses wide enough to catch even the most honest and diligent business, this is by design as it gives management the excuse to throw anyone who makes their lives difficult, which is exactly what has happened with Wikileaks.

    While Ralph’s problem is nothing like the scale of Julian Assange’s, all of these stories illustrate the dangers of relying on one service for your livelihood. Should that service change the way it operates, then any business that relies on that could be broke in hours, as many businesses that rely on Google search results have found.

    Most of the Internet is not a public space, almost all of it is privately run along similar lines to that shopping mall or a walled estate.

    Ralph and Julian Assange have shown us the limitations and risks of the privately operated web. As citizens and business owners we have to understand these corporations’ objectives are not always the same as ours and make judgements on how we live with the risk of finding ourselves in breach of a Term of Service in our business or personal lives.

    We’re still in relatively early days of the net and all of us are still learning. One lesson is clear though, we can’t allow our livelihoods to be held hostage by a small number of big technology companies. Make sure you have alternatives to your online channels.

    *Ralph is not his real name

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