April 1, 2009

Cubic Compass today announced today the release of a new ground breaking technology for creating and managing interactive websites. Dubbed "Neural-Interactive Content Creation", or NIC², this patent-pending technology allows content creators to interact with an i-Dialogue Content Management System (CMS) via a neurological interface that instantly converts thought patterns into web content, dialogue script, and workflow rules.

"The pace of change in today's environment is just too fast for simple tactile interaction with a web CMS", said Cubic Compass Founder Mike Leach. "Today's websites and portals must respond at the speed of thought".

Beta test user Samuel Anders (pictured below) successfully utilized NIC² technology to provision, develop, and launch a fully functional website and customer portal in 17 seconds. "I consider myself a 'power user' of technology, so I was eager to plug-in to NIC² and translate my ideas into a working solution. The results were simply amazing."

The following tasks are just a small example of what can be accomplished in milliseconds using NIC²:

• Provision new landing pages
• Change passwords
• Grant permissions to portal users
• Publish a press release
• Add/modify workflow rules
• Update style sheet
  

NIC² is licensed per user and requires a lengthy pre-qualification questionnaire and note from a Doctor before use.

(Actual results may not be identical to those experienced by Mr Anders. NIC² is not FDA approved and is currently not legal in many countries. Please contact sales for more information)

It's ironic how customer portals are deployed on the premise of providing "self-service" and "call deflection", but when poorly implemented, portals actually result in a net increase in administrative responsibility.

Portal administration time wasters:

• Granting access to portal
• Resetting passwords
  

Here are some general rules that ensure customers really are getting self-service to the information they need and reducing the time you spend managing the online relationship.

Rule of Least Privilege
All Leads and Contacts should automatically be members of the portal without any manual intervention. They are granted minimal privileges on the website by default. Granting access to more features requires changing a "role" or "rule" on the profile or account record.



Consistent Online Account
A customers online identity should remain consistent throughout the entire customer lifecycle. Once a lead self-identifies on a website and creates an account, that account/password must never change as a result of some front or back-office change, such a CRM Lead-to-Contact conversion or ERP account creation.

Single Sign On
Similar to being consistent with a single account, single-sign-on (or "SSO") ensures customers have access to "all" online applications and features using a single account.

Password Recovery Options
Most portal related support calls are related to password recovery, or inability to access the portal.

Anytime a password is being requested to access a portal, customers must have immediate access to their password recovery options. The password recovery process should *immediately* send an email to the requested account with instructions on how to reset or recover their password.

A link to online help on the signon page is also a great preventative measure.


As a fallback, a password reset button should be made available in the CRM system. The "reset and email" workflow should be contained in a single dialog box for the portal admin or CSR.

Portal Activation Invitations
When rule of least privilege is automatically granted to all Leads and Contacts in a CRM system, it becomes necessary to allow customers to activate their account and establish their password online.

A "welcome" page template is made available that allows customers to enter their email address and progress through a simple 2 step process to set their password before accessing the portal.

The welcome page should prevent subsequent activation attempts by already activated users.

Implementing the measures above has proven to dramatically reduce the administrative overhead of managing a portal and increasing customer satisfaction when using online portal services.

I find myself intrigued lately with the possibility of using OpenID in B2B marketing campaigns and portals.

The idea is simple. Let your customers/partners use their existing Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, or AOL account to login to your website.

For a consumer website, this is a no-brainer. I would not be surprised if I could click on a Yahoo! banner ad and log into a sponsors website using my Yahoo! username.

But does this necessarily apply to a B2B website? I'm sure Marketers managing a complex sales process will continue to want to own the relationship end-to-end and collect as much information as possible upfront. But if a Marketer is willing to collect a minimum amount of information upfront and invest in cultivating the lead to incrementally collect more information over time, then this might work.

Less complex sales cycles might actually have quite a bit to gain by letting leads self-identify with an existing identity, given they're "in the hunt" and scanning 5+ competing site at one time. The site offering the path of least resistance is most likely to win.

RPX has a freemium service that supports OpenID (RPX is also an Oregon-bred company, so it must be good ). I'm going to experiment with the free version of this service and play with integrating it with i-Dialogue membership management (and by proxy, CRM Lead/Contact management). 

So what do you think? Would you support OpenID on your website? Why or why not?

Congratulations to this years Navigator Award winners! There were so many to choose from and we ended up adding a couple extra categories to showcase some truly magnificant i-Dialogue solutions.

PORTLAND, OR (October 27, 2008)   

Cubic Compass Announces 2008 Navigator Awards

Cubic Compass, a provider of on-demand web content management solutions, today announced the recipients of the 2008 Navigator Awards. Navigator Awards recognize organizations who have made significant contributions to enabling one-to-one online "dialogues" with their customers, partners, or employees through the use of CRM and the i-Dialogue Web Suite.

Best Overall Solution
www.LeftHandNetworks.com

LeftHand Networks (LHN) utilizes the i-Dialogue Web Suite for their main website, partner portal, customer portal, and product discussion forums. The portal staging and high-availability capabilities of i-Dialogue Unlimited Edition are employed to apply a disciplined multi-stage content publishing process that ensures the right information is available to the right person at the right time.

As an early adopter of Salesforce, LHN defined all facets of their business using custom objects in Salesforce and needed a highly customizable CMS to leverage their existing CRM investment. LHN's internal staff used the i-Dialogue API to develop a variety of online web applications, such as event management, license management, product pricelists and quoting, and a site-wide search engine.

LeftHand Networks was acquired by Hewlett Packard in October 2008 for $360M and continues to be recognized as an industry leading provider of iSCSI SAN solutions. 

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Best Web Design
www.ConfigureSoft.com

ConfigureSoft makes use of rich multimedia and informational collateral to provide an interactive and personalized experience for their Customers and Partners.

Other online features deployed by ConfigureSoft include webinar event registration, discussion forums, partner portal, and customer portal.

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Best B2B Portal
portal.iGrafx.com

iGrafx manages the entire customer life-cycle using i-Dialogue; from demand generation and lead cultivation to providing an online eStore and customer support forums.

iGrafx automates the lead cultivation process by providing self-service to case studies, user guides, and product downloads then follows up with automated emails using i-Dialogue drip email marketing. All online interactions and downloads are captured in Salesforce and used by Marketing and Sales to gauge customers interest in online resources.

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Best Partner Portal
Planar

Planar has grown in recent years through the acquisition of new businesses. Planar deployed a partner portal for their digital signage business unit in 2007 and continues to expand their channel marketing efforts in 2008 by deploying partner portals for their home theater and control room business units.

i-Dialogue Premier Edition allows Planar to deploy multiple, uniquely branded partner portals that provide channel partners with 24/7 access to product marketing materials, news, events, software updates, and training resources.

Planar IT staff were early adopters of Dialogue Script and leveraged their in-house web development skills to create a dynamic and well organized online experience.

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Best Non-Profit Portal
www.RISENetwork.org

RISE - Resources for Indispensable Schools and Educators

RISE is a national nonprofit organization that helps K-12 public schools in low-income communities attract and retain experienced, talented teachers so all students can achieve at high levels.  www.RISENetwork.org facilitates online dialogues between Teachers and Schools using i-Dialogue and Salesforce to manage contact identities, applications, and workflow processes.

Online features include application management and screening, Job Search, Application Search, Google maps, Survey response metrics, teacher-school communications, and Job/Teacher interest level tagging.

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Best Consumer Web Solution
my.ColoradoPlasticSurgery.com

Like most small business and practice managers, Dr. Nick Slenkovich of the Colorado Plastic Surgery Center, was inundated with solicitations from pay per click and referral networks promising new Leads. Most referral partners provided information on how many leads were referred, but Dr Slenkovich required more insight into what kinds of Leads and Opportunities were produced from each referral source.
 
By using Salesforce Pro Edition with Campaigns integrated with i-Dialogue, Dr. Slenkovich deployed an intelligent landing page management solution and created unique tracking codes for all referral partners that resulted in detailed campaign influence reports in Salesforce. Google AdWords, banner ads, and referral partner marketing expenses are all now evaluated by the quality of opportunities they produce instead of the quantity of Leads.

Sometimes the simplest solutions are right beneath your nose. We recently stumbled upon a way to deploy a simple Partner Portal that offers 20% of the features found in Salesforce PRM, but delivers 80% of the value (as the Pareto principle would probably dictate).

Most Salesforce.com users are already managing their partners using Accounts and Contacts in Salesforce. Our mid-market channel management portal provides these Contacts with self-service access to Salesforce information with full support for escalation rules, alerts, document management, and campaign management.

But often times all small businesses want is the ability for Partners to register Leads online and allow them to monitor/update the status of their Leads and Opportunities through a portal.

Here are the steps to take in Salesforce to deploy a "Lite" Partner Portal:

1. Ensure the Account Type picklist has a value for "Partner".
2. Create a custom Contact Lookup relationship field on the Lead and Opportunity records. Name it something like "Referring Partner Contact".
3. Map the Partner Contact Lookup fields to user defineable fields in the portal.
4. Map the Lead.Referring Contact field to the Opportunity.Referring Contact so it will persist upon conversion.

With these customizations in place, we then add the "Lite" partner portal "My Leads" and "My Opportunities" web parts to the portal "My Account" page and restrict access to these web parts to those in the "Partner" role.

Finally, a standard Web-to-Lead form is used to pre-populate the referring partners Contact ID when registering a Lead. Internally, you can simply approve/deny these Lead registrations by removing the "Referring Partner Contact" field value. Upon Lead conversion, the referring partner ID will automatically carry over to the new Opportunity.

Could your customer support portal use some flowcharts and diagrams to help customers trouble shoot problems? If you're in the Hi-Tech or manufacturing sectors, the answer is probably yes.

Visio has been my tool of choice for several years, but today I stumbled on a web-based flow chart designer called Gliffy that really impressed me.

I evaluated Gliffy by recreating the channel lead registration workflow I published a few days ago, and as you can see from the image below, the result isn't too shabby for 10 minutes of effort.



Gliffy can host the JPEG images for you. I can easily envision using Gliffy in customer portal knowledge base articles to help with trouble shooting.

I also use Visio when chatting with customers on the phone to help remind me of a customers business process requirements or campaign workflows. With Gliffy, I can simply email customers a link to these flow chart sketches to get some quick feedback.

The site says it's in Beta, but you would have to have some pretty high expectations to even notice. The workspace behaves and reacts just like a desktop application. Even the CTRL-Z undo key combination works! Although, I did find it more useful to rely on frequent saves and versioning as a wiser recovery option.

Gliffy definitely follows the Pareto Principle of determining which 20% of desktop features provide 80% of the value.

Very cool.... I give Gliffy a big thumbs up.

A typical dialogue between channel sales managers and indirect sales representatives is the management of Leads and Opportunities.

The Channel Manager has oversight of each partners opportunities and acts as a referee in situations where 2 partners are pursuing the same opportunity.

i-Dialogue PRM Portal helps to mitigate channel conflict with a database of Channel Registrations that associate Leads and Opportunities with specific partners. i-Dialogue also sends email alerts to partners, such as reminding a Sales Rep that their opportunity registration will expire in 60 days unless updated.

Here is a typical channel registration workflow managed by the portal.

The process is not completely automated. An internal Account or Channel Manager must intervene in the early stages to determine if a submitted registration conflicts with an existing registration.

The ability to identify and resolve conflicts is directly associated with the quality of data collected by the portal. "Company" or "Account Name" is the most common identifier of exclusivity, but territory, industry, or product type may also be used.

To this end, the first report created in the CRM system should be a quick list of all open channel registrations by Company name. The portal could "attempt" to identify a conflict based on Company name, but because of variances in spelling (such as "IBM" or "I.B.M") this task is best left to human intervention.

Once a registration has been assigned, the portal loops 1-N times over step 6, sending out emails every 30 days (this is customizable) to help gently "prod" the partner to touch the prospect and update the CRM record.

What happens if other Partners register the same opportunity? In this dialogue flow, the conflict may be noted as an activity and later re-assigned to other partners on a "first come, first served" basis.

Because the registrations are managed as Opportunities in Salesforce, existing reports can be leveraged for forecasting and demand planning.

Salesforce.com has great Case Escalation rules that give Support Managers peace of mind that cases will not go unattended for too long. But how do Sales and Channel Managers get the same peace of mind that their assigned Leads are not going untouched?

I first started trying to solve this problem using the Salesforce workflow capabilities, which are excellent for initial lead assignment, but I quickly ran into issues trying to escalate a Lead.

For example, if I assign a Lead to a Partner, I want the following rules to apply:
1) The Partner has 48 hours to Accept the Lead (in case they're on vacation)
2) The Partner has 1 week to update the Lead record
3) If the Lead is not converted in 30 days, send the Partner an Alert
4) If the Lead is not converted in 60 days, send the Partner and Account Manager an alert
5) If the Lead is not converted in 90 days, reassign the Lead to Account Manager

I came up with some semi-workable solutions using available tools in Salesforce that were limited to internal users, but didn't work for Partner contacts (of course, now that I post this, someone will probably publish some clever way to accomplish this ).

The solution I ultimately came up with was to develop an escalation rules engine using custom objects and the AppExchange API. The design is patterned after the best features in Salesforce Case Escalation Rules and Workflow and targeted specifically at sending email alerts to Users and Contacts at predetermined intervals when certain criteria are met.

Creating a workflow engine in a forms-based user interface environment presents a unique set of challenges. Graphical flowchart visualizations are usually best for depicting complex Lead escalation rules, but this wasn't an immediate option.

(As an aside, we did develop a prototype graphical workflow engine for i-Dialogue last October using Windows Workflow Foundation, but this lacked a web-based interface. Salesforce Product Managers also have this feature on their roadmap, so who knows... It could be available within 12-18 months from someone.)

As you can see in the screenshot below, the forms-based rule designer didn't turn out so bad. In fact, you could argue that this approach is easier for most business users since the rule reads from top to bottom like natural language English:

"If a Lead is not accepted in 48 hours, reassign it to the Account Manager".