If you have an interest in web usability then you should check out Jacob Nielson's AlertBox newsletter.

This weeks topic on Business-to-Business usability is particularly relevant to i-Dialogue Customer Portal (there's also a 282 page PDF report you can purchase). Jacob's approach is more quantifiable and scientific than most other web usability specialists, but I tend to agree with many of his principles and conclusions.

In fact, Jacob's Top 10 Web Design Mistakes of 2005 challenged us to revisit i-Dialogue's design and add a few new features (namely dynamic fonts, "Best Bet" search results, and auto-focus on form fields).

Here's an internal marketing campaign that didn't make the final cut... but I thought it was pretty clever.
The idea was to differentiate interactive customer portals from traditional "brochureware" sites.

bro-chure-ware (br-shr-wâr) noun Brochureware refers to Web sites or pages that are produced by taking an organization's printed brochure and translating it directly to the Web without regard for the possibilities of the new medium. In extreme cases, all the copy in the brochure will be used as-is and visual images will be copied as well. The result will almost always be static and uninteresting. While a Web site can be thought of as an "online brochure," most designers suggest taking advantage of the Web's interactive and dynamic capabilities, including hypertext, built-in programming, and streaming video. Reference: Whatis.com definition for "brochureware" Need to upgrade your web site? Try i-dialogue.com!

Well... it's official. i-Dialogue Customer Portal just went live on the AppExchange today. Special thanks goes to our Partner Success Manager at Salesforce.com and all those at SFDC who helped in the certification process.

Here's the official press release: Cubic Compass Deploys Customer Self-Service Portal on Salesforce.com's AppExchange.

Check out our latest open positions:
Systems Administrator
Inside Sales Representative

No particular location (yes... this means you can work from home, or even Starbucks, if you have the self-management skills). Ideal candidates will have excellent online communication and collaboration skills.

Inside Sales Rep should be able to shift their 40 hours around various customers working hours and requirements.

Sys Admin requires a more regular 9am-6pm Pacific schedule.

Here's some inside information for those in the blogosphere. i-Dialogue for AppExchange is now available in private showing mode.

It should be published in the open AppExchange directory within a week or so after we finalize some marketing and operational tasks, but you can test drive and install it now. It's fully functional and tested.

The convergence of email, content management, web forms, and CRM in a single solution like i-Dialogue can provide great power, but "with great power comes great responsibility", and one of those responsibilities is CAN-SPAM compliance.

You'll notice that every email sent from an i-Dialogue portal includes an opt out link and your organizations address in the footer by default. This is to ensure that your customers always have the option to "opt-out" of future email communications and even contact your physical address in writing or by phone to make this request (you have to honor any channel).

Great thought has gone into making it convenient for your customers to opt out... but there are controls in place to ensure this feature does not get abused.

For example, when viral marketing activity occurs, customers are usually forwarding their emails to their friends and family. What happens if one of these people click on the opt out link?

Not to worry. i-Dialogue has some basic protective measures to ensure only the original email recipient can opt out.

The final key to CAN-SPAM compliance is data integrity. When a lead or customer opts-in or out via the portal, this bit of information (and it is quite literally a "bit" ) makes it back to Salesforce.com and updates the related "Email Opt Out" field within the hour.

Most, if not all, email marketing vendors on the AppExchange will respect and adhere to the setting of this field, further validating the tremendous value of making Salesforce.com data the master record for all your Leads and Contacts.

I've been looking around for a slick 'Web 2.0' type of To-Do list for jotting down ad-hoc thoughts and ideas and stumbled across a couple useful utilities.

www.tadalist.com is a nice online To Do list from the folks at www.backpack.com . Adding a shortcut link to my browsers toolbar made this about a 90% solution for what I was looking for.

Then I found Google Notebook at http://www.google.com/notebook/ . It's an active plug-in control that let's you right click on any text and select "Note this" which adds the text to your private or public notebook.

Granted, it's not a list organizer, but it was a serendipitous little discovery that also meets about 90% of my ad-hoc note and list making needs. The ability to move notes up and down relative to each other would be a nice improvement.

There's a great web cast on CRM Guru.com hosted by Wendy Close of Salesforce.com on improving the customer self-service experience.

The 5 steps outlined in this web cast are decidedly different, more substantial, and more relevant than another 5 step list I previously blogged on. The web cast includes some great supporting data and statistics on where the call-center industry is heading and the impact of web self-service.

This Yankee Group study shows the general trend of how customers are increasingly looking towards companies web sites for interaction or information.


This slide provides a great visualization of how customer relationships are matured using multiple channels. For example, using email and personalized web site landing pages to help progress opportunities towards actual phone or in person dialogues.

Check it out.... I caught the AppExchange seminar in Seattle about a month ago and will definitely be at this one. Great info for potential and current partners.

The broad scope of relationship marketing

Challenge:
Your web site must support multiple relationships. Not just customers.

Solution:
Use the 6 markets model to identify key relationships and design information architecture around them.

The 6 markets model is useful for visualizing the key markets and relationships that every organization is engaged in. Relationship Marketing takes a holistic view of all of these relationships and promotes cross-functional collaboration between internal groups to address the needs of each of these relationships in a methodical way.



Action Items:

 Low Hanging Fruit

Use CRM to Manage All Relationships
Expand the responsibility of your CRM database to manage all relationships. Create a Role field for Contacts.
In Salesforce.com CRM this is best implemented as a multi-value picklist.

Mirror Roles in Web Site
Make sure the web site is synchronized with the CRM database so that the relationship context is known at all times.

Relationship Oriented Navigation
Create navigation menu for the 6 markets.
For example, direct access links for "Customers", "Partners", "Investors", "Media/Press", or "Employees".

 Mid Hanging Fruit

Delegated Publishing Authority
Assign Marketing, Public-Relations, Support, and Human Resource representatives to specific relationships and delegate authority to manage Internet dialogues via web content and emails.

Relevant Front Doors
Remove the concept of a single home page and ensure each type of relationship has a clearly marked and accessible "front door" on the web site.

 High Hanging Fruit

Sub-Segment
Sub-segment the primary 6 markets into sub-markets using the segmentation capabilities of the CRM system. Create an iterative/incremental web publishing process that ensures targeted content exists for sub-segments.

Measure and Optimize
Create KPI dashboard indicators that monitor relationships in the 6 key markets and provide realistic feedback on relationship marketing activities.


References:
Adrian Payne (1991), Cranfield University

1. An easily deployed, personalized customer portal with appropriate branding.
   OK... I'd go along with that.
2. A customer-driven web-to-case management system for opening and tracking cases
   My usability studies show that a customer opening a case online is an unhappy customer. If the customer portal is properly designed, then customers will successfully "self-serve" themselves to needed information. Web-to-Case forms are a "request to be served" last resort that generally result in higher support costs. Besides, email and web initiated support response times are actually getting worse, not better.
3. A comprehensive knowledge base
   Definitely. This should actually be the #2 key element.
4. Embedded natural language search
   I think this myth get perpetuated from the 'Ask Jeeves' days, but customers actually just enter 1-3 keywords into search boxes.... not natural language sentences. And besides, once a customer is using your customer portal, you should be able to anticipate 80% of the keywords and rely on human edited search results to maximize the relevance of search results. Depending on engineered search solutions for your customer portal is really casting your fate into the wind.
5. An application programming interface (API) for integrating to other systems such as ERP and contact center telephony solutions.
   I suppose it depends on the company size. A small to medium business that is already buying into the concept of on-demand CRM might be best served avoiding APIs and exploring other on-demand customer self-service solutions (shameless plug for i-Dialogue ). But closed-loop integration and a thorough understanding of your customers can ultimately only be achieved using a service oriented architecture. This, unfortunately, does not really improve the customer experience, but does improve the employee experience.