IBM Software Group Thought Leadership Whitepaper. IBM Customer Experience Suite and Social Software

Transcription

1 IBM Software Group Thought Leadership Whitepaper IBM Customer Experience Suite and Social Software

2 2 IBM Customer Experience Suite and Social Software Introduction With so many customers and prospects interacting with organizations via online channels such as web sites, , social sites, kiosk, and mobile devices, you can t settle for providing an undifferentiated, uninteresting, one-size-fits all experience. If you do, your customers could just leap over to your competition, who are just a few clicks away. In short, you can t afford to represent your brand and enable interactions on the web in anything less than an exceptional manner. Today s consumers are demanding social software as means to interact with organizations. But organizations have some catching up to do: 70% of consumers want to interact with businesses using social media, less than one-third of companies have the strategies, policies, and processes in place to meet this demand 1 approximately 50,000 customers go to its community website for information about its laptops 2 Enterprise-Ready Social Software Once an organization has decided to include social media as part of its exceptional web experience, it needs to decide how to implement the strategy. One key factor is the ability for an organization to control and moderate this social software channel. At the core of any exceptional web experience is the portal and/or web content management solution that provides the platform for content and applications delivered in a seamless user experience. In order to help customers meet their exceptional web experience goals in the most efficient and flexible manner possible, IBM has recently released a new offering that is designed to help organizations create highly engaging, personalized, and differentiated web experiences. The IBM Customer Experience Suite provides a controlled/moderated social social software environment and integration with uncontrolled public social networks: Social software helps organization increase responsiveness to the marketplace and thus is a key component of delivering an exception web experience that can benefit both organizations and end users by helping organizations Respond faster and more cost effectively to customers Gain and retain expert knowledge Improve customer loyalty, satisfaction resulting in increased sales Reach new customers through improved marketing effectiveness and timeliness Case studies readily prove these points. For example, the PC manufacturer Lenovo used social media to achieve a 20% reduction in call-center activity in US over 6 months because

3 IBM Global Business Services 3 Organizations can maximize the benefit from social media and software in the enterprise in a number of ways. Responding to customers more quickly and cost effectively A self-service support community for customers can provide timely service levels at minimal cost. Research shows that the average customer support interaction costs US$12 when using a contact center yet only US$0.25 when using a self-service option(forrester, 2006) 3 TurboTax delivered an average response time of only 4 minutes all tax season 4 An online community that is motivated to help support members brings together skilled experts and professionals that can help each other. Improving customer reach, effectiveness, timeliness Social software facilitates extensive and effective networking beyond the traditional organization boundaries, allowing direct and effective communication at a fraction of the cost. For example, Facebook provides an incredible channel for organizations - at the time of writing this, there were over 500 million Facebook users and the average user has 130 friends. (ref: Facebook Statistics) we also see examples using Twitter to reach over 5.4 million followers. Using social media, an organization s reach can be dramatically increased at a fraction of the cost. For example, extending an organizations website to integrate with some of the public social networks like Twitter. Facebook and LinkedIn has an exponential impact in terms of recipient reach. Gaining and retaining expert knowledge Ensuring this knowledge is persisted in social software maximizes the opportunity for reuse and ensures that the information is not lost if a member leaves the community. For example, an online forum, can be revisited and is searchable (including public search engines like Google) enabling end users to find the answer for a problem today that was solved previously. Improving customer loyalty, and satisfaction resulting in increased sales It is critical that organizations maintain and keep their relationship with existing customers. Loyal customers can help facilitate new sales: Customer ratings and reviews rose to the top of useful marketing feedback, as they delivered tangible ROI insight. In 2009, 80% of respondents reported that customer stories and suggestions shape products and services. As a result, brands earn the trust and loyalty of their customers by listening and responding. 5 Social software provides a direct channel with the loyal customer, allowing the organization to be more responsive to their customers as well as capture positive feedback which can be turned into new sales. In addition to reach, the direct connection between individuals who know each other is an extremely effective way to increase influence:

4 4 IBM Customer Experience Suite and Social Software 90% of consumers online trust recommendations from people they know. 70% trust opinions of unknown users. 6 Therefore the ability to capture recommendations and engage individuals to endorse and expose an organization s products and services via external social networks is an extremely valuable tool to help to gain new customers and increase sales. Key Social Capabilities of an Exceptional Web Experience What are some of the specific social capabilities that comprise an exceptional web experience? Ability to Engage a Community. An exceptional web experience needs to be able to engage the community. This includes ability to create an online community that Facilitates person-to-person-person and person-tocommunity communication. Eases search for content, applications and other people Offers interactive content and applications interactive, for example allowing ratings, reviews and comments on content, products, or applications. Makes content and communication is easy to engage in for users of all skill levels. Extensibility. An exceptional web experience needs to be able extend beyond the organization s boundaries to help: Extension of community membership and skill set Marketing awareness and exposure Maximize person to person and person-to-communities relationships for both skills and sales purposes This includes the ability to both publish out content, applications and social software to public social networks and draw-in content, applications and users from external social networks. Ubiquitous and Easy to Participate. An exceptional web experience s social capabilities rest on the ability of the community to participate. To enable this, the social software must: Facilitate access anytime anywhere to people, content and social applications, maximizing responsiveness and engagement levels by participants Ensure communications are easy and readily available reducing any technical barriers to engagement. The net result is an exception web experience must be accessible via web browser, mobile and/or smart devices like (ipad and ipod). Measurable. An exceptional web experience needs to facilitate being able to measure the social activity with intent to be able to optimize and adapt to every changing market conditions Built-In Social Capabilities in the IBM Customer Experience Suite The IBM Customer Experience Suite provides a range of social capabilities out of the box. Seamless Social Features in the Right Context One of key capability that IBM Customer Experience Suite can provide is the ability to aggregate business, commerce and social services together, giving the customer the combined experience without having to jump from one application to another. The binding ingredient is the portal and it s ability to deliver composite applications, bringing a social context to a business application and vice versa. This theme is the foundation of the exceptional web experience. Community Engagement IBM Customer Experience Suite provides a number of out of

5 IBM Global Business Services 5 the box capabilities for allowing users to interact with the site, applications and each other. Profiles and Communities: IBM Customer Experience Suite provides sophisticated user profiles and community capabilities. Forums for enabling community members to engage in an asynchronous way Easy content publishing and content interaction tools to maximize communication channels, including in context web publishing, wikis, blogs, microblogs, forums, comments, ratings, tagging... Instant messaging to facilitate real-time person to person communication. The following is an example of IBM Cloud Computing community showing the community members, forum, shared blog, bookmarks, feeds and other information and applications relevant to the community. Note IBM Customer Experience Suite includes a number of integration points to the core out of the box social services. These will be covered in advanced topics below. Extensibility Integrating External Social Services IBM Customer Experience Suite provides a number key extension points to be able to reach out to integrate external social services into the exceptional web experience. Additionally, IBM Customer Experience Suite provides a set of services, Application Program Interfaces (APIs) and extension points to enable other external social services to integrate IBM Customer Experience Suite into their own services. For example, IBM Customer Experience Suite provides the ability to integrate with social networks, like Facebook (see screenshot below, showing IBM Customer Experience Suite leveraging Facebook for login). Another example, is a IBM provides a series of community wikis that are maintained by the community including IBM staff, partners and customers.

6 6 IBM Customer Experience Suite and Social Software Integration with these external social services communities, members, profiles and applications provides an incredible source of membership, skills to and marketing marketing reach to help fuel an organizations social software success. Ubiquitous and Easy Participation IBM Customer Experience Suite provides numerous access options to engage with a site. At a macro level this includes access via web browser, mobile devices and other smart devices like ipad. This ubiquitous access is critical to support a social exceptional web experience to allow user to be as responsive as and when they would like to be. Having access to the social software is one aspect, the next capability that IBM Customer Experience Suite provides is a number of easy ways for users to publish content and communicate. The out-of-the-box publishing and communication options include: blogs, microblogs, in-contextediting, forums, wikis, instant messaging and awareness, file sharing, comments, ratings and review and tagging to name a few. The following examples shows how users can easily use instant messaging to have a person-to-person chat, whether it be to as for help or collaborate on some task. Measurability IBM Customer Experience Suite includes extensive analytic and measurable statistics to help an organization understand the impact and activity within its web experience and how this maps to business results. IBM Customer Experience Suite also includes the capabilities to capture direct user feedback via forms/surveys as well as monitoring of forums and other feedback systems. Social Commerce Being able to transact with an organization can be a key part of the web experience. This involves integration of the IBM Customer Experience Suite with a commerce engine like IBM WebSphere Commerce Suite.ser In today s socially aware world, it is critical that commerce solutions are closely intertwined with social software and media to meet the market demand. It s likely that if a customer comes to a commerce site where they cannot see reviews, recommendations and interact socially with other shoppers they will probably go elsewhere to a site that does provide social commerce. IBM WebSphere Commerce Suite can be integrated with a number of social software including IBM Customer

7 IBM Global Business Services 7 Experience Suite and other 3rd party services like Bazaarvoice, Pluck, KickApps, PowerReviews. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, to name a few. The following image shows some of the Lotus Connections portlets, that can be customized: Refer to the whitepaper IBM Customer Experience Suite and Web Commerce for additional details. IBM Customer Experience Suite Advanced Integration Options The following section outlines the key ways the IBM Customer Experience Suite provides an integrated social web experience. There are a range of technologies that can be used, depending on what s being integrated where and the desired result. Portlets, Widgets and Gadgets One way IBM Customer Experience Suite provides in integration point with social services is via a series Portlets, Widgets and Gadgets. This enables social services to be integrated in context of business applications and content, giving a user a seamless social web experience. Out of the box there a several purpose-built social portlets: Out-of-the-box portlets : Six Lotus Connections portlets that integrate with Activities, Blogs & Bookmarks. These portlets use the Lotus Connections REST API. Note these are standard portlets that have been built with WebSphere Portlet Factory Designer and offer many levels of customization through WebSphere Portlet Factory Designer for changing style sheets, UI layout, adding and removing features. Both the portlets and the customizable Portlet Factory models are available for download from the Lotus Business Solutions Catalog. Instant messaging and awareness: IBM Customer Experience Suite provides online presence awareness and enterprise instant messaging. Integration points include Awareness and Click-to-chat tags inserted in content enable online status (awareness) to be shown and also provide ability of click-to-chat. Actual chat interface is provided either by Sametime portlet or integration of a custom client. Custom portlets: Custom Lotus Connections Portlets can be created by using IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory. These can be tailored to exact requirements, if out-of-the-box portlets do not meet the requirements. Lotus Connections REST APIs can be leveraged to access and modify Lotus Connections content. iframe portlet: An iframe (Webpage or Webclipper) portlet provides a quick and easy way to integrate WebSphere Portal Server and Lotus Connections.

8 8 IBM Customer Experience Suite and Social Software iwidget portlet: The IBM WebSphere Portal iwidget Portlet provides customizable, personalized, and managed access to widgets that are compliant with the iwidget Specification, thus extending the existing capabilities of WebSphere Portal to provide flexible integration with web components, independent of their technology. This facilitates aggregation of 3rd party social software iwidgets. OpenSocial: OpenSocial is a set of common application programming interfaces (APIs) for web-based social network applications, developed by Google along with MySpace and a number of other social networks. 7 Participating organizations are making social gadgets available for inclusion in an organizations own web experience. IBM currently supports inclusion of OpenSocial gadgets as part of IBM Customer Experience Suite. Presentation Aggregation WebSphere Portal Web Application Integrator provides IBM Customer Experience Suite with the ability to apply a consistent user interface and top-level navigation across WebSphere Portal and Lotus Connections to provide a seamless user interface. In the example below, although the Lotus Connections user interface looks like it is part of a larger web experience showing Dashboard and My Mashups it is actually a separate server that is aggregating the look and feel and top-level navigation from the parent portal server. WebSphere Portal Web Application Integrator can also be used to apply the main web experience navigation to an external social service, helping to create an exceptional web experience by providing a seamless user interface experience for users. Integration with External Social Networks With the proliferation of public social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter it is important that organizations integrate with these solutions to improve their responsiveness. As mentioned above, this needs to be done carefully. Here are some possible ways organization can extend their sites to include and benefit from these external social networks: Single Sign-On: IBM Customer Experience Suite provides the ability to integrate with external social networks, like Facebook, through proven enterprise security methods. Utilizing underlying WebSphere Security,Trust Association features, and OpenAuth aggregators such as RPX, site visitors authenticated through their social channels can be trusted and allowed into your website. Correlating the site visitor s social profile with the in house profile is the tricky part. There are several ways to accomplish this:

9 IBM Global Business Services 9 During the Enterprise Profile creation or editing, allow the user to establish their social profile. This makes it easy to map the enterprise profile with a social profile. Allow any social profile to be trusted and create the enterprise profile if one does not exist. Allow only social profiles that can be mapped to an enterprise profile and during trust association attempt to find the corresponding enterprise profile. This only provides trust and single sign on capabilities. To be able to bring in external social content, the site visitor must allow the data to be shared with the enterprise system. This occurs through an Opt In process. The underlying technology is a custom implementation utilizing documented API s provided by the Customer Experience Suite and the social network s API s. Syndicating Content TO an External Social Network: Being apple to syndicate content to external networks is important. For example, important business (or social) information that you d like to keep the external community up to date with, then it s important to be able to provide that information in a format that is tightly integrated into the external site. For example, being able to publish event information into a LinkedIn Group that may be interested in that event. There are a number of ways that IBM Customer Experience Suite content and applications can be syndicated to external social platforms, including: RSS/ATOM feeds, use REST APIs, iwidget and OpenSocial. Syndicating Content FROM an External Social Network: There are a number of ways that social platform content can be consumed by external party social platforms, including: RSS/ATOM portlets to consume social feeds/content from external sites. Using Portlet Factory builders to consume and manipulate incoming web services, feeds and calls to social APIs OpenSocial gadget support Consuming WSRP portlets that may be available form 3rd party vendor. See detail in section below on developing and integrating social software. Development Tooling IBM Customer Experience Suite provides a number of development on ramps for social software to be tightly integrated as part of the exceptional web experience. Both the IBM software and external social services provide various APIs for accessing and manipulating content and applications required to build an exceptional web experience. WebSphere Portlet Factory provides a rapid application development environment for developing portlets. The tool includes pre-predefined builders and WEB 2.0 widgets that can be modified with minimal coding to accessing and manipulate social media to provide a well integrated web experience. WebSphere Portlet Factory also facilitates the publishing of web services and REST APIs for consumption by external social software. IBM Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Software provides a comprehensive development environment, including the Portal Toolkit for developing portal solutions as part of a exceptional web experience. Rational Application Developer can be used by Java developers to develop solutions for integrating either Lotus Connection or external social software to deliver the exceptional web experience.

10 10 IBM Customer Experience Suite and Social Software Customer Story IBM developerworks IBM developerworks is the web-based professional network and technical resource for millions of developers, IT professionals, and students worldwide. The challenge: Maintaining a strong direct relationship between the IBM and the developerworks target audience, especially with the depth and breadth of services provides to the marketplace. Specific challenges include: For example the IBM Cloud Computing community screen shot below shows the community landing page where members can interact with other members, write blogs, discuss general topics and issues, share bookmarks and so on. These communities are an important part of the seamless web experience provided by IBM.com, they are managed and moderated by IBM-ers and community owners, ensuring they remain focussed on achieving the core objectives for both IBM and the community members. Allowing the audience to find information and expertise around both specific technology topics and general IT trends Be more responsive to an audience looking to solve issues now Providing a responsive help service in a cost effective way Providing a self-service community that extends beyond the organization boundaries. The solution: Running on the IBM Customer Experience Suite, the developerworks, externally facing community has over 400,000 members and is growing at a rate of nearly 1,000 new members a day. These communities bring together Customers, partners and IBM staff to collaborate on solving issues, developing new products and working together to promote growth and customer success within the marketplace. The communities provide the capability of online members to discuss and share ideas, issues, blog technology directions, gather feedback through comments and rating, share useful bookmarks, tag content so it can be easily shared and found again, connect directly with members, share files, work on activities/tasks with other community members and much much more. In addition to providing a strong social aspect to IBM.com, the communities extend into other external social software solutions. By both pulling feeds into these communities and making them available to community members and also publishing content out to other sites and social services, making it easier for community members to remain in contact and up-to-date with the community. Another key feature IBM benefits from is self service. Selfservice on two ends of the spectrum: Firstly making it easy for community members to help each other. Secondly, make it extremely easy for a non-technical community member to request a new community. The community is then selfmanaged by the community owner,

11 IBM Global Business Services 11 In summary, with IBM s depth and breadth of services and technology IBM is challenged on maintaining a strong relationship with it s customers and partners. Social software helps IBM bridge the gap allowing customers and partners to build more direct connections with both IBM and each other, providing responsive communication channels with minimum cost. Summary In summary, social software and social media are a key component in the delivery of an exceptional web experience. There are many social software solutions and ecosystems available for organizations to potentially include as part of their web experience. Benefits of using these solutions include Ability to respond to customers more quickly and cost effectively Ability to gain and retain expert knowledge Improved customer loyalty, satisfaction resulting in increased sales Improved and more effective market reach 1 Source: Enterprises Fail Social Media Test, informationweek.com/news/software/crm/showarticle.jhtml?a rticleid= &cid=nl_iw_daily_ _h dells_3m_on_twitter_and_four_bett.php Moderation and control are key factors when looking at incorporating social software solutions as part of an organization s web experience. IBM Customer Experience Suite provides a number of on-ramps to deliver a tightly integrated social software experience. Customers can build and control their own moderated social environment. Or, they can readily integrate with other social tools available on the Internet today. IBM Customer Experience Suite also provides the necessary APIs and development tools to ensure maximum flexibility and extensibility in this fast-paced market. IBM Customer Experience Suite provides a seamless social exceptional web experience.

12 Copyright IBM Corporation 2010 IBM Global Services Route 100 Somers, NY U.S.A. Produced in the United States of America September 2010 All Rights Reserved IBM, the IBM logo and ibm.com are trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. If these and other IBM trademarked terms are marked on their first occurrence in this information with a trademark symbol ( or ), these symbols indicate U.S. registered or common law trademarks owned by IBM at the time this information was published. Such trademarks may also be registered or common law trademarks in other countries. A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the Webat Copyright and trademark information at ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml Other company, product and service names may be trademarks or service marks of others. References in this publication to IBM products and services do not imply that IBM intends to make them available in all countries in which IBM operates. Please Recycle BCE USEN-00