LiveOps Blog

Dreamforce 2012: Modifying the Roles of CMO and CIO to Fit the Social Revolution

September 21, 2012 • By Ann Ruckstuhl
Tags — CIO, cloud, Cloud Contact Center, CMO, Consumerization of IT, contact center, customer experience, Customer Service, Dreamforce, IT, LiveOps, Marc Benioff, New Era of CRM, salesforce, salesforce.com, Social, Social Revolution

A hot topic at salesforce.com’s Dreamforce conference this week was the impact of the Social Revolution on the roles of chief marketing officers (CMO) and chief information officers (CIO). Now, more than ever, these two department heads need to work together to address and accept how technology and social tools are shaping companies, their customers, and the relationship that links them.

I had the opportunity to join the session “Focus on the Customer: The Colliding Worlds of the CMO & CIO” with other CMOs and CIOs. I joined co-panelists John Dunn, CIO, GE Healthcare; Douglas Menefee, CIO, Schumacher Group; and Catherine Hernandez-Blades, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, Flextronics to discuss the speed of social marketing and how it is creating unprecedented demands on CIOs to support the CMO and vice versa. Their responsibilities must be updated to align with new IT and the demands of customers and employees to communicate via social channels. As these technologies and demands come about, CMOs and CIOs will increasingly find themselves working together to create a better outcome for the company and their customers. As I mentioned during the session, the consumerization of IT, and most recently the growth of cloud, has created the need for a new breed of CMOs. A Gartner study recently predicted that CMOs will spend more on technology than CIOs by 2017, and I believe we’re going to start seeing more CMOs owning operations and technology functions while CIOs become advisers to them. Together, CMOs and CIOs can establish the perfect Ying/Yang relationship that will enable them to usher their company into the Social Revolution.

Watch the video for a quick recap on my participation in the session, and stay tuned next week for a wrap-up post on key trends and takeaways from Dreamforce!

- Ann Ruckstuhl, Chief Marketing Officer, LiveOps

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Dreamforce 2012: Catch Us In The Clouds This Week

September 18, 2012 • By Marty Beard
Tags — #DF12, Cloud Contact Center, contact center, Customer Service, Dreamforce, Dreamforce2012, salesforce, salesforce.com, social customer, Social Enterprise

Dreamforce 2012

“Touch the Social Enterprise” is the theme around this week’s cloud computing event of the year – Dreamforce 2012. With four days of breakout sessions, exhibitions, and CRM success stories, Dreamforce is a must attend event for those in the industry. Enabling the social enterprise to excel at customer service is exactly what we’ve been focused on this year, so it’s no surprise that you will find us at Salesforce.com’s largest event. In between attending sessions, leading sessions, and demoing the LiveOps Platform and LiveOps Applications, we will stress how social customer service has become a necessity for brands. This is why we are ushering in a new era to CRM, and, as always, we’re proud to support Salesforce.com’s contact center.

We have a number of activities going on at Dreamforce this week, including three speaking sessions. Today, at 3:30 p.m. in Moscone West, 3020, our Chief Marketing Officer, Ann Ruckstuhl, will speak to the session “Focus on the Customer: The Colliding Worlds of the CMO & CIO.” Ann and other panelists will participate in a lively discussion about the speed of social marketing and how it is creating unprecedented demands on CIOs to support the CMO. Attendees will learn best practices on how the marketing and IT teams can rally around the customer in creating social apps for awareness, conversion, and loyalty.

At the same time, in the Expo Hall – Partner Theater 2, our CTO, Cloud Platform and Telephony, Keith McFarlane, will speak on “Enhancing Social CRM with Contact Center Technologies.” He will discuss how modern contact center technologies multiply the value of social CRM by amplifying its reach across multiple communications channels. In this session, Keith will touch on the best practices for developing web callback, social pivot, and bulk contact center data administration apps. Keith will also be giving an interactive demo using the LiveOps cloud Contact Center Platform.

We will conclude our speaking participation with a breakout session on the “Dynamic Customer Journey: A New Age of Customer Service” on Thursday, September 20 at 10:30 a.m. at the San Francisco Marriott Marquis – Foothill G. Jeremiah Owyang, Altimeter Group, Partner & Industry Analyst; Sarah Barrow, Wokingham Borough Council, Head of Customer Service & Administration; and Stefan Osthaus, Symantec, VP, Customer Experience will ask the question: Is social media killing your brand? This session – for CRM, marketing, and customer service practitioners – will be led by Jeremiah Owyang and will provide real world experiences and solutions from Symantec and a UK Government visionary. They will discuss how customers are evolving, lessons learned, and best practices for managing the dynamic customer journey.

You can also catch us at booth #1321 where we will provide demos of the LiveOps Platform and LiveOps Applications, including LiveOps Social. Additionally, Salesforce.com is showing their live call center powered by LiveOps on the expo floor in their Campground area.

And, if you’re feeling really engaging, follow us on Twitter and stay up to date on ways your brand can bridge the gap with your customers and touch the social enterprise!

Marty Beard, President and CEO, LiveOps

Marty Beard, President and CEO, LiveOps

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UK = The Hub of Social Enterprise

May 23, 2012 • By LiveOps, Inc.
Tags — Cloudforce, Customer Service, salesforce, social crm, Social Media

It is clear from Cloudforce London and the many LiveOps customers and partners that we met with that ‘Social CRM’, or social customer service is on the move in the UK. This was showcased in several case studies at the Cloudforce event.

Marty Beard, President and CEO

Marty Beard, President and CEO

Many of our customers in the UK are trailblazers in this area and have smartly leveraged our social-enabled cloud contact center software to deliver high quality customer service, and in the process, distinguished themselves from their peers.  They are mixing ‘traditional channels’, like voice and email, with social channels like Twitter and Facebook, to provide a better 2-way and real-time interaction with their customers.

LiveOps customers Royal Mail, ParcelForce and Wokingham Borough Council have embraced this shifting communication culture through LiveOps Platform.

With LiveOps, Wokingham Council’s contact center now can service the borough’s 160,000 citizens through their preferred communication channels be it email, chat, voice, SMS or Twitter. By acknowledging social government through LiveOps, the council is ahead of the curve and has been able to deploy new services such as the traffic issue reporting service and the “Dog and Bone Text Alert Scheme”. Through the scheme, the council’s contact center can alert dog walkers via SMS when a dog has been reported as missing within the borough.

Through LiveOps Social, Royal Mail has improved public perception of the organization by delivering a deeper level of customer engagement. By responding to customer concerns on public forums such as Twitter in real-time, the postal service has accelerated “first tweet problem resolution”. Ultimately Royal Mail has demonstrated a true commitment to their customers by harnessing cloud-based customer services.

As the show concluded and the sun set over London’s Excel, it became clear that the social enterprise will continue to gain momentum in the UK and beyond. Hats of the trailblazers as they set the scene for the future in customer services!

- Marty Beard, President & CEO

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