This week saw the launch of our new hosted community module – Ciboodle Crowd. It’s an exciting week for us and the fruit of many months of strategising, planning, researching and developing.
The release of Ciboodle Crowd comes hot on the heels of two other notable events in the Social CRM sphere. Firstly, Gartner have just published their first comparative literature on SCRM capabilities – the Magic Quadrant for Social CRM, and many of the topics it raises were key to the recent Gartner 360 event in LA. I think Gartner have done a good attempt at a difficult job with this MQ. They have taken a disparate set of vendors, tackling a diverse set of use cases that have ’social’ features, and have applied some relative judgement based on the breadth, depth and proven reach of the vendors considered.
Secondly, this week saw Paul Greenberg tweak his seminal definition of social CRM on its first anniversary. One of the interesting dynamics of this market is the speed of movement; how much has happened in a year and how much is still in play.
Both of these point to the heart of our thinking in Ciboodle Crowd. Gartner recognise that Social CRM is not a separate market, but an extension of the core CRM market – and the key challenge and question they raise is how integrated are the social capabilities with the traditional ones. Paul Greenberg reminds us that it is the “programmatic response to the customers control of the conversation”, asking the question: how do enterprises marshal and direct their resources to best deliver the experiences the customer demands and expects?
