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During his keynote Scott Nelson, Gartner’s managing vice president, application strategies and governance, told a packed house that CIOs are focused on helping their organizations to drive growth. According to Nelson, Gartner’s research found that CIO’s top five strategic management priorities for 2006 are:
1. Delivering projects that enable business growth (this was also number one in 2005, up from 18 in 2004)
2. Linking business and IT strategies and plans (this was also number one in 2005)
3. Building business skills in the IT organization
4. Collaborative technologies (new to list)
5. Customer sales and service technologies (up from number 8 in 2005)

Is Skype the next customer service application? Gartner research vice president Bern Elliott said during a presentation on contact center strategies that today’s technologies have made “virtualization” much more possible and much easier to deploy. Something to think about: Using Skype for customer service.

Elliott called instant messaging the next-generation dial tone, and noted the growing interest in that and other presence and status services. He challenged the audience to think about presence tools versus home-based “expert” agent. “How would it change your strategy if anyone in the organization could support the customer and customer interactions could be personalized?” he asked.

CRM total software revenue (including maintenance) was $5.7 billion in 2005, up nearly 14 percent over 2004, according to Gartner research director Sharon Merzt. The drivers are business confidence, focus on revenue growth, a strong demand for industry-specific solutions, analytics, and business process optimization, she said. SAP and Oracle share about half the market; the next 25 companies total about 31 percent of the market; about 20 percent are focused solutions and niche players.

On-demand grew more than 60 percent in 2005, which translates to 8 percent of the market. It could grow to 10-12 percent in 2006. “On-demand is increasingly being seen as a complementary strategy to on-site deployments,” Mertz said, “not as an either/or.”

Treat your employees and customers as you would like to be treated. This was a key message Fred Reichheld relayed during his keynote at the recent Gartner CRM Summit. According to Reichheld, loyalty guru and author of The Ultimate Question,companies that understand the connection between employee engagement and customer loyalty include Chik-fil-A, Enterprise Rent-a-Car, an dCostco Wholesale. All of these companies pay employees more and charge customers less than their competitors, yet are highly profitable businesses, Reichheld said. Their CEOs cite following the Golden Rule as their approach to generating both customer and employee loyalty.

Peppers & Rogers Group cofounder Don Peppers echoed that sentiment during his Gartner keynote. Customer advocacy is the single biggest driver of repeat business, he said. “Be the customer,” Peppers advised. “Think and act like the customer.”

Is business process management essential to customer service? “Most of the cases that start in the contact center don’t end there. But they get call-backs when the other departments don’t follow up or follow through,” says Amy Bethke, director of product management fo Pegasystems. “Getting organization owners within a company to share customer processes is transformational.” The question execs need to ask, she says, is “How, as a company, do I want to interact with the customer?”

Using self-service to build loyalty, not to deflect calls from the contact center, is a growing strategy among some companies, says Parature CEO Duke Chung. “In the long term online service is a fact,” Chung said. “Customers expect it.”

The trick to data quality is to introduce processes “at the point of mistake” that avoid inputting errors into the system versus having to handle them after the fact, says Gina Sandon, vice president of marketing for Initiate Systems. “You need to fix the processes up front to stop introducing bad data in the first place.”