Helpstream Adds Incremental Value to SCRM with Social Marketing

On Tuesday October 6th 2009 Helpstream announced a new module for their Social CRM Product: Social Marketing.  I had a briefing with Bob Warfield (CEO) and Bill Odell (VP of Marketing) to understand better what the new offer is all about, and how it moves the company closer to a Social CRM Suite.  Here are my thoughts:

I like the company’s approach of going beyond Customer Service communities and knowledge management to other areas of CRM.  It’s a good initiative towards establishing presence in a different area.  I also like their approach of partnering and leveraging expertise and knowledge in those areas – as opposed to the previous CRM iterations where acquisitions, mergers, and hard-coded integrations were the norm.  The value delivered by those suites in past lives was negligible at best since the integrations never worked as expected.  Thankfully we advanced technologies in the areas of Clouds and Web Services to where we don’t have to see a company acquire 18 others to gain minimal functionality add-on.

So, for the $64,000.00 question — how does it work?  Glad you asked…

Let’s say you are a customer of Helpstream and you have a Marketing Automation solution running in your organization already.  You are using the Demand Generation and Lead Scoring modules and wish you had more data about how customer’s and prospects that use the Support site.  You could merge usage and web logs, find common data points, and report what you could (sometimes done in Excel, mind you).  If you have different vendors for different functions it is nearly impossible to get cross-functional data into Demand Generation.

Helpstream establishes a data-connection between their usage logs, profile information, and social media monitoring tools on one hand and Marketing Automation on the other.  By linking known-prospects or customers between both applications (leverage the information collected when the customer signed up for the community or collected from the social networks they monitor) they can pass along all the usage data about the support communities. The Marketing Automation tool uses that information to score the lead higher or lower, and use that lead in other activities.  As Larry Dignan said in his ZDNet Blog it tries to turn every support user into a lead — of sorts.

I would not go that far, but I think there is real incremental value (thanks Dennis Howlett for the distinction) in their offer.  Lack of cross-channel and cross-function tracking between vendors is the most frustrating aspect in CRM – and the one where it mostly failed to deliver the promised value.  In the demo I saw you can see an integration between Helpstream and Marketo (Eloqua is also ready, others can be done “within a couple of weeks” per the company) passing data back and forth to increase the lead scoring and the segmentation on the support site.  Very interesting.

I am sure it is not perfect, there is still the issue of anonymous users (tracking cookies can be used – but they don’t always work as expected), or incomplete information (which may not reflect on the proper prospect or the proper place) in addition to the many other problems we always experience with Marketing Automation.  Alas, the value for those that can be identified and integrated is very high.  It should not be hard to create a business justification in short term by cross-referencing databases and finding a few key customers whose data you don’t have and would like to aggregate.

Bottom Line: Good show of what the potential for SCRM is, good move by Helpstream to grow into a SCRM provider, and looks interesting enough to provide sufficient incremental value to try it on a pilot program.  I am not saying it is free of problems or defects, but it does the job it is intended to do.  Good first step towards a Social CRM Suite.