Next week, Oracle plans to launch their Oracle Listens program, a way for customers and partners to provide feedback to the company in an open and transparent way. (Disclosure: I was asked by Oracle to provide feedback on an early version of Oracle Listens. Content for this post was obtained in a formal, on-the-record briefing.)
The main page of Oracle Listens has a single, simple box with the encouragement, “Enter your idea for Oracle here.” (see a screenshot to the left). There’s also some light text explaining how Oracle Listens works.
The user is then taken to Oracle Mix, the company’s existing community site where users can create a profile, groups, and most importantly, submit ideas and engage in Q&A with each other.
Karen Tillman, VP of Corporate Communications at Oracle, said that the goal is to “provide a level of transparency that’s available with social networks. We’re making sure the customers and partners are being heard and networking with the right people in the Oracle ecosystem.”
To that end, about 30 top Oracle executives will be reacting and commenting to ideas being submitted. In addition, marketing and product managers are being encouraged to participate in the conversation, and these employees’ responses will be highlighted as coming from “expert” contributors. The executives will be actively participating until the start of Oracle Open World September 21st. (I asked Karen if we’d be hearing from Larry Ellison — her response was classic, “You just never know!”)
But what’s most interesting is where you’ll find Oracle Listens — whenever someone visits www.oracle.com, they will be redirected to the Oracle Listens page. This will happen for about two weeks until Open World, and then will move to a spot on the regular Oracle home page.
To me, this is the most audacious part of the program — that they are hijacking ALL traffic to the Oracle.com and diverting them to Oracle Listens. It’s a bold move that highlights how serious Oracles is about listening to and embracing their customers and partners. And more importantly, they are mobilizing resources within the company to be available to respond to incoming ideas.
When I talked with Karen Tillman and Oracle Listens project manager Marius Ciortea, they expect there to be some hiccups, but that they’ll listen to the feedback make changes, and “keep on plugging”. And the risks are many. Regular Oracle.com visitors will be annoyed to have to click through Oracle Listens each time visit to get to the regular home page. Ideas submitted may be lame, receive tepid or no responses and submitters get annoyed. Responses from executives and employees may be tepid, wrong, or worst, non-existent.
But I think the biggest risk is that Oracle as an organization does not sustain the effort over the long term. By design, Oracle Listens is a program — okay, it’s basically a campaign — that will culminate at Open World in a few weeks. But what happens after that? Once Oracle’s customers/partners get a taste of this “new” Oracle, they are going to want more, and the risk is that Oracle executives and employees will go back to their daily routines. But I suspect that some executives and employees — not all, but some — will also get hooked and will stay engaged.
Overall, I’m impressed. It’s not often that a company makes this visible an effort to engage their customers. All too often, initiatives like this are buried behind a link somewhere on the home page, if it’s there at all.
One interesting piece of background. The Oracle Listens program was the outcome of an internal marketing leadership summit that the company had in January. Present during the brainstorming was Oracle President Charles Phillips, who embraced the idea from the start. Karen related that with Charles’ support, they didn’t face many battles in making it happen. This demonstrates just how crucial executive sponsorship is when it comes to social strategies.
Once Oracle Listens goes live, I hope you’ll give it a whirl – and let me how it could be improved. Hey, while you’re at it, submit it to Oracle!
Hey Charlene,
I love that they are backing themselves to respond to customers in the open.
This approach could change the face of customer service. However, as you say there are big risks. I hope they have the systems in place to give this initiative the support it needs.
If a business can conduct it’s customer service in public and can be confident that it will get it right, it builds an instant pool of customer feedback that will prove far more valuable than vetted testimonials.
I believe any shift in this direction is good for everyone.
Hi Charlene,
I found your book transforming, I just posted a review of Groundswell on my blog: http://www.nacuso.org
Would you care to write a comment or two? It’s a blog for credit union service organizations.
Thanks if you are able.
Charlene,
Many thanks for sharing this excellent case study. I agree that sustaining will be a key treat, but I’d argue biting off too much at once is a bigger threat.
“Community as home page” is exactly what we’ve been doing at my company (www.Clickable.com), although our community program has been different because it’s not a campaign, it’s literally our face and DNA. Here are a few key elements:
1. Scott Wilder, head of community at Inuit, and one of Clickable’s board of advisors, recommended profiling community as high as possible. We took his advice literally by making community our home page, dynamically filtering and promoting the most valuable content to the front. At the same time, we embraced the fact we are a product company, and enabled utility for visitors who just want to purchase our product or learn more about it.
2. It’s key for a community strategy to acknowledge that community also takes place outside of your own site. Therefore, we recruited four “Clickable gurus” internally to represent us in all the major external boards and forums for our industry (search advertising). In fact, we became one of the top contributors to the Google Adwords group, and have been recognized extensively by Google for adding value. This program has had many benefits: a) cultivates our reputation and builds trust; b) pumps up our SEO; c) informs our product development; and d) provides us with great seed content for our own forums.
3. As alluded above, Clickable’s external activity is seeding our own internal forums. They are private now, but will be exposed to all by the end of September. Content areas are broken down into key areas: Product discussions; General search advertising discussions; Company issues.
4. We want to be accessible, so we made prominent Live Help/Chat and our 800 number on EVERY page of our site, in the product, and in our community.
5. Our community is new, so we’re investing heavily in useful content and education to build momentum. For example, the university section of our community, 30 days after its launch, includes: full public transparent user manual, best practices library, case studies library, quick start guides, faq and glossary. We invested heavily in a movie so people can learn what we’re all about — in four minutes. We have an ongoing content production schedule.
6. We take our blog editorial calendar very seriously, and now use it as the primary stream of Clickable communications with customers and other stakeholders. The latest blog post syndicates prominently on our home page, as well as within our product itself.
7. You rarely hear people talk about aesthetics and user experience when implementing corporate-community strategies, but we’re making a huge effort to do so. I hope people agree that our experience is simple, valuable and beautiful.
8. I was inspired by Salesforce.com’s Idea Exchange, so we’re implementing something similar in early 2009. But we’ve got a lot of other things to make successful first.
9. Back to the first point of making community our home page, we since have made community the anchor tab in our product dashboard. It replaces all prior help content.
10. We believe transparency is a competitive advantage and helps us better listen and connect with our customers. Community is becoming a rallying force to achieve that, and central to our marketing strategy.
11. Finally, our organization is highly disciplined in performance analytics and end-to-end tracking of lifetime customer value. It is my utmost priority to understand the dynamic between our community (the softer side) and our traditional customer acquisition and retention strategies (the harder side), and fine tune them to achieve greater overall return.
Our community is in the earliest stages, but we’d love any feedback you may have.
Many thanks,
Max
The essence of this post is something I spoke to on our blog tonight at: http://blog.suggestionbox.com/2008/09/24/follow-the-leaders-and-make-connecting-with-customers-your-new-bottom-line/
If programs like these end up just 4-6 month campaigns and set some type of expectation of customers enough to change the dynamic of the customer experience, you can guarantee some type of backlash from those customers.
I’ve only taken a glance at the Oracle Listens program, but kudos to them for cannibalizing all their homepage traffic and diverting it. Great to see an industry leader jumping in head first!
thanks,
BJ