Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Penny Herscher, CEO of FirstRain (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: So, that’s your primary user interface, Jive or Chatter or whatever?

Penny Herscher: Jive, Salesforce. It’s typically Salesforce.com CRM, Chatter, Jive, SharePoint, or the iPad.

SM: OK.

PH: Or a push in email. Then clients think they’re getting it in Outlook. Salespeople don’t need another tool. What they need is a workflow where everything is in one place. I think the CRM system or social enterprise is going to end up being that place. And it’s going to end up being built into the iPad in the end. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Penny Herscher, CEO of FirstRain (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I’m sure social media are creating whole new opportunities for your business. Why don’t we explore that, especially if you have specific customer examples?

Penny Herscher: There are two aspects that are social that are really impacting the workflow of the sales and marketing person. The first is, obviously, social media content. Twitter is the one that I’ll talk about. The second is the adoption of what people call the social enterprise, the ability to collaborate efficiently inside a social enterprise system like Chatter, on top of Salesforce or Jive. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Penny Herscher, CEO of FirstRain (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I guess I should rephrase the question. Are you going into CRM and researching every opportunity that’s on your salespeoples’ radar and making that information available? What’s the usage model?

Penny Herscher: The customer intelligence is configured for the salesperson, centrally, but it’s not configured automatically from the CRM system.

SM: OK. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Penny Herscher, CEO of FirstRain (Part 1)

The sales and marketing teams of large enterprises have their work cut out for them when it comes to curating new business. So, they welcome companies like FirstRain that facilitate the research that’s required to effectively cultivate relationships with prospects. FirstRain is an international company based in San Mateo, California. With satellite offices in New York City and Gurgaon, India, FirstRain serves its global enterprise clientele by combining its technology with social enterprise platforms such as Salesforce.com, Microsoft SharePoint, Jive and Cisco Quad and makes use of research platforms like Standard & Poor’s Capital IQ, FactSet Research Systems, Dun & Bradstreet, Fidelity.com, and Mergent.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Penny. Let’s start with your background and FirstRain’s background. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Mark McCormick, Senior VP of Customer Experience, Internet Services Group at Wells Fargo (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: So people can transfer money to others regardless of whether the recipient is on the Wells Fargo system?

Mark McCormick:  Yes, exactly.

SM: All right. Is there anything else that you want to talk about?

MM: The last thing I would say is that we’re always working on ways to humanize our channels. We realize this is a technology. People interact with us, and they expect us to be able to optimize the qualities of each channel that the channel does best. But we always want to look for ways to convey to our customers that there are real humans behind the technology. And we always look for ways to leverage the wisdom our bankers, and recognize customers and personalize their experiences as much as we can. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Mark McCormick, Senior VP of Customer Experience, Internet Services Group at Wells Fargo (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I can give you a couple of use cases from our day-to-day use of online banking. Some of our clients still like to pay by check. Even though we encourage customers to pay by online banking or wire transfer, we still get checks. We then have to get those checks deposited, so sometimes I find myself having to log in to the online banking system with many different keystrokes to ask if a check has been deposited. If I could do that by just asking Siri, “Can you go check my account and see if this check has been deposited?” I guess that would be quite interesting.

Mark McCormick: Yes, I think that’s a good example of how it might be useful. We have to figure stuff like that out. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Mark McCormick, Senior VP of Customer Experience, Internet Services Group at Wells Fargo (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: They’re all mobile but because of the form factor differences, usage models and usage packages tend to be different.

Mark McCormick: So, imagine how complicated my job is.

SM: Yes.

MM: We have to experiment and be always ahead of not just those form factors but the different interaction modes, the gestural modes. Gestural language is something that we had to figure out. The next thing we’ll have to figure out is voice. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Mark McCormick, Senior VP of Customer Experience, Internet Services Group at Wells Fargo (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: A couple of questions there. With the adoption of Mint, are we to expect that all banks, like Wells Fargo, are going to have to present a Mint-like solution on their websites?

Mark McCormick: I like to describe it as the visual display of quantitative information. Instead of looking at quantitative information like your account in a list view, how can you represent it with colors, charts, and graphs that customers can customize? And yes, I do think all financial services institutions have to figure this out and make it dynamic and interactive. >>>