Customer care has long been a trending topic amongst bloggers, marketing gurus and sales professionals. Recently though, the wins and war stories of customer care have become
more widespread and more personal.

Take this home security cam video, for example. The FedEx driver was delivering, or tossing rather, one computer to a single home. Despite this being a personal experience, that video went viral  - receiving over 20,000 views. (FedEx quickly put out a video with the vice president apologizing).

Or, take the story of musician Dave Carroll, whose guitar was damaged on a United flight from Halifax to Omaha when the ground crew was tossing guitars on the tarmac during a layover in Chicago.  One person’s personal experience, shared again via YouTube (now with nearly 12M views), is credited with influencing a 10% drop in United Airline's stock price, costing stockholders about $180 million in value.

The lesson I see is that one consumer’s poor (or positive!) customer experience can influence an entire enterprise.  The negative experiences are the ones that seem to go viral, but it is causing companies to put much more emphasis on customer care and customer experience. 

We recently conducted a survey, taking feedback from professionals in various industries, to find the top support priorities for 2012 – no surprise, a better customer experience ranked #1!  To find out more, check out the video overview of the survey results or download a brief overview of solutions for global customer support. 

At the beginning of this month, I was in a conference room in Santa Clara, at my first SDL Innovate conference.

An annual event where we get together as the SDL group and share with our customers and partners what we have been doing, what we are planning and maybe inspire with some thought provoking presentations from around our broader industry.

One of those thought provoking presentations that really resonated with me was the day two keynote by Mike Walsh - and looking around the engaged faces, affirming nods and occasional murmur of “YES” around the 400+ folks I shared the room with, I wasn't alone. 

As I round out my first year at SDL I have the privilege to be speaking at SDL Innovate this year and in this post, I’d like to share a little bit about what we are going to be talking about next Tuesday (March 6).  

The theme of the whole event is Mastering Global Customer Engagement and during our session we will be addressing how SDL Tridion enables our customers to enage with their customers through providing relevant digital customer experiences, across multiple devices and channels.

The session on Tuesday will blend discussion of our roadmap for 2012 and practical experience of solving needs today with SDL Tridion 2011. I am excited by the format, as we have assembled a panel of SDL Tridion experts to lend their implementation and technical expertise to the discussion and share what our customers can do with our product today.   

We are very fortunate to have a great technical community and through our MVP program we recognize those who offer exceptional contributions to that community.  We are therefore delighted to welcome Chris Summers from Urban Cherry, a 2012 SDL Tridion MVP to the panel.

We will also welcome two of our most valued and knowledgeable SDL WCMS developers; Frank van Puffelen Principal Developer from our Innovation center in Boston and Nuno Linhares, Principal Consultant from our Professional Services team in New York.

Our panel will be completed by Julian Wraith, a Technical Account Manager who has worked with some of our largest international clients, working with them to develop customer engagement solutions.

I will open by discussing our product direction, new products that are scheduled for release and I will then hand over to the panel to dive into key trends and customer engagement requirements we are seeing with our customers. For this session we will be focusing on mobile, content targeting and social and the panel will share some of the best practices and techniques that are helping our customers today. 

I encourage you to follow the hashtag  #SDLInnovate for updates and my fellow panelist @nunolinhares,  @julesdw,  @urbancherry  and @puf.

I look forward to seeing you next week in Santa Clara,

@iantruscott

As you may have seen on Bloomberg yesterday morning, when Mark Lancaster, Executive Chairman, SDL appeared in an interview with Bloomberg Television's Mark Burton, SDL’s preliminary results revealed that we have achieved record revenues and profit performance in 2011.

We commented in our full-year results that revenues have grown by 13% while profits before tax rose 17% to £33.8m. We also announced a final dividend of 5.8p per ordinary share which is a 5.5% rise on the previous year's maiden dividend. Following the announcement, SDL was one of the top performers on the FTSE 250, closing the market at 690.5p.

This year I am excited to be once again attending the SDL Innovate conference. Held in Santa Clara, California on 5/6 March, this yearly event is a great coming together of customers, employees and industry experts that are connected in some way to SDL.

This year, rather than just attending I will be part of the community panel that will engage and discuss website related matters with anyone who is interested. I do this, I guess, on a daily basis to even those who are not interested so it will be good to do this in such a great session as I hope we are going to have. Kicking off the session will be CMS community glitterati, Ian Truscott, who will share the future of the SDL Tridion platform. Then we will follow that with a discussion with community panel (Chris Summers, Frank van Puffelen and Nuno Linhares) on pretty much any topic relating to SDL Tridion that the audience wants to raise. Last year I met some really interesting people who had lots of interesting questions and I hope that there will be a similar group with which to discuss SDL Tridion. If you are an SDL customer and have not yet decided if you want to join the conference, I can strongly encourage you to do so and don't forget to attend our session! You'll find us towards the end of the day on Tuesday 6 March.

You can follow the goings on at SDL Innovate via their twitter hashtag.

Julian Wraith (Twitter: @julesdw)

Yesterday (Monday) it was official, Alterian have become a very welcome part of SDL. This is personally very exciting for me, as I am an Alterian alumnus. But more importantly, it elevates our company’s ability to meet the contemporary needs of our customers; to engage with their customers. 

People use the term ‘game changer’ quite a lot, but on our 20 year anniversary of being founded as Software Documentation Localization (SDL), this is a clear signal of intent to be at the vanguard of what global information management means today. We are continuing on the journey to serve the digital consumer that included the acquisition of Tridion to form our WCM solutions division in 2007.  

Those contemporary information management requirements are described by various acronyms, but I think we are settling on Customer Experience Management (CXM) and this acquisition brings together a family of products that can address those needs. 

In saying that I don’t mean some artificial spreadsheet or graph laid out by an analyst (as much as I respect them) - I mean it responds to real needs I am hearing from our customers today. 

Real people, in large, sophisticated organizations that are looking for how they systemize social engagement, how they reach their customers with a high degree of relevance, across multiple channels and in multiple languages.

Here are my top 3 of things top like about having Alterian in the fold:

1. The combination of language and social. This is really exciting, understanding the sentiment of what is being said out there is the science of social media monitoring and this starts with the language that is being spoken. 

2. Actionable insights. The combination of understanding your audience through observing behavior, social media monitoring and transactions - and then being able to address the audience across multiple channels. It’s a message I carried when I was at Alterian and is even more powerful when combined with componentized, structured content management and language.  

3. Expertise not just technology.  After I left Alterian, they acquired Intrepid with a view to help customers understand social media engagement. This is a great example of recognizing that we don’t just sell technology, but we have to assist customers understand the value and how to shape their strategies, especially in something as relatively new as social. Customers do approach us as trusted advisors and not just about social media, but across the board Alterian brings us closer to the world of the CMO and the challenges they face. 

These are just my quick thoughts, a top three of a list that is sure to be expanded as we bring our products together in 2012.  

Welcome Alterian, I look forward to working with you.. again!

(OK, that might be the fourth thing I like - the people).

Ian Truscott

On Twitter: @iantruscott

To find out more information regarding the acquisition you can check out our dedicated site regarding the deal. Alternatively watch the video of John Hunter and Mark Lancaster discussing the benefits of this acquisition.

In the year of our 20^th Birthday, SDL has announced the acquisition of Alterian, a leader in campaign management and social media analytics. Why is this such great news? For many reasons, but one being that it will enhance our solutions that help global businesses engage with their customers in the
language, media and moment they choose.

For those of you not familiar with Alteiran, they provide:

• Campaign management and analytics
• Email marketing
• Web content management
• Social media monitoring and intelligence

This excellent strategic fit blends the marketing analytics, campaign management and social
media capabilities from the Alterian product suite with that of SDL’s leading global Web and Structured Content Management, eCommerce and Language Management capabilities. This combination will provide an integrated platform for companies to significantly enhance the global customer experience. Find out more and you can watch a video of SDL executives commenting on the benefits of the acquisition to customers, partners and employees of the two companies.

Understanding what your customers are interested in by analysing what they are looking at, and for how long, is key in developing your web and customer engagement strategy.

We already have best-of-breed web content management technology, user guidance content management technology and leading language technology.

Adding Alterian’s marketing analytics, social media and campaign management technology will provide customers with a superb integrated solution for managing customer engagement and improving customer experience.

We are very pleased to have completed this acquisition and look forward to working with Alterian employees, partners and customers.

To find out more information regarding the acquisition you can check out our dedicated site regarding the deal. Alternatively watch the video of John and I discussing the benefits of this acquisition.

Have you noticed that the way people work has changed over the past decade? As organizations adopt a more dynamic, real time nature of business, the way individuals and teams work together is changing as well. Of course, it’s the internet that has primarily driven this change - making collaboration, sharing and communication easier.

According to Gartner, “By 2015, 40 percent or more of enterprise work will be ‘non-routine,’ up from 25 percent in 2010. [People] will work with others with whom they have few links.  Teams will include people outside the control of the enterprise.”  To address this trend, teams need solutions that enable collaboration regardless of location.

Today, SDL is launching SDL Studio GroupShare - A collaboration solution for small to medium sized translation teams who have out-grown purely desktop solutions and are looking for a better way to centrally manage translation memories, terminology and translation projects.

In both technology and business, cloud is a hot topic.  At SDL, things are no different and we are expanding cloud offerings to support a more dynamic, versatile translation environment.

As part of the release of SDL Trados Studio 2011 SP1, translators can now take advantage of SDL BeGlobal – the industry’s first cloud platform for trusted, automated translation – with a free SDL BeGlobal Community account.