Tuesday, May 28, 2013

How your pre-sales and support teams can work together with OGGflow project

Friday May 24th - Atlanta GA

Your pre-sales, qualification and support teams will need to interact with customers via many different modalities and communications channels.

In most cases the communications with external parties via social networks, web chats, email campaigns etc. take place thru an assortment of third party tools and services. When a relevant customer event or lead surfaces your sales and support teams must manually distribute the information to the appropriate account team within the organization or take extra steps to get the customer dialog imported into your CRM or sales CRM.

OGGflow is designed to connect with every leading communication tool on the market today - so that the external communications themselves build the audit trail itself within OGGflow without any additional copy and paste jobs or forwarding emails around.

In an industry like real estate for example - the time to respond is critical. The first agent a home buyer talks to will 9 out of 10 times sell them a property. The first to respond usually always wins.

Here is how a web-chat with a real estate lead could automatically become the request to the sales agent - First the property shopper would come to the site and seek contact;





When the form is submitted it automatically becomes a post in the OGGflow Enterprise Social Network live view where the entire team of pre-sales agents can see it;





The green light next to the OGGflow event lets your pre-sales team know that the customer is live on the web and ready to talk.





Rather than chatting thru a third party tool or webchat service, your pre-sales agents would interact with the customer right from within the OGGflow Enterprise Social Network interface.






The agent and homebuyer will be able to communicate in real time. The OGGflow Enterprise Social Network interface allows your agents to chat with and monitor website visitors from their desktop computers, notebooks or mobile devices via the HTML 5 standard.








All communications can be seen by the entire team as they happen - the real estate agent who will follow up with the customer may even be watching the conversation unfold in real time and know what needs to be done before the pre-sales agent even assigns it to him/her.







Once the dialog is complete, there is no need to move information around between systems. All of the information captured from the external customer chat is already in the OGGflow Enterprise Social Network and can be assigned to the real estate agent for follow up immediately.






The second the lead is assigned to the agent, they will be notified via web, or mobile alerts so they can respond and sell a property!






The pre-sales agent can even attach the relevant property listings right to the OGGflow Enterprise Social Network post so the sales agent will have everything they need when they engage with the homebuyer without the need to leave OGGflow or perform research in any external systems.

Some reading around the web;

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Thursday, May 23, 2013

Create and configure an OGGflow project


Wednesday May 22nd 2013 - Atlanta GA
OGGflow projects are a part of the OGGflow Enterprise Social Network framework and serve many purposes.
You can use OGGFlow projects to;

- Organize a support operation for a company or a specific product / skill group and connect your company support email accounts and social networks so the entire team can collaborate on responses and communicate directly from within OGGFlow with a full audit trail.

- Organize a team for a specific sales effort or account.

- Organize an engineering effort as a product manager.

- Organize a customer account management team and optionally also invite the customer team for transparent collaboration.

- Assemble a team to collaborate on a company party or social event!

The OGGflow project is really just a group where you invite team members focused on a specific goal or operational effort. It is quite flexible and OGGflow leaves the intended usage open for maximum benefit to all OGGflow subscribers or companies with a private OGGflow deployment within their own infrastructure.

Watch the video below to learn how to create and configure a new project;

Once your projects are properly set-up and the team members have been invited, the OGGflow Enterprise Social Network will allow your teams to completely work within the social network interface while they share and collaborate on all related events, documents, objects and communications.

Keeping all related communications within the OGGflow network is key for maximum effectiveness.

If there is some external system or something your company is using today that cannot be connected and worked on within an OGGflow project - let us know by sending email to support@oggflow.com or by clicking the interactive help widget at oggflow.com. Most external systems and services can quickly be added using the OGGflow connector technology.

Some related reading around the web;
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Tuesday, May 21, 2013

What is an Enterprise Social Network?


Tuesday May 21st 2013 - Atlanta GA

If you do not already know what a Enterprise Social Network (ESN) is, or ever wondered what separates OGGflow from the other offerings out there - this blog post is for you!

What is an ESN or Enterprise Social Network?

Since the beginning of the information age an increasing volume of information and types one deals with in their day to day duties in a modern company has become challenging to manage. Years ago your customers and contacts corresponded via phone or post box. Now we are on a 24 hour per day global basis sent onslaughts of contacts and news via mobile, text messages, emails, social networks, forum posts, blog posts, comment sections, photo sharing services, CRM updates, desktop chat clients and still the standard old telephone.

In addition to dealing with that mass volume of external information that must be sorted and responded to, many organizations still spend many hours per day in meetings or in other forms of correspondence separate from said information systems in huddles discussing how to deal with and respond to the volumes of information. And what is the result of said meetings? MORE emails, posts, follow-ups etc.

The world must have a way to simplify and unify corporate communications and make it more of a natural process that is a part of how the organization itself moves on a day to day basis.

For this purpose we are on the horizon of a handful of great ESN solutions that have already changed the way the worlds most advanced companies work, and will soon revolutionize every workplace or business operation whether it is a 3 person start-up, a single independent consulting firm or a 50,000 employee enterprise.


The fundamental purpose of a ESN is to reduce the volume of meetings, volume of emails and take all of the 100+ external modalities your customers and partners may choose to contact you on and bring it all into one place where your teams and internal employees can all collaborate together in one corporate cloud universe and more efficiently deal with these items and touch points all while reducing redundant and external communications normally required to manage it all.

Sounds complicated right? Not really - a good ESN can make it easy as sitting down, logging into a social network like Facebook and sharing pictures, videos and posts with your friends and family.

Remember personal sharing and communications before social networks? To share pictures with your friends and family you might have to hook up the camera to your PC, transfer the pictures to your computer, edit them, upload them to a website or attach them to emails and send them to groups of friends and family members. Sometimes the pictures were too big and wouldn't send, or maybe some of your family members weren't on email yet. You might have to go to the photo mart, make hard copies and then ship them out in photo mailers. To share a batch of vacation or wedding pictures it might take you a few days or even a few weeks to get it all done and you would spend hours to even prepare the content.

Now with advanced social networks and modern mobile devices, the pictures can be shared with the friends and family you choose seconds after the content has been created and with as little as 5 taps of a touch screen and typing in a description. You dont even in most cases need to say where you are at as the GPS on your mobile device will automatically set location in your album or in the pictures themselves.

Lets take a look at what happens at a company. You have teams of people who have items and bits of information sent to them via phone, social networks, email, etc.... You also have a CRM or Customer Relationship Management system in place to track all of this information, separately your engineering team likely has their own project management system, and your finance team has some separate systems they work within. If sales or support wants to know what engineering, finance or some other part of the company operation is doing the information isn't in the system they work out of day to day. To collaborate with these other teams the communications and dialogue must be taken external to their own system such as a CRM. Then once a collaborative effort has taken place the results of it or the new information created must be added back into the CRM or using other external systems such as email, private message or telephone call be communicated to the other team members or external customers. Its one company working together - why have all of the internal systems separate? ESN solutions seek to allow cross department sharing and collaboration between teams while also maintaining privacy where needed (private company finance information). The direct and immediate result of moving your company to a ESN is a reduction of meetings and external communications that often get “inboxed” to one employees desktop where the rest of the team waits on that employee to get a chance to circulate it like one might forward a chain of emails around.

Separately the problem with most CRM, or sales CRM solutions in the modern world is that they are built on the world of old, where contacts mostly came into your company via phone or writing / email.

A well designed ESN will bring all of these external touch points into one place so that your teams can instantly deal with, collaborate and respond all in one place - and separately unify communications between your internal teams so that the entire operation can perform more efficiently and effectively from a single interface all while eliminating redundant information.

A business focused ESN makes this as easy as logging into Facebook or Google+ and communicating with your friends or family and sharing news and content. In the business sense a ESN allows you to organize projects and teams by groups so you can keep up with efforts individually or view all of the company activity in a live news feed similar to the news feed found on the popular social network sites.

Some examples of modern ESN solutions are;


How is OGGflow different from the other offerings in the marketplace?

The OGGflow Enterprise Social Network is a slim and flexible ESN framework that can be used as is at Oggflow.com or even set-up within a companies private infrastructure for maximum security. Currently no other ESN product offers this flexibility.

While Yammer is built around Microsoft’s products such as Office365.com and Chatter only works with Salesforce.com - OGGflow is technology agnostic and designed to work with and adapt to all of the modern company cloud services used today such as Google Apps for business, Office365.com, Salesforce.com, Evernote, Facebook, Twitter, Skydrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, Gmail, Outlook / Exchange Server, etc. This freedom of services choice is critical and allows for a large organization to have mixed groups of users working together within the same ESN. With technology agnostic OGGflow a company could even change services it uses for storage such as Google Drive vs Skydrive and then even use the apps provider of choice Google Apps vs Office365.com seamlessly together. These options are not available with Microsoft Yammer or Salesforce Chatter.

The OGGflow ESN flexible connector technology allows for integration options not possible with Yammer or Chatter - In the open source development community companies like Hackerfleet have created very specialized and interesting uses for OGGflow. A Hackerfleet technology connection in OGGflow allows for Hackerfleet node events within a shipping lane fleet management operation such as an engine problem on a cargo ship at sea to trigger an OGGflow post in a support project. This allows for a global engineering community to collaborate on solving the ship engine event or failure using the OGGflow ESN collaboration framework on desktop computers or mobile devices. Other examples would include allowing a company to use their own homegrown CRM or infrastructure alert applications to trigger team collaboration posts in OGGflow with events from their own inhouse solutions.

The OGGflow ESN platform has 60% more functionality than Yammer or Chatter in a single post or event. (think about the links on a friend / family social network post that let you like a picture, comment on it or share) Some key differentiating features about OGGflow events;

- Quickly attach or create any type of object or document.

- Allows for realtime team collaboration on documents created within OGGflow. When a Google Apps document is created for example all members of the project team automatically have sharing access permissions set up for them within Google Drive and can chat / collaborate within the document or using the realtime comment feed on the OGGflow post itself.

- Tasks added to OGGflow posts are not flat checklist items. They include an entire workflow and audit trail that can be used to track many items and communications across the organization.

- Tasks added to OGGflow posts include time and resource management features. Team members can start/stop working on a task and automatically record and report on the time spent.

- Tasks added to OGGflow posts have accountability features where another team member is designated to verify that the task has been completed and sign off on it with 3rd party approval.

- OGGflow engineering “Milestones” and sales “Deals” allow for a real time view into every dependant task tied to a new product rollout or sales opportunity without leaving the OGGflow ESN or visiting any other external service, making a phone call or externally chatting anyone in the organization (these kinds of update seeking distractions also pull your team members and co-workers away from their work!)

What features are critical for your organization to get the most value out of a modern Enterprise Social Network?

Some reading around the web;
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Monday, May 13, 2013

OGGflow customer collaboration - part #2 - OGGflow lead gen -> proposals -> quoting -> closing


Monday May 13th 2013 - Atlanta GA

Having tools to document requirements, provide teaming transparency and bring everyone together in one workflow is great. In the last post OGGflow customer collaboration - Part #1 - Invitations -> collaboration -> requirements gathering, we showed you how to quickly set-up a team project, colour code everything and get everyone on board and sharing.

In this post we will explore how a sales team working within the customer collaboration landscape of OGGflow can generate new leads, track opportunities, close opportunities and manage the closed and existing account base all while easily identifying and documenting new opportunities.

Lead generation - We saved the topic of lead generation for this step as the processes for lead generation in OGGflow are the same pre/post customer acquisition.

Technique : Social feed hotwords -

OGGflow has powerful search tools implemented for customer and public social feeds such as Twitter, Facebook users and pages, LinkedIn users and company pages and Google+ users and page profiles.

Lead generation projects can be set-up in OGGflow so that at the desired interval all recent posts from the social networks containing specific keywords can be added to the lead generation project for mining;


Like all other objects or events in a OGGflow project feed, potential leads can be farmed from filters applied to social network feeds and then have tasks automatically assigned to the appropriate sales-team member or be further qualified and explored by pre-sales team watching the social feed filters and then manually assigned to a sales-team member with additional customer notes.

Key account contacts identified in social feeds within OGGflow lead projects can even be invited to new or existing customer collaboration projects where the requirements capture can begin before the assigned sales personnel even clicks on the link to join the opportunity specific qualification project.

Separately all social feeds for customers on existing projects can be viewed in a sales management project for the account. Proactively see live updates from your accounts complete social sphere and take social events that hint at or introduce new business opportunities or leads and add follow-up tasks for the account or sales manager who owns the account all right within OGGflow.

Technique : leads generated in the customer support social-sphere -

OGGflow support projects can be configured to receive all inbound support email on a companies support addresses along with customer responses to a companies pages, product pages, twitter feeds, live website chats and even voicemail messages and customer response call recordings and transcripts.

A company's social presence is often used by customers as a support channel, and by prospects as a sales contact channel.



Support and sales queue events in an organizations social sphere can easily be discussed, commented on and assigned to the sales team for follow-up all from within the OGGflow interface. This allows for the quickest possible response from an organizations frontline as a result of the unification of customers, support, sales and operations within OGGflow.

Technique : Leads generated from ongoing existing customer support operations -

One great element of social collaboration is that your internal delivery teams become very integrated with the stakeholders on the customer side of the operations fence. With a good user experience in motion this makes your organization the incumbent go to expert right there on your customers existing team. Additional opportunities in a larger organization will be much easier to spot, and when your account management and customer care teams do see something in their daily work flow to suggest that an additional opportunity is in reach, OGGFlow makes it as easy as clicking ‘assign task’ to get the event into the sales-teams view.

Tracking and closing opportunities with OGGflow milestones -

Sales opportunities are tracked with OGGflow milestones. An unlimited number of milestones, tasks, team members or projects can be associated with a customer / sales target account.

A quick glance at a sales opportunity milestone information page will show the criticals about an opportunity, the sales forecast data and all associated tasks open, completed and verified.

Engineering may be working to add a feature required by the customer. Support may be working to correct an issue the customer discovered during their user acceptance testing. All of these efforts are happening in parallel to the sales and business unit working to execute the required contracts and licenses.

A quick click on an individual task ID from within the sales milestone information page will display the real time feed for the task and an instant view into the status of the work.

A sales milestone page becomes an invaluable nexus of real-time information on an identified / qualified sales opportunity. Even better it only takes a few clicks to set-up a milestone in OGGflow so that the delivery teams can begin creating, assigning and working tasks.

OGGflow was built on a principle that redundant information does not need to cost an organization as much time and money as it does with other overly complex sales CRM solutions. Once an opportunity owner sets up a milestone the rest of the detail record and audit trail is self generated by employee and customer activity. Your sales team should not be burning cycles copying and pasting their notes and or typing updates and reports about meetings. OGGflow lets you capture everything automatically so that the valuable time of your internal teams and people can be spent doing what they do best as a part of the customer team.

It is commonplace for a large and complex customer organization to have several opportunities, projects and teams interacting with your organization in parallel. Never before has it been so easy to see an up to the second status update of every sales opportunity and real time detail on every dependency an opportunity has across multiple parts of the customer organization as well as your own.

Further, forecasts and territory sales goals can be captured and tracked in quota and territory milestones-

The goal of OGGflow is to reduce human interaction complexity and provide the most real time view possible into any aspect of an organization's processes and progress.

Account management and customer care with continuity and opportunity -

Once a customer acquisition is complete, OGGflow continues to add value by maintaining a searchable history of the collaborative team efforts back to day one of the relationship. With the immortalized relationship history, and real time activity feeds for the ongoing support and relationship management needs it is always easy to find relevant details about any topic or opportunity within the customer organization landscape.

The customers usage of OGGflow to interact with and gain support from your organization will continue to present trackable opportunities for your organization to add more value to the customer relationship.

Some additional reading around the web;
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Monday, May 6, 2013

OGGflow customer collaboration - Part #1 - Invitations -> collaboration -> requirements gathering


Monday May 6th 2013 - Atlanta GA
Customer collaboration and team integration is at its best if the effort begins early on even at the first stages of the relationship building and sales process.

OGGflow collaboration tools are built with transparency in mind. The beginning of any long term solution provider / vendor / consultant / advisory relationship is critical in forming the foundation of the teams ability collaborate and produce at maximum potential. Often in many relationships the agility and accuracy in which the teams can succeed together best defines the value of the partnership - often even more so than the cost of technologies applied or the services themselves.

History has proven that it takes great people for any project or team based effort to succeed. When a solution provider and a customer can put their best people together in a social workflow that allows them to perform at peak potential as if they are fellow employees under one mission statement maximum value can be achieved.

The transparency, sharing and collaboration should begin as soon as any form of meaningful goal or project related discussion does. In OGGflow the owner of the relationship should make a dedicated project for interacting with the customer.....


Once created - set the colour of the project to something that your organization identifies as customer facing or as a customer collaboration indicator. When other team members or employees of the organization who touch the project see posts in their task and live feed streams the colour will alert them to the fact that any activity on the project post will be visible to the customer and considered an official documented communication......


Once you have the project configured properly for how your organization works, its time to invite the team! When in the project view, you will see the team member list and invite button on the top right. Simply click invite and select existing team members and customers who have used OGGflow from the contact list, or enter the names and email addresses of project team members who have yet to join OGGflow.


The external team member invites pre-register them for OGGflow access and sends them a quick login link via email so they can quickly get into the project flow with the rest of the team the moment you invite them.....


It shouldn't take more than 5-10 minutes to have the entire team assembled.

Once everyone is on board the collaborative requirements gathering phase can begin. Stakeholders can post documents, engage in interactive discussions in real time and even collaborate in interactive telepresence working sessions. The requirements themselves will all be documented in OGGflow as the foundation of the customer relationship on day 1. Use the colour set-up in the settings tab to give colour designations to the various types of team members in a project. Executive contacts, technical POCs, account managers and subcontractors can all have their own colour coding which makes it easier to understand what is happening on a project within the team when viewing task reports.

Another great benefit of this approach is that as your customers interact with you in OGGflow and build out their own contact profile, it allows for the organization providing services to automatically be alerted of events in the customers professional social presence such as Twitter or LinkedIn posts that may provide invaluable indicators on the health of a customer account or what is needed to properly support them. Its an organization's responsibility to follow its customers and understand their needs proactively - no matter how they choose to express themselves. OGGflow will make sure your team is never the last to know!

In OGGflow customer collaboration - Part #2 - OGGflow lead gen -> proposals -> quoting -> closing we will explore how to identify and close opportunities with OGGflow and explain how unlimited opportunity is quickly realized on each customer account when complete transparency is applied.

Some additional reading around the web;
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