Tim Cook rules the changing Apple world

March 30th, 2012

When Tim Cook (pictured above left) moved into the incredibly big space left by Steve Jobs at Apple, the markets moved quickly. They began to write Tim Cook down with endless articles about his shortcomings.

At the time, I wrote that Tim would be a brilliant CEO of Apple, based on nothing more than careful monitoring and reading about his career over more than a decade. I also said that anyone with spare cash should buy and lock away Apple shares.

Seems like I called it right. Tonight, Apple shares have a value over $600 for the first time. I would not worry about the slight fall - end-week traders taking some folding cash back home – this stock is built to last.

Tim Cook, the man the markets mashed less than a year ago, is the world’s top CEO. Who said that? His employees is who.

US-focused careers site Glassdoor announced today that Cook received a 97 per cent approval rating from employees over the past 12 months that ended March 15, beating out Ernst & Young CEO Jim Turley and Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs, American Express CEO Ken Chenault and Google CEO Larry Page.

Seems also that the Man is getting another thing right. Tim Cook went to the Chinese Foxcomm plant that builds the devices his company has designed and sells and we buy. He wants change there and has some power to do that. Foxcomm has promised to hire more people and reduce the pressures on its employees.

It’s in his power to take the build contract away from Foxcomm. It’s in our power to pay more for Apple mobile products. While we ponder and prevaricate, Tim Cook is making changes. Like I said – he’s The Man.

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#scrm12 - Does social customer service improve user experience?

March 29th, 2012

A panel moderated by Maria McCann, director of customer service for Spotify, and featuring:

• David Hughes - @davidhughes - director of user experience, Expedia Affliliate Network
• Charlotte Garfield - @garfiec - marketing, ACCA
• Dominic Sparkes - @domsparkes - CEO & Founder, Tempero

David: there’s been a lot of talk today about figures, and about stories. Both are important. It’s difficult to take “your website is sh•t” and go on from there. But if you get it right, you will give positive feedback. Like, Tweet and +1 buttons will give you quantitative data about what people like about your site. If you’ve got followers on social networks, you can push things to them. Upload two page elements to Instagram - the one with the most lies gets used.

Dominic: Have you got the right technology, have you got the right ethos? Social media makes customer service unfair. They have the power. That’s unfair. A couple in the hotel had a go on TripAdvisor, without com paining to the note;l. The manager saw, and kicked them out. Data, crisis management and planning.

Charlotte: we’d hate to go back to a life without social platforms. You see the loyalty on social platforms that you don’t in the same way on other platforms.

Dominic - Had a great experience with the BT forums. It was fixed in two days, and his journey is there for people to see.

David - the death of iVR can’t come soon enough. The lack of Twitter would be a bad thing - I’ve had good support both solicited and and unsolicited. London Midland do a  great job. However, social going away wouldn’t make much difference to the UX in large companies. People are just focused on conversions and numbers.

Maria: How do you engage those people? How to you get to the people who design this stuff?

David: My customers are the customer service and marketing teams. If you have proposed changes through the social channel, take then to the UX team, and you have data to support your case.

Maria: There’s been a big theme of data today. Can we make social data work better for social customer service?

Dominic: Not just how, but how do we get to use it? We need to work out how collects it, who owns it and who uses it. In the work they do with Sony, they try to amalgamate datasets across departments, to understand user journeys. They use that to understand the UX needs of the site. They’re finding our where the pain points. It comes in, ins analysed, and is spat out to the relevant departments. That’s the utopian vision - they’re not there yet.

David: Doesn’t do percentages, does pixels. But data is key. At Expedia they have more data than they can use, but never quite the data they need. But it can identify improvements and pain points. It’s a fact of life.

Charlotte: It’s useful for us for new market development and recruitment.

Maria: What’s the future gong to bring? How will that impact on customer experience?

Dominic: It’ll be better. Hopefully. But there will be conferences like this for five to 10 years. Things change over time. Moderation, insight and engagement will all be important. Data mine their activities. moderation may triage the content and pass info to customer service, and then engage the customers in a conversational way.

David: It can only improve user experience. I’ve been looking to set up a user panel: £8k to set up, £5k a test. The same number of people on Twitter could be that, for free. People can track the sentiment of conversations. We can change customer journeys, based on sentiment expressed.

Charlotte: We’ll get faster at servicing our customers on social platforms.

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#scrm12 - Richard McCrossan on multi-channel customer service

March 29th, 2012

Richard McCrossan, strategic business director EMEA, Genesys

He’s here to save the world from bad customer service… And he’s going to do that by talking about cross-channel customer service. As the number of channels increases, the difficulty of controlling brand image grows exponentially.

Customer service is waaaay down the list of factors for customer loyalty - but it’s number one for customer disloyalty. It all comes down to customer effort. If they have to put high effort into resolving an issue, they’re more likely to be disloyal. Customers who put in high effort is a clear indicator of disloyalty. If you want to drive loyalty through social media, you need to think about the effort customer put in… 57% of contact centre calls come from the web. That’s two interactions - more effort. People have to go to multiple channels to active something. Traditional channels are not going away - but new ones are coming in. The telephone is the “joker” channel. Nice to know it’s there. but you don’t want to have to use it. A process like buying a TV often means hitting a number of individual interactions. What social media has done is added a new channel. McCrossan seems social media as just another channel. It’s a significant one, because of the damage it can do you brand. The challenge is to make it aware of conversations in other channels.

Once we’ve identified an issue, how do we equip teams to provide the right response? There are four parts:

1. Leverage existing customer service tools - including the knowledge and expertise you’ve invested time and money in
2. Use the customer’s cross-channel history - it’s rare that a social media message is an isolated event. Something has provoked them into acting. He’s had multiple contacts with the Twitter account of his airline - and he’s always got to re-establish that he’s a gold customer.
3. Blend channels at the desktop. Blending, say chat and social media gives a lot of options. Moving a discussion from the Facebook Wall to private chat can be very powerful. It’s certainly more positive than having to push it to e-mail.
4. Close the loop - Your C-level management don’t care about the specifics of customer service - they want to know high value customers are getting high-level service. A dashboard will provide that.

Social media ha shade it more important to integrate you management eSerivces into one suite. Making it easier to move cross-channl reduces customer effort, and makes it more likely that the customer will be loyal. Customer don’t want relationships - they want the benefits of a relationship: knowing him and knowing his behaviour.

 

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#scrm12 - Carolyn Blunt on how to integrate social media with traditional customer service

March 29th, 2012

Carolyn Blunt is a people development consultant at Real Results

Contact centres are going through a lot of change right now. And that’s unsettling people. Some are starting to take baby steps into social media. The key is selling the idea effectively senior stakeholders. Many of the stakeholders are in the 1940 to 1979 group - who often don’t know how to use Twitter… There’s some similarities with what we went through in the 1960s. Back then, it was mainly women in typing pools replying to letters. People liked that, because ether could control very letter. The advent of the telephone was met with resistance. But now we’re comfortable with it.

There are three approaches coming out of this:

1. passive - bury your head in the sand, and it’ll go away
2. neutral - give them the phone number when they complain
3. positive - attempt to fix the problem.

Questions that stakeholder shave: How do we handle conflict, arguments and untruths? They’ve come to the conclusion that about 90% they get in is true. And there’s a lot of brand defensiveness as a first reaction. And a lot of desire to know what other people are doing.

Best practice:

• Separate marketing and support Twitter acccounts
• Listen for mentions, and route them to customer service teams.
• Train people to deliver customer service in 140 characters
• Gen Y and Millennials are pretty comfortable with this already…
• Owned by customer service, with a social media sub team. Is worried about the “bystander syndrome” with everyone owning it.
• Use informal language.

3 Golden rules:

• Customers should receive the sam service and priority and other channels - social media doesn’t get to jump the queue
• Criticism of name people online deleted
• Never argue with a customer: acknowledge, apologise and move-on

And: avoid the chardonney and stella staff postings on Friday night by setting policies around that.

Use positive feedback to celebrate success internally.

To get people on board, remind people that it’s out there anywhere. It’s free 360 feedback! Lead from the front. And remind people that we can’t go back in time - technologies aren’t uninvented.

 

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#scrm12 - How British Gas got social

March 29th, 2012

Dan and Laura from British Gas

Dan Rutherford:

He’s being honest - energy is a low interest category for most people. They don’t talk about it - until their boiler breaks.

Online search has to be at the centre of any service-based organisation. So they seed the web with positive stories about the brand, by having positive online interactions with customers.

Three phases:

1. Develop infrastructure, tools and knowledge internally. There was internal education, buy-in from different departments, and a design phase.
2. Develop on-line self-help tools - and make service issue management public
3. Develop social channels and content to drive positivity around the brand.

Laura Price:

Social being at the centre means that they can support the digital, PR, customer service and PR teams equally.

They started by listening. They have around 400 mentions a day, with 50% customer service issues. That scales to 17k on results days. They started an active customer service programme. A team of two plus an agency can’t do this. You need to give customer support the tools and training.

50% of the mentions are on Twitter - so they started there. That got a positive reception. They since added a dedicated customer support channels - @britishgashelp That freed up @britishgas to talk about more general issues. A £50 talk to us tab in Facebook stopped so many negative comments appearing on the wall.

Now they’re identifying recurring problems, and are creating videos to address them. Every customer who watches the “how to thaw your condensate pipe” video is worth £80 to the company - as it’s one person not calling out an engineers. It’s been viewed 45,000 times…

Social engagement is epically more difficult. They’re repackaging all the content so it works in social. And they put in a social media newsroom, the hob of their content. They even have a guest blogger programme.

When there’s an announcement about price rises - they try to be as honest as they can. They knew there would be negative chat, so they got the MD on video answering customer questions, and got the video edited and up that day.

Q&A

Co-ordination between teams?

Laura: co-oridinating internally with different teams is tough. From the outside, it’s just British Gas. From the inside, it’s numerous different systems. You need to find those champions that will go the extra mile to support you. We don’t have people fighting to own this yet - they’re happy for it to be our problem.

Use of videos in call centres?

Laura: The call centre operators can’t see YoutUbe videos - they can tell customers they are there, but not watch them.

Dan: That’s a challenge for big companies - IT and social media argue about access to these channels.

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#scrm12 - Frank Eliason and the future of social customer care

March 29th, 2012

Frank Eliason, VP Social Media, Citibank

This is a man who never does slides - unil his publisher tells him he must. And so we get a few slides, and a whole lot of passion.

People saw what they did at Comcast and tried to copy it. But social customer support as people try to do it today is a complete failure. Marketers get very excited about social media. “Wow! People are going to talk about my brand.” Uh… yeah. What they’re going to talk about is their complaints, their problems, their annoyances.

Social media is not complicated. Look at your usage of it. Are you there to sell other people’s products? No. You’re there to connect with family, friends, etc. People expect good experiences from their brands. Marketers expect people to sell their brands for them. Both are up for disappointment. Most customer’s experience of support is pitiful. Companies often blame the user. Now people have the power to broadcast their dissatisfaction with brands. And it’s about to get much, much worse. Most service departments are not empowered.

In general, customers do not want social service. They want the product to work. If it doesn’t work, they want it fixed. And they don’t trust companies to fix it. That’s why they turn to social. They just want it fixed, and they will build attention until it is. At Comcast they were relentlessly feeding back the issues from the customers back into the company to fix the issues coming up.

If you’re really good at service, you get promoted upwards. And at some point, your focus changes - your customers stop being the users of the product, and start serving upwards. Don’t believe him? Look at call-centres over 20 years. They started seeing themselves as cost-centres. They started justifying themselves. They became sales centres. And all of a sudden, you phone up for help - and they sell at you. That’s why service is so bad. People are fixing things for management, not for customers.

The current model of social service is that if you shout loud enough, you get help. That’s a great message to send. It’s time to figure this out. Customers and employees now own the brand. What you see in social media is just your culture. If you want to win in social media, you need to fix the culture. If the top doesn’t want to fix it, you aren’t going to get anywhere.

Social media allows like minded people to connect with each other, to find each other. This is NOT talked about enough. Everyone is trying to sell you all the social tools under the sun - and some of them have great value - but it’s still about culture.

Don’t think about social media - think about customer experience. Look at Apple’s Genius bars - amazing experience. People say that employees should be out there in social. And he agrees. But Apple forbids their staff from doing so. But they can, because their customer experience is so good. Look at the lists of the best companies in customer surveys. The best 10 and the worst 10 have one thing in common - passion. Their customers are passionate about their products for good or bad… If you exude passion, that’s where success can be.

The power to drive change is within every person. But what do we do? Just what we’re told. People are very into metrics, but the only number that drives change is the bottom line. You’re losing money? You change. And stories drive change - use them. Everything you do sends a message.

INetersting story in response to a question, how the

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#scrm12 - the power of customer communities

March 29th, 2012

Host Luke Brynley-Jones moderating a panel of:

Vincent Boon - @vincentboon - head of community, GiffGaff

Bian Salins - @b1an - head of social innovation, BT Customer Service

Guy Stephens - @guy1067 - social media/SCRM consultant, CapGemini

GiffGaff got into community to reduce costs, and to help customers better engage with each other. And they’ve since moved to a much wider scale “way of living”. The customers need to have a say in the way the business is going. We look hard at what they want in terms of features and pricing. One community idea is implemented every three days, on average. BT go involved also for cost reduction, but also because so many of the discussions around the brand were in niche spaces. They went and engaged there - and then realised they weren’t giving people the same opportunity on their own site. There’s a psychology behind interactions that they need to understand.

Guy thinks its interesting that so much starts at cost reduction from telephone: channel substitution. Perhaps if you’re starting without a phone system, you’re not actually about cost reduction. If you’re going to be social, be social. If you’re going to be traditional, be traditional. But there will be friction between the two. Vincent thinks it works for them without phones, but they still get the occasional person who just wants a number so they can shout at someone. They are not for those people. And they’re clear about that.

Bian suggests that some people engage with the social channel because they’re desperate for help. They are still growing exponentially despite predictions that they wouldn’t. (Both GiffGaff and BT use Lithium. BT moved from Jive.) There are silos within agencies and supplies as well. You need to co-ordinate with the people who have an investment in your brand, and that includes suppliers. Lithium was on the same page as both GiffGaff and BT, and seem to be a pleasure to work with. Bian also recommends Get Satisfaction.

Guy’s feeling is that people’s inclination is to create a closed, managed space in their own image. And that works. But where we’re getting to in the understanding of communities is that they’re broadening out. People are thinking about how to blur those lines, and make other services part of their offerings. We’re moving from single sites to (genuine) multi-channels. And then how do Twitter, Facebook, the phone and our own community work together?

Bian disagrees. 10 years ago walled gardens were a big thing. Now it’s about a choice of ways to engage. They’ve integrated the experience. Forum people love forums. But only a tiny percentage of Facebook people want to use forums. It’s about choice, not control. Vincent thinks the walled garden argument one is old - it’s now about the platform you use. They have intense discussions with their community that they can’t do on Twitter or Facebook. He doesn’t think people really do customer service on Twitter or Facebook. They just find the problems there, and use other tools to deal with them. Forum tools are great, because they’re structured and searchable.

When Bian’s community manager goes on holiday, Bian suffers intensely. Part of the role is empowering customers and conversations without being too present. That’s been difficult for an omnipresent brand like BT. But they’ve engaged their passionate brand advocates to the point that they’ll do crisis management for them.

Bian and Vincent have different models of motivating their superusers (or community leaders, as BT calls them). Bian gives them access and responsibility - including meetings with senior staff. Vincent gives tangible rewards - he doesn’t like it being called payment, but that’s what it amounts to.

Challenges? Cliques. Every time BT refreshs the community leader programme, they get a new clique of leaders. That’s the biggest challenge.

Vincent agrees that trust is the hardest bit. Making sure they stay true to the values they promote is hard. You can’t be open about everything, but you can be open about what you can’t be open about. And the demand for speed of response is tricky. You need to give some sort of time scale, and what the road map is. And the biggest challenge is that people often know more about your products than you do.

Bian points out that communities only truly become communities when they start sharing information about their lives that isn’t solely about the discussion in hand. That’s what bonds them.

Q&A

How did GiffGaff deal with recent outages? Just be honest. When they said that a water pipe had burst over their servers, people accepted that.

How did BT motivate its internal community? Bian sought out like minded people across the company. They have a virtual team across the organisation that are trying to change the culture.

Metrics like customer satisfaction, likelihood of recommendation and repeat purchase are heavily measured by BT.

Guy suggests that ROI might not lie where you expect - look beyond the numbers and relate it back to your KPIs

Interestingly, Bian suggests that they’re finding themselves engaging with people who aren’t the head of the household and thus the “customer” - like children complaining about broadband outage when they’re trying to do their homework.

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#scrm12 - Ben Kay goes from social service to customer loyalty

March 29th, 2012

Ben Kay is the head of digital strategy for Everything Everywhere

Smartphones are accelerating social interaction. Voice is dead. Data is just data. What’s the differentiator? I’m a firm believer that service is that differentiator. Customer service is a fundamental tenant of what we have to ring to the market.

If customer need answers, they don’t always call in straight away. Smartphone users need more support than ever. Mintel figures suggest that people search for help with Google. Up to 13% are talking about customer issues on social media.

They started by listening. Did they know what customers were saying about them? No. So they went and looked. Orange customers were highly unhappy. Broadband speed was under debate. T-Mobile customers talked a lot about Android. Twitter tells them where in the country the network is failing quicker than any other mechanism. Once you’ve listened, you need to think about how you should engage. Should the conversation be public - probably, unless there are data confidentially issues. As a rule, keep in in the public channel. Don’t try to hide the bad stuff.

Money Saving Expert is a good example. Our role there is to join in the discussion just to make sure the factual information is correct. Not selling; facilitation.

Next: how do we nurture communities. Getting a like-mined group to support each other is a powerful tool. Have we cracked it yet? No. But we will.

So, how did they go about engaging? A small scale pilot. You have to choose the right people. You can’t just pick up a telephony agent and drop them on Twitter. Find people who are passionate, who can behave in human ways, who are social and who are thick-skinned. Build a support network around them, and give them the power they need. And let them have fun, and let their personalities come through.

However - you can’t apply traditional call centre metrics.

It was a Blue Peter sticky-back plastic operation. Free tools are great (but limited). Goodwill runs out eventually. And co-ordination is challenging - the holes in your organisation become really obvious to your customers. Resource management in possible in call centres. It’s just not in social media. So, they’re moving to operationalise social service.  It’s not about niche teams, it’s about enabling the whole business to do this. We need to give front line guys a “sheep dip” in social. This used to be called media training, but now it’s something different. Most people will take to this positively. But some people won’t. They have a simple social media policy to deal with problems.

If you’re not doing it: get stuck in. At first you will surface pent up frustrations from your customers, and won’t change everything overnight. You won’t reduce inbound call volumes in the short term. But it will give you new perspectives. You need to empower your agents, and you need to be transparent - or you’ll get caught out.

Some tips:

• They’re participants, not customers. It’s not just about preent customers its about past, present and future customers and employees
• Untapped opprtunities
• Power has shifted - customer have more information than ever, and own your brand
• Don’t fall into the broadcast trap - engage.
• Engage where the customers are - don’t wait for them to come to you
• There’s no place to hide

Social media will highlight your flaws - how quickly can you address them?

 

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#scrm12 - Who owns social?

March 29th, 2012

Neville Hobson sets the scene by showing the recent incident of a clash between Tesco and a mummy blogger.

Panel:

Katy Howell - @katyhowell - MD, Immediate Future

Nick Sharples - @SharplesN - corporate communications manager

Martin Hill-Wilson - @martinhw - director, Brainfood Consulting

Aaron Stewart - @kanasoftware - product marketing manager, KANA Software

Discussion.

Katy: Every function with a touchpoint to the consumer needs to be socially aware.

Neville blogged about this. I responded with the idea that it will become like the telephone. Owned by all.

Nick thinks “depends” is an important word. He’s seen three owners - one each in customer support, marketing and corporate comms. You need someone to lead it, not own it.

Martin thinks that the CEO should own it. That’s going to give you a strong picture of wether social is going to work in the business. The best owner is someone whose interest span the whole business - someone with “C” at the beginning of their title. They can change the culture, to the point where everyone owns the social.

Aaron - Those who have a stake should take ownership. Objectives should drive co-ownership. Who owns e-mail? For sale enablement? Sales? For Support? Customer support?

Neville thinks that there are different views (based on the debate) - with “depends” the point of commonality. Are we even using “own” in the same way. Martin thinks that there’s always a point of focus when anything new is introduced. Katy agrees as there’s a need for a catalyst, but she’s not so sure about the idea of a centre of excellence. Creating a separate department? Gives everyone the excuse to not engage. Nick thinks there’s a difference between a centre of excellent and a steering committee, sharing experiences and ideas. Marketing have moved from thinking social might be interesting, to wholesale enthusiasm and a desire for ownership. Aaron thinks that ownership is best defined as someone who has a stake in it. If you have a stake, you should take an initiative.

Martin - if you ask who can get value - everyone turns up to the table. How do we get this thing going throughout the organisation?

So, how do we get going? What’s the start point?

Nick believes that corporate communications should lead on this. That’s the department with responsibility with protecting the brand. You need to build a brand guardianship system across the business. Autoglass have a team of people monitoring Twitter and Facebook, and the CS reps can monitor, respond and chase. And occasionally they hit things that need to go to PR or corp comms. Martin - what’s interesting about great changes is that stories are inspiring because it’s one individual that decides not to fit in the box and change things. They take the simple view “how many ‘no’s do you have before you say ‘yes’ to me”. You need someone will to push the boat. Or a group of people who can work guerrilla tactics.  Twitter is a pretty useful proxy for determining if people “live it”. The other thing that is interesting is opening up the channels. A post on the Best Buy blog saw the CEO addressing the idea that their business model was in trouble - and was inundated by replies - including rom staff - telling him that he was wrong.

Lots of interesting feedback from the audience. General agreement about distributed ownership, but some contrary views on corporate comms as a leading voice - they tend to be too focused on brand protection rather than genuine engagement. At least one company has a serious social team of 20 - out of about 8000 - that seems successful.

Katy points out we’ve talked about risk and pain, but we haven’t talked about the companies that don’t have those people. Where there’s fear, you need to take small, chunky steps that show the C-suite rewards. Adoption can come organically, but it can also come because you build it into the process.

Nick - Corporate inertia is something everyone has to deal with. It took us two years before IT allowed our social media evangelists to see what they were posting on their work computers… It takes time.

Martin - Command and control is going out of fashion. We have a fluffy word - “empowerment” - for what’s next. What does it mean? Sun Microsystems social guidebook is: don’t be stupid online. That reflects an empowered company that knows how to behave.

Aaron - Listening is important.You need to listen before you can make an intelligent engagement. And who starts? Customer support. They now the customer experience.

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#scrm12 - Martin Hill-Wilson on making marketing and customer support work together

March 29th, 2012

Martin Hill-Wilson is a director of Brainfood Consulting

There’s lots of big ideas being thrown around - the social business, etc. Where do you start? When you walk in the front door, all your colleagues all look the same as ever…

At my favourite customer services watering holes, I walk in and say “there’s this new thing, social customer service”. The general feeling is that it’s only 0.05% and we shouldn’t bother.

Customer service? What does that mean? If you listen to a marketing audience, you hear a dreadful naive view. So how do you mash these two views together?

As a recruiter, would you know how to go looking for a customer service person, a marketeer, an MD? They all look different.

Are the two tribes of customer service and marketing on the same page? The audience clearly think they’re not.

We still organise ourselves in silos - that’s not going to change. But customers don’t obey that any more. They walk through them. Brands need to find a reason to get involved in conversations online - people were having them anyway. Over the lifecycle of a customer relationship, the customers move through all the silos. How do we better understand customer support, marketing and sales working together. Well, get them on one agenda. Do you know what the other silos’ goals are?

1. Develop a common view of your customers

In large organisations, we repeat and reinvent things. Marketing does a tonne of stuff about customer lifecycle. But the view is dumb in consumer service terms. Have the marketers even reached out to find out? “Voice of the Customer” programmes allow you to capture this, their experience of your customer. This is hard. It’s much easier to know nothing about them, and flog them stuff. So let’s not do it three or four times, just once.

2. Do joint business planning

The social business of the future - one would hope - would do business planning better. But right now, it’s all broken down and divvided up. Shouldn’t these three departments have some shared goals? And if they have shared gaols, how about shared dashboards? There are joke about customer services complaining about marketing pushing campaigns on Friday that lead to over-flowing inboxes on Monday. Those jokes are 30 years old. C’mon. If you want to change things, focus on the goals. People care about what they’re paid to care about. If you want an aligned organisational response to customers - create a common set of congruent motivators. Social is a pioneering discipline. It cocks a snoot at traditional ways of doing things - and that’s great. Revolutions begin with bonfires in the basement. That’s needed. You can do all this without permission. Just get together with some buddies from the other side.

3. Merge Customer Analytics

Marketing is good at analytics. Customer support, less so. Text and voice and video can all be monitored and analysed for sentiment. And that’s great if we can create common engagement from that.

So, you need new workflows. And it adds a whole new ares of community engagement and monitoring that then feeds into the traditional CRM., through into response and back into community. This is a model that has been for a while, but people are still exploring it - and finding the politics tough.

Being a social business is a big goal - break it down into steps, into milestones. And this is a good, practical milestone.

Customer communities - great opportunity. They lead to reduced cost of customer contact and greater reach when interventions are made. If you can reduce 10% (or even 20%) of call volumes? Wow. Great. Encourage user generated content, because it is an indication of how much people are likely to buy from you. It’s a new KPI, as there’s a relationship between that and funnel management. And you can use it to incubate ideas and knowledge. The ROI on knowledge management isn’t very high - but when customers source answers, it’s useful and used lots. It hasn’t been sanitised by the internal workflow. And this works indie the firewall as well - give people the tools to share solutions. You can use the generated content to drive a series of blog posts. Take that community, and evolve it into a broader communications strategy - one that can deliver 10 to 20% ROI.

Key themes? Customers, internal comms, one agenda, broken structures (”big is stupid”). The army thinks you can’t have an effective organisation beyond 300 people. User generated content.

So, actually, what we’re saying is that there’s a fourth element in the mix: customers.

The further you go up in organisations, the less they go out. They sit in meetings all day, playing with their iPads. That’s rubbish - how are they engaged with their customers like that? Headlines are great, the inspire the troops. But you can’t let them get mown down by the gunfire of politics.

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