[EDITORS' NOTE: This is part of a series of posts that began here, dissecting a two-page chart that appeared in CRM magazine's June 2009 issue on social media. The digital edition of that issue can be found here, and a standalone image of the chart itself can be seen here. (Click on the “View Full Size” button at the top right of that page.) To view all posts in the series, please add this RSS feed to your RSS reader.]
JUNE 8, 2009 — I’m a huge fan of taking a few steps back and looking at the big picture, and this chart works well on a number of levels for me. More on this in a moment, but first some big-picture stuff on the topic of “the social customer.”
June is CRM’s so-called social media issue …but I have an issue with “social media” itself. What is it exactly?
For people inside the industry bubble whose antennae are tuned to find and consume information on this topic, the answer seems apparent. Wikipedia, that king of the crowdsourced encyclopedias, offers up this overview on the phrase:
At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content. It’s a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologues (one to many) into dialogues (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers. Social media has become extremely popular because it allows people to connect in the online world to form relationships for personal and business.
Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM).
The same source, meanwhile, says that “CRM” comprises the “processes a company uses to track and organize its contacts with its current and prospective customers.”
Social media is one of these catch-all phrases that seems to mutate — much as Web 2.0 did over time — and diffuse, and there’s a danger in that.
Now, I know a lot of people could jump in and concisely define where we are in June 2009; that’s not my point. Most people on the planet are informed from a consumer perspective about Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and texting, and have some hazy ideas about how these new channels are being used to reach them. Facebook today, in my opinion, is very similar to what AOL was in the ’90s: training wheels for Web 2.0.
The advertising and public relations industries love the idea of social media because it appears to be the way to nirvana: word-of-mouth marketing. Think back to the early days — the early promises — of email marketing. Have you checked the contents of your spam filter recently?
There are plenty of talented, principled, and well-meaning marketers out there using the new media channels creatively and beneficially, but the low barriers to entry of being a so-called “social media expert” mean there are an awful lot of folks out there who see online infomercials and social media conversational spam in your future. It’s not going to be pretty.
CRM is all about keeping the lines of communication open with customers. In the future, as trusted voices become harder to pick out from the crowd, CRM’s role for customers may come to resemble the role played by a bouncer in a rowdy bar — policing (or even removing) the loud guy who keeps hitting on the girls and won’t take no for an answer.
An example: My wife’s Volkswagen New Beetle blew a hose and lost its coolant in downtown San Francisco a while back. The AAA towed it to a shop that, after getting quotes, I subsequently had do the repair work. The repairs got done, we got a six-month guarantee — and then the same problem recurred last week.
This time, I went on Yelp.com to check the garage out, and found a bunch of whiny, negative comments.
I took the car back in with a prepared-to-be-negative attitude and all set to take my business elsewhere…
…but the staff at the garage surprised me (and, not incidentally, contradicted the whinging complainers on Yelp): They behaved very honorably and fixed the problem — which was an overheated plastic-part issue they missed last time — at no cost to me.
My point: The “conversation,” like the ones in a crowded bar, depends totally on the quality and active participation of a representative cross-section of engaged people.
Now, some thoughts on CRM’s Social Media Maturity chart with the above in mind.
There is a world of difference between consumer conversations — branding, below the line — and business-to-business. I’m not going to get into the world of internal collaboration — my specialization — but you can be sure that this is in a different universe.
I think Marketing and Public Relations should be moved to the left-hand side of the chart, with Sales and Service on the right — that seems to be the way engagement flows: Sales and Service should be tightly intertwined and not differentiated or siloed as technology enables this.
Social Media Maturity Model, detail of "blended" offerings made possible by social technologies, CRM magazine, June 2009
Marketing and Public Relations conversations should ramp up to Sales action coupled tightly to Service, there’s a natural progression there that continues the conversation after the sales transaction, supporting the customer and reinforcing the relationship. We have “blended marketing & support” on the chart — see detail, right — this, for me, is foundational to the future.
More subtly, I believe we will see much more structured fragmentation going forward, particularly for huge companies. Collaborative networks of interlinked business communities, whether outward-facing (Marketing and PR) or supporting existing customers (Service and Sales), will be smaller and more agile, while having greater connectivity between parts. This breaks down the “blind giant” syndrome that is currently killing multiheaded companies such as Sony.
Three years out, I think we will really start to really see the effects of linked data: contextual ribbons of information associated with every digital artifact, as a result of semantic technologies starting to harness the siloed and unconnected information we currently (and only haphazardly) find through search engines. In addition, we’ll see interoperability with other xRM components, such as human capital management systems for internal employees.
With my crystal ball, I also predict unified communications blurring, with telephony, digital video/telepresence, microblogging, and texting forming a relatively seamless communication spectrum. We may also see the demise of the QWERTY keyboard I’m typing this on, to be replaced by a less-percussive way of communicating.
Where is Everybody? by Thomas Baekdal Image: http://baekdal.com/media/content/2009/marketflow1.jpg
I’ll not hazard any guesses on five years out: So much change is under way in the business world, on so many levels, that today’s circumstances may well be wholly unrecognizable in 2014.
Five years is tough enough, but when “Where is Everybody?” — an interesting post by Thomas Baekdal — has a go at the grand sweep of history, the effort gets dangerously fuzzy as Baekdal predicts the future. (The image at left is from that post.)
[EDITORS' NOTE: This is part of a series of posts that began here, dissecting a two-page chart that appeared in CRM magazine's June 2009 issue on social media. The digital edition of that issue can be found here, and a standalone image of the chart itself can be seen here. (Click on the “View Full Size” button at the top right of that page.) To view all posts in the series, please add this RSS feed to your RSS reader.]
JUNE 7, 2009 — Like all who have bravely gone before me in this experiment, I feel I must thank Josh Weinberger, CRM magazine, and destinationCRM — not just for giving me the opportunity to blather on and on (and on), but also for being foolhardy enough to tackle a project as ambitious as a Social Media Maturity Model.
Virtual hats off to you guys. Let no one say you lack chutzpah!
The ambitious nature of the model itself makes dissecting it a daunting prospect. As Christopher Carfi alluded to in his June 3rd post, any one of the throughlines in this model could form the basis of 30 days of meaningful discussion.
(Oh, and Chris — Thanks for setting the bar so high for the rest of us poor schlubs. A video? With onscreen highlighting? Come on — have pity on us poor, technologically deprived analysts!)
Since I only get one day for my soapbox, I’m going to try to tackle a reasonably small segment of the model: some of the ways that customer service might change that are not explicitly detailed in the model.
I have two main areas to expand on:
social media–focused service as a driver of improved product development; and
community-assisted service or user-collaborative service.
Service-driven product development: As an analyst covering the contact center and CRM space for many years, I’ve always pointed out that companies large and small are missing a tremendous opportunity for continuous improvement in product development by not using all the data they gather in their customer service operations. In the same way that Google is arguably a more-effective tool for predicting flu outbreaks than traditional epidemiology, contact centers can be an excellent predictor for identifying aspects of a product that demand improvement.
Social Media Maturity Model, detail of product design, CRM magazine, June 2009
Note that I am not talking about user-driven design of products—others have put forth that idea [see detail from the Social Media Maturity Model, left, which makes a reference to the product design aspect in the top-left "Sales" quadrant], and while I have many issues with that concept, it’s simply a different beast than what I’m talking about here.
I’m referring to the untapped motherlode: If companies mined the data that they were sitting on in all those megabytes of recorded customer calls, they would have a much clearer idea of what problems were costing them precious dollars in customer service. They could focus future development efforts on fixing those issues and reduce the volume of costly customer support contacts.
I understand the structural limitations that get in the way of companies doing this type of proactive product development today. Contact centers ‘own’ their data. But even if the contact center identifies a product problem (or a pricing problem, for that matter, or even a Web-site-design problem), there’s little the contact center can do about it. Not only does the contact center not “own” those areas of the business — but without some involvement, vision, and direction from higher up the corporate ladder, the center doesn’t even have much influence in those areas.
Social media, however, can change this equation.
By making silos and their attendant structural hurdles visible to customers, social media can provide a great impetus for companies to tackle those flaws. Think about a Facebook-like customer-support site: If 500 customers have similar problems with a product and post to the support site, the last 400 to arrive will see that their issue is inherent to that product. The visibility of the problem intensifies the urgency for a solution. If that sounds like product development and product improvement driven by a desire to avoid corporate embarrassment — well, it is. Embarrassment can be a powerful motivator; just ask the collections industry.
Social Media Maturity Model, detail of Service quadrant, CRM magazine, June 2009
User-collaborative service: Frankly, I was really quite surprised to not see something in the Social Media Maturity Model’s service category on community or peer-to-peer service. [See detail of the chart, right, for a closeup view of that quadrant.] While my first point in this blogpost — service-driven product development — may belong in the farther reaches of the model’s time scale, user-collaborative service is already happening.
In a formalized, online social network sense, there are sites such as Get Satisfaction, a site that calls its function “people-powered customer service.” The site itself acts as a neutral space — i.e., not a company-sponsored or -controlled site — in which regular customers can exchange ideas, and get help with or tips about product- or service-related issues.
The Get Satisfaction site allows companies to participate on essentially an equal footing with customers, and knowledgeable customers are as likely (and often more likely) to be the ones providing support to other customers. Some very large companies, including Adobe, use the site to help their customers and to help arm their expert customers to help each other. And hundreds of other companies should probably be paying attention to this social media–driven support concept since their products are being serviced via this medium. [Editor's Note: Get Satisfaction was one of CRM magazine's 2009 Rising Stars. See our coverage here.]
But a specialty support site is not a requirement for this more-collaborative approach to customer service. It is happening on Twitter, as well. Caltrain is the commuter train that runs from San Francisco to San Jose, right through the heart of Silicon Valley. Thousands of people use the train to commute to and from their jobs every day. Service delays, trip cancellations — even the status of the scarce space on the train cars that accommodate bicycles — all command great interest from Caltrain’s riders.
Caltrain’s Web site provides a published schedule, but it’s a fairly static page and has no facility to provide real-time travel alerts or advisories. Even if Caltrain’s site did provide real-time notices, there was no mechanism to have those notices sent to riders.
The @caltrain Twitter feed came to the rescue. The @caltrain account on Twitter identifies itself as “community-supported Caltrain notices, one tweet at a time.” Interested Caltrain riders receive an email key that allows them to email tweets that then get posted to the @caltrain account. As I type this blogpost, there are some train delays and the tweets are flying, giving the 1,500 or so followers of the feed real-time updates on what is going on with their commute. Users helping other users, creating some social form of community support.
That is the user-collaboration element. But this is not simply a case of the lunatics taking over the asylum. Caltrain officials themselves use the @caltrain feed to provide information — they preface their tweets with an upper-case “O” to identify themselves. There’s a very good reason for the company to get involved in this effort: The social media–driven communications are often faster than the mechanisms of corporate communications will allow.
An example: In early June, a train hit and killed someone in California. This caused massive and widespread delays throughout the system. The Twitter feed not only kept passengers informed of the delays, but of the actual cause. And it did so much more effectively than Caltrain’s own communication system.
Tweet from @Caltrain Twitter account, June 4, 2009
@caltrain: Power of twitter: passengers on my train knew details of delays before our conductors did
Admittedly, user-to-user support for public transit is not quite in the same league of complexity as user-to-user support in the realms of home networking or automotive repair. But the underlying concept can work across all sorts of verticals, especially if the companies get involved on the users’ terms as Caltrain did by joining in the user-generated efforts of the @caltrain feed.
In fact, that’s really the key of what I see missing from the model: Users will collaborate with each other to help solve issues and companies will need to get involved on the community’s terms, not their own. It’s a major shift in mindset, and one that may cause some wrenching growing pains, but it’s coming.
Bonus Topic (or, “Continuing the Torture”): I know I promised just two issues, but I have another idea — minor, and not as well-formed — that I’d also like to throw out to the four winds.
The model actually has a slot for preventative service, but it seems to be the result of direct engagement with and continual feedback from customers. That does seem to be one of the logical conclusions from the trends that are pushing service out of the realm of formal customer service organizations (i.e., contact centers) and into a more social domain. But the model also seems to imply that these changes are taking place exclusively because of the flourishing social media — and that may be overstating the case.
These changes are not happening in a vacuum. Being a bit o’ geekiness myself, I would argue that pervasive computing and ubiquitous computing can and will also have a role in the transition to preventative service. When some manufactured object can tell the company it needs servicing/upgrading/fixing, the company can push that service proactively, either through computer-to-device communications or through proactive contact between the company and the customer. This happens now in some enterprise technology departments, at least in the machine-to-machine realm (although those systems aim for self-healing), so why should consumer-focused goods be any different?
Obviously, pervasive computing will also not drive preventative service on its own. There’s some undefined field of overlap between socially mediated customer service and support and technologically automated service and support. Just something to watch for on the edge of the five-year time frame spelled out by the model.
Finally, while my mother never literally told me, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything,” that cultural message sank into my brain somewhere along the line. So I want to be clear that I am not just about pointing out ideas missing from the model. I also want to heap some praise on the model: CRM magazine has done a stellar job of putting a stake in the ground and allowing this conversation to unfold.
Dr. Usama Fayyad the CEO of BI consultancy Open Insights has an impressive resume. Until recently Fayyad served as chief data officer for Yahoo! Prior to that, Fayyad co-founded and led the DMX Group, a data mining and data strategy consulting and technology company. He also lead the data mining research group at Microsoft. At today’s Predictive Analytics World conference, Fayyad took the stage and shared details about his experience with data mining and marketing, specifically at Yahoo!.
“I thought being someone who worked at Microsoft and the Internet in the early days and started an analytics firm and ran a data mining company, I should understand the Internet,” Fayyad told the crowd. “I realized [at Yahoo!] there was so much I didn’t know” What we needed at Yahoo! was data strategy, said Fayyad — strategy about how to make data a driving asset and how you can dictate new business from it.
“When I joined Yahoo!, all I understood was marketing from the top to make people aware that you have a product and trying to reinforce your brand. Then, at the bottom, is marketing before a purchase.” He relayed that essentially Yahoo!’s business comes down to targeted advertising for brand awareness and direct marketing to capture customers at the cusp of buying.
Knowing this, Fayyad began to ask, what’s in between the two? Where are the marketers when customers are in the “consideration” phase? “The zone in between is more interesting and more profitable,” he said and went on to talk about search engine marketing and the art behind companies “bidding” on search results. Read the rest of this entry »
On Friday, Monster.com, the job search site, issued an important memo to its site users. According to Patrick Manzo, Monster’s senior vice president and global chief privacy officer, the Web site encountered a security breach that put its customer database in jeopardy. The data was illegally accessed and account and contact information consisting of user IDs and passwords, email addresses, names, phone numbers, and basic demographic data were taken.
What does this mean for consumers with Monster.com profiles? Monster is encouraging its users to change passwords the next time they log in. Here’s where it gets tricky — Monster has a policy of never emailing its members and asking to confirm log-in or password information. So, users must proactively seek to change this information in order to avoid any misuse of their data. Luckily, to date, no misuse or suspicious behavior involving the data has been reported.
I discussed the topic of security quite extensively with Gartner analyst Scott Nelson a few months back. Nelson predicted as social media continues to skyrocket, consumers will become more worried and cautious about security measures and the privileged information they share on the Web.
Nelson put it all into perspective:
“I think the key is one of trust. The more I can build trust as an enterprise relating to you as a customer, the more you, in turn, can turn around and trust me. If I show trust to you in the handling of your data, if I show trust you in what I reveal to you and what you might be interested in, and if I show trust in the feedback you give me … the more trust a customer can turn around and show back. I think one of the keys to the CRM cycle is going to be building trust over time. I think firms have really missed in that if you really build up that trust level, it’s highly unlikely a customer is going to leave you and go somewhere where they are going to have start all over again. On the flip side, you’ve got to be really serious because all it takes is one breach in that trust for them to say, ‘Okay, you’ve burned me, I’m not going to trust you again.’ [It's about] putting policies in place to really safeguard that, putting strategies in place to utilize that trust, and make it transparent to them.”
As the April CRM Service Awards issue approaches, we have been working on distinguishing leaders in various categories of customer service. A new category this year in which I am evaluating is that of Enterprise Feedback Management. In speaking with analysts and researching the space, I am learning that feedback is more than just a customer survey following a service call or online purchase. Customer feedback should be how the customer feels about doing business with the enterprise. When collected, feedback should funnel into workflow processes so that something can actually be done about the feedback. Consumers are busy — and they are smart. They can tell whether a survey is a waste of time or not. If they are continually asked by a retailer to participate in surveys, but they never notice anything changing within that company, they won’t see the point in participating. Consumers need incentives.
I am a sucker for surveys. For some odd reason I enjoy filling them out. I feel that if the company is going to the lengths to ask me how I feel, I can grant it the courtesy of sharing my opinions. I recently signed up for eRewards.com, which is basically a portal where marketers can submit their company surveys to willing participants. When I fill out surveys, I earn rewards by partner companies such as frequent flier miles and discounts to online stores like FTD.com. It’s a win-win. I feel like I am aiding with market research and I am getting rewarded for doing so.
If only consumers and enterprises could get on the same page about customer feedback. Michael on The Office, for example, seems to be missing the point of customer surveys. He does, however, know that they are important. Enjoy the clip and Happy Friday!
“These devices will represent 70 percent of all phones sold in the us by 2012. That is a huge change in thinking.”
Bajarin goes on, saying that generation Y will not even consider using a regular cell phone anymore. A phone without a text keyboard? Forget about it.
Mobile CRM makes sense. CRM is not an industry that ties its employees to desks. Sales and marketing people are often traveling and doing business whenever and wherever. Recently, I had the privilege to have dinner with a several CRM vendors, one of whom sells mobile CRM solutions for BlackBerry. At one point during the evening, the man next to him turned and said, “I need you.” He shared that all through the day at the destinationCRM exhibit hall, he was meeting people, making contacts, and taking business cards. He was frantically writing down information on the back of the business cards so that when he goes back and enters the contacts into his CRM system, he will hopefully be able to put a face to the name. However, as he told the mobile CRM guy, if he would have been able to pull up the CRM database on his BlackBerry, it could have been done in seconds.
I recently purchased a smartphone, mostly because I wanted to be able to check email on the road. I won’t share which kind of phone it is, but I will tell you that it’s not an iPhone or a BlackBerry. I have found myself, even after having the phone for about six months now, discovering new features and using it in new ways. Perhaps my favorite application is the quick access to Google Maps. [It means I don't have to bring my old fold-out map with me when trekking through new areas of the city. Basically, it allows me to still look "cool" in New York, even when I am incredibly lost and confused.]
Talks of mobile CRM has seemed to have taken conferences — and headlines — by storm. In the words of my dear colleague, Jessica Tsai, “Dude, I’m so relevant.”
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