Social media has forced companies into reactive mode. Brands suddenly want — or think they need — to know two things:
“Who’s saying something bad about me?” and
“How do I track the negative fall-out?”
But the real power of social media is that your customers voluntarily share a wealth of data that can drive improvements to your business strategy. Right now, your customers, without any prompting, openly share information that would have taken months of surveys — and lots of money — to collect. As social data continues to pile up, it’s time to start taking these online conversations seriously and use them to inform your customer intelligence.
The concept of monitoring social media might sound obvious, because most data-hungry marketers understand the value of their customers’ social data. But based on my research, even though most marketers may collect this data, far fewer actually use it to inform an enterprisewide view of their customers. As any analytical mind knows: collecting data is only the first step.
So here’s a new feature: We’re going to start aggregating each month’s posts, for easier reference.
We’ll start this off with a few groupings from the month of October — which, if you’ll permit a moment of horn-blowing, I have to say I’m really proud of. We covered a lot of ground in the month, literally and figuratively, with staffers filing on-the-scene dispatches from nearly a dozen events at various locations nationwide, and guest-blogposts from not only our regular contributors but several newcomers as well.
October also marks the introduction of these monthly archives (which, one hopes, will appear sooner after the end of each month), and compendiums of coverage from all the big events (which, one hopes, will appear sooner after the end of each event). In the Comments below, I hope you’ll let us know if we’re giving you the kind of material you want.
For starters, here’s a blog-only exclusive, one I hope you’ve been watching all along:
Eric Barkin’s “Eric Across America” series of blogposts, a firsthand look at JetBlue’s “All-You-Can-Jet” promotion from the perspective of a participant:
Eric Across America, Part I: The Story of One Man’s Journey into the Heart of JetBlue and JetBlue’s Entry into the Heart of That Man http://sn.im/dcrmblog100909b
Also keep an eye out for our compendium post of #OOW09 coverage from across the Web.
The rest of the month’s posts — including coverage from The Conference Board’s Social Media Summit, the DMA 2009 show, eMetrics ‘09, the RightNow Summit ‘09, and Forrester Research’s Forrester Consumer Forum — are after the jump.
As Forrester Research’sCustomer Experience Forum continues on its second — and last — day here at the Grand Hyatt New York right next door to Grand Central Terminal, the sentiment here seems to be one of not if customer experience is necessary, but rather when — and how. Fostering a quality customer experience no longer seems to be a nice-to-have, judging by the tone and subject matter of the keynotes and other presentations here. Bruce Temkin, a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, had a keynote address yesterday (my story on the speech is here) on the beginning steps companies should take.
In other news, Forrester announced the inaugural winners of their Voice of the Customer (VoC) Awards. Out of 40 applicants, only three companies took home the prize:
Speaking of “voice of the customer”, I sat in on a related track session yesterday: “Building a World-Class Voice of the Customer Program.” While the panel discussion was informative, I picked up on something rather interesting. Only one question in the entire 45-minute talk dealt with the literal audio of a customer conversation. Every other question asked by the attendees dealt with how to parse the information found in social media. This was not only evident to me, but also Natalie Petouhoff, a senior analyst at Forrester who sat with me at the session. Is this the direction VoC is taking? Are we glossing over speech analytics and going straight to social media? I’d love to get your thoughts on this.
Another question I have stemming from this conference: What exactly is customer experience? I haven’t found a catch-all, agreed-upon definition just yet. This is something I plan on exploring when I begin writing my December 2009 feature for CRM magazine on the topic, but I want to know what you believe it to be.
[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.]
Customers belong at the center of CRM magazine’s thought-provoking Social Media Maturity Model, since the model itself focuses on communicating, collaborating, and doing business with them.
Perhaps this is a natural assumption for many people viewing the model, although I think most would also agree it’s important to define your audience, prospects, partners, and customers — your people — and to stay focused on serving them.
Consider the buyer-persona concept that David Meerman Scott encourages in his writing and presentations. [Editors' Note: David Meerman Scott will be participating in this series later this month.] Businesses can benefit by putting a name and a face to all types of members within their addressable markets, keeping current profiles of each, and solving their problems.
Social Media Maturity Model, detail (upper right), CRM magazine, June 2009
Genuine conversations remain the best way to do this, despite all the fancy Web and social networking tools now available to us. (And we do so love the tools! As Esteban Kolsky notes in his comment on Mike Fauscette’s June 2nd post, they’re really a new set of enablers.)
To successfully relate to customers in our right-now, no-waiting economy, indirect communication needs to give way to direct communication, and, as the Social Media Maturity Model indicates in its upper-right quadrant, dictating needs to evolve into collaborating. (See image, left.)
Social media provides public relations an opportunity to assist this transition while impacting all corners of the social media maturity model. Perhaps the model needs to be expressed in a more circular ecosystem fashion — again, positioning customers in the middle.
Regardless, it will be an interesting journey to the era of social commerce. Here are some thoughts on how PR can help organizations and customers get there:
Moving the Needle – Organizations need to move from “Why social media?” to “How do we implement social media?” They need someone to demonstrate the benefits of monitoring and participating on the social Web. This is a perfect role for PR, although PR doesn’t have to have sole ownership of it.
Connecting the Dots – Customers don’t want a megaphone communications approach — they want information that’s tailored to their needs. Social networking gives us an authentic means of discovery. PR can encourage and facilitate customer conversations that help marketing, sales, and service further understand buyer motivations so products and services can address the needs of real people.
Keeping It Real – As organizations venture into social media conversations, they’ll need to consider bridging virtual with reality. Not every interaction should be online; in-person engagement with customers still matters. PR is in a unique position to help create these opportunities and “events.” As such, PR must also be comfortable providing accurate information not only to traditional media, analysts, bloggers, and market influencers, but also to customers directly. Doing so is the catalyst for authentic collaboration with customers to create products and services that are truly desired, and to shape the branding and messages that support them.
These aren’t flip-the-switch processes. They require learning and maturing, and are well worth the effort of connecting directly with the customers we’re trying to reach in the first place.
My thanks to Josh and the CRM magazine staff for inviting me to participate, to all the contributors of this blog series, and to everyone reading and commenting. Let’s see where this goes.
Ryan Zuk, APR, is senior media and analyst relations manager for Sage CRM Solutions, part of The Sage Group plc, supplier of business management software and services to more than 5.8 million small and midsize business customers worldwide. He also writes the monthly “Digital Dialogue” column for the Public Relations Society of America’s PR Tactics journal — a recent example of his work can be seen here — and blogs at criticalmasspr.com. He can be reached via email at ryanzuk@gmail.com and on Twitter as @ryanzuk.
[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 4, 2009 — The most recent IDC primary research shows that 64 percent of full-time working adults worldwide have participated in an online community on social networking services in the past year (for personal and/or professional use). Social media can now be considered mainstream, with more working adults in their 30s and 40s joining and participating.
Real-time status updates on Twitter and Facebook mean that people are frequently commenting about all aspects of their day – what they’re doing or how they’re feeling. Chances are good that one of your customers is commenting online about an experience with your brand.
For example, consider this tweet I discovered by searching “JetBlue” on Twitter this past March:
Marc Pitman complains on Twitter, “I’ve tried at least 6 times to book my flight to SLC on JetBlue. It’s not going through. And the phone support is a 25 MINUTE wait + $15.”
Once @JetBlue responds to Mr. Pitman on Twitter, the company grabs an opportunity to turn his complaint into a message of appreciation.
Customers just want to be heard.
Social media makes this possible and they know it. Does your company have a process to respond to comments like this one from Mr. Pitman, in order to have a voice in the online conversation(s) about your brand?
Notice that I said voice in the conversation, not control of the conversation. The power of your company to control the messages about its brand is diminishing with the rise of social media. Your customers will comment and complain about your services on social media no matter what. That’s what creates so much anxiety for businesses today. Yes, this is hard work. If your company uses social media to broadcast messages but doesn’t listen or respond to customer questions or complaints, the strategy will backfire and your company will look fake.
Notice how Mr. Pitman above compares @JetBlue to @comcastcares in one of his comments. Luckily, @JetBlue did get ‘on it,” thereby exceeding his expectations.
To be fair, I recognize JetBlue as being one of the first organizations to establish a Twitter account in order to respond to customer complaints like the one above. Here’s a recent interview with Morgan Johnston, who manages the @JetBlue Twitter account (courtesy of @CoTweet on Twitter):
outline operational changes (including a “Customer Bill of Rights”) the company would implement to prevent any reoccurrence of such an unfortunate event.
JetBlue Customer Bill of Rights
Here’s Neeleman’s February 2007 video:
So this is not a post to pick on JetBlue, but to illustrate that even highly regarded customer brands that are savvy in social media have somewhat-delayed responses to customers who are complaining about their services online.
Any delayed response is a product of the random feedback and siloed transactional data of social media today (see the lower right quadrant of CRM magazine’sSocial Media Maturity Model).
In addition, JetBlue has someone from the corporate communications team monitoring Twitter and then routing any customer complaints to the customer service team. This reflects the current state of manual and reactive processes of social CRM. It’s the reason why so many social media managers are currently overwhelmed.
The good news is that we expect response times to improve with future technologies that automate, filter, and centralize customer feedback from wherever it is posted on the Web. These feedback management tools will allow organizations to be more proactive. At the same time, the enterprise will have had more time and experience to establish structure, support and processes around social CRM once we leave this experimental phase to enter a more mature phase of social CRM in the next few years.
Caroline Dangson (@CarolineDangson on Twitter) is a research analyst at IDC who tracks the enterprise social media market. In this role, Ms. Dangson advises clients on how to leverage social media to effectively communicate and collaborate with target customers and business partners based on actionable research.
(All dates and participants are subject to change, of course.)
[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 1: 30 Posts, 30 People, 30 Days
Josh Weinberger, Managing Editor, CRM magazine, @kitson
I suppose you could argue that every endeavor is on some level experimental, at least at its start.
But this is truly a leap into the unknown, in just about every sense.
You may have seen our June issue by now — the Social Media Issue of CRM magazine, in which we immersed ourselves in the social media scene from cover to cover, devoting the entire month’s content to an investigation of social media and where it’s made itself felt within the CRM industry.
If you haven’t, feel free to go take a look — you can find the digital edition here. (The content itself will be available online later today.)
Go ahead. I’ll wait.
>The Interlude of Patient Humming<
Back already? Good. ‘Cause now I get to tell you about the plan for the next 30 days.
The experiment is this:
The June issue includes a chart (spread across pages 22-23). You can see it here. (Click on the “View Full Size” button at the top right of that page.) It’s brand new, it’s never been seen before, there’s nothing else like it in the world — and we’re going to spend the next 30 days tearing it to shreds.
Quickly: The only way CEOs can understand social technologies is by using them.
I’ve got bad news for you. You can’t understand Twitter, Facebook, or blogging by reading an article in a magazine or a report from your CMO. Sure, they can tell you what they are, but you won’t be able to truly understand how they could change your business unless you actually use them.
Social is like sex. It’s fun to talk about and read about, but you can’t truly comprehend unless you do it.
Here’s a story. Forrester’s COO, Charles Rutstein, and I made fun of Twitter when it came out. Twitter is the technology that enables you to send short messages (of approximately 25 words) to people who elect to monitor you on their PCs or cell phones. We instantly pronounced the whole concept to be brain dead. A few months later, Forrester bought JupiterResearch.
Charles said to me, shortly after we bought the company, “Hey, those analysts at Jupiter like being part of Forrester.” I said, “How do you know?” He said that he was watching their Twitter streams and the feedback was positive.
I signed up for Twitter the next day.
The CEO of Zappos.com, Tony Hsieh, uses social extensively and now has 300 customer service reps at the company on Twitter. Why? As Tony says, “People don’t relate to companies, they relate to people.” This is important insight. You, the 57-year-old CEO, may not use social, but that doesn’t mean that your customers don’t use social. You are not your customer.
Yes, much of the social technology is a titanic time-waster. And yes, much of the technology is crap. But there may be real value here for your company — something that you can’t grasp unless you engage with social.
I’ll have future posts on how the CEO can get on Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks to learn the most in the shortest amount of time. If you like books, Forrester has a good one out on the topic — Groundswell — and a related blog collecting Forrester’s latest thinking regarding social. It’s a little techie, but full of good stories about how real companies have used social to their advantage.
As founder and CEO of Forrester Research, George Colony is one of the most influential thought leaders in the world of business and technology. During his nearly 30-year career, George has become a trusted advisor to CEOs of leading global companies by providing forward-looking and pragmatic analysis on the impact of technology change on business. His regular blog is The Counterintuitive CEO, where this post originally appeared.
[Editors' Note: CRM magazine's June 2009 issue is dedicated to social media and its imapct on the CRM industry. Subscribers will receive the issue during the last week of May, and the material will be online beginning June 1.]
From my inquiries with customer service professionals, I wanted to get a generalized view of where companies are with respect to implementing the very best of customer service initiatives.
It’s become pretty clear that most are struggling with outdated technology, systems that are not integrated together, and archaic or nonexistent knowledge management software. They haven’t deployed proactive chat or ventured down the social media path.
Worse, these customer service professionals are unsure of how to document the extent to which these factors are increasing operational costs; reducing customer lifetime value; and lowering sales, revenue, and profit margins. And they don’t know how to make the business case to show that, if these types of things were changed, the return would not only be positive, but (in many cases) very large.
Meanwhile, despite these huge handicaps, their organizations continue to expect them to provide great customer experience.
Time for a Change! Seems like something has to give. Doing things the same way and expecting different results is the definition of insanity! The question in my mind was how to collect this information I was finding in the inquiries. “How can I help to bridge the gap between what companies must do to provide great customer experiences and where organizations are at?”
In covering customer service, I’ve divided the topic into the following three aspects:
Get the Basics Right;
Understand the Business of Customer Service; and
Plan for the Future of Customer Service.
I just published a document, “How To Win Funding For Your Customer Service Project.” Forrester suggests that you standardize the process and template for a business case. We use the discipline Total Economic Impact to calculate the return on investment (ROI) for an initiative. I’m hearing from a lot of my clients that in order to get a project approved, they need to justify it.
I recently had an inquiry call from a vendor that wanted to know how best to standardize the business-justification process. This vendor has found that it can’t even get a meeting — or, if it does, then one of the first sales objections from the prospective client is, “What is the ROI of this solution?”
Hopefully this will help you in creating your business case. Think of four buckets:
benefits,
costs,
risks, and
the other advantages that a particular solution offers for the future.
Forrester calls this “last-buck flexibility.” One of the most difficult parts of writing a business case is understanding the metrics you’ll use to describe the benefits and assigning value to them.
Questions for You:
Are you finding that you need to have a business case to justify the changes you want to make to customer service, or to other departments?
What are executives asking for?
What are you struggling with?
Please add a comment here to let me know how what issues you’re dealing with.
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