Crm | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

Engaging is not delivering

November 7, 2011 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Summary : tomorrow’s enterprises will be conversational and will need engagement from employees and customers. But engagement useless if not turned into concrete actions, if customers are note made actionable as parts of new social processes. Building engagement and conversations logics out of processes allowing to make the most of what is nothing more than an intention will lead to nothing except flashes in the pan.

Engagement has become a very trendy word. Either employees or customers should be engaged. But why ? Without engagement, what makes people feeling more concerned by enterprise or brand-focused collective challenges and dynamics, beyond their own assignments and objectives, it’s hard to find the fuel sustaining value co-creation systems that are the founding of tomorrow’s organizations.

So, everything is done to engage and the social tools universe plays its part in the movement. In fact, the social world is pretty much ahead because he’s one of the reason why engagement came back on the front scene these last years. On the employees’ side, I’ve already shared what I thought about it : no one should think that the use of any social platform by employees will replace a voluntaristic HR policy. It can be a part of it but nothing more.

So, let’s talk about the customer. Today’s tools make some things much more easier than they were in the pas. It’s easy to track signals and conversations about the enterprise, become proactive, join and response. That’s true that there’s no conversation without engagement, but customers can be engaged even if the enterprise chose not to invest this field : exemplarity in behaviors and product quality make it possible…social only being a substitute.

A second myth is also around. The one according to which, once the message has ben tracked, the sentiment analyzed and the conversation engaged…the job is done. I can’t count how many offers rely on this assumption : listen to your communities, engage…and it’s done. That’s a fallacy for at least two reasons. The first is that it’s not about communities but individual cases (even if gathered in community spaces…the nature of the container does not change the nature of the content) but since I’ve already dealt with this issue in previous posts there’s no time to waste on that. The second reason relates to the belief everything can be solved this way.

First, engaging the customer in a conversation does not mean engaging the customer with the brand. Facing a lamentable level of quality, conversation can make things less painful but some situations can’t be saved. And there’s no reason to blame the community manager : “if your product sucks, social media can’t change anything about it. Second, even when engaged, what is rather about a state of mind, internauts are useless for the enterprise. I used the word internaut in purpose because :

- “community member ” seldom is the reality

- customer ? nothing tells the people involved in the conversations are customers. Most of times they are not.

- prospect ? any internaut is a potential prospect but they can help the enterprise without becoming customers (crowdsourcing, social marketing).

The internaut has to be activated within a process of any kind (marketing, r&d, services, sales…) to make engagement drive value. Having conversation without solving a problem is useless. Having conversations without trying to guess for what purposes the internaut can be actioned is useless. Having conversations that don’t help to “score” the internaut and don’t come with social processes related to innovation, customer service, marketing et… is useless because it does not turn the social potential into tangible business value.

Some may retort that value is not all, that image and reputation matter, that it’s all about soft things. Ok. But give me only one reason to improve one’s image or reputation if not leverage it for more “concrete” purposes.

In the logic of moving from CRM to Social CRM, there’s a point that’s often overlooked : the concept of customer management that disappeared behind conversations while the latter come to complete it, not to replace it. Moreover, to do things well, it would be better to forget the concept of customer and talk about Social Stakeholder Management because in such “value chain 2.0″ approaches it’s possible to contribute to value creation without being a customer. In fact, it sounds reasonable to say that at least 50% that may jump in the wagon are not customers. What does not prevent them from being stakeholders.

So it’s essential to go back to basics and put conversations and engagement in the wider perspective of new value creation models, of value chain. If not the risk of endless chatting without value is real.

PS : I advise you to read this post by Marc Fidelman on social CRM with similar conclusions.

Filed Under: Customer Relationship & Marketing, Management & HR Tagged With: business process, Communities, conversations, crm, customer, Customer Relationship & Marketing, customer service, engagement, social stakeholders management, stakeholders, value, value creation

In Social Business, Businesses are the Care Bears

May 10, 2011 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Summary : Either externally with customers or internally with employees, one the pillars of any “social” or “2.0″ project is people’s need for more closeness, even intimacy with the enterprise and between themselves. This is the reason why organizations started focusing on engagement, social networks and communities. But is this lever so relevant ? It seems that even if communities have a role to play, organizations and customers don’t agree on the role each of them should have inside and even of the legitimacy of a brand joining customer communities. Ditto for employees who seem to have more desire for efficient work tools than for approaches aiming at bringing them closer one to another. In the end, people seem to be more pragmatic and realistic than businesses. A call for these latter to move toward more operational and pragmatic approaches ?

Among postulates that underlie many social or 2.0 approaches, one is so ubiquitous that seems to be taken for granted by everybody. According to this postulate people, either outside the organization (when they ar customers) or inside (when they are employees) have an irrepressible desire to strengthen their ties with business, to tell them things, to feel valued, to “be a part of something” that will bring them together. Businesses, that are “by definition”, aloof, malicious and inhuman, have to listen to this cry from the heart, facilitate and join communities where attention, passion and even love between participants will make amazing things happen.

We could have believed that businesses with their cold and rational logic would have stepped away and stand their ground…but they did not. They dove into the social world, often in a ungainly way, dreaming of internal and external communities, of being as one with passionate and engaged people in a win-win relationship. With uncertain results.

Some weeks ago, an IBM study dropped a bombshell. It shows that, even if businesses need to be closer to their customers, they don’t understand what customers are expecting.

Social CRM is not about media but a new approach to customer relationship

February 21, 2011 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 12 Comments

Summary : everyone has an idea, even a rough one, of where social CRM is taking us but no one exactly knows what will be the levers. A common mistake is to keep on managing customers the old way, as a passive target whose only function is to buy in a system where value is created to his detriment. The whole by using new channels. This way of doing things does not improve anything and even harms those who practice it. So we need go step back to basics and manage the customer relationship instead of managing the customer. It forces us to rethink, point by point, the components of this relationship : its subject, the exchanges, stakeholder identities, its follow-up and its exploitation. Social CRM is not a matter of media but a new approach to a customer that has become a stakeholder and an active player of a value co-creation processus.

I had the opportunity to talk with Paul Greenberg, during the last Lotusphere. We shared our opinions about what social CRM was, wasn’t and the state of the art.

Our first acknowledgement was that, even if nearly everybody agree on the big picture, everyone has his own definition and vision. Is it a problem ? Not at all since it’s obvious that, as for enterprise 2.0, so many cultural, organizational and even industry-related factors play a role what makes that’s there’s not a single SCRM model but an SCRM concept that has to be adapted to each organization.

Our second point of agreement was about the “social channel”. Moving from CRM to SCRM does not only mean using new channels to replicate old behaviors. For instance using Twitter of Facebook to push the same special offers as with the old emailings. At best it’s social marketing, at worse it’s spam and, even more, it gets on people’s nerves because they are bombed with useless information while they get no answer when they try to use the same channel to talk to the enterprise. (Yes…it’s a two-ways channel, contrary to email that always mention “do not reply”…strange way to envision customer relationship isn’t it ?).

Consequence of these two points : social crm is rather an approach to customer relationship than a matter a channel. I’d even go further : people can do social CRM “face to face”, by phone, on any channel. What matters is to consider the customer as a stakeholder and draw all the consequences.

So, I suggested Paul what would be, in my opinion, a minimalist social CRM program :

• Segmentation of the audience and delivery of a message, of information and contents, and even specific services for each segment. Contrary to received ideas, enterprises don’t talk a one community but to many communities they don’t own. For instance, an airline will have its own fans, the Airbus A380 fans, those who love travels, their “high contribution” customers, those who are stranded in a far country. Each category expects something different : some want to dream, some “insider information”, some special ofers, some service. Some will never be customer but contribute to establishing the brand online, some are good customers that have to be engaged and retained, some need to be convinced to be acquired.

• Organization a customer case management system that makes that, whatever is the channel that’s used, the message goes inside the organization, is handled by the right person (what would look like the junction of advanced case management and social networking) then goes back to the customer without any break in the flow. (Keeping in mind that it’s not the perfect answer to everything).

It’s a little bit light and minimalist but that may be a good start. In fact, like we agreed with Paul, so few organizations have reached this point that it’s better than nothing for a start.

But, since it appears that it’s about a new vision of the relationship between organizations and their customers, here’s how I’d see things point by point. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Customer Relationship & Marketing, Management & HR Tagged With: call center, client, Communication, Communities, crm, crowdsourcing, customer relationship, Customer Relationship & Marketing, customer service, customer support, employer brand, facebook, open innovation, sales, social commerce, social marketing, social media, stakeholders, twitter

Is Facebook the future of call-centers ? The Air France KLM Switzerland case

November 8, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 2 Comments

Summary : Facebook is usually considered as a communication and marketing tool. But it’s becoming more and more obvious that it’s becoming a customer relationship tool what has an important impact on the design of the community management system and the role of the community manager that’s becoming the central point of a service and internal networking system. Facebook is becoming a call center and the community manager a problem solver and a connector like the Air France – KLM Switzerland case shows.

I recently found this long and interesting video in which Alain Pezzoni from Air France KLM Switzerland talks about their social media strategy. The video is in french but here are some points I’d like to highlight from this case.

1°) Favor local initiatives

This is Air France KLM Switzerland, not Air France KLM global and this fact is important. In large international organizations, linguistic and cultoral factors make that, both at the customer and organization level, having a global strategy is very complex. Depending on the countries, what can be done and the way to do it may be radically different and building a strategy may be hard and take a lot of time. Since it’s a new field where businesses are starting from scratch, having local initiatives from which the whole organization will learn what can be reused elsewhere and what will stay local may be a good option.

Talking about Air France KLM Switzerland, it’s about 2 brands and three languages what makes 6 communities to address…and as many fan pages. So a local anchorage is essential.

2°) Communication is service

Even if, at the beginning, pages have to be filled with content to feed the fans and get their attention, the flow slowly reverses and the organization starts answering to customers’ requests. As I’ve previously mentioned, the scalabity of the model allows, as Alain Pezzoni says, to deal with call-centers overload. The social channel, even if owned by the communication department, is shared by many processus (customer service, quality…) this department does not own but facilitate. What implies to prepare things beforehand. The community manager is only the front of the system and has to work with many people from many departments across the organization and mobilize them. So he or she has to have the required legitimacy. Moreover, that’s not a job for an intern or a junior, rather a senior who knows the organization quite well. According to Pezzoni, this person must know whom to ask questions and have a strong internal network.

That’s a frequent observation. Many organizations that are good at external communitu management face, one day, the difficulty of identifying the right internal expertises. The limiting factor of external networking is often, once a critical mass and complexity is reached, the lack of internal networking.

3°) The value of transparency

Being good at customer relationship management is key for any business. But when it’s delivered through social media, the work is done “in public” what makes things visible. Being exemplary on twitter or facebook is like having a free communication campaign while serving customers.

4°) Community managers are not here to attract fans

As noticed by one of the participants, the role of the community manager is not to attract more fans or followers but improve the quality of customer relationship. I remember a good friend of mine who was asked to attract a given number of followers (number scientifically explainable regarding to the organization’s capacity in terms of delivery). He refused the job and, in my opinion, was right. In my opinion, the best way to measure a community manager is through the indicators of the processes he facilitates (quality, service, innovation), the measured image of the company but not by counting followers or fans. The numbebr of fans is the consequence of a good service, not its cause.

In fact, it’s interesting to see that the discussion that was about e-acquisition quickly moved to customer e-services.

Need to take users by the hand ? Remember they only have two !

July 13, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

It does not matter things are seen from the people or technology point of view, since we all know that people seldom embrace new things keeping their eyes shut and without questionning (even more in the workplace) we all understand that users have to be taken by the hand and accompanied. On the other hand, the failure of many strategies aiming at doing so show that many change programs do not know where to find the hand or have a wrong idea about its location.

It means that beyond the myth of multitasking, employees focus on two things and that all their attention goes there. It’s not a matter of lack of goodwill but they can’t do more if they want to do things well and keep their concentration. So any other issue is seen as peripheral, and dealing with it will force employees either to make it superficially or to stop doing something important, come back to it later and make up the delay later. Nothing pleasant at all.

Every day, people have one hand in their email client and the other in their structured activities (call it process, workflow…) and the tools that help them to manage and deal with these activities. The first is their principal means of communication, the only that even if it’s not properly used, keep them in touch with everyone. The second is the reason why they have been hired, what they are evaluated on, what they have to do (and do it well) before thinking of doing anything else.

That can help us to draw some conclusions in terms of change management. Since, in order to grab a hand we have to know where it is, it’s impossible to do anything without taking into account the email and its place in employees workaday life or the relationship between the new things and the structured activities. Any other angle won’t impact employees and will fail. Then, we’ll have to explain how to put their hands elsewhere won’t prevent them from doing what they used to do before, what is essential to their job.

Any other approach would be like telling a driver “take you hands off the wheel” without telling him that, on top of being enabled to do much more things, he’ll be provided by something that will at least help him to drive better than with a steering wheel.

It also has consequences on technology for both companies that try to implement social software and vendors who provide solutions to these companies. There is an incredible number on players on this market despite it has reached a consolidation phase and each of them is pushing a different approach, focusing on a specific kind of social activity to seduce buyers. The truth is there are only two valid approaches and not one more. The rest is only marketing blah-blah and even if the verbiage may sound seducing, it never survives to the confrontation with real business.

No solution can be sustainably adopted on a large scale in any organization if it doesn’t meet at least one of the following requirements (both is better) :

- high integration in email clients. It can come in different ways, from the most simple one (alerts / notifications) to the most accomplished (widget in the client, shared data and services)

- integration with tools that are used for structured activities (CRM, ERP, BPM…even ECM). Interactions and conversations often come from the need to solve a business problem…guess where these problems emerge and are identified ?

Many lines can be taken in front of employees, many tools can be proposed. The truth is much simple : who does not tackle one of these points of entry is saying things that make no sense for employees, adds problems without bringing any solution.

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: adoption, bpm, business process, change, change-management, crm, Enterprise 2.0, enterprise-social-software, erp, social computing, Social Networking

What CRM is and what it should be

January 25, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 3 Comments

The good thing with acronyms is that they are easy to remember. Their weakness is that it’s easy to forget their meaning. Let’s consider CRM for instance, it means “Customer relationship management”. I repeat customer relationship management.

If we have a closer look, we are forced to admit that CRM has been lead astray to become, in the best case, a sales enablement tool and in the worse case a reporting tool to provide informations to sales managers without any benefits for the salespeople who have reluctance to update the data and often both this tedious task.

Don’t blame the tools. It’s the notion of customer relationship that’s been lead astray. Tools only followed the trend.

Hey ! I’m your ERP and I’m talking to you !

January 19, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

I’d like to share some thoughts about what our work environment may look like in a close future if what I think being two main trends manage to reach maturity.

The first is “ambient awareness”. a word I find more relevant than microblogging which is only its embodying in terms of toosls. That’s the ability to continuously capture weak signals from one’s environment in order not to behave like an isolated player but as a player into an ecosystem, allowing to make the actions of both one and the other more coherent.

The other is “activity-specific social application” or social software 2.0.That’s a new kind of enterprise social application that do not put the social activities out of peoples workaday work (over the flow) but enrich the process tools they are built around (and are often a component) (in the flow).

Il s’agit d’un nouveau genre d’applications “sociales” d’entreprise qui ne positionnent plus la dite dimension sociale hors du travail quotidien du collaborateur mais viennent enrichir les outils de process autour desquels ils sont construits (et dont ils sont souvent une composante).

Before all I’ll start with an assumption : people always try (and will always) to automate everything that can be automated. That’s the human nature and, most of all, the organizations nature. The rise of people-centric theories is rather the acknowledgement that not everything can be automated today that a real will to focus more on people and give them more recognition.

The power of enterprise 2.0 tools is that they give people the ability to make every kind of information accessible, either in a proactive way or by answering to a question, a stimulation. This allows to run problem solving and ongoing improvement processes that integrate the workaday flow and improve the reactivity and quality of everyone’s work while building a hudge mass of searchable, usable and improvable information. The contribution of microblogging is to bring a real time dimension that is the perfect complement to traditional asynchronous web 2.0 tools.

One of the best use of these new tools and practices is “bottle in the sea”. The famous “who knows ? Who has any information about ?”. Notice that there are also implicit bottles, those we don’t throw consciously and that are in every status update, despite of us. For instance when we say “going to meet such prospect”, we don’t expect anything back. But someone can answer “I know them well / I already worked on similar cases / etc…”. In brief, a status update can also be seen as an implicit question, adressing the sphere of the “unknown unknown” that sounded quite funny in Rumsfeld’s mouth but that is not so far from our concerns.

The efficiency of the practice relies on another assumption : someone will read, answer, or push my message to someone who’ll be able to answer. This implies that the information exists, and that its owner and / or a “connector” is available in a synchronous fashion when I send my own message. Possible on the web because of its wide scope, more difficult in an organization simply because there are fewer potential answerers.

Information can be of twi kinds. It can be either formal and tacit, so it can only be shared and told by its owner (except if the owner already formalized it on any social space), or structured, codified and classified in one of the many information systems that crowd the organization. In this case, if search is too tedious, or if I ignore the very existence of the tools that may help me, I need one of my peers to direct me to this information which existence and location he knows.

Maybe you see what I’m coming to : if information is in my colleague’s head, they have to be available, but if it’s elsewhere how not to loose the opportunity to find it if the “connector” is not avaiblable, can’t read my message ?

You want your employees to be more “social” ? Rely on their selfishness

November 3, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Among all the projects that have a “2.0 label”, it’s possible to make a distinction between those that are mainly about social networkings and those that aim at bringing traditional office applications on the cloud. Each kind addresses specific needs and has its own barriers. In one case it’s about changing the way people work, in the other it’s about making them use their browser instead of their usual desktop application, what makes me say it’s more about Office 2.0 than enterprise 2.0. In both cases, getting over IT depts’ reluctance is everything but trivial, Office 2.0 seems to be less sensible on an adoption side since it does not impact people’s behaviors that much : they will still write docuemtns, fill spreadshits, but in another interface (but I’m not saying that’s easy !) I’ll also add that applications like Google Docs makes it possible to make giant steps in collaboration (or rather co-building…). All the people I’ve that who once worked on both kind of projects told me the same thing : “Office 2.0 is simpler (or less hard) than enterprise 2.0. But collaboration matters in Office 2.0 too, even if less developped than in Enterprise 2.0″. Understanding what that means may be of some importance.

Who would accept to make everything he writes on his word processor public ? No one. In the other hand, starting a work on one’s own and invite people to collaborate as and when needed because some help is needed, because it’s better to ask a specialist to write a specific part, because proof-reading is needed or because the manager needs to know how things are going on without getting a daily report makes a lot of sense. One starts on his own and widens the scope of the human, social and knowledge capital that is used he can’t do more, when he realizes he won’t be able to deliver on time or when he faces his limits. I think that enterprise 2.0 has a lot to learn from that, most of all on the adoption side. What drives collaboration is “me, the goals I’m assigned, my tasks, my issued”, and if we want to bring people to the logic that will make them help their colleagues, they first need to understand how this logic will serve them. Then for the same reasons they bring themselves to “invite” people on their Google Docs, they’ll initiate the famous conversations that are so important in the 2.0 culture.

That’s the evidence that, for 99% workers, things are not social by nature but by need. Everything starts with a (personal) taks, with (personal) limits that are faced and with the need of making all these things “social” in order to get out of the situation. Such a logic can lead to a systematic sharing not because people want to share but because they realize they have to. Conversely, any systematic sharing that would not be the result of this reasonning would be against people’s nature and causes apprehension.

What conclusions can we draw ?

Beyond social CRM : social stakeholders management

August 31, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Last week I wrote what social CRM meant to me. It’s the inevitable step toward the implementation of a customer relationship management of a new nature. Clients are not only marketing objectfs or elements of a sales pipe anymore but people with whom businesses built things on a long term perspective, beyond the sacred purchase order. Moreover, a relationship that should strenghten even if no purchase order is signed : a prospect who does no buy is not someone who make you lose your time but someone you’ve got a lot to learn from.

It’s obvious that social CRM goes far beyond the implementation of new processes and action plans. It’s, according a me, a principle every action from the company or its employees has to be in conformity with. “Is Deciding / doing such things compliant with this corporate principle ?”. It’s easy to understand that paying more attention to customers and leaving employees in a “shut up and work” logic is a nonsense, and is even dangerous. So, internal practices has to be aligned with the new way of managing customers. If not, backfire may happen quicker than expected.

In such an approach, why should partners, suppliers, sub-contractors be excluded ? They also have their part to play in this virtuous circle.

Add that the challenges that are addressed are not only economic or product-related. Marktes now have tremendous ethical expectations toward businesses that seldom had an exemplary nature. Social business is not, as some may think, a word for social media uses within businesses, but a real societal fact.

Social CRM is a small part of a wider trend. It’s the extension of the stakeholders scope, their involvement in a new governance model that has to be factually implementend in day to days operations.

This looks like “social stakeholder management”. A global approach that has to be implemented both internally and externally, and not only micro-projects tinkered here and there, without any consistency regarding to overall operations. I can’t remember who said “progress is worth only if shared by everyone”. Maybe the better way to achieve it is to built with all the stakeholders, not only with words but through day to day operations.