Is measuring online influence bad for customer service ?

January 30, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Summary : now that lots of tools exist to measure online influence (or whatever we think it is), businesses are perfectly tooled to target their messages and communication programs. Provided they get the notion of influence right. On the other hand there’s another trend that may be dangerous in the future : using a tool that’s adapted to one shot operations to systematically define the level of service and advantages a customer deserves. This may lead to decreasing the standard level of service and break the relationship with true loyal customers that will notice that his loyalty and financial contribution are less valued than the number of followers others may have.

Now that anyone can exist on the web, the worldwide network as become a wonderful platforms to measure one’s influence. And this concept has been brilliantly sold to internauts and businesses. The first need to become influent to exist, the second need to know who’s influent in their ecosystem. And guess what ? Agencies and vendors all have “the” solutions that will measure influence in an objective and undisputable way. Influent internauts will benefit from a kind of “recognition label” and businesses will be able to focus their efforts on those who deserve it (understand : serve influencers better).

Such an approach my distract businesses from what matters and lead them to failure.

Let’s start with influence. Influence on the web has been a very trendy topic for years but no objective definition of what an influencers is has really emerged. It’s not easy to do anything when no one know what it’s about. The upside is that anyone can use his own definition, what surely makes his solution unique. Is influence a matter auf audience size ? Everybody says no…but no one can neglect such an easy way to reach many people. But being listened is one thing, influencing is another. No credibility matters in the definition. But how to measure it ? Most of all, influence has to do with context : one can’t be credible on everything. A couple of example :

• Mary has tens of thousands followers on twitter. Influencer ? Yes for some, not for others that will say she’s “negatively followed”, because of our mistakes, hand people follow her to see ser fail.

• Robert has 200 followers? Influencer ? Surely not. But he’s a specialist of frog breeding in polluted urban environments. He’s very influent in his niche. But only when he talks about frogs.

• Kevin has thousands of followers and is very influent on digital marketing. All industry professionals recognize he’s in the top 10 list. But when he talks about restaurants, knowing his taste (or lack of) no one listens to him. Bad news for the famous 3 stars restaurant that offered him a free lunch, expecting a mention from Kevin.

So, we can use any criteria and even admit that one may be positively influent while negatively popular (people follow him to make fun…but they follow), one thing is sure, influence is vague and subjective.

But since there are a lot of services offering to measure influence on the web, businesses logically wonder what they could do with it.

What did we see these last months ? Events where anyone could go…provided their “Klout” was high enough (Klout is one of this tools supposed to assess how influent people are). Businesses also use such tools to prioritize customer service and even do “a little bit more” for some. Hotels are using similar tools to decide whether upgrading customers or not.

After all, there’s nothing bad here ? What can be reproached to a business favoring, among its customers, those who are the most listened to ? Those with the louder voice ? Nothing if we only consider it’s a communication operation. But, seen from the customer service side, they’re moving on a slippery ground.

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Do you need a brand strategy on the social web ?

January 9, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Summary : the presence of brands on the internet is a major concern for businesses entering the social web. But there’s a big difference between thinking and definining oneself as a brand and an ogranization. A brand is the expression of an identity while the organization is rather an action driven approach to customer service. Both should come together but, unfortunately, the social channel is often owned by the people in charge of one of these two approaches at the cost of the other. As recent surveus show, customers, even if they appreciate appearances, often prefer to value the execution of the promise. It’s time for organization approaches to replace brand strategues on the web.

Every time a new platform or service is launched on the web, the first question that comes is “how to make brands exist there.”. From a personal standpoint, as an internaut, I find it exasperating. I don’t want to rub shoulders with a brand or to become “friend” with it, most of all when it corrupts the system. You may retort me that I sometimes interact with brands and appreciate it. In fact I appreciate these interactions as long as it helps me to satisfy one of my needs. According to what I see, the more a business acts like an organization and less as a brand the more it succeeds at satisfying my needs. And, according to reports I mentioned in a previous post, it seems that I’m not the only one who thinks this way.
What is the difference between a brand and an organization ? And what are the deep consequences of the differences between a brand oriented approach and an organization oriented one ?

A brand is a matter of identity. “This is who /what I am, what I embody, my image”. Having a brand strategy is unavoidable when we see how much time we’re spending online and to what extent our online experiences impact our lives and decisions. Brands have to be known, have to let people discover and know them better, deliver a message that’s better understood when carried by conversations instead of declaration. So, having an online brand strategy is vital. But not enough. The post I mentioned above clearly shows that internauts, contrary to received ideas, don’t value neither social conversations with brands nor being part of a brand community. They want concrete and operational outputs.

For instance, let’s consider a clothing business. It can hire a kind of muse that will embody and carry the brand, make people buy its products. But if the product has a poor quality or when it need some cleaning, I not sure that asking the muse will be of any help. Not because the muse won’t want to help, but only because it’s not her job.

Another example. Everybody knows that I appreciate KLM a lot. Of course, they have a very good brand strategy but this is not the reason why I began to watch them and pay attention to what they were doing. It all started because of their effective organization strategy that once turned what could have a nightmare into a nice travel experience. Without excellence in customer service, brand strategy has little value and may even be counterproductive.

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Signals instead of conversations ?

November 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Summary :  enterprises will have to enter the world of conversations. Everything will become conversations between enterprises, employees and customers. Such a concept, when not introduced the right way, is scary for lots of businesses because it overlooks the need to make conversations actionable. Most of all, employees are very uncomfortable with the conversation attitude at work. A matter of attitude but also a matter of sense, organization, time, tools…and a human matter full stop. The business world is more in need of signals contributing to ambient awareness than of conversations. Conversations can follow the signals but are not indispensable. In the current state of maturity, employees are more comfortable with factual signal logics that may lead to conversations than with conversations as a direct model. As a matter of fact, even if  ”markets are conversation” , it’s time to realize that organizations are not market (for the moment ?). And customers seem to prefer results and factual interactions than social conversations.

Tomorrow, everything will be conversations. The web will all be made of conversations between businesses and customers and intranets will be nothing more conversations between employees. Business need to join the world of conversations and facilitate conversations between and with anyone. Of course, in the small world of initiated people, everybody understands what hides behind this simplistic shortcut (although…). But, when held in front of “real” large businesses and decision makers, this discourses often sounds irrelevant.

Of course, we can argue the these businesses rely on old frames of reference and did not get the new world that’s emerging. This is true, even partly, but does not explain everything and should not be the easy pretext that prevents from having a critical look at the content of some concepts and the way they’re introduced.

Let’s take a few minutes to put ourselves in any executive’s shoes. Imagine a business world where everyone would spend his time having conversations. The first thing that comes to you mind is : lower productivity, people loosing time chatting. Of course…such a thinking shows the person do not understand the “new world”…but, in some ways, it’s not totally wrong. Engagement and conversations share the same problem : they’re worth if actionable. In other words :

- they are part of concrete frameworks (marketing, innovation, customer service, problem solving….) and not a plan saying “converse, converse…and maybe, sometimes, we’ll manager to leverage it for business purposes”/

- they relate to an empowerment approach : conversations expose involved employees to an external stimulus that should, in most of cases, be followed by an action. If the employee is not able to take any action following the conversation, the conversation is useless and may even be deceptive for those who participated. Even if the only benefit of the conversation is related to knowledge acquisition, employees need to be able to use this knowledge in their work in the future and not be locked into logics focused on strict use of previously validated and official knowledge.

But this is not all. Conversations means a series of exchanges overtime, the willing to exchange with or without predefined purpose. So businesses started to focus on one goal : stimulating conversation. They need to make people talk the one with the other. This job usually falls to the community manager. Now let’s see this with a little distance to realize how absurd it is : if we want people to have conversations and they don’t do, do you think, even a second, that, with all the tools they already have, an internal social network (for employees) or external communities (for customers), animated by a community manager who’s mission is to make people talk will change anything ? If conversations have neither sense nor interest, the best tools and community managers won’t change anything. The problem is elsewhere.

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Filed Under: Customer Relationship & Marketing, Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Engaging is not delivering

November 7, 2011 By 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: , , , , , , , , , , ,

How to keep the humane side of moments of truth in online customer relationship

October 3, 2011 By 1 Comment

Summary : even if social media are a good means to make the humane side of the company more visible in the customer relationship, online relationships still struggle at making the most of moments of truth that are key in the service economy. As a matter of fact the human factor plays a big role in such moments and has a big impact on the value felt by the customer. To make up for this lack, it’s important to “put employees on stage”, even occasionally, or to mix online and offline experiences in order to create the feeling that will impact what customers will feel and how they’ll subjectively value the service. But there are two requirements for this to work : an actual service that can be valued and the right culture to behave this way.

When a company uses social media as a channel to manage customer relationships, it could be for different reasons. Because they need to be where the customer, when he’s there. Because it increases responsiveness. Because they make it easy to track weak signals that are about the company but are not directly send to her. Because they make the relationship more humane and more engaging. Let’s focus on the last point.

Nothing is more impersonal than a company that tries to communicate. And things aren’t even better when a company tries to interact with her customers. At best you get  a cold message delivered through an anonymous voice. At worse you get a ticket number from the customer service department. In fact things can get even worse when the rules of traditional communications are applied to customer service, what often happens when the communication department starts to try to take care of customers for the only reason they own the social media channel. Using a channel they own to deliver things they don’t master often leads to catastrophes (remember….it’s all about multiplexing). Sometimes, some manage to cross the chasm and, behind the interaction, you don’t feel the cold corporate mechanism but someone who takes care of you. That’s what I call an online guardian angel. This kind of qualitative interaction that make customers feel that, behind the customer relationship/service job there are fully engaged and committed people is more likely to happen on social media than anywhere else. It’s impossible to have the same impact with a contact form. Some may say a phone call should be better at that…but most of time you’ll be answered by someone working at a call center who has nothing to do with the company in question, only following a script to try to answer you. Most of all, you’ll have to fight with the vocal server for a long time to manage to talk with a real human being.

Despite of that, even with the help of social media, online relationships are a true challenge for organizations. When you’re in front on someone, in real life, you can se her attitude, motivation, attentiveness to do something for you. During these moments of truth you can feel more than the corporate customer service policy : you can feel the personal committment of the whole staff. Or not. So, even if some companies ask their employees to sign with their initials the message they publish on the enterprise twitter account, there’s still something missing. Something to compete with these moments of truth when they happen in real life.

Hence the idea to “show” the employees from time to time. Of course it’s only a communication performance around customer relationship that can only be one-shot but they aim at showing this commitment on customer satisfaction. As a matter of fact there’s one thing to be kept in mind : in the world of service, the perceived value matters more than the objectively delivered value. Impressions are essential.

In some ways we can say that Lipdubs, that were very popular a couple of years ago, were a clumsy try in this direction. But they did not deliver any message, any value proposition. But, with time, we began to see more clever and relevant ways to create the “moment of truth” effect on an online interaction.

 

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On the place of social media in corporate strategies

April 21, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Summary : More and more strategic plans are now involving social media. Should we welcome this or worry ? Knowing that tools are there to serve strategies it may be a bad news to see them promoted to the same level as what they have to serve. The risk of seeing the “social phenomenon” becoming something fashionable enterprises must mention without any real articulation with the strategic plan is very likely. Saying that tools are as important that the goals they serve shows that, in many cases, organizations still don’t understand the social thing and it may have negative consequences in the future.

As usual, when economy takes a turn, in a way or another, organizations change their strategic plans and explain what are their priorities for the next years. So a plan is replacing another that’s not been completed but that’s the way our world is : things change so fast that organizations need to change their direction as fast and often.

Now that’s the economy is slowly recovering, organizations have to change their pose, project and discourse to send signals to the market and re-mobilize their employees. These last months, I had a look at some of these strategic plans that’s been recently published. Most of them share three main points, usually worded like this :

1°) Put customers at the heart of the corporate strategy and concerns

2°) Improve employee’s well-being and development.

3°) Become a leader in social media.

More than being common places, points 1 and 2 are quite clumsy. They will cause comments like “Ah ? Because you didn’t use to care about our customers and employees before ?”. As for the third point, worded as such, it looks rather like a mandatory and opportunistic statement, because organizations can’t afford not paying attention to the last fashionable thing? What does “become a leader in social media” means ? Increase one’s presence ? Create one’s own services for customers and employees ? And what for ?

That’s typically what I call a social media strategy : any organization has to be there, and use these tools without knowing what for. What makes me say that they don’t understand why ? If it was the case, the articulation of the points 1 and 2 with point 3 would be more elaborated. To some extent, the point 3 would have nothing to do there because it’s only a means to serve a strategy and not a goal per se.

Then I guess we’ll soon be witnessing the coming of window-dressing projects, without any connection with reality and which impact will be hard to demonstrate. Have a “social media strategy is mandatory” so let’s have one to look modern. What would you think of a restaurant that would want to become a leader in mustard or pepper ? [Read more...]

Filed Under: Customer Relationship & Marketing, Management & HR, strategy, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Picture of the week #16 : It takes years to win a customer…

November 1, 2010 By Leave a Comment

It takes years to win a customer and only seconds to lose one

Illustration from the book “The Golden Rules for Success“.

Thanks to Thierry d’Auzers for this excellent book, the rights of use and Dimitri Tolstoï for the pictures.

Offer yourself The Golden rules for Success.

Browse the previously published pictures of the week.

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Picture of the week #9 : The Real boss in any business is the customer

September 13, 2010 By Leave a Comment

The real Boss in any business is the customer. All he cares about is your attitude.

Illustration from the book “The Golden Rules for Success“.

Thanks to Thierry d’Auzers for this excellent book, the rights of use and Dimitri Tolstoï for the pictures.

Offer yourself The Golden rules for Success.

Browse the previously published pictures of the week.

Get the iPhone or Ipad App.

Filed Under: Picture of the week Tagged With: ,

Engage with customers. And then ?

August 23, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Summary : It’s obvious that the use of social media within companies and between companies and customers are not compartmentalized but complementary disciplines. If the “internal” company is more and more trying to get in touch with customers, the world of marketing struggles to make his way toward internal departments. As communication is becoming service, initiatives that target customers can’t be separated from those that aim at reversing communication flows inside the organization, redefining roles  and realigning the whole organization with the needs of employees who are directrly in touch with customers. To demonstrate its value, social and community makerting will have to replace “push” with “pull” not only in its interactions withn customoers but also in the way the whole organization works.

Even if the external/marketing/communication part has never been my prefered one, it has become obvious that it’s impossible to dissociate the evolution of work from what’s happening outside the corporate walls. First, because no company creates value on its own et a high level of internal performance is useless when a business is not as efficient with its external partners and clients that it is internally (theory of the limiting factor or bottlneck…as you prefer), second because the internal shift from push to pull logically leads to consider customers.

The time when 2.0 was either about marketing or collaboration but not both at the same time is over. Yet, the concept of enterprise 2.0 evolved overtime and everybdoy finds logical to include all external stakeholders into it, what is confirmed by the rise of social crm. But even if enterprise 2.0 is heading down toward customers, marketing struggles to head up toward internal activities.

I recently found this interesting deck about the failure of social media initiatives. It tells us that

- there’s a lack of strategy (81%) and most marketers don’t undestand the value of interactions…and how all these things work.

- consequently, businesses invest more on technology than on people and relationships.

Why Social Media Project<s Fail?! – A European Perspective
View more presentations from BSI.

I’d like to go a little bit further and sum it up in one sentence : when marketing and communication people use social media to communicate better and differently, there are two possibilities:

- either they (or their company) don’t get it and that doesn’t work.

- Or they understand how to make a good use of social media and…they deceive their customers.

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What CRM is and what it should be

January 25, 2010 By 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.

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Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,