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.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Customer Relationship & Marketing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Process, enterprise 2.0, lean and agility

October 4, 2011 By 1 Comment

Summary: enterprise 2.0 has often been shown as the opposite of formal organizations and processes that have been the rule until then. What raised a keen interest from and fear for others who know that enterprises, organizations with a production purpose, can’t live without processes. In “Enterprise 2.0 and processes”, Yves Caseau shows that putting the one against the other in a Manichean way is wrong and to what extent each one improves and completes the other.

I usually don’t write about french books on this blog, for obvious reasons. By definition, most of the audience I have here can’t read french and even for those who do, prices are too expensive on amazon.com for imported books. But I decided to make an exception for this one because I think it brings a new way of considering things that is worth knowing about for anyone.

This book is Processus et Entreprise 2.0 (Processes and enterprise 2.0 in english), and is about innovation and collaboration through lean management. It’s by Yves Caseau, Senior VP at Bouygues Telecom (large Telco, part of the Bouygues Group). This book is interesting because it makes us look at enterprise 2.0 with a new point of view in this kind of literacy and gives it, in my opinion, a new relevance that lots of CxOs many have not seen until then. As a matter of fact, the common vision focused on social media/communities/passion/engagement often turns its back on value measurement and relies on the only fact one is a believer or not. What I often call “Enterprise Denial” made the message hard to get in “our” european cultural context relying on rational scepticism. Caseau’s approach is different : it starts with processes and shows that enterprise 2.0 is the only possible way to keep them efficient in the future.

Let’s start with some words as an aside. Even if this movement may look odd, I did not came to enterprise 2.0 by the web but by short cuts that were more about operations efficiency.Many parts of  the management side of enterprise 2.0 (or, rather, all the things one should wonder to avoid staying in a world of angelic illusion), have things in common with Theory Of Constraints (anyone should have read The Goal at least once in his life). It’s also impossible to deny that new forms of management we are promoting can be found in Deming’s 14 points, Deming who had also a clear understanding of what what wrong in our economy….30 years ago. The list is very long… It’s interesting, even surprising, to see how the manufacturing industry has solved agility, quality, improvement issues while the world of services and knowledge relying on intangible flows is still struggling. Maybe because the intangible nature of flows makes visual management impossible or makes it easy not to see things one don’t want to see ? Maybe. We’ll discuss this in a future post.

So let’s come back to Caseau’s book. Rather than starting with the assumption that 2.0 (or social) is the answer to anything and try to make the enterprise fit in, he starts with the opposite approach. He starts with problems and ends with a solution that appears to be enterprise 2.0. Like it or not but enterprises are organized on processes that are essential and vital and this won’t change. I’m to talking about the caricature of processes we’re being inflicted to make it too easy to hold them up to public ridicule. but what they should be. Caseau makes it clear that processes should be as light as possible to be manageable, as agile as possible to be improvable. Hence the importance of lean management. Things become really interesting when enterprise 2.0, rather than being seen as a danger for steadiness and processes appears than being a lever that serves agility and innovation. In this context, conversational systems support ongoing learning, innovation and ongoing improvement.

He ends with the necessary cultural of human sided of this necessary change.

Contrary to what some like to promote, processes should not disappear but become people centric to make sense, be understandable, drivable, manageable, improvable. As a matter of fact, processes are here to serve both people and the enterprise while the reality is more about people serving processes. Caseau gives us an “understandable” explanation of the world of processes, quality, Lean, Lean Six Sigma and hits the nail on the head on things like KPIs, information flows management, meetings (that are the more elementary form of exchange…)…

This book will appeal to people who don’t see a clear link between the new paradigm and what the enterprise and its operations are about or see it rather like a danger. A technical book that those who love incantations, acts of faith and fairy tales may enjoy less but that reminds us that 2.0 and social are here to serve the organization. I endlessly repeat that enterprise 2.0 increases the human and knowledge capital that can be tapped to better process execution….that’s what all the book is about.

If I had to summarize the book in one sentence I’d say “looking at the future, feet on the ground”.

Processus et entreprise 2.0 is available on Amazon. It’s so expensive oversees that buying it on amazon.fr and having it shipped could be a better option. I think it’s also available on iTunes for iPad owners.

 

 

 

 

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

Employees first ! Supporting those who really create value.

June 23, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Summary : “Reverse the pyramid”…other words may be used to scare less but it’s concern shared by many organization. It’s, in some ways, necessary to face the increasing complexity of the world that surrounds us but it’s also the obsessive fear of many organizations and managers used to the command and control model and not willing to go out of their zone of their comfort zone to improve what’s happening in the value zone. Value zone ?  As a matter of fact that’s because value is created at the field employee level that the command chain should turn into a service one. But, beyond exhortations that are easy way to drive change while being surprise it doesn’t work it’s a hard work that consists of reversing flow, redesigning some processes and transfering responsabilities that has to be done. That’s was was made at the Indian compant HCL and the story is told by Vineet Nayar, HCL CEO, in his book, Employees First, Customers Second: Turning Conventional Management Upside Down. Here are my takes.

One year ago, in July 2010, I read attentively and bookmarked this blog post by Gary Hamel where he was telling the incredible management experience that people just lived at HCL, an Idian IT service company. Spurred on by its CEO, Vineet Nayar, they seemed to be on the right way to meet a goal that look unreachable for many : reversing the pyramid to make the organization more successful.

Here’s what I highlighted at that time :

– Transparent Financial Data. Vineet realized it’s hard to feel empowered if your manager has a lot of data you don’t. With this in mind, HCLT’s IT team created a simple widget that gave every employee a detailed set of financial metrics for their own team and other teams across the company.

– U&I. Early on, Vineet and his leadership team set up an online forum and encouraged employees to ask tough questions and offer honest feedback. Nothing was censored on the “U&I” site; every post, however virulent, was displayed for the entire company to see.

– Service Level Agreements. Powerful corporate departments, like HR and finance, often seem more interested in enforcing blanket policies than in making life easier for employees. When Vineet would ask front line employees, “What have the enabling functions done to help you create value in the value zone?”

-Today, HCLT employees are able to rate the performance of any manager whose decisions impact their work lives, and to do so anonymously. These ratings are published online and can be viewed by anyone who has submitted a review.

- As the CEO, Vineet was being asked to weigh in on hundreds of unit-level plans each year. Recognizing the limits to his time and personal expertise, Vineet challenged his colleagues to develop an online, peer-based evaluation process. The solution: MyBlueprint. In 2009, three hundred managers posted their business plans, or “blueprints,” online. Each document was accompanied by an audio presentation. More than 8,000 employees were then invited to jump in and review the plans.

- Three years after launching this concept, 20% of HCLT’s revenue is coming from initiatives launched in these communities of interest.”

Today, Vineet Nayar tells us more in a book called Employees First, Customers Second: Turning Conventional Management Upside Down. Rather than summarizing a book that’s very easy to read, I’m going to highlight what seem to me being the key points of his approach and share a couple of comments. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Books I read, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Corporate e-reputation is the visible part of an impressive iceberg

October 28, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Summary : enterprises fear, and sometimes with good reasons,  the impact on their reputation of what their employees could write on the web. But this fear is sometimes so disproportinate that it leads to ludicrous situations. New balances have to be found in this domain, but that’s not all. The image of the organization, its business behaviors, ethics, also impact employee’s pride, motivation, engagement…and their propensity for harming their employer. Even worse : beyond the visible part that is made of one’s image and reputation, the same causes impact deeper mechanisms that drives quality, performance and the sustainability of business.

Lots of businesses are careful about the impact of their employees’ behaviors on their reputation. Should something negative appear somewhere on the web and an impressive self-defense system is activated. Employees have already been sharing their opinion about their employer with family and friends for ages and there’s nothing new here. The point is that, now, they can share with so many people that the situation has become critical from a corporate point of view.

In some cases we have to admit that employees are going to far beyond what the law and his employment contract allow. Of course we can discuss the right for privacy but there are things one can’t say publicly…even not at all. Not because the organization is over-sensitive but because law says so. That’s as simple as that and apply to the web as well as to any situation in real life.

But, not being comfortable with this new and unavoidable transparency, businesses are sometimes over sensitive and react to anything that’s said about them, regardless to the subject and context. This may make us wonder about to what extent employees belong their employer and what is the limit to having and sharing an opinion. The following video may look caricatured but it raises actual questions that are not that far from reality.

Would businesses want it or not, employees can impact their reputation but not as much as they may think. Once the moment of panic that comes with the emergence of a new phenomenon has ended, they’ll have to accept what’s unavoidable, learn to know what deserves a sanction and not, what is like using a bozooka to kill a fly and what deserves no reaction. After all the absence of criticism is suspicious and transparency can, to some extent, made the organization more human with its qualities and defaults.

A more human organization…that’s the point…

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Being done with the enterprise 2.0 value discussion

October 19, 2010 By 1 Comment

Summary : many still wonder what new tools will bring to their organization and still have trouble visualizing the benefits. The reason is simple ; they imagine these tools in their current organization while it’s difficult to see their contribution out of a new way of working. Organizations built rules to accomodate to the constraints of existing tools. If these constraints are removed by new tools, organizations have to built new rules that will replace the current ones.

I recently found this post on the value (or lack of) of a new technology. It applies to new technologies in a general way, applying it to social software is very instructive.

First, let’s try to answer a few simple questions.

1°) What’s the main power of this technology

It makes information sharing easier and more efficient as well as enterprise-wide discussions related to business issues, the whole taking place out of organization and application silos. It allows anybody to identify, mobilize, put together all the information, data, expertises and people on a scale that was impossible before because of the above mentioned silos. So it allows, in fine, to provide employees with what they need to be efficient in what is called the “knowledge economy”.

2°) What are the limitations this technology is removing

The difficulty sharing unstructured data, identify information and people out of a silo.

3°) What rules were built to accomodate these limitations ?

In the context of a given business process, organizations started with the assumption the information needed for delivery and decision making was not findable. So they built operation models that rely on preset rules aiming at minimizing exceptions even it it meant to deliver an acceptable result in any situation but never something adapted to a very specific need. Assuming this, knowing that people will never have to look out of the process, the time allocated to informal-out-of-process-and-silos-collaboration was considered as wasted time…what impacted the way people were measured.

List to be continued…

4°) What rules should be implemented now  ?

I won’t elaborate that much on this point because it’s specific to any situation and many contextual elements are needed to give an answer that applies to a specific business, industry, business process. But it may look like “service oriented organizations“, social routines,articulating structured and unstructured work activities, rethinking quality…

Taht’s only the starting point of a deeper investigation that has to be conducted within a given organization. Anyway, conclusions are the same than those I made about the ROI of enterprise 2.0.

- technology has no value by itslelf

- technology should allow to to things that couldn’t be done before

- rules were set to accomote the limits of previous technogies. The new technology has no value is old rules are not replaced with new ones adapted to the new potential that can now be harnessed.

In one sentence : rules have been set to accomodate constraints. If any technology removes constraints, rules have to be changed or the technology will be useless.

To end, when organization wonder “how to think” their social network or any social media project, they should wonder what rules have to be removed and what should replace them. Designing such projects without thinking a new way of working is removing all the value of the project from its beginning. It’s also the evidence that, to convince an IT dept,  a value co-construction process has to be implemented with business people because it’s simply not their role to care about how business is done.

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

Social is a substitute for quality and customers don’t care about you

September 20, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Summary : Lots of things are being said about the revival of the customer relationship made possible by social media and that’s a good thing, a more human way of doing things, less mechanized, aiming a building a richer and fruitful relationship for everybody. But businesses should be careful of too easy things and smoke and mirrors. We hear lots of things about “fans”, “passionate”, “engagement”, suggesting that if a business shows as much interest to its customers as they show to the brand, a positive impression is generated, the company improves its image and sells more. But thinking that it’s all about communication and good feelings is a dead end. Most of customers are not passionate nor fans but…simple customers. In the same way, internauts who try to pick brands up on the web are not always potential customers but only people in search of recognition and favors. In short, customers expect businesses to keep their promise and use the web as a channel to remind it to them. Keeping communication and service separated, thinking that there’s no link between communication and quality programs is a big mistake. The lower quality is the more the web is stragic to gather feebacks in order to improve quality.

Bringing good feelings and more intensity in a relationship is good but should not make overlook what matters : the product, its quality and its appropriateness to the demand.


It’s mpre and more said that customers have to be considered as partners, stakeholders, and have to be involved in co-building and co-decision programs what aim at maximizing what all parts take from the relation. Customers love brands and want a strong relationship with them…and brands should give them as much love in return because their purpose is to make customers happy. So everything seems to be perfect in a world where love and respect are getting the upper hand on basely material and financial concerns.

Ok. Now let’s top kidding. Even if the final result will be the same, we should not mistake ourselves about the mechanisms at stake.

1°) Customers are a business partners that have an impressive nuisance potential…

Collaboration between customers and suppliers is nothing new? What is new is that, now, it can apply to small individual customers, not only to B2B relationships. Why did the customer become that worthy of attention ? Because he can spend more money than before ? Not at all. Only because he’s now able to shout louder that before its love or hate…and even to gather with others to make even more noise .

Is business becoming more human ? No. It’s just about a more balanced relationship. And those who can harm always deserve more consideration.

2°) Some customers are true lovers…

Some brands have real fans, people they must capitalize on. Their paradox is that they seldom expect anything in return : they never complain and ask for few interactions. A simple “thank you” is enough and they feel as is they were vested with a mission. They talk a lot around them and spread the word.

3°) But the wide majority only expects you to keep your promises [Read more...]

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

Is Quality the 2.0 word for quantity ?

February 23, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Before starting anything in any context, knowing what one want to achieve is essential. Some say that the answer is obvisous : sell. The famous “Nothing happens until something is sold” by Thomas Waston is still unconsciously embebbed in many things we do and we have to admit that being the best at anything is useless if the company doesn’t sell anything. But there comes the second pitfall : selling is nothing if the organization is unable to deliver what’s been promised. We often hear that being “sales oriented” is the only way to success. That’s true provided the organization doesn’t put all its eneergy on sales operations and there are production and servirces team that keep the sales people promise.

In an industrial system, when strict norms and the use of machines  garantee a given level of quality (or make people think so), people have to focus on quantity. And, since optimizing the use of resources if a common concern, everything ends in productivity measurement, what is quite logical. Would organizations overlook this, they would the criticized for that.

In a system where production is more about intangibles, productivity is more complex. Everybody agrees that it matters, that the formula is still the same…but measuring its components is everyday more confusing and complex, what makes is a very touchy field.  The purpose is still to deliver what’s asked without waste. The resource factor being very hard to adjust for activities that are defined by their instantaneousness, the whole pressure is put on quantity and “always more” just to be sure nothing is wasted.

That’s when things get complicated.

[Read more...]

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

Is workload measurement the problem of the century ?

January 14, 2010 By 10 Comments

Optimizing workload has always been a key concern for businesses and managers. A too heavy workload regarding to the capacity leads to explosion, a too low workload means resources are wasted. I don’t even mention last minute assignments to face imponderables. In brief, bad adjustments have an heavy price.

In a manufacturing economy things are more or less easy to manage. The capacity of a machine or the impact of bottlenecks on an assembly line are known facts. As for people accomplishing standardized tasks in such a context, the time needed to execute a precise task at a given level of quality is known too. When imponderables come, it’s easy to identify if an added production capacity is available since the maximal and actual workload are known facts too for machines. As for people, a glance at their work-in-progress is sometimes enough to evaluate the sitation. In short, in a tangible production system, it’s easy to know the sitation at a given moment and what’s the safety margin (if any). More, the situation can even sometimes be assessed by having a look around.

The move toward an intangible economy makes things more complicated. First because things are less and less linear and setting an optimized production planning that matches reality is a very difficult task, if not impossible. Tasks become problems to solve, solutions to find and if average durations can be calculated afterwards, making it a priori as a forecast looks like accomplishing a miracle. More, talking about knowledge work, notions like quantity and quality are closer than ever. That’s for what’s foreseeable (or looks like) and it’s even worse for unforseeable things.

This is a problem that’s both about production performance and management. In this problematic, our modern tools, even if they are a part of the solution are also the cause of new issues that are far from being trivial. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Management & HR, Software & Tools, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Is Netflix the right example of enterprise 2.0 ?

September 8, 2009 By 2 Comments

Netflix recently issued a 128 slides document explaining their culture, their organizational model, their management and the way they work. It attracted a lot of attention and  advise you to read it before carrying on.

Culture
View more presentations from reed2001.

According to many people, Netflix issued the reference enterprise 2.0 manifesto, or rather the management 2.0 manifesto.  What may we think of it ?

[Read more...]

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

Social CRM needs more than a CRM approach

August 24, 2009 By 7 Comments

Ross Mayfield recently published a fundamental post about “social CRM“. The statement of fact is simple : 1% of customer’s conversations improve the organizational knowledge, 9% touch the organization without changing anything and 90% are not heard at all, businesses miss an impressive source of possible improvemens. I’m not meaning 100% of these conversations are valuable but harnessing only 1% of them is a real risk. At this point, the question is not to know how to take this conversations into account but, first of all, to be able to join them and participate. Even the stupidest conversation may be of some interest since not paying any attention to it can be seens as disdain. More, statisticians would tell that if businesses want to harness the conversations that can bring real opportunities, they also have to pay consider the less intereting ones : we’re talking about a domain where, if one aims at excellence, he has to accept a high variability, what is the opposite of the beliefs most our business processes rely on.

Those who’d look into this subject because they have a traditional CRM issue may suffer from vertigo : it’s about CRM…but also many more things at the same time. As Ross writes, it’s impossible to change the way a business considers and implements its customer relationship management without changing the way people actually operate inside the company. Knowing how hard it is to change things internally, the point of deciding what has to be changed first (internally or externally), one pushing the other, can be discussed. But the fact is both are needed and that they are the two sides of an only project.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
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