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: , , , , , , ,

Turning lurkers or unhappy customers into fans. Stroke of genius or swindle ?

March 14, 2011 By 1 Comment

Summary : what’s a fan on facebook ? Someone who likes a product or a brand of course. Are we wure ? When, to be able to use this channel to get information or the solution to a problem with the product people have to become fan, the system is biased. So the only question is to know what one think of a system that turns lurkers or unhappy customers into fans despite of them. Clever trick or false advertising ?

What company is not trying to recruit as many fans as possible for its Facebook page ? No one is quite sure of the valuation of a fan (while the acquisition cost is well known) but fans are needed. Some will buy more, some will share the essage…fans can have several role what makes it difficult to know what their contribution to the business is. That said, they have an intrinsic value for any business ; if between two competitors there is a big difference on the number of fans it must mean something.

I’ve already discussed the relativity of the concept of community membership. That’s the same with fans. And I’m close to think that it’s even worse.

What can make me go on the page of a brand toward which I’m neutral ? Get informations, maybe in order to buy the product later, know them better before thinking of sending them my CV…

In some extreme cases, I may want (rather…need) to meet the brand on its page because I’m not happy with their product, service, and would like explanations or a fix. Why not, after all, since they say “we do customer service on Facebook”.

But it’s often impossible to read of write anything without being fan. Not a serious issue after all…only a button to click. But the mechanism looks like swindle :” you want to complain, you need information, so tell the world you’re a fan first and then only we’ll talk”. Like if, before going to the customer service desk in any store, customers had to run in the street shouting “I love [the name of the store]“.

Ok, sometimes it’s only an impression. If some brands keep their contents only for their fans, in many case people only need to know were to click to get rid of the welcome page and access the content without become fans. But Mrs Anybody is not aware of that and thinks that only way to access the page and get rid of the welcome page is to click on “like”.

We can also un-fan after having done what we needed…but who’ll think about doing so ?. And  how many neutral and unhappy people did have to demonstrate their “fan-ness” to access the most basic level of information ? Sometimes I feel I’m deceiving my network when I become a fan only to have a look…

Swindle ? If you think that when I become fan while I’m only looking for information or I’m unhappy with the brand may make my network think I recommend the brand in question…there’s a real point here.

Ok…I’m quibbling. It’s all about wording and ethic. And who cares about that today ?

 

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

February 21, 2011 By 23 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...]

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Social media and customer service : don’t make exceptions become mainstream

January 24, 2011 By 3 Comments

Summary : when an enterprise invests in social media to improve its customer service it may think that a good indicator of success would be the amount of interactions that will happen on this channel. That’s a mistake : the social channel aiming at dealing with exceptions, making it process generic requests overloads it without bringing any added value. It’s important not to try to attract all customer requests on this channel but, on the contrary, to distribute the requests in order the social channel will only process the few percent for which it’s irreplaceable compared to a more conventional way of doing things.

In some of my previous posts I talked about the use of social media for customer relationship, most of all to mention that it’s more a management, process and one-to-one relationships between the enterprise and the customer than a community clap-trap. Since I recently dealt with the system bandwidth issue, I’d like to digg a little further to warn against a failing that is very foreseeable.

As you have certainly understood, using social media to improve customer service makes the whole organization move in order to face the demand and not be overwhelmed. The logical consequence, once all these efforts and investments have been done, is to make them as profitable as possible. So it implies to drive as much customers and interactions on the social media platforms that are used. Wrong. It will lead the system to failure and will seriously annoy customers.

Before specifically dealing with social media, we need to understand the difference between what need an human intervention and what doesn’t. Human are essential when the situation so exceptional and complex that an automated processing won’t work or when the customer is not able to initiate this processing by himself. Knowing that, compared to an automated system, human are not scalable, they have to focus on what they’re unique at. Typically the two ends of the Gauss Curve, the center needing an automated processing that may be launched by the customer itself (on web sites, online forms, voice systems…). Example ; no human should have to fill a form that the customer could fill by himself if he could access it.

So, human should be kept for what can’t be automated and customers that are not able to use the tools they’re given. Then, many channels exist depending on the context of the customer, his prefered devices, the fact he’s in a mobility situation. So there’s a wide range of tools that goes from the traditional call center to social media (both being complementary and not alternative). Why is it important ? Because everything that does not need an human processing and lands on an human channel saturates it and prevents it from dealing with what it should.

Maybe you guess where my thoughts are heading… [Read more...]

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Customer service : avoid being the victim of you social media success

December 27, 2010 By 2 Comments

Summary : while some businesses are puzzled towards the lack of success of their customer service initiatives on social media, others are trying to find solutions to face the increase of contacts and interactions. Hence the hasty conclusion that social media don’t scale. That’s a big mistake. The only fact that the point of contact is overloaded shows that the media scale. What does not is the bandwidth of the system that prevents from processing all customers requests. This limit is not peculiar to the media but to the processus it supports and that can only be removed by organizational actions. The capacity of the point of contact, should it be called community manager or anything else, can be improved by adding more resources, improving the system, redefining people’s tasks and, most of all, refocusing on exception management.

I often say that organizations that use social media for customer relationship purposes split in two groups : those that won’t take any benefit from it and those that will be overwhelmed with their success. In both cases, things have to be made to improve the situation.

• Those that don’t benefit from their initiative : poor understanding of customer expectations, interaction refusal,  absence of a service logic in communication activities.

• Those that are victim of their success : their understood what was the good positioning, had the right proposition of value for their customers…and were so successful that they can’t keep up with the load, what prevent them for keeping their promises and, then, creates a deceptive feeling among their customers that spreads and harm their reputation.

Today, I’d like to focus on this second group.

To find themselves in such a situation that can be described as a “rich people problem”, these businesses understood that beyond community management they had to have a processus approach. Since they offered an actual added value, they met their audience. But, either because of an exceptional event or a linear increase of the workload, they can’t keep up with their commitment anymore.

I’ve been observing something for a couple of months : many organizations that are successful with external facing social media initiatives realize that the internal organization has to be aligned too. Community managers (or whatever you call them) need to interact with internal resources to find solutions to customer problems what implies they can identity and mobilize them. So it’s an expert location issue. If tools and organization don’t make these actions possible, community management becomes a bottleneck where problems pile up without being solved. In conclusion, a scalable channel was used to replicate the same kind of bottlenecks that exist on the traditional channels they were supposed to make up for.

Should iy be executed in a linear or networked way, a processus has a constraint : its bandwidth, determined by the step that at the lowest processing capability. In our example, community management is the constraint of the processus. Said in other words, improving anything in the customer service processus will be without any effect and won’t change anything for customers since the limit is the community manager(s).

Like many airlines, British Airways is using twitter to solve customers problems. Everything works well in normal times but when snow begins to block european airports the switchboard explodes, as this tweet from R. Ray Wang mentioned :

In fact I think that this conclusion is a mistake : this is not the media that doesn’t scale but there a bottleck that limits the scalability of the processus it supports. The only fact that they can’t keep up with tweets is a proof that the media scale, since the amout of incoming messages exploded. What does not scale is the processing.

[Read more...]

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Sorry but I’m not a member of your community

December 20, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Summary : considering that one’s audience on the web is a community and treating it as such is more and more common. Is it always relevant ? In many cases the structure of the audience is very complex and can’t be reduced to a community approach. Most of time, communities are used to address individual issues, leverage a membership feeling that does not exist and, at the end, have a result that’s the opposite of what was expected and cause misunderstandings between brands and their audience….that’s seldom a community.

I notice that more and more enterprises, both on the web or by email, are now talking to me saying “dear community member” or “dear community”. I would not want to look asocial or be seen as an anti-community rebel, but it’s really starting to get on my nerves.

There are two reasons to that. First, I’ve seldom the impression to be a part of any community (at least those that think I am. I’m interested in what they do (for many kind of purposes…), period. But that’s not a important issue. In fact there’s worse : words have meanings and consequences. A community is something, a customer group is something else and an audience segmentation is a third thing. I don’t even mention isolated customers… The way one quality whom he addresses decided on the way they’ll be treated. In brief, by considering their whole ecosystem as a community, brands are making mistakes that may explain why they can’t get the most out of their approaches.

In my opinion, a community is characterized by a certain number of things, among them a shared interest toward something (ties between members and topic) and the will to operate together (ties between people). I’m sorry to tell that that’s not because your actual or potential customers follow you on twitter or self-declare as fans on Facebook that they are a community. The reason ? Most of times they have nothing to do the one with the other. That’s why, within communities, businesses can rely on a couple of passionate activists, the rest forming an inert mass.

In some cases, the group can turn into a community for a short time. For instance, when the majority of its members face the same issue and they get organized to fix it or weight enough on the enterprise so it will fix it. In this case, what made the transformation possible is the failure of the organization.To quote someone I heard earlier this year : “are all the people that go to the theatre to watch the same movie a community ? No. It’s rather a heap”. I’d add that if they don’t loke the movie or if it’s interrupted at the middle of the show, we may witness the formating of a  temporary but very actual community of those who want a refund.

That’s all as for ties between members. But the tie between members and the topic can be discussed too. Are communities brand-centric ? Not that sure…

[Read more...]

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

November 8, 2010 By 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.

[Read more...]

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

September 20, 2010 By 1 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...]

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Empowered : the service marketing (and even economy) manifesto

September 1, 2010 By Leave a Comment

I just finished the reading of Empowered, by Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler, that is in some ways the sequel of Groundswell which was a must read when it was published. To be honest, I have been quite deceived by Groundswell. Of course that’s a lucid, accurate and comprehensive photography of what the web is today and is still worth reading for many execs because there’s still an impressive gap between the usages of the web and how decision makers gets it. But something was missing in the conclusions : businesses must, of course, go on the web and join the groundswell, ok there are identified best practices about than? And so what ? Flirting with internauts is useless if it doesn’t create any kind of value for both the business and the customer.

That’s the new dimension brought by “empowered” : the book goes far beyond the nice discussions on the web to tackle what’s core in business :realigning the whole company with customer satisfaction. Everything starts with one assumption : facing a customer that can talk, compare, and impact the reputation of the company, there’s a need for employees able to fight with the same weapons, to join the customer on his own field. What means : use the same tools as the customer, meet him where he his and take any initiative to meet his expectations. The answer to customer’s needs will result more and for from an individual initiative from an employee, taylored and designed “on demand” that from the general and standardized corporate discours that aims at addressing anything without addressing anyone.

To do so, not only the employee has to want to engage in such a process but also the company must not prevent him from acting this way and, ideally, must provide him with the right tools and policies to achieve a good customer service. Saying that, the issue appears to be about management and IT policied that the book tackles in a pragmatic and lucid way. Some organizations that are comfortable with their good old practices from another century may not be comfortable with that but the arguments are clear and indisputable. That’s not about giving up control and let anybody do anything but facilitating things with a framework that’s secured at both the legal and IT level. Moreover, and that adds to the credibility ot the book, the authors admit that employees may be a danger to themselves and the organization and some risks have to be mitigated. That’s the first fundamental contribution of the book : for once, marketing is not considered as an isolated bubble but as a part of a global chain that involves the whole company and has to be perfectly aligned. The book is full of wise advices, best practices, examples and means to self-evaluate and compare with one’s industry leaders.

Second contribution, that is the logical consequence of the first : the concept of service. Marketing becomes service. Understand : instead of saying “look at how great my product is”, say “How can I help ?”. Of course it applies to people who are already customers to make them stay and spread the word, but it’s also an exemplary attitude towards those who may become customers in the future. In fact some companies already got it. And if I come back to my last dummy case, AirSocial would be a company that empowers its employees, not AirShy. That said, the question of knowing if service is replacing marketing or marketing has to learn service is still open.

Enough reasons to buy a book that, for onces, tackle the customer relationship issue from another standpoint than futile and lovely conversations in isolation.

That said, it makes us wonder about many things. The assumption is that there are HEROs (Highly Empowered and Ressourceful Operatives), or people who want to become HEROs, in organizations, and that they need to be supported by the management, by IT ect.. But it’s obisous than any HERO may need some help from his no-HERO colleagues, those who only want to do their job as they were told to do it, without taking initatives and risk. What to doin this case ? The non written conclusion of “Empower” is that service is not only about customers but that anyone in the company is an internal customer that needs empowered colleagues, and that, in the end, the very notion of collaboration in the workplace may be replaced by service too.

Months ago, John Chambers was talking (among other) about “Everything as a service”. Here we are, and “Empowered” indirectly lays the first brick of the concept of Service Economy. Not the way it’s been thought for decades, but the way it should be.

Get it on the “empowered” micro-site : http://www.forrester.com/empowered

Filed Under: Books I read, Customer Relationship & Marketing, Management & HR, Software & Tools, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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