Support | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

Engage with customers. And then ?

August 23, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 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.

How to understand and position enterprise 2.0 in the real enterprise

December 1, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 3 Comments

It’s time to sum up all the thoughts I had these last months. I tried to start from both the concerns expressed by C level managers asking for a global vision and ground managers who needed a “hands on” vision because they don’t have time to waste to try to understand such nebulous things. Having to focus on day to day delivery and short term objectives, many see such a fallen-from-the-sky (and on their head) gift as a source of misunderstanding and discomfort.

These concerns are not surprising at all : what is it, what does it bring, how does it work, how to position it and integrate it in the organization as it is today… Talking about a new discipline, lots of things were learnt from early adopters who worked on a “try / fail / improve” model and, in so doing, helped to build a knowledge and know-how corpus. As a matter of fact this corpus was build upon failed and successfull implementations that helped to refine some presupposition that were prevailing at their beginning. The whole helped “followers” to benefit from these experiences.

But we still have to be aware that that’s not by saying “that’s that, that’s not that, one must, one must not” that things will improve. Businesses need to undersand the path that lead to these conclusions to make them theirs, and we all know what happens when one content himself with copying a result without understanding what reasonning often leads to : lack of self-confidence, fear of the unknown, defensive attitude….then failure.

Rather than proposing an attractive future at the end of a vague road, let’s start from what actually exist to build the future. This will also help to explain the “why”, relying on what can be learnt from past experiences.

So you love your customers…and you let others take care of them

November 23, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Saying that customers are businesses’ most important assets is now a common view. First because their money make the business live, second because they are its best ambassadors when they’re happy with the delivered service.

Of course, an happy customer is a customer who’s delivered a service that meets his expectations. He also gives value to the quality of the quality of the customer relationship. To some extent, some would value more an average service with a good relationship than a perfect service with poor relationship quality because they like to be listened to, to see people do their best to give them satisfaction.

Note that’s the same with prospects, either in a B2B or B2C context : the promise that are made matter, but the relationship a business can foster with its prospects matters a lot. Ditto with employees.

That’s one of the impacts of social business in the relationships between a company and its ecosystem. Either it’s about marketing, sales, support, innovation, both companies, partners, customers, employees are looking for a new form of engagements. This engagement has first to be build then harnessed.

And, of course, many are outsourcinf their customer support, their recruitment, and sometimes a part of their marketing. I’d like to know how to build a strong relationship between a business, a brand, and its ecosystem, by letting a third party act and talk on the company’s behalf.

Outsourcing sometimes mean more control on costs, get access to competences that don’t exist internally. But it also mean the loss of any chance to build something with the other. Through the marketing relationship, through customer support, people want to interact with YOU. They want to discovert who YOU are. A good relationship is a two people game, without any go between. That what helps to save a deal when things go wrong. So you’d like to let someone else initiate and manage this relationship ? Someone who’s not you, who has not your culture, for whom you’re only a customer among others ?

Community management is something serious one has to manage himself. Not an undercontracted job, or a task assigned to an intern with too much idle.

Value is created and survives through relationships. Saying so is good. But that’s not enough if behaviors go the opposite way.

You’re wondering what a customer community can be used for, what your facebook fans are worth ? No you now. Now it’s time to initiate things yourself instead of outsouring, then rely on the group to leverage

PS : Whenever you can’t understand what’s at stake, ask yourselves what would have happened you you asked a friend to replace you at your first date with your future husband/wife. Get it ?

Filed Under: Management & HR Tagged With: Communities, community management, community manager, customer relationship, customers, engagement, support

Management 2.0, SOO and productivity

March 26, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

I started, here and there, writing about the need for changing flows direction within organization : switching from a “pushed” to a “pull” way of producting and communicating. The purpose is to make it possible for people to determine their action according to a goal rather than to an order.

Why is that so important ?

Because it’s more consistent with the reality of people’s work today. It waid said many times, repeated, but the time when employees has to reproduce endlessly an unique task or gesture is over. Their activities, their daily tasks, are not defined in a production plan but by a request, a need that are continuously changing. Generally people don’t need to be be told what to do but need support to do things. They need more support than instructions and this support, as paradoxical as it may be, may come from above. Today, orders are coming from above and support from above is expected. What is needed to help people to do their job is the exact opposite.

[Read more...]