Social’s First Real Customer Service Centric Platform? Product Review: Social Dynamx
By michaelpace on May 13, 2012
“No social enterprise transformation strategy can succeed unless Customer Service plays a central role.” said Michael Maoz, Vice President and Distinguished Analyst for Customer Strategies research at Gartner. “Current structures are inadequate. The challenge for senior management is to engineer the necessary processes and technology changes that will allow customer service to evolve to embrace social trends. New concepts of recruitment, measurement and outcomes are necessary to allow for the increased agent participation in social media. When this happens, and the right supporting technology is deployed, businesses will see increased customer engagement and higher overall customer success.”
Damn, I could not have said that better. Being one of a relative few social customer service practitioners, who has built a high quality, scalable social customer support team, I have been perplexed over the past two years as to why customer support/service/retention/success has been the afterthought of the social media platform market. After all, doesn’t the terminology “customer engagement” imply there is life after they have been acquired? In my own humble opinion, most of engagement is post acquisition. Everyone knows customer retention is multiple times more cost effective than acquisition. And I do not believe Marketing will ever be able to scale efficiently to provide the intimacy social customer service requires. However, the social platform market is flooded with Marketing-centric products or “oh yeah, we need to cover social” CRM bolt-ons. This is why I was incredibly interested in a new company called Social Dynamx and their recently released purpose built social customer service platform.
I learned of Social Dynamx from friend Heather Strout, Customer Insights Manager, and was asked to provide my feedback after meeting some team members and a demo. Here are my thoughts*:
Company Leadership:
If you read my posts, you know the value that I place on culture. I consider culture as the most important tacit or non-tacit asset in every organization. Before meeting with Social Dynamx team, I was very impressed with the backgrounds of their leadership. Their backgrounds are a strong mix of customer service, call center, social strategy and execution, community and technology. If you are going to design a tool with the customer service agent in mind, you need to be able to understand the complexities of a representative. They have a new workflow, marketing initiative, incentive, exception, and policy to remember each day. Their workstations are typically covered in post-it notes and processes, and are expected to get it right every time. This is not an easy job. Similarly, I have often used the analogy of understanding social to learning to riding a bike. You can read all the books and blogs on how to ride a bike or social, but until you get your butt on the seat or actively, consistently engage on social networks, you will not get it. Social Dynamx’s leadership structure, experience and competencies comes through the product. (Leadership is never strictly held in C-level positions)
This cross functional knowledge also is provided at implementation. While it’s a cloud based product, each company should customize to teach your system what to look for. The last thing a customer service stakeholder wants to hear is sales people drown on about all the things it can do for you, when they have no idea how customer service or a call center works. Social Dynamx background and experience provides both social and service understanding.
Know Your Customer: 
In my presentation for Customer Service leaders, the 5 Steps to Set Up a Social Customer Service Team, the first step of the Customer Conversation is always Know Your Customer. Social Dynamx provides a clean view of your customer’s major social networks,customer support/peer-to-peer forums and blogs, and an assessment of the priority based on their proprietary model scoring model. This priority should help your agents and management staffs understand the social impact a customer may have on your business. Of course, influence is contextual, and while someone may have a large following in technology, it may not pertain to your knitting business (for example). However, you never know how many of those tech folks like to throw a quilt together in their spare time. For future versions, I would love to see a more integrated view of YOUR customer’s value or customer lifetime value. You need to understand both social impact and the specific value this customer represents to your company.
The conversation thread feature is perfect and rarely seen in anything on the market today.
Time to get Real:
Three major aspects I wanted to make sure I received an understanding of was:
Are there differentiated views for agents and management? Yes (see pics)
How can I measure my agents? Yes, there are out of the box metrics for measuring SLA’s (service level agreements) and customizable fields. We discussed the future need for management to be able to quality monitor their associates, and is a critical aspect towards agent measurement. There is, however, a nice connection to your knowledge base to more quickly answer questions.
I probably not buying a whole new CRM (especially in this economy), does this work with my existing account or issue management tool? It’s cloud based, so no servers to maintain on site, and is an open architecture to integrate with major CRM tools. Obviously, considering this was a demo, I was not able to witness how their systems integrate with CRM platforms. This is a perfect opportunity to bring in your network support team to understand the implications.
As a Customer Service leader, I am thrilled to see a company think “customer support” first, and I believe Social Dynamx has developed the solid, very customer centric social customer platform. I love their approach, starting with understanding the customer through implementation. Considering this is a newly released public product, they have a high majority of the critical business requirements covered. (Product has been in place in a number of enterprise organizations, however, it has not been available to the general service public.) I believe the biggest challenge will be the businesses they work with, as there is still a huge, glass barrier of customer service leaders actually taking hold of the customer service reigns, and driving their social business. You can learn more about Social Dynamx here.
*I am not associated with Social Dynamx in any material manner other than my friend relationship with Heather Strout, and received no compensation for providing a review. All commentary contained within is strictly my own perception and thoughts. So if you are a hater, you know what you can do.
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Customer Service Needs a Romper Room Magic Mirror or Transparency is Innovation
By michaelpace on April 23, 2012
Magic Mirror, tell me today
Did companies do as they say,
I see Costco, Ritz Carlton, and Starbucks …
Ah nostalgia. If you grew up in the late 70’s and the 80’s, you probably remember Miss Molly and the show that was Romper Room. At the end of every episode, you waited with baited breath as Miss Molly would grab the magic mirror and peer through your television. Would today be the day she see you?
Recently, I was researching a company called Zmags, which creates beautiful rich media catalogs for retailers and others. On their support page, there is a simple and effective graphic showing customers when the slowest and busiest periods for support based on time zone.
It’s open and honest approach to helping customers determine when the best time to call for non-urgent issues. Ah transparency. Having a graphic, like the one above, puts out a shingle and sets a level of expectation for customers. It shouldn’t be used as an excuse for poor execution, and can be used for setting internal bars to overcome. This simple graphic started the hamster in my tiny brain running, and what else can be accomplished if other customer service metrics were made available and accessible to the public or your customer base.
Incident, Customer Satisfaction and Net Promoter Scoring:
One of my greatest pet peeves of most companies today is the action of asking me for survey feedback and not providing any response in return. Imagine if you could go to a link on a company’s website, and see near real time Incident, Customer Satisfaction and Net Promoter Scores. Was your feedback inline with other customers? Was your experience an outlier? Was your verbatim feedback part of a larger trend? I believe this level of transparency would improve the customer experience. It shows your customers that your organization is open to feedback, taking action on your feedback, and is concerned about your feedback beyond just numerical scores. It also can be a place for proactive messaging. If your company has received feedback that a certain product or service has a defect, you could insert messaging to your customers as to how you are tackling this particular problem. And probably the most impactful result of opening up the customer service score kimono, executives and leaders would know that their scores are out there for the world to see. If your NPS or C-Sat score was below benchmark level, you can bet your last budget dollar that C-level leaders would be eager to invest more to bring those scores up.
Service Level Agreements: (Service Level, FCR, Compliance Scores)
I’ve said it before and I will say it again, service level metrics should not be the primary metric used to determine the quality of your service. Unless your speed of answer is beyond acceptable (you know what acceptable is), how fast someone answers a phone, email, tweet or chat is a very small part of a customer experience. However, it is an important metric that shows both a part of the customer experience and how effectively staffed your organization is to help customers. Similar to the chart provided by Zmags, giving your customers an understanding of how often you answer their calls within an expected period, provides insight to how you often you keep your word (Walk matches Talk). The same thought process can be applied to FCR (First Contact Resolution) and any Compliance scores that are important to your customers. Again, by publicly providing how well you are serving your customers, you create even more accountability.
Employee Morale, Satisfaction and Engagement Scores:
You say your company is a great place to work, well prove it. Every customer loves to work and deal with a happy, pleasant associate. Everyone also knows when an employee doesn’t care about their job or their customers. By posting your employee morale, satisfaction and engagement scores, customers gain insight to how well companies treat their employees. Similar to companies doing social good, customers would rather transact with companies which take care of their associates. I wouldn’t recommend conducting an associate survey more than once a quarter, and make sure you are surveying in combination with broader company surveys.
By pulling back the curtain to your metrics and satisfaction scores, you can create higher levels of trust between your organization and your current and future customer base. Yes, this level of openness has some potential risks. Customers may not understand the scores, what is excellent versus poor. But if you provide excellent service, why not show it off. The more you can open up your company to the public, the more they can build trust. (more on measuring trust) Innovation comes in many forms, you can make transparency your next.
Do you think you are open enough to show off your scores?
What would stop you from doing it?
If your scores were available to the public, how would you change your actions?
Do you remember Romper Stompers? They rocked!
Image Credit: yttm.tv
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CH-CH-CH-CH-CHANGES or Leadership’s Most Underrated Skill
By michaelpace on April 23, 2012
It’s great to see a portion of the focus on social media technologies shift from shiny objects and how to market better to increasing the adoption of the tools and uses within the organization. The era of the Social Business or, as I prefer to call it, the Social Organization is just beginning to take hold in progressive companies, and should start to “Cross the Chasm” within the next few years. Yes, it is going to take at least a few years; some laggard companies still do not let some of their associates access the internet via their workstation. For those companies starting down the Social Organization path, or considering it, introducing tools and new corporate communication policies is not going to be enough to be successful in achieving high adoption. Companies will need to change from the inside out, shift their culture, and learn new, better ways of working and interacting.
But how do you change successfully?
Are your organization’s leaders skilled in the arts and sciences of change management?
Do you have a change management plan or methodology?
Over the years, few training courses have stuck with me like training I received while with Capital One on Change Management. For more on the specific training that was provided, please visit PROSCI’s Change Management Learning Center, in the meantime, I’ll provide my key takeaways. The basis for much of the training centered around the acronym ADKAR.
Awareness:
Most successful changes start with the impacted stakeholders being made aware of the changes. This is just an introduction to the changes that will be coming. This information may have a positive, neutral or negative impact on your associates morale, job satisfaction, workload, role, and/or position within the organization. Prior to making your associates aware of the change, I recommend completing a Change Management Assessment. See below for an example:
Steps to complete a Change Management Assessment:
1. Identify changes or workstream
2. Provide a brief description
3. Identify a SINGLE Owner
4. Judge the impact to the stakeholders
5. Is it a positive, negative or neutral change?
6. Is training required?
7. Is a communication plan or strategy required?
8. Are there organizational changes associated with this change?
9. How aware is the organization that this change is coming?
10. Identify all stakeholders associated with the change
Desire:
Often the building of Desire coincides with the communication associated with Awareness. This is your “Why”. Having a strong understanding of the possible outcomes, consequences and ripple effects is critical to be able to build the Desire for change. While creating your plan to build Desire, a great idea is to bring in 2-4 influential associates to understand what their concerns are, questions they have, and their thoughts on what the general populous reactions will be to the changes.
Knowledge:
This is where your training or continuous learning plans come into play. In general, most people recognize this phase of change management best. This is where you develop and execute training, or providing the Knowledge, for your associates.
Ability:
If Knowledge was the training or learning, Ability is the opportunity to put what has been made aware and trained into practice. You will also want to make sure you are quality monitoring in this phase, and be available to provide coaching and support.
Reinforcement:
Sometimes the most forgotten area of change management, Reinforcement is your opportunity to implement incentives (and consequences if necessary) to help your associates keep/adopt the change. The most important part of this phase is credibility. Are you walking your talk? Is this a fly-by-night , flavor of the month initiative? Identify multiple ways so your changes can be internalized by your teams.
The more impactful the change, the greater the need is for change management. If you are discussing culture change, there are few changes more impactful. By investing early on in the change timeline on a change management methodology will help ensure you execute even more excellently. This model can also be used for external customers, and I would even suggest just trying it for your next customer impacting initiative.
Have you used change management methodologies before? If so, how did it differ?
If you fear process, does this sound like too much process?
Are you considering a change on the magnitude of a culture shift?
I would love to hear your thoughts.
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I discovered my Social Media ROI? Or How much is your personal development worth?
By michaelpace on March 30, 2012
I am not that big of a fan of the term “Social Business”. I love the broader concept of using social tools and networks to more effectively and efficiently achieve business goals. For a more complete understanding of social business, I recommend two sources: SideraWorks from Amber Naslund and Matt Ridings and The Community Roundtable’s State of Community Management Report from Rachel Happe and Jim Storer. However, I worry that the term “Social Business” leaves the act of working this way to the current few in a company “who do Social Media”. I prefer the term “Social Organization”, as I wrote about a couple months back. The “Social Organization” implies that is more about the people in the organization, all the people, using relationships, process and tools to accomplish broad business goals.
If your company’s broad business goals include the personal development of your associates, becoming a social organization should be one of your key strategic imperatives. One of my favorite quotes is from the book The Power of Pull by John Hagel, he said, “There are a lot more smarter people outside of your company, than in it”. This quote has nothing to do with the intelligence of the people in your company; it’s just that there are so many subject matter experts, students, and geniuses in any field you can imagine. Social networks are fantastic way to listen, connect and build relationships with the smartest people in the world. Encouraging your associates to seek knowledge about their passions (both professional and non) and use social tools to aide in their personal development can be a powerful way for them to improve. If you don’t mind, I will use myself as a case study in this matter.
When I started becoming interested in social media in 2009, I had a Facebook account to keep track of folks from high school (mostly who I didn’t like back then either) and a LinkedIn account (mostly to help in a job search I had just completed). My professional development, at that time, centered around three areas: Understanding Social Media for Customer Service, Community Management, and public speaking. Historically, I read a lot of books to gain access to information of bright minds. I still do, but as a compliment to other forms of media. I quickly began to understand the power of an RSS feeder. Twitter was next. I fell in love with Twitter, and still love it today as a professional development tool. Twitter, if used for no other purpose, is an amazing way to pull the world’s smartest people content into a simple and digestible form. Over time, I began to build amazing relationships, some digital and some in person, and conversations from these relationships have added incredibly towards my personal development along all three areas. Today, I speak regularly at Customer Service, Social Media and Community Management conferences about how to build scalable social media customer service teams, revitalizing fading communities, inspiring cultural evolutions in your organization, new ways to measure customer retention, and how to leverage the power of the social organization. You can see some of the presentations here.
So what is the ROI of social media to me or what is the value of my personal development?
The answer is simple, priceless.
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5 Signs That Your Customer Service Sucks
By michaelpace on March 26, 2012
Talk to most any CEO, and they will tell you that they have great customer service. They will tell you how proud they are of their service, and how important it is to their business objectives. And it goes beyond C-Level executives. Lots of people think their company provides great service. So answer this for me then: If so many people think their customer service is good – great, why does most customer service suck or is adequate at best?
Yes, there are plenty of ways to score or quantify your service execution (NPS, CSAT, CES, CSI, etc…), but let me give you five behavioral clues that your customer service may suck.
How to tell if your customer service sucks (without the use of NPS or C-Sat scores):
1. You use benchmark data
Benchmark data is for suckers (pun intended). Let’s start with what benchmark data is, a culmination of average companies providing their averages. If we start with the premise that most service sucks or is adequate at best, and you take the average of their averages, you get sucky (pun again) benchmarks. I am in the business of trying to provide awe inspiring service, sucky doesn’t cut it. Identify what is critical to quality of your customers and overdeliver.
2. You prefer to handle customer service via email
Email customer service is getting worse by the day. The service itself is mostly the same as it has been for the last 15 years, but with today’s need to be real time, email is terrible. The analogy I like to use here is USPS and FedEx. People were content with the speed of mail, until FedEx showed up and proved you could get reliable delivery the next day. Sending things via USPS became relegated to packages that did not have any time constraints. I am going to assume your customers have time constraints. Email requires a lot of customer effort. Email (typically) requires back and forth exchanges. Email provides the right complete answer about 20% of the time. Email sucks.
3. Your daily representative (unplanned) absentee rate is greater than 5%
If you absentee rate is greater than 1 in 20 associates, they often dread coming to work. If your associates often dread coming to work, they are not going to provide superior service. This one is pretty simple.
4. You don’t allow your associates use social media
When companies block or do not allow their associates to access their social networks while at work, it is a clear sign that you do not trust them. Connecting via social networks is the new hanging out at the water cooler. People need people and conversation. If you are afraid something bad is going to go viral, you are fooling yourself. Emails, chats, conversations, and any interaction can go viral. It’s the content, not the tool going viral. Treat your associates like the adults they are, and/or provide the training needed to reduce the risk. There are so many possible benefits of allowing them to access their networks (training, personal development, release, monotony breaks, recruiting, branding, etc…). If you cannot trust them to access their social networks, do you really want to trust them with your customers?
5. Your goals and metrics do not include employee satisfaction scores
If you are not measuring it, you are not managing it. If you are not including your associates morale, satisfaction and engagement metrics with your typical customer service metrics, you are providing validation they are less important than your other metrics. I doubt you are going to get their best effort if you do not prove you’re concerned for their well being. See #3. You ask them to be concerned with your customers’ well being, show them you care about theirs.
So …. do you suck? Feel free to comment.
Image credit: joystickdivision.com
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Did You Just Build Your Strategy on a Shaky Foundation?
By michaelpace on March 7, 2012
Let me tell you story.
In 1974, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst completed building the W.E.B. Du Bois Library. It’s a glorious 26 story, red bricked honor to education of the 25,000+ students of the university. I believe it is still the tallest library in the United States. Besides for all the knowledge that resides in the building, it also has some of the best views of the Pioneer Valley, especially during the fall. The library is a beacon to the center of campus, and a unforgettable image I will always carry with me. Umm … there is one small problem, the library is sinking.
While it might be urban legend, every UMass attendee has heard the story of the library being built, but the architect and engineers forgot to calculate the weight of the books and equipment. The foundation is not strong enough to support. It is said to be sinking anywhere from ¼ – ½ inch a year. Consequently, occasionally a brick or brick parts fall to the ground at a speed of 9.8 meters per second squared.
While I have deep love for my alma mater and the library, the story is a great analogy for many, especially those just wrapping up your 2012 strategies. Your strategies can be bold and beautiful, and if you build them on shaky ground, you may rain bricks down on your customers. What do you need for an incredibly sturdy foundation? Below are my thoughts by priority:
- Culture – the single, most important foundational step
- Best Talent – all the best plans and culture need to executed by incredible people
- Technology – work smarter and more efficiently
- Process – if you have Culture, Talent and Technology, they always need alignment and governance
- Data – allows the other 4 foundational areas operate with confidence
Culture: Every company has a culture. The problem is most company culture’s are weakly internalized by associates, non productive, overly complex, and bullcrap. If you culture is not clearly articulated, visible and available, you will fall into the category of companies stated previously. Culture is too important to be considered tacit knowledge. Culture is how people work and behave. A strong, articulated, and internalized culture helps individuals exercise responsible freedom. It allows them to make the right decisions for your company, autonomously. It breeds trust and openness. It is a knowledge and understanding that is part of everything from communication to teamwork to respect of your customer. Make sure your culture is articulated, and better yet written and visible to all. Make sure it is discussed frequently. Build it into your performance management systems and processes. Make sure it is internalized and engrained in everyone. Attitude is not driven by policies, it’s driven by culture.
Best Talent: Popularized by the best seller Good to Great, make sure you get the right people on the bus, then figure out where to go. Poor, mediocre and even ‘ok” talent is a waste of time; it destroys value. Be honest with yourself, do you have the best possible people at each critical position within your organization. By having the best talent at your critical positions within your organization, your business as usual will go smoothly, all of your reports will develop quicker, and innovation will flow. The best talent knows how to delegate effectively, removing them from the trees and allows them to see the forest.
Technology: Just like any good tool, technology gives you leverage. The right technology allows you to work smarter and more efficiently. This doesn’t mean you need the most bleeding edge technology throughout your organization. Technology can also have high initial or maintenance expenses. So make sure you have the technology that solves for business needs, and addresses key or critical customer touchpoints. This technology can anything from a solid workforce management system, IVR, community platforms, or even an iPhone. Just remember technology is a tool, it should never be an objective.
Process: Oh, I loves me some process. I don’t love process for process sake; but process that provides direction for others to empower themselves to do great things. Stop thinking as process as red tape, but instead, think of process as a foundational step that sets your workforce loose to do amazing things. Process and governance allows others to act within their guardrails and not need micro-management supervision. Set your process foundation early; establish clear roles and responsibilities, clarify what is critical to quality, outline steps, and develop your control systems to determine your effectiveness. Process aligns the organization, and mitigates good intentions without vision.
Data: If I hear one more person say “Big Data is going to be important in year 20XX, I’m gonna puke. Big Data was important 25 years ago, is important today, and will be important 25 years from now. (Ok rant over) Data enables you to move forward with foundational and strategy steps. Data provides objective views on what has happened, is happening, and provides confidence in future initiatives. Decisions not based on data are gut, and therefore often personal. Personal decisions are much harder for others to get behind, and make influencing others outside of your organization more difficult. There is plenty of data out there, and much more to be found. Make sure you understand what is critical to the quality of your customer and what drives those metrics. All the other data is nice to have, meaning unless you have extra analytical resources or time, focus on what is most important and dive deep.
Far too often, we spend weeks developing and designing strategy without ensuring it can be supported by a strong foundation, like the library at UMass. The strategy can be beautifully constructed, innovative, and inspirational, but you don’t want to try executing it while proverbial bricks rain down. Before you go much further, make sure your foundation steps (Culture, Best Talent, Technology, Process and Data) are in a place to carry the weight.
Have you ever tried executing a strategy with a faulty foundation? Were you able to correct in time?
When did you know your foundation was shaky?
Have you ever had a strategy executed near flawlessly because of your foundation?
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Why NPS should stand for Near Pointless Scoring
By michaelpace on February 28, 2012
Just stop for a second and answer a question for yourself:
Why are you measuring Net Promoter Score (NPS)?
- Does it provide you the best insight to your customer’s satisfaction?
- Maybe you read The Ultimate Question six years ago, and have found your silver bullet to customer service?
- Or your boss told you to do it?
Does anyone else struggle with what to do with a score of 27 when last month was a 29?
Do you end up looking at all the verbatim to understand the differences?
Do you ever wonder if someone’s score of 6 is another person’s 8?
Just stop again, and think why are you tracking NPS; for what purpose are you asking people “would you recommend our services/product to a colleague, friend or family?”
(Most probably) The reason you ask this question is to understand “how likely is my company going to retain you as a customer?” If that was the question you needed the answer, would you consider possible other ways to skin the cat? The primary purpose of Customer Service departments is to retain customers. Yes, great customer service can fill the top of the funnel with new, super-qualified and efficient leads. (Learn more about the traditional funnel and how to Flip the Funnel) However, if Customer Service is not focused first on retaining customers, they become a worthless cost center. Let me be clear, there are clearly differences how companies approach retention (ex. Zappos and <insert name> cable company). Back to the heart of the matter; if you step back there are more ways than just NPS to answer the question “how likely is my company going to retain you as a customer”. It is not the silver bullet.
One recent trend that has peaked my interest is customer behavior scoring. This scoring uses variables, determined by the organization, that help leaders, management, and agents understand how often engage with your product or service, how effective customers are at using your product/service, and how much of your full suite of solutions are they utilizing. By leveraging behavioral data, you take the subjectivity out of scoring. This methodology is gaining steam with SaaS model businesses. For example, you should be able to infer a customer’s likelihood of retention or attrition by understanding how often they log into your application. This data can be presented in more raw form to analyst teams to create proactive programs and/or fed to front line associates with specific actions to take if contact is made. There is considerably more actions that can be taken based on behavioral data than from subjective Net Promoter Scoring. A Boston based company Apptegic is making some nice progress bringing these tools to market.
And while I think behavioral scoring is incredibly interesting, I am not sure it is the answer either. However, if you are able combine the emotional and subjective scoring with the behavioral and objective scoring, you start to see a much clearer picture of an actual customer. Emotional scoring (NPS/CSAT) measures the depth of the relationship, and behavioral scoring can measure interaction; together you get what I would call an Engagement Score.
And it gets even more interesting if and when you are able to understand the potential impacts of their social graphs.
Now, you have a clear understanding of who your brand advocates are, and can develop programs to leverage their enthusiasm and the power of their voice. You can also be more prepared if you have active participants with loud voices who are more likely to comment on displeasure. Once you understand which box your customer is in, you can develop effective actions to be taken by your leadership, marketing and floor associates.
All I am trying to say is NPS is not the only game in town. We should all be questioning why we do things. And finally, if you get to the root of you quest (the why), we can develop solutions that meet and exceed our needs in this dynamic landscape.
Are you fed up with NPS?
Are you using another customer scoring system that is working for your business?
Does a combination score lead us closer to a “silver bullet”?
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Putting Social Media in Context or Don’t Hate the Tool, Hate the Carpenter
By michaelpace on February 20, 2012
They say frustration is the mother of invention. This post is rooted in frustration. My frustration lies with smart social strategists and users consistently doing the following:
- Making social media the objective
- Consistently bashing one social media tool versus another, whether it’s Google +, Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Path, etc…
- Fostering conversations on “who owns social media”
Social media is a tool, plain and simple.
- It is not the result; it’s a way to get there
- I have lots of tools in my toolbox, including hammers, saws, screwdrivers (manual and electric) wrenches, and so on. It doesn’t mean one tool is better than another, they just serve different purposes.
- Nobody should “own” the tool. The phone system is a tool, you don’t see Marketing asking the Customer Service team for permission to use the phone.
Hopefully, my homemade “infographic” can put social media and its surrounding terms in context.
*CLTV = Customer LifeTime Value
While I consistently use the carpenter analogy (just because you swing a hammer, doesn’t make you a carpenter, it just makes you more dangerous), I thought including Lord Vader may connect with my audience a bit more.
Do you have social pet peeves or things that generate frustration?
Do you use a different analogy?
Do you do one of those things that drives me crazy? If so, we should fight on the playground at Three o’ Clock High style.
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Is it time to flip Customer Service on its side? – along with Marketing, Sales, Product, etc…
By michaelpace on february 15, 2012
I am not sure who originally designed how organizations should be aligned. Maybe it was the armies of the past, the mafia or some random Joe who gets no credit for how 99% of businesses are structured today. There is a Marketing Department, Sales, Customer Service, Product, IT, Human Resources, Accounting and each have their own little silos of metrics and goals. Great companies typically have a global vision, and each of the departments work together to develop an integrated strategy to deliver the vision and, more specifically, yearly goals. Each department outlines initiatives that have positive and negative impacts to budgets. They eventually get approval and proceed to execute. But what are the goals they are executing against? The goals that relate only to each department. The hope is, magically, the sum of the parts will add up to corporate goals. So Marketing starts executing on their acquisition and loyalty strategies. Sales works on their acquisition goals. Product may lead the pack or follow Marketing and Sales lead. And Customer Service takes all the flow down and tries to deliver something that more often than not, looks like adequate to good customer service.
This methodology has been in place for more than 100 years, so it obviously works well. And I am just some poor customer service blogging schmuck from Massachusetts. But why do we align this way? Why do we accept it? Skill set? Competencies? Scalability? Mentorship? Obviously, it is not to deliver a common goal. Maybe it is time to realign (yes, before the apocalypse of 2012). What if we flipped everything on its side, and aligned by organizational goals? (horizontal mambo baby!)
R & R Department (Retention and Referral)
This department is purely focused on keeping customers and making it easy for them to recommend your product, service or brand. If in some parallel universe someone asked you to deliver on goals, as stated above, would you really align by historical standards? Probably not, you might organize as follows:
Marketing:
- Focused on maintaining communication and relationships with current customers
- Developing loyalty programs
- Incentives to deliver referrals
- Communications to improve Average Revenue Per Unit or Customer
- Communicating and partnering with other R & R areas to act as 1 unit
Product:
- Delivering solutions to know bugs, enhancements and issues
- End recipient of Voice of the Customer (VoC) program
- Communicating and partnering with other R & R areas to act as 1 unit
Customer Service:
- Act as the primary point of contact for customers to interact with the organization
- Execute on retention, loyalty and referral strategies
- Serve the customer
- Cross sell value
- Community Management
- Be the primary internal resource to additions to the Voice of the Customer program
Sales:
- Accountable for established relationship management, specifically in B2B sales
Acquisition Department
The Acquisition Department is purely focused on the acquisition of new customers. This department doesn’t look too much different than today, since acquisition for some odd reason typically has priority over Retention and Average Revenue Per Customer – even though 5 billion studies prove it cost considerably less to retain a customer than to acquire.
Actually, I don’t need to go over the following areas again. Just take what they do today, and remove the stated above responsibilities.
Broader infrastructure departments (IT, HR, G&A, etc…) would continue with Business As Usual, however they may want to align their resources to specific departments (R&R, Acquisition & General)
Aftermath
Now because you have “dis”organized, you will need to fill the potential gaps in skill set and competency development, leveraging scale and competing resources. Circle of Excellence teams can provide the forums for both the skill development and communication. In my own humble opinion, I would rather matrix these responsibilities than to matrix goals.
There are a lot of ways we work that exist only because that is how it’s been done for 100 years or 10 years (don’t get me started today on Net Promoter Scoring), but that doesn’t mean we need to continue or not try different ways to get things done. Even something as predictable as how an organization is aligned should be subject to questioning and asking the question of why do we do this?
Is anyone actually organized this way?
What are the other possibilities with this scenario?
Am I a little crazy?
Image credit: Warner Bros.
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How to Set Up a Social Customer Service Team
By michaelpace on January 25, 2012
Again this week I am attending and speaking at a Customer Service / Contact Center conference, and I am seeing lots of talk of companies interested in social media, but very few acting on it. I can understand the trepidation to jump in, and I am concerned for my horizontal (customer service). The value of a social organization is so incredibly powerful, and by not participating you are missing more than just a new channel. Over the last year and a half, I have presented the following presentation to help get folks started using social for Customer Service.
Now you don’t get the benefit of my performance, but I will try to provide a high level summary.
Starting with WHY:
- Its how people are talking and sharing
- Peer sharing is overwhelming more trusted than traditional marketing
- Don’t believe me, go watch your kids
5 Steps to Success
- Get Yourself Involved
- Get to know LinkedIn, Facebook (for business), Twitter, Blogs & other resources
- Its like learning to ride a bike, you cannot do it by reading a book or watching
2. Know Your Business
- Overall strategy and objectives (social media is not an objective, its a tool)
- Know your customers – what’s important, where are they, industry best practices
- Get others involved
3. Listen to your customers
- Monitoring
- Understand their language
4. The Customer Conversation
- Service Level Agreements for great social support
- Know the voice of your brand
- A conversation is two way, build a relationship rather than complete a transaction
5. Capture Info and Catalog
- Keep it simple at first
- Don’t worry about operational metrics yet
Objectives and Metrics
- Depending on your social maturity, balance business metrics and your learning agenda
- Engagement = Customer Acquisition x Retention x Average Revenue x Profitability
- Positive and negative sentiment impact customer acquisition and retention
- Educate your customers – the more they trust and understand, the more they will spend
- Social costs per channel can be 1/6 of other channels (phone)
Hiring and People
- You need a different type of agent to handle social media conversations
- Basic qualifications and responsibilities
If you have questions or would like to talk more about the presentation, comment or send me a note on LinkedIn, Twitter or email.
Presented at:
IQPC‘s Call Center Summit (Orlando) – January 2011
ICMI‘s ACCE(New Orleans) – June 2011
Contact Center Association Fall Event (Phoenix) – October 2011
ICMI‘s Call Center Demo (Dallas) – October 2011
TSIA’s Technology Services World (Las Vegas) – October 2011 *voted Top 10 presentations by attendees*
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- Strategy 2012: Random Acts of Connection
- Customer Service Fortune Cookies for 2012
- 20 minutes is too long for Twitter Customer Service
- Are you Walking your Talk?
- My Own Personal Intersection
- Social Star Wars Saga Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
- Social Star Wars Saga Episode II: Attack of the Clones
- Social Star Wars Saga Episode I: The Phantom Menace
- 4 Fast Social Customer Service Answers to Big Questions
- How do you value the Customer Experience Executive role?
Connect with Michael