- Collaborative Customer Communities are forming everywhere and your customers can and will drive the conversation – Your customers will drive the conversation through general public platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Youtube and Yahoo, through the growing number of social media capabilities on segmented community sites like Tripadvisor or Salesforce.com’s Chatter. Or through the increasing portfolio of private company oriented or member only social networks and communities as extensions of individual company websites built on platforms such as Ning or Joomla. Whether you care or not your competitors do.
- Extending your customer contact strategy requires understanding the possible places where communities can form – Communities are forming around global brand or brands (one major consumer products company claims 28m friends on Facebook across their brands), around their local stores or branches (one retailer has an average of 500 friends at each retail store), around events (one company has 8500 Twitter followers for a new product launch as it tours a series of business conferences or around a product (one company has a private collaborative community of 1200 employees and customers participating in a new product development) and finally employees can drive communities (one company who had an employee featured on a local news broadcast as she told a reporter what a great place she worked at is now trying to decide what to do with the 7,000 followers she gained on Twitter. Whether you care or not your competitors do.
- You need to direct or modify your customer contact and collaboration technologies to help you engage – Two companies are adding a special social membership indicator to their CRM system and changing their call routing rules to special handling for their most vocal customers. One came through the embarrassing scenario of posting a 1-800 number for people to call to intercede in a public social network discussion furiously criticizing a product and having the agents who answered the call not know about the argument and dissatisfied customers which led to furious criticism of their customer service on the same website. They thought posting their customer service IM “handle” and email on social networks would be a good idea but need to make some changes there also so that the members of the network can interact with them directly if they so wish but with people who know they are social networking “family”. Another company is planning to deploy social network mining tools (Social Miner) to tell where they and their competitors are being discussed and has created repositories of video product demonstrations they can offer to expose to their employees and clients (through a tool called Show and Share) when they see a customer expressing frustration on a public product review site. Whether you care or not your competitors do.
- Social media is becoming increasingly important in driving customer purchasing behavior so not developing and executing on a strategy is not an option – Social Media is changing the way businesses and customers communicate. 70%+ of customers use social media to research customer care reputation before making a purchase, 90%+ expect companies to have a social media presence for customer service, 60%+ want companies to increase usage of social media and advanced collaboration tools for customer service including giving them access to other customers to gain insights and express opinions Whether you care or not your competitors do.
- Growth of these Communities has achieved “escape” velocity – There is a term in marketing of achieving “escape velocity” which means the growth of something is out of control and has achieved its own unstoppable momentum. This is true of the formation of these Communities. If a conversation gains public attention it will take on its own momentum and be unstoppable, this doesn’t matter whether it is true or not (In history revolutions have happened on this basis). Certainly in the developed western economies customers (and competitors) can setup their own places to communicate and be linked or associated with many like minded individuals and have largely emerged as legally ungovernable in this media. Whether you care or not your competitors do.
- If you don’t stay engaged you will lose control and risk losing your business – You and your business partners need to make proactive and focused efforts to stay engaged and to influence the conversation but the attraction of this world to your customers is that you have already lost control and are reduced to influencing. Companies need to determine how to turn this to their advantage. Not paying attention can and will lead to a major competitive disadvantage and in the tightly constrained business world of today can easily lead to business failure. Whether you care or not your competitors do.
- Success is largely about speed, accuracy and sophistication of response – Almost every business continues to experience a massive acceleration in speed. Social media and connected customer communities just increase this even more. However with business speed comes the danger of poor response. Just because you can respond fast doesn’t mean you should. Just because you can respond in a highly sophisticated manner doesn’t mean you should. Determining the correct speed, level and channel for response is a critical success factor in this new customer contact channel. Whether you care or not your competitors do.
- Analysis Tools are emerging to give you the power to listen in and react – There are tools starting to emerge that allow you to analyze this communications and conversations world (Social Miner from Cisco, Facebook Analytics, Twitter Analytics, Rightnow etc) and customer care services companies and business process outsourcers are increasingly building customer care centric social media analysis into their solutions portfolio. The increasing prevalence of Really Simple Script (RSS) based links allow you to “see” what the world is doing in many different dimensions. Whether you care or not your competitors do.
- Social Media should be added to your Customer Interaction Map – Well managed companies have a customer interaction map in order to ensure they clearly understand how their customers are impacted by multiple channels. The social networking strategy should be added to the customer interaction map to avoid confusion injected by multiple communication channels. Whether you care or not your competitors do.
- The best companies are enthusiastically embracing Social Media as a way to build interactive customer communities, many companies are watching to decide what to do and the losers are fighting the trend – The best companies and tomorrows market leaders are embracing this and enthusiastically using the technologies as a way to get ever closer to their customers, to find out more about them and to influence their behaviors. Whether you care or not your competitors do.
- The infrastructure investment decision you have made in the past and those you are making today will directly affect your ability to respond to this transformational wave – While very exciting and complex social media is just another contact channel and like all other new contact channels how easily you can drive value and how large the value your drive depends on a combination of your skills and the technology investments you have made and continue to make. The best companies are those who are extending and expanding the capabilities of their current customer contact multi-channel investments. Whether you care or not your competitors do.
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