Collaborative, Connected & Mobile Customer Communities – Part 3 – Global Best Practice Actions – Change Don’t Hope

Across the world we see a common set of actions and responses to this opportunity

• Create a multi-disciplinary team to explore the world of Collaborative and Connected Customer Communities– bringing together a team of often part-time marketing, sales, service and IT personnel to explore and participate in this connected and collaborative community world is the first step. The world is fast evolving and without people committed to helping your company figure out how to drive value from this is critical. Most companies of any size are defining small groups of 2-3 contact center agents whose job it is to engage customers based on the information gathered from social media based collaborative and connected communities. Think about the change to your business because it will change.

 

• Spend some time thinking about how this concept of communities affects your industry and your business model – It is imperative that you spend some time having this multi-disciplinary team think about how this affects your specific business given your industry model. For example and independent agent based insurance company may have a dramatically different community model than a global online retailer. Think about the change to your business because it will change.

 

• Ask your current customers and business partners what they want and engage them in the definition process. Ultimately this is about building a broader network of community than you have ever had before. Everyone is a key player and everyone should be involved, not equally but involved.

 

• Think about your current and required collaboration abilities. Where does email and IM fall? Do you have video to the person (desktop, mobile etc)? How are your people able to cope? Do you need to upgrade the people who interact with customers since middle layers are no longer required?

 

• Understand your current business and technology situation, Identify opportunities and compatible additional and incremental technology solutions that fulfill those opportunities whether cloud based or installed to give you insight into what your customers and others are saying about you and your competitors – There are a number of low cost and high impact tools being launched that can help you analyze, mine and understand what is happening in the social network so you can make decisions on how to react. It is important that any tool you select leverages your current technology investments. Experience shows that once you start working in this social media space your involvement will accelerate rapidly and whatever tools you start with will expand and deepens a little discovery care is worthwhile up front. As an example Cisco Systems recently extended their customer care solutions portfolio with the launch of their SocialMiner customer care solution to help you proactively respond to customers and prospects communicating through public social media networks such as Twitter and Facebook or other public forums or blogging sites. Salesforce.com has seen massive and rapid adoption of their Chatter application. Think about the change to your business because it will change.

 

• Proactively engage in the social media space – The best companies are creating Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, Youtube channels for their companies and for their individual products and inviting their customer to build communities around those. Additionally many branch or retail focused companies or channel driven companies are creating similar social media locations for local stores or branches or agents They are also encouraging their employees to participate and actively trying to determine where they are being discussed today. If you aren’t proactive you will be reactive and that is not good. Think about the change to your business because it will change.

 

• Own the strategy but think about the value of and how to apply external help in capability or capacity within a Self Sufficiency strategy – Most of the companies we work with have downsized their operations including IT and have little excess capacity to address this issue. Additionally knowledgeable people are scarce and those who have an industry or global best practice view are even scarcer. Use outside help appropriately. But consider how that help is applied within the context of your desire to be self sufficient in the longer term. Think about the change to your business because it will change.

 

• Take an iterative approach based on trying ideas and Optimizing your approach as you learn – No-one has all the answers in this arena. You need a flexible approach that lets you try and optimize your business and technology strategy as you learn. Think about the change to your business because it will change.