Michael Fauscette

The Evolution of Customer Service

I think that some (maybe a lot) of businesses are struggling to understand what customers want from their customer support organizations. Customer expectations seem to have changed over the last few years, or maybe what's changed is the customers' ability to do something when an experience goes wrong. In fact I don't think customers expect, at least at a high level, anything different than they did before the social web; a good brand experience and adequate customer support, are, at least to the customer's mind, the bare minimum required to get and keep our business. Is that different today versus ten years ago? No. There are differences though, and those differences touch several areas in support interactions; what a customer expects, what a customers response is to an interaction, where the customer wants to interact and in the channels that are available for companies to deliver service and support. These changes offer some interesting opportunities for companies that are looking for innovative ways to create a better customer experience.

I should start at the basics though. Social customer support is an add on to existing support systems and processes, not a replacement. In other words a company must first have a way to know who the customer is, manage customer data, collect and manage transaction data and collect and manage customer issues. If a company can't systematically do these things then they need to focus there first. And by systematic I don't necessarily mean that a business must have some elaborate CRM system, although it's great if you do. Systematic management of customer support ranges from relatively simple and low costs to full blown integrated CRM systems, but the common thread is a consistent underlying policy, process and trained personnel. Social support channels rest on this foundation, if it's solid then you can effectively add "social" but if it's not, no amount of "social" can solve your problems..

From the customers perspective the social web has brought the ability to use trust filtered networks for product / service research and advice. Peer to peer interaction about a brand and its' products and services gives customers a very comfortable way to seek input, information and advice. From the companies perspective this may feel like loss of control (not that you really ever had control) of the communication channel and the messaging. With multiple social communication channels and the broad reach of these channels a customer's ability to share "bad" experiences and to know about "bad" is greatly magnified. Take the common and well known example of Dave Carroll and his band, Sons of Maxwell. My bet is that before his customer service incident with United that you had never heard of him or his band. In fact even now you might not remember his name but if I said "United Breaks Guitars" it is likely that you know of the song and Dave's story. His ability to reach millions of people with his music video on YouTube outlining his plight is now a social media legend.

If a company has the underlying customer support infrastructure and processes how can they add "social" on top? From a customer support perspective there are really two major areas where social can add significant value. The first is in peer to peer support communities and the second is in the expansion of your support channels to include the social web. Peer to peer support through a company managed customer community can provide a very rich customer experience and strengthen the customer's relationship with the brand. This may sound a little odd on first look, since I'm suggesting that moving some of your support burden to the customers themselves can actually provide a better customer experience but this can be the case. Customers want to have relationships with the brands that they find important and satisfying. This is not limited to luxury or high price items either one of the most interesting examples of a loyal customer community is run by detergent manufacturer Tide. In a customer community members offer peer to peer support, information about products is essentially crowdsourced and the company can harvest the information to improve its own training and support material. The company also can see varying degrees of reductions in customer support calls as a result of the peer to peer support community. All in all it's a win for both the company, which reduces its support costs, increases customer loyalty and gets access to high quality product information; and for the customer who gets access to answers quickly and painlessly. It's important to note that the support community sits on top of the existing support system and the integration provides a method for escalation of unresolved to make sure customers get the answers they need. Several vendors are providing community management solutions including Lithium Technologies, Get Satisfaction, SwordCiboodle, and Jive Software. 

The second area for moving into social customer support is expanding support channels beyond your current methods like voice, web form, email, and IM/chat to include social networks like Facebook and communication channels like Twitter. Several CRM vendors are providing out of the box integration to the current crop of major social properties. The key to this expansion is to deploy a solution that is fully integrated into your support backend to provide scaleability and closed loop issue tracking while being flexible enough to incorporate new social channels as they gain momentum. Vendors like Oracle and Salesforce.com are already offering this type of integration.

Social customer service and support is simply an extension of your current offerings, which must be in good health to provide a good foundation to expansion into the social CRM world. Today this means adding and managing customer communities and expanding your communication channels to include social networks and communication tools. Providing a good, integrated customer experience is still about solid infrastructure, trained personnel and customer focused processes, this hasn't changed. What has changed is the breadth of opportunity to interact effectively with your customer and learn more about what they want, need and desire from your brand. For the customer this new added approach give them the opportunity to interact with your brand when, where and how they choose, a win for the company and for the customer.

Is your company using social customer support? What initiatives have worked and what haven't?

Tags: SCRM, support, social web, community, network, experience, social customer

Communication and Collaboration in a Social Business World

There's a pretty good argument that a big part of the social business transformation is simply using new and more effective ways to communicate. In fact that's really one of the fundamental advances that accompanied the adoption of the Internet. Internet connectivity offers multiple channels for tying people together. It provides businesses and individuals with billboards (relatively static information sharing one to many), multiple multi-media broadcast channels (infinitely changeable in real or near real time, one to many), and multiple peer to peer communication channels all in real time, all the time and accessible from a device you can carry in your pocket.

There was a time when peer to peer communication in real time meant finding a fixed site hard wired connected device (phone), assuming of course that the other party was also located near a similar site. Mobile communication, that was pulling your car up to a payphone. A revolutionary advance was attaching a tape recorder to a phone to create an answering machine, which replaced human message taking. With the introduction of fax technology we moved asynchronous communication from the letter or memo (and significant delay time requirements) to near instant although still in fixed locations. Broadcast was no different, it involved pushing radio or TV signals out to a receiving device, originally fixed but eventually portable / mobile (portable radio, TV, auto radio, etc.). Want to communicate a static message, you had billboards, signs, and print ads and articles (I suppose I could add stone tablets here but you get the picture).

But the Internet changed all of that...well, with the important addition of mobile connected devices. Communication today spans two modes, synchronous and asynchronous and an ever growing number of tools. The missing link though is an integrated way to manage all of these tools...more on that later. First let's look at the tools in the context  of general use cases.

 Communication is a part of good collaboration of course, but collaboration involves processes and tools for getting work done collectively so moves beyond just communication. The actual process though, would always include some sort of communication so my separation above might feel a bit uncomfortable for some.

Both communication and collaboration today tend to exist outside of the work context. This is an interesting issue, the process is somewhat removed from the other tools a person uses to accomplish day to day work activities. This is particularly true of communication which tends to exist as a distinct layer. This is somewhat true of collaboration tools also, but at least some of these tools exist to facilitate the work process so aren't separated, like work execution software or joint authoring tools. Embedding in work context is an important next step for social communication tools and some have already started to address this issue by providing a method for connecting the tool to the enterprise software that employees use for daily work activities. Both SocialCast and SocialText have the capability to be embedded inside another software product, a feature that I believe is essential for broad enterprise adoption. Some of the larger enterprise vendors are also exploring this concept, Oracle for example has some basic activity stream capabilities embedded in the new Fusion Applications Suite.

"One inbox to rule them all, one inbox to find them"...oh, sorry was channeling a little Tolkien. Consolidation for integrated management is still only a dream. I personally struggle with this a lot just with multiple email accounts and the sheer volume of email in general. I have found that there are a few decent ways to address email but beyond email is no-mans land today. Facebook recently has made some statements about becoming the "one" inbox but it has a long way to go to get there and a difficult task of convincing enterprise IT that it should be used as a business tool (if it should). The blurring of the lines between business and personal though, could help with adoption. I'm personally not convinced that Facebook is the answer to my communication woes though. The mobile device might offer the best vehicle to drive an integrated comm/collab approach, it's already making it easier to use many of the tools and of course in real time, all the time and in my pocket. I guess I'm just dreaming of a uber aggregator that could pull in all of the different streams and communications methods into one manageable "inbox"...

What do you think about communication and collaboration in a social business? What tools are you using?

Tags: collaboration, communication, social business, socbiz, e2.0, activity stream, IM, email, project management, work execution

Putting Personal Choice into Enterprise IT?

Corporate IT is about standardization, control, governance, compliance, IP protection and enterprise security not about personal choice and empowerment, or at least it was. There's a growing movement though towards employee empowerment and personal. Now admittedly some of the movement is being forced on IT by the new employee attitude of "bring your own" (BYO) IT tools and resources. I've watched this trend for a few years, the idea that employees feel the need to do whatever it takes to get their job done even if this means going around corporate rules. At first this attitude was met with resistance, hostility and not a little amount of frustration by CIO's and IT management. Not surprising, IT's role has moved much more towards enforcement in a lot of companies.

What I'm talking about though is different than this grassroots movement to choose your mobile device, software tools, notebooks, tablets, etc. No I'm talking about a shift in IT's stance on this idea of choice. I'm starting to talk to and hear from some CIO's that a new type of open policy of differing levels of personal choice is a viable enterprise approach. The CIO as corporate risk officer has to balance choice with security and IP protection of course, but with the growth of public and private clouds as well as new mobile management platforms, choice is becoming, well, a choice.

Citrix has pushed this idea of building a policy of choice for corporate IT devices for the last few years. It fits in nicely with the use of its desktop and mobile virtualization solutions. Cirtix has encouraged using an allowance program rather than procuring devices directly, so IT provides a fixed IT allowance to employees and then the employee can choose the mobile device and laptop that meets their own personal style. There's a fair but of evidence that this approach saves money and increases employee satisfaction.

Last week I read a story about Clorox and its CIO's (Ralph Loura) decision to move from Windows desktops and Blackberries to modern lightweight HP laptops and the choice of iPhone, Android or Windows Phone 7 smartphones.  According to Loura in the year since he took over and instituted the policy he's replaced 6000 desktops and issued 2000 smartphones consisting of 92% iPhones, 6% Android-based devices and 2% Windows Phone 7 devices. He has also moved the company to a live public cloud based email and messaging system that reduces risk by keeping the data in the cloud instead of on the mobile device. In addition to these changes Clorox is also testing a small number of iPads and while they users aren't replacing their laptops they are finding them useful as enterprise tools. Loura sees IT's job as getting out of the way of employee choice without putting the companies IP at risk.

Both the bottom up employee grassroots efforts and the new top down CIO policy shift signal a change for IT in a much broader sense. Web 2.0 taught us that software and tech tools can be simple, elegant and mask complexity while increasing productivity and functionality. The IT shop of the future is one that continues to effectively manage risk and security but also empowers employees by enabling personal choice that will increase productivity and satisfaction.

Tags: mobile, device, smartphone, iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows Phone 7, tablet, choice, Web 2.0, empowerment

   

The Evolution of US Securities and Exchange Commission Rules

This week there was quite a bit of debate and discussion instigated by a letter from SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro to Rep. Darrell Issa, Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform that was a reply to a letter from Issa and talks about the possibility of reforming the regulations around capital formation. Lately high profile start ups like Facebook, Zynga and Groupon have been under a lot of scrutiny because of their sky rocketing valuations in the secondary markets and a SEC rule that private companies with more than 500 shareholders must report financials just like public companies. This rule is designed to protect investors and takes away one of the major reasons for staying private. As Schapiro points out there is a fine line between protecting investors and in supporting a start ups need to gain access to capital. In the letter the SEC Chairman steps out from under what is often seen as a very conservative regulatory stance and suggest that some of its rules may not be in line with the current needs of start ups and need to be reviewed on a regular basis to make sure that they keep pace with current thinking or as Schapiro says "to make sure that they are up-to-date and costs and benefits remain appropriately calibrated." She goes on to provide a long lists of regulations that are being reviewed. There are a few of these that have significant implications for start ups including the increase of the 500 shareholder cap and relaxing the prohibition of companies publicizing the issuing of shares, called the "general solicitation ban."

The changes to the rules around reporting are interesting of course, taken in context to the Facebook, Groupon, Zynga, etc. status in the secondary markets. The change in the general solicitation ban though, is probably the more important. The truth is that most if not all start ups break the ban every time they raise money today. By changing the ban not only does it remove the current violation but it paves the way to using crowdsourcing as a funding vehicle. Current crowdsourcing platforms like Kickstarter are limited to projects not companies and can't offer equity stakes in those projects (prohibited by the general solicitation ban). Instead they offer "rewards". Allowing equity as a vehicle to encourage crowdsourcing would allow start ups to use these platforms. The one thing not addressed in the letter though, is a review of the accredited investor criteria, something that many start ups have called for. I suspect that those criteria will not be lowered and maybe that's not such a bad thing.   

Here's the full contents of the letter if you'd like to read it yourself:

Schapiro%20Issa%20letter%204-6-11  

Knowledge Sharing - The "New" Power in the Enterprise

I grew up with the concept that knowledge is power and that hoarding knowledge could lead to a strong power base in an organization. That's not an unusual view from the recent past and fits a hierarchical structure inside a pre-information age company. In the old structure information generally flowed in one direction and had to pass many choke points. In the days of interoffice mail, bulletin boards, and face to face meetings it's easy to see how information could pool at certain points. All a manager had to do was not pass it along and that effectively created his information hoard. Hoarded information could then be used when and where it was most beneficial for the individual who controlled it. Often your unique knowledge was closely lined to your personal value proposition, something you fought to protect. Knowledge is equated with competitive advantage, either personal or corporate. Look at the words I just used, controlled, hoarded, choke points, individual benefit, hierarchy, structure; words focused on the individual.

As computers invaded the workplace and we started to connect computers, first internally and then eventually through the Internet externally as well, companies tried to implement "collaboration" solutions. The problem though was that the systems of that era tried to mimic the existing culture and communication vehicles. Control was a key design attribute and control isn't synonymous with collaboration. What evolved were file-centric collaboration tools and a host of "management" tools (content management, project management, knowledge management, etc.) that were all about control, not about connecting people.

Today we talk about the information age brought about as a result of the Internet and the new communication and business models that it opened up. In the simplest terms, in companies today, information flows freely, almost uncontrollably through many different channels. The old problem of lack of information has turned into the opposite, yet just as critical a problem, having access to the information but not being able to find what's relevant to you. The ability to hoard information and use it for personal gain / power is predicated on controlling the communication channels but with the Internet and all of the social tools available, control just isn't possible, thus removing that version of "power" from the enterprise.

Knowledge is somewhat more complicated than information though as it includes an additional component beyond information, an individuals added understanding of information based on their experience and skills; "why" and "how" applied to information. The distinction between data, information and knowledge is not just an academic discussion but is, I think, important to understand if we are to address the issue of knowledge sharing. Think of the difference and relationship of the three as it relates to cooking soup. The molecular make up of the soup is the data, which by itself isn't particularly useful. The list of ingredients would be the information and the recipe would be the knowledge. In this case information could be useful but only if you had enough experience and skill to make the soup without the knowledge imparted by the recipe. Knowledge without information though, isn't that useful, knowing how without knowing what leaves you short of soup. That's the "what" of knowledge. the why is also important, let's say you don't have an ingredient on the list, understanding why would allow you to find a substitute ingredient. 

Information will flow in our hyper-connected business world but knowledge, which could be infinitely more important to a business, is inherently individually focused. To get that knowledge out and shared we have to overcome several obstacles. As with many enterprise problems we address today this issue has two basic components, culture and technology. By culture I mean creating an environment where sharing individual knowledge to a broader group is the accepted standard of behavior. Once that's done then the second component kicks in, what technology can facilitate effective knowledge sharing?

How do you create a knowledge sharing culture? Looking at the reasons individuals don't choose to share knowledge yields some ideas. Employees protect their knowledge when they believe that it's in their best interest to do so. This could be based on the concept that knowledge is property and must be protected or that employees are valued for what they know, which leads to protecting that knowledge, or maybe even that incentives are structured so that hoarding knowledge is rewarded. Building a knowledge sharing culture requires trust, but it also must become the accepted norm. This means that the organization establishes that sharing knowledge helps you do your job better, it gets rewarded both in incentives and in career development and growth for getting things done, and it garners personal recognition. If knowledge sharing behavior is a key component to why you keep your job then culture will change. I should note however that having a knowledge sharing culture doesn't mean that individuals should be completely open and politically naive, sharing ideas with competitors (internal or external) for example, isn't what's desired. Sharing your knowledge and working collaboratively to get more done in an effective and efficient way is the goal.

The second issue for enabling a knowledge sharing organization is getting the correct tools in place to facilitate collaborative work. There are several ways to approach this part of the equation, but as always start by defining the desired end state. Moving beyond file-centric collaboration and into a system that connects individuals is a good start. Connecting people across the enterprise (and perhaps including partners, suppliers and even customers) in a way that enables knowledge sharing in real time and in context to relevant information will increase productivity. So a social collaboration tool, one that provides peer to peer connectivity in real time with work context can help facilitate this new culture. I haven't mentioned knowledge management systems (KM or KMS) much. I think that a lot of the traditional KM systems have some inherent flaws that can be challenging. I already mentioned that overly focusing on control of information and knowledge can be counter productive when the desired outcome is increased sharing (maybe we should build knowledge liberation systems instead). Also many traditional approaches to KM often put the system in the hands of a few KM specialists, which is not conductive to a broad knowledge sharing culture. The real system goal should be a combination of social collaboration with built in knowledge and information sharing in real time and in the work context.

So knowledge sharing is the new power play in the enterprise. Getting to a knowledge sharing culture and implementing systems that will help facilitate this approach to business isn't easy but the rewards can be very high. In a recent survey we did at IDC companies reported 11-30% productivity gains from using social collaboration tools, results that should get the attention of even the most conservative executive. What do you think, how do you build a knowledge sharing corporate culture?

 Tags: knowledge, share, culture, e2.0, social collaboration, trust, web 2.0, social media

Back to the Future: Are We in Another Tech Bubble?

I've read several blogs and articles over the last few weeks debating the current tech environment and comparing (or arguing why not to compare) today to 1999. I guess it's not surprise that there's concern over this topic though, considering the soaring valuations that some of the current crop of social start ups has garnered in the secondary markets. When private companies are valued in excess of $50B it's probably healthy to take a look and see if there's some risk that we've overlooked and, if so, how do we mitigate potential impacts on the overall economy which is still quite fragile from our recent recession.

So why all the concern? Well, there is certainly an air of exuberance that is growing around the current high profile private social companies like Facebook, Twitter, Groupon, Zynga and LinkedIn. That exuberance is fueling investing from banks, high wealth individuals, VC's, etc. in tech funds, in fact the money is pouring in and almost every week there's a new fund announcement. From that perspective alone it does "feel" a lot like 1999. And think about those valuations, Groupon, for example is talking IPO at around $25B when only a year ago they were valued at ~$1.4B and Zynga and Facebook's valuations have jumped 4X in under two years. The Internet drove 1999's explosion, social drives today's. I found the following Morgan Stanley chart that provides an interesting comparison:

 

There are however some significant differences between 1999 and 2011. In 1999 I was an executive in a VC-backed Internet start up, so I have some perspective on this. So what are those differences:

• From the chart it's obvious that in 1999 the boom was fueled by the sheer number of start ups going public. Today there is a small group of private companies with soaring valuations, something that was not possible in 1999 due to the lack of secondary markets.
• And that's the second difference, the secondary markets. In 1999 the only way for companies (and investors, employees and executives) to monetize stock was to go public or be acquired. Today, with secondary markets trading in pre-IPO stock, that is not the case. The pressure to do an IPO sooner rather than later just isn't there. Companies today can delay with no real impact, and wait for business plans to play out and build revenue streams.
• During the Internet boom gaining customer share was valued over revenue. I remember joining my first Internet start up and being rebuffed for trying to do profitability models on current customers...it seems profitability wasn't a business objective, customer acquisition was (eyeballs and clicks as we used to say)...not so today.
• Today we joke that Internet start ups in 1999 didn't need a real product, and in fact that wasn't far from true. Prototypes and proof of concept products got funded right along with fully functional, operating and well planned businesses. That would not work today, products must be complete and launched, there have to be customers and for the most part a revenue model / strategy must be operational and understandable.
• In 1999 there were 308 tech IPO's, in 2010 there were 20.
• The profiles of the companies are very different today versus 1999. In 1999 tiny tech companies with no revenue landed investments and went public (and very few of those survived more than a few months). Today, as you can see from the chart above, there are only a few companies and they have revenue, global reach, and massive adoption.
• In 1999, there were lot's of innovative product "ideas" but many never turned into working products. In 2011 we have and continue to see innovative products and innovative business models. In fact business model innovation is a big part of the current high flyer companies.

There are risks today. When a trend like social drives wild, visible and large high profile companies and deals there is always the possibility that what follows those initial few successful companies won't be innovative and instead will try to mimic the previous successes. Because it's a hot trend they might get investment anyway, even without the same potential. Are we heading for another bubble? I don't know. I suppose we could already be in that bubble and not necessarily know, that is one of the traits of a "bubble", it's clear. Some even argue that tech has always been cyclic, run up to the bubble, burst, do over... I don't believe that this course is inevitable though. In fact I don't think we're near the place we were in 1999. There are many innovations and new tech trends like social, mobility, cloud, Internet of things, big data, etc. that are driving change in the enterprise. This change cycle along with the corresponding innovation cycle should continue to drive the industry and I'd expect to see start ups capitalize on this for the foreseeable future. A lot of the new companies have been focused on consumer and BtoC, now I think we'll see a whole new round of BtoB focused start ups as well as large vendors moving to take advantage of these trends.

Tags: bubble, Internet, social, tech trends, VC, IPO, innovation, funding, valuation