Michael Fauscette

Customer Service, the New Marketing in the Era of the Social Customer

Okay, I'm not the first person to write about this idea, but it has been on my mind lately, so I wanted to share my perspective on what I think is a very important change that is starting to occur for businesses and customers. The social customer is a term that is used quite a lot these days and represents an attitude shift that has spread quickly. Businesses are acknowledging that they must change customer service to meet the expectation that service be offered "when, where and how" the customer wants it and not just in ways that are defined and controlled by the business. Dealing with the social customer by providing them with choice of channels / methods and by having presence online where the customers are, is an imperative that cannot be ignored. The social web has returned power to the customer.

There's more to it than just changing expectations and even the shifts in power though. Connectivity has enabled personalization that rivals the days of main street and the "mom and pop" business model where everybody knew everybody, only now at scale. Online sharing and the subsequent data collection, analysis and use has created an new type of personal experience that customers now expect. There is also a fundamental change in how customers get information and do research on brands / products / services. The social web created a sense of community that facilitates trust relationships that serve as ready sources of information about all sorts of things. No longer do customers go first to sources you control, instead they turn to facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. And it's not just a Business to Consumer (BtoC) proposition either. Business to Business (BtoB) is still, in the end, person to person and falls prey to the same issues. Face it, you don't control the message anymore.  

The other big change is that the recession and continuing economic uncertainty is making people and businesses hyper-aware of how and where they are spending scarce resources. Value is even more important that usual in this environment and because of that, a poor customer experience will turn customers away even faster than before. Higher expectations, loss of control of the message, new technology that enables online connectivity in real time / all the time, growing influence of peer to peer networks and a hyper-focus on value...all of these things add up to customers with extremely low tolerance for mistakes. This new customer looks for conversations and by that, I really mean 2-way communication not broadcast messaging. Screw this up and guess what, often they won't tell you, but they will tell the rest of the world online (and often look for a new source of whatever they used to get from you). 

Good customer experiences are your best marketing today in the world of the social customer. Word of mouth was always an effective marketing strategy but with the social web it takes on new meaning and new power. In this new world, brand advocates can be easier to create but they are also much easier to lose, and have a global megaphone at their disposal.

So what can you do?

1. First, kill the internal silos (yes, I know, easy for me to say. Changing culture is hard, but a very important part of being ready to engage more effectively with your customers)! Collaboration, or getting and keeping all of your employees on a consistent message and  view as well as involving your whole organization in the new customer experience focus is the best recipe for success.

2. Remember (or learn) that conversation is 2-way and not about broadcasting louder across new channels. Put that as the foundation for all of your service efforts (and product design, marketing, sales...). Marketing should become less push and more dialog, in fact the strategy for services, marketing, sales, product development, etc., is really about ask - listen - respond - repeat.

3. Listen and focus on what matters to customers. Don't try to be everything to everybody, it's not possible anyway.

4. Create advocates, which comes from providing positive experiences and using the ask - listen - respond formula. 

5. Leverage the power of community through public social networks and through dedicated brand communities.

On the public social web you have to be where your customers are and you have to listen and respond. You can also create your own communities and create an even richer customer experience. Building and focusing on customer experience creates the best marketing, word of mouth / influence marketing, and that comes, in no small way, from exceptional customer service delivered "when, where and how" the customers chooses.

Tags: service, customer, social, business, socbiz, social web, SCRM

Influence and Business

Last week I was on a vendor briefing call (social media monitoring and response) and the subject of influence and it's use by business came up in the discussion. It started me thinking again about influence and how (or if) businesses could determine, track and make use of influence across a diverse set of enterprise activities. There's been quite a bit of discussion of late on the concept of measuring influence, mostly created by Klout's now infamous algorithm change and the subsequent crashing of many people's influence score. This post is not about that incident, in fact I plan to stay far from that argument, although the incident itself does illustrate an important point in an enterprise context. I'm convinced that an individual's Klout score isn't a good measure of influence for businesses anyway.

Both influence and influencer have been somewhat redefined by the Internet and the social web. I say "somewhat" because the function of influence and its relevance to business really hasn't changed, just the channels, access to channels and the reach of the new channels. I remember an exercise from the late 90's when I had responsibility for customer support at a software vendor, trying to tier our customer base so that we could focus support agents on more "important" or higher priority customers. Now I know some of you are thinking that "all" customers are important but honestly, some are more important to the business than others. It doesn't mean that you don't treat all of them with respect, it just means that you have to prioritize scarce resources. It also may not be about direct revenue from the client. Often in the priority queue, the customer with the largest stick is the one that sits at the top. There are customers that pay you a lot, there are customers that can influence others to pay you a lot, and there are customers that could, if unhappy, convince a lot of prospects to NOT pay you any money. It's all about priorities, that hasn't changed.

In a business today a customer / prospect's influence can be important across many functions. Customer service certainly has for many years, been concerned with influence. To some extent sales also understood that having the "right" reference customers would go a long way towards helping close more business. Marketing understood that influence had the potential to be important, although measuring and making use of the opportunity was usually hard. Of course as more people move online and take advantage of the explosion of "channels" across social media sites and personal blogs, as well as horizontal and specialty social networks, tracking what people are doing and saying is somewhat easier. What to do with the data you collect though, isn't any easier than before. The other side of the coin though, is that online, people have a voice that can rapidly and sometimes unexpectedly get magnified to a degree that was never possible offline. Now of course marketing would love to leverage positive influence for "word of mouth" marketing. With the growth of community based or peer to peer support, customer service has even more reason to be concerned with influence, in fact, any group in the company that wants to use a community (product management, sales, etc.) should be concerned with influence.

Businesses are struggling to varying degrees in dealing effectively with the new empowered customer / prospect. The days of a company controlling its messaging are waning. People turn to their online networks for information, advice, and recommendations instead of using company provided channels. This is the crux to the changing landscape of influence. Online influence is real time, contextual, relative, individualized and variable. Think about what makes a person influential to you. It could be that you have a trust relationship through a social network AND because of that relationship you have learned: 1. that the person is knowledgeable on the subject / content and 2. you personally value that person's opinion and advice. Influence really boils down to this, can the person's (influencer) words / actions / video / etc. get the second person (influenced) to take some action or change some belief. Or in even simpler terms, influence is based on the perception of expertise and trust which are intertwined to create brand.

So if influence is based on the perception of expertise and trust, what creates this perception? Expertise seems simple enough, it is the demonstration of understanding and knowledge on a specific topic over time. It's important to note though, that expertise is not self proclaimed, but is experiential. Trust is also fairly straight forward. Trust comes from a relationship with the influencer. Online trust is a little different though, it can actually be established through the network effect. That is, if A trusts B and B trusts C, then it would be reasonable to believe that A would trust C. But, online trust is much more fragile, any breach (or perception of breach) breaks the trust bond.

Going back to look at the other characteristics, contextual, relative, individualized and variable, you can start to see how they are related to brand (trust and expertise). For example influence is individualized because the person influenced must see the influencer as an expert and must have some existing trust relationship that supports taking action or changing a belief. Influence is contextual because of the nature of expertise, an individual influencer can be very influential on  one topic or subject and not influential at all on another topic. The influencer's impact on a person varies based on the level of the trust relationship and on the level of perceived expertise. This creates degrees of influence directly related to the strength of the influencer's brand. For example think of a simple product review on Amazon. Chances are that none of the reviewers have a specific relationship with you, so trust is fairly low and expertise can only be established by reading the reviewer's words. But if one of the reviewers lays out a case that makes you accept their expertise then the impact of the review can be more influential. But, if you have another more trusted source, say someone in your Facebook network, who offers conflicting advice you are much more likely to act on that sources' advice over the Amazon review, it simply does not have a high enough influence ability to overcome the deeper trust relationship.

From a company perspective online influence can be important but at the same time it is very difficult to establish, particularly out of context. Through social media monitoring tools you can collect lot's of data but using that data to establish influence is complex due to the nature of influence and how / who it impacts. This is even more difficult if you consider that there are differing types of influence. A person may have broad "influence" in a non-specific horizontal way, say by having lot's of followers or friends, but that type of influence most likely isn't enough to get the individual that the business is targeting to take action or change a belief. What a business needs is the influencer in the context of what outcome the business is trying to influence.

This doesn't mean that broad, popular, horizontal influencers aren't useful and important though. For example, if I have a charity event I certainly want to get to this type of influencer. This less specific type of effort to reach the broad population requires reach, amplification, a large network and a public brand that carries enough trust to move a significant number of people to action. Interestingly enough, I think this type of influence is much easier to establish and measure. It is about broad reach, resonance and a "big" public persona brand. That can equate to followers, friends and other measurable things like how often a message from them is repeated.

The problem comes though, I believe in the more specific business application of influence. The type of influence that is "measurable" by the methods that work for the broad public type of influence, isn't specific enough, isn't contextual, isn't individualized and isn't particularly relevant to the individual that you are trying to influence. Maybe a couple of examples would help here. Let's take a local eatery for example. For restaurants local influence, specific to the city and even the neighborhood is important. Certainly it's possible that a local food critic (or even a national food critic) could be an important influencer and that person might be surfaced through looking for somewhat broader public influence, but it is still very specific to the market and to the context, in this case food. But what might be even more important could be a reviewer on Yelp. I have a friend in San Francisco who isn't on Twitter, has less than 100 friends on Facebook, doesn't use FourSquare, Google+, Tumbler, Instagram, Flickr or even post on YouTube. If she has a Klout score it would be tiny, but, she has a huge following on Yelp. In fact, she is exactly the type of influencer that a local eating establishment would want, but could never be surfaced from some broad measurement of public social media presence.

Take a second example, let's say in the enterprise software world. The brands are often global or at least national so you might think that broad public influence might be desirable but the problem comes down to expertise and context again. For a complex product expertise is even more important. It's possible of course, for an influencer in enterprise SW to build a good following on Twitter or LinkedIn, but more likely you'd want to look beyond those channels to blogs. The deeper content format could quickly surface influencers and establish their expertise (or lack of expertise) based on the content. The weight of the social channel in the influence calculation is critical and specific to each industry and business.

Can enterprise influence be measured successfully and in a way that is relevant to the enterprise? The variable nature of influence by business specifics and context make this much harder. I do believe that this type of influence, that is, relevant to businesses, can be established through monitoring and measurement, but, not through non-specific algorithms. The problem with this approach is that it can't be weighted to the business specifics, it can't be adjusted to look at the specific business requirements. In fact, algorithms that are not transparent and customizable to the business are not really useful for business use cases. It might be interesting to stack rank public social presence, but unless you can consistently apply that to your business context, it's not "enterprise ready". If it has any variability that isn't completely understood and predictable by the business, it's too great a risk IMO to be used by a business. Community platforms have already started down the path of contextual influence measurement. Community platform vendor Lithium Technologies, for example, has integrated this type of tool into the platform so that influence specific to the individual community can be monitored, measured and become actionable to the community manager. Social media monitoring tools like Medallia, Attensity, Radian6 and others are moving down the path of customizable influence measurement and a response system to make use of the data.  This is an emerging area of interest from an enterprise perspective, and there's quite a lot left to sort out when it comes to online influence and how a business might monitor, measure and take action on the information.

Tags: SMM, social, influence, Klout, measurement, data, socialytics

Evolution of the User Interface

I've used Siri for 3ish weeks now and this morning, as I was "talking to" my iPhone, I was thinking about the way we interact with computing devices and how much that has changed in only a few years. I remember clearly my reaction to the scene in the 1986 Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home that's shown in the pic, with Scotty trying to talk to the mouse on an Apple Mac and of course finding earth of the past so primitive as to need keyboards. To the crew of the Starship Enterprise talking to computers was simply the way you interacted with them. That was, of course, very far in the future and even though I'd seen it on the show for years, not really that believable at the time.

That was then and this is now, as they say. Over the last 100 years or so, as the general purpose computing device has evolved, the bulk of the time the user interface was some form of text, most often captured on a punch card. Over the last 40+ years we have moved through several advances in the trip from text to graphics and the pervasive use of the mouse. The last 10 or so years though, have seen a tremendous increase in the rate of change in the ways that users use computers. While you could argue that the technology was a little older than 10 years, the general use of touch, motion and sound / voice really has blossomed in that short time.

Touch (and more importantly multi-touch) as an interface gained popularity with Apple's iPhone / iPod Touch / iPad, which only came on the scene a little over 4 years ago. Until then, there were no credible touch driven consumer devices in wide distribution. Motion is similar, with the initial developments in motion technology tied to the video gaming market. Nintendo  Wii was the first generation of this technology, launching for the Christmas buying season of 2006. Microsoft provided the next generation of motion interfaces with it's Kinect technology last year, which uses a natural user interface methodology. That technology will shortly move beyond the gaming world, as Microsoft released a non-commercial software development kit (SDK) a few months ago and is planning on releasing the commercial SDK shortly. This will allow 3rd party developers to write Kinect apps outside of the gaming space. Moving beyond the Xbox platform, Kinect will support the Windows OS in early 2012. I should add that Kinect also supports some basic voice commands.

Next we move to audio interfaces. Voice recognition itself isn't new of course, but only in the last few years has the technology gotten to the point that it was reasonably reliable. The advances on the recognition side have been matched on the processing side with dramatic improvements in the ability to process speech and take subsequent action. IBM's Watson and the famous Jeopardy showdown earlier this year is a great example of what can happen on the high end of computing. Now Watson is a great story and shows what potential voice really has, but Watson consists of 90 high end servers and hundreds of custom algorithms...makes for excellent TV but not something I plan on having in my home anytime soon. To me, the real innovation comes when I can carry Watson-like capabilities in my pocket (and at a price I could actually afford). That's exactly what Siri is proving to be (and I think Scotty would be proud to talk into an iPhone). To be fair though, Siri isn't perfect but I have to say it's (or should I say she's) pretty impressive. Just the other day I safely carried on an almost flawless SMS conversation for over an hour while driving using Siri and a headset. Siri reads the SMS "out loud" and I respond and send, all by voice. The only key stroke required is holding down the home button. Compare that to my attempts to voice dial with the 1st generation iPhone (which was only 2007) and we've come a long way in voice recognition (I say attempts BTW, because I was never able to successfully voice dial...which was very frustrating when the Apple commercial showed a person with a heavy British accent demonstrating the feature...although, maybe that was the problem). 

The first observation about all of this change in user interface capabilities is related to change itself. Technology change tends to be exponential but as observers we tend to think of and predict change at it's current pace, which leads us to think of linear change and underestimate the impact of change by quite a bit. This UI story is a great example of that. Text was the method for probably 80 years and the remaining four advances in 20 years, but the bulk of that advance happened in the last 4-5 years. Makes you wonder what might come out of this accelerated rate of change over the next few years.

I think the real advances come from combining touch / motion and voice into this new user interface paradigm. Siri starts to get to the point of action-reaction, which opens up all sorts of possibilities. Consider that this is all in a mobile package that is reasonably affordable and it's even more impressive. The opportunity and most likely the next advance is to take the back end ability for the device to interpret what it's instructed to find / do, and then take action; and add in motion and touch (which the iPhone certainly does already). Expanding this from device to the software and taking it to other form factors could prove interesting in the enterprise as well. I also didn't yet mention organic user interface research which adds display technology to the human-computer interface but that also has some promising developments like displays that become the input device and/or have the capability to take on alternate shapes. Okay, I have to finish up now, Siri just reminded me I have a previous appointment.

Tags: voice, UI, organic UI, HCI, iPhone, Siri, touch, motion, Kinect, text, graphics