Latest Updates: social crm RSS

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  Kate Leggett 06:50:59 pm on June 3, 2010 | 0 | # |
  Tags: CRM, sCRM, service, social crm, Voice of the Customer

  Aligning your social service strategy with your traditional one

  Many of you say you need a “social CRM” strategy. However, much like the evolution of eService as just another way of doing customer service, to be successful in the long run, you should look at social channels as part of your overall service strategy, and make sure that your brand remains consistent across all the communication that you have with your customers. This means that you should look to provide similar experiences on Twitter, as you do on the phone.

  How do you go about determining what social channels you want to engage in? It’s best to take a two-pronged approach that involves both monitoring and moderating.
  

  From company to company, the social channels to monitor vary. Loosely defined, these should be any communities where your customers express emotions and opinions about brands, products and their service experiences – like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter; rating and review sites like Amazon and Yelp; open source communities; and/or popular industry publications and blogs that solicit reader input. Ask your customers where they engage on-line. You can learn a lot about customer perception of your brand, products and services from monitoring these communities. And, you can translate these learnings into, for example product/service capabilities that are better aligned with your customer base or organizational changes to better service your customers. Monitoring activities do have a real ROI.
  

  In addition to monitoring activities, you should also decide what social channels you want to moderate in order to engage with your customer base – like company-sponored forums/blogs. Successes include ComcastCares Twitter profile as a viable customer service channel. Dell’s Idea Storm discussion board helps the company gauge which product ideas are most important and most relevant to their customers. After registering, users are able to add, promote, demote and comment on product innovation ideas.

  Whichever route you choose, you will need to realign your people, processes and technology to ensure that the experience across all your touchpoints – traditional or social, remain consistent and in alignment with your brand.
  
   

• Kate Leggett 08:16:40 pm on December 14, 2009 | 0 | # |
  Tags: CRM, customer service, service experience, social crm, web-self service

  Provide a Service Experience, Not just Customer Service

  We all know that the voice of the customer has disrupted the tight control that companies have on their brand. Bad experiences are easily amplified and heard round the customer community. Think of stories like Dell Hell and Yours is a very bad hotel . The fallout is that 55% of customer don’t want to talk to customer service reps anymore (Forrester, 2008) and 90% of shoppers trust community input more than your company’s input (Neilsen 2009).

  So, what does that mean for customer service? You now need to engage your customers in a collaborative environment, which melds community and company recommendations, and is as transparent as possible to your customer base who demand honesty as they ultimately control the conversation with you.

  It also means that customer service has become increasingly important compared to the sales and marketing pillars of traditional CRM. Customer service has morphed into providing a service experience. Your job now is to do better than to solve customer problems, as they can do this with community input – it is to provide them with an end-to-end experience that keeps them coming back for more. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos defines the customer experience as: “ it includes having the lowest price, having the fastest delivery, having it reliable enough so you don’t have to contact anyone. Then you save customer service for those truly unusual situations.”

  This means that you need to provide your support agents a new set of tools focused on providing a customer experience. Here’s a short-list some of what is needed in this new world

  • Your customer-facing web self-service site must include community content as well as corporate content, and your user base must be able to express their voice on your site.
  • Your search results are social – You let the community dictate important content on your web-self service site.
  • If a user chooses to interact with a customer service agent, your agents must have all the data and knowledge that they need to solve their issue pushed to them at the right point in the resolution cycle.
  • You must extend business process management to customer service so that agents solve issues in a consistent, reproducible way that doesn’t vary from agent to agent.
  • Your agents need to be cognizant of your customer’s emotion and satisfaction with the service process, and react appropriately so that the service experience keeps them loyal.
  • You need to monitor, measure how you do, and use data, including customer feedback to tune your service experience to be aligned with customer demands.

  In what other ways can you evolve customer service  offering into providing an experience?
   
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  Vikas 09:51:54 am on November 10, 2009 | 0 | # |
  Tags: customer experience management, customer relationship management, customer service, evidence-based service, social crm, Vikas Nehru

  Hype or Hyper-Measurement?

  Recently, Seth Godin posted on how we are moving into an era of “hyper-measurement.” As he explains, a journalist being fired because his or her web content isn’t drawing a lot of traffic is not going to be a newsroom novelty for much longer. In a world where, more and more, success can be measured in quantifiable metrics, why wouldn’t a publisher base business decisions on newly available evidence? It just makes sense.

  The customer service industry is no different. As my fellow blogger, Kate Leggett, points out, to truly maximize the value of their contact centers, customer service mangers must take an experimental approach towards service processes.

  For every end-to-end service process they design and deploy, managers must define a testing period during which they play around with different aspects of it and measure results against business objectives. These metrics can then be used to determine the relative effectiveness of the process – what worked and what didn’t – and update the service process, or eliminate it entirely. To ensuring ongoing optimization, no process should ever be viewed as final. Rather, managers must consider each and every service process as a prototype and resign themselves to always retesting and tweaking them.

  Delivering “evidence-based service” in this manner will help consumer-facing companies break bad habits, discover new tricks and cope with the constant shifts going on in their marketplace.

  For instance, a business introduces a new tool that captures and analyzes customer interactions in various community forums – essentially, pooling the collective input of the crowd at given time. The customer service manager applies that insight in real time to change, reprioritize and improve information presented to a customer on the self-help portion of a website or educate agents on a shift in incoming questions (depending on the level of service the company provides). Over time, they begin to see patterns in terms of what information is just chatter and what type of information is important to meeting their business objectives and their customers’ brand expectations. And, the way they use the tool – and incorporate the customer voice – becomes a highly sophisticated and beneficial to their service processes.

  The “hyper-measurement” trend, as Mr. Godin puts it, shouldn’t be ignored. It should be embraced. It offers a way for service departments, as well as publishers, to be more precise and pragmatic with their decision-making – to remain in control and one step ahead of the customer.<

   
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  Allen Bonde 05:31:42 pm on June 24, 2009 | 2 | # |
  Tags: roi, Self-Service, social crm, survey

  Survey Says: CRM spending drops…and shifts to self-service

  
  eVergance recently conducted our latest industry study looking at the state of customer service and support, with a focus on multi-channel adoption and trends, shifting priorities and where organizations continue to invest despite challenging economic conditions. As part of this, we surveyed 29 customer service leaders in the US and Europe, representing a diverse set of large enterprises in the high-tech, financial, telecom, travel and retail sectors. Some highlights:

  • Companies are cutting back, with 3/4 of the survey respondents reporting lower spending on CRM or customer service this year, but perhaps surprisingly more than 20% indicated that the economy has had no impact on their spending plans this year.
  • The economy has also caused 64% of respondents to focus more on self-service, while nearly 90% of leaders surveyed said that they can show business value or at least have some evidence of the ROI for their Web self-service efforts to-date (see chart below).  What are companies who say they can show business value for self-service using for metrics?  Deflection (ah, our old friend), Completion or Conversion rates for customers using SS vs other channels, and Customer Sat are 3 of the ones most frequently mentioned.
  • Despite evidence of lower spending overall, knowledge management, call center hardware, customer analytics, CDI and social CRM/community (in that order) are all areas that were mentioned by at least 1/4 of respondents as areas which may see additional spending this year.  Interestingly, a couple of these areas (analytics and communities) are also on Gartner’s “Five CRM strategies that companies can undertake now” list published back in May.

  

  We’ll admit the sample size for our survey is small, but the data is pretty interesting nonetheless, especially since survey participants were mostly at the Director, VP or higher up in their organization.  The global economic climate has impacted spending for sure, but rather than reductions across the board, it’s apparent that funding is being reallocated and even increased in some customer-facing areas like KM, customer analytics and social CRM.

  How has the economy affected your plans this year?  Is improving your customer experience still a priority, or has cost-savings (at least temporarily) taken center stage?  We’d love to hear your comments.  And if you’d like to get a copy of the Executive Summary of our study results, drop me a line!

   

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