You might think, after reviewing the ecosystem in Chapter 4, that your starting point in creating a social presence is obvious: You just need to decide where to engage and what technologies to employ. In fact, where and what can come only after you consider two other key questions: why and who. Why is your organization undertaking social efforts? With whom in your base of customers and prospects will you engage, and who within your organization will be involved in or affected as a result of this process? Knowing why and who provides the basis for the where and the what, enabling you to build a social technology plan for success.

Chapter contents:

• Three reasons for social customer experience
• Prioritization: getting to the conversations that matter
• Social technology and decision support

Three Reasons for Social Customer Experience

There are many reasons why organizations undertake social efforts. Certainly not least among them is that customer behavior has changed; customers are themselves forcing many organizations to move onto the Social Web. Customers increasingly insist on engaging on social channels. But in an era of shrinking margins and competing priorities, that may not be enough. Getting the organization behind a social customer experience effort will take more than just saying “the customer wants it.” And that’s good, because more specific goals will better equip you to measure success and justify investment going forward. So let’s get more specific.

In general, there are only three reasons any organization invests in social customer experience:

• To sell something (to increase revenue)
• To save something (to reduce expenses)
• To learn something (to innovate faster)

That’s it. It’s that simple. Let’s look at each in detail.

Selling with Social Channels

Sales and marketing may be the most common reasons organizations get involved in social channels today. The ways in which social technologies support sales and marketing are more varied than you might think.

First, consider social channels as a means of acquiring new customers—what are sometimes called top-of-the-funnel strategies. This is the first pillar of a social sales and marketing strategy. Remember Table 4-1? The fact that outposts like Facebook, Twitter, and others have gained hundreds of millions of members has led marketers to view them as attractive channels for delivering offers and other marketing messages to both customers and prospects. One expression of this sentiment is the ever-increasing use of Facebook as a channel for delivering coupons. In September 2013, blogger Craig Smith scanned Facebook for offers from U.S. retailers and restaurants and found more than 150 companies—from Ace Hardware to Ziploc—offering coupons.

While coupons are a tried and true way to attract new customers, they are hardly the most creative use of the world’s first ubiquitous, many-to-many, real-time, multimedia communication medium. More creative are efforts that tap the viral potential of social networks, like Burger King’s Whopper Freakout campaign in 2008 or the Man Your Man Could Smell Like from Old Spice in 2010. With humor and wit, these efforts captured the attention of millions of viewers both online and on television, with the online audience driven largely through individuals sharing their favorite video from the series on social networks.

Don’t underestimate the usefulness of basic techniques, like coupons, adapted for social media. Producing a video that receives wide attention through sharing—aka a viral video—takes a bit of genius, a fact often missed by those who aspire to success through virality. Even in the social era, genius is in short supply. And, with all their creativity, viral ads are still ads and coupons are still coupons, both imports of traditional marketing methods to the Social Web. Be sure you balance your efforts and take full advantage of all of the tools in your marketing toolbox.

You can expect top-of-the-funnel efforts to continue to be a focus. The message here is that these strategies need to be part of your social customer experience strategy but cannot be all of your strategy. In fact, recent experience shows that equally powerful impacts can come from engaging with customers in activities that go beyond deal-hunting and video sharing.

Organizations are increasingly looking at how the behaviors of customers who engage in their social channels differ from those who do not. Invariably, they find that social customers buy more, buy more often, and remain customers longer than customers who don’t use social channels. When companies can quantify that difference, the impact of engaging each additional customer in social channels is clear. For example, if you know that a social customer spends 20 percent more than a non-social customer on average, then driving adoption in social channels also drives spend. We’ll look at some specific cases and metrics in Chapter 6, “Social Analytics, Metrics, and Measurement,” a discussion that will lead to an important second pillar of marketing and sales: ROI related to the use of social technology.

In addition to ROI, important pillars for social selling include loyalty and satisfaction. Many organizations know the economic value that a single percentage point increase in customer satisfaction or single point on the Net Promoter Score scale represents in terms of future revenue. Those organizations look to social customer experience to contribute that future revenue, and they use long-term measures—combined with near-term KPIs (key performance indicators)—to keep on track. In other cases, for example, products or services sold on a subscription basis, shorter or repeating sales cycles mean that measuring loyalty is more direct. Wonder why cable operators and telecommunication companies are so active in social? Now you know.

In summary, if the answer to “why” for your organization is to more effectively market and sell, think about which of these pillars—ROI, loyalty, or satisfaction—is most important or the easiest to impact by social efforts. Use that insight as the starting point and then expand as you prove your case.

Save with Social

Want to know the biggest secret in social media as it’s applied to business? The majority of the organizations that have adopted social technology and can prove a positive ROI are using social technologies not to drive sales but to reduce costs. In a very simple sense, a business can improve its margin either by increasing revenue while holding costs constant or by reducing expenses while holding sales constant. Companies often use cost savings to justify spending on social programs: They know that such programs can have a broad and deep impact on the business, and they know that they can measure it directly. Cost savings are often easier to quantify—providing a clearer path to dollars—than other kinds of return on social technology investments.

When considering the use of social technology for cost reduction, one of the immediate differentiators is where this technology is applied. Sales and marketing tend to focus on off-domain channels, offering campaigns built around coupons on Facebook or promoted offers on Twitter that might be run at a lower cost as compared to a traditional channel like a newspaper. But on-domain cost savings can also be significant. Support communities, where customers directly help other customers, are one example of cost reduction achieved through social technology.

Like sales and marketing, a savings strategy has pillars. The first pillar is traffic generation. Most companies spend a lot of money trying to build awareness, the first step in the marketing purchase funnel. Often, this means attracting people to your off-domain social outposts and then converting that traffic into on-domain visits and orders. Your website is typically where people learn about the details (beyond the ad) in your offerings, request a sales contact, or make purchases. So how do you do this?

It’s no secret that for most companies, a majority of website traffic comes not from ads or affiliate sites or partners but rather from search engines. To see just how fundamental search has become, think about how you actually visit most websites: Using the search bar, what Google Chrome users recognize as the anywhere bar, you use a search engine even when you know or could easily guess the web address you’re seeking! Recognizing this, organizations collectively spend billions every year on search engine marketing programs like Google’s AdWords. An entire discipline has grown up around managing and measuring search engine marketing spend, and it’s an important part of being in business today.

Search engine marketing isn’t going anywhere—except perhaps up in cost and volume. So organizations have developed effective alternatives to bring in traffic: robust social content is often considered to be “search gold.” Search engines give preference to social content, because it changes frequently (it’s fresh) and because lots of people reference and link to it (it’s authoritative.). Here’s the insight:

To keep the promise that search engines make to those who use them—delivering the most complete and current information on the Web—search engines must index social sites continuously. And no matter how many people you have developing content for your website, your customers can do more, and can do it faster.

The benefits of social technology—and in particular communities, support forums, and similar applications—are substantial. Consider HP, Adidas, or Sephora, whose customer communities typically receive 60–70 percent of their total traffic from search engines. In other industries, too, like entertainment, the social areas of the website attract more traffic than all the other areas combined. Across most industries, organic search developed as a result of on-domain community sites is sufficiently powerful that these communities are designed as gateways to relevant content and features located elsewhere on the site. The result is both a revenue opportunity and a savings opportunity, with many companies actively trading some of their search engine marketing budget for investments in social customer experience applications because it accomplishes the same goals at a lower cost.

The second pillar of a savings strategy is cost savings in customer care and support. The support communities mentioned earlier aren’t just a better, more social experience for customers. They are typically less expensive ways of providing support. Think about it: When a customer solves another customer’s problem, it costs less than having a customer service agent do it. Because customers are adopting social channels in such large volumes, the savings can be massive. Social support applies to both peer-to-peer support—customers answering other customers’ questions—and support by social agents, whose organizational role is similar to that of agents who answer customer calls. Whether peer-to-peer or agent/expert focused, social tools can help companies respond faster and more efficiently.

There’s another reason why social support is so common: It’s the easiest channel for customers to use. Historically, phone-based customer care has been the primary place for customer interaction with a company. In many organizations the support team effectively owns the relationship with customers, owing to the frequency and intimacy of support processes. So, an opportunity exists to connect marketing and customer care through the support process. The result is an additional path to engagement that is perceived as easier by customers. What’s not to love about that?

The third pillar in a savings strategy consists of cost savings that exist in other functions where customers are willing to engage and help out. The most common example is market research. Historically, when companies wanted to learn what customers thought, they hired an agency to convene a focus group, often an expensive and time-consuming undertaking. Worse, the pure logistics (to say nothing of the expense) limits the size and often requires additional analysis, delaying results by days or weeks. By contrast, social channels provide a way for companies to get real-time information on customer experiences and opinions and to open these sessions to as many customers as are interested in participating. The cost of doing so can be much less, and the results can be considered in real time. The time-tested best practice of customer research hasn’t gone away; the methods, however, have changed to take advantage of technology and customers’ inherent desire to socialize.

Learn with Social

Learning may sound like a soft benefit, one of those labeled indirect or hard to quantify in ROI models. In fact, it’s the most powerful benefit of all, because it helps transform the organization in ways that enable it to thrive in the future. Learning, as used here, actually contains two elements: listening and collaborating. Listening is the process by which information is gathered, analyzed, and put in the right form and locations so that it can be acted upon. Collaboration is the process of acting on what you hear; typically, in social efforts, it involves cooperative work by multiple parties inside and outside the walls of your organization.

Too often, what starts as an obvious great idea—tapping social technology to enhance your business—gets hung up in the processes of organizational change, of breaking down silos, and of appropriately sharing and exposing information quickly and widely. It is critically important not to repeat the business mantra that goes “Our customers are at the center of everything we do” while operating largely without their input and without formally integrating their experiences, thoughts, and ideas into your internal business processes.

The key to combining listening data—posts pulled from selected off-domain social networks—with the rich on-domain conversations found in your support forums and similar social applications is that all of this needs to be connected to your business strategy and the processes that surround it. Given the hyper-transparency of the Social Web, what you do (in practice) needs to be absolutely aligned with what you claim.

For example, an outbound marketing message may claim your product has been “created for working mothers like you!” If it also turns out that your firm does not equitably promote women within the workplace, this contradiction will inevitably become known, very likely being spread through social channels. The need for aligning actions with claims raises the requirements for listening and incorporating customer feedback into your business processes. Without a strategic basis for participation, any involvement in the Social Web will be limited to listening (but not responding) and using platforms such as Twitter or Facebook for talking (as opposed to participating). Neither of these is optimal, and neither will result in the desired business outcomes.

The Innovation Cycle

The combination of social-media-based marketing and applying social technology to engage customers is powerful. Connecting customer intelligence and what is learned through active listening deeply into your business results in a customer-driven innovation cycle and in creating an organization that consistently delivers on what it claims to stand for.

The use of social technologies to create a presence for your brand on the Social Web—whether though a smart application that a community finds useful or a space of your own built around your customers’ needs—creates a durable, relevant connection to the Social Web. On-domain tools like ideation platforms and support communities encourage customers to provide insights, thoughts, and ideas on how you can better serve them. This is precisely the information you need to succeed over the long term.

What all of this adds up to is a new view of the customer in the context of engagement. Figure 5-1 offers a view of the innovation cycle, co-developed with Kaliza CEO and Dave's 2020 Social colleague Kaushal Sarda, that combines the engagement processes of social customer experience management. The primary loop—Learn, Abstract, Do, Offer—provides a framework for engagement that is based on an understanding of the endpoint use or application of the product, service, or cause-related program that you deliver. By closing the loop—by iterating—you set up a continuous cycle that drives long-term innovation through listening and collaboration.

Social technology and the disciplines of social CRM and social customer experience management sit at the core of this cycle. It is repeated innovation—not one-off hits—that drives success. The Apple iPod is a great example. The first models launched in the early 2000s bear only passing resemblance to the wide range of devices that compose the iDevice family of Apple products now available.

The relationship between innovation and social engagement is directly applicable to building your social presence. This relationship spans the stages of learning, applying the ideas gained to design, and then iterating to steadily improve (sometimes in radical steps) what is offered to customers or cause-related constituents in the marketplace. This is what makes social customer experience management different from traditional approaches to customer and market development. It’s the addition of customer-powered collaborative experiences that enhance the value of customer engagement. Without collaboration, engagement quickly devolves to a more standard company-driven marketing and business development effort.

It is important to understand the requirement for collaboration in creating effective channels for engagement. It’s easy to fall into the trap of “this is the same as what we’ve been doing, only now our customers are talking too.” The problem with this kind of thinking is not that there aren’t analogies to existing processes—there are, just as there would be in any business process evolution. Rather, it’s because “the same as” is exactly the excuse used to avoid substantive change inside your firm or organization, an excuse that inertial forces within your firm will desperately seek. Does this sound like an overstatement? It’s not. As with any other aspect of business transformation, moving toward a social mindset with the customer at the center involves fundamental process change and recognition of the need for collaboration across many fronts. This may be different from what you’ve been doing, and it is important to set expectations of fundamental change early on.

Getting your social customer experience strategy right, and successfully applying it to your business, depends more on creating an internal culture around change, around collaborative workflow, and around processes like ideation than on implementing any particular toolset. In our social media workshops, for example, we don’t begin with social media tools: we end with them. The workshops begin with an explanation of business objectives and customers and the dynamics of the Social Web. With such an understanding in place, it’s easy to choose the particular tools that are most likely to produce the desired results. Starting from the point of view of tools would result in an endless chasing of me-too ideas. Sometimes this approach works, fair enough, but more often it leads to #FAIL.

Adoption of technology follows the same rules; social technology may impact management and decision-making, for example. Product and service innovation, where ideas become reality, is certainly impacted. So are customer-support processes, where the post-purchase issues that inevitably occur are sorted out. The ripple will touch your HR department, your supply chain, and your delivery network. You get the idea.

When choosing a social technology, start with your business, your culture, and your internal processes to create a strategy for an overall platform that provides connections to your customers, supports the formal processes of active listening, and encourages your customers to share their ideas, based on their experience with your product or service, about how they’d like to see your business evolve.

We hope this discussion on the whys of social customer experience helps you see the full spectrum of opportunities companies pursue when they undertake social efforts. With luck, it also helps you recognize that you can’t do everything; success is a matter of focusing on the most immediate, practical, and relevant goals for your business. In other words, it requires prioritization.

Prioritization: Getting to the Conversations That Matter

The prior section dealt with why—selling, saving, and learning—so now it’s on to who. Too many times this fundamental question doesn’t get asked or gets asked in a cursory, almost rhetorical way: “‘Who’ is our customer—that’s who! That’s why it’s called social customer experience!” In practice, a detailed understanding of “who” matters. “Who” isn’t an easy question, nor is it even a single question.

As a starting point, think about who in two ways:

• Members: Who is the target audience, or audiences, for your social channels?
• Makers: Who within your organization will need to be involved, in any way, to make your investment in and use of social channels successful?

The following sections cover members and makers.

Members

Who are the people you want to engage with in your social channels? You may think of channels as representing different audiences—your Facebook audience, your Twitter audience, your website audience, and so forth. While it may seem logical, viewing “who” solely by channel leads to challenges with diversity and overlap: with the fact that not everyone on Facebook is the same, and many people who use Facebook also use Google+, Twitter, and other social channels. Your largest channels are likely to be very diverse. They’ll include long-time customers and new prospects; highly profitable customers and bargain hunters; those who buy your most popular products but also those using niche products, or older models, or even products you no longer make.

At the same time, while the channel won’t decide for you, you still need to decide for yourself: With whom do I want to engage and cultivate a relationship? Who can I influence, and who can influence others? Which parts of my business are ready to engage socially, and which need more time? Which parts of my customer base are ready to engage in the ways that will support my goals?

Almost every action you take in social channels will be more relevant to some than others. Think of this as an opportunity rather than a constraint; you get to shape your audience by what you offer them.

Think back on the coupon examples. Coupon mavens are legion, and a coupon offer is likely to attract new customers, for sure. But some of these customers are there for the coupon, and when the coupon is gone, they’ll be gone too. Even those you keep may be difficult to migrate to more expensive and profitable products (you’ve effectively taught them that “price” is “35 percent off”), preferring to stick to the bargains. Meanwhile, the social channel you use for coupons may turn away those in search of the latest news on new products and new ways to interact with your brand.

The same applies to engagement on your website. Many early adopters of social technology listened to the gurus who told them that a real community was a place where customers could talk about anything they wanted—not just topics related to your products or brand experience. So they created off-topic forums on their website and got what they asked for: conversations that were far afield from the goals of the business or even most customers. Eventually, executives asked, “why are people talking about puppies on our travel website?”

Co-author Joe Cothrel’s experience with a large U.S. insurance company was typical. Customers, they said, will decide what to discuss. The community was structured not by subject but by customer segment—recent grad, empty nesters, new parents, and so forth. The company knew that different people had different insurance needs at different times of life, true enough, but they didn’t reflect on needs that these members, across life-stage segments, had in common: the need for security, compliance with the law, economics and affordability, and more.

As a result, the community quickly wandered away from business objectives and toward an unstructured collection of random conversations. A few hours after community launch, for example, a long conversation developed on the subject of potty training. The company quickly understood where this would lead and rightfully concluded that a little guidance would be a good thing.

Most companies have an engaged audience around their brand or products; many have more than one. When launching social effort, think about whom you want to engage, and then shape your content and activities and offers accordingly, all within the context of your business objectives.

It’s important when thinking about target audiences to keep in mind your business objectives and the common, shared needs of your customers that relate to those objectives. The most successful social efforts begin with an addressable audience with a common bond or need. An addressable audience is an audience that already engages with you on a regular basis, preferably online. They visit your website or your Facebook page. They subscribe to your email newsletter. In some way, they have signaled their interest in what you offer. In the process, they have also given you a way to reach them—an address.

A successful social effort will ultimately attract a larger, unaddressed audience, but it’s important to begin with those you can easily engage. Take the insurance company as an example: They have a much better chance of engaging with new parents than with recent graduates, since most people don’t consider insurance products—and therefore engage with insurance companies—until they have children. For this company, new parents would readily self-select and form an addressed audience. Other forms of mass-reach campaigns might then be used to attract unaddressed recent grads.

A final key point on customers and conversations: For most companies, any channel to the public will attract two kinds of conversation: feedback (including complaints) and requests for service and support. It doesn’t matter how clear you are about the purpose of the channel; those topics will arise. That doesn’t mean you should morph every channel into a customer service channel, but you must have a plan for addressing those requests successfully. Often it’s a simple escalation to a more appropriate channel.

Makers

To ensure a great social customer experience, someone has to create that experience. As you learned in Chapter 1, “Social Media and Customer Engagement,” this responsibility does not rest solely within the social team. Nor can it rest with the digital team or even with the customer care team. A great social customer experience is the product of a great business.

Listening to the conversations in your marketplace is the starting point in becoming a great business. The application of more rigorous analytics to these conversations yields clues as to how an organization might use this input to improve a product or service. It also reveals why the highly recommended cross-functional work team approach to managing the Social Web is so essential.

The basic process of listening—whether using a marketing-style dashboard offering like Salesforce’s Radian6 or your own informal methods built around search and the underlying social networking tools themselves—is an intuitively sensible starting point. One caution, though: While listening can provide anecdotal clues as to what your customers do and don’t appreciate about your brand, product, or service, at some point you’ll need to move to customer engagement. Why?

Unless you make it known otherwise, no one knows you’re listening except you—so that makes it a safe starting point. However, unless you are also responding in a meaningful way, your customers and other stakeholders will almost surely recognize that you are only listening. If you’ve ever hollered for help in an empty room, you know how obvious it is—and what it feels like—when no one responds. Even worse, customers who are nearby—in the social sense, meaning part of the conversation or closely connected to the person(s) at the center of it—will also notice your lack of response. Given a comment that warrants attention, they will likely join in and amplify it and will themselves draw a similarly negative conclusion if there is no substantive response from your firm or organization.

To be fair, a great use of listening at the start of your social media capability development is to bring your organization up to speed on what people are saying about your brand, product, or service. Use the listening tools to do this before you actively engage your customers through social technologies so that you can develop an effective engagement strategy. This will help you build the internal constituency that you’ll ultimately need. But remember: Ultimately, not responding sends a message to your customers. Plan to participate not too long after you’ve started listening.

Workflow and Prioritization

If you’ve ever looked at conversational data pulled from the Social Web—perhaps you’ve tried one or more of the basic listening tools—you’re no doubt thinking “Sounds great, but who’s going to filter through all of this?” If you have a small brand or you’re in an industry that isn’t talked about a lot, you may have relatively few conversations that are of interest to you or require your attention, so a basic listening tool with some ability to respond may be sufficient. If you’re Coke or Boeing or Bank of America, and in particular if your product has complex or frequent service needs or your industry finds itself in the news currently on a regular basis, you’ll likely find yourself facing thousands of conversations daily.

To get an idea of just how seriously businesses are taking social analytics, use Google to search for “social media mission control.” These are becoming central to the social customer experience management challenge and as such are a solid testament to just how important social analytics and understanding what is happening on the Social Web have become.

And there’s a catch to all of this free data. For well-known brands or cause-related groups, and increasingly for many smaller brands and organizations, the amount of data can be overwhelming. Someone has to review this data, filter it, and then act on it! Very likely that means creating a social team that is staffed and run more like your call center than your marketing or PR team: productivity measures, SLAs, the whole nine yards. As you begin to plan your social customer experience strategy, think through the requirements for an engagement platform that make it easy to prioritize and address the conversations that are important to you so that you can respond efficiently.

Just as a social analytics dashboard will save you work by automatically displaying selected KPIs related to your handling of conversations in an organized and revealing manner, a proper social customer experience platform will automatically route customer conversations to the specific departments or service teams where they can be acted upon. Automated routing and prioritization based on your business rules is essential in efficiently responding to conversational data. Advanced capabilities—routing, prioritization, workflow—mark the transition from listening to engagement. Figure 5-2 shows schematically how all of this fits together, around a typical conversation.

Active Listening

Active listening, a term coined by Rohit Bhargava, means integrating what is being talked about outside of your organization with the processes inside your organization that are driving those conversations. In other words, it means listening intently enough that you actually understand not only what is being said but how and why it came about, and formulating at least a basic idea of what you will do next because of it. The implication here is deeper than what social media marketing would typically consider. The ensuing analysis and response will more often than not involve the entire organization or the better part of it.

Consider the case of Freshbooks, a small-business billing and time-tracking service. Freshbooks makes a practice of paying attention to its customers, including what they are saying on Twitter. One post in particular caught their attention: Freshbooks customer Michelle Wolverton had been stood up on a date. Freshbooks’ response, shown in Figure 5-3, taken from social media pro Erica O’Grady’s series on using Twitter in business, got right to the point: “We would never stand you up.” But then they did one better: Michelle is a Freshbooks customer, so Freshbooks sent Michelle fresh flowers. The result is near-legend status on the Web. Google it.

The point of the Freshbooks example is this: Listening alone didn’t win Freshbooks praise. Instead, there was a process inside Freshbooks—at an operational level—that flexibly provided for an appropriate response to customer conversations. It is the combination of listening, understanding customers, and enabling the organization to respond effectively and in a talkworthy manner that is really at the heart of the Freshbooks example.

One may argue that Freshbooks is a small business or that if they sent flowers to everyone, they’d be out of business. The counter to the first objection is that plenty of small businesses could not have done this even if they had wanted to. Freshbooks actually did it and in a timely manner. Freshbooks’ internal process—not their marketing campaigns—facilitated their talkworthy response. The counter to the second point is they only have to do it once in a while to advance in the eyes (and hearts) of many of their customers. There is no expectation that every Freshbooks customer will get flowers. Instead, there is an expectation that Freshbooks consistently recognizes and cares about its customers. Freshbooks is free to express this in any way it wants, whenever it chooses. Consider the similar practices at Zappos: They’ve built a billion-dollar business by doing things that were sometimes more expensive—free shipping in both directions and occasionally even overnight shipping upgrades—“just because.” Creating customer delight is a proven business builder.

Touchpoint Analysis

Touchpoints are a passion for Dave. As a product manager, he was immediately drawn to the simple reality that everything he did in terms of product design came down to one customer moment. That moment is, of course, the one when a customer uses and experiences some aspect of the product you’ve designed or brought to market. That moment, and only that moment, is the single truth that exists from the customer’s perspective: what happens when your customer plugs it in, turns it on, calls with a question, or shifts it into drive.

These points of intersection between the customer’s world and the brand, product, or service are touchpoints. They include marketing touchpoints—a commercial that someone sees on TV that elicits an emotional response (as a dad, Dave still gets happy tears when he sees the original Sea World spots created at GSD&M)—as well as operational touchpoints, such as the feeling you get walking into a Whole Foods Market.

Touchpoint analysis is often presented from a marketing perspective but is applicable nonetheless across the organization and in particular to customer care. The key to applying this analytical methodology lies in understanding how your firm or business operates and in knowing what your customers consider important and talkworthy.

The combination of talkworthiness and importance comes about because conversations don’t happen when no one cares to start them. Recognize here that some aspects of any product or service may not be talkworthy: Customers may not recognize or attribute significance to them, but they are still required by law or regulatory rule, for example. But for the aspects of your product or service that are both important and talkworthy, touchpoint analysis provides a method to analyze and prioritize how you go about applying what you learn on the Social Web to building your business.

Look more deeply into touchpoint analysis. Dave’s airline experience that we opened the book with and his experiences at the Bengaluru International Airport in Bangalore, India, are great examples of touchpoints done right. Add to that the Freshbooks example and the general customer delight practices at Zappos. It’s important to understand that across these very different businesses—of very different sizes and operating environments—the same basic practice exists: an emphasis on creating specific, tangible moments of delight that customers are very likely to talk about.

In the discipline of touchpoint analysis, we encourage plotting the defining attributes of important touchpoints—perceived performance and evident talkworthiness—against each other. The resulting plot will show you quickly where to focus. Figure 5-4 visualizes this concept.

In the case of Freshbooks, they sent flowers—$50 and change—to a customer who may spend $500 on Freshbooks services. In the case of Zappos, they provide free shipping—maybe $10 plus an occasional upgrade (at a cost of perhaps $20) for customers with an average purchase of $100 to $200. In the case of United Airlines, change fees and fare differences that may have totaled $1,000 or more were waived for a customer who had spent something like 20 times that with United in six months on either side of those events. None of these are trivial decisions, and all require an understanding of business fundamentals: objectives, capabilities, constraints, and similar. Yet each drives—measurably—favorable brand sentiment and purchase consideration.

Consider the return on investment at Freshbooks: Even a conservative valuation of the positive, unpaid media coverage around its “We would never stand you up” response greatly exceeds what it spent. Zappos clearly runs a profitable business, all the while providing branded moments of delight. Because United has won Dave’s loyalty through their acts of consideration, Dave has personally spent—from his own pocket, and not the reimbursed charges paid by his company or clients—more than $1,000 in fare differentials simply because he chooses first to fly with United even in cases where it is not the lowest cost option.

Active listening and engagement combined with a formal discipline like touchpoint analysis inevitably leads to insights into the business processes that drive marketplace conversations. The difficulty that is exposed, first with social media marketing and then with engagement, is that it becomes quickly apparent that controlling what customers say (as if you could) necessarily gives way to the more informed strategy of controlling the business processes that drive the conversations (which you certainly can).

Creating brand ambassadors—at the heart of methodologies like the Net Promoter Score—is a powerful strategy that is greatly advanced by smart use of social technology to understand precisely how your own business processes create the conversations you see on the Social Web. This is the contemporary challenge of business. It is not something that can be faked and not something that is undertaken lightly. It requires a specific, whole-business strategy and is rooted in active listening, engagement, and rigorous analysis of conversations.

Touchpoint Analysis: Bengaluru International Airport

In the course of traveling, Dave had a remarkable experience at Bengaluru International Airport, located in Bangalore, India: On arrival from New Delhi, his checked bags were waiting for him on the baggage carousel less than 10 minutes after the plane landed. Coincidentally, Dave met Anjana Kher Murray, the airport’s director of public relations, the next day in one of his workshops in Bangalore, where, to her delight, Dave used the baggage example in the workshop during his discussion of touchpoint analysis.

Dave was interested in how the airport had created this experience and was invited to tour the airport. In Figure 5-5, airport CEO Marcel Hungerbuehler (right) explains the baggage process to Dave (center) as Anjana (left) also listens. Dave came away with a detailed understanding of just how his baggage experience happened. As you read through the following interview with Anjana, think about how each specific design consideration translates into a specific customer experience. Whether you do this upfront or you use this type of process in remediation efforts, one thing is clear: The experience of your customers at a given touchpoint is the experience you designed (or failed to design) into the process supporting that touchpoint.

When Dave first asked Anjana about the overall design of the airport, she replied:

We are committed to establishing the Bengaluru International Airport as India’s leading airport in terms of quality and efficiency, to set a benchmark for the future commercial development of Indian airports. One of the pioneering concepts that were kept at the forefront while designing the Bengaluru International Airport was short walkways. This simple, functional terminal building is designed to ensure passengers don’t have to walk till they drop. Short walkways take the passenger quickly from the entrance to the check-in counters and into the aircraft and the reverse for arriving passengers.

Compare that with the endless walks (or runs) as you change planes in some of the airports you frequent. Having been through the Bengaluru International Airport a number of times, I now expect to be through security and comfortably seated within about 10 minutes of having stepped out of the taxicab when leaving the airport and about the same when arriving.

Next, Dave asked Anjana specifically about his baggage experience. What were the design goals, and how were they measured? Here is her reply:

The following elements are critical in maintaining the baggage delivery standards: people, processes, and systems. The prompt delivery of arriving passengers’ baggage is an important element of an enjoyable travel process and the aim is to provide high standards of efficiency in this area on a consistent basis. While the passenger reaches the baggage carrousel faster due to the short walkways, a long wait for the baggage could be disappointing. Upon arrival, it has been observed that passengers take about 6–10 minutes to reach the baggage claim area. Hence, it has been determined that the ideal time for baggage delivery should be between 7–10 minutes.

Important in Anjana’s response is this: Each process is designed in the context of the processes that surround it. Baggage delivery standards are not set in a vacuum but rather in the context of precisely when disembarking passengers expect the bags to be available. This is naturally the point at which the passenger first approaches the baggage carousel. For some arriving flights—for example, with international flights where passengers must clear customs before retrieving bags—the first bags are not placed onto the carousel until those passengers are likely to be heading for the carousel. Recall the touchpoint diagram (Figure 5-4). There is no sense in expending resources to have bags on the carousel before passengers get to it. That incremental money and human effort can be better applied at some other passenger touchpoint.

Finally, Dave got into the operations issues. Designing a process that is supposed to delight customers and actually delighting them are two different things. So, how does the airport actually do it? Again, Anjana’s reply:

A total of seven baggage carousels have been installed at Bengaluru International Airport, three for domestic and two for international arrivals; in addition, two carousels can be used for either domestic or international, depending on the peak hour requirement. Also known as a swing area, it enables flexibility and maximizes utilization of available infrastructure. The baggage delivery time is applicable to arriving passengers and is tracked on a first bag–last bag basis. First bag is defined as the time taken for the first baggage to be placed on the baggage belt. The same goes for the last baggage dropped on the conveyer belt and is defined as last bag.

As with the maintenance of any customer experience, measurement is a key aspect:

In order to ensure prompt baggage delivery on passenger arrival, we follow strict tracking methods: Ground handlers use radio communications, our Trunk Mobile Radio System (TMRS), to alert the airline ground staff on delivery of the first and last bags. This information is then sent to the Airport Operation Command Centre (AOCC) and recorded to monitor the time taken between the aircraft chock-on time (time when the chocks are placed under the aircraft wheels) to baggage delivery.

Periodic verification is done by the terminal team to confirm the baggage drop time for the first and last bag. We have also deployed special technology solutions such as Universal Flight Information Systems (UFIS) that help gather status information for the first and last bag. This system provides an alert if the first bag is not dropped on the conveyer belt within the specified minutes of flight arrival.

By this point it should be obvious that Dave’s bags being ready promptly was no accident and that the multiple processes that contributed to this experience were all operating in parallel, under control of the AOCC. Just how important is the AOCC’s role? Critical, as it turns out. It is the collaborative nerve center for the airport. When an airplane is delayed, for example, or when two flights are departing at the same time, the AOCC—which has airline representatives, ground staff, and other critical control personnel physically seated in the same room—calls for a quick conversation between affected parties. As a result, decisions are made in seconds rather than tens of minutes, and bottlenecks that would otherwise flare into actual flight delays are avoided. Anjana describes the AOCC and its purpose this way:

Our belief is that successful airport operations can only be achieved when all partners of the airport work closely together. This includes the processes and functions that ensure the baggage arrives on the correct belts within the set time frame. Hence, representatives of the Bengaluru International Airport’s partners come together at the country’s first 24/7 Airport Operation Command Centre. This is where crucial daily operations are streamlined for smooth, efficient, and well-coordinated airport functioning. As the nerve center of the entire airport, real-time data is being fed into it from diverse departments and collaborative decision-making process is facilitated.

As you consider your own business or organizational processes that drive customer experiences—and hence the conversations around your brand, product, or service—consider the practices of the Bengaluru International Airport in designing and measuring customer experiences with its facility. It should be clear that they are not simple, that they require a collaborative, cross-functional team to deliver, and that they do in fact produce very favorable conversations as a result.

There is another take-away from cases like the Bengaluru International Airport: Operations and infrastructure projects may not be as glamorous as a splashy Super Bowl ad. However, from your customer’s perspective, how your business or organization actually runs is much more important. The Social Web is, in a sense, the great equalizer between large brands with big budgets and small brands that simply do it better. As a case in point, consider the new Dyson bladeless fans: If someone needs a fan, a standard 3-blade model can be purchased for under $20. But someone wants a bladeless fan that is quieter, works better, and looks better, it’s a short step to a $300 Dyson bladeless. On top of that, the new owner will actually talk about the Dyson because it simply is a better fan, just as Dave has talked to anyone who will listen about the Bengaluru International Airport: It is simply a better airport, and its operations staff and infrastructure are big parts of what makes that so.

Social Technology and Decision Support

Just what is social customer experience management, and how do you build a strategy around it? In Chapter 3, “Social Customer Experience Management,” you saw a quick overview and simple definition: “a way to think about how customers relate to companies and how satisfaction, loyalty and other business benefits really come about.”

In this section, you’ll build on this generalized idea of social customer experience management and see how to create a strategy that is specific to your business. You’ll start with social CRM, since this is the connection between the Social Web and your marketing efforts.

Social CRM includes the following five elements:

• A genuine effort on the part of the firm or organization to understand and consider the point of view of its customers and stakeholders, for whom the business or organization exists.
• A method to understand and map the social graphs, communities, and social applications that connect individuals within your overall audience to each other (rather than to you) and thereby provide an insight as to how you fit into their world.
• The identification of the specific difference between the activities your customers want to take ownership for versus those in which they look to you for guidance, relief, assistance, and similar contributions from you that improve their quality of life. See Table 5-1 for more on this.
• The optimization of your commerce or conversion processes given the role of customers and stakeholders in the conversations that impact conversion.
• The connections—touchpoints—between your activities and those of your customers with the internal business processes that drive the experience that occurs at those touchpoints.

The first column in Table 5-1 shows the basic decisional-support elements associated with social CRM. Take these five elements together and you have the basis for an enterprise-wide implementation of a feedback process based on customer insights gathered through active listening that can be harnessed and used to drive your business. This is what social CRM is all about.

Table 5-1: Social CRM and decisional building blocks

Table 5-1 provides a starting point for understanding and investigating some of the best-in-class tools that can be used to create the quantitative framework for your social customer experience strategy. By linking social analytics (conversation analysis) and source identification (social graph analysis) together with commerce feedback (ratings and reviews), you see an emerging end-to-end view of your commerce pipeline. Taking the further step—through touchpoint analysis or an equivalent process—of tying sources, conversations, and commerce data to the internal business or organizational processes that drive customers’ experiences provides the business insights you need to evolve your business in alignment with your customers.

The Customer Point of View

Social analytics, even in their purely qualitative form, provide powerful insights into the personal views of your customers. Because analytics platforms collect large amounts of data, you can get beyond the anecdotes of focus groups. Because the tools are real time (or near real time) and ongoing, you can also move beyond one-off surveys. Going further, in exchange for your time spent configuring these tools—ranging from a few minutes to hours or days—they’ll organize the relatively unstructured qualitative data into themes or categories so that you can make sense of the conversations. Figure 5-6 shows a typical social analytics dashboard and the way in which its data can be used to understand a conversation.

The insight gained into what customers are talking about—and hence how your product or service experience is perceived in the marketplace by your customers—is useful beyond marketing. This is an important point to note, in that many organizations adopting social-media-based programs place the marketing department at the focal point for this work.

Here’s why this happens and why it’s important to see beyond marketing. Connecting social media with marketing makes sense if you consider the impact of a positive or negative post on sales. Clearly, these outside-of-brand-control comments, helpful or otherwise, keep sales managers and marketers up at night precisely because they cannot control those comments. However, when a business as a whole steps past marketing in its collective view of social customer experience, the conversations become more predictable, making it possible to manage them (in the direction of more favorable).

Looked at across the business or organization, the impact of social media extends far beyond marketing. Looking at the purchase funnel, shown in Figure 5-7, you can see that it’s actually a better bet that social media has relatively little to do with marketing. Beyond creating a platform in which marketers—certain caveats respected—are welcome to participate along with everyone else in appropriate conversations, the origin of the conversations themselves has more to do with operations, HR, and customer care—all of which contribute in a tangible manner to what is talked about on the Social Web—and relatively less to do with marketing per se.

Social customer experience management (SCEM) picks up on this and formally recognizes that the conversations circulating on the Social Web started in, for example, operations but then exerted themselves upon marketing (by encouraging or dissuading sales). Again, this is a very different process from the more or less unidirectional flow of outbound messages associated with traditional campaigns.

This is why SCEM is so powerful and so timely. Connecting customers into the business and understanding their perspective and what attracts them to or repels them from your brand, product, or service is a path to long-term success. SCEM combines the insights of Fred Reichheld’s Net Promoter Score—itself a benchmark metric for long-term success—with quantitative tools and a flexible methodology for defining and evolving your business.

Map the Social Graph

Once you have a handle on what is being said, the next step in designing your social customer experience strategy is to understand who said it. By “who said it” we’re not referencing the personal details of a specific individual, though you may in some cases be able to discern this information from actual customer data or a similar source.

Rather, we’re referring to profile and social graph data, understanding who is talking about you by also understanding the other places where this same person publishes content and with whom it is shared. By seeing a profile in the context of that individual’s social graph, you get a much more complete picture of individual motivation, influence, reach, and connectedness that allows you to prioritize your next steps in reaching out and responding (or not) to that specific individual.

The social graph itself—first covered in Chapter 2, “The Social Customer,” and explored in detail later in Chapter 11, “The Social Graph”—defines the social links that exist between people within social networks. The social graph also includes pointers to the various other places where this individual publishes or otherwise participates. Social CRM and the more focused source identification tools navigate this social graph to create a map so that these relationships and linkages can be understood in a business context. Understanding where someone publishes and participates on the Social Web leads you to the additional relationships that can provide real insight into the conversations you’ve located that specifically reference your brand, product, or service. Figure 5-8 shows a typical map, generated by BuzzStream, for a potential contact based on an initial keyword search.

As an example of how social analytics can be put to use in combination with an understanding of the social graph, consider what happens when you find a post that is favorable to your brand, product, or service on Twitter. Figure 5-9 shows a different example of social graph mapping, this time with the original tweet related to the map of the social graph. Using BuzzStream and a combination of basic search tools—SM2 from Alterian, now part of SDL, and TweetDeck (as a real-time search tool, and now a part of Twitter)—Dave was able to connect with the person who posted the original comment. The result is a new friend and business connection at The Network Hub in Vancouver. What if you could do this with everyone who mattered to your business? With a business-based SCEM strategy and an enterprise engagement platform, you can.

Tools like BuzzStream, TweetDeck, and HootSuite—none of which is break-the-bank expensive—provide simple and straightforward ways to implement these practices in your business or organization. For example, the combination of TweetDeck (available free of charge) and BuzzStream (under $100/month) enables you to actively monitor Twitter for mentions of your brand or a competitor’s and ascertain the social influence of those talking about your products and services. This gives you precisely the data you need to prioritize your actual response effort (which is decidedly not free), given what is being said and who is saying it. This data translates directly into meaningful key performance indicators (KPIs) too: The number of mentions on Twitter, positives versus negatives, average influencer rankings, and mean response time are all examples of KPIs that you can add to your existing dashboards.

Stepping up, engagement platforms from Jive, Lithium Technologies, and others provide robust workflow and the ability to prioritize conversations—and even to route these to specific team members and to track response productivity. This allows you to efficiently connect more deeply with individual customers, be it a one-off interaction around a particularly delightful or upsetting experience or the development of a longer-term relationship with a significantly influential individual within your customer base.

If you’ve ever posted a favorable comment—or any comment, for that matter—about a brand, product, or service, think about what it would feel like if you were personally acknowledged by the brand manager as a result. In general, people post because they have something to say—and because they want to be recognized for having said it. In particular, when people post positive comments they are expressions of appreciation for the experience that led to the post. While a compliment to the person standing next to you is typically answered with a response like “Thank you,” the sad fact is that most brand compliments go unanswered. These are lost opportunities to understand what drove the compliments and create a solid fan based on them.

Integration of the Customer Experience

In the previous section we illustrated how using a simple listening platform (for example, using TweetDeck as a real-time monitor for Twitter in combination with BuzzStream for social graph mapping) can yield valuable KPIs. The step-up in business value from listening/monitoring to engagement and response along with call-center-grade metrics is seen in the usefulness of these tools. They are enablers of business processes that connect what is learned on the Social Web with the way the business operates. This is how your ability to strategically manage the customer experience enables you to manage the customer conversations.

This combination of engagement and response, whether through use of a set of tools like TweetDeck along with BuzzStream or integrated tools like the Lithium Technologies’ social customer experience platform, Sysomos’ Heartbeat or Radian6 with Salesforce.com’s social graph add-ons ought to be a formal part of your business toolset. And why not? Where else do you find customer conversations, served up and categorized, labeled by level of potential influence, all presented in the context of an historical baseline?

The engagement process is depicted in Figure 5-10. The integration with your business or organization occurs first in the routing processes and then in tracking. Of course, the act of responding itself is a business process, but that is really a function of having or not having a listening program and does not in itself imply a social business orientation. To be sure, listening is better than not listening, and listening combined with responding is a solid idea. But to really see the benefit of a social customer experience program within your organization, you have to take a further step.

That further step is reviewing what you discover, tracking the issues—the positives and negatives—and then using this information to inform, change, and innovate inside your organization. This information can be used to develop a response strategy that includes elements of both customer response and internal business response and adaptation.

Here’s a great example, from Abbott Research and Consulting principal Susan Abbott:

I was mixing up some dip yesterday, and observed (for the hundredth time) that when you open the package, you rip off half the instructions.

—Susan Abbott, Customer Crossroads

Susan goes on to note that this is probably an avoidable accident. The barcode, she notes, is safely tucked out of the way. As they say in New York, “not sayin’…just sayin’.” There is clearly an insight here, and trivial as it may seem—or not, depending on how critical those instructions were to successfully making whatever is in the package—these are the kinds of things that are within your control, that impact the customer experience, and that result in conversations.

Looking at Susan’s packaging comment, what would you do if it were your dip and you had control over (or could influence) the packaging design? First, you could create a specific strategy, either as you discovered those comments for the first time (good) or before you began listening at all (better). The best practice here is clearly to have a response strategy in place before you start listening.

An effective response strategy considers several elements, including who will respond, how the associated workflow rules will be set up, and the threshold for response, set by the seriousness of the issue—“tore the instructions” versus “hate tiny print” versus “found something growing inside the sealed package.” Your response strategy should be built around an assessment of timeliness standards—backed up with timely KPIs—and should also include an assessment of the effort required so that appropriate staffing plans can be created.

Digging into Susan’s packaging comment further, by responding and tracking, you can tell the difference between a one-off case and an opportunity for process change that leads to better conversations on the Social Web. Maybe Susan—like more than a few of the professionals now tasked with social media responsibilities in addition to whatever was expected of them previously—is time pressured, resulting in this mishap. Or maybe, just maybe, the actual packaging process places the chip dip mix envelopes upside down in the box that Susan bought at Costco so that when Susan takes it out, she’s actually holding the envelope in a way that guarantees ripping the bottom every time—and thereby destroying the instructions—instead of ripping across the top where you had intended.

This may seem like a trivial example, but scale it up across your own processes and the actual expectations you have of your customers: How many seemingly small but crazy things do you place into the marketplace every day? For example, how many times have you sprayed yourself with (pressurized) salad dressing when opening the little container on an airplane? Someone designed that package, someone oversaw the filling of it, and someone else sold cases of it to airline catering firms with at least the opportunity to understand what was likely to happen when it was opened inside an airplane. If you don’t listen and track, you’ll never know, and without an effective strategy and planned response, you won’t be able to do anything about it.

These seemingly small things are actually important to identify and fix. Each, in its own way, contributes to a conversation, a parody, or a joke—or something far more serious that plays out on the Social Web. Rarely do any of these help you. The other great thing is that as you find these on your own or with help from customers, you can announce in channels like Twitter that you have fixed them. Not only does it send a nice message to customers like Susan, but it also says to anyone else listening that your business or organization actually pays attention to what is happening on the Social Web. At the least, this gives you an image bump; at most, it will help you spot a problem early as customers realize that because you are present and listening, it is worth their time to let you know about some particular service or product issue.

Here’s the take-away: Social customer experience management and the strategic integration of what you learn into your business processes form a solid pathway to better customer experiences and thereby to the conversations that you really want. The program can be lightweight—basic listening combined with a triage process that picks off the big issues and makes sure they don’t escalate—or it can be a deeply embedded and formalized source of continuous feedback that provides a customer-feedback heartbeat. Either way, by building strategically sound active listening into your internal processes, you’ve successfully connected your business to your customers. Further, you’ve done it in a way that they are sure to notice and appreciate. That will not only further solidify your relationship with your customers but will also result in their spreading your good word.

Customer Support and SCEM

Salesmanship begins when the customer says no. Support begins when the customer says yes. In a sort of basic truth about business, this view of customer support clarifies one of the biggest opportunities a firm or organization will ever have: the opportunity to make those who were happy to buy from you even happier that they did. We point this out because in too many businesses, whether by accident or actual design, customer support feels to customers like an obligation whose cost is to be minimized.

A different orientation—viewing a call from a customer as an opportunity to create a moment of delight—is what defines firms like Zappos, though they are hardly alone. Beth Thomas-Kim, director of consumer services at Nestlé, took exactly this view when she transformed a cost center—customer service—into a brand-building touchpoint. By viewing each call as an opportunity and measuring the outcomes of the calls, the customer service objectives morphed from optimizing (that is, reducing) call time to creating happier customers who are more likely to make subsequent purchases as a result.

Beyond the support tools themselves, the essential practices that connect the conversations occurring within them have to do with tracking and quantifying the specific themes that recur. Issues in design, production, clarity of instructions, and a lot more can be identified and corrected by examining these themes in detail. Tracking service issues through associated tools like JIRA is an easy way to identify candidate activities for process improvement, just as looking at delivery or inventory issues leads to improvement in supply chain processes.

Beyond directly addressing support and related issues, what else can you do with a support forum? Along with product or service-related findings, support forums can also yield valuable insights into the hidden experts that exist within your customer base.

This is precisely what Dell discovered as it acted on its own belief that the discussions in and around its prior support structure indicated the presence of brand advocates and subject matter experts within its customer base. By turning some aspects of support over to its customers—by offering peer-to-peer options in a support forum while making use of the reputation management tools that are available in best-of-class support platforms—Dell was able to not only reduce its support costs while improving the overall levels of customer satisfaction with its support services but also identify the customer experts who existed in the support networks. This recognition drove higher levels of engagement from these experts, in support of Dell’s overall efforts to respond to the issues that Jeff Jarvis had called out in his 2007 post calling Dell to task.

When evaluating a support platform, pay particular attention to its reputation management and expert identification tools. Support platforms from Lithium Technologies (providing the support platform for Dell referenced in the prior section) are particularly good in this regard: Expert identification is the core strength of this particular platform. When considering the use of a branded support community, look for ways to identify and reward members who are providing above-average value.

Activate Your Customers: Control vs. Leadership

Consider customer/product interactions like those described in the case of Dell and in particular the roles played by the customer versus the business or organization. The people creating and posting the content (for example, customers uploading pictures) have immediate control of the content and hence control over their side of the conversation. It’s immediate because it applies to this particular interaction: They get to define what is being said right now and to influence others who are listening right now.

By comparison, brand teams, product managers, organization fundraisers, and similar have control only as far as the design of the experiences that led to the conversations. In this sense, understanding the specifics that surround a conversation—who said it, what was said, and who (else) this conversation is likely to influence—provides the proof points for the business decisions and processes that gave rise to the conversations observed. These conversations close the loop—beyond the immediate sale—with regard to efficacy of business programs intended to drive long-term sales and profits.

The net impact is that the product manager, for example, is in more of a leadership role (as in leadership of the conversation) than a control role, a point worth noting for product team leads interested in understanding the impact of social technology on their own business. By shifting from a control mindset to one of collaborative leadership, you can achieve a more productive approach to product development that incorporates customer-led innovation. The end objective is, of course, to create the experiences that lead to the conversations you want and in turn drive the sales and innovation (or other conversions) that contribute to business success.

Review and Hands-On

This chapter covered the key decisions you need to make to undertake a social customer experience effort. It also covered integration of active listening and formalized social customer experience management into the business decision-making processes that drive an organization.

Most important is to recognize that the source of customer or constituent conversations—the specific things about your brand, product, service, or cause that people will convey to others through social media—are driven more by your organizational processes acting in concert than by marketing acting alone. This is a departure from traditional PR and advertising. While traditional channels remain vitally important in anchoring and promoting what you offer, it is the actual experience—created deep inside your organization—that drives the conversation that can significantly amplify your message and more fundamentally drive long-term success.

Review of the Main Points

The main points covered in this chapter are summarized here:

• Most companies mistakenly focus first on what social technology to deploy and which channels (where) they should engage.
• A better starting point asks why (goals) and who (customer segments and internal groups) will be involved.
• Organizations pursue social technology applications for three reasons: to sell, to save, and to learn.
• Learning means bringing a new, customer-driven capability to the decision-making activities inside your organization.
• Active listening is the core mechanism for tapping the Social Web as a decision-making tool, powered by the quantitative application of formalized social CRM.
• Social customer experience management is built around fundamental components, all of which must be present: direct customer input, influencer and expert identification, ideation and feedback gathered through organized customer support services, and a process-driven internal culture of collaboration.
• Decision making benefits directly from the integration of social technologies, applied at the levels of customers (social media), the organization (internal collaboration), and the connection between customers and the organization.

This chapter sets out a framework for applying what can be learned and applied to business decision making through the use of social technologies. This has an impact on tactical issues—responding to a localized negative event—as well as long-term strategic planning and product innovation.

Hands-On: Review These Resources

Review each of the following and connect them to your business.

1. Check out the website for award programs like Forrester’s Groundswell Awards and Lithium’s Lithys Social Customer Excellence Awards to read cases on how companies are aligning goals with strategies across different industries.
   1. http://groundswelldiscussion.com/groundswell/awards/
   2. http://lithosphere.lithium.com/t5/lithys-social-customer/idb-p/Awards
2. Spend time reading Esteban Kolsky’s blog, and in particular search for and read the entries on “analytics engines.” As a hands-on exercise, create a plan for integrating social analytics into your operational (not marketing) processes.
   1. www.estebankolsky.com/
3. Review the product innovation cycle (Figure 5-1), and map this onto your business and identify the specific areas or functions within your business that contribute to innovation. Think about the Bengaluru International Airport example as you do this. How can you design in the experiences you want your customers or stakeholders to talk about?

Hands-On: Apply What You’ve Learned

Apply what you’ve learned in this chapter through the following exercises to create your own social customer experience strategy:

1. Define the why, who, what, and where for your current social customer experience efforts, if any. How easy or difficult was it?
2. Visit with the IT, marketing, or operations teams that use your existing CRM data. Explore ways of incorporating social data into these processes and connecting that information to your business or organization.
3. Building on your exercises in Chapter 1, define one or more internal collaboration points based on what you discovered in exercise 1.
4. Building on your exercises in Chapters 2 and 3, create a workflow path for social data (for example, conversations) that carries this information to the points inside your organization that can act on it. Include a method for tracking results.
5. Build your touchpoint map, and identify the critical customer experiences that create the conversations that show up on the Social Web.
6. Combine the previous exercises and create a requirements list for the toolset that you will need to manage the social experience of your customers as it relates to your business objectives.