“If you have questions, go to the store. Your customers have the answers.”

Sam Walton, founder, Walmart

Arriving at Bengaluru International Airport in India, coauthor Dave Evans found his checked bags on the luggage carousel within seven minutes of landing. A “wow” experience to be sure. He tweeted that. Arriving late at night in Austin after a weather-related flight delay, he was greeted by a driver arranged by United Airlines for transportation to his home so that his wife and son would not have to wait alone for him in a darkened airport. Another “wow” experience. He wrote a blog post and follow-up article about that.

This is social customer experience management in action: running your organization in a way that generates the conversations you want people to see. It’s the way that savvy business are using social media, not just as a publishing channel for their own gain but as a transformational theme that recognizes the role that customers and employees, connected by social technology, can play in business.

In 2008, Dave wrote Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day expressly for marketers wanting to make the leap into social media and its use in building demand. The follow-up to the book, Social Media Marketing: The Next Generation of Business Engagement, was first published in 2010. Dave and coauthor Jake McKee pushed social technology beyond marketing proper and asked the question “What does a social business look like?” The answer is, of course, “It looks like the experiences Dave shared after landing in Bangalore and Austin.” The question, of course, is how do these businesses do it?

The World Wide Web—described by Sir Tim Berners-Lee as “an interactive sea of shared knowledge…made of the things we and our friends have seen, heard, believe or have figured out”—has dramatically accelerated the shift to consumer-driven markets and with that shift has come an unprecedented transformation in the relationship between a business and its customers. For millennia, power has rested with those in control of essential resources: first with land, then capital, and, most recently, media. In a socially connected marketplace, shared knowledge is now emerging as the ultimate essential resource. “Information wants to be free,” the saying goes, and in these new social marketplaces it is: free of constraints on place, free of control on content, and free of restrictive access on consumption.

Social technology is now powering a new kind of relationship, a new kind of customer experience. How you manage this customer experience on the Social Web is increasingly central to your achievement of your business objectives. Whether listening to what customers have to say, inviting them to share ideas on how they see your product or service evolving, or connecting your customers and employees directly in the process of co-creation, social technology is now part of your business platform. In writing Social Customer Experience: Engage and Retain Customers through Social Media we set out to take the foundations established in Social Media Marketing: The Next Generation of Business Engagement and place them in a current context. Social media marketing was aspirational in 2008; by 2010 it was mainstream. The same holds true for social customer experience: Aspirational in 2010, it is core to business success now. As you read this book, compare the cases we’ve left in from our earlier work (Starbucks, Dell, and Intuit, for example) with the businesses that have picked up the ball and run with it (companies like HP, Skype, giffgaff, JoeMobile and Barclay’s that have rebuilt their businesses on SaaS to deliver social technology). It’s an accelerating trend, and your timing in considering this for your business or organization is perfect.

How to Use This Book

This book has three parts. Building on the ideas provided by readers of our other works, we’ve written this book so that you don’t have to read it all! Here’s how the book works.

Part I: Social Customer Experience Fundamentals

At just over 100 pages, Part I will get you up to speed quickly on what you really need to know about social customer experience: why it matters and how to manage it. Its four chapters span the defining elements of social customer experience management and the ecosystem in which you can build your business platform. If you simply want to know why social customer experience matters, read Part I.

Part II: Your Social Presence

Part II takes you deeper into the application of social technology to your business or organization, showing you how business decisions are informed through collaborative software and surrounding processes. Part II provides a starting point for measurement and, like Part I, includes references and pointers that quickly take you further as you develop your specific social business programs and initiatives. Part II concludes by covering five big trends that you need to be aware of and how these trends—real-time engagement, mobile computing, co-creation, crowdsourcing, and gamification—can help you build your business. If you are part of a team considering a social customer experience program, read Parts I and II.

Part III: Social Customer Experience Building Blocks

Each of the five chapters in Part III—covering customer engagement, social CRM, social objects, the social graph, and social applications—presents one key concept, in depth and again with hands-on exercises and additional pointers to online references and thought leaders. Part III provides a detailed treatment of the individual components of a solid, business-backed platform for social customer experience management. If you are designing or collaborating on the development of your firm’s social customer experience program, you’ll want to read Part III as well.

What This Means

If you read Part I, you’ll understand the basic concepts well enough to participate on a team that is suggesting, planning, or otherwise requesting your involvement in a social business initiative for or within your organization. Part I is highly recommended for executives wanting a quick, comprehensive treatment of the fundamentals of social customer experience. If that’s you, you can stop at the end of Part I. Of course, you may not want to, but then that’s your choice.

If you read Part II, you’ll be informed well enough to question or guide a specific implementation of social business practices and in particular to specify the required metrics relevant to your business. If you are a process leader who is championing a social business initiative within your organization, you should consider reading at least through Part II.

If you read Part III, you’ll have a solid handle on the underlying concepts along with the resources and pointers to actually plan and implement social technologies as you build your social customer experience platform. You’ll be prepared to actively participate in the design of social-technology-based solutions for your business or organization. If you are responsible for such an implementation or if you are planning to undertake a project like this yourself, you should read through Part III.

The Appendixes

Appendix A (key definitions), Appendix B (thought leadership resources), and Appendix C (hands-on exercises) are applicable to anyone reading this book. They provide a handy way to quickly locate key terms, find thought leaders, and revisit the hands-on exercises presented at the end of each of the individual chapters.

Above all, enjoy this book. Use it as a starting point and reference as you define and specify the way your firm or organization will adopt social technologies and use them to engage your customers and stakeholders.