Social Customer Service: is it worth it or not?

Posted on | dicembre 8, 2011 | 2 Comments

Let me explain my personal perspective about this topic cause I see a lot of focus on the importance of providing an innovative customer service program through social media trying to give an alternative to the traditional one provided by “obsolete” contact center.

I recently read a really well-done report by Strategic Contact (you can download it here) where you can find useful information about the main drivers that form the cost structure of a contact center:

Fixed staffing (management) – FTEs, Salaries, Benefits and Taxes
Variable staffing (agents and supervisors) – FTEs, Productivity, Wages, Benefits, Taxes, Hiring & Training Costs
Technology – Investment, Depreciation period, Tech support (fixed labor)
Facilities – Space per cubicle, Cubicle sharing, Rent, Build-out, Maintenance, Utilities and upkeep
Telecom and Networking – Telecom rate per minute, Cell phones, VoIP and telephony infrastructure
Others – Miscellaneous overhead, Travel costs, Other overhead, Chargeback for services from other departments

If you want to have a look at the distribution of the related costs for an average contact center, here’s a good representation of them

So, if companies think that adopting social media as a new customer service channels set is mandatory and an alternative to traditional ones, they normally justify this decision assessing related cost saving (as I see in a lot of posts, articles and books). But there’s always something that doesn’t convince me in this approach especially when it’s used as a main indicator the contact (call) deflection.

SCENARIO COMPARISON

As you can see, if you want to reach an effective cost saving you have in this case to tackle mainly the labor component. So let’s try to compare approximately two scenarios (traditional contact and social contact handling) and their potential impact on this cost structure main component (please click the image to enlarge).

IMPACTS ON DRIVERS AND COSTS

As you can see, even if the comparison is simplistic, using CSR or Community managers hasn’t too much impact on the cost structure from a staffing component perspective. Social media presence doesn’t mean self-serving own customers, instead you have to prepare yourself to a more challenging effort made of more demanding service levels and public reputation risks. It’s then more a case of education, training and, for sure, workload optimization that can have positive effects on negative deflection components like abandonment and busy lines (improving at the same time customer satisfaction).

So the real path to massive cost deflection – freeing staff occupancy share – is to “push” internal knowledge outside your company boundaries and to facilitate its integration with collective knowledge (creating a bridge between public and private support communities) in order to match and nurture your customer information expectation. That’s the real driver which will eliminate proactively the causes that move people to take a phone o writing a post to contact directly the company. That’s the real driver for a long-term contact deflection maintaining and/or increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.

CONCLUSIONS

I think that we don’t have to see Social Customer Service as something mutually alternative to the traditional one (at least till the customer will need to communicate with a phone) but as something integrated inside your overall Customer Service strategy. It’s obvious that you continuosly need to keep an eye on costs drivers but please not to the detriment of experience quality.

You need to look at this new communication paradigm as an evolution (really big and challenging I know) of your multichannel approach to Service (look at the capital “s”), an evolution that have to respect the distinctive peculiarity of each channel/media, pros and cons of using each one of them and contextually the relative customer expectations. Therefore:

Always consider the customer journey through different channels to fix a problem as a single consistent case and not as a fragmented incoeherent set of experiences
Improve continuosly your operational processes so, when your Service staff finds the solution to a customer request, they are able to apply it as quickly as possible (and for this step remember also the preciuos contribution just coming from customers with whom you interact)
Take really care of your people. Train and empower your staff (it doesn’t matter if CSR or Community managers) because they are your best official interface to the public
Think and act always putting yourself in the customer shoes (that for me is the more important suggestion to drive to a new business mindset)

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Interview with Keith Swenson on Adaptive Case Management

Category: CRM, Customer Service, SCRM, Social media
Tags: Social > value

The real CRM side of listening and monitoring

Posted on | novembre 17, 2011 | 5 Comments

I don’t want to say anything but the obvious. Even if it’s difficult to find lots of posts or articles in which you can read explicitly what I’m going to analyze. As you know I dealt with listening activity and its essential role in a Social CRM strategy (just to refresh your memory you can read here and here) many times and I’m absolutely staunch that every company need to set the technological and organizational infrastructures that can enable market insight (just as I was and am still convinced about gathering and analyzing customer feedbacks flowing through traditional touchpoints like IVR, email, phone call, survey, web form and so on).

Normally you read about well-known guidelines and approaches that tells you how to catch and analyze industry/sector conversations or direct ones about you and your competitors; and everything starts with a wise choice of keywords and a good set of Boolean operators maybe shared with domain experts. That’s really great and it’s the first main layer on which others Owyang’s Social CRM use cases are based on.

But I think something is missing especially considering that Social CRM is an extension of a traditional CRM strategy, so let’s start for once not with topics of conversation but with your customers.

First of all try to catch all information about your customers social profiles. That’s an hard task but with the more and more accurate algorithms inside stand-alone Social Connector tools (PeekYou, Social Diligence, etc.) or Social CRM platforms (SFDC, Pivotal, SugarCRM, etc.) the final result will be worth the effort (also considering that normally profiles don’t change too much with time).

Next, brush up the good old segmentation with which you can aggregate your customers in homogeneous groups; a perfect base of departure and I really recommend to use a value-based segmentation to enrich next with social, demographic and behavioural attributes.

Once you get all your segments “profiled” it’s time to structure a listening approach to your actual customers.

I find useful to focus on the analysis crossing Social Presence aspects of each segment with Social Behaviours aspects conceptually mapped on four main social use cases (Social Marketing, Social Reputation, Social Support and Social Innovation).

Social Presence

This section tries to answer questions related to the level of “sociality” of segments. For each one, in fact, you can measure among others:

percentage of customers present in the most popular social media
percentage of customers having a personal or professional blog
average level of sociality in terms of passive and active utilization for each social media (read and write)
primary time range of utilization per social media (passive and active)
main characteristics of customers social graphs (average number of connections, content diffusion average speed and dynamics, etc.)

Finally you should build a dashboard which visualize the specific social “profile” for each segment like in the example below.

It’s like having various panels to analyze and, comparing them, you can find which characteristics mainly differentiate segments. In other words you can understand the WHEN (best moment to interact with the segment), the HOW (aptitude for peculiar communication and interaction form such as video, photo or its own text rather than others one such as links) and the WHERE (best media where segment is more disposed to interact).

Social Behaviour

In this section you must understand the content essence which is correlated with a social media utilization by a specific segment. For this reason it’s essential to channel the analyses along the main components of a Social CRM strategy answering questions like:

Social Marketing – what are the main kind of brands/products/services discussed by the segment? which kind of content is considered more interesting and useful by the segment? what’s the level of influence showed by the segment and for which specific topic? what’s the level of advocacy that characterizes the segment?
Social Reputation – what’s the segment contribution to different brand reputation crisis? what’s the segment approach (positive or negative) and level of involvement during the crisis?
Social Support – what’s the segment propensity to ask direct support through social media? what’s the segment level of contribution to peer to peer support?
Social Innovation – what’s the segment propensity to suggest real improvement to products/services? what’s the segment level of participation to innovation management initiatives (suggestions, comments, rates)?

In other words this section lets you realize the WHAT (the content and the approach to interact effectively with your customers).

Intervista a Esteban Kolsky sul Social CRM

Gartner indica il futuro del Social CRM

Category: Analytics, CRM, Customer Experience, SCRM
Tags: CRM > Segmentation > Social Behaviour > Social CRM > Social Profiles

CRM Idol: Paul Greenberg EMEA judge interview

Posted on | ottobre 4, 2011 | No Comments

Paul Greenberg is the author of the best-selling CRM at the Speed of Light and President of The 56 Group, LLC, a consulting firm focused on CRM and Social CRM strategic services. He is a founding partner of BPT Partners, a training and consulting venture composed of a number of CRM luminaries. Paul is the Executive Vice President of the CRM Association. He currently is the Chairman of the Board of Advisors of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management CRM Centre of Excellence. He has been a Board of Advisors member of the Baylor University MBA Program for CRM majors, and the co-chairman of Rutgers University’s CRM Research Center. He has also developed strategies and helped define CRM and social CRM products for all the major vendors in CRM and in social media. Paul is considered a thought leader in CRM, having been published in numerous industry and business publications over the years. He was elected to CRM magazine’s CRM Hall of Fame in 2010 – the first non-vendor related thought leader in its history.

He’s the inventor and primary judge of the CRM Idol international competition.

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/pgreenbe

Blog: http://the56group.typepad.com/

Welcome to Paul Greenberg and thanks a lot for this interview. Now Round 1 of the CRM Idol contest is just finished and all semi-finalists (America and EMEA) have been chosen for the next step. This means the end of a preliminary phase of hard work for the judges who had participated to all demos, worked out their reviews and finally made their choice. First of all – my curiosity – how did you manage the countless CRMish/SocialCRMish main products’ features to articulate your judgment?

Actually, it was kind of difficult to do that given the categories that were there for qualification. CRM or CRMish meant thousands of features to think about. But since this was more a contest about the company than the products, it became manageable, because even if one company was focused on hardcore traditional CRM and another on enterprise feedback management, we were judging the likelihood of success of the company in the markets that they targeted and that meant the features of the product were just a marker for the likelihood of success of the company as opposed to something we compared company by company. So we could handle the categories a lot easier, since this was about the company not just the product and companies have a lot in common they have to consider regardless of products they provide.

Tell us about your experience with this amazing panel of experts and colleagues.

Well, I had the pleasure of working with three people, Silvana Buljan, Mark Tamis and Laurence Buchanan, who I consider not only three of the leading CRM experts in the world, but also three friends. It made for one of the most rewarding experiences I”ve had in a long time. I learned a significant amount from the three and just had a great time with three friends besides. How much better could something get?

I think it’d be really interesting to have your overview about this first phase of the contest. In your opinion, which are the European participants’ overall strentghs with regard to their corporate visions and products?

Their strengths were the strengths that I found in both segments of the contest – both EMEA and the Americas. Some of the participants had powerful products with deep functionality and they were well engineered products – in fact one or two of the EMEA contestants products, i would say, were among the best I’ve seen even when taking more established and some larger vendors into consideration.

And what about their overall weakness?

Again, the weakness we saw in all the contestants throughout the both segments. Because their resources/finances were scarce, most of the companies had spent the bulk of their money on development and either completely ignored or for the most part did little marketing. The reason that this is a weakness is that regardless of how great your product is, you’re competing with other potentially great products and you have to have the presence to be noticed as something different than your competitors and known to the customers. Without marketing, that won’t happen.

Which aspects have driven you to make the final choice?

Those that we can say publicly have to do with the overall balance of the company – meaning the quality of their product, their vision, their mission, their experience, their road maps, their ideas on the markets they want to address, their maturity in terms of dealing with the marketplace, their corporate culture, their long term outlook, etc. That’s the ones that we can reveal. it was a rigorous process. As I said early on in the overall competition – it was easy to enter but hard to win.

Working on the two sides of the project (America and EMEA), which are the main differences resulting from a comparison with american participants?

As you can tell from the responses above, the differences weren’t all that manifest. When it gets down to it, the only differences were the differences that you would see in things other than this competition too. The cultures of the companies were appropriate to the countries that they were founded in.

Geographically (and frankly) speaking, which are the more promising countries and which the ones that disappointed you?

This is not really a good or fair question. First, the entries were first come first serve so which countries were represented had nothing to do with the geographies but more with the speed to entry of the companies that got the slots. Second, its never a matter of a country. Countries are the places where the companies exist and there might be some cultural impact on the staff of the companies, but geography has nothing to do with the quality of the company – good or bad. That has to do more with the factors I mentioned above in how we determined who were moving on to other places in the competition.

Can you give some suggestions for the CRM and Social CRM vendors that will try to participate to the next year CRM Idol contest?

Make sure that you sign up early and get your slot. We had a waiting list of almost 40 this year globally. Make sure that you respond exactly as you’re asked to in the submission form including the references that you offer. Make them solid. Make sure that you conduct yourself as a member of the CRM Idol community rather than a jealous suitor in the contest. This is very important. Keep in mind there are other factors than the demo that matter though I’m not going to reveal what they are or how much weight they carry. Finally, make sure that you are WELL prepared on the demo. I won’t say more than that. But don’t mess up.