The reason I believe this is fairly simple. When I think of the word “control”, I immediately think of the word “power”. When I think of “power”, I think of “knowledge” (as in the latter is the former). When I think of “knowledge”, I think of “information”. And when I think through what social media enables, from a marketing perspective, time and again I see better information, more knowledge, and more power. In turn, that looks like more control to me – rather than less.

I have more thoughts on this, but wanted to stop there and see if anyone believes this “customer is in control” argument, in relation to social media, might be wrong. And if you want to hear a few more of thoughts on these (and related) marketing subjects, check out my webinar on Tuesday.

But a much bigger gap exists, often unnoticed by companies: The amount of money contact centers and support organizations spend on social media is nominal compared to the percentage of customers’ queries that hit these emerging channels. This is the “support gap.”

Social media has become a new service and support channel that customers employ to raise concerns about products and services, describe their experiences, seek help from others, post new product insights, and consult for advice on features and functions. For companies, this is not trivial. It means that conversations about your products that would traditionally have occurred in your customer contact center are now occurring in public places. The Consortium for Service Innovation estimates that fully 90% of customer conversations about a company never touch the organization. What’s more, a mere 1% of all customer conversations are assimilated as organizational knowledge.

nGenera’s own Customer Interaction Management solution recently added social media support for its contact center product, but many companies have yet to consider this option. In most cases, if a social media strategy is being implemented by the support organization, it’s on an ad hoc basis with a few employees manually monitoring Twitter and branded Web spaces and responding to customers where appropriate. These interactions, though helpful, are not strategic in that they are not integrated with enterprise systems or contact center processes. Building processes and accountability around these activities is the first step that companies can take today—connecting to CRM systems in a robust and meaningful way will be the next horizon.

The plight of marketing and the plight of the support organization are linked and the two organizations need to work together, using shared information, on a common platform. Traditionally, marketing has been about communicating brand messaging, while the customer service department deals with problems and complaints. But a customer that you’ve engaged through social media for marketing purposes doesn’t see the separation – and customer service is becoming a key aspect of managing customer relationships online (I’ve talked before about how “customer service is the new marketing“). This is not trivial. It means matching the tremendous amount of time and energy spent on other official support channels such as e-mail and phone in order to meet customer expectations for social media and deliver a consistent and authentic customer experience. Those companies that think social media is just a cost-effective way to get the message out are in for a surprise. By marketing on social media you inadvertently open a new support channel as well—get ready!

A blues or jazz band—or any ‘jam band’ for that matter—operates using many of the design principles we’d like to see from a collaborative enterprise. Unlike an orchestra, a band is much more fluid in their interpretation of the music. They are able to improvise on the spot, blend sounds, and often play to the mood of the audience. In other words, they innovate, create mash-ups, and are responsive to users.

I’m not the first person to use the band analogy. Barry Rabkin of the Market Insight Group asks whether technology analyst firms are more like a jazz band or symphony orchestra. He alludes to the fact that the jazz band style is more agile and responsive to customer demands—another important outcome of collaboration:

“Another area where jazz musicians differ from their symphonic counterparts is that jazz musicians, sensing their audience, can and do take liberties with new selections not identified during their rehearsals. They can do this because they have a broad library of music and musical explorations in their knowledge set and, as importantly, they know how to blend their sounds together to get the best outcome possible for their audience.”

What’s more, in a symphony orchestra the conductor alone is responsible for guiding the entire team, whereas with a distributed, ad-libbing crew, anyone can start pushing with a new riff or mood and the others will follow suit. In this way, the benefit of each player’s perspective and expertise is baked into the model.

One of the factors that allows a band to operate in this manner is the existence of very well defined roles (i.e. guitarist, vocalist, drummer, base, keyboards, etc.) and somewhat open tasks (i.e. what songs to play, when to riff, what chords to use, etc.). This is another important learning for the enterprise. As Lynda Gratton and Tammy Erickson note in the HBR article Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams:

“Cooperation increases when the roles of individual team members are sharply defined yet the team is given latitude on how to achieve the task. [...]Assign distinct roles so team members can do their work independently. They’ll spend less time negotiating responsibilities or protecting turf. But leave the path to achieving the team’s goal somewhat ambiguous. Lacking well-defined tasks, members are more likely to invest time and energy collaborating.”

In addition to looking at how bands are structured, we might also consider how band members collect largely unstructured customer experience ‘metrics’ in real time and use the feedback to adjust their approach. These metrics provide a useful analogy for the type of approaches leading companies should take when developing customer strategies, including:

• The applause of the crowd: What kind of noise are customers and prospects making online and in social media channels? Using sentiment analysis companies can find out if it is positive (cheers) or negative (boos) and change their tune accordingly.
• Number of people dancing: How engaged is your audience? Metrics might be based on active participation on forums, comments online, rating of content, and re-broadcasting of brand messages, or more passive (i.e. head bobbing) activities such as subscribing to feeds, friending, and following.
• Song requests: What kinds of requests are coming into your contact center and support organization? In many organizations, the contact center is an untapped wealth of customer feedback, largely ignored by groups like marketing and product development. Listening to this channel and other prosumer input can lead to dramatically improved customer experience.
• Duration of stay in the bar: How long do customers hang out in your online properties? Using Web analytics, companies can now obtain this information, as well as data about how people got there, what path they take along the way, and how influential various ‘promoters’ are at bringing in prospects.
• CD and merchandise sales: How are Web interactions translating into sales? The performance is about creating an experience, but ultimately, in order to be profitable, you need people to buy your stuff.

As companies continue to seek best practices and metrics for collaboration, I firmly believe that some of the more innovative solutions will come from non-traditional fields that have deep roots in collaboration, but that have eluded formal study and analysis. (If I’ve managed to spark an interest in enterprise lessons in collaboration from other disciplines, also see my previous post on Measuring collaboration: Lessons from Shane Battier and the NBA and the related Collaboration box score.)

Collecting and analyzing customer stories – the impact you have on specific individual – is one of three approaches that I think makes sense when calculating overall ROI in a customer experience context. The other two are mission and reach. Mission is easy – most organizations have some sort of mission statement, or if they don’t, they usually at least have a CEO or a board with a well-articulated vision. Reach is also pretty straightforward: How many people to you touch? What reach does is calculate the influence of an organization or an individual. It acts as a proxy for several influence measures including: authority, frequency (how often you create the opportunity to influence consumers), independence (lack of bias in their opinion), charisma (in the case of an individual), and persuasiveness. At the OSC, the measure of reach includes both the number of people that came through the physical location and the over five million that engage with them online.

For me, impact is the most interesting measure. When assessing impact, Kevin uses the example of Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield. Having someone like Hadfield say that going to the OSC as a child helped inspire him to be what he is today means the OSC had a strong impact on him. Most companies have at least a couple of these types of exemplary stories. But at a more pedestrian level, any organization can listen to and analyze the stories of people that come through the doors and that write online in blogs, forums, and social networks every day. There are now several companies such as Attensity, Scout Labs, Radian6, Visible Technologies, Crimson Hexagon (and many others), that have software to help analyze unstructured information like customer stories. These companies can identify basic metrics like the percentage of positive and negative sentiment, as well as provide deeper analytics about specific product and service features that lead to customers having positive and negative experiences. The end goal for those looking for quantifiable ROI numbers around customer experience is to convert all unstructured data to these types of “numeric” representations that are consistent, tracked over time, and can be charted in a dashboard. In short, the systematic gathering and analysis of anecdotes.

What’s equally impressive is some of the display technology being developed to display this type of data. All vendors have some form of executive dashboard, but these are highly utilitarian. From what I have seen, the bar for sentiment visualization is being set by other innovative thinkers. For example, ongoing projects like We Feel Fine from Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar as well as Bio Mapping from Christian Nold aim to visualize emotional data in new, interesting, and useful ways. We Feel Fine is more of an art project than a rigorous sentiment analysis tool, but it provides a useful example for how we might organize, display, and search for comments. Users on We Feel Fine can search by emotion (key word only), gender, age, location, weather, and date. It also connects emotions to associated images that are found within the document.

Bio Mapping (shown below) uses a lie detector connected to a GPS unit to measure location and physiological arousal at the same time. This is then plotted using Google Maps and other visualization software. Note, in this case the sentiment metric is intensity of emotion, not the specific emotion itself. The spikes shown on the map are locations of interest, but that is all we can determine from the data.

Although most of the complex visualization technology is still nascent you can imagine where this is type of analysis is going. Companies could segment customers based on emotional response, plot the spread of viral buzz, identify ideal test markets, and optimize local campaigns based on near-time feedback loops. Employees could gain access to a new lens on customer activity, behaviour, and satisfaction in a user-friendly display that makes analytics fun. Large retailers could use similar mapping technology powered by emotion data to optimize store layout and measure display/product appeal. The biggest challenge to wide adoption of these types of tools is the lack of valid emotional data in significant volumes. Currently, mining user comments online is the best available data source, but some early research suggests promising breakthroughs in the area of voice analysis and facial recognition as well – stay tuned.

I really like this graphic because it highlights why customer interaction strategies are changing from a transactional approach to one where we focus on the broader customer experience.  I think it’s particularly relevant when we think about what is needed to satisfy each level of the pyramid. 

• Level 1: Companies can meet expectations with current customer service model.  Simply optimizing transactions, having the answers to customer queries, and providing a decent level of service is where the bar is set right now.  Amazingly, many organizations are still struggling to meet these simple customer needs.
• Level 2: To fulfill desires, companies have to figure out exactly what those desires are.  Usually they are articulated, but buried in call data and interactions with company employees.  Analytic tools and predictive modeling software now exist to help companies make sense of customer data, measure emotional responses, quantify customer wants, and respond accordingly.  It can be complex, but it’s not rocket science.  You’re front line employees probably have a good idea of what the customer is asking for; just ask them.
• Level 3: To meet unrecognized needs you have to learn more about the customer and develop a certain intuition about what would make them happy.  The only way to do this is to interact with them – build on what you learned from Level 2, engage them in conversations, and take the time to get to know them at an individual level.  Unrecognized needs are often not articulated, so you have to read between the lines to figure out what is missing from the customer experience.

I recently interviewed Lane Becker, President and co-founder of Get Satisfaction.  Becker’s model of “people powered customer service” is part of the new way some of the world’s top companies are rethinking their customer engagement strategies.  Becker likes to say, “customer service is the new marketing,” and uses the analogy of a hotel concierge to articulate the type of forward-leaning approach companies need to take to meet unrecognized needs:

“We really see this as a significant inflection point in the way companies treat customers. More importantly, how customers look at companies.  The concierge analogy is really about creating a team of people whose job it is to lean forward into the world.  So, if you think about the concierge model; what authority does the concierge have in a hotel? Concierges have absolutely no authority whatsoever. Yet, a hotel concierge, for example, not only provides the information customers want and need to know, but also engages in conversation with the customer. By putting conversations at the center of the relationship, the concierge reduces their sphere of control—that is, they do not limit the customer to a set of options for which there are defined solutions—but they increase their sphere of influence.  A good concierge doesn’t operate within silos; rather they cater to customer needs across all operational silos that exist both within and outside the hotel.

It’s their job to get out and engage with their customers in every way that they can; to anticipate the problems that customers have and try and solve them.  You are not just waiting for a customer to ask you about ‘Why did this break and how can I get a new one.’ Now you’re out there and you’re talking to your customers and you’re saying, “Have you tried this?” “Have you tried that?” “Have you ever tried using our products with this other product because that works pretty well?” It’s really a different mindset, one that is much more about leaning forward—I keep using this phrase—leaning forward into your customer base, engaging with them, anticipating what it is they need, finding out what it is that they want, and giving it to them before they even ask. And that’s a very different way about thinking about customer service.”

If you think about the current economic downturn, the Hierarchy of Customer Service becomes even more important.  As companies scale back expenses, the temptation is to operate at the first level of the pyramid where operational efficiencies are easily measurable and cost control is the modus operandi.  This type of “hunkering down” is often easy to justify because the value accrued from extra contact with customers isn’t visible in the contact center – it more often falls to sales, marketing, PR, and product development units.  The misalignment between where value is created and where it’s measured in the enterprise has been a problem for a while, but now customer choice and a more frugal market will punish companies that operate at the bottom of the hierarchy.   As wallets tighten and customers are increasingly discriminating about who they spend their money with, they are likely to seek out companies that are adding value and operating at the top of the pyramid.

This quote will ring true for many different people that have employed management consulting firms. In the worst cases, it appears that certain types of such companies merely send people in to work at company X for awhile, learn everything they are up to, and then go to company Y (& Z, etc.), looking to sell their insights for a stunningly high amount. Wikinomics and the “age of transparency” is clearly a direct threat to that model, and where this quote comes from is a remarkably good example of why.

The quote is from Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, as reported in this AdWeek article. For many years companies have been invited to trek down to Las Vegas and check out how the company does business. Now, companies that don’t want to make such a trek (travel freeze anyone?) have another option to learn a thing or two about Zappos – pay $39.95 per month for a subscription to the forthcoming Zappos Insights, a subscription video service that lets companies ask questions about the Zappos way and get answers from actual Zappos employees. At such a price point, it’s easy to see why the company is targeting the “Fortune 1 Million”, instead of a much smaller range of targets.

It will be interesting to see how this service plays out when it officially launches (I learned about it from this mashable post, where a number of people were complaining about not being able to sign in, and Tony Hsieh chimed in to note they didn’t realize the Adweek article was going up so soon, so the site has been shut down until the official launch). But regardless of whether it turns out to be a bit gimmicky or not, it should at least provide people a reminder of the intense pressure certain business models are under as certain wikinomics principles continue to gain traction – yellow pages anyone?