Archive for the 'social media' Category

Posted by: Peter Massey | 21.05.2011

Wow time flies and I realised I hadn’t updated anything here in the blog. All my online time seems to be going into the internal Budd wiki, the LimeBridge discussion forum, Twittering and keeping up to date through Twitter links, Linked In updates and connections, Facebook for private stuff and now lots of interesting discussions on Linked In groups, notably in PPF and ICS groups

When do I get any work done…..  One thing for sure is that I’d pay for a lot for a reliable high speed internet service either mobile or at home. So often I’m on pause.

The most interesting discussion was when I posted a “dream” – that in 10 years we wouldn’t need customer service as everyone would have copied people like Amazon and Skype and reduced it, in absurdem, to not neccessary. Wow some people didn’t like that. I’ve just kicked off another dream – that in 10 years we wont need marketing – “marketing is the tax you pay for being unremarkable!”

So what is most interesting from all this chattering?

1) Most people don’t live online – but those that do are learning exponentially faster than those that don’t. Is the gap important?

2) Arranging stuff at home is moving into facebook, thro small apps like events – still looking for a good tennis club app if anyone knows one? Anyone seen a “run a tennis club quiz” app?

3) Voice of customer is there on social and that’s useful, fast, two way – a lead indicator. Some senior people are using it to bypass their cumbersome VoC mechanisms at work.

4) The major step change of power from social business is not really understood yet. Social media isn’t just a way to speed up some stuff we do today. It invents new ways of doing stuff we don’t yet do but find useful when we can.

5) People are just sussing out that only if you are genuine, transparent, authentic, honest in real life can you be that online and succeed there. Your values and how you live them are everything.

6) We are yet to see the real jump from social – inversion of power from companies to customers. But it’s coming. Take a look at the inititiaves on mydata from the government. Friends at Ctrl-Shift, have been talking about it for 10 years already in a think tank called “Buyer Centric Commerce” which I joined early this century. Alan Mitchell had  a dream and wrote a book called Right Side Up way back when and the group formed around this.

Is his dream going to happen in the next 10 years – you bet. In the next 2 or3 ? Hmmmm an important question. Are you considering it?

Here’s a few links to get you going

The Cabinet Office and the white paper on Better Choices, Better Deals

Alan writing in Marketing magazine

Silicon.com raising questions about security of data in the mydata strategy

And here’s an interesting one – givememydata – a facebook app for claiming your own data

If you havent worked out a strategic understanding of this new world – Email me if you do want to talk

Peter

21st century marketing, social media | No Comments

Posted by: Peter Massey | 28.04.2011

I saw this question posted on a Linked In forum. Here’s what I think and I wrote:

“Important to define what you mean by “social media customer service”.

At a number of levels Social is a way of doing business, of interacting and running our lives . Social media is a range of tools that help us do it. You can use some of the tools to help you run your life – and if its easier than other ways you may use it.

For example you may get a quicker response by tweeting your telco at the moment – that’s probably not sustainable for those companies and its only another channel, not a new way of doing things socially.

Customers who share you tube clips on how to get your phone working or fix your router – that’s social. Customers who talk to each other in forums to find out what to buy or how to fix something – that’s social. So if your question is aimed at customers, its perhaps missing the point.  They wouldn’t use it if it was. And if it’s aimed at businesses, they’re perhaps missing the point.”

What do you think?

social media | 1 Comment

Posted by: Peter Massey | 9.03.2011

What’s the most basic service requirement a customer wants from their mobile phone company? An accurate bill? A call centre that answers the phone? No – making and receiving phone calls would be the most basic thing. And it’s become a challenge. The best service is no service has been taken too literally!

I’m old enough to remember when MF tone dialling replaced pulse tone dialling – what does that mean? The phone at the other end started ringing the millisecond you pressed the last digit on the phone. Oh how I wish I could get that on my mobile phone. Some days, working in Soho as we do, I just wish I could make a call after any length of delay. Or just receive a call rather than picking up delayed voicemails on the way home.

It’s not a problem of reception or signal strength, just network congestion. Too many customers doing too many things.

My dilemmas as a customer are simple: Buy out of the contract and move. Or not. I dont have a common sense option of being let out of contract to get a service that works where & when I work.

The dilemmas as a business are slightly different. At a customer by customer level: let the customer out of the contract so they can get service from someone else. Or keep them locked in and take the money. “Bad profits” as Don Peppers calls it. At an investment level: spend many millions ahead of the growth curve to give good access to the services sold. Or slow down products going to market so the network always works. Or keep selling services and don’t worry about it.

So let me sit in the CEO’s chair: What data would I need to answer the question and do the right thing, or at least optimise the outcome? If I am CEO what do I do?

The first issue would be “How will I judge my success?” : Revenue lost/not lost over the next 12 months? Lifetime value of a customer lost times the number of customers lost versus the investment costs in the network? Or just living our values and doing the right thing? With any of these criteria surely it should be an easy decision.

But what about shareholder expectations? Do they want the best answer for this quarter, for this year or the next 5 years? Do they want anything other than a financial or customer head count? Can they judge the future financial value of the change in a short term retention figure? Will they judge your dip in growth of customers, or your long term revenue prospects?

And what if you only run marketing, or only new sales, or only retentions, or only revenues  or only service? How much do you need to optimise the overall success of the business vs your target or result?

These problems surface all over the business. The staff you talk to as a customer live with it everyday. They tell you so. People in store, in contact centres dealing with queries about network congestion which they cannot resolve. They become numb to it. There’s nothing they can do to change it.

Or is there?

As CEO or agent or silo head or customer, I can look on the customer forum and see that 83229 customers from 110078 have viewed a tech support entry called “calls go straight to voicemail”. Its the biggest issue. By far. And its been running from 2008 til now. And the manufacturer is getting a dirty name as their phone is being blamed.

Reading the original thread,  I can see the problem explained “I have a 3g {phone} and am having some problems. The fault is intermitant but happens on a frequent basis. When people call me the call goes straight to voicemail. If they leave a message it can take up to 2 hrs to come through. Also text message are arriving upto the same period after people send them. Sometimes it can take upto 30 secs to connect a call. I have been speaking to second line support at {telco} but they have thus far no answer. I am on my 3rd {phone} and second sim card. I am begining to think I may not be destined for a {phone}. If this continues will they change the handset for a different model ?”

You don’t have to read many posts to realise that customers, collectively, have eliminated all the options and some have worked out its not the phone or the sim – there’s a problem of congestion on the network. Yet tons of resource is still going into swapping phones and sims out.

In fact looking at all the forums there’s only one bigger issue with 153k reads – “Network down”. In fact that runs since 2008.

So maybe the network investment deserves some attention?

But as CEO, or silo head, I need real data to size the problem. This is where our WOCAS processes come in. They can help size the problem, rate the impact problem, root cause the problem, investigate the commercial opportunities around it and put it into a prioritisation framework. And if acted on, track & communicate those actions, transparently. If management wants to do this we know how to do this.

At the moment this provider seems not to be seeing the most basic service problem and no amount of sticking plaster or great measurement system or recovery care service will help that. No amount of “score me” post call feedback is going to help them see it.

Only if they start to talk about the problem openly will staff feel optimism, the investment get to the top of the agenda and customers think differently of them.

If giffgaff ran this network – how would it look then? What data would be published about network performance? What would be done about it? How much more money would it generate by doing the right thing?

And that’s the issue that faces CEOs everywhere – there’s no hiding place in the social world. if you are not open and transparent you face two problems. Customers know anyway and have the tools to share that knowledge. Staff know and if they can’t do anything about it then how do they feel?

I’m off to search the other communities to see who has least congestion problems. Apart from the company that locked me in for a year when they had no network coverage 21 years ago ( thats about £50k of revenue they have missed out on so far ) and the one that didnt want to help me 2 years ago when my phone was stolen and I needed a new phone straight away.

Customers have long memories when it comes to “doing the right thing”. I have a memory of pressing a button and the phone ringing immediately at the other end.  Have phones gone backward since 1976? Or from when they were invented: March 10th 1876?

Crowdsourcong & crowdservicing, Voice of the Customer, WOCAS, brilliant basics, customer experience, feedback, honesty, listening, social media | No Comments

Posted by: Peter Massey | 7.12.2010

I thought this blog from Mashable more than just a retweet as it looks at social media through a financial person’s eyes.

It’s a simple business case in itself, showing 5 ways, with examples, that US companies are using social media to make money. The Dell example is nice – $25,000 of revenue per tweet.

Here’s 6 things you could consider doing with social media

a) Development of communities and forums where customers can help each other and you can learn from their conversations

b) Monitoring and reporting on brand gap by what people say to/about you

c) Specific service interventions in forums and channels on behalf of the customers

d) Developing intelligent 2 way conversations rather than just fixing problems,

e) Using multiple channels such as picking up a need via twitter and moving customer to phone to resolve and then closing for satisfaction on twitter

f) Creating and maintaining brand profile on specific social media channels

How many are you using?

Dell, social media | No Comments

Posted by: Peter Massey | 11.11.2010

We’ve been doing a lot of thinking about communities and the future of business this last 2 weeks. Well someone has to. Serious head scratching, some desk learning, asking the best people ( thanks Heather, Tim particularly, our advisory board members).

We met the guys from giffgaff this week who epitomise the good example of what’s possible with social business- v inspiring:)

It made me realise that we are very rich in community building experience that once understood, we can liberate further:

1) Today I had an inspiring day: helping 4 companies as a result of our  client communities helping each other.

2) Last night we had a v fine time talking about apps with people we work with, some regularly, some from time to time.

3) Tuesday I learned what an unconference was and that we invented it first in LimeBridge.

Just 3 examples of the communities we’re in and have helped to generate.

The most significant step in learning for me this week was that social business is not about social media, it’s about being social. It’s about your values. And it’s not new. If your values bring people together and they include being transparent, honest and sharing then you can build social businesses using today’s tools.

Social businesses can build and grow fast on a popular sentiment: that companies don’t work for their customers and their employees. Amazon, eBay, first direct, Innocent are not new businesses but they are businesses that grew fast and strong because they are social businesses with very strong values and ethics.

I’m going to invent a word for it: being an “uncompany”.

I think Budd from now on will be an uncompany. LimeBridge already was, we just didn’t know it.

Next year we want to generate another community of people who share our passion and are trying to make “The Best Service Is No Service” processes work in their businesses. That’s why we’re thinking hard. Maybe our manifesto should just be that passion: “How do we stop doing dumb things to our customers and our people?”

Let me know if you want to take part

Right, off to bed – should we be an uncompany providing nano-consulting?  See you – same time, same place, tomorrow’s thinking

Uncategorized, passion, social media, the best service is no service | 3 Comments

Posted by: Peter Massey | 10.11.2010

Had a great visit to giffgaff today – a real social business. All based on crowdsourcing and crowdservicing. Thanks guys for being so open. What struck me wasn’t the differences in a business based on social media. It was  the similarities with great businesses – based totally on customers and values.

Living the values of the business was evident in the personal behaviours. Transparently.

Got to dust off “100 things you can learn from…” first direct and Google and revisit the focus on values. Much more important than technology platforms.

Let’s stop talking social media and talk social business.

Crowdservicing, social media | No Comments

Posted by: Ian Mapp | 23.04.2010

The UK General Election has accelerated the interest in what is called ‘social media’ – in this context meaning Twitter, Facebook, Bebo, etc. And in particular, how these new ways of communicating with people can be used to win the election.

A lot of this has to do with the perception that the use of these new tools was hugely influential to Barack Obama’s success in the US Presidential election. We can debate whether this is true or not, but my purpose here is only to recognise that social media has become widely acknowledge and discussed. I want to look at the potential impact social media may have on business.

The current news items are only the public face of a debate that began some time ago in the business and government worlds. But what the added attention has done is move the topic of social media up the corporate agenda – and no doubt many will rush to ‘”do something”, to be seen to be doing something and not to get left behind.

Like most bandwagons, and especially technology-led ones, it pays to be cautious and spend time thinking – hard – about what you want to achieve by engaging in these new forms of communication. In amongst the uncertainty about how organisations should react to this change in customer behaviour, one thing does seem to be certain. There is no going back once you have started. 

Many groups and forums are springing up to address this area, many of which are ill-informed and offering poor advice. But, there is lots of valuable thinking and sharing being done as this new area is explored. One that I like is called Social CRM Pioneers. It has somewhat of a technology slant (which suits my background) but there are some very informative and insightful conversations being had there.

The first question is how to start – what should be done first? There is no single right answer to that, as individual circumstances differ massively, but here are a few thoughts for you.

Your customers have always been having these conversations between themselves about your products and services (although with less reach and fewer people to listen). You now have the possibility to ‘overhear’ what they are saying in these public communities and networks and, if you are careful and respectful, the possibility to be invited into the conversations and maybe influence attitudes and opinions. 

How will this change in customer behaviour affect your corporate culture? Firstly, remember, your employees are customers too – and will be feeling this change first-hand in their everyday lives. So, you probably already have a lot of knowledge internally. Perhaps, you could start by asking employees about their experiences and how they would like brands to interact with them in this environment? Start an internal conversation as a precursor to external conversations.

The rise of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems over the last fifteen years should have been accompanied by corporate adaptation to a more customer-centric model, although in most cases only the technology was implemented. Maybe, in this new social revolution we should be building ‘people-centric’ organisations.

That is, not companies facing off to individual customers (remember the ‘market of one’ and 360 degree customer views?) but individual people in organisations building trust and relationships with individual prospects and customers over time and through multiple channels and media – whether that be for marketing, sales or service needs. That would mean organising internally to meet customers’ needs and not simply organising for efficiency.

Oh, and don’t forget that there are a large number of customers who do not not participate in online communities and social media. Their needs must not be overlooked in the seeming stampede for this new promised land.

brilliant basics, culture, customer experience, customer forums, frontline agents, listening, managing, people, social media | No Comments