brand | Skilful Minds

What are the Organizational Limits to Analytics in SCRM?

June 24, 2010

From "A Journey Round My Skull's" photostream on Flickr

Recent studies, one by Sentiment360 and the other by FreshMinds, concluded that social media monitoring tools aren’t very accurate in automatically measuring sentiment, much less influence. The insight isn’t a new one and speaks to the now well-known issue of whether social media engagement is scalable. Consequently, we now see social media monitoring companies combining with text analytics companies to bundle their service offerings to increase their ability to monitor a customer’s activity and online influence, tracking that information to the workflows of marketing, sales, customer support, or operations in near real-time.

How well hybrid analytics companies, combining social media monitoring with text analytics, can deliver on the automation promise, and scalability, in managing the customer experience remains in question. For example, in attempting to convey the limits of the marketing promise, Maria Ogneva of Attensity360 in The “Right” Degree of Automation recently offered the following distinctions, between process automation, response automation, and pre-response automation.

Process automation involves developing rules to use in decisions about the flow of information. Response automation involves using automated and “canned” responses to customer questions, generally a “no no” in social media unless tied to an information update rather than a marketing message. It is worth noting, as Maria’s colleague Michelle de Haaff does, that response automation also includes automatically determining which social media messages merit engagement and which ones don’t. The whole SCRM discussion needs independent research on these new hybrid tool sets to assess their degree of accuracy over the existing automated sentiment analysis tools.

I don’t think it is too soon though to assert, following Mark Tamis recent point, that the importance of collaboration across the Enterprise and its ecosystem is crucial to SCRM. It isn’t as simple as training people to collaborate, as some imply. Rather, a learning organization and the culture that goes with it are crucial preconditions for employing analytics effectively in SCRM, especially if business processes and work practices are to deliver customer experiences seamlessly.

The thoughts Maria shared about pre-response automation are key to our discussion here.

Somewhere in between process and response automation there exists another kind of automation. It’s a hybrid of sorts, let’s call it pre-response automation. What in the world is pre-response automation? Well, I did just make up the term, but bear with me – let’s see if we can make it catch on. Your system reads, understands and distributes social media messages in step 1. Then taking it a step further, it looks up a potential answer from either within your FAQ or an external user forum, and queues it up as a potential answer for the person who should be sending this message. This way, you as the company rep, get to send a message that’s automated and personalized at the same time. The thing you are automating is the research that would take you time to look up – time you would’ve spent on a menial task that could be spent on engaging and humanizing your responses. Imagine how many more customers you could talk to then! As long as you are putting human touches on all of your messages, using automation to help you write the straightforward response is A-OK. Of course this only works for fairly straightforward cases, nothing custom or complex. Then there’s no shortcut around research (my emphasis).

Maria’s distinctions about how to apply text analytics in fine tuning social media monitoring to engage the customer experience are well put. In fact, as Lior Arussy recently noted, the more Social CRM advocates promise automation as a feasible choice for meeting the scalability challenge of social media for businesses, the more their consulting strategy mimics traditional IT consulting where the technology, though claiming to only provide a part of the solution, is actually assumed by clients to provide THE solution. As a result, crucial organizational and cultural challenges too often go unaddressed.

…we should not rush to embrace new technologies, when we lack the substance to initiate the customer engagement. A fan club on facebook or constant tweeting will not disguise inferior customer experiences. In fact it will only magnify the problem and distribute it to millions of potential new customers.

At the core of social CRM success must be not the tools but the organizational readiness to act. Both through executives’ readiness to listen and commitment to act combined with design and delivery of superior, differentiating experiences.

In his comment to Lior’s post, Marc Mandel observed that ” in my experience the fault about trying to substitute a tool for a truly appropriate organizational solution is neither the exclusive domain of the buyer or the seller, but often a shared culpability.” To her credit, Maria Ogneva of Attensity360 straightforwardly notes that analytics and monitoring tools cannot substitute for a business strategy.

How can we keep the people and culture challenges in organizational focus while deploying analytics in SCRM? As Christian Finn, Microsoft’s Director for Collaboration and Enterprise Social Computing, recently noted regarding Microsoft’s use of Sharepoint 2010, “Solve a Problem, Don’t Deploy a Technology”. To get more specific, ready the organization to solve bumps in the customer experience in a seamless way first. A good customer experience can be delivered without SCRM technology, as the video below by Jaffe Juice makes clear in relationship to an experience with Starbucks and Foursquare.

Frequently a seamless customer experience will need delivering without SCRM since the customer’s job demands application of a barely repeatable process. Or, as Sig characterizes barely repeatable processes over at Thingamy,” The activities that employees spend most of their time on every day”.

In other words, Brands Don’t Talk to Customers, Employees Do. Organize for collaboration accordingly and emphasize empathy as well as information sharing.

Posted by Larry R. Irons

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6 Comments | Collaboration, Customer Experience, Social CRM | Tagged: analytics, brand, Collaboration, customer dialogue, Customer Experience, empathy, Enterprise 2.0, SCRM, Social Business Design, social CRM | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons

Learnable Services, CRM, and Social Business Design

March 29, 2010

“Presenting a consistent face to customers improves their comfort and satisfaction.”

R “Ray Wang” and Jeremiah Owyang Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management

Marketing, especially social media marketing, and learning, including organizational learning, are both essential components of a dialogue strategy for customer experience design and management. A dialogue strategy builds on the assumption that companies learn more from customers when customers learn from them, and doing so benefits both. I increasingly think it provides a basic framework to think about, and consider as part of your experience design strategy, when relating to customers. Thought leaders increasingly refer to the challenge as social business design.

Given the maturity and diffusion of social media, a dialogue strategy provides a framework to discuss communication as an ecosystem, whether addressing collaboration, innovation, segmentation, sales, customer service, or brands. The key to the process is understanding customers, attracting them, engaging them with sales in mind, empowering them to solve your product and service problems, and learning from them to improve products and services, thereby strengthening your brand. It is not simply segmenting them, targeting them, driving them through interactions, and transacting with them through sales.

Over time, people buy things they need from you rather than someone else because they want what you offer, and because they feel an empathic connection, i.e. that you understand them. From my reading, Wim Rampen’s contention that we need to use segmentation the customer’s way gets to the heart of the point. The challenge of learning how to make an empathic connection increases to the extent that CRM (customer relationship management) aims to align customer engagement directly with business transactions.

Those looking for a direct, sustained connection between customer engagement and sales from Social CRM are expecting too much in my opinion. The key question is whether you know that Jane Smith who called for support tonight also chatted with one of your people earlier, or posted (or tweeted) something positive or negative about you on her blog, or posted something about your product/service to a how-to community forum. Knowing any of those things about Jane’s activities and experiences with your brand increases the potential for empathic connection between your people and Jane, meaning your understanding of what Jane needs from your products/services increases.

It would be nice if a monitoring platform could listen for you and, just automatically, determine how influential Jane Smith really is in the scheme of things. It might be nice to have a social media management system that just took care of everything, gauged the influence of anyone commenting about you online, ranked their value relative to your brand, and prioritized the level of response needed. However, in the near term, regardless of how much we want that panacea, your employees, or outsource partners, are going to need to engage with your customers as though their problems are your own.

Nestle’ can speak to that issue recently. It is important to note that the Nestle’ example is not the first time a company’s supply chain management, rather than a product or service per se, came under organized criticism. Nike and Shell, among others, found their own supply chain relationships under fire over the past decade. Indeed, Shell’s early experiment in 1998 with a blog called Tell Shell came under such negative commentary from the public that the company shut it down. Nike, on the other hand, engaged the debate and incorporated the criticisms into its business model, I’ll leave it to you to decide which brand strategy makes the most sense for customer relationships.

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5 Comments | Customer Communities, Customer Experience, e-Learning 2.0, Experience Design, Social Business Design | Tagged: brand, Customer Communities, Customer Experience, Customer Experience Management, empathy with customers, engagement, SCRM, Social Business Design, social CRM, Social Media, social networking | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons

Customer Competencies, Co-Creation, and Brand Communities

October 20, 2009

Courtesy of Wonderfully Complex’s photostream on flickr.

Word of mouth communities and networks using social software are increasingly spread over regional, national, and international borders, making them much more important to those who market branded products and services, online and off. The recent buzz around the concept of social business points to the growing importance of social networks and communities to the evolution of business practice. Whether companies are in fact closing the community gap or the engagement gap remains an open question though.

As Rachael Happe of the Community Roundtable notes in commentary on the Community Maturity Model:

in the stages before a company becomes truly networked, metrics are isolated to supporting one business process vs. in a networked business the whole business becomes social and the communities are set up to support cross-functional goals.

In other words, customer communities approaching maturity produce value for the business, or organizational enterprise, rather than only a specific functional area — such as research and development, product management, customer support, or marketing. Rachel’s overall point receives validation in a recent article in the September (2009) issue of the Journal of Marketing that reports on long term ethnographic research on brand communities by Professors Hope Jensen Schau, Albert M. Muniz, Jr., and Eric J. Arnould, “How Brand Community Practices Create Value .” The most interesting thought in the article for me is their point that customer competencies are a valuable resource for building co-creation opportunities in brand communities.

Unlike earlier discussions of customer competence, Schau, Muniz, and Arnould contend trying to co-opt customer competencies is the wrong strategy. Rather, their research findings suggest community management benefits from developing opportunities for customers to grow their competencies with the brand. They make it clear that their research indicates,

Companies wishing to encourage co-creation should foster a broad array of practices, not merely customization.” In other words, don’t try to keep the community focus only on what benefits the brand as you define it. The important point to keep in mind when discussing value in brand communities is that members create value for themselves through producing cultural capital distinguishing their status relative to the community, aside from the ROI and business value gained by the company owning the brand. Making sure members are provided opportunities to grow their competencies encourages them to reinvest their cultural capital in the brand community.

I discussed co-creation in several posts this past year in relation to eLearning 2.0 generally as well as Nokia and, back in 2005, its overall importance to the challenge of creating successful innovation, including the relevance of customer communities to innovation outcomes. The concept of customer competencies captures the overall significance of co-creation for efforts to produce value through engaging customers. However, Schau, Muniz, and Arnould offer the additional insight that the competencies critical to brand communities are developed through community practices. By practice they mean the linked, implicit way people understand, say, and do things. The term is further used to refer to the activities, performances, and representations (video, graphics, etc.) or talk of community members.

Experience designers can use the concept of customer competencies to inform choices about how to manage practices in customer communities.
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5 Comments | Collaboration, Customer Communities, Experience Design, Learning Experience | Tagged: brand, co-creation, Customer Communities, customer competence, Customer Experience, elearning 2.0, empathy, empathy with customers, engagement, Innovation | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons

Shaping Social Business Ecosystems as Learnscapes

August 18, 2009

The emergence of social media provides people inside and outside organizations with a way to actively speak about, speak to, and engage the product and service offerings of enterprises. Currently, 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content and 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands. Enterprises, on the other hand, listen to, engage, and act on insights gained from social media.

A recent study of social media engagement by Ben Elowitz and Charlene Li covered the 100 largest brands and, among other conclusions, noted that,

One recurring theme throughout these case studies is that engagement cannot remain the sole province of a few social media experts, but instead must be embraced by the entire organization.

Channels, policies, processes, touch points and transactions are increasingly viewed as parts of the social experience organizations use to encourage employees in collaboration (also known as — Enterprise 2.0), and engage customers in conversation (also known as — social media) for the purposes of innovation and transformation of the business. The common goal of the ongoing discussion involves transforming business practices to incorporate social relationships into the value proposition to customers and other stakeholders.

Integrating engagement into enterprises is crucial to strategic efforts to use social software throughout an ecosystem, inside and outside the formal organizational hierarchy, as social business design. My contention is that such integration is most likely to succeed with a focused approach to informal learning. In my last post, Scalable Learning and Learnscapes in Social Business Design, I offered the following point.

The concept of learnscape is a useful framework for thinking about the strategic challenge to the range of learning activities occurring as companies attempt to create feedback loops between their brand experience and the functional areas of their enterprise, especially in regard to the multidisciplinary collaboration needed to make these efforts successful.

The concept of a learnscape, initially outlined by Jay Cross, focuses our attention on designing ecosystems to heighten the innovation and performance of people. I lay out some thoughts about learnscapes and shaping ecosystems below, using key concepts from the Dachis Group’s framework, initially discussed in an earlier post on HP’s WaterCooler project. I don’t claim these insights provide proven techniques for shaping enterprise ecosystems. But, I do think they point in a useful direction for those thinking about Enterprise 2.0 and social media strategy to keep in mind. Read the rest of this entry »

3 Comments | Collaboration, e-Learning 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Learning Experience, Social Business Design, Social Networks, Web 2.0 | Tagged: brand, Collaboration, Dachis Group, e-Learning 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Innovation, Learning Experience, learnscapes, social network, user experience, wiki | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons

Social Business, the Golden Rule, and Open Empathy Organization

May 20, 2009

I first took real notice of the term “social business” in a post early this year over at Peter Kim‘s blog. The concept of social business is not limited to those enterprises seeking to “generate social improvements and serve a broader human development purpose,” though these are certainly admirable goals. Rather, social business is increasingly discussed as a frame of analysis for considering the business implications of large numbers of people using web 2.0 technologies, especially social media, within corporate enterprises as employees, or outside them as customers.

Channels, policies, processes, touch points and transactions are increasingly viewed as parts of the social experience organizations use to engage employees in collaboration, and customers in conversation. The common goal of the discussion involves transforming business practices to incorporate social relationships into the value proposition to customers and other stakeholders.

My recent reading of Wired to Care by Dev Patnaik (with Peter Mortensen) provided some basic insights for me in thinking about the development of social business practices. I highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in the intersection of experience design and organization. The book explores the concept of empathy in a manner that speaks to the social business discussion by pointing out that the result of a transformation is more than adoption of new technologies such as social media.

Wired to Care offers an approach to organizing business as well as creating design insights on how to engage customers to improve products and services. One of my earliest posts on Skilful Minds, Break the Golden Rule with Customer Dialogue Support, offered the following observation,

Many “customer care” approaches call for treating customers the way you’d like to be treated—the so-called Golden Rule. Treating customers the way we, as service providers want to be treated implies that we inherently know what’s best for them. A customer dialogue approach alternatively assumes that customers know, or can quickly learn, what’s best for them as individual customers. We need to treat customers the way their actions indicate they want, not the way we would want to be treated as a customer.

Reading Wired to Care persuaded me that my previous point only moved the discussion a part of the way to an understanding of the nuances of the Golden Rule for business. Wired to Care offers an interesting point of view on the limitations inherent in the traditional understanding of the Golden Rule, while contending that a full appreciation of it reveals truths about us as individuals, and our relationship to organizations, whether as employees or customers. It outlines three levels of the Golden Rule:

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” — the most basic level with limited efficacy unless people share the same view of the world
“Do unto others as they would have done to them” — requires increased empathy to distinguish the wants and needs of individuals
“Do unto each other as we would have done unto us” — provides for empathy by focusing on “how we’d all like to be treated, inside the company and out,” yet also recognizes that good business practice might additionally require treating people “better than they expect to be treated”

Dev contends that the third level of the Golden Rule provides a basis for integrating empathy into the everyday practices of organizations. Though he does not use the term social business, Dev’s analysis offers a foundational strategy for implementing social business through the concept of an Open Empathy Organization.

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9 Comments | Brands, Change Management, Experience Design, Innovation, Social Business Design | Tagged: brand, Customer Experience, dev patnaik, empathy, empathy with customers, Experience Design, Golden Rule, open empathy organization, social business, wired to care | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons

Social Media, Word of Mouth, and the Cynefin Framework

April 20, 2009

: The Cynefin Framework

As noted in a previous post, the promises made by brands are increasingly judged on whether they converge with the customer experience across channels of service in organizations. The challenge is a longstanding one for all organizations. However, the increasing adoption of social media makes the challenge more pressing as word of mouth (WOM) from customers, suppliers, competitors, or others amplifies their ability to communicate their experience with your brand to others. Word of mouth communities and networks using social software are increasingly spread over regional, national, and international borders, making them much more important to those who market branded products and services, online and off.

Speaking the language of customer-centricity is not good enough. Companies must talk-the talk and walk-the-walk for brand strategy. Brand strategies are most effective when based in the design and delivery of business services themselves. Listening to the conversations people engage online about a topic (such as your brand), and eliciting the participation of those people in the development and refinement of products and services, are two key parts of an experience design strategy. Even though you may think this is a “Duh!” insight, consider recent findings on the engagement gap.

PriceWaterhouseCooper’s 12th Annual CEO Survey recently reported that most CEOs,

…believe that data about their customers (94%), brand (91%) and employees (88%) are important or critical to long-term decision-making. However, strikingly low percentages of CEOs say they have comprehensive information in these and other critical areas that contribute to organisational agility. Just 21% have comprehensive information about the needs and references of customers and clients. Less than one third feel they have all the information they need about reputation (31%) and the views and needs of employees (30%).

Not surprisingly, the ability to anticipate customer needs is the widest gap between the information CEOs report they need to make decisions about the long-term success of their businesses, and what they currently possess. This post explores the Cynefin (pronounced cunevin) Framework as a helpful approach for thinking about the importance of dialogue with customers in efforts to bridge insight and action.

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Leave a Comment » | Customer Communities, Customer Experience, Experience Design, Social Media, Social Networks | Tagged: brand, co-creation, community, Customer Experience Management, Cynefin Framework, dialogue, Experience Design, Social Media, WOM, word of mouth | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons

Brand Experiences are for Employees and Customers

April 6, 2009

The topics discussed at Skilful Minds fall in a range of challenges involved in translating strategic business goals, and the complex needs of people, into exceptional experiences, for employees who provide products and services and those who consume them, whether the latter are customers, users, learners, or just plain people. Commentators and practitioners of experience design tend to focus on the latter while largely ignoring the former. A few recent posts by influentials speak directly to these concerns and merit specific attention for their insights into experience design and brands.

The underlying theme is that brands are not simply about the way customers view products and services. The way employees engage customers in the design, development, and delivery of those products and services is also crucial to brands. However, exhorting employees to live the brand and talk customer-centricity is a prescription for failure when isolated from transformational changes to a company’s engagement with customers.

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6 Comments | Brands, Change Management, Customer Experience, Experience Design, Social Media | Tagged: brand, Customer Experience, dialogue, Experience Design, PR 2.0 | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons

Deep Metaphor: Exploring the Say-Mean Gap in Design Research

December 1, 2008

In recent posts I discussed different gaps, from the community gap in particular to the encompassing engagement gap. Each of those discussions attempted to size up a disparity between the attention currently given to the importance of community and social media by companies and the reality of the commitment of resources to them based on recent research in the United States and Europe.

We hear a lot of discussion these days about Web 2.0 and social media, especially on whether adoption is driven by demographics, lifestyle, or something else. Recently, while reading Marketing Metaphoria by Gerald Zaltman and Lindsay Zaltman, it struck me that regardless of the patterns of Web 2.0 and social media adoption, the applications tap into basic sensibilities for connection that we all share, regardless of age and lifestyle. As I note below, a sense of connection is an example of a deep metaphor that the Zaltmans discuss in relation to people, products, and brands.

Deep metaphors underlie the way people understand the context of problems they face in their everyday lives. Though the concept of deep metaphor was initially outlined in Lakoff and Johnson’s book Metaphors We Live By, Marketing Metaphoria takes it a step further by developing useful techniques for exploring how deep metaphors affect the perception of brands and products and, by implication, how to approach the say-mean gap in design research.

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2 Comments | Brands, Customer Communities, Experience Design, Innovation, User Experience | Tagged: brand, community, engagement, groundswell, IA, insights, marketing, metaphor, say-mean, talk out loud, usability | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons

Brand Dialogue Strategy in Social Media

November 18, 2008

At least since publication of the Cluetrain Manifesto, with its meme that markets are conversations, observers noted the importance of what customers say about a brand, online and off — but especially those online. However, a somewhat subtler point from Cluetrain is increasingly relevant to brands and social media. The point was made in the book’s Thesis 39: “The community of discourse is the market.” In fact, the thesis actually consists of several ancillary ones: Read the rest of this entry »

3 Comments | Brands, Customer Communities, Customer Experience, Experience Design, Social Media, Web 2.0 | Tagged: brand, cluetrain, dialogue, emotion, Social Media, Web 2.0 | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons

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