Customer Relationship Management

Off late have been part of many discussions where have been asked this question repeatedly 'should brands  join Facebook communities or build their own communities' something similar 'play where they are playing or create a new playing field' ....

The first question that comes to mind is are brands big enough for anybody to move from a user friendly, loved by all Facebook, to a community that is no doubt  'walled' , or the other way to put is .. Would the brands any day be able to create something that is as attractive as Facebook that can ever scale up to 500 Million users? I think while these are valid arguments, the way one needs to look at these is with a different view; no brand owned community would ever be Facebook like or should even think of competing with it, the focus of the two are very different and more and more examples that I read about suggest is that they are ecosystem partners and can co exist without hurting each others' motive.
A Facebook kind of community exists to enable friends to share their likes dislikes, events that occur in their lives etc etc etc...however a Community hosted by company has few things in mind either to promote their products/services ( directly or as in most of the cases indirectly), or to take customer feedback on what they offer, or many other business cases that are popping up now right from the way Starbucks does it to Mayo clinic...end of it meant to be for one reason 'channelize customers insights to better of their offerings'.

Facebook right from the beginning has been for 'Friends' to connect with each other, though on may argue that they have off late tried to offer tools like Facebook connect... they are more as Jeremiah puts it more of colonization attempts. What is undoubtedly great about Facebook is the scale and the ease with which they have good everybody on board right from Boomers to Millennial generation.

Looking beyond, here is what I believe are the prime reasons that should be kept in mind with the evolving trends in Social Media, while making a decision

    * Ecosystem challenge: If one is regular on Social Media space, would know that every day there is there is a new Social Media Beast born ... TechCrunch is full of stories about all new promising tools that would one day scale bigger that Facebook, Twitter etc... so if Foursquare is the new promising baby on the block with already 100 Million users... Tumbler has a good story too. The challenge this poses to the brands therefore is , where to invest time and energy( if not money ) and how many identities to create to woo the customers . Ecosystem of free tools is fairly large, where to stop if you start on this route is a challenge.
    * Do not confuse your customers: The above ecosystem challenge when looked from a customer's angle pose a very different challenge, while most of the customers are very happy with Facebook as a basic tool to share and consume information with friends. Is that the end, no, companies today are putting up Support Videos, New product Videos, Product Images etc on other sites that are more focused towards these mediums ( Videos YouTube and the Vimeo, Flickr and Picasa web albums) ,  customers today if they have to get involved on researching a product have to look at various such sites to see Genuine information about the product, and mind you this is besides the fact that they also look at review sites, blogs etc by other customers ...to check their opinion. I see this changing soon, companies would realize that by putting different stuff on different sites is not only difficult to maintain but also confusing for their customers too, consolidation of various tools (Functionalities as understood in current world) would be the next step, come to one place see all reviews, blogs, videos, pictures etc that you want, doubt if any of the current 'Free to use' platforms would be able to deliver this.
    * Customer is king not CEO: In the days to come one thing is sure that more and more conversation that happens outside of company network like Facebook and Twitter would provide meaningful inputs for the companies. Companies would by default create systems to monitor such conversations about their products/services; however the fact that cannot be dismissed is that the starting point of these conversations has to be a product or service that needs to be created, while agreeing that customers can be of help when it comes to suggestions around improving these. To deeply engage with customers on conversations that are meaningful companies would soon need to create and own platform that would facilitate this. Companies have to own at the end of it two things a product or service they create and an ecosystem that enables customers to help them improve it

To be continued....

Posted by Rituparn Prem Dixit at 9:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Let me start by asking some very simple questions to all the readers - how many of you believe in Astrology? or to make it more objective, let me put it as how many of you read your daily/weekly horoscope?

Does some basic traits of our personality could be attributed to our birth date and the place of birth? Though to get the records straight, even I do not follow this blindly but still I have found out that one's personality and sun-sign could be related by at least some common traits, if not all.  To validate my point, one can just browse through the internet for materials that provides a basic personality description according to a birth sun-sign. If one does not trust content on internet, one can also call on some expert to know about it. I am confident everyone would be able to relate to some personality traits described by their sun-signs.

Also, how we react in different situations and conversations are governed some what by the underlying traits. Though, I will also like to add that many other factors also come into play but at a sub-concious level no one can change it even after external influences.

I believe by now everyone would be thinking that this portal is supposed to be for CRM topics and not about personality and horoscopes!! But then, I will like to say that a CRM also assists business users to know more about customers, prospects and other stakeholders. So, it makes sense if a business user can use these traits to alter their communication accordingly. How much impact this can create again will depend upon how better CRM can assist in mapping the personality traits.

Now, we arise at the question of what information should organizations have in the system in order to map personality attributes. I think the least any organization would already have about their contacts is 'the birth date'. This is more than enough to start mapping the traits. Since a birth date directly relates to a sun-sign, one can have a third-party application within CRM system to display the common personality traits directly on to the agent's screen.

Possible implications of having this information readily available:

a. An agent can have an assisted call text based on the personality type. For instance, some people prefer a straight talk, some like to have an informal talk and thus the communication could be altered in order to better engage with the customer.

b. Some customers would be pleased by monetary benefits while some are pleased only if basic services met their expectations. Hence, the services can be aligned accordingly to increase customer satisfaction index.

c. The traits could be also used as an input to recommending intelligent offers and products. A basic working is to do a analysis on mapping already accepted products/offers with the personality type which can help in future recommendations. Since CRM systems already keep track of a customer's past purchase and the accepted offers, one can try to measure the degree of correlation between a sun-sign, personality patterns with types of product/offer.

To make a more strong argument in favor of using personality attributes, let's look at a possible scenario:
'Extroverts' are mainly those people who are more outgoing in nature and want to always stay in the limelight. Thus customers who are extroverts are more likely to play a role of a efficient brand advocate in case they are pleased with the brand. Further, they are also more likely to have more number of social contacts than someone who is introvert. For a better accuracy, a score range could be attributed to it like a score of 1 relates to absolute introverts and 5 to absolute extrovets.

Hence, if CRM systems are able to tag customers with a Extroverts/Introverts score, this can help in shortlisting of influencing customers.

To conclude, this article only gave an insight on the possible useful scenarios but it is purely upto an organization how they would like to leverage personality and horoscopes within CRM business processes. May be one can start it on a trial basic with incorprating the most basic personality types as an enhancement to existing customer data. 

 

Posted by Nishith Gupta at 5:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)