Customer Relationship Management

While doing some study on the safety and security systems typically used by defense, I realized a great synergy between what's happening in global security management space and the space of social networking enabled customer engagement space - a shift from the 'command & control' attitude to 'sense and respond' approach. This shift of approach from 'command and control' to 'sense and respond' is coming into military organizations globally as they realize that their operating environment has become far more complex, unpredictable and dynamically changing. Threats to security are operating in much more network-centric fashion than ever and rules of the game are not fixed any more. If one looks at the patterns of terrorist attacks worldwide, it will be apparent how the methods and strategies used by new age threat agents have seemingly disabled the 'conventional' capabilities of the national security and intelligence in many instances.

I'm not sure how many of you might be familiar with these terms as they are not so much popular in corporate world but they are extremely well known in the defense space. So let me help you get a quick familiarity with these terms first.

Command and Control - it refers to an action of authority for the task force, with the directions from the designated commanding personnel, towards a defined specific mission. Typically, this operational model is centered around 'rapid problem resolution' with the possible resources available. As highlighted, characteristics of this model are 'action of authority' and presence of a specific mission (which is typically a situation needing attention) around which capabilities are designed.

Sense and Respond - it refers to dynamically coordinated action across multiple capability areas based on the continuous awareness of the (changing) context and the (unfamiliar) situation. Here key words are 'dynamic' (as opposed to fixed), 'coordinated' (as opposed to Chinese walls) and most importantly 'continuous situation/context awareness' (as opposed to doctrine).

Emerging operating models (and specific technology implementations) in defense are very interesting and I can go on and on, but now what has this got to do with CRM? While context may differ, in my opinion, situation that global military organizations are witnessing is not much different than what businesses are experiences with their customers.

So let me first articulate the reasons specifically in the case of customer relationship management that justify why enterprises will need to transition to 'sense-and-respond' model. In today's socially networked environment, I believe that the unhappy customers are likely to spread the bad word more frequently and more strongly as compared to the customers that are happy (appreciate if someone can point to any statistical data/survey on this). Given the power of social networks, it is important that enterprises sense the 'unhappy' customers in real-time, monitor their social network activities (in the context of business of course) and pro-actively respond to customer in order to avoid any kind of adverse promotion by such customers.

Further, due to dynamically evolving market place, opportunities have much shorter life span than usual. It simply means that the reaction time required for the enterprise to act on a social-technology based transaction is much smaller than what had been in past - hence agility is critical.

And most importantly, 'controllable' (by the enterprise) variables in the customer relationships - time, place, methods and outcomes of the customer engagement - are reducing drastically.

Collectively, these changes will force the organizations to abandon their command and control attutide towards managing customers and forces them to adopt the sense-and-respond approach over period of time.

In part 2, I will explain the specific differences that sense-and-respond approach will bring in for the customer relationship management using social CRM strategies.

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 5:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Guest Post by
Jakki Geiger, Director, MDM Marketing, Informatica

Of all the highlights we had at our Informatica World conference last November, presentations by our master data management (MDM) customers were some of the most inspiring. It was informative and gratifying to hear executives from companies such as Merrill Lynch, Johnson & Johnson and St. Jude Medical share their experiences in using MDM to solve pressing business issues.

Held in Washington, D.C., Informatica World 2010 was first at which we showcased our MDM solutions (resulting from our acquisition of Siperian). The response was remarkable--we had seven MDM breakout sessions and each was standing room only. This just goes to show you that enterprise interest in MDM to solve business pain points is reaching all-time highs.

Here are some key points from our MDM customer presentations:

Merrill Lynch
Maximizing Customer Value by Operationalizing Customer Centricity Using MDM
Being one of 15,000 financial advisors (FA) in the Global Wealth & Investment Management (GWIM) division at Merrill Lynch wasn't easy. Seventy percent of each FA's was time was spent hunting for data, which left only a few hours a day to engage with and serve customers. Customer data resided in multiple un-integrated systems, full of discrepancies and blind spots that prevented FA's from seeing the full spectrum of the customer's relationship with the bank, making it difficult to assess each customer's needs.

Now with a 360-degree customer view (also known as customer 360), enabled by MDM, advisors no longer waste time reconciling customer data and can focus on servicing customers and making relevant cross-sell and up-sell offers. In fact, Merrill Lynch's financial advisors are now 30% more productive than their biggest competitor. Some numbers shared by Merrill Lynch underscore the enterprise scale of the solution--more than 450 million records being integrated, more than 1 million searches and 60,000 real-time updates a day, 3 million profiles processed per week, and less than two seconds to sync MDM data with downstream applications.

Johnson & Johnson
Road to a Perfect End-to-End Commercial Experience: A Multidomain MDM Case Study
A byproduct of Johnson & Johnson's significant growth was ever-increasing data complexity. With its global operations and 250 operating companies, the company struggled with meeting efficiently meeting compliance requirements and streamlining operations due in large part to the huge volumes of customer data and product data which resided in different formats and multiple separate systems across the company.

An enterprise MDM implementation was the key enabler to streamline critical operations and consolidate key business processes across 14 operating companies in four global regions. On an ongoing basis, the solution manages 883,583 products and 484,679 customers with 3.9 million cross-references, supplying a single source of that data previously sprawled across the extended enterprise. Johnson & Johnson reports more accurate transaction processing, fewer resources needed to manage data, better compliance and customer service--in all, a net $15 million impact.

St. Jude Medical
An Accelerated MDM Journey: From Mastering Compliance to Mastering Products
Founded in 1976, St. Jude Medical, a $4.68B medical device manufacturer, found itself with a classic "accidental architecture" resulting from ad hoc application deployments over the years and no central master data foundation. As a result, it struggled to manage critical data and suffered business inefficiencies and increased risk.

With new regulatory requirements making better data management an imperative, St. Jude deployed MDM to support physician spend compliance in just 10 weeks. That paved the way for the next steps in the MDM journey of managing product data and sales reporting and transitioning to a centralized hub strategy for master content requests. The results include improved regulatory compliance, enhanced sales reporting and analytics, improved data quality, and a single, reliable data source to support critical business processes.

Posted by Jakki Geiger at 5:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Co-creation has been an interesting topic for last couple of years and we have heard so much from C.K. Prahalad on this who firmly propagated that future of competition is going to be based on the ability of the organization to co-create with their customers. In my view, ultimate value of the social technology paradigm (in the context of CRM) is actually going to be the creation of new customer experience possibility which seems to be in the core of this co-creation theory.

To me it is clear that creation of new customer experience is going to be the light at the end of the tunnel that will drive the future of the social CRM. However, the important question is if this customer experience creation will happen by the organization or will it be driven by the customer community. Is co-creation really sustainable and can organizations bet on it for their future innovation?

Apple - 30+ years old company, 300+ stores globally, 300+ billion USD market cap, a prominent corner stone of the innovation, what has Steve Jobs, CEO of the company got to say about their innovation strategy - "We do no market research....Customers don't know what they want...." - Now that's not much like 'co-creation'. Clearly Apple as a company has taken a path to find new things for customers that surprises them and gets them in the groove after they engage with the new products. It's a bet for the company and for that bet, company completely relies on handful of individuals (may be just one...) who can instinctively imagine the future. If Apple would have taken the co-creation route, do we think iPad would have come in the world? That's a million dollar question, I also don't know the answer but yes, I do think it could have been riskier bet for Apple...

P&G - 100+ years old company, 180+ billion USD market cap, successfully experimented with the open innovation strategy, produces more than 1/3 of its innovation using the network of external co-creation participants (customers, partners etc.) generating billions of dollars in revenue. Totally in contrast to operating philosophy of Apple as far as co-creation with customer is concerned.

This question feasibility of customer co-creation is extremely important because power of social paradigm comes from the ability to tap into billions of consumers globally that can now think together, express in real-time and evolve their ideas at speed of light. Power of social paradigm is in democratizing the control of defining the future. Power of social paradigm is in continuously evolving the future with real-time experiments being done by customers. Fundamentally if organizations don't believe that they can rely on the customers for future co-creation, chances are less that social media is going to be much miracle for it beyond some basic excitement at technology level improvements.

Historically, customer co-creation didn't really exist as business philosophy. To large extent, customers also have conditioned themselves over period of time to believe that product creation or future innovation is not something that is part of their life. Consumers behave like  consumers, which means companies have to find something good for them and if they have money to pay, they will consume it. They are not going to be bothered to spend their life in finding the future.

But times are changing. Consumers are not really the same that we have known for years. Very clearly, consumers are interested in finding a play in product designing process and would want some of their 'wish-list'  ideas become reality. Co-creation can be a powerful instrument with social technologies to bring rapid evolution to seed ideas that organizations may be working upon. It becomes such strong de-risking tool that allows to validate new ideas quickly with the customer communities and actually bring more customer-demanded features right upfront during design stage. While customer may not be subject matter experts, but kind of co-creation model we are talking about, we don't need billions of experts or creative thinkers for that matter. We need diverse ideas, we need validation of customer interests, we need access to dreams of masses to find right bets for the future.

Now important thing about co-creation is that it is not about getting customer to design the products. It is a wide spectrum of customer engagement during product design cycles for new ideas. Some organizations might chose to involve customers in brainstorming while some others might like to have customer communities for validation of product ideas. Co-creation might work differently for different industry and hence accordingly organizations will need to pick up appropriate social platforms to engage with their customers.

Ultimately, when organizations reach the plateau of value creation for the customers, co-creation is the only practical way to beat the limitation and to take the value creation to next level with the help of the customers because they are the reasons why products are created and they are in the center of the entire customer experience phenomenon. So if organizations have to offer the next-gen customer experience, is that really feasible at all without bringing the customer into the helm of this creation? 

To put it another way, when some organizations like P&G start winning the game, can the rival companies still rely on their handful creative product designers to fight future of the innovation? Well, who knows, maybe we have a different story tomorrow with Android co-creations beating Apple innovations....I'm looking forward for the victory of the democratized innovation....

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

For me, the first signs of the social stuff becoming serious flashed in my mind when I heard about a global 2000 company recruiting a role called 'social media manager' in early 2008 or so. And then we had Citibank, America express, General Motors,  Dell, Toyota, Samsung, Wells Fargo, NASA, Intel, LexisNexis and many more big corporations that seem to have now deployed a focused role of Social media management, some in form of additional  responsibility and few as dedicated one. Also, looks like our good friend and leading industry analyst Jeremiah Owyang has been tracking this role since 2007, almost an year earlier than when I noticed it first time. That definitely surprises me.

Interestingly, he has put an impressive list of corporate social strategists for 2011 that you can refer to if it excites you. I guess these are going to be one of the most 'sought after' professionals, none lesser than celebrities I suppose. If you want to have more fun, you can find some very very interesting insights from the scrape of the social networking data by technology journalist Marshall Kirkpatrick here. I was amazed to see the diversity and creativity of the analysis that Marshall has been able to pull up. Sharing two examples here:

• maximum# of tweets done by any  strategists - 45K+ tweets in 3.5 years, almost 30 tweets daily (what a zeal!)
• max# of people that someone in such a role is following on twitter - 40K (I'm not sure if I could even imagine what it takes to look at tweets from 40 thousand people; I won't dare to think about responding to tweets..)

So getting back to the main track, this social media manager / social CRM director business is on the move now, it has taken a fairly formal shape and it is likely to be most publicized role in 2011-2012. Apart from being 'cool', this role is going to put the social customer strategists at the stretch of their imagination to deal with lot of uncertainties, non-standard scenarios as well as rising complications of doing social business (let alone the stress of 'tweeting' and responding to ever-growing list of followers). One of the key responsibilities of the social customer strategists that is going to separate the men from boys is their ability to sense the direction of the overall ship amidst all distractions of the social noise and deploy high-speed response to protect against the risks that could materialize rapidly. As a social customer strategist, here are some grave danger signs that I would be on constant look out for:

1. You get busier in 'talking' and don't spend time in 'listening' - it is very tempting for organizations to get themselves busy with all social talking tools and go all over the place for marketing, branding etc. If in the process your organization is sidelining what your customers say, feel and want (or don't want), its less likely that show will go on for long. Power of social customer lies in listening; listening with genuine intent and respect for the customer's space. Don't be surprised otherwise to find later that your customers are not listening to you either.
2. You are overexcited with sharing and forgot about the information privacy - well, as I write I sense that whole issue of information privacy is going to turn big sometime soon, not just for the organizations but for the individuals as well. Real repercussions of the uncontrolled information sharing on social networks are still being discovered. Information privacy and security has to be guarded without any compromise. Feel free to check my previous blog for more insights into risks.
3. You are using the 'social platform' but not actually 'social' with your customers - I can see it happening already with number of companies. Many organizations are busy rolling out social platforms but they haven't changed their attitude and customer engagement value system to bring more 'social' into it. This is not going to work. Mushrooming of social technologies without a soul of the 'social engagement' is going to be a re-play of the dotcom bubble burst. It's good to experiment with the social technologies but make no mistake of missing the opportunities to enhance the social experience for the customer through these technologies. Social CRM needs to enhance the organization's capability to see the 'human faces' behind their customer identities. Companies that are just creating the illusion of the social CRM are at risk of being exposed sooner than later. So my advice will be not to 'pretend' social business or social enterprise; next-gen customers may not be good at forgiving.
4. You are on 'social technology' power booster but have not cured 'CRM' disability - it is extension of the previous danger. Adding social technologies will actually add to the stress and chaos if the existing disabilities of the CRM are not treated ahead of the SCRM deployment. This specifically includes system and process related issues in the enterprises.
5. You have opened the social pipe but have not prepared to manage the information explosion - social web is an information landmine. Once you get plugged into it, your enterprise can easily be lost into collecting, analyzing, filtering and processing gigabytes of data going all over the place. There is unbelievable amount of unstructured data out there without good handle on the context meta-data. If organization is not prepared to deal with this information flow in planned and structured fashion, it is going to take a lot to manage the chaos. Needless to say, unmanaged information stream is going to further intensify the issues of data privacy and security.

All in all, executives with the responsibility of the 'social customer engagement' have lot of hopes pinned on them to show the way forward, navigate through the evolving scenarios and protect the enterprise from risks of blunders from short-sighted actions. These socual customer executives will definitely need a good sense of the customer connect, smart and fast forward thinking and an attitude of continuous learning...and I probably a good sense of humor too....can anyone guess why?

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 11:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

One thing, which we as subscribers, do not prefer, is change of our personal mobile number, especially when we are using it for a few or more years, as we would have shared it with our family & friends and other service providers (e.g. banks, insurance companies, schools, book stores, membership clubs). Any change in our personal mobile number, really causes a lot of inconvenience to us and others, as it really takes a good amount of time and meticulous effort to communicate the change in our mobile numbers and others duly updating their address books/records, for future communication.

It is for this reason, many subscribers like us, end up staying with a specific service provider, even if we are little dissatisfied with their services (e.g. Quality of Service, Price and Customer Service Support). At times, this specific situation allows the service providers to take their customers/subscribers for granted.

One big relief to this problem is the excellent feature Mobile Number Portability (MNP), which allows subscribers to retain their existing mobile numbers when they switch from one mobile service provider to another.

MNP gives the freedom to the subscriber to choose a service provider based on their service offering (e.g. Quality of Service, Price and Customer Service Support). Their freedom of movement is not influenced by the inconveniences and costs that come with changing their mobile numbers.

So, MNP will be a good test for the mobile service providers to check their customer loyalty factor.

If a service provider is really taking care of their customers/subscribers, by understanding their needs, promptly addressing their problems/grievances and offering them good quality of service, at a competitive price, well backed by excellent customer service support, they really need not worry about customer churn, as their customers will be loyal to them and will remain with them.

On the other hand, if the service providers, have been taking their customers for granted, then MNP is a point of concern for them, as it can lead to customer churn, as it opens door for their subscribers to switch over to other service providers, whose service offerings are good and have loyal customer base, who would go out of the way to recommend them to their friends and family.

For subscribers, MNP, again validates the fact that 'Customer is the King', as today they have the freedom or flexibility to retain their mobile numbers, while moving from one service provider to another, based on their customer satisfaction levels.

In fact, MNP creates a highly competitive market, where service providers will go all the out to retain their customers and also fetch new customers (from their competitors), by offering them, what they really want, (i.e.), good quality of service, competitive price and excellent customer service.

I would appreciate your thoughts and views on this topic...

 

Posted by Shanmugam Gnanasambandam at 4:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

Enterprises need to start taking the social media transactions no lesser seriously than the regular customer engagement transactions when it comes to issues like privacy, response liabilities, customer identity theft, information misrepresentation etc. I recently came across various cases that clearly highlight the need for the same. I will share some of them below in this blog.

Electronic social media platforms is intensifying the visibility, reach and speed with which sentiments and specifics related to customer experience travel the globe. I recall reading a news article sometime back in 2009 where a district judge in Boulder, Colorado (USA) approved the validity of the use of social media tools like twitter and blogs to cover the court trail cases.  It highlights how the speed of information dissemination across various walks of life inclusive of personal, business and even legal eco-system is becoming 'cooler' option that allows influence of the information be 'here and now and across'.

So far, policies and regulations associated with the public use of social media are not strongly linked with the legal eco-system, instead mostly managed with 'social' sense only. However, that's not going to last for long given the intended penetration of the social media in the regularized business transactions. While majority of excitement around social media is projecting hypothetical win-win scenarios for business, it equally has a chance to turn into a dirty lose-lose scenario, especially when parties on the both sides (enterprise lobby and customer lobby) get their share of teeth from legal eco-system. I sincerely hope it doesn't get there since it will be so much unsocial really which will defeat the purpose of having the powerful social tools. But I also recognize that complications are unavoidable given the diversity, unpredictability and disparity in the global social fabric. So being prepared is being protected. Let's look at some of these example that came across in recent past:

Case 1 - A customer in Greece publishes the complaint against the an authorized Apple reseller after a dissatisfying experience of customer service; the Apple reseller sues the customer for the charges of damaging the business reputation. You can read more about this story here at mycustomer.com.

Case 2 - An employee posted negative comments about the supervisor for some work-related incident; company fires the employee for internet media usage policy violation. National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) investigation concluded that employee's Facebook postings need to be considered as protected concerted activity and the employer company was recommended to revisit their internet usage policy. Read more about this story on NLRB site here.
 

Case 3 - A famous celebrity (Courtney Love) multi-tweeted her negative sentiments against a fashion designer; case ends up in a lawsuit against the celebrity. You can read more about this story here at Reuters.

Case 4 - A financial services authority probe into Royal Bank of Scotland concluded that more than 50% customer complaints were mishandled with delays and unsatisfactory explanations. These were not necessarily social media related but consequently bank was fined £ 2.8M. Such cases make the accountability of customer handling on social channels very significant and high-priority agenda. Read more about this story here at mycustomer.com
 
 
Case 5 - At Lindsey Oil Refinery in UK, During a dispute between workers and employers resulted in a highs-speed massive strike action that got instrumented through networking groups using websites, social media, text messages and emails across the country. Clearly now both employers and the employee unions need to understand the role of the twitter-generation technology in the important engagement affairs relating to socially sensitive matters.

Case 6 - A cosmetic surgery company (Lifestyle Lift) facilitates fake manipulated review of its product/services by having its employee pretend to be happy customers; the company has been ordered to pay $ 300,000 in penalties. This is possibly just one of the cases that got discovered and hooked. Companies need to take a close watch at their social media marketing practices to find out what is being cooked. Read more about this story at Office of the Attorney General site. 

Let me share some of my suggestions to improve the overall accountability scenarios for social CRM. In my view, all of these should be high on the agenda of the social CRM directors to manage it proactively.

1. Establish a temper-proof audit trail of customer/prospect conversations that is protected against manipulation. It is needed to monitor the customer interaction as well as kept handy to be used during disputes involving customer complaints.
2. Revisit the local regulatory laws/policies on freedom of speech and fundamental customer rights to ascertain the appropriateness of your response strategy to customer comments and remarks on social media.
3. Immediately deploy strong (and fair) policy framework for dealing with the internal mismanagement and poor handling of the customer interaction (for that matter on any engagement channel)
4. Enforce specialized mandatory staff training with well formulated policies for customer engagements using online / social media.
5. Refactor your Intellectual Property training to include disclosure of information on social media by your staff
6. Deploy specialized customer engagement task force for high-speed 360 degree damage control using 'pro-social' methods

These are going to make the social media management somewhat heavy-duty but hey, that's still much lighter than dealing with lawsuits and larger market repercussions of mismanaged social media transactions I guess. That's all for this week, have a great weekend.

[In India here, we are celebrating Makar Sankranti, a festival that marks the Sun's auspicious movement from Sagittarius zodiac to Capricorn]

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 9:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Social CRM - so much is being said, debated, discussed and speculated but sad part is that much of it is more of the same. I guess that's temporary phenomenon because there is little that is available and there are too many to talk about it, another side of the social networking power -  gets everyone to talk, share, express, couldn't have been any other way. But I suppose we may re-live the experience of dotcom days, may be in slightly different shades of color. As I said earlier, more than what is being talked about, I'm excited about stuff that is still to be discovered and to be talked about. Here is one of such side-effects of the social CRM revolution - emergence of 'Social Customer Experience Designers' - a creative specialist community that will have power to revolutionize how social technologies are put to use between enterprises and customers.

How many of you laughed? (please send me an email so that I can publish the count)

And did you notice this one? Almost every small and big marketing company, advertisement company, PR company, even the web development company is morphing itself to become a Social Media or Social Business company. I like it instantly (facebook style). Sometime back I was talking to one of the creative design vendors who has done some work for me on the topic of social CRM. I was innocently telling him what we do, what I see in the market and some other observations. For a while this person kept listening to me with mysterious smile on his face and then came a big surprise to me. He revealed that his company does social CRM consulting also. I always thought that his company is into web designing, log designing, animation and all that stuff but social CRM? I must be sleeping when the world moved over. Anyway, it's never too late. So I reconciled with the fact that it is happening all over the place, happening faster than I would imagine and happening much more than what can be tracked and observed. To test my hypothesis I further did some small study of such companies that I thought are into pure play brick and mortar publishing, marketing etc. and I was not sure if they would have anything on social consulting, social business designing etc. But I realized that more than 80% of such companies have already moved over to their 'social' powered avataar. So I think even before enterprises could get ready to digest the social technology soup, world is getting full of services with entire 9-course meal on social stuff.

Now before you think that I'm being a cynical, having self-entertainment here, let me connect this observation to my prediction. Fast forward the social stuff to another 3-4 years and what you will find? We will have thousands of social tools, platforms etc. floating around, possibly many of them free of cost and amidst all of that enterprises struggling to cross the line beyond the commoditized social CRM maturity (social communities, CRM integration and horrifying social analytics etc.). Some smart enterprises will figure out how to creatively design few user engagement experiments that offer not only a good enjoyable experience to the customer but also provide opportunity to create mutual value that didn't exist before. Bingo! There begins the real future of the social CRM. As my colleague friend and social CRM enthusiast Harish Kotadia reminded me that it will happen faster than we think, and that will simply mean that competitive battleground on the social platforms will become an intense affair.

So I sincerely believe that value creation in the world of social CRM is going to happen in the customer engagement side, customer experience innovation side. And I tell it to myself that we haven't seen the real social CRM yet, it is yet to begin. To make real social CRM happen, enterprises will need to deep dive into their customer's life, their life-style and tap into their imagination. It is the Social Customer Experience Designers in the enterprise who will have deep understanding of the customer community pulse, who will be the advocate of the customer community and who will design the future of the customer experience ahead of time. That thrills me.

And I would imagine, this Customer Experience Design business is going to be far more complicated, intense and deeper than just being fancy stuff as it might sound. Enterprises to upgrade themselves to Social Enterprises, they will engage such Social Customer Experience Designers to transform their customer experience. There will be much more stronger global knowledge base available about the customer profiles, micro-preferences, micro-behavior phenomenon etc. that we don't have today. These will be used to design the micro-experience differentiators that will change the game. Let me give an early example of what I mean by this micro stuff. I owe this one to Manish Khatri, my colleague friend and a fabulous retail customer experience expert. His take is that when you and I go for shopping on the way from office, we are a different person, having different  mindset, different thinking pattern. It makes our buying behavior different than when we go to shopping from home, say with our family. These micro-behavior shifts happening on the same day in different hours of the day renders a traditional retail store ineffective to cater to such fluctuations because they are designed to service the customers with a fixed configuration of customer profile/expectation etc. Changing this design costs lot of dollars and productivity hours for the retail store owner. Given this scenario, a Customer Experience Designer will recommend a cost effective mechanism of engaging with different persona of the same customer using social technologies in form of different greeting mechanisms, differential offers, differential deal and possibly a differential store browsing options. This is where real social business transformation will take place. And that's the reason I strongly believe that it will change the way we do business, it will change the way how customer buy and I guess also redefine the product lines/services of many companies to provide next-gen experience not only of buying but also the experience of the life-style.

I'm keeping a keen eye on it. Let me also highlight that business of customer experience engineering is not new at all. But in the changing context, I think it is going to be far more intensified, specialized, deeper and innovative than it was ever in past. So be prepared to see a mainstream role of the 'Social Customer Experience Designers' all over the place if you are a budding creating customer experience guy and if you are an enterprise, well, it's going to be a really serious stuff, start thinking about it, experimenting ahead of time with it is going to prove its worth.

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 4:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

The most fascinating thing that I like about the social technology solutions is the never-ending possibilities of surprises. These surprises are the innovation brewing in all garage office across the globe with countless hours being spent to discover the next 'facebook' or 'twitter' that can change the history of mankind. Reality is that probably one out of millions of the ideas running over decades becomes earth shattering but bigger reality that I tend to believe is that in the process of finding that one earth shattering idea, there are many of them that are brought to life an unbelievable portfolio of experiments, I mean real-life experiments that slowly and progressively change the mindsets and thinking of the billions of people across the globe. You and me may not even know about all such possible cases that are happening around us but these micro change agents are continuously working to bring a new tomorrow that many of us wouldn't have thought about. That's precisely the point that I want to debate about when it comes to social CRM or social commerce is considered.

Most of the enterprises strategies are aligned to achieve certain end-state that defines the stated scenario of the enterprise when end-state is accomplished. For example, all along so many years in last decade, there had been an advocated (almost) end-state of the SOA enabled enterprise. Details of technological implementations may vary, specific organizational requirements may vary but still, at large there is some understanding and expectations of the end-state of the enterprise against which most of the enterprises attempted SOA initiatives. Further, take cloud computing, more recent phenomenon. While most of will agree that no one really can predictably say where this whole cloud computing is going to go in long term but based on current vision, there is fair degree of anticipation the end-state configurations of the enterprise as cloud becomes mainstream. This is the end-state against which enterprises are and can be advised for their strategies.

So debate is about whether we believe that there is any ideal end-state against which long terms strategies of social business is possible. As far as today's scenario is concerned, I say NO...and here is why I say that. 

When it comes to the whole social phenomenon, one really doesn't know enough beyond the current excitement of social media implementations, social analytics and social integration, especially the big changes that are going to happen to the state of the customer experience and state of the customer relationship management. What we really have today is a set of exciting possibilities that are floating in the real-life lab of industries. It's going to be for a while on the maturity curve of the social stuff where lot of experiments are going to happen. As these experiments evolve, some of these will converge to get longer life and find their way into mainstream practices - they become part of industry redefining pillars. We are in really early, very early stage of the transformation that has begun with social technologies.

There is an important reason for bringing this point of debate. As I said earlier, enterprises are now so tuned to creating end-state vision based strategies and ROI based investment decisions, social is going to be a hard bet for them. Where it stands today, I don't believe enterprises can really have a long term (.. strategic...holistic and all that) strategy and plan for the social stuff and if they were to trust me, they shouldn't really plan to have one. If anyone is telling them to spend months doing the strategy and then grand planning and then mega change management, I would have my doubts.

Now, what does it mean for the enterprises? First of all, it doesn't mean that don't have a strategy. It simply means that have a strategy that is built upon rapid evolution and continuous adaptation of the market dynamics. Have a strategy that allows to tactically take advantage of emerging possibilities and offer 'best experience' for your customers out of all possibilities in the portfolio. Have a strategy to stay ahead to anticipate the newer trends and life-changing innovation happening with your customers and take leadership to be the one to offer new possibilities to your customers. Be the best buddies of your customer as they go discover newer ways to engage with global citizens and find new norms of life-styles. I think that's what P&G, Apple, Google, Starbucks etc. are trying to do in my opinion.

This also doesn't mean that no change management is required. There is possibly a big change management required. But as I see, this is unlike the change management of large ERP and CRM programs or large transformation programs that enterprises are used to. This is a transformational change management to learn to remove the walls between their corporate beliefs and the customer's sentiments. This is change management of how customer centric thinking will drive the organizational processes, policies and value system. Very slippery and vague. Yes, and then of course there is training element to it, system enablement aspects to it and some amount of competency development but that's the usual stuff, not the one that is going to make you winner.

So here are few suggestions for safeguarding the interests of enterprises that are gearing up for the social stuff:

1. Morphed consulting overload - I suspect that what happened in SOA world is already happening to social also. Every stone and pebble will be marked "social" and all existing methods/strategies/approaches will be fully imposed to provide a 'idiot-proof' social solution. Well, I'm not saying it is a bad thing to reuse what already exists but hey, that's only a good starting point; there is a lot of learning that is yet to happen and much of it enterprises will have to experiment with their customers . If anything offered is sounding too good, just ask twice before you buy into it.
   
2. Technology innovation overshadow - yes, today the whole phenomenon of social has been possible only because of the technology, nothing else as the greater reason. And force of technological innovation is overpowering enough to make believe that business can replicate what happened in the consumer world using social technologies in the same way. That's far from being real. Enterprises will need to take extra leap of imagination and hard-work to outpace the innovations in the consumer world if they want to divert the attention and interests of their customers to them. They will need to offer more exciting and life-style redefining options to get their customers hooked onto engagements with enterprise. That's not technology game. We will need customer experience scientists who will redefine the customer's role and behavior in all customer engagement processes.
   
3. Poor CRM ghost - I should have written this first actually. Enterprises that have poor CRM in terms of customer centricity, process efficiency etc. are going to see worse of it now. Ghost of their poor CRM is going to nullify most of their investment into social unless they are able to rediscover their customer focus and set right the basics of customer management. So enterprises that have even slightest sense of poor health of their CRM practices should do some change management now so that they don't have to do surgery later and don't have to learn it really hard way.
   
4. ROI road blocks - in my view, what Social CRM is going to offer in future can't be measured in ROI that we can speculate today. Again the reason is the unpredictability of the possibilities emerging on this journey of evolution. Yes, you can possibly talk about ROI of some tactical investments like community based marketing etc. but that's too small to judge the potential that social CRM is offering. I believe that enterprises need to look at whole social CRM as blue ocean bundle of opportunities. Some amount of faith will be helpful along with the vision of future mega transformations coming in our lives. It is a bet no doubt and ROI is not the best tool to make the decision for this kind if bets. Business visionaries will sense the future and start the alignment. Others may choose to wait to see it happening before they act.

This is the my side of the debate, in brief. If this challenges your hypothesis or compliments your belief, feel free to offer your opinion,  we all are learning and we will continue to do so...after all, social CRM is going to be the game of customer experience innovations, game of breaking through the existing methodologies and existing strategies....making the world even flatter and more level playing...;-)

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 8:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

From last few months, I have come across the term "Enterprise collaboration" very often and that too mostly in the context of Social CRM.  In my view, the primary relationship between Enterprise collaboration and Social CRM is due to 'Social' behavior shown by the people and that's about it. The objective for using either of these in the organization can be as different as chalk and cheese.

To put things in perspective, what is meant by collaboration?  Collaboration is people working together in teams contributing to tasks to achieve a desired outcome. Hence from the enterprise parlance, in a stricter sense, it has to deal with only internal collaboration. Assuming the term enterprise can be expanded to all stakeholders like Partners and customers, and then collaboration with them will become part of it. At ground level the CRM deals with Marketing, Sales and Service functions of the enterprise. To say that internal collaboration within these functions supports CRM in a direct way is justifiable. This collaboration is vital to let teams within these functions provide a better experience to the customers. But, does an enterprise deals with only these functions? Not really, as there are Operations, HR, Finance, Strategy and IT Functions to name a few. Interestingly since these too have teams working to make functions more efficient and productive, social media collaborative tools are applicable here too.
If that is the case how does the enterprise collaboration fit in as a part of Social CRM only? Considering its scope, it definitely has a much wider reach. 

So what are the reasons for Social CRM and Enterprise Collaboration being considered synonymous?

a. Offerings in the market: Many players in the market claim to provide community platforms and also either integrations with different CRM systems or standalone dashboards.

b. Collaboration is Social: In literal terms, collaboration is one aspect of Social behavior of people.

c. Customer-centric organizations - providing community platforms for customer-customer, customer-employee interactions is one of the key implementations that organizations are going for to being perceived as customer-centric.

Still, are both really interchangeable? Enterprise collaboration talks about a well defined strategy of enterprises to use collaboration at work front. The objectives could be related to improvement in project management, inter-department collaboration or employee engagement. Though, if an organization identifies the need of collaboration on customer-facing channels of Marketing, Sales & Service, this is where it shares a common ground with Social CRM and hence an intersection. Social CRM uses collaboration to fulfill different set of objectives like product co-creation, knowledge management and community support. 

Hence, an organization needs to have a well laid out plan for both enterprise collaboration and Social CRM. These are not layers so thinking that incorporating Social CRM will also fulfill enterprise collaboration or vice versa should be avoided.

Considering the various viewpoints, will appreciate people to contribute to the discussion. 

Posted by Nishith Gupta at 10:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

 

Predictive analytics, by definition, deals with analysis of vast amount of historical data to capture relationships between variables and use it to predict future trends and behavior patterns. These predictions can be used to recommend actions that will drive outcomes to meet business goals.

 

While predictive analytics has a wide range of applicability, from churn management to budgeting and forecasting, one of its most popular application is in the marketing process to improve efficiency of campaigns and identify cross/Up-sell opportunities. So how is social customer behavior impacting these typical applications?

 

Most predictive models are based on the vast amount of historical data already residing with the organization to predict recurring customer behavior. Social media interactions and transactions are disrupting these complex models by adding new/unknown dimensions of social customer behavior. Social web is highly dynamic, with rapid viral spread of news, trends, fads. These can rise, evolve and vanish rapidly without giving the traditional predictive model a chance to factor them into its analysis.

 

It has become necessary for the organizations to recognize and capitalize on the changing customer behavior. Else they run the risk of their predictions and forecasts becoming less and less accurate.

 

One way is to tune its conventional predictive models to factor Social media metrics into the modeling. Eg: A customer who is actively engaged on the product's community, follows the brand on twitter and is a fan on Facebook, may have a less churn probability than a customer who is not. This higher level of customer engagement with the brand may be a representation of improved loyalty. Therefore, the churn management model needs to be tweaked to include these (and possibly other) social media parameters.

 

There are a few challenges with incorporating social media parameters into predictive models.

 

First challenge is the lack of data availability. Being a relatively new phenomenon, the amount of social behavior data being tracked by an organization is likely to be low. Also, not all customers are 'socially enabled' leading to data availability only for a subset of customers.

 

Second challenge is the changing nature of social media itself. Today, customer activity on communities may be one way of measuring engagement. Tomorrow, there will be other social media channels that may become more popular in terms of customer usage.

 

Fine tuning the predictive models to incorporate social customer behavior is certainly not an easy task. It would be an iterative and incremental approach. However, given the power of social media, organizations can hardly choose to ignore these customer behavior influencers.

 

Posted by Shyamalee Samvatsar at 4:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)