Digital Consumer: Social CRM Archives

Three Steps to Successful Social Customer Service

By now every enterprise leveraging the power of social media have at least one or more social channels (read Twitter and Facebook) through which they reach out to their customers to have a dialogue, provide support and engage with them on support issues and product updates.

Social Customer Service can significantly impact two of the key metrics of the organization. One, it improves the customer satisfaction levels significantly as customers prefer to get support through social channels in which they are more comfortable, and second it reduces the support costs by diverting lot of support call traffic into these digital channels.

Let us look at the 3 levels of social customer service, and how with each level the power of social compounds the benefits to both the Organization and the Customer .

Level 0 : Agent Care

Agent care is about extending the traditional phone support to integrate support requests from social channels like Twitter and Facebook. Good percentage of enterprises start their social customer care journey with this as the first step. The agents should be provided the right kind of tools through which they can monitor and respond to support queries or issues in various social channels. They should be also provided with the insights dashboard on what customer are discussing on a real time basis. This is definitely a good step to start your social customer service journey but certainly not enough to leverage the true power of social.

Level 1: Self Care

Digital consumers likes to figure out stuffs on their own. Enterprises should provide a good social platform where they can get all the information about the product or service. This means providing the required self-help materials, product manuals, usage videos, expert opinions, enabled with a good search functionality and a context engine which can provide contextual information on the product which is of interest to the customer. Customers should also be provided a channel for creating support content on their own, which can help other customer having similar problems. This can be promoted through Rewards and Recognitions programs for creating content and can be linked with the quality of the content as well through reviews and ratings.

Level 2: Peer Care

Ok, we are talking about social here. What is the fun if you don't provide a community for like-minded people to come together and support each other on the product they own and passionate about. The social Customer Service platform should encourage the customers to support each other on similar problems they faced and how they overcome it. Having an engagement community as a foundation for this is not something very easily achievable, but once done the impact is significant. Rewards and Recognitions for supporting other clients should be planned to encourage participation.

Once you have a matured social customer service process and methodology in place, this platform can be extended to get customers insights to improve the products and services, and also will be a key channel for co-creation and innovation with your customers.

Posted by Shanmugam Periasamy at 6:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Big Data : Making sense of Social Media Madness

Social media usage among consumers is growing at a humongous pace resulting in huge amount of data getting created every minute. The growth in usage of smartphones, location based apps and more "Internet of Things", the data is multiplying at a faster pace. The following statistics provides a glimpse of the amount of data we are talking here and no guesses that it is going to move in upward direction only. Few statistics on the social data growth,

· More than 250 million tweets are generated in a day and it is increasing at a tremendous speed.

· 30 billion pieces of content shared on Facebook on a monthly basis.

· 40% project growth in global data generated per year.

· Data will grow over 800% in the next 5 years and 80% of these data will be unstructured.

While handling such huge volumes of data pose a significant challenge, at the same time provide huge opportunities and competitive edge for the enterprises, which are ready with a strategy to handle them. Social Media data has tremendous wealth of information which analyzed properly can make significant impact to both the top line and bottom line. That is where BigData technology and Infrastructure is coming to the rescue.

Big Data processing can be defined in simple terms as fast and reliable analysis of complex and huge volumes of data in near real time with commodity hardward. Big data technologies helps in combining Social World data streams with Enterprise IT systems in a powerful way using which one can derive meaningful and actionable insights. Big data technology is not new, it has been adopted by technology companies like Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Amazon and many more for quite some time now , it has come a long way in terms maturity and now it is ready for mainstream adoption.

Having a scalable BigData Processing Infrastructure to analyze Social Data will help enterprises in,

· Responding faster to a social outburst before negative sentiments go viral the in social world.

· Creating powerful Recommendation Engines for customers to enable cross-sell and up-sell.

· Providing a complete Personalization experience for users through data collected from across the channels.

· Taking key decisions on products and services based on consumer feedbacks.

· Identifying key influencers who are impacting the increase or decrease of sales of a particular product.

Mckinsey Quarterly has projected that there is 60% potential increase in retailers operating margins possible with big data analysis. Though it is too early to put definitive numbers on the impact of BigData, this is the next Big thing which enterprises need to be prepared to get an definitive edge among the competition.

Posted by Shanmugam Periasamy at 8:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Measuring Consumer Engagement - The New Data Challenge

In my last blog, I had shared my thoughts on how mobility and social is influencing customer engagement and how businesses can use it in their favor. Although, recent times have been great and exciting but they have brought their own challenges; increased consumer engagement and exponentially multiplying social footprint is great but it is giving headaches to businesses which rely on data rather than hype to measure success.

In the good old days, not so long ago, you could publish a website put some JavaScript tags and sit back and relax, wait for your favorite analytics tool to spew out the numbers. You just had to slice and dice it and put it on a nice PowerPoint slide and present it to your bosses.

Continue reading "Measuring Consumer Engagement - The New Data Challenge " »

Posted by Vijay Kaundal at 3:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Key to Community Success

Despite all the media coverage, books, webinars and conferences on the topic, a large number of successful IT community deployments struggle to provide business value. Some communities succeed; others fail, seemingly without reason. Why?

Many seek the answer in a review of tactical details, a search that may obscure a much more important foundational difference: successful implementations accept community platforms are unlike other enterprise applications and execute accordingly. The tactics used in both programs may be similar, hence the confusion. What differs is the driving decision as to why, when, where and how they're deployed.

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Posted by Pauline Ores at 4:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Relevancy in Social Strategy

'Social' is the new buzz word for businesses. But what makes a business really social? What are basic ingredients that a company should have for a relevant social footprint? In this day and age where every company, every business, seems to be adding a Twitter account and a Facebook fan page to their portfolio to join the social bandwagon, what is it that separates one company from the other?

Most companies when asked about their 'Social Strategy' are clueless beyond Facebook and Twitter and most just use them as 'Shout' channels and not really as engagement platforms. So what are the benefits that the social media provides which can be used to both support and leverage the brand and customer base to align with the overall company goals? How can you move beyond just Twitter and Facebook to have a relevant, well-meaning and structured social strategy?

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Posted by Vijay Kaundal at 10:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (13) | TrackBacks (0)

Social Commerce

Commerce has gone electronic and social. In this blog, I am penning an example of how it has altered the shopper in me.

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Posted by Vikas Kasturi at 6:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Social CRM - Thy name is SMART

It's interesting to see how CRM has evolved over the last decade and a half. While the fundamental objective of keeping the customer at the heart of the organization still remains the same, we have seen the technology outpace the growth of business applications. The challenge is still to apply the technology to a matured business process.

Call it "Social" or "Smart"... CRM is a strategy and technology enables it. In this article, published in CRM Reviews, Prasanna Rajanna, Prinicipal Consultant - iEngage, has tried to bring out a novel business application keeping CRM as a strategy in mind. For a successful CRM, the focus should never be shifted out of "The Real" customer.

http://www.crm-reviews.com/articles/social-crm-thy-name-is-smart/

Posted by Akhil Srivastava at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Best practices in rendering customer service through social networks

As discussed in my last post, for an organization, participation on social media today is not an activity but a long term strategy. The ability to connect with the customer directly creates endless possibilities for organizations of which Customer service is one.

As companies are racing towards adopting social media for customer service, they are doing varied things to deliver customer service using social mediums. I have listed below some of the best practices to follow that could be invaluable for your journey:

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Posted by Akhil Srivastava at 5:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Social Media - the TRUE voice of customer

If you are deciding whether your organization should have a presence on social media or not - you are living in a bygone era. Today Facebook has already crossed the 500 million active users mark and 50% active users log on every day. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook has been named as the Time Magazine person of the year 2010 for "Changing your communications". Twitter has more than 105 million users who send out more than 55 million tweets in a day. In today's parlance, these are not companies, these are countries. Today we only talk about the extent of your involvement in the social network and how your organization is influencing and getting influenced by the cyber-citizen.

Many leading companies are discovering the strategic business value of this new channel and are making comprehensive plans to proactively engage this digital consumer. They are discovering new ways to influence, new methods to interact and creative channels to serve this consumer.

Continue reading "Social Media - the TRUE voice of customer" »

Posted by Akhil Srivastava at 7:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)