Ok, so I took a bit of hiatus for a few weeks, started a new job, but am back and ready to dig into topic number four on my Top Five Trends for 2013. We have talked about Virtual Assistants, Multi Channel, Mobile and now we are on to Communities and Social Listening.
Many and probably most would actually split these two into separate categories and tackle them independently. But I really see them as tightly linked and therefore I believe you can't really talk about one without talking about the other. The reason: transparency. Both of these technologies bring transparency to the service delivery operation of any company in a way that you just don't get or see with the traditional forms of service delivery. The very public nature of what happens in both community groups and on social media drives a "leveling of the playing field" dynamic that is both interesting and potentially disruptive if handled incorrectly.
Over the last couple of years, I am starting to see more and more leaders in the customer service landscape dig into the idea of social care and communities. I have seen a few companies re-orientate their entire service delivery group to be social and communities first, designing an experience that is very different looking than more traditional approaches. I even worked with one client, a large mobile telco, that designed their web experience entirely around the idea of social and communities and all other communication channels took a back seat. Then, I have seen other companies that have looked at Social and Communities and decided that it just was not worth the investment of time and resources to try to integrate them into their service delivery model. I think like any thing else, these two extremes are not likely the best answer for most companies and the right answer likely falls somewhere in between these two extremes.
At the end of the day, social is critically important to any brand or company and as such should somehow be baked into the service delivery arm of an org. I don't think it is just good enough to think about social as another channel that you have to staff to or another side technology that you can play around with for a while and see how it works. I think that social needs to be at the very core of your service delivery model. I think all service leaders should be thinking strategically about it and how they can incorporate it deep into the processes that are a part of their delivery model. As a first step on this journey, I would suggest and recommend that companies at least start out by investing in a social media monitoring or listening tool to understand what is being said by consumers. I know that some of you might be shaking your head and thinking, "duh, that is so obvious Rob, you are so behind in stating this trend", but you would be surprised how many companies are still not there yet with just the basics of listening.
Some good tools to look into on this front are a number of the social media monitoring tools such as Netbase, Radian6 and the like. But an area that I have been interested in for quite some time now that is starting to really catch on in this space are Text Analytics companies that are starting to build some really compelling and unique products to start to filter the noise. Attensity, Clarabridge and Medallia all offer some interesting products and are worth the time to investigate. The best of the best are using both and getting some really fantastic results. I have one Consumer Products company in mind that is doing some really interesting things that I can share with those that might be interested in learning more.
Now what about communities? As I said before, I think that communities should go hand in hand with social listening for two reasons. First, I think that both social care and communities have a "crowd" like underpinning and so they tend to drive towards the same goal, which is consumers helping consumers. The second reason I think they go together so well is that they both have a component to them that helps companies drive brand advocacy. Because of the very public way in which communities and social care play out, transparency rules. And as I have talked alot about on this blog before, transparency is a key foundation for developing and nurturing brand advocates and loyalty.
Most community companies or "collaboration" companies or "Enterprise Social Networking companies, as they may like to be referred to as, are working to deploy solutions that do add a lot of value. They help to immediately cut back some of the phone calls or emails that end up heading the direction of the company by allowing people to more easily connect with a brand loyalist or advocate that already knows the answer. They also tend to have a softer value proposition that focuses more on customer preference. By providing choices to consumers around the service channel they want to use and when they want to use it, consumers tend to have a more fulfilling and higher quality experience.
Companies that are working this space today as point solutions and have been leading the way are some fairly well known names, Jive, Lithium, Get Satisfaction and a number of others. Also, keep an eye out for the bigger CRM companies and how they are baking the concept of Communities into their service DNA. Salesforce, SAP, Oracle and the like would be names to watch out for here.
As a service VP told me recently, "Rob, I get 20 calls a day from companies that think they have the best next technology that will help me cut my costs by 20% or more. Some of them are really cool and some are just ok. I don't doubt that they can save me money. But my challenge is understanding how that technology fits into my broader strategy and how my customers will want to interact with me 3 years from now."
So true. The technology today is really not the issue. There are so many cool companies doing incredibly interesting things. But how does it fit your plan, that is the question we all need to be asking.
