Monitoring the Social Dialogue: Being a Good Listener
by Nancy Dobrozdravic on January 9th, 2012
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In my last post on entering the social dialogue with consumers, I mentioned that there are four main stages at which organizations interact with consumers through social media: monitor, prepare, respond, and measure. I’d like to take a closer look at social media monitoring—the fundamental stage of interaction—and the benefits it can offer an organization that is willing to invest in listening to its customers on a social level.
Social monitoring facilitates an enterprise’s ability to build and maintain an awareness of the social conversation conducted online by consumers, vendors, competitors, and bystanders about its brand. This effort enables companies to formulate an analysis and response strategy based on information gathered from social venues via keywords and/or more sophisticated queries.
An ear to the ground
Awareness of what your customers are saying is a good way to listen for and respond to negative feedback online. But this is only one of the benefits that social media monitoring affords businesses – and according to a recent Focus Research survey, fewer than 25 percent of users are likely using social monitoring tools to their fullest capabilities.
Organizations may be overlooking some of the most valuable functionality in these tools. Those that extract basic customer data but never delve into “higher-level” functions are leaving these tools severely underutilized. Consider taking advantage of social media monitoring for:
Competitive intelligence – Real-time monitoring of competitors’ activities as well as shifting consumer sentiments and behaviors.
Consumer insights – Mining your customer base for product and service suggestions, requests, and unmet needs.
Strategic relationships – Identifying and tapping your biggest influencers to help extend your brand, from bloggers to media outlets.
Communication/messaging plans – Setting brand positioning benchmarks prior to marketing efforts, measured against predetermined objectives.
Of course, gathering and analyzing information is only the beginning. The key to making this knowledge actionable is ensuring it quickly gets into the hands of the right individuals within your organization – which brings us to the next step in developing a truly social media enabled business. Once an organization has a social monitoring plan in place, the next step is to prepare the business operationally to take action on a response plan.
In my next post, I’ll look at the factors involved in enabling your people, processes, and environment to initiate a social media response.
Social Media: A Two-Way Street
by Nancy Dobrozdravic on November 22nd, 2011
The vast majority of today’s top organizations will name social media as part of their marketing or customer communication efforts. However, the degree of coordination these efforts receive can vary widely depending on the enterprise.
For those seeking greater ROI in social media and evidence of improved customer engagement, a unified approach to social media may be the key.
The ongoing conversation
How can organizations elevate their responsiveness and enhance the customer experience? Consider channeling enterprise-wide social contact through a single workflow to take advantage of customer-facing processes that may already be in place within the organization.
The contact center is an ideal place to focus this activity. Here’s why:
- It is already established as the customer engagement “hub” within the enterprise.
- It possesses the technology backbone to support an engagement and response program.
- It has decades of experience at customer communication necessary for transforming the customer monologue into a productive, two-way dialogue.
Approaching social media response from a workflow – or workforce – perspective sheds new light on opportunities for workforce optimization. Social monitoring that most companies employ for the purposes of customer sentiment and market awareness may have the capability to send alerts, notifying agents of issues that need to be addressed at the social media level.
Solutions that enable alerts such as these to be channeled into the agent’s workflow have the advantage of further streamlining operational processes without disrupting traditional customer contact or customer service. Aspect Social Media Channel Integration, for example, provides this capability. In addition, Aspect offers advanced add-ons to its social media solution to develop and track social media KPIs, measure outcomes from interactions, and establish benchmarks for performance.
Mastering the social dialogue
As we see it, there are typically four main stages at which organizations interact with consumers through social media: monitor, prepare, respond, and measure. In my next series of posts, I’ll show you how organizations operating at each stage can optimize social engagement, as well as harness new applications and tactics to advance the social dialogue to the next level.
The Age of the Customer elevates the importance of the contact center
by Nancy Dobrozdravic on August 16th, 2011
At Aspect, we’ve talked for some time about the potential of the contact center to tap the collective intelligence of the organization to serve the customer. Through this level of engagement, progressive companies have built a competitive advantage by being customer service champions. Others seem to be coming around to that notion as well.
Traditionally, the contact center was seen as the cost of doing business—a compulsory function that sought to resolve issues but wasn’t a source of competitive advantage. The evolution of industry, technology, and consumer behavior is changing how we collectively think about the relationship of business and the customer. The confluence of technologies such as unified communications and the more collaborative nature of today’s consumers are highlighting the contact center’s vital role in strengthening customer relationships.
A recent Forrester blog noted that we have entered the Age of the Customer. As analyst William Band puts it:
“The successful companies will be customer-obsessed, like Best Buy, IBM, and Amazon.com. Executives in customer-obsessed companies must pull budget dollars from areas that traditionally created dominance—brand advertising, distribution lockup, mergers for scale, and supplier relationships—and invest in four priority areas: 1) real-time customer intelligence; 2) customer experience and customer service; 3) sales channels that deliver customer intelligence; and 4) useful content and interactive marketing.”
Fundamentally, Band is saying that if companies don’t have strong customer relationships, efficient operations and savvy marketing won’t matter. That’s a bold statement: in effect, the focus on operational excellence should take a backseat to customer experience. So while I’m happy that executives want to join the customer experience party, I don’t believe companies should view it as an either-or proposition. Let me explain.
Many companies are already reassessing the traditional organizational functions and how they interact. I’ve written previously that the entire organization, led by the contact center, must work together to serve the customer. Greater collaboration and more effective information sharing are critical to support this evolution. Fortunately, unified communications provides the tools and capabilities to enable employees to reach across departments.
The contact center is emerging as the natural hub of interaction between the organization and the consumer. How critical is the contact center in the Age of the Customer? Let’s take a look at the four priority areas noted above:
Real-time customer intelligence. In the course of operations, contact center technologies can extract and analyze data from not just social media but also customer service conversations, providing companies invaluable customer insights
Customer experience and customer service. The next-generation contact center has the ability to engage with consumers on their terms—multiple channels in real time. Traditional metrics such as average call times have given way to a more holistic view of interaction and customer experience.
Sales channels that deliver customer intelligence. By integrating outbound dialing, text messaging, and social media, the contact center has become one of the most valuable sales channels. The contact center has the ability to capture insight from customer conversations and translate it into business intelligence that can then inform future customer encounters.
Useful content and interactive marketing. The contact center now has the ability to tap experts and offer content to enrich the customer interaction. FAQs, online self service, and content such as blogs and white papers are other powerful tools in the contact center arsenal.
Companies can reorient their customer service efforts so that every part of the organization—from executives and experts to frontline personnel—is supporting the same strategy. And by giving the contact center a more prominent role, executives will still be able to devote the necessary resources to operations.
What Southwest can teach other companies about customer service
by Nancy Dobrozdravic on August 7th, 2011
Most major corporations have developed customer engagement strategies that reach across a number of channels, from the contact center to social media. The market leaders often distinguish themselves by how they use each mode to differentiate themselves.
Take Southwest Airlines. Recently, the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) released its 2011 rankings for a number of industries, and among major airlines Southwest was in the top spot by 17 points over its nearest competitor. As a low-cost carrier, Southwest’s lack of seating assignments and meal service might be deal breakers for many travelers, especially businesspeople. However, Southwest has built its reputation on the strength of its flight attendants and service staff, who not only seem to like what they do but also go the extra mile to create a great in-flight experience.
As the report notes, Southwest also seems to have developed a knack for understanding what their customers care about and will pay more for without affecting overall satisfaction. While other airlines made the move to charge for bags, for instance, Southwest made its “bags fly free” policy a centerpiece of its marketing campaign.
Interestingly, the report made no mention of Southwest’s embrace of social media and its multichannel approach in the contact center to drive loyalty and understand what customers want. Now, we’ve talked a lot about the contact center as the natural nexus of marketing, communications, customer service, and sales, and Southwest is the embodiment of how an integrated approach can pay off. By providing so many different options for customer interaction, Southwest not only speeds the resolution of issues but also ensures that it stays aware of customer feedback.
Its customer contact strategy features a multichannel approach to address how Consumer 2.0 wants to engage with companies. Customers can book tickets online or through a service agent and sign up for updates and notifications through e-mail, mobile, and text. The trick, however, is ensuring that all of these channels offer a consistent customer experience and provide easy access to information in the event of delays or cancellations.
To provide multiple consumer touchpoints, Southwest also maintains a robust presence on Facebook and Twitter. Southwest’s Facebook page, which has more than 1.6 million fans, is used to promote special deals and offer information. In addition, the company makes good use of self-service tools on its website and also maintains a blog that offers a variety of internal perspectives.
Companies that aspire to deliver outstanding customer service in this new consumer landscape can take away several lessons from Southwest.
1) Use different channels to achieve different strategic goals. Although Southwest states that it won’t address specific customer issues on Facebook, fans can still post questions and comments. The airline uses its Twitter account to monitor customer feedback and dispense pointers. While not every company has the resources to be active in all media channels, selecting the right channels to support strategy can still create an impact.
2) Recognize the value of customer contact in building loyalty. Because Southwest’s employees—from flight attendants to contact agents—are united by their commitment to customer experience, customers keep coming back even when fare prices jump. Once companies are able to forge this kind of emotional bond with their customer base, they can begin to redefine the company-customer relationship.
3) Understand what your customers value. The ASCI survey notes that when Southwest decided to begin charging for early check-in, customers weren’t bothered by having to pay for this perk. By engaging customers in a variety of ways and monitoring their feedback and trends, companies can identify new opportunities to market products and services and extract more value from existing ones.
4) Integrate emerging consumer technologies. As smartphones have become more popular, Southwest and other airlines have developed mobile apps to allow travelers to check in, monitor flight status, and change reservations. Such technologies serve to strengthen the bonds between the company and consumer, so executives should stay up to date on new trends and determine the right time to invest.
All of these efforts can complement the contact center, but to get the most value they must be integrated so that agents have transparency into the conversations taking place in different channels.
Let me know what approaches have worked for your company. I look forward to continuing this dialogue in future posts.
Marketing and IT converge in the contact center
by Nancy Dobrozdravic on August 4th, 2011
In a recent post, Forrester’s Luca Paderni noted that many organizations are starting to recognize the need for marketing and IT to work more closely together. This issue is no doubt part of a larger trend among companies: the use of data and analytics to personalize every customer interaction and the rise of social communications have moved IT from a support function to a key component in business strategy.
Marketing faces some different challenges, however: an expanding number of channels to interact with customers, new devices, and rising customer expectations regarding service levels. The company-customer relationship has changed from an infrequent, one-way conversation to a continuing dialogue; surveys to gauge customer satisfaction have been augmented by an explosion of online feedback, social media reviews and forums, and contact center data.
As I mentioned in a previous post, companies have collected this information for some time but with varying success in translating it into more effective customer strategies. Part of the challenge is that multiple departments—marketing, communications, sales, customer service—interact with the consumer. They then use a variety of metrics to gauge the effectiveness of their programs and the organization’s overall performance.
So now, as Paderni notes, “Data ownership is not just an operational issue but is being elevated to senior management.” Successful companies understand that the insights these departments collect are vital to making informed strategic decisions and identifying new opportunities. To encourage collaboration, executives should seek to tear down traditional barriers to interaction and reorganize the company around business goals rather than functions and departments.
The contact center, especially with the benefit of a unified communications platform, is well placed to serve as a primary information engine and help drive the evolution of the organization. As a key customer-facing function, the contact center already has a range of interactions with consumers and collects data and feedback―and, in turn, is the focal point for employing that data to enhance customer relationships and move closer to true “1 to 1″ marketing. And since the contact center integrates capabilities to communicate through social media channels and monitor online conversations, the contact center is uniquely positioned to collaborate with marketing and communications to develop new efforts that reach and engage consumers.
As important, the contact center can act as the catalyst to engage the enterprise and draw on its collective knowledge and business intelligence to serve the customer. Moreover, tools such as rich presence enable service agents to tap expertise within the organization and forge stronger company-customer relationships. Indeed, using the industrial strength routing and workflow capabilities, customers can automatically be matched up with the agent or even non–contact center employee that can best serve them based upon known customer information
I’m not pretending that this kind of evolution happens easily or quickly. It will take a sustained and concerted effort by executives to get marketing and IT to work more effectively together, as well as to implement an organizational structure more focused on business goals than functions. But companies would do well to draw on the successes of the contact center—both its processes and its ability to extend throughout the enterprise and to customers—to help drive these efforts.
If the whole organization is responsible for marketing, what role should the contact center play?
by Nancy Dobrozdravic on July 18th, 2011
The McKinsey Quarterly just published an article, “We’re all marketers now,” that highlights how the rise of digital channels and the shifting dynamics of customer engagement have extended responsibility for marketing to the entire organization. It’s a great piece featuring insight from executives of top global companies. As the article notes, “At the end of the day, customers no longer separate marketing from the product—it is the product. They don’t separate marketing from their in-store or online experience—it is the experience. In the era of engagement, marketing is the company.”
The authors’ main premise closely parallels a vision Aspect has been advancing for some time: that providing a seamless customer experience will require customer contact to extend throughout the organization. In effect, marketing and customer experience will become so closely entwined that the entire company will be responsible for their execution. As CEO Jim Foy predicted in a recent interview, the traditional contact center will no longer exist in a decade. Instead, the enterprise will need to change and mobilize to keep the customer satisfied.
All of that sounds good, but to get there companies will have to transform the way their organization functions. As the Quarterly notes:
The starting point is a mind-set shift around customer interaction touch points. Companies typically think of them as being “owned” by a given function: for instance, marketing owns brand management; sales owns customer relationships; merchandising or retail operations own the in-store experience. In today’s marketing environment, companies will be better off if they stop viewing customer engagement as a series of discrete interactions and instead think about it as customers do: a set of related interactions that, added together, make up the customer experience. That perspective should stimulate fresh dialogue among members of the senior team about who should design the overall system of touch points to create compelling customer engagement, and who then builds, operates, and renews each touch point consistent with that overall vision. There’s no need to worry about traditional functional or business unit ownership: whoever is best placed to tackle an activity should do so.
Two key components the authors don’t address: how the contact center and collaboration technologies fit into the equation.
I believe the contact center has a huge role to play in executing this new approach. While marketing is tasked with branding, the contact center already supports overall brand value by engaging customers across multiple channels. Similarly, sales owns the customer relationship, but the contact center is an integral element of strengthening that relationship.
A critical element to support this organizational approach to marketing is transparency and collaboration. When the enterprise adopts a unified communications solution, it supports more effective contact center operations as well as providing a platform to share information seamlessly across departments. Contact centers have developed and honed effective strategies and processes over years of experience. Unified communications enables contact centers to bring the company’s best resources to the conversation in a seamless, efficient, and well managed way—in effect, extending the contact center to every function of the enterprise.
And when it comes to ownership of certain activities, the contact center is well placed to manage social media monitoring and engagement. In fact, contact center technology already integrates these functions to allow service agents to respond to customers in their preferred communications channel.
Progressive companies have already grasped the benefits of unified communications. At the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference last week, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer noted that 70 percent of Fortune 500 companies have implemented Lync.
But while technology is advancing rapidly, organizations must evolve as well to reap the full benefits—a far more difficult and entrenched challenge.
If your company has already begun to shift to this more holistic approach to marketing, I’d love to hear from you—what’s working as well as the impact it’s had on customer experience.
How the contact center can support collaboration and brand building
by Nancy Dobrozdravic on June 15th, 2011
I came across an interesting post on the HBR blog by David Aaker, “How CMOs build brands by collaborating across silos.” The first thing that struck me was how long we have been talking about organizational silos. The second was that, for once, the author did not advocate the need to break down the silos. After all, the perennial recommendation to tear down these walls (Mr. Gorbachev) overlooks the fact that they are a necessary organizational element of corporate life.
Instead, Aaker recommended replacing competition and isolation with collaboration and communication across these silos, with the CMO acting as the facilitator. He offered five suggestions to achieve this goal:
- Define the role of the CMO team as facilitator, consultant, or service provider
- Use teams
- Develop and exploit silo-spanning programs
- Identify and leverage great ideas
- Get a common planning and information system
This approach seems eminently more reasonable to me. For a real-world example, see what’s happening now with the U.S. Senate, House of Representatives and Office of the President on the budget deficit talks.
So when it comes to strategy and idea development, this decentralized model is a good one. However, to integrate some of these ideas and recommendations in marketing operations, organizations must come together around a common, centralized set of processes, best practices, and knowledge resources.
For example, marketing might come up with this great product promotion after conferring with various internal stakeholders―but to make that promotion successful, there has to be a heck of a lot of coordination across demand generation in marketing, internal sales reps, order fulfillment, billing, product and brand management, among others. Execution is as essential to maintaining brand equity as are the strategies themselves.
Aaker highlights the need for better knowledge sharing in his fifth recommendation. The reason silos are counterproductive is that they result in a lack of transparency. Without engagement and information from each marketing-related function, executives don’t have the comprehensive perspective to make good strategic decisions.
And that is where the contact center, especially those resting on and bolstered by Unified Communications (UC) infrastructures such as Microsoft Lync, becomes so critical. Tools such as rich presence, IM, screen sharing, and back-office integration enable collaboration within the contact center and across the organization.
Since the contact center has the most direct interaction with customers, this function is a crucial component of any coordinated marketing effort. On a daily basis, customer service reps reinforce the core brand of the company as well as collect feedback on how its products and marketing are being perceived.
So, yes, decentralize in idea generation but centralize the execution of those ideas to your customer base around the contact center. The CMO can facilitate the formulation of go-to-market strategies and campaigns―and the contact center can facilitate their successful operational rollout to the market.
Aspect’s online symposium continues robust dialogue on customer contact
by Nancy Dobrozdravic on May 23rd, 2011
This past Thursday, Aspect hosted its third annual (confirm) online symposium entitled “Customer Contact is a Consumer 2.0 World.” I had the pleasure of presenting with my colleague, Serge Hyppolite (our VP of Product Management), on “Defining the Pathway to Next Generation Customer Contact.” We discussed the broadening role of contact centers and the key technologies and capabilities organizations should consider to serve Consumer 2.0.
Our keynote speaker, customer experience expert Bruce Temkin, spoke on how the world is changing and the necessity for contact centers to evolve in order to keep pace with Consumer 2.0. We were also fortunate to have Ashima Singhal from our global strategic partner, Microsoft, discuss the role unified communications can play in a customer-centric organization. The symposium closed with a roundtable with Aspect customers on the “Customer-Centric Organization.” Our thanks again to everyone who presented – and to those who attended.
A pleasant surprise was that the number of registrants exceeded our expectations by quite a margin – almost 3x what we had anticipated. But quantity is not everything – and happily we also enjoyed high-quality exchanges with the attendees. It is not a good feeling as a presenter when you ask if there are any questions at the end of your spiel and there is deafening silence.
This time around, we had a great flow of questions coming in at the end of my and Serge’s presentations, and really thoughtful questions to boot. I hope in some small measure that was due to our talk hitting on topics of real concern and interest. So, it was a great event – well worth the anxiety one has before presenting in front of a group, even if only virtually.
If you missed the symposium, the sessions are available on demand. I hope you find them worthwhile…and keep those questions coming.
Empowering the entire organization to serve the customer
by Nancy Dobrozdravic on May 13th, 2011
When buying my house, there was a hiccup on the day of closing (naturally), and the needed funds were not going to be available to me until hours after my appointment. So, I went to my bank and explained the situation to the poor teller.
He asked me to take a seat in the waiting area and told me that he would go find someone who could help me. I was not all that confident he would be successful…but two minutes later, the branch manager comes up to me saying that she understands my situation and will make some calls/arrangements on my behalf.
She told me to sit tight – I did, literally, foot nervously tapping – and 5 minutes later she returned with a certified check for the amount I needed for my closing. Needless to say, I will always be a customer of this bank.
That’s the power of providing customers with access to the person(s) within an organization that can actually help resolve their issue. Now, sometimes this seems to be difficult even when the consumer walks into a brick and mortar store – who hasn’t left an electronics store with the wrong cable or a home improvement store with ill-fitting hardware?
So how are organizations supposed to handle this when the consumer reaches out to the contact center agent – by phone or the Web? I’ve learned that yelling that you want to talk to the supervisor will not get you all that far when you encounter that initial roadblock to getting needed answers – 9 times out of 10, the supervisor doesn’t have the knowledge to handle the situation.
That’s why the contact center agent must be able to communicate and collaborate with knowledge workers throughout the enterprise when prepared reference materials do not supply the needed information to the agent. The ability to reach out to these knowledge workers is a good start, but agents need to know which experts are available when the customer is on the line (you can take that literally or figuratively).
Otherwise, the customer experience will deteriorate quickly as the consumer waits for the agent to fumble around in the hopes of finding a live body to come to the rescue. Organizations must open themselves up not only to the agent but directly to the customer – in essence, bring the processes, best practices, and discipline of the contact center to every functional area of the enterprise.
Even this is not enough – the inroads into the organization must be complemented by intelligent participation in social communities and knowledge exchanges (either consumer- or company-created) outside of the company. That’s a lot of ground to cover, but successful, customer-centric organizations figure out a way.
For more information on how your company can integrate the contact center into the enterprise to serve customers, be sure to attend Aspect and Microsoft’s online symposium, “Consumer contact in a Consumer 2.0 world” on Thursday, May 19.
A growing recognition of the value of customer experience
by Nancy Dobrozdravic on April 18th, 2011
You never know what to expect when you sign up for a conference. Most times you are pretty disappointed with the content or attendee mix/composition. Well, this past week I attended the Argyle Executive Forum on Customer Care Leadership in New York City and was very pleasantly surprised. It was a great gathering of folks from a variety of companies and industries focused on how to maximize the customer experience and to foster loyal and profitable customer-company relationships.
People have been talking about customer-centric organizations for eons now without much meaningful action. As I noted in my last blog, companies are getting better and better about listening to the customer but don’t always know what to do with that information. It was therefore heartening to hear from so many executives (at the director and VP levels) who have taken on that challenge and are making real change happen within their organizations. …Read more >
Improving the way companies communicate internally and externally with their customers is an important objective for all organizations. This blog is focused on levaraging the collective knowledge withing Aspect.