emergencemarketing.com

While attending the Enterprise 2.0 conference and hosting a great dinner with 28 thinkers in the space on Monday night (the dinner was sponsored by Clearvale, which is our client), I got a chance to reflect on what social CRM actually means, and how many people are thinking about it in a way that is too narrow.

Let’s start off by one of my favorite quotes from Peter Drucker: “Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.” Ok, so creating a customer and managing the relationships with those customers should be the heartbeat of a company – we can all agree on that. That is also why Customer Relationship Management should be one of the most important processes within a company.

In the research leading to the writing of our (award winning – sorry couldn’t resist the chest thumping) book, the Hyper-Social Organization, we found that those companies that are successful in leveraging the social as part of their business, turn their business processes into social processes. So turning your CRM process into a social process makes a lot of sense.

The question is – How Do You Turn CRM Into a Social Process?

In order to answer that question, let’s peel back the various layers of the onion that make up the CRM process. And to do that it may be useful to categorize the parts of the overall process into the following elements – the actors, the processes that make up the CRM process, the places, and the data.

The actors are the people that should play a role in your overall CRM process – they don’t just  include your customers and prospects, which most companies will consider as part of their CRM process. They also include your detractors, your employees (those that interact, and those that should interact with the customers – e.g., those that share a passion with your customers), your suppliers (if you run on tight inventories and a supplier has an delivery issue, that will impact customer relationships), and your partners.

The processes that make up CRM include not just sales, marketing, and customer support, but also the buying process (most products are now being bought, not sold), the recommendation process, and the relationship management process – processes that have already gone social and been fundamentally transformed in the past decade.

The places refer to those places where you interact with your customers, or where they interact with one another while making buying decisions and sharing recommendations. They include face-to-face encounters, email, telephone, and social media environments.

The data refers too data that typically will reside in systems of record like CRM systems and financial applications. The data you keep about your customer relationship process should include customer data, transactional data, legal data, financial data, and increasingly social data.

Some people say that a CRM system that contains social data is social CRM – but when you look at all the parts of the social customer relationship process, you realize how myopic this view of social CRM is. Some consider the act of managing customer relationships in social media social CRM – an equally myopic viewpoint.

Social CRM needs to encompass all the different parts of the Customer Relationship Management Process – the Actors, the Processes, the Places and the Data.

That of course is not an easy task, and will not happen by deploying technology applications alone. Social CRM is about culture, people, and processes supported by technology.

What do you think?

I would also like to thank the people with whom I had good conversations on the topic: @elsua, @pgillin, @billives,@dankeldsen, @scratchmm, @mkrigsman, @mingk, @marklazen, @sameerpatel, @denispombriant, @absolutezero, @pitosalas, @rawn, @crmstrategies, @jyarmis, @_richardhughes, @skwilder, @debyang, @mjayliebs.

Everybody will agree that the social has reentered business and commerce as we know it.

In fact, in the beginning, all business was social. If someone sold you a bad chicken, you would badmouth the business and others would shun it until the merchant cleaned up his act. Then the business infrastructure scaled and we ended up with large multi-national companies. People were still social, but the impact of them being social was no longer affecting business – we became at their merci and the social all but disappeared from business. That is when businesses started to develop real bad habits – treating their employees as commodities and waging war with their customers. With social media, a massive platform of participation, the social infrastructure scaled to the point where the social made a difference once again. And because humans are hardwired to be the only Hyper-Social species without all being siblings – the social made a comeback in business with a vengeance.

So what do you do with that? Smart business people, like many of the ones I interviewed as part of the CMO 2.0 Conversation, will tell you that the only thing you can do is to allow your business processes to become social. Barry Judge, the CMO from Best Buy who I interviewed said: “So to the extent that we can basically be human with what we know, and share it as freely as we possibly can, I think we’ll go a long way towards gaining a higher or stronger level of trust with the consumers.” In talking with Luis Suarez recently, he told me that IBM went as far as letting its complete knowledge management process go social. Pfizer’s Sr. VP of Strategy and Innovation, Kristin Peck, was recently quoted in an interview about their innovation process as saying: “when we thought about innovation,we asked ourselves “how do we make it more social?”"

It looks so obvious, right? Yet what do many companies do? Looking at how to commercialize the social that is happening between their customers and prospects. Buying ads on social networks, trying to develop buzz networks, and paying people for recommendations and word of mouth.

That unfortunately will not work much longer. Let’s just hope that those who try to commercialize the social do not muddy the waters with decreased levels of trust among customers and prospects for the rest of us.

More so than for any other department within your company, taking advantage of the social in customer support requires that your organization be allowed to behave social as well. The reason for that is twofold – people will seek help from others about your products in a variety of places, not just your customer support community; and people want to be helped by people, not faceless organizations.

While it may seem obvious that customer would seek support for your products in your customer support community, in reality they will look for it across a multitude of sites. That is especially true for products that have complex distribution channels. When you have a problem with your shiny new Canon lens, do you look for help on Canon.com, Bestbuy.com, Amazon.com or GetSatisfaction.com?  Or do you turn to your independent photography enthusiast community, or maybe a photography Facebook group you belong to? If you truly want to support your customers, you need to empower your employees to engage those people where they are. Sometimes that is your site, sometimes it is all over the place, and sometimes it’s on a focused destination that you did not set up. That was the case with TiVo, where a vibrant TiVo customer support community was set up by users and ran independently from the company. Tivo did not try to set up their own customer community and lure people away, which many companies would have attempted in the name of controllable knowledge management – i.e., access to people’s profile, ability to mine the content, ability to generate reports, etc. They engaged where people were already hanging out, and turned the existing community into a real competitive advantage. They realized that in order to take advantage of the social in customer support you need to behave social yourself.

Many people confuse community-based customer service with crowd-sourcing customer service, but in fact leveraging hyper-sociality in customer service is not the same as crowd-sourcing your customer support activities.

In some rare cases there may be enough passion around your offering or a critical mass of users surrounding your products so that you can crowd-source customer service. In most cases, however, your support activities will remain at the center of the customer service community, and be amplified by the community, not replaced.

Microsoft may be able to turn every single one of their support articles into a wiki and expect decent results from co-creating those support articles with their users. For most companies with fewer users this could end up in disaster – with tons of inaccuracies, stale articles, or worse, content that could expose you to liability.

We just finished a series of in-depth interviews with companies who are deploying social media as part of their business processes. Most initiatives were marketing based – and none were focused on deploying social media as part of customer service.

What is wrong with that picture?

Customer service is a perfect place for people to use social media – people love helping others, and at some point in the customer lifecycle, most people need help.

It is also ironic to realize that the biggest brand damage often occurs through a poor customer service experience.

So why are marketers not seeing that as a fertile ground for social interactions with customers and as a way to achieve some big marketing and brand benefits? Is it because marketers have grown myopic and no longer consider customer service as part of the brand experience? It is not because marketers do not actually run customer service that they should not consider it as an important touch-point between the company, the product and the customer. When looking at companies like Zappos or Tivo, where they have turned customer service into their main customer touch point, you realize that even if what you’re after is increased word of mouth or increased sales – customer service may be your best avenue.

Maybe I am just missing something…

Or maybe not – in most companies, customer service is treated as an expense, just like marketing…

It really should be an investment!

I am scheduled to travel to Belgium to visit my father who was diagnosed with two aneurisms and is facing a fairly complex and dangerous operation later this month. When he had an aneurism 17 years ago it burst and not only did he almost lose his live – he lost his business.

So I made reservations on Air France to go visit, and when I called my parents today with my itinerary I realized that I had made a mistake. I wanted to come back on the 27th and for some reason when I ordered through airfrance.com they booked me a train from Brussels to Parin on the 27th and a flight on the 28th. Now I order stuff online all the time, and if there is an overnight situation I expect the site to alert me to this. I called Air France, hoping that they would rectify the situation, as I do not want to spend a night around the Paris Airport and also need to be back in the US on the 27th. When I heard that they had plenty of room on the 27th, I thought it would be a no-brainer for them to change my reservation – and was even prepared to pay a fine for what surely was their screwed up user interface. But no, they could not change it – I begged, played nice, tried the empathy card – but the answer was no way, non, merde…you lose your ticket and buy a new one (which I did – but on Air Lingus – hoping the Irish are somewhat better).

Now my family has been using Air France ever since the Belgian Airline went out of business 6 or so years ago.

In these bad economic times, you would expect companies whose service are going to be the first to be cut from personal and business budgets to do everything they can to hold on to their customers – especially if it does not cost them a dime to accommodate the change request which would satisfy the customer, and perhaps make up for their deficient product offering.

I am flabbergasted – but should I? You could blame customer service arrogance, something that the French have been accused of, but in the end it has become an industry-wide behavioral attitude.

How do we customers give them the middle finger?

Many companies seem to have legal departments that put up huge barriers to adopting communities and other social media programs that include employees, customers, prospects and even detractors. In fact some put up barriers so high that nobody can do anything in the space. Now, if your competitors cannot find a way to overcome those objections either, you may be ok, but if they do and manage to extend their business processes to leverage the power of the internal and external crowds, it may be “game over.”

Typical legal objections include the issues related to brand protection, engaging hourly workers as part of internal communities, the threat of liability for what employees say in public, having employees socialize online instead of doing work, meeting regulatory compliance requirements, and more. While most legal departments will claim that their situation is very unique, at the end of the day the issues are fairly common among many companies.

I do not think that there is one best practice on how to overcome those objections. Some companies find it easier to get legal involved upfront in the process, while others are asking legal to quantify the risks and then balancing those with the benefits or the risks of doing nothing. One good bit of common sense (as recommended in this BT case study) is to make sure that you do not overhype what you are trying to do and position it as something radically different from other programs. Many companies already have policies in place that cover things like email communications and acceptable behavior in public forums – which could possibly be extended to virtual environments without too much change.

What have you found to be working?

When you have a vibrant community, you need to protect your members from other members who might not have the best interest of the community at heart – like spammers or bullies. Sometimes it becomes hard to do that, especially when you have the wrong tools – like Facebook, which does not allow you to communicate with your members if you have a large group, or does not allow you to manage the membership easily, as I described here.

Sometimes, companies go to far – as is the case with LinkedIn. Now I have been a longtime fan of LinkedIn, spending a fair amount of time brainstorming and advising the early management team and acting as a press spokesperson when there were few of us on the system. I have over 700 connections and unlike with some other systems I am religious about only accepting and inviting connections that I have actually met. Ok, there might be a few exceptions in there where I accepted invites from a few people that I never met because they were well crafted. The last time I synched my contact list with LinkedIn there were three people who said they did not know me – even though two of them had had gigs with my clients through me. That instantly made me a pariah on LinkedIn. I can no longer invite people who used to work with me at previous companies, and every time I try inviting somebody I am reminded that “You are now required to enter an email address to send invitations from this page because several recipients of your invitations indicated they don’t know you,” and asked to contact customer service.

When I did that they did not even bother responding – what was I expecting?

That, I believe, is going too far – what do you think? What is the right balance and how do you maintain it without making your strongest champions feel like they are no longer welcome, even the ones who may have made a mistake?

As you may recall, I had my share of problems with my last laptop, which culminated in a bad customer service experience. I was sufficiently incensed to blog (see vent) about it here.

What happened next made me stay with Lenovo instead of switching to a Mac. First off, Mark from Lenovo posted a comment on my blog, asking me to contact him. He apologized for the bad experiences I had and scheduled for a technician to come to my house to fix my problem. When I had additional problems with my computer he jumped through hoops to get it fixed. At the end he send me a brand new computer – extending the next business day on-site warranty beyond what I had purchased.

So what happened that made me regain the trust in the company:

• Timely response to my problem with a genuine “I feel your pain” attitude
• No corporate speak – honest and transparent conversation to resolve my issues
• Wow me through customer service by doing unexpected things – in this case send me a newer and better computer without me asking for it.

At the end of the day, most customers know that products cannot be flawless. If they do end up with a lemon, their tolerance to work through the issue with the vendor is usually large – after all they bought the product because they have a certain affinity for the product and/or the company and so their default attitude towards that company is usually positive.

Unfortunately you can squander all that positive social capital in minutes by having a customer service rep with a bad hair day becoming combative with a customer calling to resolve an issue. That too will happen – especially in large companies.

The key is to minimize this negative people-effect by hiring the right people and by building a no-excuse customer-centric culture – much like what Zappos.com has been able to achieve. The other key is to have a swat team of people on staff who can jump in when the inevitable will happen – a complete system breakdown. Because even when that happens, you can and should try to recover that customer.

Lenovo just did it with me…thank you Mark.

I had the pleasure to see Tony Hsieh from Zappos.com talk about the importance of corporate culture at the recent community 2.0 conference.

I was left with two new proof points for things that I knew were critical to a company’s success – the importance of hiring people who have a perfect cultural fit with the company, and the importance of customer service as a marketing and sales channel.

When you look at the Zappos.com corporate values, or read the corporate culture book (they ship it to you free of charge) – you are not left with that empty corporate speak feeling that you get when reading most companies’ belief statements. They mean something, and you can either associate with them or not. When they say “create fun and a little weirdness,” or “deliver WOW through service,” or “be humble,” or “build a positive team and family spirit,” or “build open and honest relationships with communications,” you can point to numerous people issues within many companies that are caused because the company does not foster or enforce a culture like that. In fact, they go so far as to pay people $1,000 to leave the company – and according to Bill Taylor, so should you. If people do not feel a 100% fit with your culture, make it easier for them to go…

The company is also a great case study for how you should treat your customer service department as one of the most important customer communication channels. At Zappos, they go as far as saying that customer service is their business. Even for non-retail companies, the lesson learned should be that customer service should be treated as one the most important touch-points of your company’s UI (user interface) through which customers experience your brand. In fact, and as McKinsey and Booz Allen & Hamilton have argued in recent articles on the change of the CMO role, customer service should be managed by marketing.

Now I need to buy some shoes, and it looks like I will be a loyal Zappos customer for a long time to come…