Jacada Blog

The Need for Social CRM

First, this is not about definitions.

Social CRM has been well and poorly defined elsewhere – not getting into that debate. From my perspective we are talking about extending CRM into the new Social Channels, if you want to call it something else or look at something different – be my guest. For the purpose of this series, we are talking about making CRM more powerful by extending it to the Social Channels.

What, what – series?

Yes, thanks to Jacada I have been giving a forum to express my thoughts in regards to Social CRM that will last five posts.  This is part of an ongoing project they are doing where they introduce a series of Experts (and me) through their blog.  I am the third one to attempt this, Penny Reynolds and Bruce Temkin preceded me talking about Call Center Best Practices and Customer Experience.

And now, I am talking about Social CRM.  I won't, as I was saying, cover the what of Social CRM – but the need for it. Why would an organization feel compelled to extend their CRM implementation into the Social Channels?

Many have attempted to label Social CRM in many ways and give different reason why you MUST or HAVE TO do it.  To me is a lot simpler than what anybody else may have said. It is about actionable insights.  It is about doing something with the feedback you collect from your customers.  It is, finally, about being able to understand your customers' expectations, and being able to meet or exceed them.  It gives any organization the power they did not have before, to really understand their customers and to really make them satisfied.

Am I implying that we did not know what they wanted before? No, I am not implying it. I am saying it.

You see, in the past organizations did not (at first) care about what their customers wanted or needed. Sure, they had Focus Groups and Research Efforts, but those were mild at best and not always designed to find what customers wanted – more like telling them what the organization was doing and expecting praise on return.  Don't believe me? Think about Coke II.

Later they thought it would be simpler to do surveys, mostly online, and the world of Enteprise Feedback Management was thrust upon us. What I call the "Denny's Effect" soon exploded: everyone was asking for your opinion from the gas station to the automobile dealer.  The amount of feedback collected was staggering.  A company that had 80 million customers and conducted over 2 billion transactions a year was able to store almost 2 TeraBytes of survey responses.

Alas, all that data is useless – or almost useless for two reasons: first, most people did not know what they were trying to ask and the questions were, at best, biased and did not have a lot of value. Of course, there is the also the problem that people lie in surveys.  Well, lie is a very strong word – let's say that they are usually biased towards the entity asking the questions.  At the end, 90% or more of those surveys we produced and distributed are biased, incomplete answers to questions never asked.

Or utter garbage.

Do you really want to use that data to make decisions for your business?

One thing we have known all along was that people tend to be honest in their relationships and recommendations to peers. Enter Social Networks.  

These new Social Worlds gave us the ability to tap, almost eavesdrop if you may, into these peer-to-peer relationships.  Those of us in Feedback Management have said for many years that the structured feedback (the surveys, focus groups, and other market research activities) represented at best 5-10% of the available feedback.  Now, thanks to the Social Networks we span, we can access that other 90-95% -- the truer, more honest feedback.

And as we access that data, this is where Social CRM becomes ever so powerful – and needed. For any organization with clients, the value of feedback increases exponentially as you merge it with existing customer, transactional, and operational data.  The ability to analyze that data in that context is what Social CRM brings to the table – and the reason you need it.

Actionable Insights can only exist in this context, and can only bring value to compensate for the work it takes to compile them if they are used in that matter.

And that is the need for Social CRM – aggregate true feedback collected from Social Channels with data from Customers Systems of Record and Transactional Systems(CRM and front office), Operational Systems (ERP and back office) and bring it all together into an analytics engine, analyze it within the context of specific processes or functions, and create an actionable insight.

In other words, use the true Voice of the Customer to create better products, services, and experiences to over-deliver to the customer's expectations.

Any questions?

Esteban Kolsky - Principal and Founder of ThinkJar

Note: Esteban Kolsky has been retained by Jacada to participate in the Customer Service 2.0: Access the Experts speakers series. The opinions shared herein reflect the views of the author, and not necessarily Jacada or its employees.

The Customer Experience Evolution of Contact Centers

Are contact centers becoming extinct like dinosaurs or typewriters?

Based on the hype in the general media, it seems pretty clear that contact centers are a dying breed; getting replaced by more modern interaction channels like the Web, mobile, and social media.

But the data tells a different story. I've done a lot of consumer research over the years, and it continues to show that customers very often want to speak to someone on the phone. Whether it's to verify a piece of information, get help, or place an order, some people still want to interact with an agent. And when it comes to getting customer service, the phone often remains the preferred channel – across all generations of consumers.

While contact centers may not be quickly fading into obsolescence, they are not evolving fast enough to guarantee their ongoing relevance. As Charles Darwin said: "In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed."

So what do "collaborate" and "improvise" mean for contact centers?

Collaborate means that contact centers need to connect with other channels. They need to augment and support Web, store, branches, mobile, and social media interactions. It's no longer viable to think of phone interactions as standalone experiences. Therefore, contact centers can no longer remain an isolated organization. For contact centers to thrive, they will need to become an integral component of multi-channel experiences.

Improvise means that contact centers need to redefine their purpose; their raison d'être. For many years, contact centers have been considered cost–centers; companies did everything they could do squeeze every last penny out of the cost of every last phone interaction. This pushed many interactions to offshore call centers and gave rise to purely cost-focused metrics like average handle time (AHT).

Contact centers need to evolve from cost-centers to loyalty drivers. The biggest financial impact of a phone interaction often has nothing to do with the cost of the call; it's the resulting behavior of the customer on the other end of the phone. Companies obsess about cutting $0.50 from the cost of a call without recognizing that the phone experience might generate a $1,000 difference in the lifetime value of that customer.

So how can contact centers learn to collaborate and improvise? By mastering what the Temkin Group has defined as the four core customer experience competencies:

1. Purposeful Leadership: Operate consistently with a clear set of values.
2. Employee Engagement: Align employees with the goals of the organization.
3. Compelling Brand Values: Deliver on your brand promises to customers.
4. Customer Connectedness: Infuse customer insight across the organization.

Over the next five blog posts in this series, I will explore how companies can apply these competencies to their contact centers. We'll dedicate one post to each of the four competencies and then use the final post to examine the metrics and measurements that you need to support the effort.

Let me circle around to the original question: Are contact centers becoming extinct like dinosaurs or typewriters?

Not yet. But the ones that don't evolve will definitely not survive. 

Bruce Temkin - Customer Experience Transformist & Managing Partner, Temkin Group and author of the popular blog, Customer Experience Matters

Bruce Temkin has been retained by Jacada to participate in the Customer Service 2.0: Access The Experts speakers series. The opinions shared herein reflect the views of the author, and not necessarily Jacada or its employees.

The Social Customer and the Globalized Small Town

Back in the days when people in a small town purchased everything they needed from the local market, businesses had an opportunity to truly understand their customers and provide exemplary, personalized customer service. The local grocers and butchers, for instance, were able to interact with their customers on a regular basis, understand their needs, likes and dislikes and tailor their operations to better suit their customers. We know that things are quite different in the flat world that we live in today. While customers have enjoyed access to a broader variety of products and services at competitive prices, they have had to move farther away from the core of the business to allow businesses to leverage their economies of scale. As a result, businesses have gotten disconnected from their customers with impersonal communication, transactional interactions and shallow relationships. Despite having a sea of data about customers and their interactions with the organization, businesses struggle with understanding their customers as individuals and with providing authentic customer experiences.

While social media amplifies the disconnects that exist between businesses and customers, it can also serve as a catalyst for authentic relationships between them. The proliferation of the social web has made it all the more easier for people to share information about themselves and about their experiences anytime, from anywhere with anyone. As a result, the web exists today as an ever-growing repository of user-generated content – The number of user-generated content creators in the US will increase from 43% of Internet users in 2008 to 52% by 2013. Buried in this content, are individuals' profiles, their interests, connections & thoughts and sentiments or feelings on various topics. Businesses can now understand their customers through their publicly announced personas and improve the products, services and experiences they offer to their customers, presenting a win-win situation.

Irrespective of size and global reach, businesses that are empowered with social customer insights can effectively migrate to a customer-centric model, in which they can treat customers as individuals rather than account-holders and prospects as people rather than personas – as if they existed in a small town. Finally, this would enable businesses to build authentic relationships that lead to value creation for both businesses and customers alike.

For more information on why businesses should leverage the social web to understand their customers beyond their relationship history with the company, check out my white paper, Social Customer Insights: Building Customer-centric Organizations. This paper  covers how companies can improve customer experience and customer advocacy by harnessing the insights gathered about the social customer.

Kumaran Shanmuhan - Director, Product Management, Jacada Inc.

What makes for exceptional customer service, Part 2: Using data for the customer's benefit

I recently wrote about an example of excellent customer service.  However, in another case, I had reason to call my mobile phone provider regarding a faulty phone that was still within the warranty period.  

"Yes, I see from your call history that you've called us on this problem a couple of times and prior to that, no problems...it's still not resolved? ...ok, let me post you an envelope to return the phone to us, and I'll email you confirmation of the job." 

Now, as a customer, that one conversation gives me reassurance that the company knows me because they have my call history, they can see my issue (their repairs system is connected to the CRM), and there's no putting me on hold and transferring me to a separate team to arrange returning the phone. Is this a Universal Agent? They have a complete view of me regardless of what means I use to contact them, clearly their email system is integrated to their CRM.

Could my Telco provider have gone that extra bit further? Undoubtedly. 

I'd called four times over a few days on the same issue. I suspect their management reports served management more than the customer, otherwise they would have noticed that I'd blown up their First Call Resolution figure. Perhaps unbeknown to them is the fact that they can capture in real time, instances such as when a customer has called more than twice within a short period and is therefore at risk of being very upset or, worse still, at risk of churn. By connecting that customer with, say, their billing history, you get a picture of how valuable that customer is to service and therefore whether to pass this key customer to Retentions to service immediately.

Having the capability to interrogate internal systems regarding Abandoned Calls and First Call Resolution are just two ways of going that extra bit further than the competition, leaving that extra positive impression on what is now a loyal and positive customer. Rather than wait a week for the next scheduled report run, and if you can do that in real time then all the better for retaining that customer.

Karnail Jita, Presales Consultant, Jacada Inc.