There’s lots of buzz around social media, but until now few were doing much about it in the business world, besides hiring a blogger and then launching a blog without much of a plan or much in the way of goals.
However, there’s good news that looks toward the future where melding social media with traditional marketing and customer efforts can become a reality.
According to the March 23, 2009, CustomerThink Advisor eNewsletter, businesses are becoming more interested in adding social media to a menu of tools. Meanwhile, businesses, innovators, researchers and consultants are developing and testing ways to measure and eventually monetize social media.
One of the ways I see and hope this melding happens is within Inbound Marketing, which can be defined as any place within a business where customers talk to an employee about a product, service, want, need, concern or to offer a suggestion, and the ways we currently do Outbound Marketing. Furthermore, I believe the most likely places for these new ways of doing business to happen are the call center, the customer service department, sales (including stores) and marketing.
Within today’s business structure, those are the areas that experience most of the customer touches. By aligning those functional areas and sharing the incoming data delivered in the customer’s own voice, businesses can then understand how social media adds strategically and tactically to primary tools that heretofore were employed–the telephone, e-mail, advertising, web site forums and so on. And because the last thing a business needs is to add to its already complex and bloated bureaucracy, neither a new department or functional area headed by another executive is necessary, adding to efficiencies and cost effectiveness, as the CMO or the EVP of Sales and Marketing seems the obvious choice to lead this effort.
In Building the Social Customer Service Experience, Bob Thompson, CustomerThink Guru writes, “Over the next couple of years, more and more companies will take the plunge into delivering a more ’social’ customer service experience, to better engage with customers while also improving efficiency.”
That being said, Thompson warns that according to a Forrester study of 5,000 consumers, “45 percent of consumers still prefer to speak with a customer service agent on the phone” while 36 percent prefer going to a physical store.” That means that 81 percent of consumers would prefer traditional ways to interact, not via e-mail, web, chat or social media tools such as a blog. (To read an excerpt or to purchase the Forrester Study, click on the following title: The Gap In The Customer Service Experience,)
That tells me that the time to begin the departmental alignment process and to upgrade IT so that the software necessary to run an effective Inbound Marketing program is compatible with the infrastructure is today. Furthermore, the time is now to launch social media tools across the functional area channels mentioned above because it will take a year or two to get customers comfortable with e and social media technology, not to mention the work and time required to grow the audiences, to encourage their participation and to gather enough data to that we can improve the customer experience and we can turn the customer touchpoints into revenue centers, where both traditional metrics and the new metrics and tools being developed by technology start-ups serving social media efforts are in Beta.
The Bottom Line: Marketers, social media consultants, and technocrats need to add to their discussions about social media as a conversation tool and begin sharing the value around alignment of customer contact points to better serve customers with strategies and tactics that are both inbound (customer-activated contacts) and outbound (business-generated content). Within this context, social media has value for both businesses (creating better customer experiences and new revenue centers that are measurable) and the customers (adding another place where they can share their thoughts about a product, service, want, need, concern or to offer a suggestion and be offered a product or service that want or need).
By gathering and storing what customers say, businesses can group customers according to their wants and needs in ever smaller and smaller segments, and then respond by offering only those products and services that those groups want or need by using both Inbound and Outbound Marketing response mechanisms, employed by anyone, at any moment, when talking with any customer or group of customers. When each business implements its specific strategy and works out the details necessary for this alignment of functional areas and tactics (tools) to succeed, social media content will look very different from what we see today and both consumers and businesses will be better for it. When this happens, in whatever shape or form it eventually takes, Businesses Will Take Social Media to the Bank.
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This is an excellent post, Lewis. Well thought out and articulated. Here’s my take: if companies haven’t done the necessary work (and many haven’t) to centrally manage all of the input gleaned from inbound customer communications yet, they had better focus on doing so as quickly as possible. How can they react to customer problems and input to offer products or services in alignment with customers’ needs otherwise? Especially now, in a tough business environment, companies need to look for every advantage they can find. Customer relations are the key to riding out the storm and having a future. While social media can be a valuable tool in the marketing arsenal, why add it if the information from that too, isn’t managed well? Or if companies aren’t committed to engaging the customer in dialogue? Wouldn’t that just lead to more frustration and negative perception by consumers? Better not to waste capital and human resources on any new initiatives until every other customer touch point is fully aligned, analyzed and used to deepen customer relationships, in my view.
Outstanding post. I agree entirely. We’ll look back in a few years and wonder why we ever thought about social media as a marketing tool, when it’s really the evolution of customer service.
Ted,
You are exactly correct. If a business isn’t currently creating a process for data collection, analyzation of that data and predictabilty arising out of the analysis, they are not ready for social media in my opionion.
Currently, social media seems to be used primarily as an Outbound resource for communications, PR and brand building, and I don’t believe that those uses are either cost-effective or a tool likely to have monetization results. Smart people can argue my point here and raise other values and I respect their opinions. But since a business’s first goal is to make money, we need to present ideas as to how we can make that happen. That is my purpose here and it is how I see the future of SM evolving.
Jason,
Yes! Although I am talking about Inbound Marketing here, that process can not deliver monetary results unless it first delivers customer service value. I continue to believe that marketing and sales future is in aligning with the customer service touchpoints to deliver only those products and services that customers want, when they want them. Customer data is key to achieving that level of service.
Sounds like the focus here is on technology (data collection, IT infrastructure, etc.) but I believe that any technical integration or innovation needs to take place within the context of an organizational shift that removes the silos separating customer service, call centers, sales, and marketing from one another.
Michael Lowenstein of Harris Interactive (there’s a good interview with him here: http://www.customerthink.com/interview/insight_into_how_customers_think) has demonstrated that customer loyalty is most intensely influenced by interactions with the employees of your company (big surprise, right?). Yet how many marketing departments have a direct, operational connection to customer service folk or even people on the sales floor? How many loyalty programs consider management of these personal interactions as central to their mission?
Long story short, organizations need to make sure that their people (all of them) are focused on creating great and memorable experiences for customers before investing in the tools that will help them do just that. This often calls for an organizational realignment prior to or in conjunction with any sort of technical implementation
Matt,
Actually, we agree. I place the focus directly on alignment (which means eliminating silos in business speak)by writing the following: “Within today’s business structure, those are the areas that experience most of the customer touches. By aligning those functional areas and sharing the incoming data delivered in the customer’s own voice….”
However, the technology needs to be in place as well, or the alignment makes no sense to CEOs, COOs, and CFOs. This is not about changing an entire culture, which is going to happen. This is about aligning several functional areas to create a new way to listen and communicate with customers, while also creating a new revenue center.
Having spent and consulted with large businesses, and that’s who we are talking about here, change comes slowly, it must be practical, and it must deliver ROI. Otherwise, the company will simply do what today’s businesses are doing: Hiring a social media person and creating another silo. That is a horrible idea and makes alignment even more difficult.
Matt,
I’m sorry. I forgot to respond to your point about employee engagement, which has little to do with alignment. I wrote an book based on the fact that great companies succeed from the inside out. Meaning, employees determine brand image, marketing and sales success, and the quality of the customer experience. I couldn’t agree with you more about its importance, and I often write about it here and on my own blog.
That makes sense, LG.
On re-reading your post, I was particularly struck by your emphasis that by incorporating new technologies into specific functions, an organization can better collect and share critical customer at precisely those points where it gets generated.
Social media is a great tool for segmentation and conversation (feedback, monitoring, selling). In my opinion social media is only a part of the marketing function and a larger part of the online marketing strategy. However, we must remember that only a fraction of our possible customer are online (facebook has 10% of general US population and 9% of Spain’s population), so social media is a “tool” for communication at this point. Yet, a tool that requires knowledge and know-how to utilize properly. What is great is that these new online tools are cutting the cost of communication for many marketing budgets and creating new effeciencies in the marketing spectrum, which is really cool stuff!
http://trevorlandia.blogspot.com
I agree with you. My biggest challenge with clients is that they are afraid a disgrunted customer will dominate the social networks with negative comments and the client wants to avoid that at all costs. Guaranteed 2% of customers no matter what you do will be unhappy but i think they are missing a true opportunity to engage customers. How does a marketing expert help the client overcome these fears?
We need extra advice for Turkey. Thank you.
Trevor,
Good analysis. I completely agree that social media is a tool still looking for critical mass. The important strategy is that it become integrated with other communications tools and not seen as something requiring a new functional area.
Linda,
Once integrated within Marketing, social media can be used to gather information–good and bad–to improve products, services and customer service. The upside remains that when that data is properly analyzed, it can result in cross sells and upsells, turning Marketing and Customer Service Centers into revenue creators.
I think the reason ‘81 percent of consumers would prefer traditional ways to interact’ is largely because social media still isn’t as ’social’ as we’d like to think it is…Social networks, blogs, twitter, etc. all seem like easier, more convenient ways to interact with consumers, but they take just as much a time and energy commitment as answering phones or meeting customers face to face. People need to feel like they’re actually speaking with an actual person via these social media avenues. Until that happens – until we really use these tools as ways to genuinely interact with others – we can’t take full advantage of the business-enhancing and customer-engaging benefits of social media.
Mary,
Yes! People need to feel like they’re actually speaking with an actual person… Brilliant! Wish I had said that.