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Table of ContentsIntroduction ............................................. 3

Chapter 1.................................................. 4

Chapter 2................................................ 11

Chapter 3................................................ 13

Chapter 4................................................ 15

Chapter 5................................................ 18

Chapter 6................................................ 22

Chapter 7................................................ 26

Chapter 8................................................ 31

Chapter 9................................................ 33

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Make the Voice of the Customer Your Business Asset

Wouldn’t it be amazing if a marketing, customer service or product per-son could ask his customers directly, easily and quickly how to define messaging, increase customer satisfaction, improve a product, add a new feature, or what to work on next? Wouldn’t it be even more amazing if it were a part of a company’s business process to do so? Could a com-pany really drive its marketing messages, new product introductions and improvements, and service processes based on what customers want?

Yes! The time is now! The proliferation of customer feedback fueled by social media, when combined with the growth in email, chat and other channels, and the growth in voice of the customer (VOC) analytics adoption by enterprises, immediately creates an important convergence of possibilities.

The need to create the right business processes to take action on this customer data has never been more important. Enterprises are starting to realize this and leverage customer data as a business asset. What do you do when you find out a customer is unhappy and is screaming about it online? What do you do when your community is having trouble solving a service problem? What do you do when you learn of an emerg-ing problem in social media that is starting to affect your email and call volume? You create process. In 2011, companies are not just listening to customer feedback and monitoring social media; they are engaging in it. They need the business processes and IT infrastructure in place to support that engagement.

This eBook delves into the processes, opportunities and benefits of leveraging your customer conversations as a business asset. It includes best practices from real customer successes and challenges, and some great tips, tricks and methodologies for you to leverage. It is designed to use the lessons learned in hundreds of voice of the customer imple-mentations to help you think through how you can put the customer experience at the center of your business processes and turn your customers into loyal advocates.

Introduction:

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Ten Steps To Improving Your Customer Experience

Giving your customers — current and potential — the most flawless and seam-less experience possible is one of the hardest challenges that any business may face. It’s difficult for several reasons. First, you have to take yourself out of your own shoes and put yourself in the customer’s shoes: What is her pain point? What has driven her to explore your product in the first place? How does she learn about your product and product category? Is

there enough information? Can she try it for herself? What does the on-boarding process look like? What is the pre-sales and post-sales support? Is she able to purchase conveniently?

This requires that you look at your business from the customer’s perspec-tive, pretending that you know nothing about your product and perhaps not a lot about the product category, and then walking yourself through that experience from the beginning. This is hard to do.

Second, customer experience has many touch points, from initial educa-tion (thought leadership and marketing), to the sales process, to the prod-uct experience, to the support experience during and after the purchase or sign-up. There are many departments that will be involved, each with their own objectives, structures and to-do lists. This makes alignment extremely difficult, but not impossible, if you can show how and why service and ex-perience is the new marketing.

Chapter 1

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For the reasons above, among others, you will see that giving the customer an exceptional experience is a multi-faceted process that transcends silos. We’ve worked up some basic steps to help you think about that process holistically, and put some structure around the steps you may need to take to examine the current situation, align resources and execute:

1 Listen to what the market is saying about you. To start, you should be listening across the relevant social media channels, including both current users of your product or

service, as well as non-users. Some feedback is going to be obvious (“Hey @brandX: love your product, but wish you didn’t put me on hold for 10 minutes.”), while some is going to be a little more subtle (“Wish there was an app out there that allowed me to hail a taxi from my smartphone without calling anyone.”).

Figure out what users like and dislike about you and about your com-petitors, and don’t forget about the non-users, as their feedback can be even more telling at times. Read between the lines to understand what the main pain points are, and what these people are looking for, which may or may not be currently provided. At the same time that you are listening to social media feedback, you should be listening to what your customers are telling you on the phone and via email. Every touch point you have with a (potential) customer is an opportunity to learn and pro-vide an excellent experience.

2 Analyze to extract meaning from your social media research, as well as your traditional research. Extracting meaning and actionable insights is easy when

you have a small data set. However, what happens when you have thousands and tens of thousands of comments and conversations to analyze? Whether you are dealing with social media or unstructured messages inside your firewall, such as emails, call center notes and text surveys, you need the ability to automatically read through those conversations

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and extract the business insights they contain. To do this you need a text analytics solution that is capable of processing conversations with a high degree of accuracy at high volume. If you are dealing with struc-tured survey data, you should be working with a statistical tool. While you are listening and analyzing, make sure you do it across the channels that make sense for you — i.e., where your (potential) customers are.

3 Collaborate to create customized experiences. In the social age, so much of the customer experience is going to rely on your ability to create products and

services that solve customer needs. Analyzing what people are saying in social media, call centers and support emails is an impor-tant step, and can give you a view into how people view your product right now and what they want to do, but can’t. Taking it a step further, you need to ask customers what they want, and give them the tools to collaborate with you. Take a tip from Threadless, who has pioneered a crowdsourcing product. By involving their customers in product design, they have created advocacy from those who design and those who vote — both of those groups now have direct influence into how the product is shaped. As you create the collaborative process, make sure that power us-ers, brand advocates and experts in the field can shape the product roadmap. For lighter users who don’t want to get that involved, make it easy to provide feedback and ensure that they know they are being heard. The social customer wants to feel ownership of the product’s di-rection; (s)he wants to be heard when providing feedback. Make sure the feedback doesn’t just sit there, but rather let customers form discussion communities around ideas, allow them to flesh it out, and communicate back to the community the status of idea adoption. We love tools like UserVoice for that.

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4 Examine content: Customer experience starts the first time a potential customer discovers your prod-uct or company. With the advent of social media, there

are infinitely more touch points and ways that someone can discover you. Sometimes it’s through a blog post or a tweet that you’ve written, or a blog post or tweet that someone else has written about you. It can come from a YouTube video, a panel to which you contributed, or when someone mentions your product in his own training session or panel. You get the point … It can be anywhere at any time. When someone else is creating content about you, you can’t control what they write or say. What you can control, however, is the awesome-ness of their experience with your brand. Awesome experiences lead to awesome tweets and blogs. When you are creating content, on the other hand, you need to know what value you add as a company and articulate it. What story do your materials tell? Is this story right for the customer segment you are selling to? Don’t be overly concerned with promoting your product; if your content adds value and can be shared easily, it will help you sell your product without selling. In the social age, the mantra for all pre-sales experiences should be “less selling, more educating.”

5 Examine product: Based on the findings you glean from your analysis (#2 above), you should evaluate how your product currently compares to the needs, likes

and dislikes of the market. Make sure you do an honest audit of your current product or service, as well as its roadmap. Sit down with the product team and share your findings; understand which items are already slated for release, and what’s currently on the work plate for the team. Once you understand this, you will be able to start the planning process, prioritizing certain developments and de-prioritizing some oth-ers. Make sure you are also getting qualitative feedback from customer service, in addition to the more concrete data pulled from call center notes and support emails.

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6 Monitor and measure: After you have discovered the important trends and feelings from steps #1-3, and have prioritized product feedback per #4, you

are now ready to develop the product enhancements and release them out into the world. As you do that – preferably in incre-mental chunks so you can adjust as necessary – ensure that you are continuously monitoring social media for early feedback. Commit to the changes you are making; however, remain nimble enough to course-correct when things don’t go as planned, and the feedback isn’t as positive as you expected. As with everything you do, monitor and measure, measure and monitor. Lather, rinse, repeat.

7 Examine support: Killer product and pre-sales education is only part of a killer user experience; support is just as important. There are two major types of support:

pre-sales and post-sales, and both are important to the over-all customer experience. When customers are just getting to know your product and testing it out, pre-sales support is paramount. To ensure that it gets done, you need to understand if it falls under the sales or the support department, and make sure that the lines of communication are open between the two. After the customer purchases the product – or signs up, if the product is free – you also need to ensure that you have beefed up post-sales support. At this point, the customer has com-mitted resources to your product, so you need to ensure they aren’t regretting their decision. There are different kinds of support that you can provide: email, phone, social (Twitter, online forums), community-powered support, or all of the above. Figure out what makes sense for you, from the standpoint of the product and the customers using it, and execute well. Word of caution: If you support in more than one channel, make sure that the experience is consistent, or rather, consistently excellent.

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8 Align priorities: As you examine your content, product and support, ensure that all the departments in your company are on the same page. Inherently,

everyone has unique objectives, which can be contradictory at times. To ensure a seamless customer experience, you need to align these objectives. For example, if you have a complex product that needs more than average objectives, in terms of on-boarding, you need to allot extra pre-sales and post-sales resources to it. If the product is important enough to the overall product portfolio, the C-suite has to support this, while realizing that the higher costs of support will make it a lower ROI product. Clear objectives and metrics of success have to be set forth and adhered to by the management team.

9 Invest in data management, otherwise known as Social CRM. There’s nothing that can kill a deal and turn off a customer more than a disorganized experi-

ence, where various reps in support and sales aren’t working from the same record. How many times have you called into a customer service center and had to tell your story twice, or received conflicting information or – even worse – there was no trace of a conversation that you had yesterday? Too many, probably! Make sure that everyone in the company who can potentially touch the customer has access to the same dynamic information, and is able to update it on the fly for every-one to see.

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10 Empower and train: None of the above is possible if you don’t have the right human resources. To have a truly customer-centric culture, you need to

ensure that your employees have the wherewithal to carry out the brilliant strategies you set. To ensure that, you need to:

1. hire employees who are quick on their feet and creative, and will go above and beyond to provide the right experience for the customer;

2. train these employees;

3. empower them to make their own customer-driven decisions;

4. adopt the culture of risk-taking as an organization, where failing fast is OK, and employees aren’t afraid to move creatively to serve the customer.

If you do the above well, and if you are able to create a cogent, consistent and excellent customer experience from the very beginning, you should be able to build advocacy with those who touch your product. Whether or not they end up buying or using your product, they can still spread their feedback freely, and we all know what happens when positive or negative word-of-mouth spreads like wildfire.

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Are You Listening Where Your Customers Are Talking?

There’s been a lot of buzz lately about social media monitoring. It seems as if every minute, another organization is putting up a Facebook page, or launching a social campaign.

But it’s very important to take a look at your customer listening objectives from a complete perspective. There are a wide variety of channels that can prove useful to your company. Which chan-nels you utilize can vary according to your company, industry and objectives.

You should make sure that your company is aligned on your listening strat-egies, which often involves bringing together people from marketing and customer service. The sources of customer conversations can include:

• Social media• CRM logs• Customer surveys• Review sites• Internal customer communities or forums

Chances are, there are people within your company who are charged with “listening” to all of these different sources for different reasons. Are your “social media” listening efforts isolated from your “CRM” listening efforts and separate from your “survey” listening? Who is in charge of monitoring your customer communities?

Chapter 2

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You also should evaluate what information you are seeking from your listening program. Are you interested in automatically routing communica-tions from unhappy customers to the appropriate representative? Does your VP of customer service want to mine information on service compli-ments and complaints? Is the PR group trying to measure buzz and reach? Are product managers looking for product feedback and suggestions? Do you need to seek out “at-risk customers” for remediation? Is your sales team looking for “intent to buy” indicators? Are you trying to do competi-tive benchmarking? By focusing on the complete picture, you will be able to utilize budgets and financial resources more effectively to achieve your goals. And, you’ll be more likely to get the complete picture you need that will translate into increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, share-of-wallet and retention.

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The Customer Experience Executive

Most large companies are not designed with a cross-functional business unit and organizational leader of “the cus-tomer.” There are people all over the organization who are responsible for different facets of the customer’s experience: marketing for their experi-ence with the brand; product managers for their experience with the product; customer service if they have a prob-lem; and sales when they want to buy or if they want to buy more.

We recently had the opportunity to speak to a large health care company about customer listening, analytics and social media strategy. When we

entered the room, there were a lot of people there! We noticed that they were introducing themselves to each other and asked the project sponsor what was going on. She said that they didn’t know each other but were brought together as leaders from various parts of the organization to create a strat-egy and set of processes for how to interact with customers in social media! There were people from customer service, member services (a fancy name for sales), public relations, marketing, business process and an IT guy for good measure. The first organizational, cross-functional initiative began with this discussion; but it was the customer that brought everyone together.

Chapter 3

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The customer experience executive doesn’t have an easy job. He or she has to try to break down barriers and create processes for interacting with customers, no matter what the topic or channel. What we have found lately is that social media is putting this cross-functional role of caring for the customer into motion — no matter whether it’s through awareness, service or feedback. We are glad to see this new role emerging in com-panies. Whether it’s someone who is leading the cross-functional charge, or someone that has reporting/management responsibility for people who interact with customers, it bodes well for the customer – which ultimately bodes well for business.

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Why Having a Social Media Strategy is A Bad Idea

It’s interesting that, with the rise of social media, companies seem to have “unlearned” everything they learned about integrated marketing and service in the email and ecom-merce revolutions in the past. Many companies are hopping on the social media bandwagon this year, launching social media initiatives in specialized groups to listen to and engage with customers in Twitter, Facebook and communities.

We believe that social media should not be pursued in a vacuum. It should be aligned with other customer feedback, marketing, and service principles and processes. Being able to listen, analyze, relate and act on feedback from multiple sources like social media, emails, surveys and call center records better than anyone else is a key component in increasing loyalty and revenue opportunities.

Why is it so important for companies to create a multi-channel strategy as opposed to a social media one?

• A multi-channel strategy gives you the ability to perform more in-depth analysis that reveals the “why” behind a trend. For example, you might find that a lot of your customers are talking about wanting to buy a new product you’ve just announced. By sending a follow-up survey or creating focus groups with those customers, you might learn more about why those customers are so excited, as well as uncover and address any uncertainties they might have that could slow their desire to purchase.

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• Validation or refutation of a trend. Customers might complain about a product issue a lot in social media, but they might be merely echoing complaints based on overheard rumors, rather than on actual first-person experiences. When you look into your customer service records, you no-tice very few calls about the issue and your return rates haven’t gone up. This could mean you have a PR perception issue rather than an actual product problem.

• Consistency of brand experience. You want to ensure that a customer contacting you via Twitter doesn’t get a totally different response than someone who contacts you via a web form or email – or, if they do, you want it to be the result of a deliberate decision on your part. Everyone should have access to the same knowledgebase of information and the same set of processes, regardless of channel.

So, how can you create an effective multi-channel strategy in your company?

First of all, you need to get all the players sitting at the same table. You need to think about everyone who is touching your customer at different points in the sales and service process. This can include representatives from sales, marketing, customer service, market research and even your channel.

You need to then determine where you are listening to your customers today. Are you currently surveying your customers? Are you looking at the actual survey comments or just the numbers? How connected are your pre-purchase and post-purchase survey and focus group programs? Are you mining external customer communities where customers gather, from expert sites to review sites? Do you have your own internal customer communities? Are you listening to social media or do you need to extend existing social media programs? How are you leveraging feedback from your email and contact center systems?

Once you add up all of this feedback, you’re talking about a lot of informa-tion. This is where analysis comes into play: using the power of automated text analytics to reveal the products, trends, issues, and sentiment being described in the text of each of these customer conversations. By creating a centralized repository for multi-channel communications, you provide a

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single authoritative source to which every constituent can come to find out answers. Now each team is able to see the complete customer picture, instead of drawing potentially incorrect conclusions based merely on a small sliver of data.

Relating these insights to structured information and data residing in other systems is key. What were the top concerns of people who rated this prod-uct a “2” versus a “4”? How much of this product did we ship in the last month? How are customer service complaints stacking up against social media complaints? It’s very important that your analytics solution interact well with your in-house data warehouse solution, whether that is Teradata, BusinessObjects, Microstrategy or other solutions of record.

You then need to plan for how you will act on this information. Do product managers, executives and others come to your market research or analytics department asking for specific pieces of information? Or, does your analyt-ics team understand the business well enough to be able to proactively approach others with ideas and insights? To what types of issues does your company want to respond? How quickly should that response be delivered? Who should respond, and based on what criteria? Do you treat “influencers” or “VIP customers” differently from everybody else, or does your company espouse an “every customer is important” ideal?

Thinking through this in a comprehensive way will enable you to be more effective, not only in your social media efforts, but across all of your customer engagements. It’s important that you select a partner who understands the importance of the multi-channel customer experience and has worked with companies similar to yours, to guide you in best practices from previous engagements.

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Who Is Your Social Customer?

The Social Customer is not a figment of your imagination; she’s here kicking social media butt and taking names. She wants to engage with you, the brand, but only when appropriate and convenient for her. Just because you are listening, does not mean that she wants to talk. And, what you actually say to her is more of an art than a sci-ence. Understanding what her needs are, and where she is in her decision and consumption cycle, can help guide your conversation with her.

I’ve identified six main stages that a customer goes through when commu-nicating with brands via the social web,

and what she is looking for in each cycle. Let the customer set the tone for the conversation and tell you what she needs; don’t “show up and throw up.”

1 Painpointidentification: The first step to fixing any problem is to recognize that problem. If the customer knows she has a problem, she becomes open to solving it, and later considers various solutions. What

she is looking for: advice on what to do next, primarily from her network. This is not your place to sell your service; you must tread gently and realize that the most effective (i.e. listened-to) communication will come from peers. This is where your advocacy building efforts will pay dividends; one word about you from a happy customer is worth 10 words from you about yourself.

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A tweet like “Oh no, my watch broke!” will elicit ideas from her network, such as: “Hey I know this great repair shop” or “Hey, Macy’s is having a watch sale today.” Listen to the context of these interactions and only if you can add value should you suggest an idea, remedy, or send a link to a resource page. (Your resource page is not your product demo page, by the way.) Do not sell her on your solution; she hasn’t yet decided which route she will take to solve her problem.

2 Research: After the customer decides on a course of action, she starts exploring options consistent with that course of action. Continuing our example … if she decides to buy a new watch, she

will first examine independent advice on how to buy one, where to buy it and what the most important features are, as well as things to look for and avoid. Only then will she be looking at various brands and retailers, and doing due diligence on the options available to her via her network, con-sumer review sites, and even brand and retailer sites at a later point. She is looking for advice and resources, and maybe more specific sug-gestions later. Again, don’t send her links to a sale you are having. If she engages with you and thinks you have been helpful, only then is it time to include: “Oh, and by the way, we are having this sale.” Each situation is going to be different, and there are situations when it’s not appropriate to talk about yourself at all, or at least until much later in the conversation. Consider the individual circumstances, and remember that you have to earn the right to talk about yourself.

3 Validation: When a customer is in this phase, she has decided on a course of action and is evaluating options. This stage can be quick or drawn out; length is typically dictated by engagement with the

category, complexity of the product, average price (or price range) within the product category, and availability of information about options (think: choosing a pen versus an automobile).

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What she is looking for: her network to tell her about their experiences with a set of options, information from brands to be easily found, and brands to be available for questions and research. At this point, it’s OK to share prod-uct information, but only if it makes sense. She isn’t looking for a canned marketing message, but rather a customized learning experience. This is also the point where advocacy from her network can pay huge dividends for your brand. When she asks Twitter for a watch recommendation, she will listen to people she knows and trust first.

4 Selection: In a higher involvement category, she will probably select a couple of competitors to really focus on. At the end of this stage, she will select her top contender and will be ready to purchase.

What she is looking for: a hands-on experience and support from the brands she is evaluating, tools to help her make a decision. If she gets a free trial of your product, make sure she is adequately supported. Here’s an important point worth stressing: her customer experience during this period needs to be aligned with and indicative of her experience as a customer. If you provide phone support to paying customers, you need to provide it to potential customers. The reverse is also true: don’t oversell the experience and then under-deliver. Decide how you want to support her and in which channels: social and / or traditional.

5 Post-purchase: Congratulations! You won the customer’s busi-ness, and she signed up / purchased your product. You should know by now that customer retention is your Number One priority. Not only

is it cheaper than customer acquisition, but happy customers also make happy advocates, which in turn creates new customers, creating even more happy advocates, reinforcing the cycle. Happy customers are also good for sales: Vovici research shows that “a totally-satisfied customer contributed 2.6 times the annual revenue that a somewhat satisfied customer gener-ated, and 14 times the revenue of a somewhat dissatisfied customer.” So it follows that a tip-top customer experience is key and more than pays for

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the expense of providing it. What she is looking for: as your customer, she expects you to be available when she needs help, where she is, with a customized support experience, and to have her voice heard. Sending your customer to an 800 number over Twitter is not enough. Make sure your employees are empowered to give her the precise solution tailored to her problem. Taking it a step further, make sure you proactively collaborate with her and allow her to shape the future of the product. When listening to product feedback, don’t get defen-sive; help her explain what she means, and never get so entrenched in your own vision that you can’t take input or course-correct along the way.

6 Advocacy: This doesn’t mean that you should kiss the hands of all people who say nice things about you. That being said, you should definitely invite your lead raving customers to share their experiences.

But, also understand that true advocacy comes from really listening and giving users a stake in the future of your product. Know who your advo-cates and influencers are, and give them the tools to tell your story. Don’t force them to talk about you, but rather make it easy to rave if they have a good experience. What she is looking for: to be recognized as a contributor with solid ideas, have her ideas listened to and heard, and incorporated into the product. The stages of the decision cycle may and will vary by product and industry. However, regardless of the industry and stage in the decision cycle, the social customer is always going to look for:

1. Speed of response

2. Speed of resolution

3. Honesty and transparency

4. Customization

5. Empathy, humanity and respect

To learn more about engaging with the social customer, check out the Attensity whitepaper “Engaging In A Social Media World.”

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Social Media: In-House or Outsourced?

Social media is hot, and sometimes it can feel like an arms race across businesses of all sizes to start using social media. There are many caveats and best practices to listening and engaging correctly; although it’s still a developing field and best practices are formed every day, there are certain spoken and unspoken rules and ap-proaches. With that said, it’s imperative that brands adopt a smart strategy and thoughtful execution of social media.

Because social media should be integrated with all groups and silos inside the organization, having an internal social media leader more than makes sense. However, what happens when you don’t have the right resources, or don’t have enough resources to do something right now?

There are many different approaches and goals of social media engagement: the slow and steady, daily engagement versus the more time-constrained campaign aimed at generating buzz. Outsourcing as a question is a little less complicated with social media campaigns, so let’s start with that: it’s gener-ally OK for the brand to outsource at least the creative execution of a social media campaign. A good partner that’s worth its salt will understand what works in your sector and can help jump-start your creative process. What-ever you do, please be judicious in selecting your external partner – do your research, listen to social media word-of-mouth and ask your network. After selecting one, establish visibility into what they do and make sure you are tracking, measuring and course-correcting constantly.

Chapter 6

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It’s important to differentiate between different types of daily engagement. First, there is the strategic, high-level inbound and outbound conversation about larger industry, company and product issues. This is the stuff along the lines of, “Why are you guys focusing on this market and this feature? Do you plan to offer a mobile app?” These types of conversations, along with proactive discussions with industry analysts, as well as potential customers and partners, are essentially your lifeline to the world and demonstrate your strategic thinking and thought leadership. We never recommend outsourcing it. No one knows your business strategy better than you do. The second type of daily engagement is the more tactical part, including more routine questions and customer support: “Hey, when is your webinar?” or “I lost my password; how do I reset it?” or “I get an error when I connect my database to your system.” Because these types of queries will most likely be numerous in volume, and not every organization is set up to handle them, a mix of outsourcing and automation could be appropriate. The big caveats are around the right execution, in hiring a contact center partner that can deliver a quality customer experience and is aligned with your goals. Outsourced contact centers are a great way to bridge capacity issues and ramp up quickly as a shorter-term solution. In the longer term, I would encourage you to bring your support at least partially in-house. Even if you are working with an outsourced partner, it is still imperative at least to have internal customer experience leadership in-house, and thought leadership initiatives should always be in-house. Here is why:

1 Culture: Only you know your business as well as you do. If your internal culture is strong, every employee should know what the com-pany stands for and what its values are. They will also know what your

organizational mandate is for customer support and how you interact with other people in the social sphere, as well as in traditional channels. It’s more difficult to act as a steward of a company if you don’t live inside this inter-nal culture, and if you aren’t privy to internal workings, things the company

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does well, and areas for improvement. There’s just a certain level of magic that’s there when you are on the inside. To be a true brand ambassador, you have to be internal.

2 Transparency: Just as you can get more visibility into what oth-ers are doing, others can get more visibility into your world when you are internal. Of course, an outsourced agency will share what they are

working on, and Social CRM tools allow everyone to work from the same customer record. However, the level of transparency is just not the same when you take things externally, no matter how you slice it.

3 Collaboration: Because social media is not a silo, and collabora-tion is key, an internal person is naturally going to have an easier time working with the right people in the organization. Access to the right

department heads is also key, and is simply easier when done internally. All organizations, especially larger ones, have their own cultural and com-munication norms, and even office politics, the observation of which is also inherently easier from the inside. We can all debate the importance of flat organizations and seamless collaboration, and while we are moving in that direction with Social CRM programs and social business and collabora-tion tools, we are far from the ideal. Also, internal cultural idiosyncrasies will always exist, no matter what tool or process you enact.

4 Support from the C-suite: Right along with culture (#1), it’s key, especially in large organizations, to have the support of the C-suite in order to implement social media initiatives on a meaningful scale. Of

course, many companies have started grassroots programs that blossomed into full-scale social media initiatives. Yes, that’s a great place to start — if you have social media savvy folks, they can certainly start providing support in social channels, blogging, creating content and developing a set of so-cial media guidelines. Once you start, you should be tracking your success, because you’ll need that data gain the executive support you need for a full-

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scale operation. It’s easier to start from the inside, get buy-in and grow than it is to get buy-in to outsource. There’s simply more transparency, and the C-suite will feel better that they know what’s going on. Many of their con-cerns and fears can be calmed with the knowledge that they have access to internal social media resources at all times. Once you pilot an internal program, get buy-in; you can then lobby to augment your efforts with out-sourced support (excluding customer experience leadership).

5 Building a future: Having internal social media and customer experience leadership also means that you can get others energized from the inside, and you can make plans to grow your social me-

dia team over time. You should plan to do this; however, as you consider growth plans, make sure that you are not creating a social media silo. Rath-er, you should make social a part of everything you do and not leave it up to your social team to be the only social voices for your company.

Finding the right social media leader is difficult and time-consuming. Of course, many companies are lucky to have social media leaders sprout up from the inside. But what do you do when you really need to bring in an external hire, for one reason or another? If you are in a situation where no one internally feels comfortable about his / her social media “chops,” or no one has the extra resources to dedicate to it, it’s OK to ask for external guidance. Recruit an outside resource that can help you create a social me-dia strategy, even if it’s just for the next three to six months. However, you should use them as guides -- social media “sherpas” of sorts -- while you also get someone internal to collaborate with the agency.

Have you ever had to make an in-house or outsourced decision? What are some success factors?

Image by Matt Hamm

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Your Untapped Goldmine — Your Employees

Here’s one resource you are probably not using to its 100 percent capacity: your employees. And, we don’t mean it in the “run-‘em-into-the-ground-work-around-the-clock” kind of way. What we mean is that you are prob-ably not leveraging their knowledge, their passion and enthusiasm, as well as their knowledge of the customer or their social capital well enough. How do we know that? Because very few companies actually do this, and most of the rest do not really appreci-ate that their employees have a value above and beyond what they were hired to do.

Think about it: with the advent of social media, your employees, as much as your customers, define your brand. If you even partially understand the impact that the social revolution has had on the way we do business and re-late to each other as individuals, you certainly know that you no longer have control of your brand – your customers do, and non-customers as well. This reality has hit home for most; however, what hasn’t hit home with the same force is the realization that your employees have just as much impact — if not more in some situations —on how your brand is perceived in social media. I’m not only referring to what employees are saying, but even more so in what employees are not saying. Are your employees your own brand advocates? Are your employees effective in the frontlines working with cus-tomers to build a better product?

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Chances are, even if you don’t have official social media practitioners in your organization, many of your employees are probably active in social media. Even if they aren’t, at some point, each employee that you hire will be from the Facebook generation. Why should you care? Because the low-hanging fruit of creating social media buzz is tapping into our employees’ voices to tell the story of your brand. But, you want the story to feel energized, right? That can only happen when your employees are energized and empowered.

Employees have always been the face of your company, social media or not; only now are they having a lot more touch points with the “outside world.” When people go to an event or a local bar, they meet employees that work at your company. If they are genuinely excited about what they do, it will show, and others will have a positive impression of your brand. However, the inverse is also true. If your employee is not happy about where she is, feels stifled and uncreative, the same energy will be transferred. With social media, each employee’s excitement (or lack thereof) has the opportunity to get amplified faster than you can say “amplify.” Excited employees share excitement with others; energy is contagious! So, em-power your employees to be these buzz agents and share what they do with others. Buzzing employees are just part of the equation, though. Are your employees empowered to work with your customers to get feedback and implement it into product decisions, and to work with customers to create a product that actually works for them? Are the employees ener-gized enough when providing customer service to turn a bad experience into a positive one? Are they empowered to resolve a customer issue on behalf of the company without going through five levels of approval?

Empowerment is one of those fuzzy concepts that makes some roll their eyes. What in the world is empowerment, and how do I know when I see it? We can’t tell you what it means to you, but here’s what it means to us: When someone is empowered, his interests become most closely aligned with the objectives of the whole (company, country); the empowered person can take actions in the best interests of the company, taking pride in the work he does because he feels like he can affect change. Most importantly, how do you cultivate empowerment in your employees? Here are some

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quick “gimmes” that are common sense; however, keep in mind that common sense is anything but common:

1. As Maslow posits in his famous “Hierarchy of Needs,” after you take care of food and shelter, people pursue self-actualization. By giving your employees interesting work that challenges and leverages their strengths and interests, you can feed this need.

2. No red tape! Social media moves at the speed of light – you blink, and your “hot” news is yesterday’s news. Unlike yesterday’s para-digm, the social business must work faster to keep up with the social customer. Employees rarely (if ever) have the ability to wait for red tape to lift and for bureaucracies to work through their cycles in order to make a move.

3. In order to act in #2, there must be trust between the company and the employee. An empowered employee has been given the mandate to act, because there’s inherent trust in his ability to do the right thing. This right thing can take many forms: representing the company accurately on a social network, respecting other salespeo-ple’s territories, going above and beyond the call of duty and, in every way, doing the right thing for clients, partners and the ecosystem.

4. An empowered employee takes risks. Because business moves so fast, constant experimentation is necessary to stay on the cutting edge. Of course, you will do things that are tried-and-true; however, there must be room for experimentation. Without experimentation, there’s no innovation. Without innovation, you will eventually be outperformed and out-innovated by your competitors. However, you shouldn’t take risks for the sake of taking risks — make sure you have a solid business reason, and your risks are calculated.

5. Related to #4, you need to be OK with failing fast, and learn to be good at it. Yes, failing fast and well -- you fail well when you learn something and become better -- is a skill like any other. When you fail, you need to examine why it didn’t work, share your learnings, and move on to something bigger and better, all the while remember-ing not to make the same mistakes. Think of it this way: the faster you fail, the faster you can succeed with something else.

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6. For all of the above, you need a flatterorganizationandreportingstructure. Social media and internal collaboration tools are bringing employees of all ranks closer together and onto the same page. The flatter the organization, the more buy-in people have, and typically the amount of red tape is reduced. Michael Fauscette of IDC mentions this in his “Social Employee Manifesto” by saying that employees need mentors, not bosses.

7. Related to #6, the organization should be structured (or rather un-structured) fluidly, to encourage project-based collaboration and ability to co-work and collaborate with other employees, based on skill sets, with the goal of solving a particular business problem.

8. With things moving so fast, your skills need to remain on the cutting edge. This is why winning organizations that empower their employees recognize the need for personal and professional development.

9. In the age of social media, as personal and professional brands blend and merge, it’s important that, while growing your corporate brand, your employees are also able to build their personal brands.

10. Check in more often than during the yearly review. For many, it’s the only time that each employee sits down with his manager to evaluate performance and career progression versus expectations. However, it’s important to ensure that everyone is on the same page, as well as to have a consistent, open and honest conversa-tion about the employee’s level of satisfaction. Do not wait until the employee leaves and takes his social capital with him to find out that something isn’t working.

As you explore how to socialize your business and empower your employees, here’s another great resource. During the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston Bevin Hernandez gave a keynote speech about employee engagement with a purpose. She astutely developed the framework of employee engagement styles across four quadrants defined by two axes: Purpose and Engagement. Those with both high purpose and high engagement – those are your social media rock stars. Those with high purpose and low engagement prefer to work on their own, but could use some encouragement for sharing their work in social channels and with other employees. Those with high engagement

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and low purpose – the social butterflies – already use social channels, but they could use a little more direction. Low engagement and low purpose employees are a bit tougher to move to one of the other quadrants, but it could be done — otherwise, it’s probably not a great fit. This is a worthwhile exercise for understanding how you can mentor and coach your employees to a purpose-driven, social media rock stardom.

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A Voice of the Customer Strategy – Getting Started

“A t the core of Social CRM success must be, not the tools, but

the organizational readiness to act. Both through executives’

readiness to listen and commitment to act combined with design

and delivery of superior, differentiating experiences.”

— Lior Arussy, Customer Experience Management Expert

Because traditional CRM implementa-tion became more about tools than strategy, many implementations failed. If you focus on the tool without under-standing what you want the tool to do, what your organizational processes and data flows look like, and how the platform can support it, your platform will become shelfware before you can even say “shelfware.”

While there are plenty of tools available to help you nurture your relationship with your new, empowered customer, none of this will ever work until you

sit down and figure out what kind of customer experience you want to offer. Buying a tool and then hoping that it will take care of your strategy is a Band-Aid– a short-term non-solution for the business problem. Are you looking for more awareness, or to provide better and faster customer service? Where do you want to listen (i.e., where are your customers and future customers)? How will traditional customer support coexist with social media support? Do you have adequate resources or do you need to hire? Is the company culture

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ready for a transparent and honest conversation with the social customer? Are employees empowered to act as company evangelists? How will you create customer advocacy through your social media engagement? What is the role of social media as it supports your overarching business objectives? What are these business objectives? These are some tough questions that each business needs to ask itself, and there’s no shortcut. Jumping onto Twitter, or the newest monitoring platform, or the next shiny object, is not going to get you any closer to success.

As Lior points out, most of Social CRM success or failure is tied to the organizational readiness to act. Alignment, executive buy-in and establish-ment of the right processes and, even more importantly, the right culture, is key. When you take care of the culture, education and internal alignment, you should sit down and figure out what you do now, how information flows, how activity is tracked, and how social media is going to fit into the process. How will you support these processes with human resources? What does the workflow look like? How do you measure success? Please think through all of this first, and create your own data flow diagram. Because there are as many Social CRM implementations as there are companies, you should never rely on a pre-created stack diagram. You need to do the hard work of creating your own. Then you are ready to start using a platform like Attensity for engaging, measuring and doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

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A Framework for Your VOC Strategy – LARA

LARA stands for Listen, Analyze, Relate, and Act. It is a methodology that outlines a process by which organizations can take user-generated content (UGC), whether generated by consumers talking in web forums, on micro-blogging sites like Twitter and social networks like Facebook, or in feedback surveys, emails, documents, research, etc., and using it as a business asset in a business process.

Listen: To “listen” is actually a process in itself that encompasses both the capability to listen to the open web (forums, blogs, tweets, you name it) and the capability to seamlessly access enterprise information (CRM notes, documents, emails, etc). It takes a listening post, deep federated search capabilities, scraping and enterprise class data integration, and a strategy to determine who and what you want to listen to!

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Analyze: This is the hard part. How can you take all of this mass of unstructured data and make sense of it? This is where the “secret sauce” of text analytics comes in to play. Look for solutions that include keyword, statistical and natural language approaches, that will allow you to essen-tially tag or barcode every word and the relationships among words, making it data that can be accessed, searched, routed, counted, analyzed, charted, reported on and even reused. Keep in mind that, in addition to technical capabilities, it has to be easy to use, so that you business users can focus on the insights, not the technology. It should have an engine that doesn’t require the user to define keywords or terms that they want their system to look for or include in a rule base. Rather, it should automatically identify terms (“facts,” people, places, things, etc.) and their relationships with other terms or combinations of terms – making it easy to use, maintain and also more accurate, so you can rely on the insights as actionable.

Relate: OK, so now that you have found the insights and can analyze the unstructured data, the real value comes when you can connect those insights to your “structured” data: your customers (which customer segment is com-plaining about your product most?); your products (which product is having the issue?); your parts (is there a problem with a specific part manufactured by a specific partner?); your locations (is the customer that is tweeting about wanting a sandwich near your nearest lunch store?); and so on. Now you can ask questions of your data, and get deep, actionable insights.

Act: Here is where it gets exciting, and your business strategy and rules are critical. What do you do with the new customer insight you’ve obtained? How do you leverage the problem resolution content created by a customer that you just identified? How do you connect with a customer who is uncov-ering issues that are important to your business or who is asking for help? How do you route the insights to the right people? And, how do you engage with customers, partners and influencers, once you understand what they are saying? You understand it; now you’ve got to act.