Is Social Media Key to Customer Experience?

 Is customer experience the overriding strategic marketing concept in the age of social media? It’s a chaotic marketing environment made up of customers with all kinds of needs and usage habits, multiple screens, myriad channels of communication, and exploding content, both marketer-generated and user-generated. The concept of customer experience links all of these together into a unified system that results in a satisfied customer, so I argue that it should provide ultimate guidance for marketers.

What is a definition of customer experience that marketers can use as a guide? There are a lot of formal definitions, but I like what GM VP Alicia Boler-Davis said last year. She explained that GM has expanded its definition:

to include what happens before, during, and after the sale – instead of just what happens in the dealership.
“We’re no longer thinking about a vehicle sale as a transaction or a singular event. . . We’re thinking about it as part of a relationship between the customer, the dealer, and GM.
“Put another way, the customer experience begins long before our products make it to the dealer showroom.  It begins with our very decision to build a vehicle… and involves every customer touch point after that.  It involves the entire enterprise.”

Ok, that’s not a new concept; relationship marketers have been preaching it for years. But it is incredibly challenging in the face of today’s myriad—and growing--number of customer touchpoints. Social media marketers know well that the content in many of the social touchpoints is controlled by customers, not by marketers, and that complicates the situation.

The PWC graphic illustrates just how hard it is. Their Digital IQ survey revealed that 66% of US online adults use social media; 59% of respondent companies have provided mobile tools for their employees, but only 37% (30% of top performers) make use of external social media communities. Businesses are far behind their customers in the use of social media, which isn’t exactly news!

Here’s a Forrester graph that makes the role of social media clear—and more than a little scary! Above the dotted line in this customer experience journey map the Forrester team shows many customer touchpoints—you can think about what they are for your business. Some touchpoints make the customer happy, others do not. Already the customer experience is not “seamlessly satisfying”—the marketer’s ultimate goal. The unhappy customer doesn’t leave it here, as so often happens these days. She tweets out her frustration.

 

Below the dotted line we see that the only internal process visible to this customer is social media! And one can intuit that the social media team does not have the skills, or even more likely, the organizational power to tweet back in a manner that satisfies the customer’s complaint. The customer’s problem has not been resolved by the channel she chose to use—social media.

What does it take to develop a customer experience strategy that results in seamless satisfaction? A Forrester blog post lists six necessary elements:

Strategy. Forrester says:

The strategy discipline is your game plan. It's a set of practices for crafting a customer experience strategy, aligning it with the company's overall strategy and brand attributes, and then sharing that strategy with employees to guide decision-making and prioritization across the organization.  . .The customer experience strategy defines the intended experience.

Customer Understanding. Need we say more? Understanding the customer is the marketer’s basic job description. To what extent are your customers using social and mobile media? How is this affecting their search behavior, their shopping behavior and their purchasing?

Design. Whether it’s a wonderful product or whether it’s a website that not only looks pretty but works well, good design is important in an age that seems increasingly visual. Think again about the statement from GM, above.

Measurement. Don’t all digital marketers preach the importance of measurement? I still like the old quality management phrase, “what gets measured gets managed.”

Governance. Business policies must focus on customer satisfaction and lead to the internal policies that create it. Creating good customer experience is a job for all employees at all times!

Culture. Good governance leads to a culture of openness and transparency that creates an environment in which customer centricity can flourish. That just happens to be the same type of culture that encourages successful use of social media.

So I repeat my initial argument: customer experience strategy should be the cornerstone of marketing strategy. These 6 elements, however, make it clear that the organization as a whole is the player in customer experience with social media able to play a key customer-facing role. So marketing needs support from the top levels of management if it is to execute a meaningful customer experience strategy.

The Migration to Mobile III--All Shopping Can Be Local

It used to be a sign that you were cool with current technology; you did research on your computer before heading to retail stores to shop. That’s no longer true. Now shoppers can use their smartphones or tablets to get the information they are looking for right at the POP--and maybe a coupon to boot! That is a powerful concept and it is driving profound changes that go all the way down to the individual retail location.

It doesn’t start when the shopper nears the store or walks in the door, though. It starts by building a meaningful SoLoMo strategy. One interpretation of the mobile shopping funnel captures the essence.

http://www.brafton.com/news/smx-advanced-buzz-social-local-mobile-marketing-leads-to-sales-800526890

Social marketing helps build—or maybe for the small local retailer builds all by itself— awareness and a positive brand image. Retailers use tactics ranging from paid advertising to instore promotions and events to lure followers to their social platforms. Mobile marketing—whether paid ads or content marketing—reaches people when they are actively researching a purchase or provides a triggering cue by suggesting a reason to purchase. Local marketing reaches them at the point of purchase, giving them compelling reasons to buy at that moment.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/25/mobile-shopping-apps/

Adding another dimension to that argument is data about the role of various types of shopping apps during the 2012 holiday season. The huge growth is seen in retailer apps and the lowest growth in the daily deals apps, whose difficulties have been much in the news. I wrote about the Macy’s shopping app during the holidays. The mapping application still seems to be available only for the Herald Square store but deals, wish lists and other retail services are going strong. At the moment they are offering me a 20% off promo code, which might be useful, and a bridal registry, which definitely is not! My initial reaction was “so much for personalization,” but how do they find out unless they ask?

The data also highlights another important mobile issue. Price comparison apps also experienced explosive growth. Showrooming—checking prices in stores then buying more cheaply online—seems to be ongoing.

But there’s good reason for local retailers not to hit the panic button. The trend can be their friend! No less a retailer than Walmart is encouraging people to use their phones in stores. Wired explains it well:

Walmart’s stores are “geo-fenced,” which means the location-aware app enters “store mode” when you walk through the door. Once in store mode, you have access to an interactive version of the weekly on-sale circular for that store. You can see what’s new in the store. You can scan bar codes with the phone’s camera for prices and keep a running list of everything you’re buying so you’ll know the total cost when you get to the register.

How can retailers without Walmart-level resources turn showrooming to their advantage? The advice from the Retail Customer Experience site is:

1. Embrace omnichannel.
2. Bring the best of online shopping into the store.
3. Implement innovative in-store technologies.
4. Empower in-store personnel.
 
Putting it all together they say:

Innovative in-store technologies can help shoppers engage with brands and create a great, enjoyable shopping experience that leads them to both return to the store and to act as brand ambassadors through social media, leading to more visits from their peers.

Very interesting—it all comes full circle. Use both the human touch of your store employees and the power of technology to give your customers a great shopping experience and they will share it with their friends on social media. Like all good advice, it’s easier said than done, but the guidelines are there!

Internal Social Media Use by CEOs Builds Emotional Capital

Originally published October 25, 2012
How can CEOs and CMOs manage organizations that have a strategic commitment to social media marketing if they know nothing about it? I’ve often repeated that C-level executives need a user-level familiarity with social media even if they are not intensive users. Otherwise, how do they know whether the organization is using social media wisely and well?


A recent blog post by HBR suggests that half of CEOs are “social media challenged” and 35% of those are actively fearful of social media. In this case, lack of familiarity breeds contempt. Few users of social media fail to understand its communications reach and power.

SMR published an article in September that suggests an avenue for the social media challenged executive to engage in a way that is useful and perhaps less intimidating than engaging with customers right off the bat. All CEOs have things they are trying to accomplish within their organizations and most spend a lot of time communicating that to groups of employees. Why not use social media to communicate their messages more widely and to engage workers.

The article by Huy and Shipilov of Insead found that internal social media use could build positive emotional capital among employees. Interestingly, they also found that an expensive IT buildout of internal social infrastructure worked less well than an inexpensive implementation at Tupperware clearly aimed at creating positive attitudes among a far-flung workforce. Their 4 pillars of emotional capital are:
1. Authenticity
2. Pride
3. Attachment
4. Fun.
Read a summary and posts about other research on internal SM on Shipilov’s blog.

Each company CEO can think about how to express the 4 issues in ways that are relevant to the organization, its issues, and its future. A study reported on the Workforce blog of Crain Communications reports several goal-directed programs that have achieved success. Southwest Airlines, for example, encouraged employees to establish Facebook pages at each airport, which turned out to be useful for timely updates of local conditions. They have a corporate intranet which has employee profiles, photos and comments on issues that impact Southwest. “It is interesting how it has reinforced our culture and driven interaction for our employees,” (Katie: Director for Communications) Coldwell says. If an organization doesn’t already have a culture of open communication, one will have to be built and social media is ideal for that purpose. Huy and Shipilov call it “building community first.”

Be warned of several issues, however:
• If employees see lack of authenticity, the initiative is DOA. That ranges from having an assistant write the CEO messages to taking negative comments off the network.
• Technology is not the issue, corporate goals and objectives are. However, there are platforms designed for internal use that may work better than the free ones we use as consumers and marketers.
• It is just as important to listen to employees, to implement good ideas, and to let them know the results as it is to communicate straightforwardly with customers.
• If top executives can poke a bit of fun at themselves in the process, it does wonders for the culture.

Here’s a good summary of the 10 major mistakes made with corporate social networks. Follow the links and read the experiences of corporations, small businesses, government organizations and non-profits and for yourself.  All suggest that the work of the organization can be supported and extended by judicious use of social media. How long will it be until the best employees expect that kind of corporate engagement? Do the elusive Millennials expect it now?
For me, there’s another take-away. This is the kind of employee interaction CEOs should crave–should already be doing to the extent they can. An internal social initiative extends both reach and frequency. It allows the CEO to communicate vision and direction as well as inform about daily issues. It does so in a familiar environment—the business itself. It has potential to be an excellent training ground for the social media challenged executive, even though it takes some time and maybe some attitude adjustment.
More organizations should design their own internal social media initiative and use it to build positive emotional capital. Do you have experiences to add?