The challenge of wrangling 178 cats

Last week, we talked about how marketing and customer service need to be able to work more effectively together to create a harmonized brand experience and improve brand equity with their customers.

But how can these two groups accomplish this? What are the techniques and tools that marketing and customer service groups can use to respond more quickly and team together to deliver a quality customer experience?

One way is to solve the problem technologically, through a marketing/customer service system that ties together both outbound (push) campaigns and inbound (reactive) campaigns.

However, when one considers that the average large organization has 178 different social media accounts, trying to create a solution that can help users coordinate and provide insight into all of these activities, let alone manage interactions in traditional channels like phone and email, can be incredibly daunting.

With the current state of technology, choosing one tool to rule them all can often be a difficult exercise for a company. Usually one group "loses" in the choice - either the marketing group, which often wants sophisticated publishing capabilities and extensive audience reporting, or the customer service group, which needs robust workflows, agent performance reporting, and often cross-channel capabilities. 

In addition, even sub-groups can often lose. For example, one application might be good for publishing to Facebook, one for customer service response on Twitter, and another for managing community sites.

This is why we are starting to see increased activity on both the partnership and M&A front. 
For example, the latest partnership between social media management companies HootSuite (which started out more on the marketing/publishing side) and Attensity (which started out more on the customer service side), was driven by a customer who wanted to be able to use both solutions in-house and yet have a unified communication between the two.

Meanwhile, Salesforce, a powerhouse in CRM, purchased both Radian6 (social media monitoring and light engagement) and Buddy Media (experts at Facebook publishing). And Lithium, a leader in community site management, purchased Social Dynamx (social media response).

There are a host of other social media management applications (Adobe, Sprinklr, Conversocial, Sprout, etc) that started out on one side or the other and are now trying to "reach across the aisle" to address the needs of the "other" constituency.

All this can make it a real challenge for organizations to settle on a single solution, and I would expect a good deal of "solution churn" to still occur in the next 12-18 months as companies implement a solution, discover that it doesn't work in some areas, and look to pivot to something else. Or they might find a solution that works, only to find that the provider of that solution is being purchased by a larger company that then slows innovation down, or even shuts down the solution entirely.

So in short, there is as of yet no technological "magic bullet" on the engagement front. Hope is on the horizon, but in the meantime, the simplest solution may simply be to make sure that marketing and customer service continue to talk to each other about the challenges, either informally or by creating a single contact point via a role like the Chief Customer Officer or Chief Digital Officer.

In my next blog post, we'll discuss some Customer Experience Management reporting solutions that try to solve these problems at a data collection level, and outline the pros and cons of some of them.


 

Customer Service is the New Marketing

I threatened on Twitter last week that I'd start blogging again, and so I have! I did, however, refrain from adding posts to my 2008 blog, which was an amusing blast from the past (PowerSet? Mahalo?), but didn't quite feel relevant. So we're starting fresh!

I was thinking today about brand equity and how companies can better build it. 

Now when most people think of brand equity, they think it's the purview of the marketing department.

But when you think of brands like Zappos, Kimpton Hotels, or United Airlines, what comes to mind? Their advertising?

For most people the answer is no. 

They think of customer service.

Whether for good or ill, one interaction can make or break a customer's relationship with that company. I know many people who will "never fly United again" or, conversely, who are rabid fans of Kimpton. 

I'm pretty sure the people who will never fly United don't feel that way because they don't particularly like Gershwin's music. 

It's because they had a bad experience, or they had a friend who had a bad experience. 

And now that social media makes so many interactions public, it's even more important for companies to respond well to their customers' issues.

Dimensional Research reports:

• 42% of consumers purchased more frequently from a business after a good customer service experience.
• 52% stopped dealing with a business after a bad experience.
• 95% of the people surveyed admit that they have told someone about a negative customer service experience. 
• 54% of those people who have shared their negative experience have, at least on one occasion, told a minimum of five people.

In short, customer service is the new marketing. 
 
And a good experience isn't just about responding well... it's also about responding quickly.

In a study by The Social Habit (cited by Sprout Social), 32% of people contacting a company via social channels expect a response within 30 minutes. And only slightly less -- 24% -- expect a reply within 30 minutes regardless of when the contact was made — meaning the same response time is expected at night and on the weekends as during normal business hours.
 
The average response time for a company? It's a bit longer -- 4.2 hours, according to a recent study by Simply Measured.

Clearly there is some room for improvement here.

In my next blog post, we'll discuss various techniques and tools that marketing and customer service groups can use to respond more quickly and team together to deliver a quality customer experience.