A weblog by Christopher Carfi, since 2004.
Wendell Berry – The Real Work
It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
(via Jerry Michalski)
Some good data and info from the folks over at CRM Magazine on how brands are starting to integrate social customer support workflows into their processes. Here’s the link: Most Customer Service Tweets Go Unanswered
The problem is that a majority of companies are still letting these opportunities fall on the floor.
In total, the study involved 1,125 tweets delivered between April 1 and May 15 to the following retailers: Amazon.com, Zappos.com, Staples, Dell, Office Depot, Wal-Mart Stores, Sears Holdings, QVC, Office Max, Best Buy, Newegg, Sony, Costco Wholesale, Macy’s, Victoria’s Secret Direct, Hewlett-Packard, J.C. Penney, L.L. Bean, Target, Systemax (TigerDirect.com), Gap, Williams-Sonoma, HSN, Overstock.com, and Toys ‘R’ Us.
All told, among the top 25 retailers, an average of only 44 percent of customer tweets were answered at all.
However, a number of companies are starting to get it. On the good side, the article does note:
Of all those companies, Zappos and L.L. Bean—replied to every single tweet within 24 hours. Rounding out the top five most reliable Twitter performers were Overstock.com (replying to 98 percent of all tweets within 24 hours), Dell (98 percent), and Best Buy (89 percent).
There are some great conversations happening over at the Advanced Social Media Strategies for PR, Marketing and Corporate Communications event at Cisco today. In particular, wanted to give a shout out to our CEO Sean O’Driscoll, who is presenting today on the topic of Turning Fans into Advocates. Check out Sean’s deck, embedded below.
This one should be a lot of fun. Sean O’Driscoll will be presenting with the folks over at Badgeville on the topic of engagement and gameification in a webinar on April 25th at 10:30 PT. (Register here.) The quick agenda:
Sean O’Driscoll, our fearless leader at Ant’s Eye View, is keynoting an event next Monday here in the Bay Area. Here’s the description:
“Becoming a fully engaged enterprise in today’s social world isn’t about creating a “social media strategy.” It is a journey defined by stages of operational maturity, milestones, and ultimately, a destination. The successful journey requires practitioner experience, pragmatism – and perseverance. But the payoff is immense. The fully engaged enterprise discovers on this journey that customers again trust them, recommend them, and equip them with new insights. Connected and impassioned employees in the fully engaged enterprise lead and foster the online conversation and attract the industry’s best talent. Companies willing to embark on this transformative journey can, and will, re-emerge as powerful connected brands.”
The event will be at EMC’s campus in Santa Clara. Hope to see you there! Details are here:
The Social Journey 2831 Mission College Blvd Santa Clara, CA, 95051
April 23, 2012 5:30-8:00 PST
Katniss Everpeep volunteers as tribute.
Katniss Everpeep startles the judges.
Katniss Everpeep cuts down a Tracker Jacker nest.
Katniss Everpeep destroys the supply pile.
Katniss Everpeep avenges Rue.
Katniss Everpeep buries Rue in flowers.
Katniss Everpeep and Peepa are crowned victorious.
A big thanks to Jennifer Cobb for the link to this New York Times article entitled “Swatting Down Startups That Help Consumers.” The gist is that there are a raft of startups that act on the behalf of customers in interacting with big brands (These kinds of services can be thought of as “fourth party” services.) Some examples:
A number of brands (American, Soutthwest, Hertz, etc.) have acted in ways to restrict the ability for customers to use these services to attempt to improve their travel experience.
The linked article above is worth a read.
image: NYTimes
The concept of “big data” is, ultimately, going to hit a brick wall. Here’s why.
For a number years now, the concept of being able to collect, mine and process massive data sets that predict customer behavior has been a modern day holy grail. However, many organizations struggle to develop customer insights because they primarily focus on understanding markets rather than individuals. Overall, at least 80 percent of CMOs rely on traditional sources of information, such as market research and competitive benchmarking, to make strategic decisions.
With that context, here are a few things to think about:
There is a flip side to this. Think of it as “small data.” In contrast to huge, correlated data sets of petabytes, exabytes and zettabytes of data, instead individuals will have their own personal data stores. (That personal data store link is a must-read from the Financial Times.) Here’s an example. Jerry Michalski has kept his information in a system called The Brain for over fifteen years. Here’s a video of Jerry speaking at the Personal Digital Archiving conference on his experience of capturing over 150,000 pieces of information over the past decade and a half. (Think about that for a second. There’s a conference for “personal digital archiving.”)
Understanding that this sea change is coming is going to be implicit in the future success of business. As such, here’s something you can do right now.
Go to http://www.networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp. It shows you the advertising cookies that are being tracked in your browser. Realize that even though many of us wear our “business” hats for a good majority of our waking hours, we’re all still individuals as well. We are all customers. As such, we are all responsible for our own information.
As these issues become more widely understood, more individuals will be tracking their own information. Perhaps it won’t be to the level that Jerry has done it in the video above, but it will be happening. This means that we, while wearing our business hats, will need to be developing real relationships with our customers. We need to listen to what they are saying, what they are asking for, and working collaboratively with them in order to help them fulfill their needs. In the best cases, we’ll have built up levels of trust with our customers and will have been given the explicit permission to access our customers’ personal data stores. In doing so, we’ll be able to actually take the guesswork out of the equation that was noted so clearly above in the Facebook example and will, instead, be able to connect directly with our customers’ intentions and deliver value on their terms.
Sponsored post disclosure: This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet
Trending worldwide on Twitter right now: “Two ways to fix customer loyalty programs.”
The lede:
“Consumers aren’t as loyal to loyalty programs as they used to be.
Since 2008, the number of consumers who feel that such initiatives don’t offer any real value jumped by 50%,according to a study by Forrester Research. The same study also found that almost one-third of consumers say that loyalty programs don’t influence their purchase — that’s up from 22% in 2008.
Why the dissatisfaction? Let’s call it the Groupon factor. Since 2008, there have been a flood of daily dealmerchants, like Groupon and LivingSocial, that have filled customers inboxes with irrelevant offers. (Groupon itself has recently employed a Pandora-like “thumbs up, thumbs down” rating system to tackle this problem, which is best illustrated by the example of middle-aged men getting offers for bikini waxes.)”
The answers they propose are crap, however. The answer is not “better targeting” of customers. The answer is not “mobile payments.”
The answer is making the customer a full participant in the process. Start here.
This is the first time I’ve seen this. AdWeek is redacting their content until you click and “engage” with one of their ad units. This is a perfect example of the concept of “bad attention” that I’ve written about previously. Of course, I’m sure the metrics they are tracking around engagement are through the roof. I’m also sure they are not taking into account the destruction of goodwill caused by using tactics like this. Check out the video below to see how annoying this is.
