Sensei Blogs

Customer Experience Cannot be Automated

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

I’m a bit disturbed by the fact that most customer experience (CX) discussions I’ve had lately with marketers have been about marketing automation and technology. Software firms pitching clients at trade shows, on webinars or at conferences all seem to be leading with the promise that their technology will generate a greater customer experience through automated engagements tracked back to the individual user profile.

I hope the clients of these software firms understand the phrase: Caveat Emptor / Buyer Beware. Customer experience is not downloadable, it does not come out of a box and it’s not about automation. In fact, great customer experience is not a technology-driven principle at all.

So what is Customer Experience?

It's a business discipline; customer experience is something you do, not something you install.
It's corporate culture; customer experience is something you inherently think and believe, not something you schedule.

Customers are more informed, sophisticated and social, which only serves to increase the pressure on businesses to better engage and satisfy. Customers have gained a lot of control over the success of the brands they love and hate and so they’re able to demand an improved customer experience. More automation is the opposite of what is being demanded.

A Deloitte and Forbes survey of 192 U.S. executives proves that this phenomena has become a major risk for the corporation. "Social media wasn't even on the radar a few years ago, and we're now seeing it ranked among the top sources of risk, on the same level as financial risk," Henry Ristuccia, a partner in Deloitte & Touche LLP. The power of the consumer voice, as amplified via social streams is forcing businesses to improve the customer experience or risk alienating current and prospective customers who are actively seeking each other out in these channels.

More High Touch, Less High Tech

Is your customer experiencing your brand solely through technologically-based communications such as social media, email, or automated answering machines? Are campaign decisions being directed by marketing software automation? There is definitely a role for software in the Customer Experience Management (CXM) process, but it must be a supporting player, not the director. CXM software must be chosen to augment real customer experience strategies, not have it dictated by the software’s pre-configured workflow.

When architecting the experience, the only universal “best practice” in customer experience design is to consider the customer’s satisfaction with the product or engagement as THE top priority and benchmark. And since every business and customer base is different – not to mention different customer segments within that base – there is no one technology that can effectively create the customer experience for your brand. In fact, there are an infinite number of outside influences on your customers including social channels, technologies, competition and other market forces, which add greater importance to human intuition and human touch.

It’s time your business stop looking to social media managers to bolster the engagement you have with customers and look to customer experience professionals that will infuse the discipline and culture across all customer touch points with your brand.

Has customer experience become overly automated? Are we building relationships on thin and technology-based connections today? Join the debate below!

Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

Marketers, What Your CEO REALLY Thinks Of You

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

You’ve earned hundreds of thousands of dollars in earned media. You’ve built your Facebook fans to 10,000 in 6 months. You’ve increased the lead funnel by 15% over last year. You’re the golden child of the organization; you’ve played squash with the CEO and received the keys to the executive washroom.

All is right with the world.

Until the company’s fortunes or the economy in general takes a downturn and the marketing budget is the first to get cut and the first department to see layoffs. Your executive washroom keys are taken back; you’re shocked that you once again have to “go” with the rest of the nobodies in the organization. You bide your time and do more of the same with less. Then (Oh Happy Day!) the economy rebounds and the marketing budget is the first to reap the rewards of the loosened purse strings.

Anyone in the marketing industry for more than 10 years, be they a corporate marketing or agency professional, has experienced this phenomenon at least once. When the business or the economy suffers, just as marketing is needed the most, CEOs stop investing in it. When the company’s fiscal outlook swings “to the black” and everyone is optimistic, budgets return to normal.

To my fellow marketers, what does this universal truth say about what CEOs really think of marketing or the value they place on what you do? I’ll tell you: it says they see you a marketer, not revenue generator. Your department is a cost, not a profit center.

Do you still think that branding, brand awareness and lead generation are the goals of marketing?

“What is the value of a mother’s hug?”

AAARRRGG! A week does not go by that I don’t bang my head on my desk in frustration with the articles, presentations and social commentary I see marketers spewing about the value and importance of branding and engagement, especially in the discipline of social media.

Of course brand awareness – the first stage in the customer lifecycle – is important; without it, marketers and sales teams cannot nurture the client towards strong purchase consideration. Of course social media is important; without it, we cannot identify the opportunities and obstacles in the way of consumers’ decision-making processes. Of course content marketing is important; without it, we’re not seeding social proof into the newly-social search engines. All of these go-to strategies and tactics marketers are so found of promoting these days are important, but without a calculation that demonstrates how they’re turning the marketing department from a cost-center to a profit-center, marketers will forever be the fair-weather friend of the CEO and the board of directors.

So, are you a marketer or a profit generator?

Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

Image Credit: George Marks

#bizforum Recap - Perspectives on the New Role Customer Service

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 00:00:00 GMT

This week's #bizforum debate had the business community challenging each other on the morphing role of customer service in the social economy. Below is a slideshow sharing just some of the key arguments and insights from the debate along with some of my own observations.

Read the framing post here: Customer Service has become the defining Success Strategy for Business

Join the debate! Share your reactions or comments to the arguements made in the comments section below.

Sam Fiorella - Sensei
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

#CustServ Has Become the Defining Success Strategy for Business

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Has customer service emerged from the call centers and basements of businesses to become the defining business strategy for success? Well, if you’re to believe the results in the newly released 2012 American Express® Global Customer Service Barometer, you’d certainly lean that way.

The conclusions drawn from this report suggest that social media has elevated this business function from a supporting player to a business driver. More specifically, it’s the growing influence of consumers adopting social media that has elevated them to such prominence in the corporate hierarchy.

Here are some of the facts in report that illustrate how customer service can make or break your business based on the increasing power of the customer voice through social (mobile, social networking, blogs, etc.) channels:

- Customers say they’d spend 21% more with companies who deliver great service, compared to 13% on average.

- More than eight in ten consumers have bailed on a purchase because of a poor service experience compared to 55% overall.

- On average social media users will tell 42 people about their good experiences, compared to 15 people overall.

Wrap up the benefits of just those three statistics and you you’ve successfully delivered an effective customer retention program, a customer acquisition strategy, a WOM/awareness campaign and a created a Public Relations team. You’ve delivered a greater sales and profit metric through social media than, likely, what the sales, marketing and PR teams combined have been able to demonstrate.

Lesson learned: today, great service has a greater exponential impact on your business’ bottom line than other business functions. Poor service has that exponential impact but in the opposite direction. The key difference today is the "exponential factor", which makes it a compelling case for the re-channeling of budgets and strategic focus on the corporation’s customer service department.

Join the conversation:

Has the customer service function become the more important strategy to a business’ success? Share your arguments for or against below.

Join the live #bizforum debate between 8 and 9 PM Eastern tonight where we’ll challenge the premise that Customer Service is the defining indicator of success. Join us by following #bizforum in your Twitter steam or by following www.tweetchat.com/room/bizforum.

Sam Fiorella – Sensei
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

Social Scoring, Misdirection and HR Recruiting

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Sun, 03 Jun 2012 00:00:00 GMT

You’re not active on Facebook? You may not be qualified to work as an Engineer.

Not Tweeting? Sorry, you can’t be hired in the Travel & Tourism industry.

No Pinterest board? You’re future as a Chef just hit a major roadblock.

To rational people such statements will seem ridiculous but in reality they’re not far from becoming factual accounts of real life job seekers if the alarming social influence measurement trend is not curbed quickly.

Gauging a person’s influence is nothing new in the marketing world and recently the socialverse has been turned on its ear with the hullabaloo over pseudo influence measurement tools such as Peerindex, Klout and Kred. Sadly, this trend is making its way into other areas of business including Human Resources. New tools such as Reppify, Identified and BranchOut are targeting HR executives with the promise of providing accurate insights into the personality and even qualifications of potential hires based on one’s social interactions.

Yes, you read that right. Analytics software is predicting your qualifications for any job type based on your social conversations. Reppify, for example is a new service that provides recruiters and HR teams an online dashboard that pulls data from LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and even GitHub profiles. By scanning the job candidate’s resume and social connections it generates a “job fit score” for “reputation,” “influence,” “footprint,” and “overall candidacy .

To their credit, unlike flawed influence measurement tools like Klout.com, Reppify allows hiring managers to set some parameters with which to score candidates. However, the fact remains that your personal social engagements are being scanned to determine your fitness for a job that most likely has nothing to do with social engagement, like a network engineer or a quality assurance analyst.

There’s Reality and then there’s Reality.

Reppify representatives argue that their service, unlike Klout or PeerIndex, asks permission before it creates a score; however, that’s only half true. Reppify uses the email address and resume data you provide to a potential employer to match it with the public data it gathers from Google searches as well information from social network that don’t require a “friend-level connection”; in other words anything you post publicly on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Etc. So a score based on limited resources establishes an initial impression and metric about your job candidacy for HR managers who subscribe to the service.

Reppify notifies you that a potential employer generated this initial score and offers you the option to grant it access to your private social network connections and data so it may augment the initial score. If you accept, you’re granting a third party (and a potential employer) access to information you purposely didn’t share publicly. If you don’t accept, you’re essentially creating another impression of yourself. What do you have to hide? Without sharing that additional information with the potential employer using Reppify, you’re job application is labelled with a limited score.

Some, like the CEO of Reppify argue that there’s no need to worry about such scores since they are only one tool in a list of apps and measurements used to determine your job compatibility, but from personal experience I can tell you that overworked HR teams don’t exercise such sound judgement in these decisions. And mine is just one of many such stories. If you choose to opt-out altogether you’re required to shut off public access to all your personal information across all social sites. The onus is on you to do so. And once again, based on personal experience with Klout, "opting out" really means they can and will reinstate you at their leisure or when it suits them.

When did we lose the importance of human insights?

When an HR manager or potential employer chooses to do some research on you as a candidate and scans your LinkedIn profile or tweets on Twitter, he is forced to exercise some judgement through the context of the information he’s reading. Software doesn’t utilize such filters and, for example, may record comments you disagree with – but are posting to share with others – as your views.

“If I get a recruit who has only half a dozen connections on Twitter or LinkedIn, they are tainted with the belief that they are not connected and not up-to-date,” reports Human Capital Management Systems CEO Trevor Vas. Perception is reality and those perceptions are formed with lack of data as much as they are with thousands of data points. Never has this been truer than in our over-connected world where social engagement is given so much importance.

Where you have HR scoring systems based on social interactions, just like the marketing versions before them, you will see people gaming the system to mislead those they wish to impress, further poluting the metrics and diminishing the validity of the score's claim. And there's no end in sight. From marketing to HR and next: Customer Service. Via Salesforce.com interface, call centre operators now have access to a callers’ Klout score so they can respond with the appropriate amount of deference if someone has a complaint (be extra nice if they have a high Klout score...don't fret if they have a low score).

Again I find myself calling out businesses for their reliance on third party social scoring metrics as any form of guideline in making business decisions. The increasing volume of content being generated on the Web and through social channels (what some are calling “Big Data”) isn’t necessarily “Smart Data”. Proponents of these tools and services will claim that those who use them understand that they are limited and should be used as one of many factors in making business decisions. However, we understand the reality of tight budgets, short timelines and frankly, human nature. Where a short cut is available, the short cut is almost always used.

Am I the only one who is frightened at what the future holds as businesses continue to use pseudo-scientific analysis of people's social media engagement (or lack thereof) as indicators of real real-life substance or value? People thought Klout was harmless yet the trend is now permeating other areas of the business with reckless abandon. I pray that this trend will turn out to be a fad we'll all be laughing at 5 years from now, like bell-bottom pants or leg warmers. In the meantime, someone needs to give those executives relying on such tools a reality check.

Sam Fiorella – Sensei
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

The Uncomfortable Age of Transparency

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Mon, 28 May 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Gone are the days of the stand-alone customer loyalty card (or just plain loyalty for that matter) – we’re now seeing a range of new data, social media feeds and smart phones that are changing the way organisations engage with their clients. We’re in a generational and philosophical struggle between older, closed systems and the new, open culture of the Internet.

The open internet culture has proven to be at odds with both corporate cultures and political regimes.In fact it's open season on corporations. It’s become a war of wills between the over-connected public with free and instant access to publish and consume information and the traditionally private and secretive enterprise.

Egyptian filmmaker Amr Salama offered this warning: “Businesses now really need to understand something that governments, dictators didn’t understand. Someday you’ll be busted. Anything you do will be known. Social media’s gonna get you, and if you’re lying we’re gonna know.” While we've certainly seen this accountablity in the world of politics (See Mashable.com's list of the 9 Social Media Uprisings that Sought to Change the World in 2011), this phenomena is now taking hold in the global corporate marketplace.

“I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.” —Hunter S. Thompson.

Through blog and social networks, the public have become an army waging war on corporate irresponsibility, which is forcing the need for brand transparency. In a twist of fate, social media propelled the demise of media giant: The News of the World. The scandal saw employees accused of engaging in phone hacking, police bribery, and exercising improper influence in the pursuit of publishing stories.

When the news hit, the public honesty-police took up the call and microbloggers like Andy Dawson took to the Twitterverse to push known News of the World advertisers like Ford to drop their support of the newspaper. “Within about 90 minutes, it had started to snowball, and my timeline was filled with people tweeting at various companies,” reported Mr. Dawson.

The reaction speed of advertisers to the public outcry that eventually led to the closing of this over century old publication led many pundits to call it “Britain’s Arab Spring”. Rory Cellan-Jones, a technology correspondent for BBC Mobile summarized it best when he quipped: “a random collection of loosely organised people with no one leader have come together to deal a blow to the finances of a powerful media organization.”

The uncomfortable age of transparency

What does transparency means to business? According to the Business Dictionary, transparency is the “minimum degree of disclosure to which agreements, dealings, practices, and transactions are open to all for verification.” I’m betting that corporate executives & financial stakeholders have a completely different interpretation of this than their customers.

Where corporate executives saw investigative reporters as problematic, they now see the public as enemies in the war over brand control. It has forced many analysts to argue for greater transparency from brands yet most don’t know what transparency looks like or how to assess whether or not their companies are, in fact, being transparent. Many see corporate transparency as “grand gestures” (Deb Shultz) or clever marketing and PR tactics.

In my last post, I discussed the challenge to McDonald’s Corp. by consumer watchdog Corporate Accountability International to: "issue a report within six months of the 2012 annual meeting assessing the company's policy responses to growing evidence of linkages between fast food and childhood obesity, diet-related diseases and other impacts on children's health”, which was overwhelming rejected by McDonald’s stakeholders.

Should McDonald’s have taken that challenge? Should they have done it before being asked? What’s the risk of not doing so? Disclosure is now an element of transparency where companies no longer attempt to conceal their inner workings. They must figure out how to be “open” to sharing their activities and the impact of those activities with the outside world.

Patrick Doyle, President of Dominos USA said: “there is nothing more import or sacred to us than our customer’s trust” in his video response to the now infamous viral YouTube video of two staff members doing unspeakable things to Pizzas that were apparently served to customers. Trust is a constant theme in corporate marketing but that does it take to really gain that trust? Is it possible for a corporation to be truly open and still maintain their structural integrity? When it being open too much?

Join us this Wed, May 30^th, 2012 between 8 and 9 PM for the #bizforum Twitter debate where the community will be exploring this very issue.

Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

The Seven Rs of Modern Day Communications

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Tue, 01 May 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Each year sees a new trend in the evolution of business communications. Over the past years people have called out Unified Communications, Cloud Computing and more recently Mobility and SIP-Enabled Infrastructure. Most predictions focus on the evolution of the technology rather than the cultural changes that impact how we communicate within our organizations and beyond.

Have technologies evolved to meet the changing needs of business communications or has technology inspired shifts in communication patterns? Whichever camp you’re in, it’s important to take a breath, look up and scan the landscape so that you can best understand your employees' and customers' motivations, experiences and communication expectations. It is this realization that will enable you to improve how your business communicates, not an in-depth understanding of the underlying technology.

I took my own advice recently and looked up and across the communication horizon. What I saw is encapsulated in my Seven Rs of Modern Day Communications. They’re listed below for your consideration.

1. Rapidity
Speed is the hallmark of today’s business communications. Due to social networks or mobile technologies, the expectation is clear: I want answers and I want them now. Haste is challenging quality at every turn. Finding the balance is the corporation’s next big trial.

2. Relevance
Technology has spurred on the Big Data phenomena and crammed data stores with transactional, social and profile data on consumers, employees and other stakeholders. So much so that software (and budgets) cannot adequately mine the horde of data sets for nuggets of insight. On-demand contextual data will be the focus of productivity and strategy sessions in boardrooms across the country. Meta-information will supplement voice, video, chat and text communications to provide greater context for customer experience design.

3. Relations
The phrase “Content is King” was prevalent throughout 2011 and if it was accurate then, in 2012 Context is its Queen. Social interaction and customer care have become completely intertwined. Big Data requires a new understanding of the relationship between the content generated and collected among sales, marketing and customer service teams.

4. Reach
The proliferation of screens, especially mobile devices including smart phones and tablets, has added a new dimension to content creation and display. Multi-device formatting is quickly becoming the war chant of Customer Experience strategist globally. Blog posts for example must be written in various formats to ensure proper engagement across different platforms but this is no longer limited to text. Content translation to sensory preferences such as visual and audio mediums including podcasts, videos, audio, etc. is a newly mandated content strategy.

5. Resonance
“Cutting through the clutter” has been a catch phrase since the 90s but it’s no longer sufficient. Yes, content must be visible and stand out from the plethora of mixed media messages we’re bombarded with daily but it must now also impact the reader on an emotional level if it is to solicit any advocacy through sharing, commenting, tweeting, etc.

6. Responsive
Related to point #1 above, our 24/7 connectivity will increase the demand for unique content creation and content support. Front line customer service teams will have their hands full identifying, qualifying and addressing the flood in incoming messages that they’ll require 24/7 support services from content producers and eventually content analysts. Same applies to the sales and marketing teams.

7. Results
Lastly and maybe most importantly, will be the shift in focus to Content ROI. As businesses move along the strategy continuum from social media to social business, CEOs and CIOs will demand a demonstration of the financial value that social communications drive to the bottom line. “Measurable Content” and “Profitable Content” will be new buzz words shortly.

Content Marketing has hit the big leagues. And with it comes added pressure to perform, complete with greater risks and even greater rewards.

Do you agree with the Seven Rs listed above? Others you'd add? Some you'd challenge? I'd love to hear from you.

Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

Join us Wed, May 2nd, 2012 at 8 PM EST for the #bizforum Twitter debate where we’ll explore the future of business communications. Follow along on TweetChat or your favorite Twitter application.

Stop Measuring Customer Service

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 00:00:00 GMT

One of the benchmarks many businesses set and measure is the quality of their customer service. No doubt, it’s an important metric to a business but do the results (positive or negative) really enable game changing business strategies?

In this series, I’ve been challenging business leaders to compete by changing the rules of the game instead of trying to be the best player at the game. Doing so requires breaking free of industry best practices and radically rethinking your business. In this post, I’m asking you to answer how standard customer service measurements enable those game changing strategies?

To change the rules of the game, your business must stand for a great idea, not just a great product. Anyone can sell a great product but it requires truly empowered and insightful employees to convey a great idea. The role of employees in executing such radical innovations often goes underestimated.

Before you consider game-changing strategies, you best get a sense of your team’s ability to execute it…and your ability to measure it.

Rethinking Customer Service Measurement

Many B2C retailers perform mystery shopping campaigns to check the customer service level of their employees. B2B organizations send out surveys asking customers to rate their team’s performance. It is common practice to test employees for their adherence to prescribed standard operating procedures (SOPs); SOPs that are created by industry consultants, whitepapers and executives with umpteen years of experience in the field.

Yet what are the results of gathering these results? They indicate how well your employees are observing to the current game plan. They might indicate which plays or players need to be swapped out or receive additional training in order to best the competition (who by the way are usually playing by the same rules and training their teams in the same fashion). So it’s a tit-for-tat strategy. More “me-too” thinking. And ever so slowly we progress as we try to out-compete rivals.

Focusing on how close to the rules employees’ operate will not unlock their potential. All you’re doing is encouraging an assembly line mentality that dulls their ability to drive innovation.

Employee Storytelling

Why not stop measuring “service” and measure what your employees think? What they believe? Can your employees easily and proficiently articulate to your customers “what is the differentiation in our business”? Do your employees even share a common mindset?

Too many organizations strategize (and thus measure) their customer service campaigns as a defensive plays. Customers complain and service teams are dispatched to turn them into satisfied customers. I’m not suggesting that such plays are not required but there’s an offensive play here as well.

In their exchanges with customers, all employees have the ability to tell your story but are they capable? Beyond the executives, do they even know it? Measuring their ability to tell your story and truly differentiate the customer experience is critical but you must first be willing to empower them to do so.

Many businesses understand the potential that employees have in executing a game-changing strategy. Few truly enable them to do so however and fewer still include them (all of them) in creating the new rules.

Your Challenge, Should You Chose to Accept It

I challenge you to measure how cohesively employees answer the following questions: What do we deliver that no one else in our field delivers? What is our story? What do we promise that no one else promises?

That’s step one. Stop measuring customer service and try measuring your team’s ability to tell your story. If they can’t you would be well advised to consider changing your rules for employee relations before you try to change your relationship strategy with your customers.

Sam Fiorella – Sensei
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego