Delivering a fast customer experience isn’t everything.

Earlier in the week I headed to Vision Express for my bi-annual eye test. Having just come back from fabulous family holiday and dropped my daughter at her new ‘big’ school I was in a pretty buoyant mood.

The quality of the eye test, the price charged and the speed at which it was executed were exemplary. It should have been, the optician’s was empty and I was the only customer. My issue is not with the service, but with how it left me feeling.

Now my wife accuses me of being a demanding customer and expecting too much. You may agree, but before you do, let me explain why I don’t think I am.

During the whole time I was there, none of the staff I interacted with smiled at me. When I was asked how I was, the inquisitor wasn’t really interested in the reply. Beyond the factual questions about my spectacles, no one asked how I felt about them or how I chose them. No one asked me what I liked or disliked about them. I was treated like I was on a conveyor belt to be processed as quickly as possible. I was left feeling like an inconvenience, someone to tick off the list.

Treating customers quickly and efficiently is important, and I would guess that most customers would value it. I know some people that would value it above all else. However, I was looking for a little more. Some small talk, a little chat about my holiday, the weather - the whole back to school phenomena.

Customers are not just units to be processed quickly. They have feelings and if they didn’t branding wouldn’t work. Taking a little time to connect with me would have transformed how I had felt about my relationship with Vision Express and I would have considered them for my new sunglasses.

Consider how differently this blog would have turned out and the value of the order they have missed out on.

More of the 6 fundamentals of enterprise social media

                                            Part Two – 4 to 6

So to recap briefly on Part One; We have a shared understanding that our enterprise is in social media so we put in place our governance team. The first thing the governance team was articulate the endpoint and how it is measured and set out their road map. We defined what we wanted from a social media platform and procured it.

Managing expectations

While all this was going on we were managing eh expectations of the business.

This means explaining to the senior leadership team what is going to happen next, how you will report on it and what their role is in this. It's worth working with the Corporate Affairs chief on this, they have been through it all before with Execs for PR.

You explain to your own staff what you are doing and how they are involved. This means setting out a simple social media policy. A paragraph should do it. Explain why what they say and do in social media can impact the brand and them in the long run. HR and Internal Engagement should be able to help with this.

Speak to your customers about what you are doing, what you are providing and why that’s good for them.

Make sure everyone on the social media leadership team understand what role social plays and ask them to articulate to each other, their teams and their senior sponsor how social fits into their channel strategy.

In all cases, ask for feedback and act on it.

Reporting and analytics
Firstly, these are two different things. Both have a place and both need to be addressed contentiously and with stakeholder involvement.

Reporting, or MI, is regular time based activity. Weekly or monthly reports that set out volume data how many etc. But most importantly, what are the most important topics, users, channels and how are they and their sentiment changing with time?

Analytics is still evolving and you may need external help to get your head around this to start with. Don’t let that put you off, this data is dynamite.

Social media analytics will help you to become conscious of the conversations about your brand that your organisation is currently unconscious of. It will allow your business to understand real sentiment around share price. Or, imagine tracking responses and views on an above the line campaign in almost real time.

Not just counting the conversations and reporting some sentiment like in the weekly reports, but analysing unstructured data to get behind how a social media crowd is responding the proposition, not just the presentation.

Analytics is not just an essential part of social media for enterprises; its power is going to help organisations that master gain a real and tangible competitive advantage in the 21st century. Maybe not in the next 2 years, but certainly beyond that.

Scale and depth
Now your enterprise has everything in place, it needs to scale it by embedding it in every part of the business and every market. This is what we call social business.

Social businesses that use social media to learn from and engage with their members will develop more consistent financial performance.

They will overcome reputation challenges easier, build more brand equity and customer loyalty through trust, see higher productivity through internal collaboration and continue to evolve to serve the communities around their brand: Customers, staff and shareholders.

The 6 fundamentals of enterprise social media

Part One – 1 to 3

If my own experience is anything to go by, every large enterprise in the world has reached the conclusion that it is in social media, like it or not.


I estimate that every FTSE company with a UK consumer brand receives at least twenty thousand social media posts about it every month. From corporate news through product/service comments, sponsorship to marketing activity responses.

So now that playtime is over, what do corporate businesses need to handle this and future social media demand.

Governance
Marketing doesn't own social media in an organisation any more than any part of the business owns the telephone. However, it does, or should, own the voice of the customer, so it's a good place for governance to be initiated and led from.

The social media steering or leadership team must include executive representation of key markets and include senior responsible owners from service, sales, corporate relations, internal engagement and business continuity (risk management in financial services. The team should appoint a manager that has the authority to act and clear accountability to that governance group.

Roadmap not strategy
Like so many things that technology touches, social media continues to evolve. Therefore, large enterprises don't have time to hire expensive external advisors to carry out a social media audit that will only have a short shelf life and set a grand plan that will become obsolete as the ink is drying.

Set a course of action and move towards it.

As competitors, technology and your customers blow you off course, change it. The end destination will remain pretty fixed anyway. It will be described as something like: Creating a digital channel that £x generates incremental revenue, or y% brand awareness, or my favourite a z% promoter score.

Single management platform
This is harder than it sounds, not least because it involves IT people and procurement. You need a social media monitoring, analytics and reporting platform.

There are plenty to choose from and at a basic level, all do the same thing. But it's not until you have lived with it and the supplier that you can realise what you actually want is something else.

I can and will write a whole blog on this, but in the meantime, here are the most important things to consider:
         
Does it categorise posts as they are received?

Does it monitor all of the platforms you need?

Can it measure and reporting the metrics that are important to the business easily?

Does the vendor understand the difference between social media monitoring, analysing what has been monitored and just counting conversations?

Part two of this blog will be here next week – 28th August 2012.

Which would you rather be, a client or a member?

Being a client is certainly better than being a customer. It suggests I am valued by my advisor or supplier, our relationship is based on more than transactions. So why not go one step further and have members?

Membership suggests I belong. I am part of something bigger than me. It may even suggest exclusivity, unless we are talking about the Coop.

If I am a member I feel obliged to share, to have some involvement with how my club runs. To read the newsletter. To take my turn to do the teas. To listen to the other members. To help my fellow members.

I may even feel obliged to buy from my membership organisation.