Thanks for checking back in, lives dive right back in to the final part of this study!
3. Get Credit for Delivering Great Experiences
Social media isn’t just for fun anymore; it has evolved into a critical channel for
customer outreach and customer feedback. Social CEM allows brands to monitor,
listen and take advantage of social trends. By engaging with customers across
all channels of communication brands can now engage in customer dialogue in
an integrated fashion. Engaging in this dialogue is the first step towards a plan to
co-create your brand with your customers.
Some brands now have their own fans run their fan pages for them with minimal
oversight. This is just one of the ways that you can mobilize advocates on social
networks. Look for other opportunities to create social advocates. There are
many! And you want to look at technology providers like Empathica to help you
deploy and scale advocacy development programs.
Once you have delivered a great experience make sure you get credit for it by
making it easy for your advocates to share their stories on social media. Once
improvements are made and consumers know about those improvements, many
will often respond in kind by recommending the company to friends; driving positive
word of mouth conversations, posting positive comments online and blogging
about how the company moved heaven and earth to respond and provide great
service. This is the turning point when a consumer becomes an advocate.
It is in this moment that it is important to capture that customer’s positive emotions
and thoughts about their experience. In today’s instantaneous landscape, mailing
out surveys and hoping the customer remembers to post online their great
experience is not efficient or reliable. From the point of view of the consumer, great
customer experience memories can be fleeting. Companies who use technology
to enable the consumer in the “moments of truth” of the transaction to brag
or recommend instantly, enables their customer’s voice to be heard about their
great customer experience are leaping ahead in building and retaining consumer
advocates.
4. Ensure Your Whole Organization is Committed
Consider who the stakeholders are that can affect the Social CEM program. To
do this requires a dialogue within your company about the next steps for Social
CEM. Realize that different people and groups will have different points of view on
the program need and value.
Change is good and should be embraced. Often changing current operations
and processes can seem like a monumental effort. The wisdom of the old
question “how do you eat an elephant?” applies. (Answer: one bite at a time.)
Organizational changes such as a shift to Social CEM are complex processes that
take place one step at a time.
Larger organizations are often daunted by the magnitude of the implied changes
they will need to make in their operations and technology infrastructure to deliver
great customer experiences in today’s socially networked world. Empathica’s
approach to Customer Experience Transformation (Figure 11) maps out a pathway
to reach customer advocacy. This transformation process focuses on how leaders
can shift their organizational culture, put people, process and technology to work
and deliver a consistent and differentiated customer experience.
The first stage is viewing the data from which decisions can be made. While gut
instinct will always play a role in business, astute leaders will always look to data
to validate any key decisions before moving forward. Once the data is collected
and reviewed, the next stage of evolution is managing the outcomes. This is
where decisions become actions and the outcomes of the insights uncovered by
the data are put into play. As the actions begin, integrating the changes across
the entire business is the next phase of program evolution. When complete,
then a brand reaches the final stage of evolution where the customer experience
becomes a key aspect in engineering the brand, and brand identity itself.
What can set this approach apart is the focus on the endgame of brand engineering
(or re-engineering). The end goal is to have the entire company culture focused
on the customer experience. When that happens, improvements in the customer
experience can be measured as business outcomes – and brands can predict the
financial impact of improvements in customer experience scores.
A particular capability of leading Social CEM vendor solutions is the ability to
provide, (through financial linkage analysis an example of which is shown in Figure
12) the impact of higher customer satisfaction scores on return visits. In addition
it has been statistically shown that a 5% increase in customer satisfaction can
reflect the growth of sales by ~0.7%. This can translate into tens of millions of
dollars each year for large enterprises.
For organizations interested in quickly acquiring new customers as well as
supporting the current ones, long, drawn out transformation programs may not
work. Today many organizations need to take action quickly or their companies
will cease to exist. The goal of most organizations is to build customer advocacy
quickly with a short-term Social CEM strategy.
5. Social CEM Readiness Checklist
Below is a checklist to help start to evaluate where an organization is with respect
to Social CEM. How many of these questions does your organization have solid
answers and practices for?
√ Are we delivering superior, emotionally-connected Customer and Brand
Experiences across all channels and touch-points?
√ Are our Employees sufficiently engaged and performing to advance our
Experience and Brand goals?
√ Are we doing enough to leverage our “Moments of Truth” efforts?
√ Are we clearly standing out in the mind of the customer compared to our
competitors, especially with respect to customer service?
√ Do we have the technology and analytical resources in place to make dynamic
new decisions on a daily basis (i.e. things change, every day)?
√ What are we doing to move beyond customer satisfaction and loyalty to
cultivating and measuring Customer Advocacy?
Conclusion
Customer Experience Management is evolving into a social experience for customers
and brands alike. In an “always on,” changing and connected world, the game
to engage and interact with consumers in real-time regarding their likes, dislikes,
wants and wishes is “on” in full force. As a consumer facing company, the challenge
is to respond to social consumers, and perhaps even change how the company
operates when consumers point out their disappointments and suggestions.
In this new world, one thing is clear. Companies that continue to embrace new
consumer behaviors and develop new approaches to engaging with their brands
will be the market leaders that forge deeper connections and build active advocacy
across all brand stakeholders – owners, employees and customers.
When it comes to Social CEM, don’t feel you need to go it alone. Reach out and get
help. The Customer Experience Management industry has been around for more
than ten years and there is a treasure trove of knowledge available. Companies
such as Empathica have a wealth of information from current consumer research
and trends as well as technology that can help at http://www.empathica.com/
resources/.
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