I had the privilege of being invited to attend Paul Greenberg’s (world renowned CRM expert and author of CRM at the Speed of Light) first Social CRM Summit in Washington D.C.
The weekend before the event, Dulles Airport received a record 32.4 inches of snowfall and the forecast called for 10-20 inches the first day of the #scrmsummit. The snow forced the company hosting the summit to close their offices. In true social media fashion, Paul Greenberg contacted me and others over Twitter to let us know the summit was still on and the venue had changed to the Westin Dulles. Within 5 minutes the change spread to most of the invited attendees and others planning to follow the #scrmsummit conversation over twitter.
When I arrived at the D.C. summit and to my amazement, despite the snow, the room was packed with ~100 of the most influential people in today’s social revolution. Attendees included; Brent Leary, Jesus Hoyos, Barry Dalton, Natalie Petouhoff, Esteban Kolsky (via twitter), Adam Metz, Mike Fauscette, Brian Vellmure and Mike Krigsman to name a few.
There were many enlightening topics discussed. My top 10 takeaways for commercial organizations and government agencies were:
(1) Don’t try to manage customers or assume an organization knows customers’ expectations. Organizations need to listen to customers’ and citizens experiences from their perspective to understand the true voice of the customer. Start by looking at how your customers interact with your organization. Specifically, what channel do they prefer to contact you – email, web, phone, or social?
(2) The customer/citizen value comes when organizations provide value. The definition of value is different for each customer, but there is commonality found in transparency, access to knowledge and an authentic relationship. Develop your value strategy first, and then let technology create the capability for the engagement.
(3) The 2009 Edelman trust barometer study showed 58% of people trust “A person like me” over corporate experts. This is up from 22% in 2003. Studies like this show how much power the average citizen has in today’s social world.
(4) According to 2009 Nielsen research, social communities and forums reach more internet users (66.8%) than email (65.1%) – this is a first!
(5) In a social world, customer experience dominates efficiency in a contact center – first contact is more important today than the first call.
(6) You need to listen to the live conversations that are occurring in the cloud in real or near time and participate by taking immediate appropriate action.
(7) Forrester Research shows 55% of customers no longer want to speak to an agent – so how do you service this group? Web self-service, community driven customer service, service outreach by engaging in the conversations that are taking place in the cloud (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube,etc.) to prevent problems in addition to just solving them.
(8) Social media and customer experience technology are fundamental to enabling real-time situational awareness. It’s imperative to empower, engage and collaborate with the citizen (not try to manage them). The White House fully sees the benefits here and has demanded agencies comply with these practices via the Open Government Directive.
(9) Make sure you give the customer a voice in how they engage – offer multiple channels and allow them to interact with you across them all at different times for various purposes, but be sure all channels are integrated.
(10) Measuring and feedback are critical to being social. Look to capture structured and unstructured data, survey at the point of interaction (not twice a year, which will tell you what used to be the problem) and hear the whispers by not only focusing on the words, but by understanding the tone (+ or -), knowing the patterns and understanding the social graph of influence. Paul Greenberg frames this concept by saying … “customer experience is the act of perfecting, not about being perfect.”
The morning of day two, I woke up to 10 more inches of snow and a whiteout. I attended the summit over twitter and still felt pretty connected to the conversation. These were my highlights from the conference, here is Michael Krigsman’s recap, which includes a video dialogue between Natalie Petouhoff and Mike Fauscette. Please share other thoughts on the summit or examples of how organizations are listening and engaging in the social web in the comments section below.
Follow me on Twitter @kevin_paschuck
Kevin,
Great post — I especially like the last point you make (which to me is the core benefit that organizations will achieve from becoming social businesses) — feedback is the currency of social businesses. And, should be noted, must flow both ways to bring value to the interaction.
I agree with the way you summarized the findings (thanks for the shoutout, btw, bummed i could’ve not have been there but between twitter and backchannels i felt was almost there — another wonder of the social world that could not have happened some 2-3 years ago (ok, 4-5).
Good post, thanks for the writing…
Esteban – Appreciate your comments.
Really good post. Pretty good to know for anyone who’s into Twitter, old or new.