Press 1 for Twitter, Press 2 for Facebook ...

Social Media has been a leading phenomena in the last 3-4 years. Facebook has grown from some 12 million users in 2006, to nearly 400 million in early 2010. Don't even try calculating the growth on that. Its BIG! There are lots of such data points that suggest that social media is beyond hype, and is becoming very much the manner in which people are interacting, communicating and participating on the web.

I discussed about Social Networking in the Enterprise in my previous blog post. Enterprise Social Networking is still in its infancy, and such solutions will need to pass the test of the CIO, the CFO and ofcourse time. But there is one aspect of social media & social networking that will and is increasingly being accepted by the Enterprise today - Using social media for customer engagement.

There are many definitions for social media, so let me add one more - Social media is an online platform for users to share, participate and engage in conversations (both monologues & dialogues) with friends, like-minded individuals and everybody else. With social media, it is as easy to create content, as it is to consume it.

Social Media brings about a distinct shift in the Customer service world. This shift is rooted in the definition stated above. In a traditional customer service environment, either the customer calls the contact center i.e. the customer gets in touch with the enterprise to complain, ask or notify or the contact center calls the customer i.e. the enterprise gets in touch the customer to notify, request/threaten or upsell. It is foolish to think that this communication is the only communication that a customer has about the enterprise. Before calling the contact center, most customers would either have "googled" the query, discussed with their peers (increasingly over the web), or shared their frustrations with the world (most likely on some form of social media). Imagine a frustrated passenger, who had to search for the lost baggage claim process on google, then ask his friends on facebook if they knew the call center number for lost baggage, and then tweeted about how bad his flight experience has been. After all this, he calls the contact center - the happy agent on the other end does not have the slighest clue what is coming his way when he picks up that call. Social Media changes this. Social Media enables enterprises to hear, engage and participate in customer conversations that are not happening only when the customer calls the contact center, but happening the other 90% of the time when the customer talks about your enterprise with friends, like-minded individuals or everybody else.

In today's social web world, neither does the customer need to get in touch with the enterprise, nor does the enterprise need to get in touch with the customer to hear the customer. The power of social media provides enterprises the ability to listen to customer conversations, and pro-actively offer support, way before the call reaches the contact center.

Social Media is on the rise in Asia. Of the top 30 countries with most Facebook users, 7 were from Asia Pacific (Australia, Indonesia, India, Philippines, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore). Despite the growth, some enterprises in Asia & Worldwide are still questioning why social media is important for customer service. The popularity of "United Breaks Guitars" is a clear reminder of the impact that social media can have on the reputation and business of an organization. In the words of Jeff Bezos, customers now use the internet as a "mega phone" to tell everyone what they think about our product & services.

A Social Customer Engagement strategy can be beneficial in many ways to the contact center:-
a) Ability to provide Pro-active Customer Care, hence improve Customer Satisfaction
b) Connect with the customer using the channel they use most, similar to the principle used in the multi-channel approach with voice, email, web chat, etc.
c) Make customers your service agents, by getting customers to respond to customer queries on the social web

These benefits lead to a strong value proposition for the enterprise:-
a) Create customer communities to increase stickiness & loyalty
b) Monetize social channels to deliver promotions & targeted campaigns
c) Disseminate information to a wider or targeted audience in real-time & cost effective manner

Building a Social Customer Engagement strategy is becoming increasingly important for enterprises, however, enterprises need to be wary of the challenges that come with a social media customer service channel. Social Customer Engagement is fairly new, and is unlike the other customer service processes where we have metrics, benchmarks and best practices to improve our processes. Including Social Media channels as part of the customer service process requires a thorough assessment of the customer base & existing customer contact processes, and the need to build a new set of processes & programs.

More on the building blocks for a social media customer engagement strategy in my next post...

EnterpriseBook - Facebook for the Enterprise?

Imagine that a Sales Manager gets a notification that says "Opportunity X has moved to the next level. $250K". The Sales Manager "comments" on that update asking for some details. The "comment" gets sent to the sales person who entered that opportunity X, and can then address those questions. Based on the responses, the sales manager also "recommends" a "group" that focuses on such specific deals. The Country Manager "likes" the update to keep the sales person motivated and also subtly informing him that he is aware and can make himself available if the need arises. The Country Manager can also "follow" this opportunity so that he gets any updates to this particular deal.

You get the idea. Taking Facebook & Twitter and creating an Enterprise focused social networking solution. There are many questions that come to mind when you think of such a solution -
does it replace email, instant messaging or team workspaces or is it a new medium altogether?,
will it improve productivity or reduce it?,
with so many emails to respond to already does this application require me to update-on/respond to/take-note-of all "updates" and activities?,
would this only be restricted to the enterprise, or can partner companies also join the network?,
what impact does it have on storage needs, security needs, content management, etc?

Instead of trying to address all these questions, lets evaluate the potential benefits of such an application. In order to do that, let's analyze what happened in the consumer world with Facebook & Twitter. What benefits did Facebook bring to consumers, what existing communication channels did it replace? I don't think Facebook replaced Email but yes, it definitely would have replaced the number of emails that people sent to their friends & family. I don't think Facebook replaced Instant Messaging, but Facebook realized that it is a complimentary communication channel and it has added that capability to its website. Facebook did definitely challenge a Flickr, as many people just upload their photos to Facebook now instead of doing it separately to Picassa or Flickr. Facebook improved our ability to "connect" with our friends, even though we could not meet often in the real world. Facebook gave users the ability to know what was happening in their friends life, and they could just share their life-happenings on Facebook knowing that their family & friends would get to see/read about it (maybe reducing some IDD phone calls here). Facebook didn't replace blogs, but made it a feature for users to be able to share "notes". In a nutshell, Facebook did a bit of everything and provided a single platform that was social in nature, and could be viewed by friends & family.

If we take this to the Enterprise, a Facebook-like application or what we might call an Enterprise Social Networking solution would not necessarily replace Email, Instant Messaging or Workspace. But it could become either a platform through which all these can either be accessed and complimented by the features such as status updates, rating/tagging, etc. or a platform that can be used to offer a Email-like, IM-like, Workspace-like environment. The important thing in both scenarios will be that this platform will be a "social" platform.

The obvious benefits of such a solution would be better information sharing across teams in the enterprise, better knowledge of what's happening in the enterprise, better connect with employees (especially in geographically dispersed teams) improving collaboration amongst teams, and providing a communications platform that is social, increasingly popular and partly informal.

An Enterprise Social Networking (ESN) solution could possibly be an addition to the existing communication channels that exist within an enterprise. What I believe will become important for ESN is that it could become an integration portal or access portal for other communication channels, a bit like IM on Facebook, Messages (Email) on Facebook, etc. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that you could add voice capability & web conferencing as an application to ESN as well. What could start as a new communication channel, eventually has the potential to be a communication platform that can truly connect the other communication channels and deliver a quasi-UC (Unified Communications) experience.

Whether or not ESN will become popular in the enterprise can only be decided once the solutions from players such as Cisco, Salesforce.com, IBM, etc. get into the market, and how enterprise CIOs react to these. There is a bit of a precedence for ESN in the way Instant Messaging is becoming popular in the enterprise now. Starting as a consumer communication channel, IM has now become an enterprise solution, and it took a good 3-5 years after IM was already in the consumer world, that it reached the enterprise, and another 3-4 years before it became mainstream. Even if you improve that rate of adoption, one should not expect ESN to become popular before 2012.

My biggest worry is what will happen when my boss "pokes" me about some deliverables? Is "Super Poke" the new micro-managing tool?