This week I moderated another Social Media Today webinar as part of their Best Thinker webinar series, this time on the topic of What Does Customer Experience Mean for Your Social Business? We assembled a really fantastic panel to give us their perspective on this topic: Jeofrey Bean, a noted author on "The Customer Experience Revolution" and Principle at Del Mar Research; Shep Hyken, the Chief Amazement Officer and Customer Experience expert at Shepard Presentations; and Dave Haucke, a Senior Strategist for IBM's Smarter Commerce. This webinar was also sponsored by IBM.
Jeofrey started us off with a discussion on "Why customer experience?" and more importantly, "Why now?" After defining the difference between Customer Experience and User Experience, he dove into some research his firm had produced around what percentage of companies are focusing on customer experience. The data reminded me a bit of Geoffrey Moore's book Crossing the Chasm - where 5% of the market were leaders in customer experience (early adopters), 25% were focused on either the user experience or the customer experience (fast followers) and 75% were leading with their product or service (late adopters).
Shep took over after Jeofrey and talked about the journey from "reacting to engaging." He cited some research that mentioned the average response time on social media was 9 hours when the customer expectation of a response time was closer to 1 hour. He also talked about keeping your response in the "channel" and not answering a tweet with a snail mail response (true example).
Dave then finished off the presentations with a deep dive on how to move from the current state to your desired state. He cited some IBM research that show there were three key behaviors common to success and they are: First, break the typical silos and barriers to that get in the way of being customer focused and treating customers more holistically. Second create a system of engagement that enables listening and interacting with customers much more effectively. Third, foster a customer-centric culture that focuses on establishing a win-win with the customer.
Now, if you have ever been on a Social Media Today webinar before, you know they are very "participant-driven" and we love to ask your questions of our panelists. Some of the questions we covered in this webinar were: What is the difference between service design and customer experience? Should everyone have a branded Twitter handle, Is social media becoming the dominant channel for interacting with customers?
If that piqued your interest, you will want to hear the replay of this webinar or review the slides from this webinar. Otherwise we hope you will join us on another Social Media Today webinar! The next one is on What Does Customer Experience Mean for Your Social Business; sign up for it or view the schedule of upcoming webinars here.
Also to follow the play-by-play Twitter action, just read the following Storify: