A New Customer Experience Model
With maturing strategy models, assessment methods and new reportingand analytic tools, businesses look differently at social mediacompared to just one year ago.
So what did change?
Clearly marketing was the early adopter of social media, createdcampaigns and explored ways to capture the attention of customers andprospects. It is less expensive than traditional advertising and at thesame time more effective in getting new customer attention. But at theend the successful companies started elsewhere.
A cross functional approach
Now as customers get touched by marketing obviously sales is waking upand so is service. But most importantly the changing socio economiclandscape brings also executives to the table. The next wave of socialmedia is a comprehensive and corporate wide customer experience model.A cross functional way of customer engagement means incorporating allcustomer touching units including support, product design, logistics,sales and all the way back to marketing.
A mature corporate social media framework, as developed by experts from the social media academy :
- Business Objectives
- Social Media Assessment
- Strategy development
- Execution Plan
- Budgets, resources and ROI
- Measure model and tune results
What is the impact:
Numerous customer studies returned all the same result: Customerservice is the biggest obstacle in creating a good customer experience.The actual purchase process is the least important issue. But manycompanies invest more in improving a situation that seems to be a noneissue while circumventing investments that need it most.
SUPPORT DEPARTMENT
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Based on the above findings, strategic engagements in social media starts ideally on the supportside as we can see with companies like Comcast, Ford, Dell and manyothers.
PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT
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A natural next step is to leverage the experience in the service andsupport departments to drive down product development cost, get earlymarket feedback and in particular support during the product launchphase.
LOGISTICS AND PROCUREMENT
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Social media is probably the most effective and the least expensiveearly warning system for everybody involved in procurement, logisticsand production planning challenges.
SALES & MARKETING
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With the experience from support, product development and logistics itis a natural to now leverage social media in sales and marketing. Whyat last? Only happy customers become advocates, helper in the word ofmouth campaign or any other function to help create buzz and becomebuzz drivers into a market. Frustrated customers do the other wayaround. So starting in marketing - while very counter intuitive - isprobably the biggest mistake you can make when you engage in socialmedia.
The Social Media Academy is running a complementary webinar next week Friday, July 10 helping business managers to gain insight:
"Social Media - New Customer Experience Model" Please join: Customer Experience Webinar
