The Social Customer vs The Jobs People Do

I think we’ve come to a critical juncture in the discussion about the Social Customer. It seems that we keep focusing on the customer directly, and not in the context of the jobs people do to make the customer experience and outcome the best it can be. Just engaging in social conversation using social media, does not make a customer centric business, or person. It simply makes you someone who is distracted by shiny new things. That can be dangerous, because you still have to get the rest of your job done – and this distraction is invariably making that job harder to do.

What is the job to do done? Is a job sharpening pencils? Or is that only part of a bigger job? Is the job data entry? Or is that part of a bigger job. Is the job fork lift operator, or is that part of a bigger job? In my extremely mind-blowingly simple diagram below, I’ve depicted…

• At least six different jobs, or
• A Managers job, or
• One of the jobs of a business, or
• All of the above

The fork lift operator is employed to perform one or more tasks. In this case let’s keep it simple by suggesting he goes back and forth all day and does nothing but picks up boxes and puts them into a truck. I’m sure he considers that a job. But to the business, the job to be done is delivering a product to a customer. The entire job goes from ordering parts all the way to getting the final product in a consumers hands.

Sure, this is overly simple. And from a business’s perspective, we can certainly identify more jobs to be done. But in this simple example, is there one product that can be optimized to bring innovation to this complete job? Let’s look at the forklift. How can the forklift manufacturer optimize the job, or make the job move faster? Maybe they could make the fork lifts faster! Or maybe the company just needs a deal so they can buy more forklifts.

The answer could be an innovation, either for the forklift manufacturer (doubtful), or a competing company. Let’s say a new company started making a automated conveyance system that could eliminate the packaging step, optimize the inspection step and take the product right to the box truck?

So, if you simply focused on a product, you might miss out on the real potential for innovation.

So How Does This Relate To The Social Customer?

There is only the customer and the job to do for the customer – the social piece is irrelevant unless you just like to make up new words. Smart businesses who are gathering information and adapting already understand that their customers are influenced by others in social communities just as they are still influenced by the more traditional social channels. They realize this, and they adapt. Has their business changed? Has the job to be done changed? When we go to cocktail parties, will we ask someone we meet “So, what kind of social business are you in?” or “How the heck do you manage to keep your social customers coming back?”

Factors surrounding the job to be done have basically expanded the canvas, so to speak. The expansion could be something about the environment the operate in, or a problem some companies begin to have getting the job done, or maybe a competitor that has innovated and put them at a disadvantage. If they focus on the products they use, they will miss the real problem, an expanded or slightly changed playing field. They still have to get the old job done. The more nimble companies will realize that something has changed and begin understanding what it is.

The social customer is posing that challenge to us today. Do we design a social solution around the social customer? Well, go ahead if you want. But you will be completely off the mark, in my opinion. Still, the job to be done now has to incorporate different engagement channels. If you design solutions that don’t work with the rest of the tools and channels already in place, have you moved the ball forward?

In reality, we are not going to throw the canvas away and start over again. We will expand our notion of engagement, collaboration or communication while leaving the old notions in place. The innovation will be bringing them all together in a way that allows us to continue the jobs that we have to do, while extending our capabilities to understand customer needs and reduce friction in customer processes. Sure, the old vendors that don’t get it will certainly be replaced with fresh ideas, but not at the expense of the jobs the have been done, and we will continue to do. You simply have to get the entire picture (job), not just the latest cutesy buzzword and the imaginary world it occupies.

The social customer is the customer. The social business is the business. Social CRM is CRM. The canvas has expanded, it hasn’t been thrown away.