A New Customer Experience Model
With maturing strategy models, assessment methods and new reporting and analytic tools, businesses look differently at social media compared to just one year ago.
So what did change?
Clearly marketing was the early adopter of social media, created campaigns and explored ways to capture the attention of customers and prospects. It is less expensive than traditional advertising and at the same time more effective in getting new customer attention. But at the end the successful companies started elsewhere.
A cross functional approach
Now as customers get touched by marketing obviously sales is waking up and so is service. But most importantly the changing socio economic landscape brings also executives to the table. The next wave of social media is a comprehensive and corporate wide customer experience model. A cross functional way of customer engagement means incorporating all customer 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: Customer service is the biggest obstacle in creating a good customer experience. The actual purchase process is the least important issue. But many companies invest more in improving a situation that seems to be a none issue while circumventing investments that need it most.
SUPPORT DEPARTMENT
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Strategic engagements in social media start therefor on the support side as we can see with companies like Comcast, Ford, Dell and many others.
PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT
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A natural next step is to leverage the experience in the service and support departments to drive down product development cost, get early market feedback and in particular support during the product launch phase.
LOGISTICS AND PROCUREMENT
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Social media is probably the most effective and the least expensive early warning system for everybody involved in procurement, logistics and production planning challenges.
SALES & MARKETING
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With the experience from support, product development and logistics it is a natural to now leverage social media in sales and marketing. Why at last? Only happy customers become advocates, helper in the word of mouth campaign or any other function to help create buzz and become buzz drivers into a market. Frustrated customers do the other way around. So starting in marketing - while very counter intuitive - is probably the biggest mistake you can make when you engage in social media.
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 [1]
Axel [2]