Last week, Nigel Fenwick, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester spoke in a joint Forrester/ NewsGator webinar. The topic was Boosting IT Productivity with Social Technologies. However, Nigel validated several thoughts that had been bouncing around in my brain. He speaks about the influence and shifts in mobile devices, social technologies, pervasive video and cloud computing. Each of these converge to enable a more intelligent and influential customer, the empowered customer. I have been thinking about the shift from a focus on customer satisfaction to customer experience and how this has changed, dramatically, with the usage of social platforms. While I often talk to clients about employee empowerment to use and leverage social technologies, I had not thought about the flip side – that of empowered customers.
Thanks to the social web, customers have access to more information than ever. It is not just information developed and distributed by various corporate marketing teams. It is information from individual employees, customers, business partners, competitors, supply chain vendors and anyone else who may interact with that company, its products or employees. The online customer support forums of the early millennium have evolved to include live online discussions (by text or VoIP) with support staff and interactive chats with fellow customers. If we are not satisfied with the support we receive, we tweet or Facebook immediately – and usually get some kind of attention from the company’s support team.
Thanks to the social web, prospective buyers can research, investigate and analyze products, services, reputations, ethics, roadmaps and competitors. They come to you, the vendor providing their product or service of choice, armed with intelligent questions. They are ready to make decision, but have perspectives based on the information that have gathered and interpreted. These perspectives will influence their discussion with you (and others!) regarding features, functionality, delivery and pricing.
Thanks to the social web, your company and its employees can also be empowered. Your employees can access the same information as your customers. As mentioned by Nigel in the aforementioned webinar, they use social technologies to get ideas for their job, to research key topics, to collaborate externally to solve a problem. Your company may say that they already provide them with the tools to collaborate and investigate. If they do, this is great, but are they using the tools and the platforms that your customers are accessing? Can you as an employee gather the same kind of insights so that you can understand the customer’s perspective? Tthe ability for employees to understand a customer's motivation can only help them represent the company to its greatest advantage.
Companies used to control the message. Subsequently the need for employees to participate and monitor online activities was limited to specific initiatives (i.e., customer support). However, the social web has changed how information is shared. It is still shared on websites, but customers are seeking authentic insights and finding them via blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn Groups, Slide Share, and Scribd. If your company is just getting started with social technologies, empower your employees to learn in the same fashion as your already empowered customers.
What’s your perspective?
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