Customer Engagement and Social Media

The new customer engagement challenge

Customer engagement is what business is about.  After all, you can't sell something without engaging at some level with customers.   The way engagement happens though, is changing.  It's become more social, more active - both pro, and re, active - if you will.  In my opinion, customers now have much more control over the dialogue.  Driven by technology, dialogues occur when they want them to, on the topics they want to dialogue about.  So, customer engagement today has to be about reacting to customer wants and needs, expressed through dialogues, and stimulating engagement from customers so that we can then react to them.

I believe that for many businesses it's a challenge to incorporate a social media based customer engagement strategy into their existing business processes. The interactive, multi-layered nature of social media is outside of their normal "controlled" process for distributing information.  It also doesn't fit well into their highly process oriented way of doing things.  Many businesses are  accustomed to generally controlling customer dialogues.  Research (Gartner and Forrester) shows that businesses are adopting social media in spite of not understanding it, and mainly because they're being forced to do so by customers.  Most still do not want to embrace social media as a means to grow their businesses.   So, they continue to do what they've done in the past even though it costs more now and is less effective than it used to be. 

Yet, it seems to me that most businesses fundamentally understand the challenges they face as well as the opportunity social media offers for engaging with customers.  They see declining e-mail open and click through rates, increasing lead generation costs, lower survey open and participation rates, etc..  At the same time they see the very rapid growth of social media adoption.  It also seems to me that most businesses haven't determined the optimum approach to engaging with customers via social media.  Nor, how to integrate the information being produced in various social media "channels" into their sales, marketing and support processes. 

As I see it, the challenge of social media integration with sales, marketing and support processes includes four functional elements:

• Gathering all customer initiated data from all the places where they put it
• Sifting through the gathered data so that all the essential insights are identified and categorized
• Making each insight actionable by the right people in the organization
• Ensuring the right action is taken a timely fashion

Addressing the customer engagement challenge - 6 steps

For B2B firms its easy to get started with a customer engagement strategy.  For most businesses, lots of the infrastructure already exists to promote engagement.  In my judgement, doing the six things listed below will help businesses create engagement paths and processes that will help them grow going forward.

1. "Plug" into all the places your customers and prospects go to for information relating to your products or services.  By "plugging in" I mean connect each engagement "channel" with some some analytical process that lets you derive insights from the dialogue taking place.  This could be as simple as manually monitoring a LinkedIn forum for potential leads.  It could be as complex as feeding a text analysis system with all the data coming from your Facebook page.  The dependency is volume of items to look at. More volume means more need for automation.  Easy places to start this process are your customer support forum or Facebook page.  
2. Sift, analyze and categorize the data (in real-time if possible).  In low volume situations this can be done manually.  In high volume situations it requires feedback management technology with verbatim analysis capability.
3. Qualify every "hit" identified through the analysis of verbatims or other social feedback.  In low volume situations, this can be done manually.  In higher volume situations it requires automation, typically a web-survey of some sort, delivered through the channel you are "plugged in" to.
4. Action each item of qualified feedback.  A couple of examples:
   - If a post to a support forum mentions a need for something you offer but that the customer doesn't have, that data has to be sifted out, categorized, qualified, and actioned. 
   - If a LinkedIn forum you monitor identifies a topic area of specific interest to lots of your customers.  That data needs to be extracted, qualified (sales lead, marketing opportunity, potential product idea, etc.) and actioned.  The action might as simple as to assign someone from the company to participate in the dialogue and monitor it further.  It might be to react with a countervailing viewpoint or it might be to try and assess if the topic requires investigation at the customer level via inclusion in some customer survey.  
5. Inter-connect insights and actions.  For instance, if you post articles in forums based on feedback from customers, do it with content that is first posted on your website or blog and then reference the url in your forum post. Tweet the post, reference it in LinkedIn, etc.  This drives traffic to your website or blog and enables web crawlers to find it based on its content and tags.  It also ensures that a larger audience than the forum will see what you said. 
6. Incorporate actions where relevant into business processes.  Data has to get to the people who can act on it and they need to be made aware of the need to act on it, and when. 

Selling and Marketing in the future means more engagement outside of the processes we are all accustomed to using.  Ultimately though, the engagement model should help us develop and maintain more loyal and emotionally connected customers, which is the success driver for most businesses today.

Of social media, text analytics and on-line surveys

Like many people these days, I spend increasing amounts of time using social media.  I visit LinkedIn forums regularly, where I find that other people are asking questions I might ask.  Or, where I am a resource to those asking the questions.  Besides the fact that I occasionally find leads and prospects this way, I find the give and take with people and the exchange of knowledge to be both personally enriching and often professionally useful.  I tweet from time to time too and have a Facebook page.  Given the growth in all manner of social media, lots of folks clearly feel the same way I do.

But for businesses social media is a challenge.  Businesses are typically not equipped to take advantage of social media and appear to be struggling with it.  But, as businesses become more aware of social media and raise their participation in it, they need to understand that they are creating multiple feedback "channels" that all need to be listened to. 

For  instance, today many businesses use on-line panels or communities to collect feedback from designated customer subsets.  But, in the social media world, is a product oriented LinkedIn forum simply a social media based panel or community?  I think the answer is Yes.  The difference is that in LinkedIn or on Facebook, members of the community initiate (and respond to) topic dialogues.  And, the forum or page may be "owned" by some member of the community and not by the company.  Members of the community / forum dialogue on subjects they feel are important or relevant and do it when its important or relevant to them.  Whereas in company directed panels and communities customers mainly react to company initiated dialogues.  So, social media is a different model requiring a different approach to the feedback being generated in the community.

Data flowing in from social media channels can be revealing as to customer needs, wants and issues (especially current ones).  Often, forum posts will illustrate needs for upgraded or enhanced products or services.  Yet, businesses have few options or even mechanisms available to help them organize and use this kind of feedback, with many relying on their people to scan LinkedIn forums and Facebook pages for relevant opportunities or challenges that require action by the business.
Needless to say, vendors of EFM platforms (like QuestBack) have mobilized to help businesses to dissect and analyze this kind of data so that it can be used to the benefit of the business.  Since much of the conversation occurring in social media environments is customer initiated, it's important that businesses have tools that enable "listening".  Many businesses use text analytics to provide this automated listening capability.  I work with a product called Etuma360 and find it very useful in interpreting text based feedback. 

However, pure text based feedback analysis can only take you so far.  In my experience, text analysis results typically need augmentation from more structured feedback - usually survey based - in order to provide actionable insights.  Text analysis can tell you what is happening and if it's good or bad.  But it doesn't tell you who its happening to, why, or if you should do anything about it.  For instance, text analysis might highlight that a problem exists amongst customers.  It typically won't tell you that the problem is within a certain customer subset.  If you have lots of customers, that can be a critical data point that determines how to react.  Being able to quickly deploy a survey into the social media environment that collects respondent profile information provides the additional insight needed to generate action at the business level.

Businesses therefore need to use social media, text analytics and survey technologies together to interpret dialogue, understand its meaning and provide insight into how to act.  Potentially a tall order.  But the technology is getting there.  Stay tuned.