Archive for the ‘Create a Customer Centric Institution’ Category

Social Media Today

Conversations are taking place today all over the social web that impact your business – whether you are a large commercial Enterprise, a government department responsible for executing policy and programs, a Small or Medium business trying to grow your business;  or a Not for Profit organisation perhaps trying to influence government policy.

Any and all of these organisations today must have a ‘Listening’ capability – the ability to ‘hear’ these conversations on the social web and in turn be able to analyse the resultant data to understand the impact of those conversations on sales, service, marketing, product development, policy formulation, policy execution and to understand the behavior and impact of customers, citizens, influencers and other conversations on your actions.

The social web and social media have a remarkable depth of information. It is possible to uncover detailed information on sentiment, demographics, locations, influencers, reach, amplification and more through the capturing and analysis of online conversations in social media.

And besides general analysis of social media conversations, it is possible to monitor specific competitors in business, or specific groups for government agencies. Indeed, it is possible to delve into a rich source of data to track movements in sentiment regarding specific topics, subjects or brands over time to understand whether your actions are influencing the conversations.

“If a conversation took place on the social web and you weren’t there to hear it did it really take place?”*

The Art and Innovation of Listening

It’s never been easier to hear what your citizens or consumers are saying about you or on subjects you are interested in.

*Brian Solis

STOP before you ENGAGE

Citizen engagement is an important element of government service delivery, and online tools may provide a unique opportunity to engage. It is important that our agencies not only focus on using tools because they exist; they need to think through how these tools can support deep engagement, and create conditions that allow citizens to participate in a meaningful and impactful way. Learn to build a social media team inside and outside state government.

However, before you start – STOP and think about the four points below!

1. You cannot tweet and chat with your citizens without the involvement of specific departments (e.g. Police, Fire, Emergency Services,..)
2. You cannot discuss topics in a forum without the involvement of your support teams
3. You cannot have a citizen service dialog without the participation of your service delivery departments
4. You cannot explore trends and demands without the inclusion of services procurement department

My thoughts on using SocialMedia to support citizen engagement are here.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) Services

Why is Net Promoter Score important?

Net Promoter is a customer loyalty metric developed by (and a registered trademark of) Fred Reichheld, Bain & Company, and Satmetrix. It was introduced by Reichheld in his 2003 Harvard Business Review article “The One Number You Need to Grow”. The most important proposed benefits of this method derive from simplifying and communicating the objective of creating more “Promoters” and fewer “Detractors” — a concept claimed to be far simpler for employees to understand and act on than more complicated, obscure or hard-to-understand satisfaction metrics or indices. In addition, proponents claim the Net Promoter method can reduce the complexity of implementation and analysis frequently associated with measures of customer satisfaction, providing a stable measure of business performance that can be compared across business units and even across industries, and increasing interpretability of changes in customer satisfaction trends over time.

How is Net Promoter Score applied?

Companies obtain their Net Promoter Score by asking customers a single question on a 0 to 10 rating scale: “How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?” Based on their responses, customers can be categorized into one of three groups: Promoters (9-10 rating), Passives (7-8 rating), and Detractors (0-6 rating). The percentage of Detractors is then subtracted from the percentage of Promoters to obtain a Net Promoter score. A score of 75% or above is considered quite high.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Emperor’s clothes – Selling through Social Media – Why should you care?

There is a dichotomy occurring in sales where our customers are driving commoditization of our products and services and vendors trying to position themselves as unique.

Understanding this and leveraging the right Social Media tactics is truly a case of the Emperor’s clothes as customers have changed from 5yrs ago and we can’t employ the same tactics.

Customers do this through trying to decrease differentiation, introduction of new technologies, introducing competition, and being more demanding. The traditional approach to attack this by suppliers is to define new products/services, encompass value added services to the product/service, attempt to bundle offerings, and provisioning of customized options.

The arguments I have heard from many sales organizations are:

• Customers are getting tougher to deal with
• Treat you more like a commodity
• But they also demand more expertise and support than ever before
• They are using new purchasing techniques to force greater concessions from their suppliers Read the rest of this entry »