Surviving and Thriving in the age of empowerment

The application of social media that appears to be gathering the most momentum is its use as a customer service channel. The cost efficiencies of dealing with problems using social media – monitoring customer comments on Twitter and Facebook – rather than a call centre, are compelling, especially at a time when most organisations are looking to cut operational costs . According to Ben Kay, EE’s head of digital strategy: “not only are social agents four times more efficient than telephone agents, but they also result in better Net Promoter Score ratings” (the critical metric for most customer service teams). It would appear that customers would far rather voice their complaints on social media than spend hours on hold in call centre hell, waiting to speak to a real person. The social customer service specialist, Conversocial, claims that 50% of us are already using social media for this purpose. The cost efficiencies of social customer service are also highlighted by a statistic from British Gas: according to Laura Price, the company’s social media manager, “Each view of a YouTube customer support video equates to an £80 saving on call centre costs”. Producing a simple YouTube video, explaining the solution to common customer problems, can generate massive cost savings.

Another growth area is the concept of mutual support, in which existing customers help new customers solve problems. This has been standard practice within the technology sector for years, but it is beginning to be used in other business sectors. According to the consultants at McKinsey, “Using customer communities to solve customer problems costs 10% of traditional call centres.” Not only does this approach save a huge amount of money, but it also flatters the people providing the advice: they feel good about being a source of expertise.

The innovative giffgaff business – O2’s experimental telecoms brand – has taken this collaborative model to a particularly sophisticated level, offering financial incentives – in the form of discounts that can be redeemed against the cost of calls – if members of the giffgaff community help other people resolve problems with their mobile phones. It is so successful, that according to giffgaff’s commercial manager, Vincent Boon, “Customer communities handle 85% of our customer support.” The cost savings that result from not having to operate an expensive call centre operation allow the company to offer some of the lowest call prices in the market.

Social customer service is not without its challenges. It turns the act of complaining and the resolution of those complaints into a public act: anyone can follow the interaction between customer and company. Some organisations will recoil from this level of public scrutiny, but the smart ones recognise that being seen to handle problems quickly and professionally, especially when done in a friendly manner, can enhance their reputation. Conversely, mishandling a customer complaint or adopting an inappropriate, over-officious and unfriendly tone of voice can have serious repercussions. The fashion and homeware retailer, Next, recently found itself in the middle of a social media storm when one of its social media team spotted a customer complaint on Twitter. The language used by the complainer was a touch fruity, although the Tweeter was not directly addressing her complaint to Next – i.e. she didn’t address her diatribe to @Next but to her personal followers. The Tweeted response from the person at Next was particularly clumsy: “We kindly ask you to remove your original tweet as the language used may offend other readers.” Another Twitter user, tracking the conversation, wasn’t impressed: “Dear @nextoffical Perhaps address/sort the complaint first before ticking customer … off for language?” A veritable Twitter-storm followed, summed up by another Tweet from an interested observer: “Bad delivery service, bad twitter management … is there anything Next can do well?”

The other big challenge posed by the rise of social customer service is the need for speed. Customers complaining on social media expect their enquiries to be dealt with within minutes. Research conducted by Social Habit (a US-based social media analyst) indicated that 67% of customers expect a response to their social media complaint within 24 hours, 42% within an hour and an impatient 32% within 30 minutes. This is a major challenge, given the tortuously slow nature of most organisational decision-making, in which front-line staff are often forced to seek the approval from multiple layers of management before responding to a customer complaint. It will also force organisations to operate their customer service function beyond traditional working hours: consumers will expect a rapid response to their complaint, even during evenings and weekends.

Within five years, social media will be the primary customer service channel for most organisations. The cost efficiencies are compelling and customers seem to prefer this way of complaining, so long as the subject of their complaint is able to respond quickly and sensitively. Traditional call centres will be replaced by teams monitoring streams of social media chatter, increasingly 24/7. The smart businesses are already experimenting with different monitoring systems and training their customer service teams to operate the technology. The social media-empowered customer has arrived.

There is one Christmas marketing campaign that continues to stand head and shoulders above all of the commercial rubbish: Lowe SSP3′s work for the Colombian government. For the past few years the campaign has used the power of Christmas – and the insight that even the most hard bitten guerrilla fighter are likely to be thinking about home and family at this time – to persuade FARC fighters in Colombia to demobilise.

This year’s campaign – Operation Bethlehem – involves the creation of beacons of light to mark safe havens for the wannabe deserters:

The campaign builds on the government’s previous initiative in which Christmas lights were left in parts of the Colombian jungle frequented by the guerrilla fighters. This simple use of Christmas imagery was enough to convince more the 300 fighters to demobilise.

A powerful insight. Brilliant execution. True ROI. Happy Christmas.

There have been plenty of false starts: for a time Quora looked liked being a contender, only to join all of the others on the list of social media platforms that almost made it.  But Pinterest – the visual social network – does look it will genuinely become the ‘next big thing.’  At present it is pretty insignificant in the UK with only around 200,000 users, but its spectacular growth in the US – where it was the fastest site to achieve 10 million users – suggests that it has a chance of becoming a mainstream platform.  It is easy to use, relies on a simple call to action – Pin It! – and appears to lend itself to commerce: it is apparently generating more referral traffic than Google+, LinkedIn and YouTube combined.  For any business selling products that rely on their aesthetic appeal - fashion, furniture, furnishing, cars, holidays – now is the time to take Pinterest seriously.

For a quick introduction to Pinterest, check out this video:

A marketers guide to Pinterest

Co-creation is one of the many myths propagated by the apostles of web 2.0. They would have us believe that millions of consumers are actively involved in the creation of ideas and concepts for their favourite brands. In fact why bother employing an agency creative team when there are millions of wannabe creative directors out there, willing to apply their brains and ‘Magic Markers’ to your brief. We are all creatives now.

The reality, according to The Future Foundation, is that only 15% of British consumers claim to have participated in some form of branded co-creation. This doesn’t mean that people aren’t creative – The Future Foundation also claims that around 50% of consumers say that ‘expressing their creativity is important to them’ and 60% regard creativity as ‘a route to personal fulfilment’ – they just don’t necessarily want to apply this creative urge to your brand or service.

The vast majority of successful co-creation or creative crowdsourcing initiatives have been more a case of ‘expert-sourcing’: this is more than mere semantics, the distinction is important. During the summer of 2009 Unilever decided to abandon the usual practice of deploying an advertising agency on its Peperami brand. It dismissed the agency that had worked on the brand for 15 years and created the successful ‘bit of an animal’ campaign and instead offered a prize of $10,000 to any creative team that could come up with the best-executed idea. Although the Unilever spokesperson claimed that the winning idea could come from a ‘plumber from Barnsley’, the fact that the contest was being run through an online community for creatives called ideabounty.com underlined how Unilever wanted primarily to attract entries from professional creative teams. The company also promoted the competition on the freelance recruitment sections of the major advertising and marketing blogs. It was therefore hardly surprising that the winning entry didn’t come from a Barnsley plumber, but from a former agency creative director working alongside a freelance copywriter. Nic Ray, speaking on behalf of the freelance creative community, explained the attraction of this approach for his peers: ‘ almost all agency creatives work on freelance briefs outside of their normal employ – and get paid substantially less than $10k for doing so. Here’s an opportunity to work on one of the UK’s most iconic (and irreverent) brands, pull out those brilliant back draw ideas that were never sold and have some fun shaking up the industry in the process.’

When it comes to involving members of the public it is far more appropriate for brand owners and agencies to talk about creative collaboration rather than co-creation or creative crowdsourcing. People are happy to collaborate on many different levels – depending on this level of interest in or enthusiasm for a particular brand or service – but you have to make it easy for them. Don’t give them a blank sheet of paper but instead give them the tools to customise and adapt. And don’t ask them to come up with ideas from scratch. Writer Eric Raymond used the metaphor of the ‘cathedral and the bazaar’ to describe two very different models of innovation within the software industry. The bazaar represents the loose, open source approach, harnessing the skills of the wider developer community, whereas the ‘cathedral’ represents the traditional, tightly controlled model. Raymond argues that both approaches are valid and potentially complementary, although the experience of the software industry suggests that the ‘bazaar’ is not particularly effective at originating concepts, which still rely on the spark of individual genius to make them happen, but is very effective at testing and improving them. So in the case of your creative brief, you still need the creative thinkers – working within the company’s or agency’s ‘cathedral’, to come up with the original ideas, which can then be tested and fine-tuned by the members of the ‘bazaar’.

W.L. Gore and Partners, the manufacturer of Gore-Tex, in addition to over a 1,000 other innovative products, has been described by Fast Company magazine as “the most innovative company in America.” It regularly comes top in rankings of the best places to work. Its founder Bill Gore believed in the importance of trusting people to do the right thing and in the unifying force of a strong corporate culture. He wanted to create a non-hierarchical, non-bureaucratic, self-regulating business, without rules, built around self-managed, small teams.

Over 50 years later, Gore continues to adopt a flat, team-based structure – they call it a ‘lattice structure’ – that is underpinned by a corporate philosophy that encourages initiative and a focus on personal fulfillment. You won’t find any organisational charts at Gore, any sense of hierarchy, job descriptions or prescribed chains of command. Decisions are made by those closest to a project, no one can be told what to do, bosses are described as ‘sponsors’ and teams largely self-organize around specific projects, typically without any pre-defined leadership.

Ann Gillies has the interesting challenge of heading the human resources function for W.L. Gore in the UK, which mirrors its US operation by rejecting a traditional hierarchy or formal job titles. True to the company’s ethos, there aren’t any HR policies and procedures. One of the practical benefits of this approach is that there is far less paperwork generated than in a typical HR department. It also means that the department operates with a much smaller headcount than the norm and allows the HR team to focus its time on the important stuff: helping people understand the Gore values and culture, rather than pushing paperwork around the office. In an interview with Personnel Today Magazine, Gillies explained how decision-making works within Gore: “We do need to make decisions here, we’re not a hippy commune,” she insists. “It’s about making sure something is happening, but not taking control – you’re not managing people, you’re letting the team work out the how and then get on with it …. I can imagine that in the military or in law enforcement you need some sort of control-and-command structure, but elsewhere, if you trust people, they will do a good job.”

This is the future of the HR function, as the guardian of the corporate culture, rather than the master of employee compliance. In fact, if HR departments renamed themselves as ‘culture departments’ and consigned the job descriptions and appraisal forms to the waste bin, they would almost certainly make a more effective contribution to corporate life.