Monday 1 June 2015

Social Media Is Indispensable & Personal


Earlier this year, I was invited by Jason Chu, the Chairman of the Asia Pacific Customer Service Consortium to speak at the Customer Relationship Excellence round table hosted by DHL on my views on Social Media as part of the O2O customer experience.

The first step is to recognize that Social is Personal and that is is indispensable as part of a customer experience.  The more involved you are, the more you can capture those moments to make it an awesome customer experience.

Being someone active in social media, my behaviour is typical of what customers are like, and companies should embrace and care about being engaged in social media.

Here are 5 why the Chief Customer Relations Officer should care:
1. I have 4000 followers on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Blogspot, Linked In
2. I wake up and reach for my phone to check my social accounts and that's the last thing I do before I go to sleep
3. I am great at multi-tasking: I am active on my social accounts at work or at play
4. I shoot, post, tweet, share and answered the responses before I finish my meal or leave any social event
5. I share everything - the good, bad and ugly. I am vocal. Hear me express myself!

In 2010, only 25% will share their negative experience on social media.  That has risen to 75% in 2015.  Capturing the negative is not all.  It has also become a sales generation tool.  Gartner's research suggests that by 2015, businesses around the world will get 50% of their sales from social media.

Looking at Gartner's Hype Cycle for Digital Marketing, we have already experimented on many elements from all the various stages.  We are definitely already on a journey in a new way of marketing supported by technology from real-time marketing, to data-driven marketing, to commerce everywhere, to web analytics, and so on.

But why are we not seeing the results of our technology and digital marketing getting exponential results?

Gartner thinks that only 80% of social business efforts will not achieve the intended benefits due to inadequate leadership and an overemphasis on technology.

From the response around the audience, while many have acknowledged that social media is here to stay and the customer engagement needs to evolve, many are still hesitant due to fear of backlash of negative comments going viral.  While the desire is there, the management focus, processes, policies and skills may not be ready.

Let's look at how well our top leader, the CEO is doing in embracing social media. IBM's CEO Study estimates that only 16% of CEO use social media as a tool to connect with customers.  This is expected to grow by 3.6x to to 57% by 2018.

The social transformation must start with setting the strategic goals and culture, strong executive sponsorship, integrated orchestration across the organization with new processes and roles, governance and policies, and then technology and standards.  Will the CEO drive this change?