Sipping fine coffee the morning after dinner at Claridge’s is happiness itself.

Especially on a warm spring morning when London’s buzzing.

It is certainly one good reason to become a NewVoiceMedia customer and go the cloud route for your customer interaction infrastructure.

It’s a space that has turned up full time on my radar. Amongst the many topics I work to keep up with, cloud services have rapidly become part of the zeitgeist. A lynchpin in the evolutionary transformation of doing business that’s currently in play. Especially in relation to customer engagement.

Just a few short years ago I was lending my voice to premise based solutions. Frustrated and bored at the snail’s pace of getting everything plugged in, no-one ever seemed to arrive. You know, do stuff with all the amazing functionality. And maybe then enjoy the benefit of becoming known for it.

‘Universal Queuing’, ‘Personalised Service’, ‘Multi-Modal Interaction’. Great YouTube eye candy but seldom spotted in active service. Somehow it all seemed too damned hard to get off the ground. No doubt the effect of a strong gravitational pull and no headwind.

That’s not to say peoples’ imagination of where to go, as and when the lights eventually flashed green, was in any way missing. But unless you were an Amazon, a Zappos or evergreen First Direct, the remaining alphabet of inspiring case studies was pretty much threadbare.

Cloud Based Customer Engagement Is Attracting New Brands

And that’s what impressed me as I listened to the assembled table of early adopters. People weren’t focussed on the trauma of getting the kit in place. Instead their imagination was directed at “joining up the dots”. For them that meant launching fresh episodes of their customer engagement story as fast as they could experiment then learn ‘n scale.

Their sense of forward momentum was nearly as good as the “Sautéed Scottish Scallops With Sevruga Caviar” that arrived as the third instalment of a seven course epic. Actually that’s not even remotely true. The food was way better! But their orientation did win me over for being a country mile from old school mindsets.

In fact, if they had a common point of reference, it was not to be part of any legacy call centre practice and culture. That belonged in a parallel and distant universe. They insisted they were about something other than AHT (average handle time).  Instead their vocabulary was peppered with ‘customer insight’, ‘recognising VIP customers’, ‘scaling to meet fluctuating demand’ and ‘providing a common view of customer interaction across our global footprint’.

Great to hear about these from customers instead of a vendor EVP pitch. A strong indication that advanced functionality is perceived as within grasp for cloud customers. Especially those that cannot afford the quality of technical resource traditionally demanded to get all this up and running.

Maybe that alphabet of case studies will start filling out over the next few years.

Extended Functionality Without Integration Pains – All Part Of The Service

Most at the dinner table enjoyed tight links between their customer interaction and customer data capabilities. This is courtesy of NewVoiceMedia and Salesforce’s mutual love of cloud integration. With the latter providing a particularly rich pool of add-on functionality.

These vendor ecosystems are another characteristic of going shopping in the Cloud. As consumers, most of us have already sampled the simplicity of ‘app store’ style access. When transferred to business, brands can build out their customer engagement workflows in an organic way. Minus, of course, the old school hassle of ‘point solution’ integration costs and delays.

This is a big deal. A major IT headache simply no longer exists. Being back in control as business users was a commonly celebrated theme I picked up on.

What’s Left On The Roadmap?

By the way if you are the type to drool over menus, here is the one that Gordon Ramsey’s team produced for the NewVoiceMedia customer club . I’ve already confessed that food plus the ambience of Claridge’s and a stream of good conversation put me in an excellent mood. So did I end up too starry eyed?

Certainly not everything is done and dusted on the customer engagement ‘to do’ lists I heard being discussed. We hit on a few topics that caused reflection since they had not been top of mind.

For instance, Customer Strategy. A long term favourite of mine which I think is even more important now that getting hold of the right functionality in no longer the deal breaker it’s often been. Yet I still polled the same <10%. A recurring benchmark when I ask at any comparable gathering. To my mind that’s a weakness. Being excellent at anything needs a plan.

A Data Strategy is another area that’s long been a thorn in the side of intelligent customer interaction. Customer data is hard to gather, cleanse and normalise. Just ask those trying to make sense of social data!  These issues have not gone away just by virtue of cloud access.

But CTI based routing is at least baked into the core proposition which democratises access to a crucial capability that only flowed so far down the market when exclusively a premise based solution.

I’d also argue that as Smartphone culture continues to popularise our transition to a mobile lifestyle, the improved hit rate on recognising customers via their CLI (caller line identification) makes this an even stronger routing option.

I know many reading this will have heard the ‘routing rap’ before. But this time I’m willing to wager that before long we might actually start hearing stories from our own personal networks. Such as being recognised as a VIP customer or being connecting to the same person looking after our ongoing situation as a matter of course. We shall see.

The last topic I picked up on was the people side of any service proposition. I think this remains work in progress, if for no other reason, than we still score poorly in the UK on employee engagement. While command and control is in certain decline, I’m not sure that many organisations have worked out what its replacement really means.

Empowerment is often mistaken for no longer needing to pay any management attention at all. As you might guess I disagree with that view. People in service roles need to have their energy and willingness to give regularly replenished. It’s a human thing.

Anyway a quote from someone at the customer club showed some recognition of the issue.

“…In particular the discussion about enabling our people resonated with me. We have no barriers to where we locate people and nor do we place them under unnecessary pressure to close calls but I’m sure we could do more to improve their knowledge which would enable them to offer a greater customer experience…”

Closing Thoughts On Clouds And Claridge’s

So apart from the nosh, was anything else worth mentioning as reasons to belong to such a club? I reckon this guest nailed it when he concluded in a ‘morning after the night before’ email.

“…You quite often get a large degree of obstruction (some conscious, mostly subconscious) when instigating change programs to improve customer experience so being in a room of like minds charges the “customer battery”.

I quite agree.

By the way, as testiment to the whole evening’s topic, the service chez Gordon was impeccable!

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Social Media and Financial Services are getting to know each other pretty well.

There are some obvious opportunities to be grabbed. For decades B2C verticals such as banking and insurance brands have littered doormats and TV screens with broadcast style messaging. Yet even the most inventive direct marketing only provided one way response mechanisms as a token form of interaction.

The net result was ever diminishing returns from a generation of consumers that learnt to tune out the noise and instead preferred to seek advice and recommendation from trusted sources.

So what’s being done? Certainly the race is on to persuade C-Suiters that they need to invest in the social business model. And as ever, those at the top find themselves challenged to accept ideas that are not native to their own generation or  instinctive ways of thinking.

Finding Reasons To Engage

Nonetheless the train is leaving the station and 2012 and beyond will host another era of experimentation from financial service brands.  This time hoping that customer engagement, using the channels and culture of social networking, will deliver better returns than legacy direct marketing techniques. Of course for those that get it and have set the right expectation, they know this is not about any instant success in order to deliver next quarter’s funnel targets.

Instead they have realistically set the scene that social engagement is a matter of long term strategic intent. That of building a new identity which today’s increasingly self sufficient customer finds valuable. Of course a well executed social campaign, maybe embedded with gamification hooks, is still capable of delivering immediate customer wins and renewals. But the bigger issue of learning to become a social brand remains.

For some, this may start with assessing the many communities of interest that matter to customers and which a brand can become affiliated with as part of establishing that new identity.

Like health, wealth is a common human concern and a great opportunity to engage for those that provide such services. Equally, reducing the risks from going about one’s daily business is a great point of focus for insurance brands. Might this allow them to deepen their relationship with consumers, which in many insurance niches has become transitory and purely task focussed? That’s the carrot currently dangling out there.

Thus, there are many opportunities for creative brands to set about redefining their value to customers and prospects. The key will be to experiment intelligently and find out how investments in listening, dialoguing and all the other aspects of engagement can be integrated with more traditional business processes.

One Agenda

The notion of ‘customer engagement’ is catalytic since it cuts across silos. This emerging era of Social Business is going to redefine how key customer facing functions such as Marketing, Sales and Customer Service learn how to gravitate towards a common agenda.

This is not a trivial matter. Goals and rewards amongst these teams have never been consciously synergised. Hence all the dumb behaviour that costs brands so much in effectiveness and goodwill as blindsided functions bump into each other in pursuit of their own incentivised priorities.

Have you noticed they are also populated by different types of people?  Imagine an identity parade. Could you spot the Marketer, the Salesperson or the Customer Service representative? I bet you could. Why? Ask any recruiter and they will instantly tell you that they come from ‘different countries’. No surprise then that any cross-over between these tribes remains uncommon.

So how are these culturally diverse groups inducted into the greater cause of ‘One Agenda’? In other words, helped to consciously recognise that they now need to be witnessed as a coherent brand? Remember, the essence of being ‘good’ at social is accepting that a brand’s behaviour is now transparent and so must be made congruent in the collective eyes of their online audiences.

Listening and learning together is a good start. This is enabled through social media monitoring and a shared interaction workflow. These allow brands to organise unified responses to what their target audiences are communicating on social networks. Of course this is guided through interaction policy about when to respond, who should respond and how to respond if things get ugly.

Some brands that have advanced beyond first base are also busy empowering much larger numbers of workers to engage in the belief that making customers part of the company is the right radical next step to take. Crowd-sourcing, co-creation, co-evolvement is some of the new language being formed to describe this new unprecedented level of involvement.

Piggy In The Middle

One of the short term issues being thrown up during this seismic shift is how social customer service is being delivered. From what I’ve just described, it should be pretty obvious that social customer service is more than just adding Facebook and Twitter as the latest arrivals in an ever expanding multi-channel strategy. In fact getting the latest upgrade from your customer service technology partner is the least of it.

It remains true that most social customer service teams are owned by the Marketing/PR axis. Some may have moved into the traditional customer service environment but remain specialist units. Those able to ‘talk Shakespeare’ in 140 characters now find themselves in great demand. Interestingly these teams often become multi-cultural in their membership and so provide an early glimpse into how social business activity might be resourced in the future.

In the main, these small teams operate outside the cultural and policy norms of the customer service mother ship. In fact much of the initial popularity of social customer service from the customers’ perspective lies in that difference. They appreciate the ‘humanness’, ‘responsiveness’, the ‘concierge style service’ being provided through the process pitfalls of middle office red tape. These customer advocates have scored highly for their more customer friendly house style.

However they risk suffering the same fate as their cousins in traditional customer service. They are expected to absorb the mismatch between customer and brand priorities and so end up ‘piggy in the middle’ between the internal and external agendas that brands seem to find so difficult to effectively align.

The idea of using feedback from the front line to change the business is not new. NPS, customer effort, speech analytics and so on have already provided some of the stepping stones to rebuilding an Outside-In culture. But its tough. And the blueprint is not yet out there for everyone to access.

Nonetheless I remain optimistic. All things social are currently part of the zeitgeist. They have mojo and plenty of folk are pushing hard for a different way. So it will be interesting to see if the messages that social customer service teams take back into the heart of their organisations are listened to more than has been the case to date.

Maybe the fear of reputational risk has opened a few more senior eyes than before. Equally, a new generation of operational management could be more in tune with customer sentiment.

Let’s hope 2012 turns out a defining year.

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Related posts:

1. Social Media Is The New Customer Service?
2. Will Customers Use Social Media Strategically?
3. Is Social Media About To Prove Itself A Great Consumer Con?
4. Social Media & Debt Management
5. Will Social Media Tear Up Traditional Corporate Life?

Here’s what the Customer Service industry is missing: a service catalogue.

A what? It’s like a product catalog, only for customer service.

Your service in fact. The one you provide to your customers, courtesy of your customer service operation. It’s strange but true that service professionals never think of telling their customers what they ‘sell.’ For a product marketer, this would be the equivalent of forgetting to get dressed before going in to work!

Let me scene set a little more while you figure out if I’m nuts or onto something we might have all missed.

Why Product Marketing Is Smarter Than Service Marketing (for now)

The ‘no service catalog’ is a long standing soapbox topic for me. I was reminded about it again when I had the pleasure of being a guest presenter at one of the world’s top high fashion brands.

It was great. I was in a beautifully decorated environment, surrounded by beautiful people who sell beautiful things. Even my presentation on the wonderfully expensive LCD screen looked its Sunday best. I was in heaven.

I’m sure I won’t be rocking your boat by telling you that selling at a premium price needs an equivalent product.

It has to look the business. And that comes down to exquisite design and execution. I don’t know what their ‘little blue book’ contains for those entrusted with materials sourcing, manufacture and packaging. But it must be a work of immense detail and clarity, given the conscious branding effort put in everywhere else. Even the refrigerators were ‘on message!’

This is something I admire about people who make things. They have the good fortune to immediately see if their product quality is rubbish. Whereas we in the customer service industry can ignore the fact that the IVR has ‘bits’ missing, or that a customer journey has been ‘sown’ into a dead end.

You must have watched a shopper carefully examine the quality of a line of stitching before buying a garment. That’s why the same shopper gets frustrated at sloppy service delivery. The comparison in her mind is all too obvious.

So my point is this: why do we in the customer service industry still feel it is OK to duck out of being clear with customers what we deliver?

As a sign of our growing maturity, we need to make it clear what the customer can expect and produce our equivalent of product labelling. It’s called your service menu.

This is what I mean:

Launch Your Own Service Catalog (you might be first)

Figuring out answers to this type of checklist becomes the basis of your service catalog which is then promoted to customers in the same way that product catalogs already are.

Having issued this challenge many times before, I can anticipate the way you have been shaking your head and thinking about all the reasons why this is a bad idea. So let me leave you with two further thoughts.

Imagine yourself as a customer being offered this. Would it have a positive or negative impact? Secondly, what would such a challenge do to catalyse everyone in Customer Service and raise their game to the point that they could offer a defined, guaranteed service with confidence?

It’s worth a chat at the next team meeting at least!

PS. The groundwork for producing effective customer service options is laid out in this associated post “Thinking About Multi-Channel“.

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This post is for anyone in customer leadership who needs to think clearly about their multi channel strategy.

Offering a multi channel service is now expected and technology solutions are plentiful. But what’s the thought process that drives success and avoids poor customer experience and disapointing internal ROI?

Beware Those Predictions!

The last few years have been awash with predictions on how multi-channel is bound to end up. Here’s a few of the more common ones. Versions of which you’ve no doubt encountered.

Queuing to speak is just so pre Gen Y. Text-based interaction now rules!

 

Traditional customer service = outmoded mindset. Real-time, social customer service is the future!

 

Live service is dead. Long live self-service!

 

The usual formula for this style of headline grabbing conclusion is a personal story suggesting how customer preferences are changing, mixed with a smattering of consumer research to ‘prove’ the prediction.

For added authenticity, some will claim the extra mile by letting you know they’ve made calls to important people in the industry. As some kind of  divination booster!

This house style is now so widespread it’s become all too easy to lapse into an unquestioning state of acceptance. We’ve come to absorb these back and white absolutes without engaging any little ‘grey cells’. A faculty so rightly prized by that skilled scrutineer of human behaviour- Hercules Poirot.

Still Some Time Away From ‘One Agenda’

In fact, this is one of the early issues you have to face when trying to craft a decent multi-channel strategy. Whose prediction can be trusted? The more you read, the more confusing it becomes. Establishing a set of foundation stones you feel confident building a strategy on becomes a real frustration.

Here is an insider tip that may help you decode and make sense of this ragbag of predictions.

Have you noticed most of us commentators betray either a functional or generational bias? Bear this in mind when evaluating anything themed around “The Future Of Multi-Channel”.

For instance, customer needs look different if you are schooled in Marketing rather than a Customer Service or an e-commerce mindset. Glancing through all the material I’ve collected, I find it no co-incidence that research sponsored by those with a heritage in call centres find voice interactions still command an overwhelming majority of customer traffic. Whereas text based interaction is most commonly top of the leader board in Digital Marketing sponsored insight. And guess what the Social business pundits see as a dead cert?

Funny thing this prediction game! Equally it’s a ‘no shit Sherlock’ moment to say that a twenty something blogger has a different generational propensity around communication preferences compared with a forty something commentator.  And their advice to you will often betray that.

In fact those assumptions are more deeply ingrained than you might at first imagine. And it’s worth understanding why.

My take is that the generation of communication technology you grow up with remains instinctively core to you forever. For some it is letter writing. For others it is a real time text message.  The form as such does not matter. What does matter is how you and your social network learnt to relate and endlessly discuss the business of life. Think teens and their 24×7 need to maintain a live feed into their social network.  T’was ever thus!

In later life, the medium becomes as fondly remembered as the message.

That’s why a letter for a certain generation signifies respect. For others it smacks of officialdom. More than once I’ve heard how proud dads wonder why their kid never answers e-mail.  Surely we are both online so what’s the problem? But the digital stallion has bolted: from Outlook to Hotmail to Messaging to Facebook. Maybe they are all text based. But they are also different countries culturally.

Managing Cultural Diversity

So where does all this get us?

I’m a long term fan of asking customers what they want around their communication preferences rather than guessing. Too many ‘new’ channels arrive under the pretext of delivering a cheaper solution and therefore have to be foisted on unwilling customers who kill the ROI by refusing to use them.

Since channel choice grows and seldom shrinks, a smarter way of prioritising customer needs is something else you need to source.

One tactic is to provide a communication preferences service. For instance, this can be offered when a new customer is on-boarded.  Preferences are added to individual CRM customer records to function as an ongoing interaction business rule.  Given that customer engagement is now recognised as a prime goal in digital strategy, surely it helps kick-start matters by engaging via preferred channels?

What Else Drives Channel Choice?

While we retain preferred ways of communicating, it’s also true that most of us can be persuaded to expand our channel choice based on circumstance.  Let’s explore what can trigger such behaviour.

Here’s a discussion slide I often pull out during a typical BrainFood ‘Next Generation Customer Service Workshop’. The original slides are here if you want to use them.

All the listed bullet points are worth thinking about as a way to help put you more vividly into your customers’ shoes. Obviously finding out directly from them is the ideal next step once you completed this act of creative imagination.

So to answer the question of what influences someone’s choice of communication channel, here are four contextual buckets.

The Task They Are Undertaking

The Situation They Find Themselves In

Their Communication Habits

Their Awareness Of Communications Options

And here’s the thought process around each.

In terms of ‘doing stuff’, humans display a common characteristic. The desire to find shortcuts. Like water finding the shortest route downhill.

Have you ever noticed how people will walk diagonally across a section of grass if it gets them round a corner faster? In spite of all the curb stones that signal you should be staying off the grass and remain on the pavement.

As if that was ever capable of policing people’s instinct!

This trait shows up in IVR queues. It’s an open secret with some brands that selecting their sales option gets you through faster as a transfer to customer service.  Iterative customer behaviour uncovers the shortcut and then shares it on sites like gethuman.com

The moral of the tale is that customers will always game your traffic flow if it does not suit them. Equally, ATMs worked from the word go because they continue to offer a genuine shortcut to accessing cash.

So, have your customers discovered an equivalent? If so, can you upgrade  it into a mainstream form of interaction?

Moving on. The perceived importance of the task to the customer also drives channel choice. Understanding why it’s important to customers is a key UX design factor.

For instance, if the task at hand is important to me, will I trust an unfamiliar channel? Email communication between organisations and their customers suffers a lingering reputation for being unreliable. That autobot response often creates the opposite intended impression. That no-one is really at home! In relation to a time critical enquiry this triggers a fear “When, if ever, will they actually respond?  Might as well phone to be sure”.

At least with a phone call, you can convey importance through tone of voice, use of language, a direct appeal to the person listening. Even a demand to escalate the issue. We know Autobots and Avatars on the other hand don’t give a fig.

Someone I know extremely well just won’t buy online. Happy to use BBC iplayer all day long. But not the bit that requires credit cards and shopping carts. Even though their demographic suggests otherwise! It’s still a face to face world for them.

In another customer scenario, accuracy might make the communication an important one and thus influence choice of channel. Or expectation of a certain experience might be high on the list. Common sense says complaining via a self service routine is not as emotionally satisfying as telling it directly to a person.

So in summary the type of task and the importance it has to the customer influences which channels are chosen as most suitable. If you buy this analysis of behaviour, do you know what matters to your own customers in terms of communication priorities or ‘top tasks?’

By the way I recently listened to a great presentation from Gerry McGovern who has obviously thought long and hard about helping customers achieve what he calls their ‘top tasks’. He was demonstrating how the need to engineer online functionality to make those top tasks easy to do, is even more important when designing a mobile experience. Anyway, I found it facinating and practical advice. The presentation is a little under an hour, so here is a shorter take on his thinking from his web site “What Is Task Management?”. Well worth bookmarking for later.

The next set of reasons sit in the bucket called ‘Situation’. Does the choice of communication channel change if I’m at home, at the office or on the move? Should this consideration influence your multi-channel strategy? It’s worth an empathetic moment.

For instance, at home you might have better broadband speeds than in the office and so you try out the self help video clips on the You Tube channel. Anyway You Tube might be blocked as part of the social media lockdown at the office.

Or maybe you are travelling by road. Hopefully you not going to try and web chat and drive at the same time! But you might try ‘hands free’. Still it’s hard to concentrate on detailed information.

Maybe if this was discovered (as a qualifying question for mobile/cell numbers), then Customer Services or Sales might have developed a specially expedited workflow before you lose concentration or pop out of signal.

Try taking this idea a bit further. Being in a rush is a pretty common condition these days. So in recognistion, can you design two versions of service. One for ‘time to spare’ and one for ‘in a rush’? News services have long and short form versions of their product. Could this work in a service context?

Imagine something else. You might be trying to make contact during lunch break. Furiously multi-tasking via touchscreen as you wait in queue to pay for your lunch. By the way, delivering effective sales and service via smartphone is a whole new issue that will need a separate chapter in your strategy.

Finally, consider a customer’s communication options? Maybe out of signal range. Maybe their phone was stolen on holiday and are using a landline at the airport? Maybe they only have access to a desktop and Google search. In the good ol’ days we might dismiss that as their proble. If we are meant to be competing on service with every other brand in the known universe, is that still such a good idea?

Winding Down

OK that’s probably enough. Here is the second companion slide which suggests a few of those foundation stones we mentioned at the start as a practical way of moving forward.

The last point on the slide is a good one to end on. If you don’t let customers know you offer 24×7 twitter service or a shop online-collect instore service, how are they to know? In fact, effectively promoting service is the next part of the puzzle. In my view Customer Service Marketing is as important as Product Marketing. Which is why the topic of ‘Promoting Service‘ got it own separate post for you to read as soon as you are ready.

Thanks for listening!

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In another time and another place I used to spend many an evening sharing personal insights in the company of others.

(You can DM me if you really want to know why).

When one person was done, someone else would pick up the communication baton.

It was sometimes cathartic. Often dull. Occasionally so funny it left you breathless. Both for the person risking reputation and dignity by publicly exploring ‘their truth’ and for those doing the listening. In fact the dynamic of the process only worked if both played their role. As communicator and as collective witness.

When everyone got in the zone, boundaries dissolved and a purer, more direct form of human experience was unleashed. As collective witness you’d often feel the person communicating was speaking on your behalf. As communicator you could sense the moderating presence of those listening. Even while speaking, you’d know if what was coming out of your mouth was the real deal or fabricated twaddle.

Such a clean source of feedback is priceless in the face of our personal capacity for ongoing self delusion.

What’s New? Maybe Transparency

I’m telling you this story because like most I’m trying to chisel out a way of describing what is new in this hyper networked age we currently live in. I won’t use the S (social) word since I know it already makes many feel sick and deeply irritated with its escalating overuse. But the way we can now all play witness is causing those being witnessed to at least become self conscious about their standards of behaviour and at best, actually start to modify them.

Last week at a trade show I met up with Mitch Leiberman. We started that chiseling conversation. He started with ‘Authentic’. I started with ‘Transparent’. We ran out of time to hammer it all out but both words provided diving boards into a useful way of looking at things.

By the way if you fancy the ‘Authentic’ diving board then check out Mitch’s blog. He thinks straight and writes well. If you want to stay with ‘Transparent’ then this is my line of argument.

The Impact Of Being Witnessed

This conversation sits in the context of a growing sense of anger and disillusionment that can be heard about organisations who just don’t get it. They are accused of remaining  indifferent to vital stakeholders’ interests (aka customer and co-workers). This is in spite of overwhelming audience participation that begs to differ.

“We can see you” taunts the online crowd. “Your products suck. Your service stinks. Your prices are the backend of all abominations!” Change or be damned. The narrator then comes on stage and assures them that since 520% of all customers now leave such naughty brands, justice is served. Even if such exaggerated arithmetic doesn’t really add up, it all helps condemn the behaviour. Rather like booing the villain in English pantomime if you’ve enjoyed that ritual. Certainly as surreal.

Interestingly there is a parallel track going on with the ‘global goes local’ protest movement against Wall St. Their narrative is similar. “We’ve seen you”. “You might try and play possum”. “But we are going to keep bearing witness until ‘enough say that’s enough’ and you are forced to change.” Encouragingly many onlookers have wished them well before they scurry off to work. Maybe the cultural experience of ‘dark satanic mills‘ is still real for many of them.

Of course organisations have the same capacity for self delusion as individuals. In fact I wouldn’t argue if you countered by saying it was a capacity multiplied many times over.

The dynamics remain the same though. Such is the fallout from hubris, fear, greed and any other of the great ‘sins’. So called, because of their personally corrosive effects which in this context also become amplified into an organisational reality. Thus a transparent view of the world beyond those revolving doors of HQ reception is replaced with self deception.

This state of psychological disease is often deeply held over long periods of time and even generations of leadership. This is the consequence of such behaviours never being witnessed. Until now that is. Having to do virtually every aspect of  business in the full glare of a globally networked witness has poured light into some festeringly dark places.

But let’s momentarily return to the psychology driving this behaviour that so maddens the crowd. What maddens them is the lie. As ‘witness’ they can see it. As plain as day. YOUR SKIRT IS UP YOUR KNICKERS! they chant. But guess how the self deluded behave?  Organisations might claim to be on the right agenda but tell tale behaviour says otherwise.

So why do organisations lie about their ambitions?  Because the real ones are ugly and so are kept hidden from view.

It doesn’t take much to figure out that hubris fear and greed don’t sound like crowd winning brand values. So instead a more acceptable face is presented. Thus recruitment and induction is inspiring until corridor chatter punctures the dream. Even award winning brand messaging, revitalised with location based gamification gloss, cannot mask the downer of discovering you are one of the 70% of customers that are left unanswered having complained on Twitter.

As in all of those morality based fairy stories,  the wicked usually come unstuck as the gap is revealed between who they claim to be and who they motivationally reveal themselves to actually be.

What’s your word for that catalyst? Mine is Transparency. It transforms or destroys.

What Price For A Business World Run On Transparency?

Well for a start there is Facebook. As a business, it has never been easier to understand your target customer. Timelines combined with the vocabulary of Actions and Objects effectively makes the consumers’ previously labelled ‘private life’ transparently clear to the analyst, product designer and marketer.

What to make of this? A marvellous example of individual transparency laying out your life experiences to be shared and enjoyed by friends? Or the unwitting act of painting your wallet neon in return for social business offering unprecedented levels of personalised product and service? Undoubtedly, two sides of the same coin.

The question for the consumer of course is to wonder if this remains a one way mirror? Or will brands that now know me so well authentically reciprocate? Whatever the answer to that,  it has reset the boundaries for transparency.

The same game is also starting within the organisation. And maybe this is cause for hope. We are learning to publically collaborate outside our silos and also be witnessed outside the traditionally private relationship of employee:manager.

For instance, the social employee motivation service WorkSimple  builds its motivational service around the concept of social goals, where employees publicly commit to the goals they hope to achieve, and the software tracks achievement as well as the intertwined goals and accomplishments of team members.

The service has since added the concept of a “work story” as part of each employee’s profile that serves as a running record of accomplishments at work. Now, WorkSimple will allow employees to share items from that profile, like goals they have set or recognition they have achieved, publicly on their LinkedIn profiles.

This is all great stuff. Customers and co-workers are getting a taste of the new transparency. If you have nothing to hide, there is much to gain. If not, then time is ticking. I really do pray that the effect of a more transparent world will be to transform or destroy those brands still with something to hide from customers and co-workers.

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As in all areas of life, the art and skill of listening matters.

Our work life certainly demands it. In fact customer listening and co-worker listening (new term?) are now core to keeping corporate headlights pointed in the right direction.

Given that’s becoming accepted wisdom, it’s both strange and unfortunate we don’t know a great deal about how listening works. Or for that matter find ourselves well educated in becoming good at listening. Either personally or organisationally.

Back in the day, I was lucky enough to absorb 27 sessions of communication skills training. Every week for three hours. All practical work. Building stamina and capability to listen. I seem to remember doing that twice over for some reason. Maybe the second was an advanced version. I then unwittingly repeated the whole cycle when I moved from rookie to apprentice trainer. Glad I did. I still experience benefiting from that investment today.

In today’s world, full of transformational themes such as Social Business and Customer Experience Management, customer listening has emerged as a hot topic. Listening platforms (Social Media Monitoring) and Voice Of The Customer (VoC) are fast becoming mainstream investments.  Thus listening, in one form or another, appears to be pretty much established as a mandatory start point for delivering valued change.

Maybe that’s why session three in this series proved more popular than I’d expected. Having caught up with many of the people that re-tweeted it across their own networks, I’m pleased to tell you that the topic of Customer Listening has broad appeal across pretty much all front line cultures. Sales gets it. Customer Service gets it. Marketing gets it.

That is to say they recognise how it impacts their own ambitions. And of course “social” versions of those functions double get it. Even Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff is going nuts for it. And he is never one to miss an opportunity!

This tells me there is a hunger to find out more. So in that spirit, here are some further insights I picked up as I went digging into the research literature on listening.

By the way for those new to this series, a quick pointer. The underlying assumption is that organisational listening is a version of what individuals do. Therefore understand the human process and the competencies for any organisational model become clearer.

If you can live with that notion, read on.

Why Listening & Hearing Are Not The Same

Although there is a common belief that customer listening is on the up, I’m not so sure it’s listening that taking place. Instead I think we are doing rather more hearing than we might imagine.

This is what I mean.

The terms hearing and listening are often used interchangeably in everyday life. Normally that is fine.  But in order to learn how to listen effectively, it is important to understand the differences between both activities.

Although hearing is a complex process, it is essentially an automatic, passive activity. It is possible to hear sounds without consciously engaging in the process. Whereas, listening requires a conscious effort from you in order to make sense of what another person is saying.

Think of it like this.

You have the ability to use your ears and your brain in two modes. Hearing mode and listening mode.

Each has its own purpose and both function in a different way. Hearing is a ‘wide-band’ process. Listening is a “narrow-band” process. We will get into what that means later on once we have grounded more of the story as to why  ‘listening’ and ‘hearing’ are not the same thing.

Here is another difference. Unlike listening, which is a skill we have to develop throughout our lives, everyone gets born with their hearing capability switched on. From then on, providing that physical equipment is not damaged, we spend the rest of our life able to hear. Nothing to learn, we just do it.

For instance, ever wondered why you don’t have the equivalent of eyelids for your ears? Just not needed as an ‘always on’ faculty.

What Hearing Is Good For

A quick soundbite of social history.

Humans learnt to hear before they learnt to listen to each other. It’s an older, universal skill. Early on in our human evolution, hearing was a more urgent survival skill than listening. Hearing could locate danger before eyesight and therefore was vital in the never ending struggle to stay alive.

You have remnants of that instinct within you today. For instance have you ever wondered why a person can sleep through the louder sound of a train passing nearby and then be instantly awake because of a faint noise from their child’s room?

The mechanics are this. Your hearing prioritises events for you. Or to be more accurate, your hearing turns down the volume on sounds that are non-threatening. The result? You become better at picking out those things you do need to respond to from the overall inflow of sound you constantly process.

That night time train is a regularly experienced sound. Your child’s cry is different. It is unexpected and is registered as potentially urgent. And since you are hardwired to protect your offspring, you respond by waking up. Unlike listening which needs your conscious attention, hearing allows you to tune in even during your sleep.

This is the upside of the way your hearing works. It filters out irrelevant sound for you then alerts you when something’s important. Similar to the way a firewall keeps away unwanted stuff but lets through the right stuff. Or the way that social media monitoring filters the signal:noise ratio of online chatter to an acceptable level.

But the downside is that hearing is all about the overall landscape of sound. It has one mission.  Regulating how much sound filters through to your conscious attention. It does that to keep you sane. If it stopped playing this gate-keeping role, imagine how you would feel if everything your hearing picked up then demanded equal attention from you? You just could not keep up. Even with a gallon of Blue Mountain coffee inside you!

We face the same issue with social networks. Trying to pick out the voices that matter to our individual organisations.

For the sake of mental comfort, your hearing turns down the volume. Thus making that landscape of sound you walk through every day, more “background” and less “intrusive”. Why? Because your attention span is finite and easily drainable. Similar to a rechargeable battery in fact.

This means your ears only tend to message your brain with alerts on sounds that fit a certain profile. For instance sounds that suggest the need for immediate or emergency action such as the cry of a child. It’s a kind of exception based reporting that actually works!

OK that’s enough on hearing. I’m sure you are getting the idea. Let’s wrap up this part of the story keeping this summary in mind.

The role of hearing is to keep you safe. It filters all sounds allowing the everyday ‘soundscape’ to become just a background feature in your awareness. Without directly focusing on it, you know it’s there. But you can’t make out individual sounds without switching into listening mode.

What Listening Is Good For

You move into listening mode as soon as your attention becomes focused on a particular sound. This demands you redistribute some of your energy from the ‘wide-band’ configuration of hearing  into the ‘narrow-band’ of focused attention. Thus triggering the start of the listening process.

In doing so something significant happens.

One of the great qualities about your hearing is that you have seemingly unlimited stamina and capability to hear. No doubt you’ve noticed that you don’t get tired from hearing in the same way that you get tired from listening. That’s because the energy to fuel listening is much higher octane. Since it burns up faster, it runs out faster and so you get tired much more quickly. If listening is the sprinter, then hearing is the long distance runner.

Maybe this is why we end up just hearing customers rather than listening to them. Since we don’t appreciate the dynamics, we don’t  budget sufficient energy and resources to focus the required level of attention that listening demands. I’m sure the same can be said of co-worker dialogue.

Anyway back to the description. That higher grade energy you use up in listening certainly goes to good use. Listening is all about discrimination which is a process intensive activity. Consciously sorting out the sounds you want to focus on and discarding the rest. It’s an energy guzzler. This explains why you can zone in on a particular conversation within a roomful of noisy people all talking ‘nineteen to the dozen‘.

And this is how you do it.

Energy is first consumed making the conscious effort to exclusively focus attention onto that conversations’ stream of sounds. More is then spent distinguishing the separate voices within the conversation. Finally you convert the ‘noise’ of each speaker into something meaningful with a final ‘burn’ of concentration.

At the conclusion of this amazing processing feat,  you experience sound becoming language and move into a state of connection or relationship with the person who is speaking. This again takes energy. In fact some people experience increased heartbeat or feel hotter as symptoms of being in listening mode.

As an adult you can do that whole sequence amazingly fast. If you have young children in your life as I currently do, then you can witness that struggle up close over their first couple of years of life. It’s often slower but remains quite amazing synaptic gymnastics!  But the point is this. Whatever your age  it’s an energy draining process when you are really listening.

By the way, the reverse is also true. Get too tired or distracted and conversation can quickly deconstruct into streams of sound, stripped of meaning.

Implications For Organisational Listening

Let’s quickly re-summarise.

1. Hearing is a physical capability we are born with. Listening is a skill developed throughout a person’s life
2. Hearing uses a ‘wide-band’ focus that scans and filters all sounds. Listening uses a ‘narrow-band’ focus that tunes into particular sounds
3. Hearing is an always on function. Listening is a short term conscious choice requiring far greater energy
4. Connecting and relating to others only happen through listening

So now we have compared and contrasted the act of hearing with the act of listening what can we learn?

The first nugget is this.

Understanding what another person is saying  is a conscious act of will.

It needs energy to focus attention.  I suspect this is why today’s social customer is profiled as being so insistent that there is a real ‘clunk click’. Something more than an exchange of sound needs to be happening between them and the brand.

Associated questions then come to mind. In your organisation, how many times are customer interactions conducted in listening or hearing mode? During face to face sessions. Over the phone in the call centre. Categorising a customer’s social stream for sentiment scoring.

A tough question to answer of course but worth asking if only to raise the next question of  how to get better. One practical way is to give greater kudos to listening. The chairman of Social Media pioneer Best Buy is recently quoted as saying listening skills are crucial to having a thriving business. Horrah! Good for him and the attention this creates in the C-Suite.

So get on with it! Identify and recognise the listeners in your organisation. Create a leaderboard. Offer a two week trip to ‘Paradise Island’ for the family of the best listener. You know, the normal motivational stuff. Maybe even make it a mandatory, tested competency for certain roles. Try customer and co-worker listening roles for instance!

The next point is to call time on ‘fake’ listening.

It is no secret to say that we’ve all learnt how to use hearing in pretence of listening. It’s less energetic for a start. Behaviourally it looks similar. That is until your instinct kicks in and any sense of rapport and conversational rhythm is replaced with an experience of being ‘handled’. Humans find this profoundly irritating and offensive. Either when practised by ‘nearest and dearest’ or organisations.

I’ve said elsewhere that the hallmark of listening is to pick up on what is not even been said. Logically this is nonsense. But emotionally it rings true.  If you stop and wonder why this can be, there is something facinating to be learnt.

Communication does not occur exclusively via an exchange of words. Embedded in any idea is the initial experience a person had which gave rise to that idea. Conveying that across the communication chasm is as important and often more important than being able to recite back the words that make up the idea. Being in a state of listening allows us to sense that experience and actively use it in the process of turning sound into meaningful dialogue.

This dynamic lies at the heart of organisational listening challenges. Picking out the real message.

Interestingly Steve Jobs had similar insight about product innovation. His instinct was to ‘listen to’ the latent desires of an audience. He knew all the good stuff sat just under the surface. Unnoticed by those who were content to merely hear customer feedback. Given the example Apple has provided over the last decade, I’d say that listening in this sense is a proven enabler of differentiation. Apple’s market cap says the rest.

Conclusion. Pretending to listen is a loser’s game. Both personally and professionally.

My next point is to question the value we ascribe to the listening platforms that are currently hot assets in the race to build social businesses.  I wonder if these are better called hearing platforms?

Social listening command centres that are entering the league of ‘big data’ volumes sound impressive and no doubt have ROIs to ‘prove’ they work. But I’m always struck when I talk with experts from that space how often they mention that a human filter is needed. In fact sentiment tracking in quite a few social media monitoring solutions boast that it is real people who do the categorising.

By the way this is not a Luddite reaction. I’m a vocal supporter of analytics, whether voice or text and see automation as a crucial enabler of scaling listening capability over anything but the smallest of customer bases.

Even today’s versions of organisational listening are not to be sniffed at. They move the game on. According to a Forrester research study on behalf of Dell (summer 2011), companies that implement listening and digital engagement initiatives see better customer satisfaction scores, loyalty and brand metrics. Nice to see that causal link being made!

Yet only 6% of those surveyed said their companies’ listening and engagement initiatives were “Very Integrated”. All of which makes me think that most corporate listening is still more akin to hearing.

Why? Because a ‘lack of integration’ is the organisational equivalent of needing to pay more attention.  In other words, ensuring the right people are listening to the customers’ voice after it has flowed over numerous workflows and possibly been further distorted through analysis or sanitised into Powerpoint. Bruce Temkin‘s recent findings on the maturity of VoC (Voice Of The Customer) efforts shows the same issue. All hearing and insufficient doing.

Conclusion. We are still inventing workflow that allows an organisation to maintain their attention on what is being said by important stakeholders. Given this is still work in progress, it helps us move forward faster when we know this and recognise our true level of competency.

I have one more observation before signing off. This time about the organisational value of bringing this distinction between listening and hearing up to conscious awareness. It’s directed at HR and L&D leadership teams. The topic is a certain culture transformation.  The very same one they have been charged with for a while now. Delivering the customer centric culture. If ever they were handed a poisoned chalice…

Anyway, we all know cultural change starts with mindset management.  In this instance, the target is appropriate and inappropriate attititudes towards customers. Here’s the example that triggered this insight for me.

Someone in the rail industry I was talking with described the cultural journey they were on as moving away from the view that customers were ‘self loading freight’. As an industry outsider I was both amused and appalled. But on reflection every market has its own version. An unofficial ‘in-house’ perspective that objectifies and de-humanises their customers.

It then occured to me that this is a common problem with an important heritage.  Previously we have had to tackle embedded attitudes towards gender, race and age in the workplace. We have done this by gradually unpicking the assumptions that enjoyed being socially acceptable until challenged. Derogatory language towards customers behind their backs is therefore just another clean up job.

But where does the hearing/listening bit fit in? The facilitated discussion goes something like this.

Relating to customers as ‘self loading freight’ (insert your own market specific prejudice) is easy to do when an organisation is just hearing them. Why? Because we know that hearing functions as an automatic, impersonal background activity. It is only when we engage through listening that customers become real, individual and start to matter. At that stage we naturally grant them the respect they deserve.

Of course that discussion takes time, re-inforcement and a good dose of communication re-skilling to deliver a sustained mindset shift. But you get the idea I’m sure.

Conclusion. Raising organisational standards around hearing and listening should be adopted as a key mission by culture transformationalists as part of the solution to banishing unhealthy in-house mindsets about customers.

Final Thoughts

So in bringing this session to a close, let me drum in the key messages one last time since we all know repetition is the mother of learning.

Hearing and listening are different ways of using the same physical equipment – our ears and brain.

One mode is more instinctive, the other more conscious and deliberate.

One is more orientated to protecting our most basic needs. The other allows us to learn and therefore evolve who we are.

Hearing keeps us alive, listening and being listened to can change who we become in life.

Organisational listening need not be a pale imitation of these dynamics.

That’s it. I’m done.  Thanks for reading. Let me know what you think.

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Related posts:

1. The Art & Skill Of Customer Listening: session 1
2. The Art & Skill Of Customer Listening: session 2
3. The Art & Skill Of Customer Listening: session 3