I shop online a lot. In fact, before I wrote this article, I spent a good hour browsing around some of my favorite online shops. It’s research! Although I seem to have no trouble spending more than enough money on these sites, I started thinking about what my ideal online shopping experience would look like. Here are my top five wishes:

1. Give me useful help while I shop

If I’m shopping for furniture, I probably want to know how shipping and delivery works. If I’m shopping the clearance section, I probably want to know about returns on clearance items. Don’t make me go look for these FAQs. Be proactive and show them to me while I shop with good web self-service.

2.Give me personalized offers

I’m on your site, and I have my credit card number memorized. This is your chance! I usually spend the first 10 minutes or so on a site deciding if I’m really going to buy anything. Make me an offer I can’t refuse. If I’ve shopped with you before and you know what I like, you should be able to target an offer that will lure me in. Free makeup samples? Yes please. Free shipping? I’ll take it. I just need that extra nudge to get me to start loading up my shopping cart.

3. Please don’t show me things I can’t buy

If I’m looking for shoes, ask me my size right up front. Don’t let me get all the way to the purchase step before you tell me that you don’t have my size. I’ve already fallen in love with the shoes I’m looking at, and I’ll likely be so disappointed I’ll just quit shopping. It’s just mean. Understand who I am and what I’m looking for and only show me what’s available.

4. Tell me about … me

I absolutely love it when a store keeps track of my past interactions with them. I want to see how much I’ve spent with you in the last year, when the last time I shopped was, what size I purchased, and so on. This gives me a reason to shop at your site rather than someone else’s.

5. Let me talk to you

Although the automated process of online shopping is wonderful, every now and then I need to talk to someone. Make it easy to access customer service chat, email, or speak to you on the phone. And when I do speak to you, your agents should have some idea about who I am and have the knowledge available to help me.

I don’t think I ask for much. And the payoff will be excellent for you – did I mention I have my credit card number memorized?  It isn’t that hard to transform your online service experience. Check out more details on how to do it here. I’m looking forward to even better online shopping!

(Kelly Koelliker is Product Marketing Manager, KANA)

I’m guessing that many readers of this blog had never heard of Trinicom before. So here’s a small introduction… we are based in a castle somewhere in The Netherlands.

Trinicom offices

I am sure you know our capital Amsterdam (KANA CMO, James Norwood has written a nice blog about the city) and maybe some stories about wooden shoes, cheese, tulips or windmills. I have to disappoint you; we don’t wear wooden shoes anymore and we don’t have windmills in every Dutch village, but yes… we do like cheese and flowers! But now to the exiting news. In Holland, Trinicom is the largest European supplier of customer service software for interactions. Trinicom numbers around 250 organizations among its customer base, and we are convinced that meaningful interactions lead to satisfied customers and win-win relationships. Because we work so closely with our customers, we pride ourselves in delivering the right total solution each and every time.

To make sure we continue to deliver great solutions to our customers now and in the future, we began looking for new ways to grow and to accelerate the development of the Trinicom solution. At Trinicom we firmly believe that not only can a good many organizations in Europe benefit from a customer interaction software solution like ours, but businesses worldwide as well, so we looked for global opportunities to expand our market reach.

And that’s where KANA comes in. When I first met some of the KANA team in Amsterdam, just a few months ago, it was extraordinary to see how similar these KANA people were to us ‘Trinicommers’. Hard-working, very motivated, but also fun. It was a perfect match and a perfect complement to Trinicom.

A couple of months later, we are part of the KANA family and it feels good! Since we announced the news of the acquisition internally, every ‘Trinicommer’ is excited and looking forward to this new chapter for our company, our customers, and the opportunities for personal development this will bring to them. As part of KANA we meet our strategic goals of delivering the Trinicom solution outside of the Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg) region, not to mention helping bring KANA’s enterprise solution into the Benelux market. After the external announcement of the acquisition, we’ve received so many positive reactions from our customers, who agree this is a logical step to take for Trinicom. After all, they can only benefit from KANA’s future investments in the Trinicom solution.

The transition from Trinicom to KANA is progressing gradually and smoothly. It’s nice to see the cooperation between the teams work so well and knowledge is being shared very effectively. We are all looking forward to this new chapter in Trinicom’s history and the start of the KANA era!

Met vriendelijke groet (with kind regards)

(Lisette Jochemsen-Besselsen is Marketing Manager, Trinicom)

Readers of this blog will be aware that KANA completed the acquisition of Netherlands-based Trinicom recently.

We made this news public last week in Utrecht, Holland, to coincide with Trinicom’s largest trade show of the year, and I was very fortunate to be invited along as the KANA spokesperson to assist with the event, chat with customers, prospects, media and analysts. This I did, and I was gratified by the positive response to the news that Trinicom is now a part of the KANA group of companies.

KANA and Trinicom at the De Dagen Contact Center Event

I was particularly pleased to meet and greet Trinicom’s Sales and Marketing team for the Benelux and welcome them to the KANA family. What a friendly and hard working group of people they are and I’m tremendously excited to be working alongside such a motivated team.

The Trinicom acquisition is the result of a near two-year journey for KANA to find an appropriate solution to adequately address what we firmly believe is an under served group when it comes to customer service – the midmarket. KANA’s Service Experience Management serves enterprise and KANA Lagan covers the public sector but there are precious few midmarket solutions such as Trinciom. In my next blog I will discuss what KANA means by the midmarket but for now, suffice it to say, KANA has a really good fit within Trinicom.

During last week’s De Dagen Contact Center Event in Utrecht I was delighted to see that Trinicom invited all their customers and prospects to be with them on their stand during the course of the event. Groups of customers spent the day chatting to prospects and other passersby, regularly logging into their own cloud instance of Trinicom (using the internet workstations liberally spread out and available across the expansive booth) and demonstrating how their particular web customer service solution worked in real-time. Fantastic! In order to do this, you need satisfied customers, and I sensed this from every single customer I talked with. Happy customers and happy employees: a perfect combination.

And, talking of happy people, here’s KANA’s CEO, Mark Duffell and Trinicom’s CEO Wilco Rietberg, cutting a cake baked specially for the occasion.

Mark Duffell and Wilco Rietberg

Van harte gefeliciteerd en welkom bij KANA.

(James Norwood is Chief Marketing Officer, KANA)

When I Google “define: brand,” I get the following result:

trade name: A type of product manufactured by a company under a particular name

Is this definition accurate?

Traditional marketers would agree with Google’s definition. These individuals spend lots of time and money developing a name—an image with which to brand their products and services. They create recognizable logos, catchy taglines, memorable AD campaigns and more to build awareness of their businesses and products. But while this design, messaging and advertising might be necessary to promote a brand, it’s insufficient when it comes to defining a brand. A brand name or image in the traditional sense doesn’t comprise the key ingredients that dictate how a brand is established or perceived.

To me, the Google definition seems incomplete at best, superficial at worst. Good-looking logos, clever taglines and high-profile Ad campaigns don’t define a brand. Not a successful brand anyway—it takes more than an image to win customer loyalty.

Rather, brand should be defined as the sum of experiences customers have with a company. In this way, brand is established and reinforced through every customer interaction—with the service experience in particular—and embodies customers’ expectations to the company’s products and service.

Wal-Mart is a good example of a powerful brand. When I walk into Wal-Mart, I expect cheap prices and reasonable service. And that’s precisely what I get. FedEx consistently delivers on its brand promise: a promise of timely delivery. Similarly, Starbucks fulfills customer expectations by offering good coffee and pleasant ambiance. Every Starbucks I’ve visited has a similar menu, service and décor—whatever their formula, they strike it right every time. With its hallmark blue box and white glove service, Tiffany’s signifies good taste and high quality. My wife has never been disappointed when she finds a Tiffany’s box under the tree; nor have I when I arrive at the jewelers in need of some helpful suggestions about what she might like.

Brands like these have become powerful because they live up to a defined expectation. Brand value has been established by aligning the brand promise, or surface image, with the products and services actually offered. When businesses deliver on their promises consistently over time and through every service experience, they reinforce their brand by fulfilling customer expectations. In this way, ‘brand’ is a set of ongoing experiences.

It’s time to stop thinking of branding as a marketing event. Establishing a brand is a journey. And, it starts by aligning brand promise with the service experience your company provides.

(Vikas Nehru is VP, Product Marketing, KANA)

I recently struck up a conversation with some folks in the restaurant business. As we talked about the various aspects of running a restaurant, from the long hours to the impossible-to-satisfy patrons, the owner mentioned that one of the most important things he had learned from his years in the business was about the front of the house staff – the hosts, waiters, bartenders, etc.

“The front of the house is the most important part of the business. A bad experience with the front of the house will ruin a great meal, and a great experience with the front of the house can make an okay meal excellent.”

Thinking back to my own experience, I’d have to agree. Oftentimes when I return again and again to a restaurant, it has more to do with the people than the food itself. This got me to thinking about this same phenomenon in other areas of business. A company can make a great product, but if the service experience people have with the customer service agents is terrible, the overall feeling your customers will have about the product will be negative, and vice versa. If you think about highly successful companies like Zappos, they aren’t offering a great product – you can buy shoes anywhere. But the experience a customer receives from their interactions with the staff is superior to their competitors.

In today’s market, it is nearly impossible to sell a product or service to customers that  is so great that it can overcome terrible customer service. Imagine how good the food would have to be at a restaurant that you would endure a rude, inattentive wait staff.  You are much more likely to eat somewhere that the staff will be friendly and accommodating. Similarly, your customers will find other companies to purchase similar products and services where they can also receive the service experience they expect.

So, are you treating your ‘front of the house’ as the most important part of your business? Are you investing sufficient time, energy, and resources to make sure your customers will remain loyal? Whether it is the experience on the phone or on your website, customers are demanding a higher quality of customer care to go along with the quality of products and services you ‘re cooking up in the kitchen.

(Kelly Koelliker is Product Marketing Manager, KANA)

Drugs? I bet that’s the first thing that came to mind when you read this blog post’s title. Funny that, or perhaps not so funny if you are the City of Amsterdam, which has so much more to offer than ‘coffee shops’. Unfortunately, for many people, particularly (if you excuse the generalization) the young, Amsterdam all too often represents the ultimate sex, drugs and rock’n’roll experience. This is quite simply selling the City short.

Even I have to admit that my first three or four visits to Amsterdam were as a young man, with other young men, in search of… I think you get the idea. I didn’t see or remember much at all (at least that’s the story I’m sticking with) since that wasn’t the point of those visits, which tended to center on the infamous red light district.

Recently I was in Amsterdam again, as I had been late last year too, and I was really looking forward to it as it’s such a romantic and picturesque place. The City really is a fantastic one if you just get away from the (now much smaller) red light district and tourist environs.

And of course the best way to experience the real delights of Amsterdam, such as its museums, canals and architecture is either on foot or bicycle.

Amsterdam

Not by boat, despite the canals, and certainly not by car. Amsterdam, thankfully, is not car friendly. It is people friendly in every way. That said, you need your wits about you at all times if you don’t want to end up under someone’s wheel, because believe me, the bikes come thick and fast from every direction. In fact, you really do take your life in your hands every time you step off the sidewalk (or pavement as we say in the UK).

Perfectly served by public transport (you can be in the center of the City from Schiphol airport in less than 15 minutes and for as little as six Euro) including trams and buses, Amsterdam and its 165 canals is an easy city to get to and traverse. The City is also home to around three quarters of a million people (2.1 million in the greater metropolitan area), some 2500 house boats and around 600,000 bicycles (almost one per person). That’s a lot of folk living in just 84 square miles, many in the 6,800 buildings built during the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.

That could be quite a challenge for Amsterdam’s 15 autonomous districts and numerous administrative departments, yet the City seems to just take it in its stride. You might also be surprised to learn that such a famous ‘old town’ as Amsterdam is at the leading edge of public service technology with its population almost universally connected to the internet, helped by the City’s own promotional program ‘glas naar de meterkast’, which translates to ‘fiber to every home’. This is important as, in order to manage funds and support citizens effectively, Amsterdam underwent a project to deliver public services online via web self-service as opposed to the myriad of complex hotlines and switchboards that were previously used to route inquiries. This led to a 50% reduction in calls to the contact center through a 400% increase in self-service usage; citizen satisfaction increased too. You can read more about that here, since the City of Amsterdam is a KANA customer.

At the end of the day, the City of Amsterdam positively changed the way its people interact with it, just as I changed the way that I now interact with it. If you haven’t been or haven’t been recently, then I suggest you go and experience it for yourself.

(James Norwood is Chief Marketing Officer, KANA)

How do I shop, let’s say, for a new digital SLR camera? I go to the internet and search for cameras, read the reviews, do product comparisons and shortlist the brands and models that meet my need (want?). Then I search for the best price.

Next maybe I’ll go to a retail store like Best Buy and play with the display models to further narrow down my selection. I don’t remember the last time I went to a store and asked sales associate ‘Can you please suggest a good camera?‘. If I see something in the store that wasn’t on my list, I quickly pull out my smart-phone and look for reviews and prices.

I find this access to information quite liberating. I’m not at the mercy of store ‘Genius’ or ‘Geeks’ to help me pick what I need. At most I’ll ask them for the aisle where the stuff is located and then hope they leave me alone. I didn’t think of this behavior much until I came across two articles:  Retailers Add Gadgets for Shoppers at Ease With Technology (The New York Times) and How Amazon, Google and Apple made self-service the new customer service (The Washington Post). Reading these made me realize that my shopping behavior has changed in recent years. I am longer dependent on store employees for information. And this trend is on rise with more and more customers having smart phone and tablets and walking around with information many times that of Encyclopedia Britannica (RIP) in their pockets. The only store associates that I have sought out and spoken to recently are from Home Depot and Lowes to help me pick the right shade of wall paint and correct gauge of wiring. Even for that I had gone to DIY videos on You Tube and gotten bill of material I needed for my projects.

Customers are empowered with a lot of information and they’re using it to their advantage. Now service providers and retailers can use this trend to their advantage or feel threatened. I still remember when Circuit City stores provided kiosks with internet access to browse products –but only allowed access to CircuitCity.com! Of course, they were concerned that customers would browse other stores and ask for price matching or maybe they thought patrons might check their email at the kiosk but I doubt that was the reason. But now everyone is carrying internet enabled devices with them.

I asked myself this question ‘Is self-service just another form of labor arbitrage?‘ Have we made a deal with vendors? – “Let’s share the burden of service. I’ll do my homework, you provide me what I need. I’ll manage the transaction. We’ll split the savings”. But I think there’s more to this rise in self-service adoption than just cost savings.

The scope of self-service is expanding and I think customers love it, whether it’s checking-in for flights at home or self-checkout at grocery stores. Don’t we love flying Virgin America where we can self check-in, use electronic boarding pass at the gate, order food and drink right from our touch-screen, credit card enabled, seat entertainment system?

Service providers need to do their part, need to enable customers to let them conduct these transactions effectively. They need to make sure the customer experience process is smooth and pleasant. And if customer gets stuck, they need to be sure that is help available to carry on with the transaction, rather than frustrated abandonment. At the heart of this self-service experience is information or knowledge.

As far as product and market knowledge is concerned, today customers have an easy access to it. Retailers have lost the bargaining power based on unequal information. Customers have same access to information (mostly) and at the same time (almost) so they tend to make more informed decisions. Retailers can add to this knowledge by providing contextual information about transactions and business policies to enable customers to do more business with them.

Self-service is not just about saving costs. It is not just about customers resolving issues on their own. It is not just about call-deflection. It is about customer empowerment throughout the customer journey.

Ron Johnson, the JC Penny’s CEO summed it up ‘We want customers to shop on their terms, not ours. By setting our store monthly and maintaining our best prices for an entire month, we feel confident that customers will love shopping when it is convenient for them, rather than when it is expedient for us.’

This idea of ‘We want customers to shop on their terms, not ours’ should be the motivation for offering self-service.

Ajay Khanna is Senior Director, Product Marketing. KANA

It almost seems wrong…  Whilst the verb ‘exploitation’ has very negative connotations, I’ve chosen it deliberately instead of ‘optimization’ or ‘shift’ to emphasize to our government customers the scale of the opportunity to improve not only citizen satisfaction but also their own service delivery through the exploitation of the myriad of on-line channels available today in a way that has not been done before.

In US terms, it’s about putting ‘311 on-line’ or, put another way, giving citizens access to all the information and services that a government employee has access to, except of course where it would have a damaging business level impact.

You might ask, ‘How is this different to “channel optimization” or “channel shift”?’  If so, I’m glad you asked! It’s different because I believe government organizations are only scratching the surface of what’s possible. It’s different because I’m challenging all government organizations to look at channels afresh – not from the perspective of shifting or even optimizing – but from the perspective of exploiting!

‘But we’re not about exploiting our citizens!  We’re a government organization!’ I hear you cry!  Well, that’s the best part!  If you truly exploit channels, you are giving citizens exactly what they want, so you will make them happy and improve your service delivery at the same time!

So what does this all mean?  Well, this is the first in a series of blogs where I’ll be giving some concrete examples of how to exploit channels.  For now though, I’ll end by re-stating the vision alluded to above…

Imagine you can put all your government services on-line, giving citizens access to all the information and services t government employee has access to, except where it would have a damaging business level impact…  And that in doing so you make them happier and it improves service delivery…  Isn’t that something worth pursuing?

(David Moody is VP Product Marketing, KANA)

Back in the day, I did a little studying with Gary Becker at the University of Chicago, winner of the Nobel Prize for applying micro-economic theory to criminal behavior. My use of the phrase ‘a little studying’ is precise, because my main lesson learned from this brilliant man was that ultimately economics is advanced math, and advanced math is hard (at least for me). But, the core tenet of microeconomics did penetrate my mathematically-deficient brain: people respond to incentives (and disincentives). This idea, when rigorously applied, can de-mystify a lot of mysterious stuff (like why popular first names become unpopular {the name ‘Mark’ was the 6^th most popular in my birth year yet has almost disappeared today – 161 and fading}). The Freakonomics series of books and documentaries builds on Becker’s work to illustrate the power of incentive to shape, well, ‘the hidden side of everything’.

Freakonomics says: if you understand a person’s incentives, you will understand a person’s behavior, even in the most esoteric corners of human activity. If you reward teachers for improving student performance on standardized testing, they will teach to the test. And, many will cheat to the test. Want to know why waiters push specials at a restaurant? What’s behind the fact that realtors typically keep their own homes on the market longer than their clients do?

It can be unsettling, even repugnant, to see how real world data tells the same story over and over: people seek rewards and avoid punishment. But, there it is. Importantly, freakonomics is not about money. Incentives come in many forms, from promotion to time-saving to a sense of fulfilment. So, what can Freakonomics tell us about the hidden side of managing service experiences?

Observation 1:  Enterprises have more control over channel usage than they imagine.

We often are engaged in projects where the goal is to shift service usage ‘to the left’, substituting low cost channels like web self-service for high cost channels like field support. A frequent operating assumption is that customers have all the power, and will access channels at their whim. The reality is your customers will use the channels they are incented to use, and avoid those laden with disincentives. If you hide phone numbers behind a wall of clicks (Amazon), 99% of your interactions will be self-service. If you provide dazzlingly friendly and helpful agents (Zappos), people will call. If you build mind-blowing stores stocked with knowledgable folks (Apple), people will queue up for blocks when they could order online. Freakonomics says that the right system of incentives and disincentives will be a powerful lever for steering channel usage, and in our experience, the prediction holds true.

Observation 2:   KM adoption requires solving the problem of  ’externality’

One of the fascinating examples in Freakonomics is the centuries long struggle to get doctors to wash their hands. Literally hundreds of thousands have paid the price for doctors stubborn resistance to pristine hygienic behavior. Years after the discovery that Victorian era doctors were accidentally killing one in 10 women during child birth due to infections emanating from intermingling autopsies and birth assistance, doctors failed to comprehend their complicity. To this day, when every doctor understands the danger of germs, 48,000 fatalities a year are caused by unnecessary infection during medical procedures. Doctors know the price of poor hygiene, but they don’t pay a price. The damage is ‘external’ to their actions, and fundamentally untraceable back to any specific doctor’s deeds. So, there is little incentive or disincentive for behavior modification. Economists call the problem of secondary harm ‘externality’. When behavior has an impact purely ‘external’ to our own well-being, we are naturally resistant to worrying about it. Agent usage of Knowledge (KM) systems suffers from roughly the same problem. Agents understand the world would be a better place if they used their KM tools, but how is their world a better place? The damage done from not providing a consistent answer or insuring compliance with enterprise policy is almost always external to their incentives and untraceable back to a failure to ‘search’. In fact, to the extent that agents are measured on AHT, KM usage may be positively punished. Using a Knowledge Base is precisely akin to a doctor washing their hands: an act of hygiene that is too often ignored in the press of  ’important business’ (a synonym for what is measured).

How can we combat ‘externality’? Guilt is a super-charged disincentive, and to provoke it requires visibility. Hospitals, having gotten little mileage from a range of table-pounding dictates to ‘Please, wash your hands’, discovered that the simple expedient of utilizing screen savers depicting close-ups of germ-laden fingers produced a powerful and constant reminder to do the right thing. Just displaying graphic images of nasty germs triggered enormous increases in hygienic compliance. Out of sight, out of mind. In our face, and guilt kicks in. KANA’s best practice around KM is now to build knowledge retrieval into the work process, placing the positive power of knowledge firmly in view. When confronted constantly with the ‘goodness’ of KM, adoption follows.

Observation 3:  The economic impact of Dreadful Service Experiences far exceeds that of Dazzling Service Experiences

While economics focuses mainly on the positive power of money to enable choice, freakonomic analysis often shows that people are often more sensitive to disincentives than incentives. You have a greater chance of being killed by, in fact, almost anything, than suffering at the hands of a shark. A bicycle is 1000x more dangerous than Great Whites; using a soda machine more deadly than taking a swim. Yet, the disincentive of shark attack keeps many people out of the water. The very ordinariness of most accidents numbs us to the consequences (how many newscasts have you seen about people falling off their bikes?). Bad service is like a shark attack: the horror produces an impact disproportionate to its significance in the universe. Yet, that horror is real, and has consequences: people who are upset do a lot of talking, at the expense of your brand. Scientific research shows conclusively that the negative impact of bad service far outweighs the positive impact of great service. So, while gurus put the spotlight on delighting customers, freakonomics say the better investment is to aggressively work to avoid upsetting them. A truly egregious experience is a penalty you impose on your customers, and this disincentive to do business with you will profoundly impact behavior. As with sharks, even once-in-a-blue-moon bad experiences will keep people from hanging with your brand.

Freakonomics is powerful voodoo, with endless application. As you design service experiences, the nature of the incentives and disincentives you create for customers and agents will dictate your success.

(Mark Angel is EVP and CTO, KANA)

For the past five years, during the first weekend in August, I have participated in a fund raiser (the Pan Mass Challenge) where approximately 5,000 cyclists pedal a 192 miles over two days and raise $34M for cancer research. As a resident of New England, USA, August is the perfect time for long bike rides following the longer training rides during the warming Spring and Summer weather.

This year I’ve added an event in June and number of friends and I will pedal 148 miles in one day, riding (mostly up hill) from Boston Harbor to the Green Mountains of Vermont. Given that there is snow on the ground here in Boston at the moment, the morning temperatures are routinely in the 20s degrees F and you need at least 12 weeks training before the event, a full and powerful panic has set in!

As a result, I have been spending more and more quality time on my trainer, in my basement, in front of my TV. During my last business trip, a long one during which I was fortunate enough to spend some time with our customer City of Brisbane, my kids staged an uprising, seized control of the family DVR and vaporized my planned work out programme.  My chosen line up -History Channel, Six Nations Rugby, NFL combine – had all been replaced by fashion shows, reality TV, MTV based dramas, the occasional vampire, teenage angst (with the occasional vampire) and food programming, which my progeny obviously felt was more important than “Dad’s shows”! Time for the back-up plan…

However, my usual back-up of catching up on TV Series on Netflix that I’ve missed during the week -Downton Abbey, Modern Family, etc.- had all been run through on my flight back from Australia SO I was stuck with watching live, commercial interrupted TV. No ability to fast forward, skip commercials, just TV at it’s broadcast live, something I’ve not done for a long, long time.  A mode of TV I have come to detest.

Whilst watching the despised live TV on a cold and blustery Saturday morning, I was struck by the number of large consumer brands still dependent on TV advertising. Their ad messaging seems to be based largely on the quality of their Customer Service as well as their presence on Facebook and Twitter. It strikes me to be especially pervasive when selling insurance.

Insurance ads tout and feature call centers, with glamorized representations of happy agents helping their customers procure policies, navigate the complex maze of medical benefits or, in the case of auto insurance, helping customers get their cars fixed instantly and painlessly. Each ad ends with a call to action of  ’liking us’ on Facebook or ‘follow us’ on Twitter.

While some advertisers even go so as far as to extol “look what our customers are saying about us”, the messages are often vague and relatively one-sided. What’s the benefit to me, the consumer, of  ’liking’ or ‘following’?  How will these proposed interactions help me do business with or be supported by the company doing the advertising?  Taking Twitter as an example, in his recent blog post Vikas Nehru cites that ‘71% of all customer complaints on Twitter meet with no response.’

Isn’t it time that the two channels of Customer Service and Social converged? Putting aside the more strategic question of the ownership of the social channels by Marketing or Customer Service, surely someone should be listening and reacting? As customers, we demand it and can now truly influence the success of a business by voicing our opinions, dissatisfaction, approval etc.

At KANA, we understand this and are passionate about helping our customers provide real help and value for their customers engaged in social media. We do this not only by analyzing the customer experience through social media but also by making social media actionable. Through a combination of our solutions, including agent desktops and social listening, we can help our customers answer their customers’ questions of ‘what’s in it for me?’ and fully utilize social media as a two-way street.

(Chip Greer is Senior Vice President, Worldwide Sales, KANA)