Ask a University or College student what their number one concern is for a great technology experience, and they’ll probably look at you funny. But fill a lecture room with 300 students and watch wifi access grind to a halt, give students access to a breakout room with uneven wifi coverage, or open a new campus half-way around the world and listen to students’ complaints about intermittent wifi access, and it becomes very clear that fast, consistent wireless internet access is top of mind for students…at least when it doesn’t work.

Of course it goes without saying that for students to have a great Higher Education experience, the product has to be great; i.e., the faculty have to be thought-leaders that deliver engaging lectures, the campus environment, the layout and structure of the buildings and lecture rooms have to be highly functional, and the culture of the institution has to align with the students’ values.

But underlying the bricks and mortar is the dependence of students on technology – to be in the know about the goings on on campus, to be able to pick their courses at the start of the term, check the online ratings of professors, take notes that synch with their phones, do research, look up their marks, collaborate with fellow students, discover which campus events are worth going to. The list goes on.

…underlying the bricks and mortar is the dependence of students on technology

Indeed, in the “old days”, when I did my MBA at least, cell phones weighed about two and a half pounds and computers were “luggable”; not portable. We faxed notes to one another and carried around books that took their toll on our shoulders. When we had to hand in a group paper, we asked the guy who knew how to type, to consolidate the notes and key them into Wordperfect. Then he’d print the report on his dot-matrix printer, run off hard-copies for everyone, and hand the final copy in to the professor the next day.

Fast forward to today, and we no longer think about the technology that touches almost every aspect of our lives; of student life. It’s taken for granted; expected. We no longer breathe air. We prefer wifi and 4G instead.

The ubiquity of mobile, means we’re always on. Service delivery is not only measured by the quality of the solution, and the attitude of the University staff, but by the number of minutes it took to solve the problem. Who can wait days or even hours any more? We live in a just-in-time world.

This puts huge pressure on IT staff, because if you dissect the student journey, right from making the decision about which institution to go to, to applying to a University or College, to getting accepted and choosing a program and courses, to being a student and all that it entails, to graduating, to getting involved in the alumni community, to giving back to the school…each touchpoint has an underlying element of technology. Each point at which the student and institution cross paths is likely layered with some piece of technology – a mobile app, email, a social network, an online community, a legacy system, a piece of data, an interaction with the Student Information System, whatever. There’s no way around it.

Each point at which the student and institution cross paths is likely layered with some piece of technology…

And it’s at any of these touchpoints that the student can either be left with a positive memory of “wow, that just blew me away!” or a negative memory of “what a terrible #fail!”…strong emotions of delight, or frustration and disbelief. So what happens next? Where does the student turn? …time to share that experience with friends and family perhaps? Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Snapchat?

You can be pretty sure that if the strong positive or negative emotion was triggered by an event that helped define the student’s opinion of the institution, that she will very likely share a comment or story about the incident on Social Media. And so it goes. If we do something really well, people talk about it. If we do something really poorly, people talk about it. But few talk about the boring stuff in between. No one has time to share a comment about the status quo. And people often think “if no one’s complaining about us, we must be doing an OK job”. If this is what you’re thinking, you’re fooling yourself. Consider that over 50% of angry people never complain about a problem. So what does this imply about those students who simply accept the status quo?

As technology leaders and enablers of the flow of information in our various institutions, CIOs are in the unique position of being able to impact the student experience and raise the bar on what might otherwise be boring, average interactions between the students and the school. Taking this a step further, if 50% of complaints are not being heard, can we afford to be complacent? Sure, we can bury our heads in the sand and say “it’s not my job to worry about non-technical student concerns”. But then we’re supporting the status quo in our Universities; supporting being average in our Colleges, and we’re potentially supporting disruption of our institution. We need to be constantly thinking of innovative ways to create “wow moments” by adding value (technological or informational) at various touchpoints along the student journey.

…CIOs are in the unique position of being able to impact the student experience and raise the bar on what might otherwise be boring, average interactions

Here are 7 tried and tested ways for CIOs to create or facilitate a winning Student Experience:

1. Get out of your office. Walk the halls. Listen to the conversations students are having. Find out how they really feel about the University systems and applications they use on a daily basis. Ask them. What works? What doesn’t? Listen to conversations staff and faculty are having about students. What are some of their struggles? Take notes. Document the feedback. You may even want to share it openly with the school as your starting point; your baseline from which to move forward.
2. Spend a half-day at the College Help Desk. Observe how your staff speaks with students, faculty, and staff on the phone, how they interact in person, their body language. Watch the reaction on the faces of the people asking for assistance. Do they look happy after the interaction or did they leave with pursed lips and a feeling of frustration? If faculty and staff leave the service desk frustrated, this will likely trickle down to students. Let’s not forget, students don’t exist in a silo. Their interactions with people outside of the student community impact their overall experience at the institution.
3. Get on Social Media. Specifically, create a Twitter account. Listen to what students are saying. Open the lines or channels of communication that are used by students. Engage with them. Help them to see your human side. Just because you’re in IT, doesn’t mean that all you think about are bits and bytes…at least one would hope not, especially if you’ve made it to the CIO or IT Director level.
4. Sit in on a lecture or two. What’s the experience like for students; for the instructor? Is all the classroom technology working the way it should, is the Professor fumbling around to get it all working, or might it help if he had a PhD in engineering? How’s the Professor doing as an instructor? Is she engaging? Is she boring? Is there anything you could help this faculty member with to perhaps make her delivery more interesting? …after all isn’t she in the role of delivering/sharing information with her students? Just as the CIO is in the information enablement and delivery business, are Professors not serving a similar function?
5. Introduce technologies that are intuitive. When was the last time you read the Facebook user manual (if there is one)? How about Dropbox or Asana or Gmail? These easy-to-use applications are the standard by which all software learning curves are measured. My rule of thumb is, if it takes me more than 10 minutes to get the overall gist of a new technology and its features, it’s going to be an uphill battle for students….a battle I may not be prepared to fight. If they’re not going to adopt it and use it, why even take the risk of investing in it and bringing it into the school? New technology implies change, and no one likes change, no matter how often they’re confronted with it. If you can lower the barriers to adoption, you’re more likely to succeed and have students reap the benefits of its use.
6. Put together a Student Advisory Committee. Reach out to students who you feel would take an active role in dialoguing with you about technology at the University. Meet with them formally once a term, and as they move through completion of their degrees, bring on newer students to replace those that have graduated. Another less formal way of doing this might be to simply meet with individual students that have taken an interest in technology, on a one-on-one basis through the year just to dialogue about what’s working and what’s not working.
7. Develop an IT Strategic Plan that is student-centric. As you develop your short and long-term plan, each deliverable should impact the student community in some positive way. Make sure that as you prioritize these deliverables, they are projects that the students, through focus groups, discussions, and/or surveys, have identified as areas that would provide them with high value but that the university is falling short on. Focus in on those with the biggest gaps between what the students want and their level of satisfaction. Try to steer clear of prioritizing projects that have a lesser impact on the student experience.

As CIOs we need to see things from the “inside-out”; through the eyes of the student. We need to understand and make their pain points our priority. I tend to view students through a customer service lens – I see them as our most important customer. We need to give them the highest priority on the service scale. After all they ultimately pay our salaries.

As CIOs we need to see things from the “inside-out”; through the eyes of the student.

As technology leaders in Higher Education, we need to worry less about buying the latest pieces of hardware or upgrading to the latest versions of software and more about “how can I use or introduce technology to reduce friction that the students are experiencing, so that they can focus on achieving their main goal – learning and completing their often rigorous programs” and “how can I find a way to add some technology (at this particular touchpoint) that will improve the student experience and create a feeling of delight; something worth sharing”. Keep in mind the strongest form of marketing comes from within – from our existing customers…our students. They can be our biggest, most vocal advocates, and share positive stories with their friends and family…but only if we deliver great experiences that elicit emotion and make them worth sharing.

Some of us may want to rethink our priorities as CIOs. Do we have our heads buried in the sand, or are we focussed on ways to create great experiences for our students? A consequence of making the wrong choice is that disruption may interrupt our comfortable careers faster than we think.

Bowing under pressure, and trying to bring customers back into the stores, CEO Ron Johnson announced last week that J.C. Penney will be bringing back sales. I guess Mr. Johnson’s about-face was as a result of the 50% slide in the stock price over the past year.  Clearly, J.C. Penney has not been listening to its customers.  Yet, the writing was on the wall – Facebook’s wall, that is.  Almost 3 million people are “fans of”/”like”  J.C. Penney’s Facebook Page.  That’s quite the community, wouldn’t you agree?  A following that takes years to build, yet can take less than a day to destroy.   Here’s the message they posted this past Friday on their Facebook wall:

New Facebook page everyone!  Time to rebuild.  Time to wipe the slate clean.  New name “jcp”, new gray logo, and best of all… “We did it for you”!   Hmmm, do companies really think their customers are stupid?

As you skim the  posts about the weak brands that J.C. Penney now carries, the bare new look of the stores, and the pricing changes, it’s clear that customers are very disappointed with the Penney transition.  Clearly, the negative comments far outweigh the positive ones.  But every now and then you read a post from a Penney loyalist who’s supportive of the company, advocating on their behalf.   So like most communities, there’s internal discussion going on; people engaging with others from similar “tribes”; agreements, disagreements.   A lot of loyal customers voicing their concerns on the site.  Yet what’s glaringly absent are comments from J.C. Penney itself.   No one from the company is engaging with its followers.  Maybe the brand is listening, but the Facebook fans sure wouldn’t know it.

…the Voice of the Customer

One has to wonder if the digital community mirrors the brick and mortar.

Perhaps the new corporate culture, that includes ignoring customers, has trickled down from the top.   At a time when Ron Johnson should be listening to his customers, with the company having lost $4 billion in revenues during his tenure, he may feel he knows better.  After all, few believed that his Apple store concept would make money for the consumer electronics giant. He proved them all wrong.

More likely though, the business probably has so many internal silos that no one realizes the value of the customer data they’ve built up over the years.  They may just think of Facebook as a digital sandbox; a time-waster where people who have nothing better to do post useless comments and try to ruin the reputation of brands.  It’s likely that the J.C. Penney Facebook community isn’t even on any of JCP’s leadership’s radar screens.  At least that’s how it looks from the outside.

More likely though, the business probably has so many internal silos that no one realizes the value of the customer data they’ve built up over the years.

What other explanation for shutting down a community with almost 3 million subscribers, and starting fresh?  To re-brand under the new “JCP” acronym?  To rebuild the community under the JCP brand hoping to wipe the slate clean of any negative sentiment?  C’mon…wake up J.C. Penney!  You’re going to piss more people off, and lose a ton of opportunity in the process.

We have to give credit where credit is due, however.  J.C. Penney could have deleted all the negative posts and comments on their original Facebook page.  Instead they chose to ignore customer complaints, they chose not to engage in conversation, and they chose to miss any opportunity to show support for what few advocates they had, and start fresh.

Link to new JCP Facebook page

Much has been written about the psychology of service recovery; i.e., how resolving a customer complaint is an opportunity to create a stronger relationship with the customer than if the service failure had never occurred in the first place.  Service recovery is an opportunity to build loyalty.  One needs only to Google the term “service recovery paradox” to read the various scholarly articles, white-papers, and blog posts about it.  But customer outreach and engagement needs to be done on a one-on-one basis and it needs to be part of an organization’s overall business strategy.  One might have expected this to be the reason for the new Facebook page, but alas, we are still scratching our heads.

…customer outreach and engagement needs to be done on a one-on-one basis and it needs to be part of an organization’s overall business strategy.

Great customer service is clearly not on JCP’s list of strategic objectives.  Or if it is, some people are pretty good at paying lip-service to the initiative.  And you can be sure that when they considered what the overarching Customer Experience should “look” like, JCP didn’t bother to ask their own customers what was important to them.

Companies pay megabucks to research firms to build consumer panels that they can dip into for opinions on an ongoing basis.  And they pay big bucks to collect customer feedback, typically through surveys pushed out after a transaction is completed with the brand,   All of this is part of a “Voice of the Customer” (VoC) program.  You can be sure that J.C. Penney has this type of program in place.  All big retailers do.

You think the VoC team even knows that a Social Media community exists?  If they do, do you think they’ve even put two-and-two together, and have considered pulling in feedback from the Facebook community?  Social Communities and Social Media Customer Care provide non-invasive, truly unbiased environments for collecting Voice of the Customer feedback.  The sad part is, in many large companies, people don’t communicate very well across departments – the VoC team probably doesn’t talk to the Social Media team and vice-versa.

You think the VoC team even knows that a Social Media community exists?

And so we can only shake our heads in disbelief, as we watch a powerful brand, with a deep-rooted American heritage,  make a decision that makes no strategic business sense whatsoever and throw the baby out with the bath water.

Great media headlines have a knack for pushing the right emotional buttons and leaving people with strong negative or positive feelings, especially when they haven’t read the rest of the article. And in today’s world of 140 characters and digital media inundation, many of us, including me (I must confess, at times) are guilty of only reading the top line. So it is with this headline that hit the digital press Friday morning: “These Big Companies Are Abandoning Twitter And Facebook For Customer Service“. Wow, sounds pretty dramatic! Oh, and to add to the drama, the featured image in the post is a picture of Joaquin Phoenix in “Gladiator” garb, giving the thumbs down.

So now imagine your CEO, SVP Marketing, SVP Store Operations, etc., getting this headline forwarded in an email from a personal friend or relative over the weekend, or seeing the image below when they click on the link.

Do you see what they see? A headline and a metaphor of themselves, a leader, saying “not a chance”. The rest is a blur. That’s the message that will register with them. That’s the memory they’ll be left with. And it’s a shame, but that’s the reality for too many busy executives. What may seem important for someone who works in Social Media, or Digital Media, or Customer Support, may be but a blip on a CEO’s radar screen. And they’re often looking for cracks in the wall to discount all of these peripheral requests for extra funding.

So, before they or someone else at the Senior Executive level, ridicule Social Customer Service in the days and possibly weeks ahead, because of this article and any subsequent noise it stirs, let’s spend a bit of time with the details.

Two companies are mentioned in the post. That’s it.  Charter Communications, and Wegmans.  Charter is the fourth largest cable provider in the US with 5.2 million customers across 25 states. Wegmans is a supermarket chain in the northeast US with 81 stores. And they’re both big companies. But here’s the difference. Charter sucks at customer service. In fact, according to Bruce Temkin, Managing Partner of the Temkin Group, a highly respected research and consulting firm, in the 2012 Customer Service Ratings study completed by his firm (which covered 174 companies from 18 industries and polled 10,000 US customers), Charter ranked at the very bottom in terms of Customer Service (I’ve added a red box to highlight Charter’s position, in the table on the left). Isn’t cutting out Social Customer Service in line with them being Customer Service bottom feeders? Need we say more?

Charter ranked at the very bottom [of the 2012 Temkin Customer Service Ratings] in terms of Customer Service

Now Wegmans is at the other end of the spectrum for service and Customer Experience. First off, Wegmans just ranked number 5, last week, on the Fortune list of best companies to work for. And research shows that happy employees make happy customers. Michael Hess of CBS Moneywatch, in an article published in late 2011, asks the question: Could this [Wegmans] be the best company in the world?  As it happens, it was only a single one of their 81 stores (though the largest in New England) that shuttered its use of Social Media for Customer Service. Does anyone really care? Does it really matter to a single store of a brand that is so customer-focused? Come on!

Wegmans just ranked number 5, last week, on the Fortune list of best companies to work for.

So, “Big Companies abandoning Social Customer Service”? I think not.

Given this background information, would you not agree that the premise of the Business Insider article is suspect?  But it’s clear there’s still fear out there about using Social Media. And the author is playing to the fear of Senior Executives.  So given that many CEOs and their leadership team may be fearful of this new medium, because they don’t quite understand it, how might we help reduce the risk for them? Why should they care about Social Customer Service? Perhaps if we try to answer this from a Senior Executive’s point of view. What’s in it for them? What’s in it for the business?

…the author is playing to the fear of Senior Executives

1. Social Customer Service helps drive greater revenues/more profitability – Social Customer Service is all about listening and responding to Customers through the Social Channel. It’s about managing customer service issues through Social Media. Most organizations recognize that price-competition isn’t a long term strategy. It’s great if you want to sell commodities, but this is not going to make the business profitable. In order to differentiate your products and services from your competitors, you need to provide great experiences for the people who buy from you, so that they spread the news; so that they tell their friends. Average experiences are boring; they’re not an option. Your customers view your company as a single brand; not a bunch of individual channels. But because your customers can choose to engage with you across the channel of their choice – in-store, Call Centre, web, mobile, Social – the experiences that they have with you need to be consistent. Social Media is simply another channel. Trouble is, you don’t control it. It’s just there. Ignore it at your peril; especially if you’re a large, well known brand. Embrace it. Don’t fear it. Using Twitter and Facebook for Customer Service provides an opportunity for the brand to create unique experiences that your customers will want to tell their friends and family about, and it can serve as an amplifier for word of mouth advocates for your brand. Word of mouth advocacy builds loyalty, engages more customers, keeps them longer, and enables you to charge a premium for your products and services. In short, it helps your business drive greater revenues and profits. As simple as this sounds it’s the essence of a Customer Experience Strategy, that smart companies are realizing they need to develop and execute in order to survive in today’s commoditized world.
2. Social Customer Service helps manage the brand’s reputation – Social Customer Service is about responding quickly to negative feedback that has the potential to grow exponentially and “go viral”. It requires active listening skills, the ability to empathize, and the ability to provide thoughtful responses very succinctly – often with 140 character limitations. Depending on the volume of service issues you’re responding to, it might also require routing of the issue to various people in different departments within the organization. It’s also about building community and creating advocates that will come to your defense if people talk negatively about your brand on Social Media. Consider these examples of real life events that have actually happened in the past year:
   1) You’re in the travel business, and a couple who are to be married book a honeymoon travel package with you, but two days before the wedding, the husband gets killed in a freak accident. A customer service agent follows policy and refuses to refund the bride-to-be for the couple’s travel fees, so her sister goes on the company’s Facebook page, that has over 62,000 fans, and seeds an outpouring of negative comments towards the company.
   2) You’re a very respected brand in the high-end food service business and someone notices a mouse scurrying across the floor of one of your stores. They tweet a warning out to their 14,000 followers. The story goes viral and hits the mainstream news media.
   3) You’re a major financial institution and your ATMs and access to personal account information go down for 2 days nation-wide because of an Information Systems glitch. Irate customers take to Twitter and Facebook to voice their anger.
3. Social Customer Service is an Insurance Policy for protecting your brand’s reputation. In all three cases above, smart leadership, fast action, and the right messaging with customers helped circumvent brand reputation damage. Social Media gives a voice to your customers that until now was one-to-one with the brand – think about a phone call with a Call Centre Representative, an email to Customer Service, a problem in a store or a branch.  These are typically private conversations between a customer and an individual in the company.  However, with Social Media, a single customer’s voice can now grow to reach thousands of people within a day; hundreds of thousands within a few days. And the Social channel is not like a valve that Marketing or Customer Service can simply shut off. You can choose to ignore the Social noise about your brand, and risk tarnishing your reputation, or take the route of engaging with the noise-makers, giving your brand the opportunity to take back some control.

What else might be important to your Senior Leadership team in terms of positioning the virtues of using Social Media for Customer Service?  What do you suppose the author of the Business Insider article was hoping to gain from positioning his post the way he did?  What does your own company think of Social Customer Service?  Do your Executives get it?

Drug store chain with over 1,100 stores

Last week, Shoppers Drug Mart, the leader in Canada’s retail drug store marketplace, saw the writing on the wall…its Facebook wall, that is.  No sooner had Halloween ended than the drug store chain began streaming Christmas songs over its in-store airwaves. By the evening of November 1st, the complaints started rolling in as negative comments on Shoppers’ Facebook wall.  One by one, customers shared their written feelings through Facebook, and by 3pm on November 2nd, Shoppers responded with a post of its own saying that they would suspend all Christmas music until further notice.

With over 7,500 likes, as of this writing, and over 5,800 comments, this music issue clearly struck a few bad chords, to say the least.  It also hit the mainstream media – CTV, the Globe & Mail, the Toronto Star, and others.

You have to wonder though, if Shoppers had taken phone calls from discontented customers about the music, or if people had indicated their concerns through the existing web and IVR-based Voice of the Customer (VoC) survey, would Shoppers have flinched?  Hard to tell.  Perhaps if there had been enough noise through these alternate channels, perhaps if some of the executives had listened to actual customer phone calls, or read written comments from the web survey, there might have been a response to the negative customer sentiment.

Having worked on VoC programs for about 8 years, what I’ve found is that unless a company’s culture is such that they have a sincere commitment and belief in the importance of the customer experience, the feedback they collect from customers tends to lose its priority behind operational or financial data.  Too many companies simply pay lip service to creating wow moments for their customers, or superficially try to improve their NPS (Net Promoter Score) because it’s part of employee job descriptions or compensation plans, or they want to move up from 4th place in the JD Power award for best in customer service.  VoC becomes another program, added to the stack of programs that people are working on.  And employees sense that VoC is complex because it relies on many thousands, perhaps millions of bits of information about customer perceptions.  When you look back at why so many VoC programs fail, some or all of these points were likely contributing factors.

Let me be clear.  I’m not insinuating that Shoppers Drug Mart is having problems with its VoC program or has failed in any way.  I’m simply using this incident as an example of how customer feedback through Social Media (through a Facebook page that has only been up for about a year) may have a stronger impact on change through customer voice, than a long-running VoC program.

Now it may very well be that at Shoppers, Social Media customer feedback is part of their VoC program for listening and responding to customers.  They also have a Twitter account @ShopprsDrugMart, that they use to field customer service issues across all of their stores, in addition to pushing out marketing messages.  I’d venture to guess that Marketing and/or Public Relations manages Social Media, and the Voice of the Customer program is managed through Customer Service or Operations.  Social Media is still finding its place within most organizations, and typically falls under the umbrella of the Marketing Department.  But the discussion of who should own it is great fodder for another blog post – many posts have already been written discussing the best place for Social Media to reside.

…what Social Media tends to do, if done right, is build humanity into a digital customer interaction

The point is, Social Media is sexy for most companies, and perhaps Marketing has made it so.  Social Media shifts control into the hands of our customers and prospective customers, and that creates fear in the minds of many corporate executives.  It also creates a permanent written record for all the world to see.  (Ooops, better get Legal looped in on this one.)  Finally though (of course there are many more benefits to Social Media, but being more intangible and harder to quantify means that the C-Suite would typically ignore these) what Social Media tends to do, if done right, is build humanity into a digital customer interaction.   Just look at the examples below, taken from Shoppers’ Facebook wall.

Three different people – John, Fiona, Barbara – real customers with pictures of their faces, sharing their emotions about the timing of the Christmas songs, and each is engaging other Shoppers’ customers who are providing their feedback, some for; some against the music.  These are not rows in a spreadsheet with a unique identifier; they are not written verbatims in a database; they don’t represent bars on a frequency-distribution chart.

for those of us in the Voice of the Customer world, not much has changed in the past 10 years

Let’s face it, for those of us in the Voice of the Customer world (we tend to work in silos don’t we?), not much has changed in the past 10 years.  The amount of customer feedback has increased, we have text analytic tools now to help us be more efficient at making sense of unstructured customer comments, but at the end of the day, the output is pretty much the same – spreadsheets, charts, graphs, scorecards, dynamic visualizations.  Nothing too sexy or exciting to look at that relate back to humans.  Nothing emotional to hook us in.  And as for IVR-captured responses, while we can hear the emotion of the respondents from the calls, these snippets of dialogue have to be listened to sequentially.  It’s a time-consuming process.  Generally speaking, it’s pretty boring output.

If I wanted to make a point to the executives in my company; if I wanted to get their consensus for changing a customer policy, I know which source of customer feedback I’d turn to.

The sad part is, most of us are sitting on reams of rich data about customer sentiment through our VoC programs.  Yet, decisions based on information from all of this data, that is actionable, may take weeks or months to implement.  We’re reading about and seeing decisions based on relatively fewer Social Media-based customer comments often taking less than a day to turn around.

I started by asking the question: “When does Social Media carry more clout than your Voice of the Customer program?”  Isn’t it time we incorporated Social feedback into our VoC programs?  The progressive VoC vendors have incorporated Social into their platforms.  But few companies seem to have taken them up on their offer.  Is it because the control of Social Media is siloed from that of Voice of the Customer?  Is it because Social Customer Service is so new that companies don’t know where it should be slotted?  Voice of the Customer programs are at a turning point.  It’s up to those of us who are practitioners in this space, to make sure that our VoC programs incorporate key Social channels that provide us with rich, humanized insights that support quick responses to our customers.

My eye caught a couple of interesting tweets the other day at lunchtime. They were snippets of a Twitter chat that was streaming across my screen. In or out of the context of the chat dialogue that was running in the background, these two tweets raise some interesting questions about the importance of investing in a Social Customer Service strategy.

First tweet: “The “right” social channel depends on where your customers hang out. You party where the party is happening” and then second tweet: “…it makes little sense to be on Twitter if your customers don’t use it despite its popularity”.

Putting on my Customer Experience hat (because that’s my current lens), when we think of the various touchpoints where customers interact with a company to resolve service issues, Customer Care, the Call Centre, the IVR channel, the corporate website often come up in Journey Mapping exercises. However, we’re starting to see Social Media, and in particular, Social Customer Service, coming up as a touchpoint that people want to delve into in more depth in the mapping process.

Whether brands like it or not, customers are forcing their hands to use Social Media to communicate with them. Because customers can now control the message, they have the power to generate their own negative groundswell about a brand. Now whether this will impact a brand’s success depends on the brand strategy; i.e., consider the fake RyanAir Facebook page created by angry RyanAir customers. RyanAir has made a conscious choice, as a deep discount airline, not to engage with its customers on Social Media. Will the fake account impact sales? Probably not. But if a fake Twitter or Facebook account were set up to spoof a more mainstream or premium brand and was used to create negative buzz, or if an avalanche of negative comments went viral in Social Media, it could have some reputational damage for the brand.

Because customers can now control the message, they have the power to generate their own negative groundswell about a brand.

What I’ve discovered from working with clients at major brands across the country, speaking with colleagues, and just my own observations, is that companies are at different stages in the Social Customer Service life cycle.  And don’t kid yourself, these are early days for most. Companies are still experimenting with what works and what doesn’t.  While some companies have a strategy around how they’re rolling out Social Customer Care, others have just jumped into it in a “trial by fire” sort of way. Some are at a very early, very cautious stage with PR doing the listening; others have been at it for a couple of years and have a team of Customer Service agents engaging with customers. For many, Marketing is handling all the Social inquiries.  Some companies are listening and engaging 9 to 5, on week-days only; others, 24 x 7 and across the globe.

Rogers and TD Bank have multiple agents manning their Twitter accounts and engaging with customers about service issues. Flight Centre has multiple geographic accounts with multiple agents, so that it’s handling service issues 24×7. Canada Post is into the third phase of its recently launched Social Customer Service strategy (they just went live July 3rd) and is priming for high volume engagement over the Christmas season, according to Brian Beehler, their Director of Social Media. Interestingly, retailers in fashion especially, are quite diverse in how they engage. A quick scan of their Twitter accounts, while still marketing-heavy, show clear distinctions from zero engagement and one way push, to ongoing conversations and great engagement. One might intuitively think that fashion retailers would be pretty aligned in their Social strategies.  Yet just look at the low to high engagement continuum between The Bay, Holt Renfrew, Club Monaco and Aldo Shoes, respectively as you scan the activity in their Twitter profiles. Can you see how they differ?

Aldo does a great job with its Twitter profile

Others, like Town Shoes, doesn’t seem sure how they’re going to engage yet. So there’s a real mish-mash out there. Seems pretty random to me, but perhaps just a function of where the company is on the Social Media adoption curve.

In order to help build the business case for Social Customer Service and put it on the priority list, an important question companies should be asking is whether providing Customer Service via Social Media is a “Moment of Truth” (MoT) or not? In other words, will the interaction between customer and company at the Social touchpoint, be an event that helps define the customer’s opinion of the brand? Do we have an opportunity to leave our customer or prospect with a lasting memory of a great experience that they’ll want to share with their friends and colleagues?

In order to help build the business case for Social Customer Service…an important question companies should be asking is whether providing Customer Service via Social Media is a “Moment of Truth” or not?

At the company I work for, we have a methodology for defining “Moments of Truth” quantitatively. We define a “Moment of Truth” as a large gap (on a 100 point scale that’s relative to the size of the other gaps – usually over 30 points) between what the customer says is important to them and how satisfied they are with the touchpoint. [Note the red box around the Social Customer Service touchpoint, in the image below. The MoT gap is 36 points.] This “Moment of Truth” is determined by presenting our customers with a series of quantitative questions where they’re asked to rate the importance and satisfaction of various attributes about each touchpoint). So if customers are telling us that Social Customer Service is important to them, and they are highly dissatisfied with their experience at this touchpoint, this would suggest we have an opportunity to invest in and/or improve Social Customer Service and create lasting memories for them. We would prioritize this as a touchpoint we want to invest in. And by invest, I mean, not only to improve the experience through better tools, training of Social Agents, and interactions, but also to create an innovative approach that would differentiate us in the marketplace.

“Moments of Truth” help us focus in on what’s most important for our customers

Why are businesses investing in Customer Experience strategy in the first place? It’s to help differentiate themselves in a commoditized world. It’s to help them create lasting memories at specific touchpoints so that their customers want to share with their friends, family, and colleagues how they felt about banking at the newly-designed branches, experiencing the cool vibe at the restaurants, speaking to an empathetic, upbeat customer service rep on the phone about returning a product, getting a tweet about a delayed flight responded to positively within 3 minutes, etc.  The emotional rush that we get from an exceptional experience and the desire to share the story with people we know, is the essence of the Net Promoter Score a metric used by many leading organizations, it’s at the heart of Word of Mouth marketing, and it’s shown to have direct links to increased loyalty and increased profitability.

Why are businesses investing in Customer Experience strategy in the first place? It’s to help differentiate themselves in a commoditized world.

Let’s not forget that organizations have limited budgets. Social Customer Service is but a single touchpoint where our clients (depending on the business we’re in) can engage directly with us. Social Customer Service may well be worth pursuing; however, if we can’t build the business case for it, will our executives give us the funding to invest in the staff, training, and tools to make it a success? You may be able to show how an investment in Social Customer Care can offset some of your Call Centre costs (if you have a Call Centre); you may be able to sell it to the executive committee using fear as a tactic; i.e., if you ignore service requests on Social, it may lead to a PR nightmare. At the end of the day though, as organizations become more customer-centric in order to differentiate from their competitors, unless their customers are telling them that this is really important and the company is doing a lousy job at it, it’s probably going to be low on the priority scale for executive investment.

What do you think?  Do you think an investment in Social Customer Service is important for your own company?   How important do you think it is for your customers?

Who will the “big fish” be?

“Some news to get while on Vacation!!” That was the reply I got from Jaime Stein, ING Direct Canada’s Manager of Social Media, when I sent him a direct message on Twitter last Thursday. Word had gotten out in the media about the Bank’s impending sale, and I was curious if Jaime had some inside information. “Nothing.” He asked me what I knew. “No idea”, I said. Jaime and I had kept in touch over Twitter since connecting at ING Direct’s first “Meet and Tweet” in Toronto [PIC] back in January 2010. (Jaime was Manager of Digital Media at the Canadian Football League back then). He’d only been in his new role at ING Direct for 5 months when he got word that his company was being sold.

If you haven’t already heard, ING Groep NV, the Dutch parent, is planning to sell off the Canadian Direct Banking unit in order to restructure and pay down a good portion of its remaining debt to the government from the 2008 financial bailout. The Canadian Financial Services market is abuzz with speculation.  Who will the buyer end up being?  National Bank?  Scotiabank?  Manulife Financial?  PC Financial?  You can be sure that a slew of Barbarians are just chomping at the Gate.

When you read through the various opinion articles, from both Canada and abroad, and the analyst predictions, the stories are about return on assets, book value, the impact on the banking sector, market share opportunity, predicted purchase price.  Nowhere is there any mention of the human side – the uniqueness of the ING Direct Canada brand, the transparency of Peter Aceto, the CEO, their involvement in building and supporting community, the unique culture created by the 1,100 employees, the Café experience, the high proportion of millennial customers.

Why is it that the human side is so often ignored in these stories of corporate acquisition?

Why is it that the human side is so often ignored in these stories of corporate acquisition? Aren’t stories of human interest, culture and people what make for engaging articles? Isn’t it the stories of great leadership and approaches to creating social good, that engage peoples’ interest?

Photos courtesy of WWF-Canada/Linda Lee and Kris Krüg, respectively, on Flickr

When I look at ING Direct, I see an organization that has employees committed to the brand, I see a CEO that has taken risks in such a regulated market and puts himself out openly and regularly on Social Media, I see a company that has taken very simple financial products and has bundled wonderful experiences around them, I see a Social Brand that has put its values proudly on display for all to see.  To think that ING Direct’s value proposition is about its direct online approach to delivering their product – they can offer lower fees and higher rates of return than the Big 5 because they don’t have the overhead of physical space – would be naive.  What’s really differentiated them in the marketplace is how they execute, how they build brand advocacy from within, how they’ve created an open organization, their leverage of Social Media as a tool of engagement and collaboration, and how they’ve developed trust with their clients.  ING Direct has built a brand that offers its customers unique experiences they don’t get with other financial institutions. The commoditized world in which we live would do well to learn from these guys.

What’s really differentiated them in the marketplace is how they execute, how they build brand advocacy from within, how they’ve created an open organization, their leverage of Social Media as a tool of engagement, and how they’ve developed trust with their clients.

When we think back to TD Bank’s acquisition of Canada Trust in 2000, it learned that it could differentiate itself on the retail side, through a focus on customer service, and doing it well would lead to increased profitability.  When they subsequently bought Commerce Bank in the US seven years later, TD learned how to offer unique branch experiences, and what that also meant for the bottom line.  TD Financial understood that banking services are highly commoditized; that the only way to offer something competitive in the market is to create unique experiences for their customers, and continually work to innovate and keep those experiences fresh and exciting.  And as a result, TD leads the market in customer loyalty.  It’s in an enviable position to hold.

Fast forward to this week. The Canadian Banking Sector is primed for a bit of a shake-up right now, with ING Direct’s “FOR SALE” sign out on the front lawn.  The almost $40 billion in assets or the return on assets are not all that’s at stake here.  (Consider that CIBC, the fifth largest of the Big 5 had assets of over $350 billion at the end of last year, and RBC, at number one, had assets of over $750 billion). I see the real opportunity as being among ING Direct’s almost 2 million loyal customers and its 1,100 engaged employees. ING Direct has a groundswell of advocates. And you know what they say about the value of brand advocates. The prospectus for this sale needs to highlight “awesome Customer Experience” as a key asset. It needs to highlight the human factors; the strong culture; the strength of brand advocates both within the company and among its clients.

The prospectus for this sale needs to highlight “awesome Customer Experience” as a key asset.

As we speculate about potential buyers, it’s possible that TD Financial may end up picking up ING Direct. Anything’s possible. Remember, it has to work both ways. If that happens, you can be sure they’ll win the JD Power award for highest in Customer Satisfaction for an 8th year in a row.  If one of the other big banks succeeds, they’ll have a better chance of dethroning TD, if they are prepared to learn from the ING culture and can think outside the hard asset box. If one of the smaller guys buys them, this could get exciting.  Word is, we’ll find out by the Fall.  Let’s hope for the best, for the sake of the employees and the customers of ING Direct.

We live in a social, consumer-driven economy that is highly complex and offers many points of interaction for the customer.  Companies that will thrive, are those that can engage with their customers meaningfully across all touch points.  Corporate marketing  can no longer control the message or the brand.  Engagement with the customer must become the responsibility of the entire organization.   In effect, as Tom French, Laura LaBerge, and Paul Magill of McKinsey stated so clearly in their July 2011 article, “We’re all marketers now“.  In this new era of engagement, marketing is the organization, and it’s all about the Customer Experience.

What does this shift mean for the VP of Marketing or the CMO?  If marketing is the organization and engagement is the responsibility of the entire organization, then these roles have to evolve, and perhaps this builds a strong case for companies to now rally around a Chief Customer Officer rather than the person who runs Marketing.

Westminster Savings, a British Columbia, Canada-based Credit Union (ranked 14th largest in Canada by asset size), has recently gone through some structural change as a result of this type of progressive thinking.  Maury Kask, who’d been in the VP Marketing role for over three and a half years, was just promoted into the newly-created role of SVP Chief Customer Experience Officer, at the beginning of March.  I caught up with Maury on the phone last week, to better understand what the implications of this move were for the company, his own career, and for other marketing professionals who can see the writing on the wall.

Here are Maury’s responses to the questions I asked:

1. When did the topic of Customer Experience first pop up on your radar screen?

Maury:  Last February, as we were starting our strategic planning process, Customer Experience became an increasingly important part of the discussion, because we were starting to think about who we were, what made us different, and what was going to be the future value proposition to help us differentiate ourselves in the marketplace.  This is when the subject of Customer Experience began to get talked about in earnest, in the company.

2. Can you share a bit about your career background?

Maury Kask - SVP Chief CE Officer

Maury:  I’m a cross-functionally experienced marketer.  My background spans strategic marketing, branding and communications, e-commerce, product marketing and promotions, corporate sponsorship and citizenship, sales, and anything in between, which I’ve been doing for about 23 years.  I have a background in information technology, consumer packaged goods, transportation, hospitality and tourism, Telco, and five years working internationally.  I have only been working in Financial Services since 2008.  Instead of staying in one vertical and rising up through it, I wanted experience in a variety of sectors to increase the value I can provide.  I’ve worked in different businesses of different sizes – from a small software start-up in Seattle Washington with 6 people, right up to a global multinational with close to 1,000,000 employees.

3. What is the mandate of a Chief Customer Experience Officer?   What does the new structure look like?

Maury:  At the strategic level, it’s being the champion for the strategy, leadership, planning, and execution of all Customer Experience related strategies at an enterprise level.  This is a fundamental part of our new Strategic Plan. Tactically, the mandate is a comprehensive view, and probably a very authoritative view of our customers and developing and executing strategy to enhance our differentiation, maximize acquisition, retention, and customer profitability.  It requires a comprehensive, strong view of our customers that is very insight-driven, that helps us to differentiate in a very undifferentiated space.

The functions that I directly oversee today are traditional marketing, communications, internal communications, community investment, products and services and how they impact our channel and delivery strategy.  I also oversee our mobile and e-commerce channels as well as our customer Contact Centre. I work very collaboratively with other delivery channel owners.  We’ve also created a new position – Manager, Customer Experience – that directly reports into me.  I’ve got everything from traditional, promotional and marketing communications that customers are seeing and experiencing – advertising, and all the associated components, all the way through to the products and services they use.  I impact the delivery channels in which they use them, and that extends down into how customers engage with us, and ultimately how we translate our brand promise into what we do in the community.

For me, the move doesn’t feel risky. It feels like a natural extension and kind of the world that every marketer wishes they had…

4. When we talk about career moves, people often play it safe and stay within their comfort zones; where they’ve developed most of their experience.  Moving from Marketing into Customer Experience, is a bold, risky move.  How do you see it?

Maury:  Going back to my first comment, as marketers, we regularly talk about the need to live and breathe our brand. In this new position, not only can I promote that mantra, but I’m now also responsible to help make it happen throughout the organization, which is a very enabling move for me. I’m also expected to work cross-functionally to look at all policies, practices, processes, the entire customer experience, everything that should be a reflection of what our brand promise is. It’s hugely fulfilling.

For me, the move doesn’t feel risky. It feels like a natural extension and kind of the world that every marketer wishes they had, because as a marketer you have control of your functional area and you try as best as you can to impact others.

5. Doesn’t it scare you?

Maury:  The things that scare me about it are probably 1. The size, the scope, and the complexity of the challenge probably presents a bit of a scare for me because now I have to look at things through an entirely new lens and a much deeper lens; and 2. I don’t have an Operations background here and a lot of Chief Customer Officers come from an Operations background in some way, shape or form. I’ve worked in Operations in other industries but not in Financial Services; so this is new for me. Fortunately I work with a great team of people at Westminster Savings and we’re all out to do our best together.

I’m very fortunate to have the full support of the Executive team.

6. As a Customer Experience practitioner, I know first-hand how difficult it is to get buy-in from the Executive Team about investing in Customer Experience. How difficult was it for you to get buy-in from your peers and the CEO, for this new position?

Maury:  I’m very fortunate to have the full support of the Executive team. As part of our strategic planning process, the Executive Management Team collectively agreed that someone needed to take ownership of it at the Executive level, and I was approached as a candidate. This was presented to our CEO and he agreed.
So at the start of last year I was put in charge of leading the development of our Strategic Plan. As part of building our strategy, talking about our strategy, and helping to prepare the document, I became a bit of an authority on our strategy and what we’re trying to accomplish. So from that standpoint, it felt like a very natural progression to go into this kind of role, because for the most part, I was assigned to leading the Strategic Plan over the course of that same year.

7.  What are you hoping to achieve for the business in this new role, that you were unable to do as VP Marketing?

Maury:  First, I’ve got to take off my VP Marketing hat. While I still oversee the marketing function, I’ve got to take that hat off in order to see our business differently. Working with the rest of the Executive Team, I’m looking to make a very strong cross-functional impact. Based on our Strategic Plan initiatives we know we have to break down some silos and make our Customer Experience even better than it has been in the past. We know it’s already very good, but our challenge is how to make it even better and take a customer view across our process – re-look at everything we’ve done from a policy, procedure, practice, and strategy perspective and look at it from a total customer view. It’s going to mean working horizontally across the organization, working collectively with the executive management team, and ultimately it’s all about delivering some differentiated Customer Experiences that are going to set us apart from everybody else.

Based on our Strategic Plan initiatives we know we have to break down some silos and make our Customer Experience even better than it has been in the past.

8.  What sort of advice can you share with other Marketing Professionals about the importance of Customer Experience?

Maury:  I’d probably come back to what I’ve said before, which is, in most service-oriented businesses, it’s almost entirely about the Customer Experience.  If you’re not thinking about how your organization delivers on its brand promise, then you’re not thinking about Customer Experience and you need to be thinking about it.  Customer Experience is a fundamental part of what we’ve done in a marketing function for quite some time.  Now the opportunity for marketers who’ve always taken a customer insight-driven approach to building marketing strategies, is how to extend that to directly impact a customer’s experience.

So for Maury Kask, this move from VP Marketing to SVP Chief Customer Experience Officer, made perfect sense.  His immersion in leading the Strategic Planning process for the past year, and incorporating the Customer Experience as an integral part of the plan, made this new role a natural fit for him.  How about for others?  What if you didn’t come from Marketing or Operations? What if you had to gain the support of your Executive team? Do you feel you have what it takes to become Chief Customer Officer?

Disclosure: Westminster Savings is a client of Strativity Group, the company I work for.

By the way, Maury’s promotion is so fresh, that at the time of this writing he hasn’t even had a chance to update his LinkedIn profile.

Ok, so by now we’ve read all the posts about Rogers’ #Rogers1Number hashtag promotion backfiring on Friday.  Another case of déjà vu?  It seems like every week another brand is biting the dust on Social Media by putting together a marketing campaign hoping to get some great positive exposure, only to have management woken up to the phone ringing off the hook by colleagues proclaiming: “red alert!”.   And sure, we can just chalk it up to social media naivety on the part of the brand, or blame it on a Social Media intern, or on the person or company that developed the campaign; i.e., they weren’t clear enough about how to use the hashtag, and customers took advantage.  The fact is, companies cannot control the message on Social Media.  Surely we know this by now.  Brands can put out whatever message they want.  And customers will react to it any way they want.  And guess who has the last say?  The customer.

You can’t fake tweets, as Toyota tried to do during the recent Super Bowl game.  You can’t fool people.  You have to time your tweets properly, and make sure they’re in good taste, as Kenneth Cole found out early last year during the Egyptian uprising.  And clearly, you can’t control how people will use a hashtag that you’ve created for a specific, often well-intentioned purpose, as McDonald’s recently discovered with #McDStories (and as if they hadn’t learned, their St. Patrick’s Day #shamrocking hashtag, has already turned into a “bashtag“), RIM learned the hard way with its #BeBold campaign, and Rogers similarly just found out.

The fact is, companies cannot control the message on Social Media….And guess who has the last say? The customer.

Hashtag hijacking is becoming a popular trend among disgruntled tweeters.  But can you really prevent it from happening?   Twitter is an efficient vehicle for the masses to feed off one another and amplify their collective voice.  It’s fast becoming the voice of the detractor, when it comes to brands trying to control the message.  I’ve spoken to a number of Senior Executives who won’t venture into the Social space for this very reason – they fear that all their dirty laundry will be aired online for the world to see.  And they’re probably right.

But isn’t this a symptom of a much bigger problem?

You can be sure that many of these larger organizations, like McDonald’s, Rogers, Toyota, and RIM have been soliciting feedback from their customers over countless years.  Customer Satisfaction surveys, focus groups, Voice of the Customer programs, etc., are often overdone by many of these companies.  So undoubtedly, they already know how customers feel about them.  The brand sentiment scores don’t hide the truth.  We know who the  “promoters” are as well as the “detractors”.  These are terms popularized by Fred Reichheld of Bain & Company, through his research on the correlation between corporate profitability and customer behaviour.  Most large organizations use the metric that he developed – the Net Promoter Score (NPS®) or some derivative, to segment customers and measure Loyalty or Customer Experience, because of its simplicity and predictive accuracy.

To calculate this metric – Net Promoter® Score – all you need to do is take the percentage of customers who are Promoters, or those who rate the “likelihood to recommend” at 9 or 10, and subtract the percentage of Detractors, or those that would rate it between 0 and 6.  Referring to the diagram above, coloured for ease of identification, note that there are 3.5 times as many chances of providing a rating in the red (0 through 6) as there are of providing a green rating ( 9 and 10).  So right off the bat, we’re starting from a place that’s stacked against customer advocates.  Now, of course, this is only one metric used to measure customer advocacy.  But because it’s so widely used, we’re probably safe to make certain assumptions. (By the way, I’m agnostic when it comes to loyalty metrics, so I’m not advocating the use of NPS®, but simply using it to make a point.)

Twitter “bashtags” are often symptomatic of problems at the very core of an organization – the brand promise and strategy do not align with the customer…

So if these large multinationals have all this satisfaction and loyalty data about their customers, in addition to NPS® scores, how are they applying the knowledge?  A key question is, are the Social Media or Marketing folks who manage the Twitter campaigns, collaborating with the Customer Service or Operations folks who typically “own” the research?  Often, because of the way organizations are structured and the way departments are siloed, the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing when it comes to the customer.  The sharing of information, horizontally, across an organization, isn’t at the level it needs to be.  Departments are often working with their own independent versions of customer information, rather than working from a single, centralized version of the truth.  And, it’s highly likely that the same customer who completed the follow-up telephone survey about their recent wireless phone upgrade or the online survey about their most recent service appointment at the automobile dealership, is the same person that tweeted about a recent experience.  If this customer is a “detractor”, it may not look pretty when his or her hashtagged tweet hits the Twitterverse for all to see and comment on.

Twitter “bashtags” are often symptomatic of problems at the very core of an organization – the brand promise and strategy do not align with the customer, but rather with the products that the company sells.  For these organizations, it’s all about pushing more product and selling higher margin goods and services.  And customers know it and resent it.  Remember, information about brands and the products and services they sell are easily searchable on the web, and very often a one-button “share” between friends.  Newsworthy information gets amplified rapidly.  As companies realize that the only way to differentiate in this commoditized, digitized world is by creating unique, wonderful experiences for their customers (stories and memories that can be shared, by putting their customers at the centre of their businesses), and by creating a culture where employees are empowered and proud to wear the brand on their sleeves, will we see a reduction in the number and frequency of Twitter promotions that backfire.

Think about companies that are customer-centric – companies like Wegmans, Nordstrom, LL Bean, Chik-fil-A, ING Direct, Apple, Westjet, USAA, Lexus, Four Seasons.  These organizations appear to be executing a comprehensive Customer Experience strategy.  They may be at different points in their customer-centric journeys, but they’re walking the walk and their customers know it.

Now think about the organization that you work for.  Is it sincere about putting the customer first, or is it just paying lip service?  Do you think a Twitter campaign would work in your company’s favour, or would it backfire?

Footnote1: I think it deserves mentioning that I am a long-standing customer of Rogers.  I’ve been a wireless, cable, and internet customer of theirs for well over 20 years.  And I actually use Rogers1Number.  I’ve been using it for about a month now.  I see its real value while travelling and being able to call any number in Canada at no extra charge.   I’ve seen improvements in Rogers’ customer service over the years.  I think they’re doing great things on the Social side, in terms of opening up and becoming more transparent.  But overall, they’re clearly still a very much product-focussed company.  And until that changes, they will continue to experience backlashes similar to this Twitter one, but across their other customer touch points as well.

Footnote2: I also did consulting work, a few years ago for Rogers through a previous company, with their technology and their finance groups.

Nothing is as fast as the speed of trust. These words resonate from a best-seller written by Stephen M. R. Covey back in 2006. Speed happens when people trust each other. Obstacles are reduced, if not eliminated. Information is shared openly. There is a high degree of accountability. Costs go down. Sounds like customer utopia, no?

Trust is the basis of customer loyalty, the holy grail of customer relationships. But organizations are at different points in their quest for loyal customers. To create a sustainable competitive advantage nowadays, Customer Experience needs to be part of the organization’s overall strategy; otherwise, commoditization becomes the norm, and price wars prevail. However, in many cases it may take years before an organization can become customer-centric. One question on the minds of most executives is: can we get there any faster? Can we somehow reduce the length of the journey?

They say it takes 28 days to break a bad habit. What if the strategy of being product-focussed is not a deliberate strategy, but nothing more than a bad habit which has been taken for granted? You think we could break it in a month? I highly doubt it. But even if we could, imagine how long it would take for your customers to not only detect the change, but also for you, as a company, to begin to put your customers at the centre of your world and have them feel that you truly care about their best interests. Changing people’s attitudes; their belief system, transforming a culture…such transformations are journeys, often taking years for an organization to reap sustainable benefits from. (That’s not to preclude short-term gains being made along the way that show progress and keep the momentum going.)

Your organization is going through transformational change. Why should I as your customer, trust that you’ll change for the better? Why would I trust that the path you take will work…for me?

I like how Simon Sinek defines trust. He says: trust is a feeling. It comes from a sense of common values and beliefs. Trust is important because when we’re surrounded by people who share the same beliefs as we do, we’re more confident to take risks; to experiment and make mistakes; to go off and explore. We know that there’s someone from within our community who believes what we believe, will watch our back, and will help us when we fall over.

Think about it. When we truly trust someone, we let our guard down. We simply believe. In a business setting, when we meet someone who is trustworthy, are we as rigorous about doing background checks? Are we as concerned about the details of the contract or statement of work they present us with? Are we as rigid with our budgets or can we be more flexible? Our gut tells us that they’ll be fair with us, that they’ll be reasonable, that they have integrity. Think of all the measures we put in place because we don’t trust people. Think of all the money that’s wasted on legal reviews and compliance; think of all the time we spend developing policies and procedures to protect ourselves. Now think about how easy it is to do a deal on a handshake when you trust the other person.

Think of all the measures we put in place because we don’t trust people. Think of all the money that’s wasted on legal reviews and compliance; think of all the time we spend developing policies and procedures to protect ourselves.

When we trust a company that we’ve bought a product or service from, we’re more likely to recommend them to our friends and family. We’re confident that by recommending the brand or the organization we’re going to maintain our own integrity. We’re putting our good name on the line. We want the other person to feel just as good about the experience as we did.

Social media is a huge boon to trust. Social media opens up a window into an organization. When an organization puts itself out on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and blogging sites, their personality comes through. They become transparent. We catch glimpses of their communication style, the openness of their leadership, their integrity as an organization, and their approach to giving and receiving feedback.

Most of us know of companies that have implemented a well-executed social media strategy; you don’t have to look very far. Companies like JetBlue, Dell, Best Buy, Ford, Zappos, and Starbucks, to name a few, understand the importance of transparency. We probably have come across others that may have hired interns, outsourced their social community management, or jumped into Social because it’s “free”, and have failed miserably at portraying themselves as a trusted brand; i.e., they’re not responsive, they don’t share content that is meaningful, they don’t engage their customers, and they blatantly try to sell. When we think about how we’ve tried to engage with these companies that have missed the social sweet spot, how do we feel? Are these companies that we would trust to deliver a great experience to a friend or family member that we care about?

Social media is a huge boon to trust. Social media opens up a window into an organization. When an organization puts itself out on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and blogging sites, their personality comes through. They become transparent.

I was intrigued just last week, by our Toronto Transit Commission (TTC). Under pressure by citizens to improve customer service even at a time when budgets have been cut back, the TTC had its first Town Hall meeting, guided by their leadership, that besides being open to the public, was live-streamed, televised, and simultaneously tweeted about. The recently hired Chief Customer Service Officer, obviously socially savvy, responded to each and every Town Hall tweet over the weekend. Since when do you see someone in the public service working outside of regular business hours? The TTC is a very bureaucratic, mistrusted, often-ridiculed public service. Citizens are clearly angry about upcoming service cut-backs and wait times. Yet, the TTC opened up. We think of them as very “old school”, yet they’re taking positive steps to becoming transparent. They are building trust. And while trust isn’t earned overnight, it’s a first step in becoming customer-centric.

Charlene Li, in her book Open Leadership, writes about leading in this socially-connected world. She describes openness as being the new normal. She talks about the importance, as a business leader, of being able to let go of command and control. When you start to dig a little, you often find that the companies that have truly grasped the concept of transparency and its link to trust, have leaders who, according to Li’s definition, are “open”. These same leaders have created a culture founded on trust, among other brand promises, and seem to recognize the importance of having a “customer-first” culture. Li is saying: “Open up or die”. Jack Welch, the former CEO of GE, once said: “If you’re not fast, you’re dead”. There appears to be a clear link between openness, trust, speed, and a fanatical devotion to the customer. While you don’t necessarily have to be open to be customer-centric (look at Apple, for example), Social Media is clearly a scalable lever that can be used by a company to become open and transparent. Transparency builds trust. And trust is the foundation for delivering an enhanced customer experience. An organization that is trusted by its customers is one that has eliminated many obstacles for doing business with them.

So go ahead, get Social, especially if you’re sitting on the fence; but do it strategically. Everyone’s telling you the time is now. Even if your research is telling you that the customer segment that would engage with you via Social channels makes up a very small portion of your overall customer base, it’s more important to show the world that you’re an organization that can be trusted. And who knows, your transparency may be picked up by a blogger, a journalist for a major newspaper, a Gen Y’er who decides to make a video about you that goes viral. It’s all in your customers’ hands now. Remember, the sooner you open up, the sooner you’ll be able to establish trust, and the sooner you may move the needle on your Customer Experience strategy.

Imagine you’re booked on a flight across the country to visit your sick mother. Your cranky 5-year old daughter just threw up in your lap while your plane, sitting on the tarmac, was delayed over an hour and a half for takeoff, because Catering had misplaced the flight’s sandwiches. You’ve shared a play-by-play with the Social Media world and your followers on Twitter, not because you’re a rabble-rouser, but because this is what you do as a writer and successful “mom blogger“. It’s just who you authentically are.

So imagine tweeting out this stream shown here on the right [please read from bottom to top]. One might expect a response from Air Canada? I mean, you mentioned their name before you took off and while you were waiting for your connecting flight. The least they could have done was responded to you. It’s not like they had to have a steak waiting for you when you arrived in Vancouver airport. Although that might have been a great PR coup for Canada’s national air carrier.

So what might one expect Air Canada’s response to be? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Not during the tweeting, after Catherine Connors (the passenger I’m writing about) had landed, or while she was facing the further potential dilemma of missing her connecting flight. In fact the last tweet by Air Canada had been 20 hours earlier. It appeared that whoever was managing Air Canada’s Twitter account, was not manning his or her post. Now that’s just my perception. It could be that Air Canada’s Twitter account was set up, according to corporate policy, to only send outbound tweets.

But get this…Westjet (Air Canada’s number one Canadian competitor) picked up on Catherine’s situation within minutes. Both the official @westjet account and @flygirlws, a Westjet employee who just wanted to help.

And it gets even better. Westjet doesn’t even offer a connecting flight from Vancouver to Kamploops, BC. But here they were, trying to find solutions for a distressed passenger. If nothing else, they were listening, engaging with her, and trying as best they could to help.

…if only I could get better help than shrugs and ’email customer relations’. @WestJet *called* me.” 1:08 PM Aug 26th via Twitter for iPhone in reply to @sharmstro ~herbadmother Catherine Connors

So what do we make of this? First off, no doubt Catherine Connors, whose Her Bad Mother blog has been mentioned in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the American Prospect, the London Times, as well as on CNN, ABC, CBC and the BBC online, who has over 13,000 Twitter followers and a Klout score of 70 (at the time of this writing), will probably not speak or write very positively about the Air Canada experience to her friends or followers (talk about helping to drive down their NPS, if that’s what Air Canada uses to measure loyalty).

Secondly, if you follow Catherine’s Twitter stream, a number of her followers actually tweeted with her through her ordeal (me being one of them). Notice @rachelofcourse’s Tweet to the right. She even mentions @dooce …hmmm, I wonder who @dooce is and if she has many followers? Get the picture?

Thirdly, let’s think from a customer’s perspective for a moment. Let’s say you like to communicate with your friends through Twitter and other Social tools. It might be instinctual for you to send out a tweet to a Brand expecting some type of reply…I mean most big consumer brands are on Twitter now, aren’t they? And if they are, by this time in the evolution of Twitter, do they not know that Twitter is about authentic two-way dialogue; not a one-way push of marketing content? Surely, there’s someone or a group of people back in the recesses of Air Canada that manage the brand’s Twitter account and can engage in a two-way dialogue?

So what does this say of the Air Canada culture vs the WestJet culture, and how employees are empowered to act on their company’s behalf? Remember, people power a Twitter account. There’s an actual human being behind both @aircanada and @westjet. When Twitter accounts are set up to represent organizations, especially large brands, we often forget that humans are monitoring them. What does this say about each organization’s committment to the Passenger Experience? One company is actively listening (and actively engaging with the customer); the other is deaf. To make matters worse for Air Canada, they actually opened the door wide open for their number one Canadian competitor to walk in and impress their customer simply by listening and offering “moral support”, as Catherine put it.

One company is actively listening (and actively engaging with the customer); the other is deaf.

What do you think? Am I being unfair in my assessment of how these two airlines compare in terms of their committment to the Customer Experience? Maybe Air Canada has a strategy in place but is not quite there yet. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Oh, by the way, according to Catherine, she did finally make a connecting flight with Air Canada (not the one she had originally been booked on), squeaking in on stand-by, but it was despite her communication efforts with them. WestJest was prepared to get her and her daughter to Kamloops via Calgary, and one of her Twitter followers even offered to drive her…and her mother also seems to be feeling better now