I’ve been thinking recently about the huge shift that is taking place within the world of customer service as a result of social. What we are seeing with social is a move from a closed, largely process driven transaction towards a more open and experiential one, where the resolution of the issue is almost secondary to the experience of it.
The advent of social has brought with it a whole new lexicon that is having to be learnt. This lexicon is made up of a vocabulary that is heavily open, collaborative and emotional. In many respects anathema to traditional customer service.
Agencies, analysts and commentators alike, of which I am one, tell businesses to be open, transparent, meaningful, authentic, empathetic, honest, relevant, interesting, courageous, human, humane, and ultimately be real.
The pursuit of these is a noble one, and ultimately will one day result in a better, more acceptable and accessible form of customer service.
But I’m wondering for a part of the business that has always sought solace in numbers and structure, predictability and averages, what do these words really mean?
What does being open mean?
What does being authentic mean?
What does being empathetic mean?
What does being relevant mean?
What does being real mean?
If I’ve never known these things, and never had to be them, how do I know what they are? How do I know where they are? How do I know what they look like? How do I know when I’ve become them? How do I know?
The agencies tell me that my first tweet should be interesting and relevant. But what does that really mean to me? What does it really mean to my business? Do the agencies really know themselves?
Openness to one company is not necessarily the same openness to another. And perhaps it’s even different again to what a customer thinks openness is.
So the next time you tell an organisation to be open, make sure you know what you mean in the first place, and then tell the organisation what you mean as well. Otherwise you’ll both be forever guessing and assuming, and the only thing that comes out of guessing and assuming is likely to be disappointment.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by guy stephens, Paul Marden. Paul Marden said: RT @guy1067: Just added blog – Social customer care #custserv: Take the guesswork out of being open: http://wp.me/pDv8M-82 […]
Guy,
I couldn’t agree with you more, especially how you concluded. I think the value of those “words” are how they are used to discover opportunities within the organization. They are terms that make people think differently about who they are, how they behave and what they represent in their particular domain. The idea of “build it” and they will come is over, having a big advertising budget doesn’t cut it anymore, and quite frankly having a great product isn’t unique either.
I think the words bring people back to the basics of why they are in business, and make them think about how they arrived where they are. Most of the small businesses I work with come to the realization that they let “work” get in the way of really serving their customers. The reality check is the exercise of thought…work will always be there, but your customer probably won’t.
Thanks for making me think!
my .02
Hi Guy,
I echo Bill’s point about your article and conclusions. Open, authentic, real, empathetic….all of these words will have relative meanings for different people, businesses and customers at different times and in different contexts. I think the trick to being open is to understand that this is not a fixed meaning but something that is organic and runs counter to how we/they may have been doing business for the last few decades.
Perhaps, being ‘open’ is about realising that things are changing, will continue to change and that change is something that we have to get used to if we are to build better businesses and relations with our customers.
Adrian
This is highly relevant and goes to the heart of my own misgivings about the prevalent quality of advice regarding social media. Let’s stop for a moment and consider what organisations do:
They seek to survive.
They seek to reproduce themselves in their existing image.
They seek to avoid risk.
The really good ones go on to achieve sustainability and profit.
Organisations are feature very large and very importantly in our lives. This is extremely obvious – but not quite so obvious is that outsiders to individual organisations thus automatically transfer their moral aspirations for society on to organisations……
…..Organisations should be good, they should be honest, they should be kind, they should cherish the earth that sustains them and so on.
In this regard social media advocates are absolutely no different to all the other sources of moral hope being direcrted towards commercial organisations. And, in failing to articulate alternatives for achieving survival, reproduction and risk avoidance, social media advocacy is no more effective in its connection.
The connection needs to be struck on the mutual grounds of productive morality. My work around Cultureship, http://www.cultureship.com , seeks to provide connectivity between the human and the commercial through Community Contribution & Recognition.
Whether you agree with my personally identification of the drivers to sustainable corporate out-performance, the core point remains that social media needs to move beyond moral bleating and arrive at moral/commercial connection: otherwise it remains as a crude platform for duplicate sloganeering, or an overly abstracted and distant dream work.
Hi Marcus, you’ve really made me think about the moral aspect of this – outsiders to individual organisations thus automatically transfer their moral aspirations for society on to organisations.
The idea of a moral transfer is a really interesting one and something I hadn’t really considered before. I’ve got no more comment than that as I need to think about it more, but it’s definitely got me thinking. Thank you.