Over the past few years, companies have been flocking to social media faster than potheads to a Grateful Dead concert. Most CEOs and executives will say they understand the importance of using social media to connect with their customers. You’ve probably told others that you think social media is important to your brand and company, too.
But are the things you think of as important the same things that your customers think of as important?
When dealing with Social CRM, it’s very important to create collaborative experiences with your communities, but in order to do that correctly you have to have a full understanding of what it is your customers expect from you in the social world.
Expectation Junction
A little while ago IBM did a great study of where customer and company expectations lie. You can download the full reports here, but they are quite long, so I’ll help bring you the gist.
One of the most interesting things they found was the huge divide between what customers want from their online interactions with brands and what brands believe customers want. It looks something like this:
Pretty impressive, if you ask me. The top two things that customers want from their brand interactions online (discounts and purchases) are the two things that brands think are the least important.
So, what do companies do with this information?
The first thing to do is to understand that the current client understandings most companies operate under are quite faulty. It’s not easy to redefine the relationship and understanding of customer actions, but that’s the world we live and work in now. The customer is changing, and although businesses are also changing, most businesses are digging their heels into the dirt in order to not have to change their conversations with customers….and that’s what needs to change the most.
Social CRM can easily be most effective managing the dialogues with customers rather than the customers themselves.
So, the first step in all of this is to bring in the tools that can manage those conversations in a way that gets your company on the same expectations page as your customers. If you do that and nothing else, as the chart shows, you’ll be ahead of 90% of your competition.
Thoughts?
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[...] The Great Divide [...]
[...] The Great Divide [...]
G’Day Joey,
I believe that we pay far to little attention to what I call EPC: expectation, perception and consequences. This applies to both staff and customers. Expectation is a far more powerful driver of behavior than most managers realize.
Having said all that, I’m always a bit sceptical about “Surveys.” A study done here by one of our local universities a few years ago suggested that about 70% of all surveys unwittingly provided responses consistent with the views of the organization commissioning the survey.
Expectation, in the form of Self Fulfilling Prophecy is alive and well in survey design. And I have to say that almost all of the surveys I’m asked to complete on the web are very poorly designed.
Asking customers what they need in terms of new products is of little value. As Henry Ford is alleged to have said; “They’d have wanted a faster horse.”
None of that means that I am having second thoughts about the importance of EPC. We just have to be careful about who and how we ask. As George Bernard Shaw said; “The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves. It’s how she’s treated.” We can go right back to the Hawthorne experiments to see an example of that in a workplace.
Best Wishes
Leon