Social Media and Customer Service

Talking to people at holiday parties, this subject keeps coming up: Why would anybody use social media for a customer service issue?  Doesn’t it make more sense to contact customer service directly?

Not in my experience.  Have you ever had one of these situations happen to you?

• Called a computer manufacturer’s support line because of networking problems only to have the customer support representative tell me with great solemnity that “Your computer is not compatible with the Internet.”  I got the rep’s name and told him that I was going to quote him on this and he still insisted that my PC was not compatible with the Internet.  (What training do they give these people???)
• Called a different manufacturer about problems with another PC.  I had run diagnostics that showed that my PC was not booting because of memory hardware problems.  The service rep insisted that he could not authorize replacing my memory unless I first wiped and re-installed my operating system — and everything else on the computer.  I argued with him for hours and could not get him to budge on this issue.  (I resolved this one by writing a letter directly to the CEO of the company, which by the way, became famous for its poor customer service.)
• Another time, I was having trouble with email.  The customer service rep for my service provider told me that the problem was that I was sending attachments too big for their email server to handle.  I went so non-linear that my family is still laughing about it.  It turns out that I was the Product Manager for that particular email server and I knew it’s exact specifications.  I had worked for the company that sold them the email server and had been personally and directly involved in the sale and installation of the software.
• Most recently, changes at my service provider caused my email client to stop working.  When I asked them to fix it (and it took hours to get to the right person) he told me that he knew what the fix was but would not fix my problem because they did not support email clients, only Web clients.  I argued that they had caused the problem, but it was to no avail.  He was prepared to argue with me for hours when it would have cost his company far less money to just give me the fix.

Believe me, I am not making this stuff up.  I could never imagine this level of insanity going on in any professionally-run organization.  When a customer service organization reaches a certain size, Dilbertian behavior somehow becomes the norm.  There is something about the goal-setting process and poor training that results in this type of behavior.

So, why do people take their customer service problems to Twitter and Facebook?  On the surface, it does not seem to make sense.  Why blast your problem out in a broadcast to thousands of people when it would seem to be more efficient to handle it one-on-one with a trained customer service agent.  Here is why people use social media for service issues:

1. Customer Service agents behave differently when the eyes of the world are on them. One-on-one they can and do say the most outrageous things to you. Before the eyes of the social media community, they need to be much more careful.  A mistake like any of the ones above could cause a viral firestorm on social media and severely damage the reputation of the company.  The stakes for the company are much higher on a stage that big.
2. Customer Service agents on Social Media appear to be better trained. In my experience, customer service agents who handle social media are much more thoroughly trained, not just on technical issues, but in common sense and on social interaction skills.  Dealing with one giant telco who has a deep and well-earned reputation for poor customer service, I found the telephone support people to be worthless.  On the other hand, the Twitter support people were helpful, knew their stuff, and quite willing to fix the problem.  The telephone support was so bad,that I documented the entire experience, tracked down the VP of WorldWide Customer Support, and sent her a letter detailing the situation.  It took a month to get a response from her.  In the meantime, their Twitter support team had solved my problem cheerfully within 48 hours.

Culturally, I see some people struggling with these issues.  For some it seems like “bad manners” or something to broadcast a product issue out in a one-to-many fashion.  At the end of the day, you have to use what works and my experience is that social medial support channels just plain work better.  Why wast literally hours arguing on the phone when you can get a quick fix on Social Media?

The worldwide transparency of Social Media makes customer service organizations bring their A-Games. No enterprise wants to attract the Roving Eye of Sauron.

Advice for Software Startups 2011

As we head into 2011, the business picture for startups is continuing to improve steadily.  Around San Francisco and Silicon Valley, the startup “buzz” is reaching levels not seen in a long time.  Funding continues to grow, cautiously. The cost of launching a startup is falling.  The end game remains a bit cloudy: The vast majority of startups plan to exit by selling themselves to a larger company.  Here are my thoughts for 2011, with a particular emphasis on software startups.  (See also Silicon Valley Startup Investing Trends blog posting.)

Start With Non-traditional Funding. Angel funding in particular are gaining strength and with the lower financial barriers to getting a startup going, in many cases the Angel round can be enough for many startups to achieve escape velocity.  Also consider the investment arms of larger companies.  This is particularly true in CleanTech and BioTech but there are large companies that will invest in software startups as well.  VC funding is out there, but you need to have a running application with a vibrant and active community before seeking funding.

Build & Deploy in the Cloud. Startups can build and deploy  services in the cloud for much less up-front money.  Using platforms such as Amazon EC2, Salesforce.com, Heroku (acquired), Google, IBM, and even Facebook. The financial benefits  of the cloud will mean a much lower barrier to entry for new companies.  It has gotten to the point where nobody in their right mind would fund a startup that built their own datacenter.  Even if your plan is to have your own data center for competitive differentiation reasons, it still makes sense to start on the cloud first, test the viability of your idea, and then invest further.

Have a Plan to be #1 or #2 or Forget It. Geoffrey Moore spelled this out in his book, “The Gorilla Game” and it has never been more true.  With the speed of Internet innovation and the lowered barriers to entry, markets mature and consolidate faster than ever before.  The only companies who typically make money are the top two players.  Special exception: Sometimes it is possible to carve out a profitable niche market and defend it.  Think hard about the barriers to entry are in this market and prepare to defend them if this is the path you chose.  Niche Example: Security products and services in the U.S. Medical market requires specific  expertise in HIPAA privacy rules.

Solve a Specific Problem for a Specific  Customer. A lot of people are in love with the idea of “ship it, listen to your customers, and iterate.” That approach only works if you are the market innovator or a market leader.  In a crowded market  or when you are coming from behind, that approach does not work.  You must have a clear business value proposition and clear market differentiation to separate you from the rest of the pack.  Actually, that is good advice for every startup.  Example: Zynga found specific and unmet customer needs around social gaming.

Plan Your “End Game” Carefully. IPOs remain unlikely in the current economic conditions for all but the very most successful startups (Groupon, for example).

• Be clear about what your end game is.  If it is to sell to a larger company, make sure that this is built into your business plan, that your core team knows it, and this goal is prioritized correctly.
• Be clear about who your target buyers are and how you plan to position your startup to them.
• Never only have one target buyer.  You always need a backup plan, even if it is just for bargaining leverage.  When you say you are willing to walk away from the table, you had better be willing to do just that – which means you have to have a Plan B.

Have a Community Plan.  Most startups with a social element to the offer will have some aspect of community to them.  The question is, where will you get your community?

• Build Your Own: This is very hard to do if you are trying to build a large generalized community.  Even Google is struggling with this.
• Specialize: Some topics are not for everybody to hear.  There may be ways to build community for specialized topics like neurosurgery, cloud computing, or startups. The challenge will be to offer a significant enough incentive to make it worth people’s time to create another online identity and profile.
• Borrow One: You can build your service on the Facebook platform, for example.  This gives you an instant community of 600 million users, but comes with significant constraints and risks.

People Count. A lot of startups I talk to spend all their time thinking about innovative and cool ideas.  That’s a good start but, when it comes to getting Series A or Series B funding, the quality of your core team count for as much or more than your business idea.  Why is that?  See the next item below.

Listen & Iterate. Lots of startups launch, listen to their customers, and find out that they need to change their business direction.  Sometimes radically. Thanks to Agile Development techniques (example: SCRUM) and cloud platforms, many startups are able to make the changes required if they are listening to their customers.  The good news is that customers will happily tell you what they want and where you are screwing up, if you listen.  Social media makes that customer interaction even faster and more powerful.  Your customers generally will want you to succeed and will try to help you to do so.  Another key lesson here is not to go too far down the path on v2.0 until you have listened to and completely internalized the customer feedback from v1.0.  Everybody in your organization has to be listening after the release of v1.0 — and that includes the development team.

Low Barriers to Entry for You Means the Same For Your Competition. The good news is that you can get your startup operating and competing for a lot less capital investment.  The bad news is that your competitors can too.  So, the question is: How are you going to stay out in front of them?

• Out-grow: Grow faster than your competitors and leave no breathing room in your target market.  For example: Facebook is in a dominant position just because of the sheer size of their community.  Users are fatigued with creating and managing multiple online profiles.  A startup that asks users to create a new one is facing a serious uphill battle in 2011. That does even for a competitor as powerful as Google.
• Out-innovate. Listen to customers better, and provide more value that way.
• Specialize: Carve out a niche and defend it by catering to the specific needs of the market.

Partner. There are a lot of good reasons to partner. The important thing is that if you are serious about the partnership then you have to staff them.  Partnerships managed by busy people in their “spare time” almost never work out.  Partnership goals include:

• Whole Products: Partners can help you to fill in the gaps in your product and deliver a “whole product” or solution to your target customer, not just technology.
• Apparent size: Small fish swim in schools to look like a bigger entity to larger predators. Partnering can make you look more viable.
• Ideas: Partnering with other startups can help just through shared experience and ideas.
• Market Access: Larger partners can help you get into markets. Just don’t look at them as sales channels for your products.  You have to bring value to the table and that usually means qualified customer leads and/or a way to make their products more competitive in the marketplace.
• Your End Game: Build a relationship that may grow into something deeper.  Like acquisition. In many cases, it makes sense to partner first to test out the relationship before buying the company.

Right now, most of the software startup action is in social media and mobile applications.  That doesn’t mean there isn’t opportunity elsewhere, it is just that the path of least funding resistance is here.  With all the “action” concentrated in this space, it makes it all the more important to have clear market differentiation.

A couple of years ago, the advice to software startups would have been to develop offshore (to reduce costs) and to open source your software (to position it as open).  These two things are no longer flat requirements  for funding but can be useful tactics if they make sense for your business.

Best Wishes for 2011!

Web Analytics Usage Statistics

I have always been interested in Web Analytics.  Most of the tools claim to solve world hunger, but which of the literally dozens of Web Analytics tools do people actually use out there?  I stumbled across one pretty interesting analysis of who is using what today.

Here are the Top 5 Web Analytics tools used according to this survey:

1. Google Analytics.  (57%)  Not surprising.  It’s free to use.
2. Quantcast Tracking. (18%)
3. Google Analytics Asynchronous (14%) Also free to use.   More about what this is.
4. Omniture SiteCatalyst.  (14%) Recently acquired by Adobe.
5. comScore.  (9%)

The number six tool is down around 3% share.

This is just the beginning of a long analytic tool war.  With the data on the Internet fragmenting (see my previous 12/13/10 blog post) they tools makers will have to move quickly to be able to track and measure activity on the Web.

See Full Report

The Future Direction of Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

SEM is pretty straightforward, right?  You use some analytics software to figure out the search terms that customers are using to find your product or service and then you bid on the right to place ads with those terms.

A new white paper from Forrester looks at the future trends in SEM.  Like a lot of things, the searchable Internet is fragmenting  in many ways:

• Into new forms of content.
• Into new uses: Mobile/Social and GoogleTV are examples.
• Into communities and platforms that are opaque to traditional search engines.  Examples include the Apple iPhone, Android phones, and social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.  Search engine technology is going to adjust.  In fact, Bing and Google are already making changes.

But, the bottom line is that search engine marketing techniques and analytic approaches must change as well.

You can download the full Forrester report for free from Omniture (owned by Adobe):  The Future Of Search Marketing

It’s well worth reading.

Google Social Media Strategy Update

The one thing that is clear about Google’s Social Media strategy is that it is evolving.  Here are some of the highlights of the latest news on the subject:

• Google Me planned for Fall 2010, will now roll out in the Spring 2011 timeframe.
  • Google Me was planned for fall.  ZDnet Article.
  • Then they said they were not building a traditional platform.  Telegraph Article.
  • Now, the update is that Google Me or Google +1 will roll out in the spring of 2011.  Blogherald Article.

• Google will not compete head-on with Facebook.  The emphasis will be on providing a new and unique social media experience.  (Good Idea)
• Google +1, which is the latest thinking on what was Google Me, will not be an app so much as a browser extension.  This will be complimented by a mobile app called Loops.
• The idea behind Loops is that you have “loops” or groups of friends and do not want to blast out all messages to everybody.  You want to send certain types of messages to certain groups.  That makes a lot of sense to me.

Why a Frontal Assault of Facebook Does Not Make Strategic Sense

It’s a matter of simple mathematics.  Social media is all about your community.  Check the relative community sizes of Facebook and Google.

Facebook            Over 500 million

Google                 Well over 100 million GMail users

How Do All The Google Parts Fit Together?

There is actually quite a lot going on at Google that would compliment their social media strategy.  The big thing that is missing is a natural way of pulling it all together – a sort of grand unification theory.  Google needs to find a way to leverage its strengths in search, video, email, etc and extend them naturally into the social media space.

The good news for Google is that they are not starting from bare dirt.  They have a lot of corporate assets that can play in this space.  The big challenge for Google will be to convince all of their anonymous users (Search, YouTube, Maps) to create and share online identities and become part of a Google community.

Groupon would seem like a very nice fit with this whole picture.  The Groupon model would be a great way to monetize social media and diversify Google’s sources of income which is virtually all from ads.  The problem is that Groupon turned down a $6 billion offer from Google last week.  BW Article. The opportunity for Google is that Groupon’s business model is not to hard to emulate.  The challenge is that Google is coming from behind in social media and really doesn’t need another battle to fight.