The "Social Quotient" Web 2.0 and Great B2B Customer Experiences

I've talked about Danny Meyer's approach to hospitality as a business tool.  Danny believes that in his restaurants, if you want to deliver a superior customer experience, don't begin with customer experience strategies.  Begin with employees that GET customer experience and have a high Hospitality Quotient (HQ) -- that innate ability to be hospitable, listen to customers and deliver an enriching experience to customers.

Question: Can the same approach be used in B2B environments?

In a word yes.

Companies that deliver great customer experiences tend to experience:

1. An appeal to both techie and non-techie users because both are engaged with the content and communities that appeal directly to them
2. Higher return on marketing dollars because they don't provide marketing speak but speak in plain spoken, conversational tones and leverage great UGC. So customers WANT and NEED to engage in such forthright conversations.
3. Products that are more closely aligned with market needs again because using the voice of the customer to influence product decisions
4. Greater intimacy between customer and brand leading to a superior revenue stream: Marketing  Drives Conversation, Conversation Drives Relationships, Relationships Drive Brand Affinity > Brand Affinity converts into Revenues
5. Customers as avid brand evangelists that do your reference selling (WOM) for you

Many believe that Web 2.0 implementations are the vehicle for making this customer centricity possible.  While those are indeed the tools, foundational elements within a corporation need to be laid first.  Chief among them are what I call a companies - "Social Quotient"  - the likelihood of an organization to effectively utilize Web 2.0 solutions to drive greater customer intimacy.  A companies' SQ begins with its employees:

1. How likely are they to want to use social media tools to connect not only with one another but with customers and partners?
2. Are they using Twitter, blogs, Wikis of their own accord?
3. Are they demanding that these tools be deployed internally for greater internal collaboration
4. Are they part of a diverse workforce generational makeup - does it have a broad distribution of Millennials (Gen Y), Gen Xers, Early and Late Stage Boomers  - Millennials and Gen Xers tend to drive adoption of these tools
5. Do they have a penchant for experimentation and are not afraid of Failure? Are employees given innovation time? Time to do their own projects?
6. Are there lots of grass roots implementations afloat and are employees evangelizing them to others?

Employees with a high SQ will want to use Social Media to drive customer intimacy and in so doing benefit not only the customer but the brand.  So start with an Employee First approach to Social Media NOT the Social Media itself.

Comments

[Seth Brady]

Steve,

I enjoyed reading your post, and thought you took an interesting approach to gauge social media success by looking first at the company's cultural makeup and tolerance for change before looking anywhere else.

We've all seen ventures where a senior-level exec gets excited about a shiny new technology toy, demands that it be implemented quickly, and then wonders why several months later this abandoned initiative became such a failure.

To help avoid these kinds of disasters, Forrester has been very vocal with their POST approach (People, Objectives, Strategy, Technology; the tools are the LAST thing you should be worried about). There's some great examples in Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff's recent book "Groundswell", which clearly outlines this approach and walks through case studies of those that have used social media well (or at least, started down the right path).

But when Forrester talks about "People," it's generally questions about your customers and what social spaces they tend to congregrate in (blogs they read, discussion forums they post in, etc).

This doesn't really extend People questions to employees of your company, however. I agree with your post that there is another dimension that must be examined first: the likelihood of a company to truly be a social company. The state of a company's culture often has a direct effect on the ability for that same company to succeed in this space. And even in those companies with excellent customer service, there can sometimes be a big difference between being customer-centric and being social (it's easy to put a top-notch CS team behind phones and email, but it's another thing to put yourself and your brand out into the marketplace and engage on a global stage.

Without the cultural backbone in place, the drivers to get a social media project -- or any new tech project, for that matter -- off the ground simply because "my competitors have one" will quickly lose steam and become a high risk of causing brand backlash.

Your points on the use and adoption of tools like Twitter of one's own accord are valid and give a pretty good starting barometer for one's own SQ, as is the fear of failure stemming from prior initiatives that never took off.

If nothing else, those of us in the business of evangelizing and acting as a social media steward within our companies sometimes need to stop and look closely at our companies' cultures and how we can help them adapt to this radically different way of doing business.

At least this way when we end up hitting the roadblocks that we know are already out there, perhaps we'll be able to put things in perspective and even work through a better long-term solution by helping influence the cultural barriers that may be the main stumbling block affecting the rapid adoption of these new technologies.

[Gregory Y]

It is a very thought provoking post. I wonder if anyone bothered to collect statistics on what percent of working population actually engaged actively with Tweeter (which personally I cannot figure how to use in meaningful way), blogs and wikis. I have seen a number stating millions of blogs, but high percentage of them is dormant or dead, and as you may noticed most blogs have no comments, which make them more monologues than conversations. The same can be said about most wiki implementations, which start with the bang and shortly welter with a whisper. Given challenges the enterprises face in recruiting skilled employees, and how inept most of them are in it, it is hard to imagine that SQ will get on HR radars very soon.

The other issue the companies are wrestling is a definition of line where "social" is not appropriate. I can see that product support and management areas are excellent candidates for socialization, but many companies would see opening their customer's contacts as a treat. This is not only an enterprise issue, but also for individuals to define the limits of their comfort zone.

I did not mean to sound negative, I just look for more constructive, example primed information on how the new, or not so new, technology tools could be integrated with existing business processes.

[Meryl Steinberg]

Thanks, Steve. You point out an additional element to consider when developing social media strategy... the SQ of the company. Leave no stone unturned.

[Steve]

@Seth correct, its all about "da cultchah" as we say in The Bronx. Without the right foundation social media implementations, customer experience initiatives and even IT projects will fail. I think the SQ can measure/be an indicator of that success or failure.

@Gregory thanx for your comment, as far as engagement in most online social structures, use the 1/10/90 rule 1% super users, 10% content generators/90% passively soaking up the info. The SQ can answer the "where" question you appropriately point out but even the "should we even bother" question

@Meryl correct, create a 360 degree view

[Yura]

Gregory, how about MSDN and IBM Workshop blogs? There are plenty of IBM and Lotus developers blogging (the IBM ones have to say that those aren't IBM's opinions, tho), so it really depends on the people.

As Steve mentioned, only a small part of the Web/work community contribute, so the matter is in a) hiring them b) finding them in your company and c) handing them the microphone. Not everyone employee of IBM blogs, but who blog do give the attention it deserves. The same can be applied to any company.

[george faulkner]

Excellent post, solid points. I see this happen everyday. People pushed into Social Computing spaces without prior knowledge, experience nor passion for the practice. Doomed to fail. I'll be sharing this post for weeks to come. Thanks Steve

[Steve]

Greg... thanx. I think IBM is doing an excellent job at driving internal adoption. It must be fun to be part of it. I find that Inspiration (like Perspiration) goes a long way in getting things done in the corporate world eh?