Thursday, June 9, 2011

Customer Engagement

Enchantment by Guy KawasakiI wanted to announce that according to Guy Kawasaki I am an "enchanting person". Just thought you would like to know. Moving on this idea of being enchanting is key for any organization when working in social media and CRM.
(PS. If you would like to take the test here is the link to Guy's blog)

I found a company that has the tools and know how to help people achieve greatness in social media and customer engagement 3CSI. These great ideas come from 3CSI's blog.

"In this early world of Digital CRM, two basic approaches have emerged — one of Monitoring and one of Engagement. Monitoring, the forerunner of the two, is the passive tracking of things like sentiment and experience (whether positive or negative). Engagement, on the other hand, is much more active and takes Digital CRM a step further by involving both conversation discovery and proactive engagement. The result is a direct and personalized communication channel between company functions (such as Marketing and Customer Care) and the customers and prospects they serve. Certainly, between the two, engagement offers brands greater opportunities, while at the same time offering consumers greater value. And while Monitoring can help a company with the broad strokes, it’s Engagement that leads to meaningful interactions with individual customers. This is important because as all relationship managers know (or ought to), it’s measurably less expensive to retain existing customers than it is to create new ones."

Thanks for that insight 3CSI. I wanted to take this a little further in how do you engage with the customer because monitoring is dull and easy to understand. But to be successful in customer engagement you need to find ways to become enchanting to those customers with whom you interact. This chart was taken from Tom H. Anderson's blog  I found it to be extremely useful and much easier to read and useful than my boring writing.





































































































I truly feel that if you can become enchanting and understand the tools available, you will achieve truly great customer engagement and work magic within the realm of CRM in a social environment.

Thursday, June 2, 2011

Listen and grow your business

Listening is such an important part of customer interaction. I recently read a great example of this by a company named Cinch on Scott Monty's blog (from Ford).

Cinch is a company that combines Social Media with voice messaging, which is a pretty amazing service. It allows you to hear the intonation and other cues of those who are messaging. This a company you would think would excel at listening. I am pleased to state that they do.
This is what Scott Monty wrote on his blog;

"On May 31, Cinch announced to its customers via email that it would be changing the service's URL from http://www.cinchcast.com to the shorter http://icin.ch. Easier to remember, right? And since they have an iPhone app, iCinch seemed logical.

Evidently not.

Customers didn't take it that way, at least. And while I didn't see any violent backlash online, the team at Cinch must have gotten an earful, for on June 1 - the very next day - they issued the following email to their customer base:
Yesterday, when we sent out the message regarding our upcoming website transition from http://cinchcast.com/ to http://icin.ch/, we heard back from several of our community members that they did not like the new domain choice. While it was short, they thought it was hard to remember and share with others, and did not clearly represent the Cinch brand.


Well, we took your feedback to heart. We still need to transition domains on June 7, 2011. However, we have decided to transition the Cinch website to http://cinch.fm instead. Again, other than the URL change this transition will be seamless to our users.


Please let us know if you have any questions. We apologize for any confusion.
Best Regards,
The Cinch Team"


I agree with Scott that this is an amazing example of listening; not only that, it acknowledges their customers. Cinch really wanted to let their customers know they listened, and acted on the comments.

This is the power of social media and e-marketing. Many of the comments came via the social media accounts linked to Cinch.

I also wanted to add a great social media tip I learned from Belgium Brewery. They ran a contest to promote pictures of people's dogs where the winner got dog-related prizes. What made this contest unique was that they also gave $1 for every entry to the Humane Society, which created a huge support from dog lovers everywhere. Giving to charity often motivates people more than just a prize because people such as myself don't believe we will win, but we are doing something for charity.

Another great idea my wife is addicted to is Free Kibble  where you answer questions about dogs and cats and they give away kibble to animal shelters whether or not you answer correctly. A great cause you should go check out!

The message for today is: listen and provide service and people will come.