Customers: A good source of ideas

Your harshest critics (and greatest advocates) will always be those at the receiving end of your products, processes and services. If you make it easy for them to tell you what they think of your business, AND you have the constructs to act or at the very least, can respond appropriately to this feedback, then you will have continued access to their wallets, and to those they tell of the experience.

I believe that businesses that focus on complaint and customer feedback capture have an opportunity to evolve from what essentially is a negative forum, to a more positive interaction with their customers that delivers the same data, but drives a different customer culture.

We know that moving a customer from a neutral position to a position of advocacy is powerful, but moving a customer from a dissatisfied position to one of advocacy, increases the strength of that advocacy.

Here’s a little graphic to represent the concept:

 

By inviting customers to frame their greivances into improvement opportunities, you begin the shift from complaint management, to customer innovation management. This is also a process improvement because it removes the step/responsibility (and a big one it is) where the complaint then has to be re-positioned into an opportunity. This will increase the strength of their advocacy.

From my experiences with dedicated complaint resolvers, they are not too good at (or interested in) doing this.

The language and categorisation you use in your capture mechanism is key to driving this shift. It’s important to note that external customers won’t be as accommodating as employees with respect to keeping them informed, so make sure you’re geared to manage the information that comes through from that space.

Our systems automate much of this and we encourage clients to consider the copy in automated email responses as they would any customer marketing messages – keep the language ’on-brand’.

Keep the categories simple. Internal capture can be a little more detailed because mostly, your people have a more intimate knowledge of the business and can more precisely identify with your categories. Your customer categories certainly need to align to the ones you use for your employee system for reporting purposes, but scale them back (and make them more customer centric) or you’ll get too many misdirected ideas that will add to your workflow.

 

Community Manager / Sponsor

The success of any Innovation Management or Community platform is very much dependant on the ‘quality’ of the Community Manager (CM) or Sponsor.

RWW provides an excellent overview of the Community Manager role as it applies to start-ups, and I feel that it also relates to any business, big or small, new or established, deploying any Web2.0 strategy.

There are some big companies here in Australia about to toe dip into community collaboration to improve the business and better engage internal and external customers.

I’ve seen it work, and I’ve seen it fail, and I know the success (or otherwise) has related directly to the choice of or priority placed on having access to the right CM.

Based on my experience with community platforms, these are the key attributes of a CM:

• Passionate about Web.2.0 and the network effect
• Entrepreneurial and energetic
• Customer focused
• Has a solid grasp of user interface design
• Understands enough of the technical aspects of web design to estimate time/cost of solutions
• Quickly grasps technical concepts
• Can translate the business requirement to the developer and developer capability to the business
• Passionate about and competent with Continuous Improvement methodologies
• Effective change and stakeholder manager
• They are agile and can promote/facilitate the shift in business thinking to enable agile development
• Project Management
• Passionate about Collaboration, Creativity and Innovation
• Understands the network effect and the power of collective intelligence and how they can apply to the business need
• Excellent presentation and public speaking skills

Some of the key accountabilities of the CM are:

• Quickly identifies the business application/opportunity of new web technologies and can project manage those opportunities or facilitates those who will
• Manages the relationships between the business and the developers (there are developers out there who are so passionate about the social web opportunities, they will give away some freebies to help the client fully maximise the benefits…and then some)
• Activley promotes a culture of creativity and collaboration and is (the very visible) ‘Innovation Champion’ 
• Where able, acts as the ‘on-site’ person during development to facilitate the business engagement required to ensure success
• Prepares and presents proposals to the client
• Seeks new business
• Manages ongoing relationships with clients after the job is delivered and promotes and proposes new opportunities where relevant and as they arise

So it’s not just the startups. A good CM is a critical part of the overall business strategy as it relates to Web2.0, whether that business is the developer or the client.

For businesses that don’t feel the need to have a dedicated in house CM resource, make sure the development team you pay to do your Web2.0 work, has a good CM.

 

Keeping the Crowd Creatvity Flowing

Creativity and people’s ideas are so precious…and personal. The way we think and process/react to information really identifies us socially, so when you ask someone to give you their ideas on how things can be improved, you’re asking them to share with you how their brain responded to a particular input…you’re effectively asking them to bare their soul.

There is nothing more disheartening or insulting to ones creativity than putting your views on the table, and never hearing anything about it again. Early DellIdeaStorm, (Dell’s idea capture system built by Salesforce) copped an absolute caning from idea initiators because they weren’t responding effectively to their creative community.

Put plenty of energy and thinking into how you can make it easy for the business to manage not only the creative output, but the way initiators are kept updated and satisfied, so that they keep coming back with ideas.

Identify ‘hubs’ in the community and promote and reward them for thier involvement because they join your Community Manager as evangelists, promoting the system and encouraging others to join in. Nodes or hubs are those who are actively involved with and respected by the community and who can influence the crowd.

Your ‘hubs’ will be key to the success of your innovation management framework, keeping the momentum going particularly during ‘dry spells’ where there may not be lots of ideas being implemented due to various business reasons. They will nurture the crowd and keep them interested and involved.

Cheers: Eric Imbs