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www.empathica.com
Authors:
Dr. Gary Edwards
Dr. Natalie L. Petouhoff
Lisa M. Schwartz
Social CEM
Moving Beyond Customer Loyalty to Customer Advocacy
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Social CEM: Moving Beyond Customer Loyalty to Customer Advocacy
Overview: Using Social CEM to Transform Your Business
The Current State of Customer Experience Management (CEM)
The Transformation of the Customer Experience
Leveraging Global Trends to Engage Todays Consumers
Targeting the Millennial Generation
Five Challenges & Implications for Brands in a Socially Connected World
Understanding the Customer Experience Lifecycle
Managing Customer Experiences throughout the Customer Lifecycle
Deciding When (and When Not) to Take Action on Customer Feedback
Consistently Delivering Customer Experiences That Positively Affect Your Brand
Going beyond the Loyalty Stage to Drive Active Advocacy
Recommendations for Managing the Social Customer Experience
Get a Deeper Understanding of What Drives Advocacy
Drive Focused Actions in Your Locations
Get Credit for Delivering Great Experiences
Ensure Your Whole Organization is Committed
Social CEM Readiness Checklist
Conclusion
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Table of Contents
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Overview: Using Social CEM to Transform Your Business
With the advent of social media and the rise of mobile smartphone technology,
consumers are in the drivers seat, posting their customer experiences in permanent,
online forums and providing instant customer feedback that is increasingly visible
to the public. To get in front of these trends, traditional, relatively passive Voice of
Customer programs have the opportunity to evolve into highly actionable Social
Customer Experience Management (Social CEM) solutions. The most advanced and
commercially advantageous Social CEM includes not only the process of gathering
one way customer experience feedback, but also the ability to provide true two-
way dialogue that drives local and immediate improvement efforts, drive positive
online and ofine customer advocacy, increase same store sales and increase
Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV). Social CEM is about moving beyond interrogating
customers about their experience with brands and creating an ongoing dialogue
where customers become co-creators of the brand by becoming active, engaged
advocates. This paper is about how brands are transforming their businesses by
using Social CEM.
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The Current State of Customer Experience Management (CEM)
Measuring customer experiences is really about understanding the sum of a series
of touch points, the gestalt of one or several moments of truth that drive an overall
perception of the individuals involved and the product purchased or consumed,
juxtaposed against the channel engaged and the expectations of the brand.
Customer Experience Management (CEM) is how a company manages those
interactions with customers. CEM has emerged as a space or methodology in
retail parlance, as it provides a means to manage and create loyalty, and higher
customer lifetime values (CLTV) where customers buy more goods and services
over longer periods of time, positively affecting revenue, prots and margins. By
contrast, notmanaging CEM can lead to increased operational costs as well as
negative word of mouth and customer attrition. Social CEM acknowledges that
with social media the impact of either positive or negative customer experiences are
more immediate, tangible and amplied and as a result, must be integrated in the
customer experience management program.
It is an old adage in business that you cant manage what you dont measure. Many
companies do not effectively measure, communicate and hold their front line agents
accountable to continuously improve their customer experiences. They may collect
customer experience data, but the time and distance from feedback to a customer
evidencing any tangible improvement is so long that most consumers who provide
feedback do not believe any good comes of it. This is evidenced by Consumer
Insights research done by Empathica showing that only 46% of respondents
believe that feedback is used to improve the customer experience. This can only
be the result of two factors: 1) a lack of transparency and communication from the
brand outwards on what the score is and whats being done about it, and 2) a poor
understanding and execution of the improvements needed at the local unit (i.e.,
store, restaurant, branch, dealership, etc.) level. As a result, the revenue boost and/
or cost cutting goals of CLTV have often not been met and customer experience
improvements remain an elusive goal in many companies.
Whether taken seriously or not by the executive suite, customer experience metrics
have always been important indicators for the success of a company1. Whats
changed and made customer experience management a vital, bottom-line business
initiative in todays world is that digitally connected consumers are far more vocal
about their customer experiences and have a more far-reaching impact than everbefore. With studies showing 78% of consumers trust recommendations versus only
14% who trust advertisers messages, managing on/ofine customer experience
has never been more important2.
Whats made customer
experience management
a vital, bottom-linebusiness initiative in
todays world is that
digitally connected
consumers are far
more vocal about their
customer experiences
and have a more far-
reaching impact than
ever before.
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When todays consumers post information about their customer experience online,
they can reach thousands of people in mere seconds. And those posts remain
online as a permanent record of customers experiences. If, as is often the case,
the customer experience is off, the company is in danger of not only losing the
future revenue of the customers who posted, but also the revenue from hundredsif not thousands of other customers who read about how the brands products or
services didnt meet customer expectations and subsequently choose not to buy
from the brand. In addition, the lack of improvement in the business can result in
increased operational costs dealing with customer complaints, the source of which
could have been rectied if recognized and corrected based on ongoing customer
feedback.
The rapid adoption of social media and mobility has left most companies
organizationally challenged to adopt new approaches in how they design and
improve customer experiences and drive customer loyalty and advocacy. Utilizing
a systematic approach to Social CEM can provide real-time feedback for thecorrections and adjustments required by the business as well as to build an ongoing,
online customer advocacy program. Companies can use Social CEM to drive
high quality interactions and provide end-to-end customer experiences across all
communication channels (online and mobile) as well as in face-to-face (F2F) brick-
and-mortar locations such as in retail stores, restaurants, hotels, bank branches
and auto dealerships. However, making these changes requires not only a change
in how leadership views customer experiences, but also the empowerment of the
various functional departments who are being measured by customers to actually
make the changes required to deliver exceptional customer experiences.
The Transformation of the Customer Experience
In the last decade, consumers have rapidly adopted disruptive, online technologies.
Customers went from being limited to visits to a brick-and-mortar location to
researching and comparing a companys products and services via Internet
searches and review websites followed by in many cases making the purchase
online. A shift from brick-and-mortar shopping to ecommerce signalled a new way
to communicate with customers, SMS text messaging over mobile phones is not
just a way to interact with friends; it is increasingly a means for companies to interact
with consumers.
The advent of handheld devices like the smartphone and iPad, have forced an
evolution in how consumers and businesses communicate. Today, handheld digital
tablet technology makes mobile communications available and useful at every age.
Unlike generations before now, even kindergarten students are indoctrinated into
this new paradigm. These future customers grasp for their parents smartphone or
tablet computer as if it was a link to life itself. Along with handheld devices, social
networking sites continue to proliferate. Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest along with
dozens of new, well funded entrants into the eld allow consumers a direct line
Social Media Statistics:
Smartphone owners now spend
as much time using social
networking apps such as Twitter
and Facebook as they do playing
games
Users log an average of 77minutes per day using apps on
their smartphone
40% of Twitter users regularly
search for products via Twitter
12% of consumers have
purchased a product online
because of info they found on
Twitter
60% are willing to post about
products/services on Facebook ifthey get a deal or discount
Source: http://thesocialskinny.com/99-new-
social-media-stats-for-2012/
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of online communication to each other and to companies on a global scale . And
the Internet capabilities of modern smartphones and tablets now give consumers
access to social connectivity on the go.
The Internet capabilities of smartphones are also shifting how brick-and-mortarcompanies operate. Why? When a consumer has a good (or bad) experience, they
post via their smartphones, telling thousands of other connected consumers. This
issue alone is driving brand perception into the limelight with just a few clicks on a
smartphone. Not only can consumers help create or destroy a brands reputation
and brand equity, they can also access online content while they are in the store.
This content can include:
Reviews, comments and videos from other customers (both satised and
dissatised);
Product features, functions and offers; and
Competitors pricing.
Research from Empathicas Consumer Insights Panel shows that with social
technology proliferation, 55% of customers are making on-the-spot, real-time
purchasing decisions (Figure 1). Consumers are willing to provide feedback (Figure
2) and often this doesnt even require offering an incentive. Consumers want to
provide feedback to brands and are self-motivated to post comments online. A
large share of respondents feedback is simply to relate either a positive (31%) or
negative (25%) experience with the brand.
Source: Empathica Consumer Insights Panel, Wave 1 2012. empathica.com
Figure 1. Empathica Consumer Insights Survey shows
55% of smartphone users check prices while in-store.
Figure 2. Empathica Consumer Insights Survey shows
incentives are not the only driver for consumers to provide
feedback.
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This means that the need for companies to partake in these social interactions as
well as provide better customer experiences is extremely important. Companies
that do not pay attention to this phenomenon may eventually have to close their
doors because they wont be able to compete with competitors who do take social
networking seriously.
Leveraging Global Trends to Engage Todays Consumers
According to Nielsens latest Global Trust in Advertising report (Figure 3) which
surveyed more than 28,000 Internet respondents in 56 countries found that:
92% of consumers say they trust earned media, such as recommendations from
friends and family, above all other forms of advertising.
70% of global consumers surveyed online indicate they trust messages from
online consumer reviews, an increase of 15% in four years.
While many companies are spending millions of dollars in traditional advertising,
data like this suggests that perhaps money might be better spent developing social
customer experience intitiatives.
Figure 3. Consumers trust recommendations from people they know more
than TV, newspaper or radio ads.
Recommendations from people I know
Consumer opinions posted online
Editorial content such as newspaper articles
Branded Websites
Emails I signed up for
Ads on TV
Brand sponsorships
Ads in magazines
Billboards and other outdoor advertising
Ads in newspapers
Ads on radio
Ads before movies
TV program product placements
Ads served in search engine results
Online video ads
Ads on social networks
Online banner ads
Display ads on mobile devices
Text ads on mobile phones
Trust Completely/ Somewhat
Global Average
Source: Nielsen Global Trust in Advertising Survey, Q3 2011
Dont Trust Much/ At All
92%
70%
58%
58%
50%
47%
47%
47%
47%
46%
42%
41%
40%
40%
36%
36%
33%
33%
29%
8%
30%
42%
42%
50%
53%
53%
53%
53%
54%
58%
59%
60%
60%
64%
64%
67%
67%
71%
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Targeting the Millennial Generation
While global trend research points to the need for the management of customer
experience and advoacy, companies need to especially focus on the Millennial
Generation. This next generation consumer is a unique and large target segment,consisting of consumers that are 13 to 29 years of age, who have adopted social
media into their daily lives more rapidly than any other target market. This group
is particularly important as history has shown that early adopter behavior typically
points the way to mass market adoption of new technolgoies. While over 50% of
the worlds population is under 30 years old, the purchasing power of the Millennial
group is estimated to be $170 billion per year.
According to comScore3, in the U.S. there are:
~79M Millennials (born between 1981 and 2000)
~48M Generation Xers (born between 1965 and 1980)
~79M Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964)
In Edelmans study of Millennials, The 8095 Exchange: Millennials, Their Actions
Surrounding Brands, and the Dynamics of Reverberation, they found a direct link
between the immersive, symbiotic relationship Millennials have with social networking
channels and the likelihood to dene their personal brand and reputation by aligning
themselves with brands they favor. According to the study, 86% of Millennials are
willing to share information about their brand preferences online, this means creating
customer experience programs is of the utmost importance for companies.
Brands must understand and use the demographic, psychographic and online
interaction preferences of Millennials if they want to learn how to engage this next
wave of the largest mainstream market segment. For instance, when engaging or
surveying Millennials, standard consumer survey approaches may not garner the
response expected. Tech-savvy consumers often are fatigued by wordy, lengthy
demographic surveys and the old style of interrogation. Instead companies need to
consider engaging in a dialogue with not only Millennials, but all consumers. Generic
this could be any brands survey will not cut it with this segment.
In fact, consumer surveys should not be generic but rather they should capture
the unique customer experience with the brand. For example, a company who isvery focused on the customer experience would actually post completed survey
questions/feedback in the back room of the retail store or a restaurant. With that
information of what the customer experience should look like, staff members can
use it as their guide to focus their customer interaction behaviors. An insightful
survey should capture the customers emotional experiences with the brand, moving
beyond traditional questions that tend to interrogate customers. For example, in a
food service context, a generic question like Was your drink hot (or cold)? is an
impersonal way to ask a question. A new way to phrase it would be: The drink was
prepared perfectly for me.
Brands must understand
and use the demographic,
psychographic andonline interaction
preferences of
Millennials if they want
to learn how to engage
this next wave of the
largest mainstream
market segment. For
instance, when engaging
or surveying Millennials,
standard consumer
survey approaches may
not garner the response
expected.
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Five Challenges & Implications for Brands in a
Socially Connected World
Customer perceptions of their experience are formed over time and at every touch-
point where the customer interacts with a brand. And it can extend beyond the
direct interaction with the company and include indirect interactions with a third
party supplier or shippers such as UPS or FedEx. Customers perceive a good
experience with a company if they are able to obtain the product or service with
minimal effort on their part for a reasonable price.
Customer experiences, both online and in brick-and-mortar stores are important.
Many brands make a considerable investment in building out a physical presence.
Today, more than ever, with increased online competition there must be compelling
reasons for customers to buy at the store beyond just touching and feeling the
product. Additional motivating factors can be; helpful and knowledgeable staff, in-
store promotions integrated with online offers as well as an inviting atmosphere.
A good customer experience is when the customer believes they are treated
well, processes were efcient, the product worked as advertised and they received
what they expected for their money. A great customer experience is experienced
when the sum total of all the interactions during the journey were extraordinary
and went beyond the customers expectations. Some companies are challenged
with providing a consistently good customer experience and others are at the
stage where they want to go from good to great. In order to get on the path to
improvement, brands must ask themselves the probing question how are we
delivering against our customer expectations?
1. Understanding the Customer Experience Lifecycle
The customer experience lifecycle typically starts when the consumer receives
an advertisement, a marketing offer, or sees displays of packaging on shelves,
catalogs or even a referral by a friend can be considered an appeal to purchase.
These awareness-consideration phases gain market awareness, garner interest
and compel the consumer to consider buying (Figure 4).
In the consideration-intent stages, some consumers may know as much or more
than the brands staff about products or services from online investigation. Someconsumers may even go beyond this by applying different and unique ways to
test and use products or services and even menu choices. Serving the educated
consumer is increasingly becoming a challenge for retail stores as well as in
restaurants.
Some companies
are challenged with
providing a consistentlygood customer
experience and others
are at the stage where
they want to go from
good to great. In order
to get on the path to
improvement, brands
must ask themselves
the probing question
how are we delivering
against our customer
expectations?
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Serving the educated consumer to move from awareness to consideration and
purchase intent is increasingly becoming a challenge. One example is with big
box retailers who offer good price but at the expense of a good experience. It is
not that customers are shying away from big box, only that the market is going in
two opposing directions, with a resurgence of high end, high touch retail brands.
These trends are combining to put increased focus on customer experience
as a risk to the big box business model with Consumer Insights research fromEmpathica indicating that 61% of consumers are choosing big box retailers
specically because of price.
The next stage in the customer experience lifecycle is making a purchase. Buying
from a brick-and-mortar company or from a website is often then followed by
delivery, the use of products/services, through to receiving customer service or
customer care (e.g. getting questions answered, returns, etc.).
At each stage in the customer experience process, marketing, sales and customer
service and even a third party who may interact with your customer can either
gain support from the customer or bring the whole customer experience lifecycle
to a grinding halt. Companies who treat these stages as separate sprints by
their dedicated teams run into difculties. Those who understand that it is really
closer to a relay race, with overlap among each team and a careful handoff from
each, are prone to succeed.
Figure 4.The new customer experience lifecycle goes beyond
loyalty and drives advocacy and referrals.
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2. Managing Customer Experiences throughout the Customer Lifecycle
A growing concern for many companies is having limited knowledge or control
of their customers experiences throughout the entire customer lifecycle. Yet
research on customer experience (Figure 5) demonstrates that because manycompeting brands are so similar and the price among them so close, the only
real differentiator available is the customer experience. Brands inherently create
a particular customer experience, implicitly and explicitly, sometimes intentionally
but often unintentionally.
One way to look at this is to consider that each time a customer comes into
contact with a business the customers experience will result in an opinion. As
time passes, the customers collective set of experiences forms a picture in the
customers mind. That picture is what shapes their image of the brand. The trick is
to make sure that at every point at which a customer interacts with your company,
the experience exceeds the expectation.
For consumer-facing companies (e.g. retail stores, restaurants, banks, etc.) to be
effective at social customer experience management, they need to understand
the difference between just greeting customers versus creating an authentic
relationship and truly engaging with consumers over time, whether it be face-to-
face or online.
Figure 5. Key customer experience touch-points that build
consumer advocacy.
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A retail example in Figure 5 shows the key touchpoints on the customer journey
that are often called moments of truth. These are the moments on the customer
journey that will have the biggest impact on overall perception of the experience
and will drive customer advocacy if their expectations are exceeded. Developing
active customer advocacy is necessary to generate positive, peer-to-peerrecommendations and increase the positive share of voice online compared to
competitors.
3. Deciding When (and When Not) to Take Action on Customer Feedback
Almost all businesses collect feedback from their customers. The problem is that
few incorporate that feedback into their operation or follow up with customers on
their concerns. This is often discouraging to the customers that provide feedback
in good faith that it will be used by the brand (Figure 6).
Figure 6. Consumer Feedback on big box retail experience.
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As we can see from Empathica research on the big box retailer experience in
Figure 6, survey results showed that 85% of consumers have provided some
form of feedback to big box retailers, yet only 46% of respondents believe that
brands actually use this feedback to make constructive changes to the customer
experience. In addition, only 52% believe that feedback is shared with individuallocations.
Consumer feedback overload can be a problem as well. In an attempt to be
more responsive to customers, brands often provide their staff with data but
stores/locations can be overwhelmed with the data they get from head ofce.
For instance, what should be done with negative reviews on Yelp or Google?
Should they direct my staff to focus on an issue because of one or two negative
comments received in the last month? Location managers dont have the time
or expertise to digest and interpret the data. This causes a lack of focus and the
advent of social media can only make things worse. The answer lies in using
information from different sources at the right time.
Unstructured data (for example reviews from sites like Google or Yahoo) can be
very useful to observe trends at the brand level, but often contain an insufcient
volume of location specic data to be helpful to individual stores. Structured data
sources (e.g. survey responses) can be highly instructive for location specic
issues. Semi-structured data (like that from social review sites like Yelp or open-
ended survey responses) can also be useful for locations as they may point to
specic issues with service or product when taken in aggregate. It is important
for brands to realize data from unstructured sources should not be given undue
weight versus feedback from semi-structured and structured sources (see Figure
7) like the customer satisfaction survey which relates to the individual location.
Figure 7.There is a wide range of feedback sources, and each
must be used carefully to improve the customer experience.
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This is critically important to avoid location managers wrongly interpreting one or
two bad comments (that may or may not apply to their location) and changing
their approach without looking at feedback in aggregate for their location or
understanding how this impacts customer loyalty.
4. Consistently Delivering Customer Experiences That Positively Affect
Your Brand
With the advent of social media, ecommerce and global Internet shopping, your
customers are always just a click away from purchasing from a competitor. While
some customers, on occasion, will buy a companys products or services even
though they have had a bad experience along the way, this has become the
exception not the rule with the variety of choice now available in the market. The
old mentality of build it and they will come worked in the past if the company
devised a way to completely lock up the marketplace. However, locking the
market is no longer possible in todays globally connected competitive landscape.Companies need to pay attention to the customer experience they deliver because
customers will post their experiences online and affect the opinion and shopping/
purchasing habits of other customers.
However, consistently delivering a great customer experience across all locations
remains a challenge for all multi-unit brands as seen in a restaurant example in
Figure 8.
As much as overall improvement is key, just as important for brands as they grow
is to develop a consistent experience. Being good every time is far better than
being great and terrible, each some of the time.
Figure 8.The brand promise is often challenging to deliver
consistently across all locations.
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5. Going Beyond the Loyalty Stage to Drive Active Advocacy
For many years, one of the primary goals for brand marketers has been driving
customer loyalty and thus one of the 20th century customer experiences goals
was to create loyalty (i.e. generating higher customer lifetime values as customersare consistently delighted and buy more over longer periods of time).
The 21st century goal is to add an additional step to the customer lifecycle
called customer advocacy (see Figure 4).Why? A study entitled Inside the Buy4
revealed that the very idea of loyalty has changed for 97% of consumers and that
a new consumer behavior, contemporary loyalty, is redening loyalty.
It was a widely held belief that consumers who bought a brand and liked it
would potentially become brand loyalists. In the past, brand marketers felt that
the demonstration of preference for that brand over competitors or even generic
store brands meant loyalty. The wake-up call for proponents of brand loyalty isthat because consumers are exposed to so much more information, especially
with the penetration of mobile devices, they are more open to a wider range of
choices in the marketplace. The study showed that consumers do a fair amount
of research (primarily online) prior to purchasing a product, from a high of 64%
before buying electronics, to a low of 25% before purchasing food or fashion.
Of those surveyed, 94% indicated that their decision to buy was positively
inuenced by research. Around half of consumers visit a brands website to
research the brand prior to purchase, and 40% said they go to third-party review
sites, but almost 75% rely on general consumer reviews as their rst choice for
research intelligence.
At the click of a mouse, consumers can be persuaded by all the online content,
especially content written by other consumers, to become interested and even
purchase from another brand. Because of the proliferation of online reviews and
content, purchase consideration has dramatically changed. Brand marketers
must re-examine their views on brand loyalty because this online world has lead
to constant competition to get wallet share from the consumer. This presents
brand marketers with a new challenge to make sure they get their products in
front of real inuencers (reviewers and consumers alike) and can result in costly
outreach blogger type programs. In fact, bloggers sometimes expect to be paid
for their endorsement of products and services.
The Consumer Advocacy Stage
Research shows that while a customer might be temporarily loyal, that loyalty
may not necessarily translate into consumer advocacy, the last stage in the new
customer lifecycle (see Figure 4). If the customer experience is good, often brand
advocates want to share their customer experience with others. Companies must
not only decide how best to measure the customer experience, but also address
how to systematically implement the customer advocacy and referral part of the
customer lifecycle.
Brand marketers must
re-examine their views
on brand loyalty becausethis online world has lead
to constant competition
to get wallet share from
the consumer.
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Brand advocates are built through a series of positive experiences with the
brand. Some social media technology solutions offer the ability to reward true
advocacy when brand advocates exhibit behaviors that affect top line metrics. By
measuring who the most engaged and active advocates are, the brand can make
sure to reward those advocates each time a new campaign begins. Social CEMtechnologies can enable a brand advocate to share great experiences online
immediately with a friend or en masse to many friends and followers through
Facebook and Twitter.
Over time, various customer interactions can result in the customers seeing
brands as great (likely to advocate/promote), passive (personally loyal but not
necessarily a promoter), or negative (a detractor likely to defect or complain).
Research shows that if your customers feel they have had a great experience with
your company, they are more likely to re-purchase and even tell others about their
wonderful experience in a quick moment over social media (Figure 9).
Figure 9. Customers use social media recommendations to
make purchase decisions.
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Studies from Purdue University also show the direct affect the customer experience
has on branding, customer loyalty and propensity to repurchase:
of people create their opinion of a company and the brand by theexperience they have with the company.
of customers said they would become disloyal, (never shop at that
company again) because of a bad experience.
follow the opinion of their friends and family; if they have a bad
experience, they tell everyone they know and spread bad-word-of
mouth5.
One of the big challenges brands have is getting credit for their efforts. Experiencewith over 150 brands using Empathicas GoRecommend social media
advocacy solution has found that most brands have a silent majority of potential
brand advocates. Whats required is simply a gentle push or simple ask to convert
their positive sentiments into a powerful marketing message, as well as validation
for a job well done. Making it easy and seamless for customers to go beyond
just providing survey feedback and later liking the brand on Facebook, creating
immediate brand advocates can be transformational.
Recommendations for Managing the Social Customer Experience
The following sections contain recommendations to drive social customer experience
success. It is important to understand that the very nature of customer experience
is constantly changing because of evolving consumer behavior. With ever changing
market conditions, companies must be nimble and able to constantly tweak their
approach and strategy.
1. Get a Deeper Understanding of What Drives Advocacy
As you decide on your customer experience management processes, begin by
looking at whether the people, process and technology enablers you are choosing
are in the best interest of engaging with your best customers as social advocates
(Figure 10).
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Social CEM: Moving Beyond Customer Loyalty to Customer Advocacy
Figure 10. Mapping the pathways to customer loyalty is a critical component of a well-rounded Social CEM strategy.
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Focus on the total customer experience. In good times and bad, there is one
constant people expect a great experience when they come into your stores
and locations the people, the product, the facilities, etc. If they dont get it, they
have a lot of other choices and their social networks will be more than happy to
point them to your competitors. If you do deliver on a great customer experience,customers will reward you time and time again through increased visits, higher
spend and theyll tell their friends. Focus on training and knowledgeable, friendly
staff.
Before designing a customer experience map, conduct the appropriate
research to understand customer needs from across all traditional communication
channels, including social media. Examine not only the rational (logical) part
of an experience (e.g. the product comes with a carrying case), but also
the emotional aspects(e.g. the carrying case ts with the lifestyle needs and
brand of the buyer).
Continue to get to know your customers all over again with a deeper understanding
of their experience through customer journey mapping, and loyalty and advocacy
modeling. This exercise will allow you to map out in detail the customer interaction
journey and the key points where you can enable technology, people and process
to drive customers toward customer advocacy.
Finally, analyze the way your customers are served and process map all aspects
of your business, key processes and integrate third party suppliers and partners
that serve your customers. This thorough evaluation of each component of your
business can ensure that the way work gets done always serves the customer.
2. Drive Focused Actions in Your Locations
As you begin to evaluate your social customer experience program, it is also
important to consider the critical role played by the locations and staff. Take an
honest look at where you are with respect to standard operating procedures and
best practices. If you have mapped out an ideal customer journey, have you also
mapped out and created systematic plans for locations to deliver against it? Have
your front line staff been thoroughly on-boarded and trained to do so?
Remember that all locations are NOT created equal. Dont treat all your locations
the same each location has its own challenges based on the local clientele,
customers, as well as the skill levels of the people who work there. Instant mobile
and social media consumer interactions are driving geographically dispersed
brands and locations to adopt technology to provide the information necessary
to guide each location to operate in a way that is unique and driven by its local
patrons and local social commentary. This information enables brands to shift
local operations, to take corrective steps in product/service development,
product/service delivery, product/service offers and customer service based upon
local preferences. Technology from solution providers like Empathica can also
automate the sharing of best practices among locations.
Focus on the total
customer experience.
In good times and bad,there is one constant
people expect a great
experience when they
come into your stores
and locations the
people, the product, the
facilities, etc. If they dont
get it, they have a lot
of other choices and
their social networks
will be more than happy
to point them to your
competitors.
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This can be advantageous especially for new managers to get up to speed quickly
by learning from more experienced managers.
Following the brand leaders can provide all locations with additional coaching.
Often times other high-performing stores or locations have had similar experiencesor made similar improvements when faced with particular challenges. In a lot of
cases, you can leverage that information and those best practices. You do not
have to reinvent the wheel.
Finally - Focus. Focus. Focus. Every employee who is focused on the customer
experience should be given consistent direction. These employees in turn build
your culture and your brand even when you are not there in person to oversee
every interaction. Every interaction point serves to give the customer an opinion
of your brand. Give staff the tools and information they need to focuson the right
interactions for the operation of their store or location.
3. Get Credit for Delivering Great Experiences
Social media isnt just for fun anymore; it has evolved into a critical channel for
customer outreach and customer feedback. Social CEM allows brands to monitor,
listen and take advantage of social trends. By engaging with customers across
all channels of communication brands can now engage in customer dialogue in
an integrated fashion. Engaging in this dialogue is the rst step towards a plan to
co-create your brand with your customers.
Some brands now have their own fans run their fan pages for them with minimal
oversight. This is just one of the ways that you can mobilize advocates on social
networks. Look for other opportunities to create social advocates. There are
many! And you want to look at technology providers like Empathica to help you
deploy and scale advocacy development programs.
Once you have delivered a great experience make sure you get credit for it by
making it easy for your advocates to share their stories on social media. Once
improvements are made and consumers know about those improvements, many
will often respond in kind by recommending the company to friends; driving positive
word of mouth conversations, posting positive comments online and blogging
about how the company moved heaven and earth to respond and provide great
service. This is the turning point when a consumer becomes an advocate.
It is in this moment that it is important to capture that customers positive emotions
and thoughts about their experience. In todays instantaneous landscape, mailing
out surveys and hoping the customer remembers to post online their great
experience is not efcient or reliable. From the point of view of the consumer, great
customer experience memories can be eeting. Companies who use technology
to enable the consumer in the moments of truth of the transaction to brag
or recommend instantly, enables their customers voice to be heard about their
great customer experience are leaping ahead in building and retaining consumer
advocates.
Every employee who
is focused on the
customer experienceshould be given
consistent direction.
These employees in turn
build your culture and
your brand even when
you are not there in
person to oversee every
interaction.
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4. Ensure Your Whole Organization is Committed
Consider who the stakeholders are that can affect the Social CEM program. To
do this requires a dialogue within your company about the next steps for Social
CEM. Realize that different people and groups will have different points of view onthe program need and value.
Change is good and should be embraced. Often changing current operations
and processes can seem like a monumental effort. The wisdom of the old
question how do you eat an elephant? applies. (Answer: one bite at a time.)
Organizational changes such as a shift to Social CEM are complex processes that
take place one step at a time.
Larger organizations are often daunted by the magnitude of the implied changes
they will need to make in their operations and technology infrastructure to deliver
great customer experiences in todays socially networked world. Empathicasapproach to Customer Experience Transformation (Figure 11) maps out a pathway
to reach customer advocacy. This transformation process focuses on how leaders
can shift their organizational culture, put people, process and technology to work
and deliver a consistent and differentiated customer experience.
Figure 11: Empathicas approach to customer experience
transformations.
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The rst stage is viewing the data from which decisions can be made. While gut
instinct will always play a role in business, astute leaders will always look to data
to validate any key decisions before moving forward. Once the data is collected
and reviewed, the next stage of evolution is managing the outcomes. This is
where decisions become actions and the outcomes of the insights uncovered bythe data are put into play. As the actions begin, integrating the changes across
the entire business is the next phase of program evolution. When complete,
then a brand reaches the nal stage of evolution where the customer experience
becomes a key aspect in engineering the brand, and brand identity itself.
What can set this approach apart is the focus on the endgame of brand engineering
(or re-engineering). The end goal is to have the entire company culture focused
on the customer experience. When that happens, improvements in the customer
experience can be measured as business outcomes and brands can predict the
nancial impact of improvements in customer experience scores.
A particular capability of leading Social CEM vendor solutions is the ability to
provide, (through nancial linkage analysis an example of which is shown in Figure
12) the impact of higher customer satisfaction scores on return visits. In addition
it has been statistically shown that a 5% increase in customer satisfaction can
reect the growth of sales by ~0.7%. This can translate into tens of millions of
dollars each year for large enterprises.
For organizations interested in quickly acquiring new customers as well as
supporting the current ones, long, drawn out transformation programs may not
work. Today many organizations need to take action quickly or their companies
will cease to exist. The goal of most organizations is to build customer advocacy
quickly with a short-term Social CEM strategy.
Figure 12: Level of initial satisfaction across frequency of return.
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5. Social CEM Readiness Checklist
Below is a checklist to help start to evaluate where an organization is with respect
to Social CEM. How many of these questions does your organization have solid
answers and practices for?
Are we delivering superior, emotionally-connected Customer and BrandExperiences across all channels and touch-points?
Are our Employees sufciently engaged and performing to advance ourExperience and Brand goals?
Are we doing enough to leverage our Moments of Truth efforts?
Are we clearly standing out in the mind of the customer compared to our
competitors, especially with respect to customer service?
Do we have the technology and analytical resources in place to make dynamicnew decisions on a daily basis (i.e. things change, every day)?
What are we doing to move beyond customer satisfaction and loyalty tocultivating and measuring Customer Advocacy?
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Conclusion
Customer Experience Management is evolving into a social experience for customers
and brands alike. In an always on, changing and connected world, the gameto engage and interact with consumers in real-time regarding their likes, dislikes,
wants and wishes is on in full force. As a consumer facing company, the challenge
is to respond to social consumers, and perhaps even change how the company
operates when consumers point out their disappointments and suggestions.
In this new world, one thing is clear. Companies that continue to embrace new
consumer behaviors and develop new approaches to engaging with their brands
will be the market leaders that forge deeper connections and build active advocacy
across all brand stakeholders owners, employees and customers.
When it comes to Social CEM, dont feel you need to go it alone. Reach out and gethelp. The Customer Experience Managementindustry has been around for more
than ten years and there is a treasure trove of knowledge available. Companies
such as Empathica have a wealth of information from current consumer research
and trends as well as technology that can help at http://www.empathica.com/
resources/.
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Social CEM: Moving Beyond Customer Loyalty to Customer Advocacy
http://thesocialskinny.com/99-new-social-media-stats-for-2012/
Next Generation Strategies for Advertising to Millennials, comScore, January 2012
What It Takes to Win at Customer Experience, Bain & Company
http://www.bain.com/publications/articles/putting-social-media-to-work.aspx
The 8095 Exchange: Millennials, Their Actions Surrounding Brands, and the Dynamics of Reverberation by
Edelman and StrategyOne
http://www.empathica.com/consumer-insights/wave-1-2012-key-trends/
http://www.empathica.com/press-release/while-85-percent-of-shoppers-provide-feedback-few-believe-it-will-
have-an-impact/
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/12/using_social_networks_to_impro.html
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/media_entertainment/consumer-trust-in-online-social-and-mobile-
advertising-grows/
References
Endnotes
1Customer Experience Management Papers Dr. Natalie Petouhoff, Bruce Temkin, Claus Fornell - University of Michigan2Edelman, Trust Barometer, 2011.3Next Generation Strategies for Advertising to Millennials, comScore, January 20124AMP Agencys Consumer Shopping Survey Inside the Buy Reveals Modern Consumers Lack True Brand Loyalty, February
7, 20115Integrating People with Process and Technology Gaining Employee Acceptance of Technology Initiatives, Dr. Natalie Petouhof
and Lisa Schwartz, 2007
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About the Authors
Dr. Gary Edwards
Gary is the Chief Customer Ofcer of Empathica and is responsible for oversight of sales, marketing, client strategy, marketing
science and retail insights. Gary is involved in solving business challenges with research and technology solutions. He has
served a key leadership role during program development, implementation, and follow-up with clients for the past ten years
at Empathica. For over 15 years prior, Gary led worldwide and domestic research projects in customer and employee
research.
Garys prior experience includes serving as a Senior Vice President at Maritz: Thompson Lightstone and an account executive
in the then newly formed Financial Services Research Group. Prior to Maritz, Gary served as the General Manager of Gallup
Canada. Garys research career began as an epidemiologist for the Culture, Community and Health Studies division of the
Clarke Institute. Gary has a PhD specializing in Social Research Methods from Wilfrid Laurier University.
Dr. Natalie L. Petouhof
Dr. Natalie is the Director and Instructor of the UCLA Social Media Business Course at UCLA. Dr. Natalies applies her unique
perspective on business and social media via her social media assessments and ROI calculators that help clients to develop
social business strategies, tactical plans and real-world execution capabilities so that social media can be integrated into
the business to increase the bottom line. She develops custom training programs for social business/media, leadership,
employee motivation and organizational change.
Dr. Natalies four business books and many white papers are the subject of hundreds of articles in publications like USAToday,
Adage, BusinessWeek, Fast Company, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Peppers and Rogers 1-to-1 Magazine
and CRM Magazine as well as national television and radio.
As an emeritus member of the Board of the Los Angeles Social Media Club, Dr. Natalie has held positions as a Forrester
Analyst, Chief Strategist for a Weber Shandwick PR/Marketing Agency, management consultant at PWC and Hitachi and in
management at Hughes Electronics, GM and GE.
Dr. Natalie also teaches Social Media, PR, Marketing and Leadership courses at USC and Pepperdine University.
Lisa M. Schwartz
Lisa has an MBA specializing in marketing and business management. She partners with Dr. Natalie in conducting research,
social media business assessments, brand audits, organizational change management, traditional market planning
integrated with social media. Lisa creates custom strategic business programs in social business/media and focuses on
leadership and employee motivation, specializing in customer service and CRM. She is an experienced business analyst,
program manager, data center, network operations and contact center manager.
Lisa is the author of two business books, many white papers on the topics of technology adoption, change management,
call centers, customer service and social media. And she has held positions as a Vice President and Director of Marketing at
Oracle Corporation, Business Management Director at Accenture and Hitachi, and Management positions at Cedars-Sinai,
Intertainer, and Geffen Records.
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About Empathica
Empathica is the leading provider of social Customer Experience Management (CEM) programs to the worlds most respected
multi-unit brands in the retail, food services, automotive and hospitality sectors. Its rich analysis of survey data using state-
of-the-art surveying and dashboard reporting software allows for performance-improvement solutions, evidence-basedmarketing insights, and customer experience management consulting. Empathica is headquartered in Toronto, Canada with
executive consultant ofces throughout the United States and a European ofce in Birmingham, England.
www.empathica.com