Twitter is the latest trend in social media, and while it is still unclear how Twitter will influence and change people and business, it is clear that something is happening around micro-blogging that is worth a closer look. If you haven’t heard of Twitter yet, Twitter is a free social-networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read each other’s updates.

The tremendous growth that Twitter has experienced in the last months clearly shows that the service has traction and is increasingly attracting not just early adopters but also the average Internet user. Below you will find a comparison of traffic between twitter.com and cnn.com.

Since Twitter has a more open platform than Facebook, this increasing adoption opens up significant opportunities for businesses to tap into the online conversations of their customers and initiate micro-interactions with them.

Based on my close observation of Twitter (I wrote my first article about Twitter in March 2007), I have identified five use cases that demonstrate how businesses can use Twitter. Additionally, you can now follow the Customer Experience Labs on Twitter at   www.twitter.com/cxlabs.

The five use cases that I have identified are:

Voice of the Customer

When customers are talking, companies should listen, and while this has been difficult in the past, Twitter allows to listen to these conversations through various tools that allow to monitor online conversations. The easiest starting point is using Twitter search to search for conversations that include a certain term (i.e., your brand name). Popular brands such as Apple have a large volume of conversations, but there is probably somebody talking about your brand as well. Just open Twitter search, type in your brand name, and listen to the conversation. A more sophisticated tool for monitoring Twitter is monitter.com which allows to monitor three keywords at the same time.

Proactive Customer Service

After starting to listen to online conversations, the next step is to react to these conversations. While it is easy to say thanks to positive statements about your brand, a much higher impact is possible by providing proactive customer service when customer are complaining online. Here are some examples of customers complaining on Twitter:

AT&T…horrible service, not receiving e-mails on Blackberry, and their customer service is horrible. Oh well! Looking into verizon

I called Rogers customer service, couldn’t help me. Don’t even know if an existing customer can buy one at all, let alone price.

Intuit – What kind of customer service is that?

Acting on complaints like this on Twitter is extremely important because the nature of the system is to start conversations that in the case of complaints lead to negative word of mouth. Monitoring when customers express their negative experiences with a brand and initiating proactive customer service can restore customer satisfaction. All you need is to create a Twitter account, setup Twitter searches for relevant terms, and be ready to act when customers complain.

Recruitment

The social network and messaging features on Twitter not only allow to talk with customers but could also be used to find potential employees. Especially if you are working in a media or technology-related industry, Twitter provides an additional proactive recruitment channel and could help you find your next employee. Research In Motion, the company that develops the BlackBerry smartphone, has recently started to actively recruit employees via Twitter. Two recruiters tap into the conversations and try to identify potential candidates on Twitter. To get an impression of how this is done, you can take a look at @BB_Recruiter and @eloisewalsh and see how they publish job opportunities and interact with potential employees.

Customer Feedback

Once you have established a sufficient followership on Twitter, you can use this channel to collect instant feedback about new products, services, and ideas. Twitter allows you, through its nature of near real-time conversations, to collect instant feedback about your organization’s activities. Here is one example of a survey done by Gillette:

uncrate: Do us a solid and take this Gillette/Uncrate Answers survey http://bit.ly/MxrUo

Of course, this feedback doesn’t need to be collected openly as a Twitter conversation. Inviting customers to give feedback through a web-based survey tool like SurveyMonkey or Google Docs Forms has become really easy.

Viral Marketing

The social network features on Twitter provide a potential channel to build viral marketing campaigns. The essential point is NOT TO USE Twitter for your viral marketing campaign but to INTEGRATE Twitter into your viral marketing campaign. This means that a business should not just try to run a campaign and spread the word through Twitter but actually integrate Twitter as a channel in the campaign. If you are doing an online campaign, you can simply create a link through to Twitter with a link to Twitter that includes a certain message.

This can be done by creating a link to Twitter that includes the status update and looks like www.twitter.com/?status=Check out the Customer Experience Labs at www.customer-experience-labs.com. This presets a Twitter message and makes it easy to spread the word with your campaign. Once your campaign spreads on to Twitter and you have Twitter integrated as a campaign channel, your campaign is ready to go viral. An example is the integration of Twitter into the streaming music service grooveshark that allows listeners to share their music on Twitter. Below is a screenshot that shows the Twitter link in the lower left corner.

Some Companies that already use Twitter

The following Twitter users are companies or represent companies that use the service to interact with customers. All of them are confirmed; you can also find a complete list of major companies on Twitter.

BBC http://twitter.com/BBC

British Airways http://twitter.com/BritishAirways

Delta http://twitter.com/deltaairlines

Intuit QuickBase http://twitter.com/IntuitQuickBase

Siemens PLM Software http://twitter.com/SiemensPLM

Capgemini http://twitter.com/Capgemini

Honda http://twitter.com/Alicia_at_Honda

Vodafone Ireland http://twitter.com/VodafoneIreland

Vodafone Germany http://twitter.com/Vodafone_de

Getting Started

The steps to get active on Twitter are simple and can be done without much effort. Simply register on Twitter and you can start to follow other users. If you don’t want to start with your company’s brand name, you can simply use your own name to see how your use of Twitter evolves. If that works out well, you can switch to an account that represents your organization. Nevertheless, registering your company name now is a good idea to ensure that nobody else can use it.
Finding users to follow can be done through the integrated user search or by doing a Twitter search with your brand name and following the users who are talking about your brand. Additionally, you can set up the auto-follow functionality based on certain keywords through services like http://www.twollo.com/.

In order to work with Twitter efficiently, you can install a desktop client like TweetDeck, which offers a lot of functionality (i.e., user search, keyword search, URL shortening) and makes Twitter really easy to use.

Spread the word

If you like this article and find it helpful, I would appreciate it if you spread the word tweet about this article.

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The challenge in large organizations is that through an ever increasing division of work, less and less employees actually interact with customers. In small companies with only few employees, chances are high that every employee has to deal with customer every now and then. Think about an organization with tens of thousands of employees and the share of employees that actually interacts with customers significantly decreases.

As a consequence large organizations lose their customer-focus and struggle to improve their understanding of customer needs and requirements. The “silver bullet” is to get closer to the customer by spending time on the “front-line” and interact with customers. But how much time should employees spend on the front-line? And even more important, how much time should the CEO of an organization spend with customers?

John A. Quelch, professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, recently asked this question and he states that it is important for CEOs to find a balance between time spent on the outside versus time spent on the inside, but there are situations when time is spent better on the inside than on the outside.

In a service business like Tesco’s, the health of the brand depends heavily on the quality of the millions of daily transactions between shoppers and staff. Motivating the front-line personnel is critical. But in the pharmaceutical business, the key to success is not customer intimacy but product innovation; the CEO will need to spend time with his chief scientists, medical opinion leaders, government regulators, and CEOs of the companies distributing pharmaceuticals, but not so much time with end consumers. And, if cost minimization is the focus of the business strategy, it’s not necessary for the CEO to spend time learning how different clients would prefer customized solutions.

If you still need to get closer to customers but need to limit the time spent with customers, Prof. Quelch identified three strategies that can help to overcome this problem. I am not happy with two of these since they reflect the solution to all customer and marketing oriented problems – growing the right (customer oriented) talent and investing in uncovering customer insights. Nevertheless one strategy was something unconventional: the definition of customer health lead indicators.

First, the CEO should spearhead the identification of three or four customer health metrics that are leading indicators of sales or profit performance. These metrics should not be off-the-shelf standbys such as customer satisfaction (which, in any case, is a lagging indicator): they must be specific to the strategy of the business. Company scores on these metrics may be benchmarked against direct competitors and/or outstanding companies in other industries.

The question what could be a useful leading indicator of customer health is difficult and cannot be answered in general for all industries. Lead Generation and associated costs is a high-potential area but too many factors affect this to give a one-for-all answer. Deloitte published an article about Leading Indicators and they have identified a set of indicators for different sizes of organizations.

The research has uncovered that [the 56 high-growth companies in this study] overwhelmingly use “leading indicators”, or metrics that act as predictors of future success. They use them to monitor their progress towards goals. They use them to shape short-term strategy and adjust longer-term objectives. They use them to achieve balance between productivity and growth. The research has extracted some notable insights. For example, the vast majority of leading indicators are industry specific. Additionally, customer-specific leading indicators are important for all companies, across all industries, and across all size segments. As confirmed in most discussions, these indicators are often the toughest to create and maintain.

This study gives an overview about a set of leading indicators, a few of them might be transferable to your company or department. One should remember that simply spending “more“ time with customers and measuring “lagging indicators” of customer health is not enough for a successful customer-oriented organization.

Read more about “How Much Time Should CEOs Devote to Customers?” from Prof. Quelch.

Read more about “Leading Indicators – Gain the foresight you need about tomorrow to better run your business today” from Deloitte.

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David Armano at Logic+Emotion posted a great visual explaining the different roles consumers can play in a social media landscape. (Here is the post).

People can be user, consumer, customer, producer, participants and community member. But at the centre is that understanding that we are human beings. David asks

So the geeks build the platforms and networks. The users use them. The users become participants. Participants form the networks and communities and participation in communities sucks up our time and attention.

Then where does that leave marketing?

Marketing comes in when the geeks build the platforms and networks: but not for themselves, but for someone else. When you build a platform that is not for “yourself”, it is necessary to understand your potential user, so that they can use it and become participants. One big question remains: How can I understand my customers so that I can build platforms that makes “users us them”?

One example: How would you build a social network for physicians? Either you are lucky and find a physician who is geek AND who needs a social networking platform or you need the “right” marketing people that help you understand your future users. Because questionnaires won’t do the job.

Read the full posts here.

Posted in customer insight, marketing | Permalink | 2 Comments »