Business 2 CommunityHow To Leverage “All Things Crowd”
The legendary American first lady Eleanor Roosevelt famously said that great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, and small minds discuss people. In the spirit of Mrs. Roosevelt and her penchant for lofty ideas, I’m here to talk about crowd-sourcing, an effective tool that corporations are learning to harness in order to elevate the customer experience.
If you’re not convinced about the power of the crowd, then just ask any trader on Wall Street. He will tell you that if your brokerage doesn’t invest in high-powered sentiment analytics in order to guide their purchases of securities, then you should pack up shop and go home. Tapping into the mindset of a crowd of investors is vital to being a successful financier these days.
It’s also vital to being a good forensic scientist. They use science and technology generated by crowds of people to help track down criminals – cyber or otherwise. The power of the crowd matters even among regular policemen, Did you know that investigators get many of their best leads on social media? Criminals often find it hard to resist chatting about their exploits with their associates online. Instead of walking the beat, police are likely to troll the Internet using sophisticated crowd analytics to track down thieves.
No doubt about it: Having the right tools to tap into the collective mind of a large crowd puts an organization at a tremendous advantage. One industry in which these data-mining techniques has come in handy is the cable & telecommunications sector. For decades the model was quite the opposite: Customers paid for a monthly subscription of hundreds of channels of entertainment delivered to their television sets. They were the ultimate passive consumers of a company’s product.
The irony, of course, is that no other industry is already positioned to glean powerful insights from the minds of its consumer base. Cable & telecom service providers have what any other company would love: A fiber optic cable into millions of households. Think of the mountain of data they can extract in order to better serve the market.
That data mountain is a large one, and it grows bigger every day. In much the same why that a stock broker or a commodities trader wants to get a sense of where the capital markets are headed before a trade, cable providers want to get a firm command of their audience preferences and concerns so that they’re proceeding proactively and in the consumer’s interest at all times. The mountain of unstructured data can include blogs, emails, RSS feeds, Facebook and Twitter chats, and other online prognostications. When an enterprise works with Infosys, they are presented with all of that data in actionable form. It’s distilled down and placed on dashboards, insight reports, and engagement feedbacks, just to name a few outlets.
People become the place
I was struck by what one partner told me in a recent conversation about capturing consumer sentiments. He said that the “crowd is an interesting place right now.” I had never thought of a crowd as a place before. But by George, I think he captured the essence of what kind of transformation is occurring within the industry. As consumers become more engaged, the business model is changing such that the consumer base as a whole is an actual place. It’s a network unto itself through which the best companies are running their businesses.
To better understand the power of the crowd in the cable industry, first you have to understand how the sheer number of people is creating new opportunities for analytics. Companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple are focusing on the daily activities of consumers. It’s what I like to call “the build-out.” They’re very concerned with how many people interact on their sites. And they’re using mobile apps and tools because the smartphone or the tablet has become a lot cheaper and a lot more common than the laptop.
After the initial build-out, the enterprise concerns itself with the customer relationship model. Some people call it the XRM. The initials refer to a customer relationship model (CRM) combined with the best data features of the social networks. No matter the channel, an enterprise needs a 360 degree view of their customer so they can respond and help them. For instance, no longer can an organization neatly silo and separate interactions from social sites and those that call a helpdesk any more than they can treat them differently depending whether the connect via a smart phone or their local store.
The third element in this transformation involves social commerce. Because of the overall power of social networks and, specifically, the recommendations that individuals exchange there, companies can get a good sense of the changing demands of their customers. People now prefer to make transactions based on recommendations from members of their own networks. Relatives and friends collectively have more influence than a large company with a lavish print and TV advertising budget. In some ways, mom and pop have replaced the glitz and prestige of Madison Avenue.
The search engine that could
This is where everything involving the Cloud comes into play. That’s where all things cloud comes into play. More and more corporate users tell me that they want to figure out a way to share, rent, and socially interact to achieve their enterprise’s goals. As a southern California surfer might say, it’s crowd-sourcing your company “to the max.” Crowd-sourcing in this sense shouldn’t be confused with crowd-funding used so successfully in the financial services sector. The crowd I’m interested in helps a cable provider achieve a unified customer voice that lets a company understand how various parameters like billing, service quality, and customer care are perceived by the masses.
From there they can drill down in order to correlate any dissatisfaction a customer might have so that the enterprise understands the actual and specific problem on the ground. The old days of sending a van out to a home to trouble-shoot are happily over for the most digitally savvy of cable companies. Each trip accounted for hundreds of dollars without even knowing if the specific problem would be solved during that first visit.
In the United Kingdom, for example, we helped a telecom operator improve its hit rate by 30 percent by incorporating and analyzing search tags shared by customers. We’re not just engaging them but actively listening to them. The Voice of the Customer is a fountain of ideas that allows enterprises to not only be more responsive but in the end, sell them better. To put it another way, we’re taking their ideas as a source of insights to create lucrative up-selling and cross-selling opportunities.
There’s a precedent here. The Voice of the Customer, as some of you might know, is a traditional term in Six Sigma. It’s about converting that voice to quality metrics. That’s why we asked ourselves: Why don’t we consider the voice of the crowd in managing all of our communication channels with our customers? Innovation is being aligned with crowd-sourced ideas to generate lucrative results.
Take a regular Facebook or LinkedIn posting and put an additional layer of eyes and ears on top of them. Let the software agent analyze who is discussing what. Are we dealing with promoters or detractors? The same sentiment analysis that helps stock brokers can help a cable provider know in an instant what is going on among its consumer base. When promoters are on the upsurge, it’s time to upsell and take advantage of those positive feelings.
Leveraging your front line
The tracking of unstructured data doesn’t only take place outside a company’s walls. We’re also interested at looking at the employee perspective. Employees discuss all sorts of stuff around the proverbial water cooler. Capturing these insights and correlating them to the customer’s needs saves time and money. That’s because your customer service agents are the first (and often only) line of interaction with customers. They can solve problems, of course, but they can also customize offers and reduce churn.
What we’re essentially doing here is closing a loop of sentiments and information that we’ve never been to close before because the technology didn’t exist. But now we can convert ideas into positive, actionable things. The right tools in this environment mean everything. They let your enterprise listen carefully to customers. They facilitate crowd-source ideation and leverage near real-time decision-making. Best of all, the customer has an “experience journey” that’s positive and rewarding both to her and the enterprise.
Who would have thought just a decade ago that HBO could be offering targeted coupons to viewers not unlike Wal-Mart has done with tremendous success. In the not-too-distant future, I predict that all enterprises, no matter their industry, will have sophisticated command centers dedicated to monitoring and exploiting social ideas. By doing so, the enterprise will be making their customers the heroes by letting them know, in the spirit of “All Things Crowd,” that they are in charge.
This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: How To Leverage “All Things Crowd”
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