A continuation of my earlier post about corporate social media engagement.
While there can be lots of positives when corporates actively use social media tools. There are certainly plenty of potholes on the road to watch out for too.
Assume you've started using Twitter and Facebook to engage your customers directly. The number of followers / fans is rising and things are looking up. Suddenly it hits you: an increasing number of customers are starting to use these channels as an alternative to the standard customer service touch-points (CS hotlines, emails, service centres).
Now what?
The ideal situation would be to have dedicated customer service staff monitoring the social media channels constantly (even 24/7, given the nature of social media). This way, a corporate's own customer service team is cued into the issues or concerns that are most relevant to its customer pool, thus allowing for a more proactive approach to managing the issues customers face with a corporate's product/service.
Yet this is likely to be the biggest bugbear corporates face, given the necessity of a bureaucratic (in the Max Weber sense, not the derogatory sense) organisational structure among corporates. Certainly, the inherently chaotic nature of social media makes it highly challenging to monitor and measure the social-media-as-customer-service approach.
Highly-challenging, but not impossible.
If social media is conceived of as a large chat room with many people within talking at once, the answer is clear. Corporates need to invest sufficient resources in customer service to ensure that these voices in the chat room can be listened to and handled with respect and care as expeditiously as possible. Just because social media is chaotic doesn't mean that the usual customer service check lists can't be applied. On the contrary, the offline customer service tools and experiences can be adapted and deployed to social media.
Which brings us to just 1 thing: convincing the boss to sign off on this....
Thursday, August 26, 2010
3 Days Of Creativity And Innovation In New York City
Recently made a trip to New York City to attend a company sponsored training course conducted by WhatIf.
I have to admit, when I was first informed about this, I was highly skeptical. After all, it seems counter-intuitive to think that creativity and innovation could be 'taught'.
Furthermore, the course was pitched as one that's focused on new product development. Given Singapore's small size, it hardly seems likely that anything new will be commissioned from this country. Singapore is used frequently as a test market, but certainly not a breeding ground for new products, at least, not in this company.
So, it was quite a surprise when I turned up in NYC to learn that:
(1) This was the first time anyone from Samsung had been enrolled in this course. In other words, I had the privilege of being 1 of the first 15 in the entire company to be there.
(2) The classroom certainly didn't look like a classroom. In fact, the first thought that struck me was how much it resembled a playroom in a kindergarten back in Singapore.
(3) We didn't have to do the case studies so beloved of other marketing-related courses I've attended. This was a huge relief, since those case-studies tend to be pretty divorced from reality.
In fact, the learning experience was the best I've come across in a long time. Our trainers, Lisa and Gareth, made the effort to break the ice. They taught us about different techniques we could use to cultivate creativity and innovation, all in the context of developing a new product.
And the way it was taught was certainly memorable. Of course, principles were explained and definitions clarified. But throughout the course, there was role-playing, actual field-work, demonstrations and hands-on sessions where everyone chipped in.
And it was during the course of this training that Lisa & Gareth helped me realise that the techniques and tools didn't have to be restricted to new product development. In fact, the techniques and tools could be applied in everyday work, if we took the trouble to do so.
All this certainly made the long trip there worthwhile. And it was definitely s very positive experience to be remembered and lessons to be applied.
I have to admit, when I was first informed about this, I was highly skeptical. After all, it seems counter-intuitive to think that creativity and innovation could be 'taught'.
Furthermore, the course was pitched as one that's focused on new product development. Given Singapore's small size, it hardly seems likely that anything new will be commissioned from this country. Singapore is used frequently as a test market, but certainly not a breeding ground for new products, at least, not in this company.
So, it was quite a surprise when I turned up in NYC to learn that:
(1) This was the first time anyone from Samsung had been enrolled in this course. In other words, I had the privilege of being 1 of the first 15 in the entire company to be there.
(2) The classroom certainly didn't look like a classroom. In fact, the first thought that struck me was how much it resembled a playroom in a kindergarten back in Singapore.
(3) We didn't have to do the case studies so beloved of other marketing-related courses I've attended. This was a huge relief, since those case-studies tend to be pretty divorced from reality.
In fact, the learning experience was the best I've come across in a long time. Our trainers, Lisa and Gareth, made the effort to break the ice. They taught us about different techniques we could use to cultivate creativity and innovation, all in the context of developing a new product.
And the way it was taught was certainly memorable. Of course, principles were explained and definitions clarified. But throughout the course, there was role-playing, actual field-work, demonstrations and hands-on sessions where everyone chipped in.
And it was during the course of this training that Lisa & Gareth helped me realise that the techniques and tools didn't have to be restricted to new product development. In fact, the techniques and tools could be applied in everyday work, if we took the trouble to do so.
All this certainly made the long trip there worthwhile. And it was definitely s very positive experience to be remembered and lessons to be applied.
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