I have a profile over on the Austin door64 site and began cross posting my blog recently. A frequent poster spawned a new thread yesterday after reading an eWeek article on Salesforce.com including a “Twitter in the Cloud” offering.

Here’s a link to the eWeek article:
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Enterprise-Applications/Salesforcecom-Puts-Twitter-in-Its-Service-Cloud-351280/

Clearly, this is another example of a company getting in on what everyone now recognizes as an industry buzz with some momentum. And the offering certainly gets very very close to what I’ve been talking about, though my example was more targeted at a specific workflow challenges.

I had a similar experience not long ago. I had tossed out a Twitter update lamenting the fact that the Flock web browser had no native support for Linked-In despite including just about everything else. Low and behold, Flock responded the next day and indicated that Linked-In had yet to open up their API, which was a gating factor in Flock including it in their offering. It was a great example of how companies are out there mining for dissatisfied customers and getting ahead of them with no direct inbound request from the user themselves.

But I’m a hands-on-the-keyboard implementation guy and once you get past the edgy buzz and fuzzy value, I still think the far more boring and practical implications have miles to go. Off the top of my head are questions like:

• What happens after someone discovers a product mention out in the Social Media Cloud?
• Is a case created automatically?
• What kind of workflow happens as a result?
• What determines which team in the organization handles the mention?
• How new or old is the data and what aspect of the system is able to discern from a Twitter update last week that was already handled vs. one today. (Closing the loop is always the hard part)
• What kind of performance management reporting is being generated that offers any kind of meaningful, actionable information? If you aren’t learning, then what are you doing, exactly?

The one I find the most intriguing is that any time you have a “case” or “incident” there’s typically a need to bind it to a customer entity. I wonder how companies will bind the case when they don’t know who the entity is beyond “twitter.com/their_profile”? It has interesting implications for the CRM players, who’s entire notion of customer management is built around the idea that you KNOW who your customer is. Certainly during my time at Motion, where the entire Sales channel was built off a network of distributors and resellers, the biggest challenge was knowing who owned the product and where? The distributor model made your view of the customer very opaque.

It quickly becomes a “Customer Master Creation” problem. And now a Company profile as well as individual Contact profiles will need to provide facilities for capturing the Facebook site location, Twitter, etc. You might as well have their status updates fed directly in to the CRM system and trigger workflow off of those. Interesting.

Most importantly, how on earth does a company justify the soft costs and hard costs that go with this? What P&L eats the line item? Does inside Sales own it? Customer Service? Marketing? Is it shared? The reality is that it will end up in the Service organization at some point as being yet another channel that has to be monitored and maintained, and heaven forbid a Twitter inferno starts over something innocuous. The last thing in the world you need is a VP of Sales, or the CEO, screaming bloody murder because Service wasn’t able to contain a Twitter update gone awry and now it’s perpetuating like mad.

Unless you have mechanisms that leave you in defensible positions you’ll find a lot of resistance to incorporating this stuff in to the Service teams. If I were running your service or support organization I’d want to define very clearly and very early on what metrics determined success or failure before I took on the headcount and ownership.

Perhaps SFDC has addressed many of these questions already. I’ll have to go read up on what the Salesforce.com offering is in more detail. I have some friends who work there and I’m curious to see what they perceive the value is along with the elegance of the implementation. I’ll circle back and share what I learn, if anything.

Jay

Last week I spent some time with a high level technical guy working within the Sales & Account Management structure at a big Telecom company. Overwhelmed with emails from customers that need answers and orders that need to get processed, he struggles with keeping his longer term projects and deliverables on track.

As a Support Manager, most of the emails that arrive in the in-box require that you take action. By contrast, a VP might find that 50% of the email they get is “FYI” or “CYA” related. In highly tactical roles you react to inbound requests from employees, partners, and customers and a seemingly insignificant unread email can lead to real problems later. My advice is always the same – Stop chasing bunnies in order to provide good service.

It’s ironic that as leaders in our discipline we spend lots of time crafting, implementing, measuring, and refining repeatable processes that support customers, yet often fail to do anything of the sort for ourselves and how we manage requests as individuals.

• Use your calendar with maniacal focus. I know it seems counter-intuitive. “Dude, I wish I could schedule my day like that but the phone won’t let me. I’m entirely interrupt-driven”. Rubbish!

  Each day will have time devoted to reports, reviews, meetings, and customer requests. Plan those times and include two 30 min periods for flex time. On my calendar I call them “Struts” because they helped stabilize my day and allowed for the “VP of Whatever” to walk up and hand me an emergency or indulge the unplanned cubicle-drive-by from co-workers.

• Turn off the Outlook blue reminder box and envelope notification in the system tray. Schedule time to read and respond to email & voice mail 3-4 times a day. Remember that you are NOT helping your customers or your team’s reputation if you are responding to a ten second old email rather than tending to the issue you are in the middle of working on. Besides, you lose focus and make careless mistakes.
• Do not answer your phone unless you’re waiting for an important call. Let it go to voice mail whenever possible, knowing you’ve planned time for retrieving them, scheduling the call backs, and giving customers your undivided attention. Or forward to your iPhone/WinMo where you can set ringtones to alert you to important calls vs. standard ones.
• Get efficient. Example: Outlook 2007 includes a handy “Quick Parts” tool as well as Message Templates. Many responses are similar and it’s senseless to re-write “Hi Mr. Customer, I just got your email regarding …”

  Craft as many as you need and keep shortcuts to them close by. Speak to response times that are appropriate for the request, and then set-up Outlook rules that copy or forward it to the right team member based on the body of the message. It’s all about being efficient and setting expectations properly. Doesn’t hurt to get crafty with some Outlook macros as well. You’re technical. You can handle it. ;-P

• Take the email you just sent and drag it to your calendar. Always ask yourself WHEN will I be able to do this and HOW LONG WILL IT TAKE? Some take five minutes. Some take an hour. By adding them to your calendar and regularly reviewing it, you’ll start to develop a radar screen that tells you when you’re out of time and risk dropping the ball on a customer.

  When it fills up and there are more to go, and delegating no longer seems plausible, it’s time to ask your boss for help with priorities. Never spend time complaining to your manager that you’re overwhelmed or can’t keep up. Bring an organized set of items and get the priorities validated. By doing so you’ll have set their expectations and kept them from being surprised when something falls of the to-do list.

• FOLLOW UP FOLLOW UP FOLLOW UP!! – If you employ the methods above, you MUST make sure you follow through. So use Office automation tools, build out processes for yourself, and leverage your calendar to make sure you’re doing that. I always assume I’ll forget something so I leave constant reminders for myself. Place copious amounts of notes in your case management system so you set a good example for the rest of the team on how to capture relevant information.

I was at a SXSW event sponsored by Maggie Fox and company from SMG on Friday night (Thanks Charlie and Maggie!) and spent some time talking to folks involved in the world of Social Media. I’ve been spending a fair amount of time thinking about this topic and how the ultimate maturation and commoditization of these technologies will be leveraged in the context of customer service and technical support delivery. There are tons of interesting opportunities, in my view. Here are a couple of quick examples of what I’m talking about.

1. Twitter for Case Creation – In my last gig at Motion we had tons of “Rinse & Repeat” product failures or breakages. That’s the world of mobile computing hardware, after all. When a customer contacted us we needed two obvious things. The first was basic contact information, and if we were speaking with a regular that managed a large pool of product it was a straightforward exercise most of the time. The second thing we needed was the serial number of the device. With it we could quickly determine its configuration, warranty and entitlement, break/fix history, etc. The transaction itself was very simple. We simply needed to trigger case management and repair logistics workflow so boxes could ship, repair centers could be notified of an inbound product, etc.

   It occurred to me that a tool like Twitter would be fabulous for the poor IT guy running around a hospital needing to set up repair cases. Why couldn’t case management and CRM systems “Follow” Twitter updates from a particular source, who’s only Tweet’s contain a serial number and short failure code that a case management system could monitor? Since we know who the Twitter ID is we now have a primary key that could pre-populate the contact info, and if the body of the message was a serial number, we’d know what the warranty was, what size box to send, etc. The second set of info could be short codes that tell us what the failure is. What a time saver.

2. Facebook for Field Support Escalations – I’ve been involved in countless customer escalations that are comprised of varied and diverse teams addressing product performance or deployment challenges that take weeks or months to run their course. Typically these scenarios involve the customer and their internal organizations, Sales teams, systems consultants, resellers/partners/vendors, Engineering teams, corporate executives or sponsors, and of course the Service & Support organizations. We’ve all seen how the “Cc:” list grows with each day, sometimes with upwards of 20 people all wanting to know the latest and greatest, or simply do some CYA and manage upward.

   These “Escalation Micro-Projects” tend to have several disparate companies or organizations that need regular status updates on a particular topic but from people that otherwise might not have an affinity for one another. These loosely coupled “relationships” may only last for two weeks or splinter off in to other separate groups. But essentially they are temporary workgroups that don’t want to get blasted with email all day, want to be kept up to date on status, and need to share documents, rich media, and such. They can’t do that as easily via in-house apps like SharePoint or Outlook due to obvious access concerns, and the relationships don’t warrant it anyway since they’ll likely end soon.

   Facilities like Facebook can be leveraged to quickly assemble a team, get them all communicating in a common interface, and be more effective. Imagine them all being members of a Social Media group named “Acme, Inc – Case #456789″ or “Acme, Inc. Implementation & Roll-Out”.

It’s food for thought anyway. There are some things that need to get sorted out of course, such as how entitlement and proprietary information are kept private, and discretion becomes an issue. But it’s just as easy to forward emails around to others so I don’t see how this would be much different. I’m continuing to read more and more about this and see what various groups are doing to talk about social media technologies in service and support delivery. The notion of “Service 3.0″ and what delivery looks like in five years is pretty fascinating.

While standing in line to get my morning breakfast taco & coffee fix I realized they had finally started to recover from losing “Fast Fingers”, the always disheveled looking counter guy. I don’t know what happened to him or where he went. But I know that for the first week the wait time to order and pay took 4x what it did before his departure. The guy moved around that register faster than anyone I’ve ever seen and hustled to help out the kitchen guys. And he was always chatting up customers. Despite his flaws he was pretty good at building a rapport with folks. The place seems void of any personality these days, which means all a customer cares about is the speed of the transaction. Screw that up and the only barrier to switching is a couple of bad tacos.

I don’t think service or tech support teams face challenges that are any different than that. You need to be mindful of both the transactional component of what your organization delivers as well as the relationship aspect of what you deliver. Make it easy for customers to get to you, deliver good service consistently and accurately, and in parallel make sure the teams are taking the time to get to know customers and learn what they’re about. If you don’t customers won’t volunteer to you that they may be unhappy or underwhelmed because there’s no compelling reason to. They’ll also be more likely to minimize inevitable blips in performance as you scale the business if you’re making an effort to personalize the interaction. In fact if you do it right you can snag some really terrific ideas from customers on how to do things better. But you have to ask them and trust their judgment.

Equally important in the tech space is the internal effort. Learn what makes a Sales guy tick, or what Product Managers are working on this quarter or next. You can’t continue to live in a vacuum and hope that everyone appreciates what I call the “Silent Excellence of Service”. Show a genuine willingness to build relationships across the organization and you’ll likely discover that it’s reciprocated.

Yowza! This is a great example of how being highly efficient can provide BAD service.

• I needed to research more inexpensive health insurance for my seven year old daughter. I hit Google and found a site that seemed reputable for offering quotes.
• I completed just the contact portion of the first form, clicked “Save and Proceed”
• I was in the middle of completing the second one when my mobile phone rang with a very nice woman from Austin who introduced herself and was confirming my on-line submission. Somewhat stunned at the rapid response I joked “Wow, you folks are fast, but yes, that’s all accurate, what I’m looking for is….”

Before I could finish my sentence my (very loud) home office phone rang with a Florida phone number. I have relatives there, so I asked the woman on my mobile phone to sit tight for a moment so I could quickly get this call and tell them I’d call back. Except it wasn’t a relative, but a SECOND insurance representative calling me from a different outfit?

I explained she was 48 seconds too late, that I already had someone on the line. She said “Can I call you back?” I said yeah that was fine but I’d like to get back to her since she’s waiting on my other phone. That was met with a somewhat terse “When can I call you back?” “Can I call you back in 30 minutes?” (At this point my blood pressure is rising; I have a phone in each hand, and just want to get on with it.)

I hung up the second call and within three seconds (!!) the phone rang again with a THIRD rep calling me. I hung up the phone and a FOURTH rep called me. Frustrated, I just turned off the ringer and chatted with the nice lady from Austin. Since then my phone has rang an additional three times for a total of seven calls within roughly 15 minutes.

Lesson learned – Being efficient at getting back to someone is all well and good, but angering a potential customer while you pummel them with phone calls utterly destroys any goodwill you earned being too fast and aggressive. This was good process causing a bad result because the lead generation site doesn’t see me as their customer. The carriers they give the leads to are the customer. I’m just a means to an end. Unfortunately the carriers now bear the burden of my dissatisfaction with the arrangement before they even had a chance to earn my business.

The web site that got me to fill in the form now has me hacked off at them, and the only way I’ll view any of this as positive is if the nice woman that called me first gets a result we’re happy with.