Social Media Marketing: Improve customer experience by experiencing customers…..….

In the traditional enterprise software world of the late 90s and early 2000s, ‘collaborating’ with our customers or prospects wasn’t a common occurrence. In fact, the ‘window” to the customer was typically via the sales channel during the sales engagement process, where informal collaboration might occur but the engagement objective was about closing the deal. Some vendors met with customers individually or as a group as part of the product requirements process. User groups were established which met on a regular basis but in many cases, these venues were more about “pushing” information to customers. Developer sites were also established to both push information and respond to customer inquiries – always product-related – about features, functions, fixes, etc. The world ‘collaboration’ was never used in the same sentence as the word ‘customer’.

It’s interesting how the term ‘customer relationship’ turned into ’customer relationship management’ (CRM). When first hearing the term – 15 years ago or so – my interpretation of the term ‘customer relationship’ was: establishing great relations with our customers. While that is the objective of CRM systems, somehow the personal aspect of relationship building faded from view as we got caught up in the technology side of the relationship equation.

Then the term ‘customer experience’ surfaced. Where CRM is about customer-facing parts of the organization and is typically a one-way street – that is, the vendor gathering data about the customer; customer experience is a two-way street - multiple channels within an organization interacting with customers. And, the more personal the interaction is, the better because that makes a customer feel important…special. We send the message that we know the customer and understand his/her (relevant) issues or want to.

My view is that the objective of customer interaction is to create a collaborative forum to gather and record historical data to (1) understand our customers (profiling), (2) improve personalization and most importantly, (3) know, understand and gather information about our customer’s behavior, preferences, thoughts, intellectual property and points of view.

One way to do this is for us as software providers to “experience the customer”: provide multiple forums to share our information, ideas, questions, thoughts, intellectual property and experiences with our customers/prospects AND create a dialogue to encourage interaction so that a customer responds with information, ideas, questions, thoughts, intellectual property and experiences back to us. The dialogue or conversation is continuous. This is one of the key objectives of social media marketing.

I was recently reading a blog by Larry Brauner, a well-followed social media marketing professional – the link here speaks for itself http://online-social-networking.com/top-10-reasons-for-social-marketing. One of Larry’s ten points is that social media marketing allows us to dialogue with our customers. I concur with this and his other 9 excellent points and believe that, even more importantly, social media marketing creates a forum for developing and maintaining positive (and hopefully continuously improving) experiences for us, as software providers AND for our customers. Creating these mutual experiences delivers mutual value.

Here is a list of 7 value items that we, as software providers, realize:

(1) Improved insight into the customer by improving customer profiling and personalization.

(2) Foresight into the customer, his/her preferences, top of mind issues, points of view, signals on anticipated behaviors, etc. for continuously improved profiling, messaging, targeting and personalization.

(3) A continuous and formal medium to collect, collaborate and share information on product and marketing requirements.

(4) User-generated content that we can analyze, publish and share back to our customers and initiate continuous dialogue.

(5) User-generated content for use in off/online demand generation campaigns.

(6) Be recognized as the “go-to thought leader” as we build a thought leadership ‘library’ about various topics over product issues, product requirements, industry issues, economic issues, top of mind issues, compliance issues, any relevant issue around our ‘space’ as a software provider.

(7) Most importantly, the quality of our customers' experience, our experience with customers and demand generation campaigns continuously improves since we no longer have to exclusively rely on internal resources for dialogue or campaign content.

One important last comment: Social media marketing is not the be-all, end-all. My view is that social media marketing is blended with traditional marketing strategies to develop an integrated campaign that targets a specific audience. More on this later…..

I welcome and look forward to any thoughts on this positing. After all, blogging, like all other social media marketing mediums, is about creating a dialogue…..….