Why Social Customer Service Is Your 1st Real Digital Milestone

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I’m fond of pooh-poohing those who think that adopting chat or another ‘new’ channel means they have gone digital. This is because classifying channels in this way is arbitrary and technically inaccurate.

On the other hand I can recognise their intent when on a site visit you are introduced to the ‘digital’ team. It’s not just that they sit in their own space; they already look like a different tribe.

Instead I think much more prominence should be given to social customer service as being your digital laboratory. It provides all the core challenges.

Having just facilitated a recent masterclass on the topic, a number of table conversations are still fresh in my mind which a few days further on have now come into perspective.

To give you a frame of reference, the masterclass explores the following competencies. It’s worth slowly reading the full list to give you a sense of the challenge this throws up in everyone’s mind.

As a framework to generate a strategy and roadmap it makes sense. Only it’s a big ask given the organisational context everyone actually sits in every day. Exploring each competency seemed to trigger memories and emotional reactions around how their organisation is trying to cope with becoming adaptive, real-time responsive, data literate, customer focussed, etc.

For sure, the list of intermeshing initiatives most organisations are currently running is frightening in terms of project management complexity. And yes it is the clearest signal that the need for radical improvement is both recognised and being invested in.

Unfortunately, how it all joins up into real-world outcomes and benefits for customers and employees is often overlooked.

Change Management Needs Fixing As An Urgency

This is a major error, in my view. Yet it is the product of conveyor-belt change management. Isolate, go deep, stay focussed is the accepted wisdom. To which I say what about joining the dots, sharing inputs and outputs, generating an end state vision?

Command and control thinking continues to infect our plans to escape the management theories of 20th-century industrialisation.

Witnessed at ground floor level, old school planning and execution results in a messy, wasteful, often deeply irritating experience. I think what struck me most strongly in the chats I overheard at break time which then occasionally surfaced in the formal group discussions, was the overwhelming need for ‘a better way’. Even more so given the undoubted talent of individuals I’ve met in all the masterclasses.

Their stories show that every organisational culture seems primitive in terms of bringing out the entrepreneurial talent needed to transition into and then thrive in a digitally interconnected world.

The lifecycle of a typical initiative always seems to attract ‘Faulty Towers’ type dysfunctional behaviour. These are laugh-out-loud, stupid decisions that squash new shoots of green growth. When deliberate rather than a result of unconscious incompetence, it’s amazing that such people are allowed to get away with it.

In a family context, it would quite rightly be called out as childish behaviour and punished appropriately. There is still too much immunity in organisational life for this reaction to ‘building a better us’.

Soapbox aside, these fifteen competencies provide a real ‘ironman’ challenge in terms of endurance and focus. None are impossibilities. But it is going to take some to make them happen.

This is why I think the development of effective social customer is a much more fitting challenge towards becoming a digitally competent service organisation than claiming the inclusion of a new channel as being what it’s all about.

Your Milestone Checklist

Therefore in summary I’m suggesting that once the following competencies are up and running, you should take the team out to celebrate reaching your first digital milestone.

Author: Guest Author

Published On: 9th Sep 2015 - Last modified: 5th Feb 2019
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1 Comment
  • Nice post Martin, I enjoyed reading your insights. I would also add that Legal/Compliance would be involved to ensure rules and governance are established to protect the brand image and messaging to the market. Of course, this will vary greatly depending on the industry i.e Financial Services vs CPG

    T 16 Sep at 14:09