Consumer Products vs. Enterprise IT - Part 2 - Social Media

Transcript for Consumer Products vs. Enterprise IT - Part 2 - Social Media

Blair Pleasant: Hi everybody, this is Blair Pleasant sitting in for Jim Burton and today I am with the UCStrategies experts. We are doing a follow-up to a podcast we did a couple of weeks ago about the impact of consumer products in the enterprise or consumer products versus enterprise IT. Today we are going to talk about social media or social software, and how it has moved from the consumer world to the enterprise world. So I am going to start off basically talking about how I use social media to help me do my job. I am an independent analyst so I work from my home. I am not a part of a large enterprise. I do not get the benefits of using social media to reach out to other experts and people in the company. So I do not get to use it that way, but I do use social media a lot to help me with my job. I use it for networking, obviously; it is a big part of it. In fact, Dave Michels and I met through Twitter, and he has been a part of UCStrategies for a while. It has been great for making connections and making contacts; also for doing research. Sometimes I will just post a question on Twitter and ask for input and responses to try to get some information and research done, so Twitter has been great for doing that. And also for letting people know when I have published new research, or when anyone in the UCStrategies team has put something on the UCStrategies website, I usually tweet about it so other people will know.

So it has been great for making connections, doing research, getting information, and also letting people know about the work I am doing or things that I have written and published. I think the connections is probably the best part of it. I have met so many people through Facebook and Twitter that I probably would not have otherwise – more Twitter than Facebook, because people will just start following me and then we get into conversations. I will find other people who are interested in unified communications or in social media, and then we really connect on Twitter and become social media buddies. Again, that helps with my research into unified communications and social media. Nancy, I know that you use Twitter and Facebook a lot, and that you are another social media fan, so why don’t you talk a bit about how you are using it?

Nancy Jamison: I just love Facebook and Twitter. I use LinkedIn, too, but for me LinkedIn is more business, just about the amount of connections, because I do not typically search through it to find somebody. With Facebook, I love it, because not only do you just do the normal things—get to laugh and get to see people’s pictures and such, you really do develop deeper connections with people and deeper relationships with people, especially like with this group when we go to these analyst briefings and such. We know the people there, and we already have a relationship with them that is actually deeper. Last week we were in a TelePresence meeting with seven sites and people were popping up; I was noticing, “there is so-and-so...there is so-and-so.” I actually would not have known them as well if I had not had conversations with them on Facebook and Twitter. And I have had people pop their heads up in a conversation on Facebook that resulted in consulting projects.

So I think that that casual intimacy cannot be overrated. It really paves the way so you do not have to have those uncomfortable “who are you” moments when you are on the phone, because you really have met them. It is really a good way of reconnecting with people that you may have had a connection with years ago when Facebook suggests that you have these friends in common, and you realize that you did not know that this person was still around, etc. And just to reinforce something that Blair said about Twitter, you really can expand your reach in getting information when people tweet, so you read an article, or you ask a question, or you re-tweet somebody else’s information so that it goes out to a wider audience.

Blair Pleasant: Nancy, it was kind of funny last week when you and I were on a call with a vendor and someone made a joke about something and I tried to play innocent as though I did not know what they were talking about. The vendor said, “Blair, I saw on Twitter some of the things that you follow, and I know good and well that you know exactly what we are talking about.” “Oops, busted.”

Nancy Jamison: Or when we tweeted in the middle of that conversation I asked, “Can I tweet that?” And bam, it was out there before they could even breathe.

Blair Pleasant: Art?

Art Rosenberg: Yes, I wanted to bring in not just the person-to-person contacts and information exchange, but within a business environment, you also have processes that are automated such as notifications and announcements. They exploit the social networking as well. It is a whole mix and match, and there is going to be a little bit of confusion in terms of who is going to be publicizing the information they want to exchange, whether it is an individual or it represents an enterprise, a business process. So it should be looked at that way, because the means of an information exchange does not really care. I do not care how I read this, whether I Tweet it or I get an email or I read it in the newspaper. It is all going to be information.

So I like to break down the information exchange into three ways. One, person-to-person, which we all know about, the exchange of messages and so on, but it is person-to-person and individual. And then there is process-to-person, where there is an automated process that is trying to notify an individual about some information, announcements, or a warning, “Hey, your bank account is overdrawn,” or something like that or, “Your plane flight has been cancelled.” And then needless to say the thing that has been most active is person-to-process, which is retrieval. Somebody says, “I need some information. How do I get it? Where do I go to get it? Do I go to somebody I know, or do I go to a source of information where all that information is available? I will do a search.” Those are the three categories I think for information exchange in a business environment. So I just wanted to highlight that there is a mix and match possibility there.

Blair Pleasant: And Samantha, you wanted to bring up some things that enterprises need to be thinking about?

Samantha Kane: Thanks, Blair. I have two points that I would like to talk about today. One is how social media has changed the way we communicate globally. And as Art has said, there is business-to-process, process-to-people, etc. And now what that is driving is policy. How does an enterprise make a decision about what they will allow their employees to use? How will they use social media? Where do they break the line or draw the line between individual private social media collaboration and business enterprise collaboration and what it is used for and how it is used? There have been some instances that have been reported where large enterprises have approved social media, and then come out two or three months down the road after they have seen large activity of bandwidth and interactions and they have blessed social media for it to be sold by them, but they have not condoned it as to their own people using it.

So I think that along with the people, the process, and the technology, that enterprises have to think about what their position is and policy, how they want their enterprise employees to use it, and where does the buck stop as far as the cost of social media or handling time if you wish, which has a cost to it?

The second part that I would like to mention, is that social media has actually, because of its popularity, driven the creation of web information companies. And so we have created this whole second layer of information gathering about the web, who is on the web, how they gather information, and what they do with that. Which is really maybe the second or third generation of communication business process and business intelligence, and how we are gathering that information. Social media should be really considered a part of business intelligence and knowledge management, which goes back into all of the kinds of resources and the analytics that unified communications has been so significant in promoting and adopting to. So I will turn it back to the floor to have anyone comment about those and anything else about social media.

Marty Parker: Thank you very much for that Samantha. This is Marty Parker. Let me suggest that businesses actually are truly valuing social media, perhaps more than it appears by looking at it from the viewpoint of say, Facebook or Twitter. And the reason I say that is that the case studies are growing about the use of products like IBM Lotus Connections. IBM Lotus Connections is a social media product for business. That is how it was announced two and a half years ago, and that is how companies are using it and providing case studies discussing it. One example is Rheinmetall, one of the largest defense contractors and automotive equipment companies in Germany. They basically have found that it allows them to connect knowledgeable people to other knowledgeable people in ways that were not possible before. And their executives described a benefit as getting significantly more utilization out of the knowledge that they have invested in. There is also the capability which you find in the IBM products, you also find it in the Microsoft SharePoint products, and you see that Microsoft’s new releases such as Lync 2010 integrated with SharePoint and Office, are providing the function of searching document databases, people’s work products, and so forth, in order to autotag expertise within the company. So there are ways that search engines—and search engines can be defined to only look in certain places, so it is not into personal material or personnel information other than published documents. You can basically focus that to get a real good automatic tagging of expertise within the company. Like I say, you can do that with the IBM-based product, you can do it with the Microsoft-based product. And I think that trend will continue, because that trend can be accomplished within the enterprise firewall and within the enterprise policy world. It can be clearly defined to people that this is a work product and not personal product. So I think we see the learning of social media being rapidly adopted by many of the likely companies in the enterprise. There is in fact, a Gartner Magic Quadrant on social communication products for the enterprise, and there are some surprising new players showing up in that Magic Quadrant along with those that I have named already. So I think we will see the learning of the public systems coming into the enterprise, as well as some of the uses that have been described for enterprises that are reaching out into those communities, mostly through call centers and outbound contact in order to build their customer populations.

Jon Arnold: I would like to add a couple of things as well on that, Marty, and then onto what Samantha was saying earlier with the policy. I just want to add that as we all see, social media changes our behavior in ways that are new and it is happening very quickly. It is not necessarily in ways that enterprises want to see from their employees, because they cannot control it and it is all web-based. So it is becoming a parallel universe. And as far as policy goes, they are struggling with this issue of, “do you take it or not?” If you leave it off the table, then it becomes more of a private issue, then you have all of these problems of productivity and working out of context and stuff.

But I did want to get back to what came up a little bit earlier in the contact center. And I think this is an area where social media actually can really create some true new forms of business value, because the contact center has a lot of outreach, of course, with the customer being the front door. The social media tools can be really helpful for agents to better understand how their company is being perceived out there in various social media settings because word travels faster there than anywhere else. It can be a very good sounding board for them to learn more about what is on the customer’s mind, but also about how the company is being perceived. And of course, a lot of savvy companies are using this as part of their branding policy. But I think the pieces are there for companies who play in that space to find ways to integrate social media applications into the contact center, because I really do think it has some potential to add value to how they interact with customers, and the intelligence as Samantha was saying earlier about knowledge management, that comes out of that, because these are all pieces of gold sitting around, but no one has yet to figure out how to put them together and create value. But, the pieces are definitely there for that.

Samantha Kane: I would comment back to you though, that with that great opportunity comes challenges. And those challenges are making sure that the master data management and the integrity of the data is still maintained when you are using social media. And the things that Marty talked about in tagging the business intelligence and that it does not become a duplication of effort and a duplication of information, which now leads to extra storage and then it creates this whole chain effect within the infrastructure and the environment. And so it has to have its own business rules. It has to be collaborative with the business rules that go along with the rest of master data and business intelligence. And it has to have – the knowledge and the information has to have the respect of not duplicating things, as well. So I just make that comment forward to you.

Blair Pleasant: And I think there are other things to take into account also like HIPAA regulations and depending on what industry someone is in, there is going to be different regulations and different rules about what they can and cannot publicly say. That is really going to be an issue, and then also the issue of discoverability. If you have an IM chat, is that going to be discoverable, and how are you going to archive and store that and for how long? There are a lot of issues that people have not really been thinking about yet, that are going to be coming into play. A lot of work is going to be needed in these areas. I am looking at an article right now that talks about how one-fourth of respondents to a study who complain via Facebook or Twitter expect a reply within 60 minutes. And 6% of them expect a response within ten minutes. Conversely, these same people if they notify a company of a problem using its web site, about 50% of the people are willing to wait a day for a response, and 27% are fine waiting up to three days. So one thing with social media is it has really changed our expectations. If I am going to Twitter a complaint about somebody, I want them to be listening and getting back to me in a very short period of time. Companies that are not doing that, I think are not going to be getting my business as much.

Nancy Jamison: Conversely Blair, one of the ways I think that is going to impact the contact center is that as we have this shift to shorter answers and quicker replies, that is going to place a burden on a contact center being far better at what they do. When a person’s expectations are that they are going to get a quick reply, often it is either a FAQ or a short answer. So that means that when they finally go through that chain and get to that agent, that agent really better be able to answer their question or solve their problem. So I think we are going to see a shift in the quality of what is expected of the contact center.

Samantha Kane: Nancy, this is Samantha. That really I think is becoming labeled as the gold asset worker. No longer is it good enough just to look for the answer. But the faster and the better that you can complete the transaction and provide the right information to a customer and fix obstacles versus trying to be over customer eccentric, but just get the job done faster, better, quicker is going to demand a higher quality of knowledge worker at that call center and at that desktop.

Nancy Jamison: One other piece right in the middle is a real critical piece. The voice channel is not going to go away, right?

Samantha Kane: Yep.

Nancy Jamison: But that IVR has got to be able to do a whole bunch of stuff better and faster too, because I cannot imagine...we front end contact centers, what 80 or 90% of the time with an IVR?...that we are going to get rid of those. So we are going to have to improve how they deal with it, because it is sort of a chain of how much bad service or not so great service we get quickly. And then it moves up, so once they move from the web and they move from chat and text and they move to the IVR and then they move to the contact center, each one of those has to get better.

Art Rosenberg: Nancy, I would just like to make a comment about IVRs. Not only is it a fact that it is not going to go away, because people will be using phones as they did before, but a lot more of their phones will be multimodal to begin with.

Nancy Jamison: Yes.

Art Rosenberg: And they are not going to be so dependent on using voice for outputs, because it is stupid to do that.

Nancy Jamison: Yeah, that is what I am saying. Those things are paired together.

Art Rosenberg: Yeah, you just plug it in and then you use whatever is appropriate and efficient. That is what is going to be changing; it is not the old IVR. It is not your grandfather’s IVR.

Samantha Kane: So, I would put this question out maybe to Art and Marty and Nancy. Years ago when the web came out first electronically with e-cart, nobody finished their transaction. Amazon had 86% abandonment rate in their first year. They wanted to complete the call with a live agent. Do you believe the same thing is happening in social media? Do they still have that mistrust, or do they have enough trust in social media that they believe that the transaction can be completed totally within social media? Or, do they need that next step, going back to that contact center?

Art Rosenberg: Are you talking about the need for live assistance?

Samantha Kane: Yes.

Art Rosenberg: I think it is pretty evident that people are using the web for getting information of all kinds. And they are getting experienced with that. They know what they can find and they know what they cannot find. So some things will still be dependent on live assistance, and it is a dynamic thing.

Nancy Jamison: I just want to clarify something. Are you saying they did it on purpose? That their abandonment rate was high?

Samantha Kane: At the beginning of web purchase or e-cart, they did not have the confidence in the web that their information or their credit card was secure. So, they abandoned the cart. When Amazon.com and Charles Schwartz and those folks all realized that in the first and second year and allowed someone to opt-out to a live agent to complete the transaction, then they had greater success in completing the transaction. And so what I am saying is that as Art has quickly pointed out, there are many touch points now. There are many parts of a transaction that you can touch to complete a transaction. So is a live agent still part of the success of the completion of that transaction? Or, has social media led to a new type of parameter?

Art Rosenberg: I will answer that question then. I think there will always be a need for live assistance. You never know where and when, so you cannot say we can get rid of it all. So you do more and more kind of self-service kind of automated things, and different ways to make that easier to do, faster to do, and then confirmation comes in. I use it all the time, but there will always be a case where there is a question, problem, or somebody just does not understand or they made a mistake. So the need for live assistance will always be there no matter how good the process is.

Nancy Jamison: I will definitely agree with that. It is going back to that gold standard, that by the time they get to the agent, the agent is going to provide more value. This new social media channel, if they can capture who you are...we were talking to Cisco last week about how are we going to capture, because you do not always have the information if the person’s Twitter handle is just something and it does not give you location or account number or anything like that. Although I just saw statistics this last week that said that there was dramatic improvement, something like from 22% to 44% of people are now putting their location and putting more information in their bio’s. There is a great article out there. I think that as a social media channel grows up, then we will be able to have more transactions completed. If I get into a Twitter discussion with a Twitter agent and they say, “Okay, do you want to order two of these?” And I say, “Fine.” So it is just like those people who opted out of the shopping cart that they did not trust it, and now a huge percent do. The same thing is going to happen with social media, but that does not mean that the live agent goes away, just like Art said – we are just going to up their value.

Blair Pleasant: What do you think Marty?

Marty Parker: Well, I think that this depends on a couple of things like what problem we are trying to solve, that is, what business process we are in and what their goal is. So if I am an enterprise dealing with my customer-facing elements, then what social media has done is provided me another channel with which to deal with a different demographic. So what we see companies doing, is they start identifying a demographic who is comfortable with social media, but may think of telephones and IVR as yesterday’s lunch. So they open up a channel to those people. They do not necessarily close off the other channel. They do not say, “Well people that use IVR, forget about you,” because they are still an important customer base. But, they may market differently into that channel, say the under thirty-something channel through Facebook or Twitter. They will market differently there. They will send different products. They might have different pricing models. Their marketing will be less brochure-based and more social affirmation-based. So that is what we are seeing, in my opinion and my experience, from the marketing perspective.

From a business operation perspective, some of our clients are distinguishing the types of tools that they put on desktops according to worker populations. But in general, human resources executives try to talk the line management out of that. They try to teach people across all generations how to be most productive in the company, rather than saying, “Well, we will let the people who have been here for 30 years use a lesser set of tools than the people who have been here five years.” So there is some tension in the enterprise as to whether or not to distribute the tools set based on demographics. And I would say the bias by most executives is not, rather than try to bring the value of these new tools to everybody in the company, than to distinguish them by demographics. It is something a VP in marketing does not care about. They are happy to reach the buyer, if the buyer will open their wallet, they will reach them however the buyer wants to buy. Inside the enterprise, it is a different question. It is called utilization of the investment and the resources, mainly the people and knowledge in the company.

Blair Pleasant: This is a great discussion, but it is getting a little long; we will have to continue another time. So thank you everybody for participating, and we will see you all next time.