I’m new to the Model Metrics team having spent the last 5+ years as an analyst covering customer experience at Forrester Research. What does that mean? I’ve spent the last five years helping large firms improve the experience they provide their customers by understanding and listening to those customers better, rethinking their products, services, and business models to better serve those customers and ensuring the changes they’re making propel their business forward. So how does someone with that background move into the world of social enterprise? Here are a few things that influenced my decision to join the Model and Salesforce team:
1. Social enterprise fuels a better customer experience. Customer experience is not just the job of designers who influence the look, feel and interaction of an experience. In fact, everyone in an enterprise plays a role in shaping the customer experience but ultimately, it’s the sum total of the perception the customer has of all of their interactions with your brand. The social tools available to us today allow everyone to take a more prominent role in positively shaping those perceptions. Take for example Barclaycard US where a 75 person cross-functional customer experience team recently spurred a change to the way the company creates products. The company recently introduced its Ringmaster Card — the first crowd-sourced credit card. Card holders actively shape the card’s features and share in its financial success. This change, along with others the team has initiated have resulted in a 50% reduction in customer complaints, a 28% reduction in attrition and is adding up to more than $10 million in annual benefit. Not to mention they won first place in Forrester’s 2012 Voice of the Customer Awards.*
2. Your brand is an important conduit in your journey to social enterprise land. Most companies think of their brand as something they want their customers to remember. Model Metrics is working to make brand something that your employees should want to represent. Think about brands like Nike where their interpretation of “athlete” is anyone with a body and includes that employees get recreation time in their world-class sports facility or Ritz-Carlton where they describe their mission as “ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen”. Enterprise brands, on the other hand tend to ignore the feeling the brand gives their employees and fail to recognize the importance of that feeling. By bringing the brand story and attributes back to enterprise app design and development however, Model Metrics is helping brands like Dr. Pepper, Hershey’s, and Diageo reinvigorate their social enterprise tools with the same appeal they use to reach out to customers.
3. Customer experience improvements can’t be bought in a box. Although it’s critical in a customer experience transformation to have the technology to gather, store and share customer data, CRM systems (typically used to do that) are not the panacea of customer experience as many technology vendors would have you believe they are. Customer experience is a discipline, one that requires people, processes, and yes, many technologies to master. I appreciated that Salesforce seems to understand that. Not only has their acquisition strategy demonstrated the breadth of technologies that they think are important to an overall customer experience (ahem, social enterprise) transformation, the organization itself is constantly in the midst of such a transformation and are subsequently the biggest users of their own technology.
*For more info on the Forrester Voice of the Customer Awards or Barclaycard US’ entry see:
