Are you tired of the hype out there covering obviously un-scalable first wave social media as customer service systems built using Twitter?
From my perspective, social media often becomes a customer service channel weather a company likes it or not. It is simply too easy to fire off a bitch session over Twitter at AT&T because their network is over sold and drops calls. There is a certain amount of satisfaction that your “followers” will feel your pain and can reply with their same “lack of” customer service opinions. Thus, corporations need to look at streamlined work flows, training and technology that will intelligently distribute inbound conversations and route them to the correct domain expert within the organization.
I find that the “social media” customer service tools are lacking compared to enterprise level multimedia contact centers on the market. I have to give “Frank” and his team who created “Comcast Cares” presence on Twitter http://twitter.com/comcastcares @comcastcares credit because they are trying to do a good job with first-gen tools. The issue is scale. As you see on the Comcast Cares Twitter site, Frank is featured. What happens when Frank receives a better offer and leaves Comcast? The strategy is kind of a double edge sword. It is cool that Comcast innovates and lets Frank be their human face, but I think that in the long run this strategy has draw backs.
First, Twitter as a Customer service channel is latent and does not have any type of intelligent routing systems that compare to unified contact center players. Sure there are products such as Co-Tweet that provide multiple agent users, monitoring and more. But they do not seem to integrate into the current base of enterprise level unified customer care systems from Aspect, Cisco, and Cosmocom.
Back in 1998 when I was in the golf ecommerce business we had many of the same customer care issues that are happening today with the social web. The main difference was that today customers have 100X more viral vocal power to crush your brand and sales by conversion across the social web.
I was basically the CTO, CMO and Webmaster for GolfDiscount.com. We did not have a technology team, just a small outsourced technology partner that developed our shopping cart technology. I remember searching for new ecommerce technology and it all provided limited functionality. It was very expensive as well when Oracle came out with their solution, Sun Servers were $25K + if you could find one and hosting at Exodus was $1,500 per month if you could get rack space. Then you had to deal with security and buy two copies of Checkpoint firewall software, one for your main server, one for your “slotting server” used as a fail-over.
There were no ecommerce platforms at the time that fit our needs. We needed to combine an ecommerce shopping cart with a traditional phone ordering system tied to inventory managment across both our warehouse and 12 retail stores. The entire Pro Golf Discount and GolfDiscount.com organization generated north of $50million in sales by the time I left in 2000. Today, the GolfDiscount.com side of the business would be easily listed in the top fastest growing NW companies buy profit margin and revenue if it was listed by the PSBJ.
Our retail stores served as mini-warehouses and the stores hated the “internet department” because we often took their inventory and potential sales commissions. The “internet department” was also branded differently than the retail stores because we were a spin out business due to the fact that the owner really owned rights to a franchise called Pro Golf Discount covering the NW and San Diego. Thus, we could not use the Pro Golf brand for ecommerce. Like I said we had a ton of weird dynamics working against us during the peak of the internet time warp from 1998-2000. These dynamics created huge customer service hassles and obstacles. But we were creative and our owner had the will to try new things with dollars to take risks.
In a previous position (1996) as the director of new media for a collegiate direct response company, we also were using a call center as our primary point to process direct response sales. My mindset was that the call centers would be oblelete in the future because I of a vision I saw while looking over Silicon Valley after the Intermedia World Conference. This was the conference where Jim Barksdale and Mark Andressen (Netscape) spoke about the rise of the internet. I met the core of the first wave internet pioneers in S.F. that year and it was very clear that the world of inbound call centers and customer service would change rapidly.
The golf space was still old school back in 1998 and the manufacturers did not know how to embrace the internet. One day we could put Callaway golf club prices online, then next day they would ask us to pull all prices from our site. Never the less, we scaled our ecommerce operations with a very small team from $1m to $9m in 20 months at a profit, while other companies were loosing millions and going IPO. On a good day we sold $60k worth of golf equipment over the web and via our call center. I would watch the PGA Tour on Sunday and on Monday launch a direct response email campaign with a list of gear that the tour pros used to win. Tiger Woods helps us sell millions!
So what do you do when you can not put prices online? How do you provide good customer service?
Let me tell you that when you have $7 million in inventory and a first generation ecommerce site, updating your price catalog is a pain. Next, when you have your vendors call and ask you to remove all prices one day and then allow you the next week, your hair will fall out. In the period of a month we are asked by Callaway, TaylorMade and Titlist to remove prices. Our customers where pissed and did not understand why?
We dropped from a good day of sales $40k down to $20k over night. I woke up at 4am with an idea, why not record audio wav files with prices and stick them on the shopping cart? This fit in our restrictions not to list “text prices” that people would print off and take to their local retail golf store - asking to match the price. These printouts would be instantly faxed to the golf manufacturers with blistering attack from our competitors. The “audio prices” were accepted by our golf vendors so we rolled them out to test the model. It kind of worked because people could surf and shop for pricing by clicking and listening to the price. But this was obviously a band-aid solution because our customers still had to call to place an order, the reverse of a frictionless ecommerce shopping experience. I also recall getting a ton of press for “audio prices” because it was novel, so we just leveraged the press and we increased sales at least a few hundred thousand dollars per month using audio prices.
A friend Paul Coppock at the time was the west coast sales person for Net Perceptions. Remember them?
Net Perceptions was the collaborative filtering technology provider for Amazon.com’s recommendation shopping service. Paul recommended that I connect with a startup in the contact center space called Cosmocom http://www.cosmocom.com headed by Steve Dellutri. Cosmocom was the first company in the world to create a pure IP based contact center with intelligent call routing, collaborative browsing, chat and even video conferencing session using Microsoft’s NetMeeting. There were zero ecommerce sites back in 1998 with this type of technology. Video on the web was nascent and the most advanced internet customer service systems were email forms and basic chat sessions.
It was really interesting to train our team and basically invent the way that IP multimedia contact centers were to be used for “real-time” internet customer service. What do you do when you receive a chat call from Mexico in Spanish? You translate the text using Systrans or the earliest version of Google Translate. We developed a few smart ways to leverage the new IP multimedia call center. First I could program intelligent call routings based on what the customer had in their shopping cart. For example, with skills based routing, I could route a call about a left handed female putter to a female agent in our call center.
Think about this on a global scale? Inbound calls from Japan could be routed to in-country native speaking sales agents using the language selection in the customer’s browser.
We tested numerous new innovations such as collaborative browsing sessions where our golf pros could “push” product pages and recommendations to our customers. We connected live video and audio conference sales and customer support calls from Australia to help our customers oversees save on long distance calls. Yes, the calls would drop because the bandwidth was slow, but we tried new ideas and learned what worked. Ebay purchased Skype with the vision of leveraging live VOIP calls across their platform as a form of customer service.
I contacted Avenue A (now aQuantive) who was helping with our ad serving at the time. As their first customer, I had direct access to Scott Lipsky and Avenue A’s tech team. I suggested to use a dynamic ad code where we could attach a code to the end of our 1-800-394-GOLF phone number. The ad code would be generated by Avenue A who served up our banners on Yahoo. Thus, the agent would ask if there was a code after the phone number 1-800-394-GOLF Y3453—the “Y” tracked that it was a call originating from a Yahoo Ad Banner; 3453 was the keyword we purchased on Yahoo such as “Ping Golf Clubs”. Now we could track online advertising with an off-line call center. Amazing innovation that would only work if the call center agents were consistent in plugging in the correct code into their computer (I framed in the Avenue A code form at the top our home page, only viewable by our agents).
I will end the golf story with inventing another customer service innovation called “Video on Hold”. Have you ever waited on hold for 5minutes and had a good experience? Not likely. Since we had basically invented the use of a web base call center for the golf business why not take it a step further? At the time video on the web was nascent with NW companies like Real Networks leading the charge. We purchased a new mac, Final Cut V1 and a Canon Elura. I setup a small studio to produce short web videos for our top selling golf equipment. We leveraged our push browsing capabilities and would push videos to people when we had to put them on hold to check inventory or locate product information. This provided a new customer experience when they were on hold because they could watch a product video. The main issue at the time was the lack of broadband and ubiquitous video codes. Thus, we pulled back on the innovative customer service “video on hold” model.
Today my view is that video with clickable in-video hotspots and augmented reality enhance ecommerce will become standard in the next five years.
The capabilities of many digital services are strongly linked to Moore’s law creating the hyper-convergence that we are experiencing today. Thus, my view is that hyper-competition will meet hyper-convergence and the power of the social web where the customer is in charge will rapidly transform the customer service landscape. Patents already lock out many innovations for small players such as Co-Tweet are eclipsed by broad patents covering the unified contact center IP space. Thus, there will be rapid consolidation driven by lawsuits in the social web as customer service space. Furthermore, customers will demand mixed channel customer service all on demand in real-time.
“Unified Contact Center Technology for Unified Customer Communications (Consolidated, Virtual Contact Center platform for Enterprises and Service Providers who require a scaleable, multi-channel, communications infrastructure to serve both inbound and outbound contact center requirements.” - Cosmocom
One brilliant aspect of customer service created by the social web is customer-to-customer customer service. Service like Get Satisfaction http://getsatisfaction.com/ provide “instant-on support communities for sharing answers, ideas and solutions. Tony Heish at Zappos (now Amazon.com) created a billion dollar ecommerce shoe business using the social web tied to superior customer support and community. Running customer support systems live over Twitter, via call centers and chat sessions is expensive. Thus, social support systems are a lower-cost solution that also potentially drive better support since often customers know product better than the manufacturers.
Smaller organizations without massive budgets will have to settle for fragmented solutions such as Co-Tweet and new offerings from Web 2.0 companies like ZenDesk http://www.zendesk.com . New innovative ecommerce players will roll in social media, customer support and collaborative browsing features. Here is a video interview with ShopIgniter a new “social ecommerce” solution built on the open source CodeIgniter framework.
The social web and customer service operations are rapidly merging with mobile. For example, shoppers will spend $400m on eBay using just their iPhone application. Since the experience for shopping on eBay is on the iPhone the company must also use this same application for customer support. iPhones using apps like Tweetie are also very popular and quick to fire off rapid tweets.
Thus, social is merging with mobile, commerce and customer service. Does CoTweet have an iPhone application used by in-field or remote customer service agents?
Smart companies such as ZipCar have launched customized iPhone applications that blend “self-service” solutions with GPS, maps and other features. The iPhone ZipCar application increases customer satisfaction and decreases inbound call center support calls. Brilliant! What ZipCar is missing now is a true social media strategy to leverage services such as Twitter.
It is amazing to see how ZipCar comes up with the smart iPhone app but then drops the ball on their Twitter accounts. Am I missing something when I Google “Zip Car, Twitter” and only come up with:
http://www.twitter.com/zipcar - 0 Tweets!
http://twitter.com/zipcarNYC - 0 Tweets!
Thanks for reading this post and please field any links to innovative social media customer service stories and solutions that are scalable.
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