Tag: social media

Rethinking customer support

As the computer power at our fingertips gets more powerful, the tools to help customers are getting smarter and better.

One of weaknesses in most organisations is getting customer service right, good support takes time which costs money and leads many big and small companies  to scrimp on support to save a few costs.

In a conversation with BMC Software’s Suhas Kelkar about customer support – Remedy, one of the biggest helpdesk software packages is a BMC product – the discussion turned to how the process has changed in recent years.

Not too long ago we reached for manuals, but those vanished as CDs and then downloads became common. Then we’d call the manufacturer’s helpline or our unfortunate store who sold us the item.

Today we Google a problem to see if we can find a quick solution and if that fails we reach out to our social networks by posting the question on Twitter or Facebook. We may even post the problem to a support forum to see if anyone has an answer.

Only if can’t find the solution anywhere else do we call the support line, for most of us it is the last resort.

In some ways this is a success for corporate cost cutting as most of us call a “helpline” only in desperation as we’ve trained to expect long waits, confusing menus and poorly trained operators.

That model developed in the 1980s – in order to pay rockstar salaries to executives it was necessary to cut staff wages and training costs with after sales support often being the first business area to suffer cuts.

Eventually this started to backfire and the Dell Hell saga as one of the leading examples where the computer manufacturer’s lousy support became industry legend. It’s fair to argue that Dell has never quite recovered from the damage the period of poorly outsourced support did to their brand.

To repair the damage to their brand, Dell adopted a crowdsourced support model where company forums were available for customers to ask about problems with the hope other customers could answer before expensive staff became involved. Eventually other companies adopted this system.

Social media has created a doubled-edged sword for businesses, it’s easier for people to ask their friends for help but it also increases the risk of brand damage if online posts aren’t monitored and responded to.

All of this is forcing a rethink of how customer support works. For businesses big and small, social media and crowdsourcing tools are changing the way we talk to customers and how they can talk about us.

The big data push is also changing customer support as businesses now have the computing power available to mine knowledge bases, issue registers and call logs to identify market trends and weaknesses in their products or sales teams.

For business owners and managers stuck in the 1980s ways of customer support, they are in for a wretched time over the next few years.

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ABC Nightlife: Apps down the farm

For the October ABC Nightlife spot we’ll be looking at how the agriculture sector is using smartphone and tablet computer apps

If you missed this program where we covered a wide range of subjects, you can listen to the ABC Nightlife podcast of the show.

Paul Wallbank joins Tony Delroy to discuss how technology affects your business and life.

This week we’re talking about how the agricultural industry are using smartphone apps and the web. A list of apps for farmers is available from the NSW Department of Primary Industry website.

We’ll also be looking at how machines are talking – in agriculture, the next generation of farm equipment will be sending data straight to the farmers’ tablet or laptop computer using the technologies we’re seeing in jet engines and other high tech equipment.

Connecting everything does come with risks. A US report found that networked medical equipment is rife with malware and the Defense Signals Directorate points out that out-of-date computer systems are one of the main causes of data breaches.

One of the things driving the apps world is cloud computing and Google have given a rare glimpse into the data centres that run their services.

Social media is one of the things that are driving cloud computing, but there’s traps for businesses in posting information about customers and staff. We’ll be looking at those as well.

We’d love to hear your views and comments so join the conversation with your on-air questions, ideas or comments; phone in on the night on 1300 800 222 within Australia or +61 2 8333 1000 from outside Australia.

Tune in on your local ABC radio station or listen online at www.abc.net.au/nightlife.

You can SMS Nightlife’s talkback on 19922702, or through twitter to @paulwallbank using the #abcnightlife hashtag or visit the Nightlife Facebook page.

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Big Data, Bad Data

Is the data being collected by social media sites accurate?

“What about bad data?” an audience member asked me at a recent presentation where we looked at how social media and big data were changing business.

His question came from an experience where he had sacked a staff member who now refuses to change their status as being employed by his company.

The former employee wants to keep up appearances that they are still being employed and this causes reputation problems for their old employer.

All of this makes that LinkedIn information on the employee and the business junk data. Rather than being useful, it’s misleading noise and that is a risk to LinkedIn’s business.

This ties into Facebook’s problem with groups, if people can be added without their consent then the risk of mischief making and false information increases. In turn, this makes Facebook’s targeted advertising less effective.

Similarly, Google’s aim to become an “identity service” becomes less feasible when the information they’ve gathered isn’t accurate – again something that is increases with their opaque policies and poor support.

In Terry Gilliam’s movie Brazil, a man is arrested and dies under interrogation because of a fly getting stuck in a typewriter. We’re in the age of a billion flies being stuck in typewriters.

LinkedIn, Facebook and all the other social media and “identity” services need to build in systems where those mistakes can be managed and the consequences limited. If they can’t do this then their value and relevance will be limited.

Big Data shouldn’t mean bad data, and we all need to be confident that the data about us and the data we use in our lives is reasonably accurate.

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Posting without permissions

Facebook’s groups feature can be dangerous if you don’t check before adding people.

A client of mine once had a angry worker scream at him when she found out he’d posted photographs of all his staff on the company’s website.

“My ex is a psycho, he doesn’t know where I live or work. If he finds this, he might come around here and kill us all,” she cried.

The photos went down immediately and Kevin made sure he got explicit consent before he posted any details of his staff onto the website.

It was a valuable lesson on why you shouldn’t just post people’s details online without first asking them. We all have reasons why we’d like to keep certain facts out of the public light.

A Texan gay choir’s organiser posting the details of members onto Facebook is another reminder of why it’s a bad idea to put someone else’s details online without asking them first.

For two members of the Queer Chorus at the University of Texas, having their sexual orientation pasted on their Facebook feeds caused terrible damage with their families and it should serve as lesson to every manager, business owner or community group leader that this stuff matters.

One of the worrying features with Facebook is how other people can add you to groups without your permission – almost certainly a recipe for misunderstanding and mischief.

What’s even more unforgivable with Facebook’s conduct is the privacy settings for those groups overrides an individual’s own privacy settings.

As one of the victims said in the Wall Street Journal of when his father saw the status update, “I have him hidden from my updates, but he saw this,” she said. “He saw it.”

So even though both the individuals had chosen to lock their profiles away from public view, Facebook and the organiser of the group decided they knew better.

We shouldn’t let the administrator of the Facebook off the hook on this lapse, Christopher Acosta decided to make the group open and public. “I was so gung-ho about the chorus being unashamedly loud and proud,” he’s quoted as saying.

That’s nice when you have a tolerant family and you’re from a liberal community but for others that ‘transparency’ can lead to damaging family relations for years, if not lifetimes. In some communities the consequences could be far worse.

“I do take some responsibility,” says Mr Acosta. Which is a nice way of accepting you might have screwed somebody’s life up by doing something you didn’t understand.

Ultimately responsibility lies with the person who presses the button which causes the email or status post to be published. In this case Christopher Acosta was responsible.

To be fair to Mr Acosta, the ability to add people to Facebook groups without their permission is a deeply flawed as are those groups’ setting overriding an individual’s privacy preferences.

Facebook have to understand there are real life consequences to ‘transparency’ which can ruin careers and even cost the lives of people. The damage to families and communities can be immense.

Coming from a secure upper middle class white background, Mark Zuckerberg probably doesn’t quite understand the risks his company’s policies pose to people in vulnerable situations, hopefully some of his older and wiser advisers will explain why ‘transparency’ and ‘openness’ are not always a good idea.

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Today’s business Neanderthals

Many businesses are hopelessly ill-equipped to deal with today’s realities and are doomed to extinction

“Bringing a knife to a gunfight” describes showing up hopelessly ill-equipped for the task at hand.

Two recent conferences, the massive Dreamforce in San Francisco and the smaller, but still fascinating, Australian Xerocon in Melbourne illustrate just how radically the commercial world is changing and how many business leaders are poorly equipped for today’s times.

In July, the Melbourne Xero Convention bought together 400 Australian partners of the cloud accounting service which showed how how one New Zealand based company is building it’s business through engaging other suppliers who add features to the basic service.

Vend, a Point Of Sale cloud service provider, was one of the companies exhibiting at XeroCon. In the past POS systems have been a pain for retail businesses with most suppliers’ business models being about locking customers into expensive contracts.

With cloud services, the old vendor lock in model dies as stores can use any device they like such as a PC, tablet computer or a smartphone so a business is no longer locked into using an overpriced and often antiquated piece of equipment.

Making the cloud offering even more attractive is that Vend, and many of their competitors, also take advantage of APIs – Application Program Interfaces – built into other services so they can seamlessly change records.

So a shop can make a sale in their physical store and inventory levels will automatically change in the online stores and on services like eBay. If an item is now of stock, the websites are automatically updated to reflect this.

This business automation makes it easier and cheaper to run a business. It’s everything that computer have promised for the last thirty years and is now being delivered through cloud computing services.

At Dreamforce in San Francisco last week, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff showed the 90,000 attendees how these services work on a corporate level with demonstrations from companies as diverse as General Electric, ski company Rossignol, and Australia’s own Commonwealth Bank.

What really stood out with all of these presentations was how each business had made major technology investments that in turn allowed them to deploy modern tools.

The Virgin America Dreamforce presentation was particularly telling. Having just endured a 13 hour United Airlines flight in a plane that had been barely refurbished since 1988 it was clear that the older airline simply didn’t have the hardware to compete with the upstart even if management and staff wanted to.

From both Dreamforce and XeroCon the message has been clear, those legacy managers who won’t invest in new technologies or re-organise their businesses to meet the realities of the 21st Century are simply doomed.

In Australia this sense of doom in the business community is confirmed when MYOB and Google missed their target of giving away 50,000 free business websites as part of their Getting Aussie Business Online program.

Depending on whose figures you use, between 50 and 65 percent of Australia’s 1.7 million small businesses don’t have a website – and websites are last decade’s technology.

Business has moved onto mobile and social platforms, those 800,000 businesses who are yet to move into the new century are roadkill – the competition are just going to run over them.

If you are still struggling with the idea of a website – let alone a mobile site, mobile phone app or social media strategy – then you haven’t bought a knife to a gunfight, you’ve bought a sharpened stick. It’s time to figure out whether you still want to be in business.

Disclaimer: Paul travelled to XeroCon in Melbourne courtesy of Xero and to Dreamforce in San Francisco as a guest of Salesforce.com

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Towards the social media enabled jet engine

General Electric’s GEnx engine illustrates how social media is changing business

“What if my jet engine could talk to me and what would it say?” Asked Beth Comstock, General Electric’s Chief Marketing Officer, at the Dreamforce 2012 conference.

The idea of social media connected jet engine is strange, but the idea that a key piece of technology can talk to engineers, pilots, salespeople and management makes sense.

At the Dreamforce conference, Salesforce.com were showing how their Chatter social communications tool can be applied to more than just salesteams, in GE’s case by giving their new GEnx engine the opportunity to talk to its support teams.

In flight telemetry is nothing new to the aviation industry, ACARS – Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting Systems – have allowed airlines to monitor the performance of their aircraft over high frequency radio or satellite links during flight since 1978.

The difference today is the sheer amount of data that can be collected and who it can be shared with. If relevant data is being shared with the right people it makes managing these complex systems far easier.

More importantly, it helps teams collaborate. The GEnx engine is a new design that’s fitted to Boeing’s latest airlines including the troubled and late Dreamliner 787 so streamlining the design process of a new, high performance piece of technology pays dividends quickly.

Although things can still go wrong – one wonders what the final tweet from this engine would have been.

We’ve been talking for a long time about how social media and cloud computing services improve collaboration in a work place, the GEnx jet engine illustrates just how fundamental the changes these technologies are bringing to organisations.

If an industrial jet engine can be using social media it begs the question why service based companies and workforces aren’t. It’s where the customers and staff are.

These tools are radically changing the way we work right now – the question is are we, and the organisations we work for, prepared for these changes?

Paul travelled to Dreamforce 2012 courtesy of Salesforce.com

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Live Blogging from the Dreamforce keynote

A live commentary of the Dreamforce keynote session

01.29

So the session begins with some case studies and interviews with happy Salesforce customers including Comcast, Deliottes and a not-for-profit.

At the front of the bloggers section, things are pretty civilised but that will change in a few minutes as the doors are about to open for delegates.

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11.55

Now we’re into the final run, Marc revisits the Touch mobile plaform and starts the final ‘vignette’ which is Burberry.

The thrust of the Burberry video is how the company is using all of the various Salesforce tools.

“It sounds like Minority Report” Marc asks, “it is” says Angela Ahrendts the CEO of Burberry.

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11.44

George and Dan demonstrate a smart QR-code enabled Coke vending machine. One should worry if the Daleks get this technology.

Now Marc talks with Coca-Cola on integrating an SAP back end with a Salesforce social platform before winding up.

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11.40

George gives a big thank you to those who’ve contributed to the Ideas Exchange and then introduces Salesforce Identity to manage the enterprise social media indentity.

Is this a direct competitor to Google+ or to Microsoft?

The single point of user management was a selling point for the various Microsoft services shown at last week’s Australian TechEd.

Should Salesforce be able to get traction with a corporate identity service then it creates a real threat to Eric Schmidt’s concept of Google+ being the identity management service of choice.

George shows off how the cloud services can be bought together with intelligent vending machines that can even track who scarfed all the diet coke.

 

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11.28

Now we have a look at Coca-Cola with a historical look at their advertising.

50,000 tweets a day about Coca-Cola and they try to answer every one that is a question.

The concept Coca-Cola putting forward of personalised drink dispensers linked to reward programs and social media is interesting. While it may not work for soda, this is something we will see.

Now George Hu, COO of Salesforce takes the stage. George has a good story himself as he started at the company as an intern.

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11.19

So the work.com system works around awarding badges. Do we get a drink if the word ‘gamification’ is used?

The integration into Amazon allows managers to create incentive prizes.

Tim Campos the CIO of Facebook is introduced by Marc. Applause from part of the audience – not sure if that’s fanbois or Facebook employees.

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11.10

Now we get the demonstration of how Salesforce are looking to change the HR department with Work.com

In many ways the social angle makes sense for HR, one of the failures in the modern corporation is how the employee management has become depersonalised. Even the term “HR” illustrates the industrial machine mindset.

Joh Wookey, EVP work.com and social applications, show off their HR software.

Facebook was one of Work.com’s first customers. This is an interesting alliance.

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11.01

Wow! Marc Benioff is almost as tall as Tony Robbins. I wouldn’t like to meet those two in a dark alley.

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10.59

Harris announces a secure, Salesforce integrated version of Dropbox, Chatterbox.

This is an interesting product as one of the concerns of CIOs and IT folk is the potential security risks of staff sharing documents on public cloud services.

Harris demonstrates how Virgin can use Chatter to expedite customer support. It would have been interesting to how Virgin Australia would have used this feature during their reservations system implosion two years ago.

Notable during Harris’ presentation is how integral iPads are in the demonstration.

Another aspect of the support demonstration is real time advice to passengers through inflight wireless networks and personal IFE systems.  It would be hard to see how this could work on airlines like United.

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10.50

Virgin America’s turn arrives. The fastest growing airline in the US using Chatter.

Thirty percent of communication in Virgin happens through tablet devices.

A big call for Chatter and now Salesforce co-founder Parker Harris takes over the presentation from Mark Benioff.

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10.46

Now HP. Now this is a company that needs help both with customers and internally.

George Zimmer, Mens Warehouse CEO now joins Mark and makes the point that his business was built on a billion dollars worth of advertising to baby boomers, marketing to Millennials requires selling through social media.

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10.41

The reskinned Radian6 control panels are shown for the CBAs social presence.

Andy Lark of the CBA joins Mark Benioff, “banking has always been a social business,” Andy says.

 

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10.30

“By 2017, CMOs will spend more on IT than CIOs” quotes Benioff

Brett Queener EVP of Salesforce’s marketing cloud.

“Social is the biggest change to marketing in sixty years” says Brett. It’s interesting that marketing ceased being social.

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10.28

And now the Aussie contingent. I’m not sure if I’d call the Commonwealth Bank an “amazing company”.

Kaching appears as the CBA first product being showcased which isn’t surprising.

CBA claim Facebook and Radian6 are one of their most effective marketing platforms.

“It’s not about technology, it’s about meeting customers’ needs better.” Is this the same Commonwealth Bank we know in Australia?

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10.24

Now Jeremy Stoppelman from Yelp! joins Benioff.

“Mobile is the core” says Stoppleman which is obvious.

“Monetizing mobile” – is Yelp making a profit?

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10.20

Some screenshots of the control panel for Service Cloud tracking customer issues through social media.

The demo continues in showing the call centre and service desk applications in bringing up a customer’s social media activity along with their service history.

Now we see how customers can use Facetime or any onboard video to diagnose service problems.

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10.11

Now a case study from gaming company Activision. Salesforce’s videos are definately more interesting than a boring IBM style whitepaper.

Fergus Griffin, SVP of Solutions Marketing at salesforce.com shows off the small business aspects of the Servicecloud product.

I wish people would find an alternative to saying “I’m thrilled to announce….”

 

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10.03

One could say Powerpoint free sales presentations could be one of mankind’s greatest achievements and concludes Hilary’s product demo.

Marc now interviews the CEO of Rossignol, Bruno Cercley before moving onto a Charles Schwab executive.

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09.56

Hilary Koplow-McAdams, President of Salesforce’s Commercial/SMB Business Unit takes the stage to announce the new products announced this morning which we covered earlier today. 

The audience seems a little underwhelmed by the new Touch iPhone app.

Hilary takes the hall through how the various products integrate through a demo around Rossignol who were showcased in the previous segment.

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09.48

The production values in the videos are exquisite. Salesforce don’t cut corners when it comes to making a promotional clip.

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09.46

And now the business case studies start. It might be worth slowing down the live blog for a while.

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09.44

And so ends the GE segment. As @evanshrugged says on Twitter;

Loving #Dreamforce, but since they’re interviewing GE employees I must say #RememberTesla. GE sucks.

 

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09.40

Beth Comstock from GE claims her sales team are 100% digitised.

Demonstrating using Chatter for customer,  maintenance and design teams working on the early Boeing Dreamliner GEnx engines.

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09.37

“The social revolution is a trust revolution.”

Benioff asks “are you and your company going through a social revolution?’

And now the story of GE and Marc Benioff’s 30 minute conversation on the future of GE with Jeff Immelt.

“I believe the future of GE is the man-machine interface” said Immelt, “we  believe the revenue future is becoming a customer centric business.”

GE Share: Jet engines with APIs – a social network around an aircraft turbines or CT scanners that structures customer information and service details.

And now a promo video on GE proclaiming itself to be a social company.

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09.30

“It’s a customer revolution” states Benioff as he prowls the aisles of the hall.

Social is “a fundamental change in business. We  saw that to be really successful in this time we had to be a company customers could trust. We’d have to have a level of transparency that has never been seen.”

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09.24

We’re in a social revolution — “you only have to see the news this morning to see how a video can change the world.”

“How many companies here today use social computing in your business in some way?” Most people put up their hands.

“Business is social”.

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09.21

“We are standing on the shoulders of giants” — Watson, Gates, Ellison, Sergei Page all get a mention as building the tech industry with a special shout out to Steve Jobs.

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09.19

For the last decade, Marc has been travelling the world saying “the cloud is coming”.

Putting 1% of equity into charity is “the best decision we have every made” creating million of grants, donations to 16,000 non-profits and 350,000 hours in hours donated by Salesforce staff.

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09.15

Now Marc Benioff takes the stage and thanks the audience for making Salesforce the success it has been.

 

Marc Benioff onstage at dreamforce

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09.12

The clip now goes through some of the applications for mobile commerce; aircraft engineers using their iPads to service planes, ordering hot dogs from your stadium seat and, most unlikely of all, making flying a pleasure.

 

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09.09

Impressive promotional clip to kick off the keynote. A big emphasis on the mobile phone and social.

Too many stats to recount, it’s like a social media expert’s dream.

“Everything is social, everything is in the cloud.”

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09.06

And now MC Hammer takes the stage. Sadly he’s lip synching most of it except for the last rap.

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09.01

Excitement grips the room as the safe harbour investment statement is read out.

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08.59

Now Evan Trent from the School of Rock comes onto the stage to discuss how franchisees use Salesforce’s small business tools like Do.

I had a beer with Evan last night at the media reception, School of Rock has a big operation and they’ve streamlined what was the typical ad-hoc small business mess onto the cloud with Google Apps and Salesforce.

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08.49

So Do.com is kind of a competitor to Basecamp that plugs into Facebook and Google+

Sean announces a Do app for Android and open APIs for developers. We’ll probably hear about many more APIs and app releases.

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08.46

Sean Whitely from Salesforce’s Do.com is now up to give a demo of the business social media platform

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08.44

The San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee now joins the event. He’d be pretty happy with 90,000 attendees today.

Ed makes the case for San Francisco as a technology hub – “San Francisco; innovation capital of the world” and he’s declaring October to be Innovation Month.

“Vote Early and Vote Often” for city Proposition E that gives tax breaks to technology companies based in San Francisco.

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08.37

The customer interviews continue with a small business story in local business Carlos’ Bakery and multinationals in Schneider Electric and Accenture.

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08.34

Whoops! The time settings on the blog were set to Sydney time, so the initial date stamp was 17 hours out. All fixed now.

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