Facebook Connect & Social Commerce – examples from the consumer world

Mark Zukerberg, CEO of Facebook first talked about Social Graph at the Facebook f8 conference in May 2007. Since then Facebook has quietly extended across the web, in the first instance, embedding Facebook Connect and the Facebook “Like” button into consumer web sites.

I logged onto Amazon.com the other day with Facebook Connect and it’s hard not to be impressed with the depth of Amazon’s integration into Facebook. When I logged onto the site, I gave Amazon access to my Facebook profile, from which Amazon picked up my favourite books, CDs and movies (supplementing their knowledge of my previous purchases to improve the recommendations they presented to me). I could also see what my friends had liked on the site and see recommendations from them. In addition, Amazon picked up the dates of my friend’s birthdays and gave me ideas for birthday presents to buy for them. Scary? Big brother? Maybe... However, Amazon.com is certainly one of the early examples of social commerce in action.

Similarly, on holiday last month I noticed that Tripadvisor had caught the Facebook Connect-bug. By logging in with Facebook connect I could see which cities my Facebook friends had visited, post questions to my friends, asking them to recommend a hotel or restaurant and update my own traveller profile to give back to the community. In effect I could leverage 2 networks – my direct friends and the wider, unknown peer community.

The consumer world, unsurprisingly, is currently leading the way in Social Commerce. Here are just a few other examples of social commerce in action:

Dominos Pizza offer each “Major of Foursqure” in their local branches with a free pizza each week when they spend over £10.

Futureshop.ca, the Canadian arm of Best Buy, use a video avatar called Aaron to answer questions based on knowledge summated by other customers on their Lithium customer forum.

Seesaw.com allows users to post status updates of TV content they have downloaded to Twitter and Facebook (e.g. Laurence has just downloaded “Top Gear” and rated it 8/10). They also crowd-source recommendations using Baynote e.g. “people who liked Top Gear also liked Fifth Gear”).

Levis launched a Facebook friends store on their US site, allowing users to view what jeans were popular amongst their friends.

Sephora set up a Beautytalk forum for their customers to exchange beauty tips. Customers can watch YouTube videos of how to best use their products, rate advice, vote on their favourite products and post questions to the community.

Of course this space is emerging at great speed. The examples above are accurate today, but most likely out of date tomorrow. It will be interesting to see how they evolve and how the two worlds of social collaboration and privacy collide.

If you’re interested in social commerce, Altimeter Group are hosting a conference on The Rise of Social Commerce on October 6-7^th.

Lies, lies and dammed statistics – do social media storms really affect a stock price?

I was reading some provocative headlines the other day about “United Breaks Guitars”. One from the Daily Mail stood out: “The sweet music of revenge: Singer pens YouTube hit after United Airlines breaks his guitar... and shares plunge 10%”.

Somewhat sceptical, I decided to look at the United’s share price during the social media storm to see whether the facts backed up the headline, or whether this was simply over-zealous reporting. My workings are in this Google spreadsheet (I’m no financial analyst so if you find any errors please feel free to let me know and I’ll update accordingly!).

Dave Carroll posted his video on YouTube on Sunday  05^th July 2009. Previously United’s share price had closed at $3.31 on 2^nd July (before the holiday weekend). The day after the video was posted the share price rose to close on $3.34 (+0.91%). The story then hit the national press on 8^th July and the share price closed that day on $3.25 (-1.81%). In the following few days the share price reached a low fluctuation of $3.07 on 10^th July (-7.25%), but it closed on the same day at $3.26 (just a -1.51% drop from 2^nd July). One month later the price had soared to $6.04 (+84.5%), hardly a “10% plunge in value”.

In addition, there were most likely lots of other issues affecting United’s share price during the period in question. Correlation of events certainly does not mean causation, particularly in an industry that has been greatly strained over the last few years and has seen huge fluctuations in stock prices. In this case, at best “United Breaks Guitars” might have been one contributing factor to a temporary dip in United’s stock price; a PR storm in a teacup that the company quickly overcame (at least from the perspective of their stock price).

I started to wonder whether the same pattern played out in other social media storms so I tracked the stock price of BT (after Patrick Askin’s YouTube video complaint), M&S (after Bra wars), Nestle (after their Greenpeace attack) and Dell (after Dell Hell). If you have any other interesting examples please let me know.

In the case of both BT and Nestle, both saw a minor drop in their share prices in the week following their media storms. Nestle’s low point fluctuation was -1.88% (19/03/2010), BT’s was -1.5% (25/06/2010). One month later BT’s stock price had jumped back (+3.39% on 20/07/2007), Nestle’s had dropped further (-2.08% on 17/04/2010); still nothing to suggest that social media storms have anything other than a minor impact on short term stock performance.

M&S and Dell however, experienced slightly larger drops in share price in the period after their respective social media storms. Following (but clearly not necessarily because of) their customer petition against their pricing policy on bras, M&S saw their share price drop by -6.47%, at the lowest point during the first week . One month later the stock had dropped -15.88%. However, we should remember for context that the UK was deep in recession at the time and most high street retailers were suffering.

The day before Jeff Jarvis published “Dell lies; Dell Sucks”, Dell’s share price stood at $40.45 (20/06/2005). The story was somewhat slower moving than the Twitter-storms of today. Various articles appeared on “Dell Hell” over the next few months, including The Guardian and Business week on 29/08/2005. Through that period, Dell’s share price certainly did fall: -2.92% in the first week, followed by a bounce back of +2.78% in the first month, followed by consecutive month by month falls. On 19^th August the price was down -9.7% ($36.39 on 19/08/2005 from the original $40.45 on 20/06-05), in September -18.27% (20/09/2005) and October -25.15% (20/10/2005).

So what can we learn from any of this? Firstly, attention-grabbing headlines aren’t always what they appear. Secondly, in the few case studies I’ve covered (which is clearly nothing like enough to draw out a pattern), the only constant in all the cases is a single-figure percentage point drop during the first week of the social media storm; certainly painful, but not necessarily disastrous.

Perhaps the best learning is that a social media storm can act as a wakeup call to senior management, alerting them of key issues that customers care about. In the case of Dell, these were quite fundamental issues relating to product quality and service and Dell’s response and embrace of all things social has been well documented. In the case of M&S, they responded to their customer petition by publically acknowledging their mistake and changing their pricing policy on bras. Similarly BT, hit by the Patrick Askins video (and indeed often criticised for their customer service) have embraced social media relatively extensively. They have a customer forum where customers can submit questions or ideas, they monitor Twitter for negative sentiment and their last TV campaign featured a “what happens next? You decide” online vote. Many of the companies who have experienced the wrath of the social customer have seen temporary pain but have then turned their negative into a positive.

Disclaimer and Disclosure – I have not worked with any of the companies mentioned, not have I analysed anything other than their share price and the dates of their social media storms. Share prices are affected by a huge range of factors (earnings reports, new product releases, acquisition rumours etc). I have not traced any of these major events to the stock prices above.

How is Social CRM relevant for B2B organisations?

Most content produced around Social CRM relates to B2C scenarios and describes the shift in the balance of power from provider to consumer. Recently I've been working with some B2B organizations who understand the concept of Social CRM but have pushed me to define how specifically the topic can be applied to B2B organizations. Below are some initial thoughts.


Perhaps the most obvious fit for Social CRM within B2B is with those organizations that in effect sell B2B2C, for example Consumer Products companies, selling to retailers, who in turn sell their products to consumers. Historically the Consumer Products company's primary relationship has been with the retailer. However, as consumer demand drives retailer demand, many Consumer Products companies have seen an opportunity presented by Social Media channels to build a direct relationship with the consumer in order to capture consumer sentiment and feedback and feed this back into product development, marketing and sales. For example, an ice cream manufacturer allows it's consumers to vote on new recipe ideas on its Facebook fan page. Those recipes that receive the most votes are put into production, and the level of consumer participation gives the ice cream manufacturer an immediate audience receptive to marketing offers, as well as a feel for the likely level of consumer demand; valuable information which in turn can be used to support retailer (B2B) negotiation.

What about pure B2B? Selling accounting software or professional services to an industrial manufacturer or selling electronics components to an aerospace company. To date most discussion around Social CRM in B2B has focussed on three potential uses of Social CRM:

1. Social Sales - this is perhaps the category that receives the most focus. Most SFA solutions capture transactional information that can be greatly enriched with social information. For example, relationship or profile information from Linkedin, or information services like Hoovers, can provide valuable insights for an account manager trying to build relationships with new stakeholders within an account. New conversations are much easier if the account manager can find a mutual contact or at least show that he/she has come to the meeting prepared, having done some background research.

2. Sales Genius - Some vendors like Oracle have built Sales Genius functionality into their SFA solutions. the basic idea behind Sales Genius is to identify "similar customers who might want to purchase", in theory helping a sales person to hunt for new leads within their installed base and maximise up-sell opportunities.

3. Internal collaboration - I tend to categorize internal collaboration tools like Yammer or Salesforce Chatter more as Enterprise 2.0 tools, rather than Social CRM; but definitions aside, there can certainly be value in applying the same principles or technologies more commonly associated with consumer social networks to internal or partner collaboration. My own company, Capgemini, are extensive users of Yammer which can be used for Facebook-style status updates, or to crowd-source answers to questions.

The danger I see with the above three categories is that they ignore the fundamental inside-out to outside-in mindset shift that Social CRM demands. Social CRM is not about technology tools; these are merely one enabler for a customer-driven, outside-in strategy. The danger in leaping straight to tools, is that this simple principle is often ignored; social sales tools, for example, could conceivably provide sales people with more Linkedin contacts to cold call and bombard with offers; doing nothing to change the core sales approach towards one of listening first and understanding the customers wants and needs, before creating a customised proposition to meet those needs. Recruitment companies and corporate events companies are often particularly guilty of this; seeing Linkedin as a potential goldmine of contact information that can be used for cold calling, but failing to engage, build relationships and understanding before pushing product. B2B customers are just as intolerant to irrelevant marketing spam and privacy invasion, as consumers are!

We can argue and debate whether "Social CRM" is a worthy term or whether it should really just be part of "CRM". I don't particularly care much for these debates. I've been happy to adopt Social CRM as a term (as defined in Paul Greenberg’s “Stake in the Ground Post”) as I think that it brings to life a key distinction from the CRM of the last 10 or so years; namely a clear shift in the balance of power between buyer and seller, enabled by social communication channels. Social CRM compliments an organisation's investments in CRM by capturing the true, authentic and unstructured voice of the customer, enabling them to be customer-driven and not simply pay lip service to customer-centricity.

If we then apply Social CRM to B2B in this wider sense, encompassing the shift to outside-in, more usage categories emerge than those that have received the headlines to date.

1. Social lead generation - one of the tenets of Social CRM is the shift within Marketing from outbound-blast campaigns (Seth Godin calls this interruption marketing) to conversations with customers and prospects. Customers are more likely to engage in a conversation if they feel listened to and if the individual or company they are conversing with has established credibility and subject matter expertise. Gary Vaynerchuck's book, "Crush It", describes this concept pretty well. Gary advises anyone starting a business to first establish credibility through blogging, commenting and engaging in discussions. This is true across both B2B and B2C. Kachiwachi, an IT consultant and Logitech customer who I have written about previously, has established himself as a subject matter expert in Logitech's products through extensive participation in Logitech's online customer support forum (he has single handedly answered over 40,000 customer questions on Logitech's behalf). In turn I suspect that Kachiwachi is in great demand as an IT consultant - if you were a business looking to set up web conferencing using Logitech's products who would you turn to? Kachiwachi or XYZ consulting firm? By participating in online discussions, blogging, contributing and sharing you can establish credibility, start conversations and create leads. 

2. Communities - I've come across a few B2B organizations who have started to set up B2B communities. SAP's software developer network is one of the best examples with around 1.8m members. The community allows SAP to give it's customers a voice - allowing them to blog, participate in discussion groups, download training material etc. The community is powered by Jive Software who also practice what they preach, setting up dedicated collaboration portals for their partners to share leads, request information etc 

3. Product innovation - one of the benefits of a healthy B2B community is that customers can start to participate in the product innovation process, ensuring that their requirements are gathered and fed into product development funnel. Salesforce.com, for example, use their Ideas platform in this way to capture ideas for product enhancements from their customers. Dell do the same with Dell Idea Storm, this is just as relevant to B2B as it is to B2C. 

4. Social support - Wim Rampen's recent series of posts on the Future of Marketing reminded me of the sound principle that from the customer's perspective, value is not created at the point of contract, it is only created as an outcome of usage. B2B organisations who wish to ensure that their customers generate value from their purchases can use communities to keep in touch with their customers and ensure they are receiving value from their purchase. They can also facilitate non-competitive introductions between their clients. One organisations embarking on a difficult or challenging project may gain a great deal from building a relationship with a similar organisation who has worked through the same challenges. Of course social channels like wikis, community sites etc make this collaboration much easier.

What have I missed? What other key usage scenarios exist for Social CRM in B2B?

Three lessons from Paul Greenberg's Social CRM Summit

Paul Greenberg’s inaugural Social CRM summit earlier this year was severely disrupted by a snow storm. It was volcanic ash and a BA cabin crew strike that threatened to disrupt my visit to the second summit, held at Kennesaw State University, in balmy Georgia.

The event was something of a gathering of minds in the SCRM space with distinguished thinkers like Paul Greenberg, Dr Jeff Tanner &  Jeff Pedowitz  presenting and thought leaders like Esteban Kolsky, Marshall Lager,  and Jacob Morgan driving a lively discussion and tweeting live from the event. It was a uniquely social event with an extended audience following the #SCRMsummit hashtag on Twitter.

Two of my fellow participants have already published excellent posts on the event. Lauren Hall-Stigerts wrote a comprehensive summary of the event here and Jacob Morgan covered the more social side of the event here! I don’t aim to repeat anything they have already written. Instead I wanted to focus on 3 key learnings I look away from the summit.

1. CRM remains the foundation of Social CRM

Although the summit focussed on the “S” in SCRM; Paul emphasised a number of times that CRM does not disappear. Companies still need to answer phones, take orders, handle complaints etc... SCRM does not replace CRM, it compliments CRM. In some ways it represents the final missing piece of the CRM puzzle. The piece that acknowledges the customer’s control of the conversation; the piece that encourages listening and responding to the direct and authentic voice of the customer (and the customer’s community); and the piece that forces companies to embrace outside-in thinking and not simply focus on internal command and control mechanisms. Many SCRM vendors and practitioners still have some way to go in articulating a strong CRM integration story, but the 2 must be treated as one.

2. Embracing Social Media does not mean you have embraced Social CRM

Setting up a Facebook fan page or Tweeting special offers to your customers is easy, but let’s be clear; that does not mean you have embraced Social CRM, you have merely adopted some new channels. Adopting social channels without a wider framework can be dangerous. Social media can give marketers more data than they ever dreamed of; the danger of which is that inside-out thinking is perpetuated and increasingly granular customer segments are bombarded with direct messages, tweets, notifications etc.  The force has both a light and a dark side! See my post on Star Wars and Social CRM.

3. The concept of “someone (or a company) like me” is central to what drives customer trust and advocacy and LTV is no longer enough

This was an interesting idea that Paul introduced at the event. The idea of “someone like me” has been told many times. Customer’s trust advice and guidance from people they perceive to be similar to themselves, far more than they trust corporate marketing, PR or a smooth-talking salesman. “A company like me” extends this concept through the alignment of a company’s brand values to those of its customers. Customer advocacy is not just driven by successful transactions; it’s a product of an emotional connection that the customer has made to the company and its brand. Co-creation is a powerful mechanism to help establish a customer’s emotional connection, as customer’s can be made to feel part of the brand. When a customer feels part of the brand and starts acting as an advocate, traditional metrics like LTV are no longer enough; the social customer can have positive or negative value far outside their direct revenue-generating transactions. See Paul’s recent post on Measuring the Social Customer.

It was a pleasure to attend the Social CRM summit and connect with many of the friends and colleagues that I have been working with for a while. A Transcript of the Tweets from the event can be found here.

Disclaimer and disclosure: I attended the Social CRM summit as a guest of Paul Greenberg and BTP Partners but my company Capgemini paid my travel costs.

What's driving Social CRM - opportunity or fear?

Most clients that I have discussed Social CRM with so far have fallen into one of two camps: those motivated by the opportunity presented by Social CRM and those motivated by their fear of the social customer. Let me say from the outset that I recognise that this is quite a crude split, that there are grey areas in between, and that over time it's certainly possible for a client to move from one camp towards another; but for the moment let me explain my thinking.

First, a reminder that Social CRM is "the company's response to the customer's control of the conversation" (Paul Greenberg "Time to put a stake in the ground on Social CRM"). Those driven by the opportunity of Social CRM see customer control of the conversation as a positive thing as it provides knowledge, insight and engagement that they might otherwise have missed.  If we take a Consumer Goods company as an example, most have long been separated (and as a result frustrated) from their end consumers by retailers. For Consumer Goods companies Social CRM represents a unique opportunity to engage, listen, capture and respond to the direct and authentic voice of the consumer. Consumer Products companies can leverage Social CRM to build deeper relationships with the end users of their products, create new products (or re-design old ones) based on direct community feedback, adjust promotions or test new markets based on real consumer insight.

Those motivated by fear of the customer's new found control of the conversation, on the other hand, think quite differently. These are organisations whose relationship with their customers is typically defined by negative moments of truth. Take a water utility, for example. Now I have no desire to have any sort of interaction with my water utility other than when I sign up, when I leave, or if something goes wrong in between. My relationship with my water utility is defined purely by how easy it is for me to set up or close my account, the cost of my bill, how many things go wrong and how well they are dealt with. If things do go wrong (for example, if my bill is incorrect, my water pressure is low, or if sewage is pumped into my street) them my relationship with my water company is determined by how well they deal with that negative moment of truth. If my water utility can't fix the problem in a manner I deem to be appropriate, through the channel of my choice, then the chances are that I will eventually turn to social channels to vent my frustration. I will tweet, I will blog, I will write negative reviews etc. If my negative sentiment resonates with others, then it will gain viral momentum, causing embarrassment and potentially lost customers. If you think about many of the headline-grabbing Social failures like United breaks guitars, Eurostar's Twitter storm, or BT's YouTube complaint; many have been driven by an inability to spot and deal with a negative moment of truth. Hence for some organisations, their primary driver for Social CRM (at least in the first instance) is simply to be able to better listen and respond to angry customers; putting out sparks and flames before they become fires.

Currently most commentary on Social CRM is directed towards the opportunity camp. I don't dispute that, or the logic that goes with it - the opportunity camp is where the excitement happens; where organisations can become truly customer-centric / customer-driven. But the opportunity camp is not necessarily an easy starting point for all organisations; improving customer service to quench flames of discontent is far more tangible for some. Over time I suspect companies starting in either camp will evolve their thinking and usage of Social CRM. Those who start by trying to listen and respond out of fear for the social customer may find an opportunity to better understand their customers (their desired outcomes and their value creation processes). This insight in turn may lead them to spot new opportunities for product or service enhancement.

What's your view?

Measuring the ROI of Social CRM

For some reason ROI is often a dirty word when used in the context of a Social CRM initiative. Metrics are abundant but dollars are often harder to find. It’s easy to point to a metric like number of followers, page impressions, percentage of positive sentiment etc but ultimately all of these are just leading indicators. Every board room I have been in to have asked the tough questions:

•    How much is this going to cost me?
•    What cash flows will I get in return?
•    How will this enable me to achieve my strategic objectives?
•    What are the risks?
•    How does the proposed course of action compare against other (viable) alternatives that I have?

I couldn’t imagine facing off to a hard-nosed exec without having answers to these questions and responses like “we need to join the conversation” simply don’t cut the mustard. Kathy Herrmann nails this point in her presentation on “What Social Business ROI really means”:

“There are folks who seem to view social media initiatives as a special class of corporate initiative that’s exempt from Business 101 fundamentals. That astounds me, especially when you consider how the costs for social media can climb...It is unrealistic not to expect execs to demand an ROI on any major corporate initiative. Companies run on money, not on tweets or the number of friends they have.”

Twitter may be a free tool, but Social CRM has real costs: People, Process, Technology and Management. It can also create tangible benefits; increasing revenues (e.g. through word of mouth marketing, up-selling or cross-selling), or reducing operational costs (e.g. through call deflection via an online community, or reduced cost of lead acquisition). Logitech for example deflect around 120,000 cases per month from their online community. Dell famously sell around $3m per annum via Twitter (tiny in the context of their overall revenues, but nevertheless growing).  As such, why shouldn’t the Board be entitled to understand the likely cash flows from their investment? Natalie L. Petouhoff, Ph.D. from Forrester has done a terrific job of detailing some of these costs and revenue as they relate to online communities in “The ROI of Online Customer Service Communities”. The Social CRM vendor, Lithium, has gone a step further and has built some of this thinking into their product.

The real question in my mind is not whether ROI is measurable or valid (it is), it’s whether ROI is the only metric worth evaluating? I would suggest that ROI as an isolated metric is not enough. In fact nothing like enough. All companies aim to create shareholder value (or “Stakeholder” in a public company); but each will have different methods of achieving that goal. For example a low-cost retailer might focus all its energies on growing revenue and market share during a time of economic recession. The retailer will actively hire and spend marketing budget to achieve those aims. Other companies may focus on earnings during the same climate of economic distress; consciously sacrificing risky revenue growth opportunities to concentrate on cost-saving. A decision to invest in Social CRM needs to be based on ROI but also on alignment to strategic objectives. This is a point Wim Rampen makes clearly:

“If the goal of your strategy is to double your market-share in 10 years... I would think that any investment you are doing should be aimed at meeting that strategic goal, hence any business cases should not only be measured against financial ROI, but against strategic-outcomes too”

Don Peppers and Martha Rogers take strategic thinking about customer-investments one step further with their comprehensive work on Return on Customer (ROC). They suggest that customer’s are the surest route to business growth:

“Most business executives would agree, intellectually, that customers represent the surest route to business growth – getting more customers, keeping them longer, and making them more profitable. Most understand that the customer base itself is a revenue-producing asset for their company – and that the value it throws off ultimately drives the company’s economic worth. Nevertheless, when companies measure their financial results, they rarely if ever take into account any changes in the value of this underlying asset, with the result that they are blind – and financial analysts are blind – to one of the most significant factors driving business success.”

This way of thinking balances short and long term objectives in a meaningful way and offers something complimentary to ROI:

“Return on investment quantifies how well a firm creates value from a given investment. But what quantifies how well a company creates value from its customers? For this you need the metric of Return on Customer (ROC). The ROC equation has the same form as an ROI equation. ROC

equals a firm’s current-period cash flow from its customers plus any changes in the underlying customer equity, divided by the total customer equity at the beginning of the period.”

What I like most about ROC is that it treats customers as an asset (the sum of all customer lifetime value) and it takes into account changes to the capital value of that asset, instead of simply looking at the dividends produced by the asset in the current quarter i.e. current quarterly revenues. The capital value of the customer asset is not just their transactional worth it is also their “social” worth. As my Capgemini colleague Mark Walton-Hayfield points out:

“Having reward mechanisms that are based on more than just what the customer spends with the company will become more important. Reward mechanisms need to develop to be based on the value that customers bring to the organisation through co-creation and customer advocacy as well as their attitude to the company brand. This could be based on the contributions they make to an online community or knowledge base, for example, and the additional customers the business may obtain through existing customers’ recommendations or positive comments made by an existing customer.”

On that basis therefore, whilst I would suggest that looking at the ROI of a Social CRM initiative is mandatory, I do not believe it should be looked at in isolation. A decision to invest in social CRM needs to be aligned to an organisation’s corporate objectives and needs to consider both short and long terms value drivers.

Further reading and presentation material:

A huge amount of work has been done on ROI in Social CRM. I’d recommend the following:

Natalie L. Petouhoff, Ph.D. (Forrester) - “The ROI of Online Customer Service Communities”

Kathy Herrmann - “What Social Business ROI really means”

Mike Boysen - The ROI of CRM (and Social CRM)

Olivier Blanchard - Basics Of Social Media ROI

Don Peppers & Martha Rogers PH. D. – “Return on Customer”

This article was first published on myCustomer.com

The sports fan experience at Saracens RFC

I recently went to a rugby match - Northampton vs Saracens in the semi final of the Anglo Welsh cup. A friend of mine is Finance Director at Saracens and he invited me along. We arrived 3 hours before the game in a cold windy car park in Northampton and he told me that his CEO was passionate about creating a positive customer experience at their games. He had a vision of creating a pre-match atmosphere at English club games similar to the Southern Hemisphere, where fans turn up a couple of hours before the game creating a party atmosphere in the car parks, with meats roasting on BBQs and rival fans enjoying a pre-match drink or two as they welcome the teams into the ground. Intrigued, but somewhat bemused as the icy wind smacked across my face, I looked across a vast, empty, desolate car park next to an industrial estate and I couldn't help but question the sanity of such a vision.

We waited in the car park for around 5 minutes then I watched a Land Rover pull up about 300m away from us. The driver got out and put up 2 tall Saracens rugby club flags. As we walked closer to the Land Rover, another car arrived and set up a couple of tables with drinks and meat pies. We arrived and helped ourselves to a drink and some food. Within 10 minutes over 200 people had joined us; fans, ex-international players, current squad members (not playing through injury), junior players and back office staff. The CEO had been on Twitter and the club's web site and had publicised a pre-match Tweet-up to ensure that a large group of fans would greet the players as they arrived at this hostile away fixture. For the next 30 minutes or so, the CEO and many of his staff gave out food, drink, flags, horns and even Saracens tabards to those supporters who had made the early journey to Northampton. All of the Saracens staff mingled with fans, listened to their views and discussed the game ahead.

By now nearly 300 people were in the car park and we marched in procession to the ground to welcome the players as they arrived at the ground. The players got off the bus to find a mass of cheering supporters, mascots and a double-decker Saracens bus (set up as the mobile club shop) waiting for them. They looked amazed, and I hope, also inspired by the support.

When we got into the ground I understood why they needed that support. Northampton supporters seemed to outnumber Saracens fans by around 20 to 1. On the pitch, Saracens put up a good fight in the first half but suffered from indiscipline and in the end were soundly beaten by Northampton.

From a customer experience perspective, my interest is in the learning's that can be drawn from my day at Saracens.

1.       Customer Experience is a continuous process; not a one-off, end of season party - many organisations treat customer satisfaction as a one off event, measured annually by customer satisfaction surveys. Often they hold an annual customer party or invite key customers to an event just before the annual survey. Of course, customers don't think that way and aren't so easily bribed. They remember the basics (the late deliveries, the broken promises, the inaccurate bills), just as much as the end of season party. The customer experience is the sum of all of the individual customer interactions which typically take place across formal (organisation-owned) channels, as well as the Social Web, normally outside the organisations control.

2.       Changing customer attitudes takes time - Saracens are trying to create a new and different experience for their supporters. This is not going to be simple or easy. Customers have ingrained habits, just as much as organisations have ingrained culture or practices. Instead of trying to start with a big bang and failing, Saracen's are starting small and building their tribe. They are listening, engaging, understanding what their fans value, and over time they are winning the right to create the vision they are aiming for.

3.       A little generosity creates enormous good will - speaking to a few of the Saracen's fans, none of them expected to receive free food or drinks from the club. Let along flag or tabards. I'm sure the club won't do that at every game! However, once in a while, unexpected random acts of kindness can help make an experience memorable.

4.       The best CEOs immerse themselves with their customers and they encourage those around them to do the same - I guess it would be easy for most sports-club CEOs to spend all their time wining and dining in the corporate box with sponsors. Of course those sponsors are key customers. But the best CEOs try and understand the customer base, from top to bottom. Sure they may allocate their time towards certain customer segments, but they never lock themselves away and they expect the same from those around them whether they work in Marketing, Sales, Finance or Logistics. No one is too senior to sit in a call centre for a day and take customer calls, or shadow an account manager to speak with real customers.

I enjoyed my day with Saracens. It's great to see customer experience thinking being applied in areas you don't necessarily expect to find it.

Disclaimer and disclosure - I was a guest of Saracens for the Anglo-Welsh semi final. Saracens paid for my ticket to the game. However, I am not a Saracens supporter! I support one of their main London rivals - Harlequins. Saracens had no input whatsoever into this article which represents my personal views only.