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.

A business framework for CRM & Social CRM

There seems to be common agreement within the Social CRM community that the time for debating definitions of Social CRM is over. Most people have accepted Paul Greenberg's stake in the ground post and have now moved on. Turning definitions into action is the next challenge.

As such, this post is work in progress. It doesn't aim to move the needle forward on the academic thinking on Social CRM, but it does reflect recent client presentations I have given on the subject, that have moved clients forward. Having got definitions out of the way, I've found that clients have responded well to this business framework for CRM and Social CRM as a tool to help them visualise the different components of CRM and SCRM, how they work together and where they should focus their attentions, before looking at tools.

The framework below is simple. It's meant to be. I've used variations of it for the last 10 years to facilitate CRM discussions between different stakeholders (e.g. business and IT) and ensure they are on the same page. Social CRM has allowed me to add in a missing layer encompassing a customer's social interactions and experiences. Let me try and explain the model layer by layer (right click and open in new tab to see a larger version).

Customer Strategy layer - This is the starting layer. Both CRM and SCRM need to be strategy-led and people / process / technology-enabled. This layer begins with the key mind-set shift from "Inside-Out" to "Outside-in". If you haven't made this step-change, do not pass go. Social CRM simply won’t work.

Customer to Customer layer - this next layer of the model starts with the customer's desired outcomes and their value creation process to achieve those outcomes. Often the first step that a customer might take in achieving their aims is to ask other customers. The customer-to customer layer refers to the social aspect of customer value creation e.g. customer's reading product reviews, contributing to forum discussions, writing blogs, joining Facebook groups etc. To paraphrase Paul Greenberg, this is the new "customer control of the conversation". See my post on "outsource your marketing, sales and service to your customers" or "Customer to Customer and the legend of Kachiwachi".

Customer Experience layer - the customer experience is the sum of customer outcomes from the customer’s perspective of both social interactions and formal, company-"owned" channels.

Operational CRM Channels layer - traditional multi-channel CRM, supporting the range of company-owned channels of communication and customer interaction. CRM remains a foundation and key building-block for Social CRM.

People & Ecosystem layer - perhaps the key layer in the model. While your competitors are focussing on tools; do something different and focus on people. They probably have a bigger impact on customers than any tool you can buy. See my post on "Software doesn’t build relationships; people do"

Lean & Agile processes layer - this layer of the model relates to all customer-facing business processes. I've simplified to "marketing, sales, fulfilment and service" as that seems to capture the complete customer lifecycle. I make no distinction between company-owned processes and out-sourced processes as customers don't!

BI, Sentiment & Social Listening layer - to some extent BI is the handle that turns the wheel, driving constant measurement and refinement of the customer strategy.

The Altimeter Group have done a terrific job of putting a framework around Social CRM tools. See their paper on “The 18 use cases of Social CRM: The new rules of relationship management”. This comprehensive report and framework allows organisations to get a clear picture of tools available to enable Social CRM.

What I plan to move onto next are the other foundational enablers to the framework e.g. MDM, SOA etc, along with the delivery approaches to successful transformation e.g. Lean, Agile. See my post on “Lean thinking in CRM and SCRM”.

As stated this is very much work in progress, if you have any constructive builds I’d certainly welcome them.

Software doesn't build relationships; people do

I had a call this week with Michael Krigsman. Michael is President and CEO of Asuret, Inc.  and has chosen to specialise in a interesting niche, IT project failures. He writes a blog on the topic of IT failures for ZDNet and talks with a rare passion for a difficult subject.

One of the things on which we agreed strongly was the assertion that many of the IT failures, that at first appear to be technology related at their core, are in fact people-related. That resonated with me as although I am often quick to criticise technology-centric CRM projects, I have seen many a project where technology is an easy scapegoat for more complex people problems.

I once worked on a CRM project-turnaround where the project team all pointed the finger of blame on the software product that they were using. They pointed to bugs and things not working as they expected. After some quick analysis I found that the implementation team had no previous experience of implementing the package they had chosen, they had no sponsorship from the business, no CRM strategy and only tiny budget set aside for change management. Software was the least of their problems…

My conversation with Michael got me thinking of some previous experiences and anecdotes relating to the importance of people in CRM projects. It's a complex topic, that deserves far more attention but if you are embarking on a customer-centric transformation these are some of the people-factors you should be considering:

Skills - this refers not only to the technical skills required to operate the CRM system (in some respects, that's the easy part). Skills, also refers to the soft-skills like listening, making realistic promises, seeing things from the customers point of view, meeting deadlines, negotiating with win-win outcomes in mind. It's easy to train someone to operate a CRM system, but much harder to enable them to use it properly.

Culture - it's incredibly difficult to change culture.  I once witnessed a call centre agent using a new and recently live CRM system apologising to a customer for her "new slow system", only to see that she was finishing typing an SMS to a friend (the new software had actually loaded in a sub-second). The best tactic I have come across to changing culture is hiring the right people from the outset. I listened to a Gartner presentation by Ed Thompson recently where Ed reminded me of SouthWest Airline's recruitment policy of hiring customer service staff who smiled. Simple but effective.

Incentives - often the most ignored aspect to a CRM project. INCENTIVES DRIVE BEHAVIOUR. REPEAT. INCENTIVES DRIVE BEHAVIOUR. If you pay customer service agents solely on average call handle time they will cut off difficult calls or calls in peak periods (not always, but sometimes - believe me I've tried mystery shopper call exercises at peak times). If you measure sales reps 100% by quarterly sales revenue, then of course they will do everything they can to bring in deals before the end of each quarter, despite that sometimes damaging future business. I recently heard of a software sales rep threatening to give a customer a licence audit if they didn't sign $2m worth of new business in the current quarter… a really great tactic to generate short term revenue and ruin long term relationships.

Knowledge - people don't know what they don't know. To some extent CRM is all about knowledge; shared knowledge of the customer to ensure everyone is on the same page and in alignment. I've worked with many organisations that have split up their sales teams by product or service area, only to find the customer getting bombarded by different, often competing sales teams.

Collaboration - as a term you may love or hate "collaboration"; it's certainly an overused buzz-word, but I couldn't really care less about that. If you don't have collaboration in CRM deployments, they fail. Period. That means IT and the business need to talk, all customer facing teams need to talk, customer facing teams need to talk to enabling functions like product management, logistics, finance… CRM is often accused of breaking down silos in the front office, only to create a silo between the front and back office.

The people issues of CRM deployments are often over-looked. Thanks for Michael Krigsman for reminding me of my passion for the topic and the importance of people in preventing failure!

The Emperor’s new Social CRM clothes

"How do I look?"

"Wonderful, your majesty! Your new Social CRM coat really brings out your customer-centric side"

"Do you really think so? It was made by the tailors in Silicon Valley you know, using the very latest Fabric-as-a-Service (FaaS). The fabric is so fine it looks almost invisible"

"Incredible, your highness. You look just like the King of Zappos, or his Royal Highness, the Prince of Threadless.com"

"Excellent. What do you think my subjects will think?"

"They will marvel Sire. They have long expressed a desire for you to set up a Facebook Fan Page so that they may honour you"

Make no mistake, I am a huge advocate of Social CRM. To anyone who has worked in the CRM space for some time, it should make perfect sense. Social CRM completes CRM. It's the missing piece in the CRM puzzle that gives an organisation the potential to listen to the direct voice of the customer and use that feedback to co-create products and improve services. It allows an organisation to create a platform to facilitate and help customer to customer collaboration. If your customer's feel positive about their experiences they may chose to answer queries, recommend products and fix problems on your behalf (see my post on "Outsource your marketing, sales and service to your customers").

But, to clear, there are many things that Social CRM cannot do. I'd advocate that anyone embarking on a Social CRM journey understand these before they proceed.

Social CRM cannot compensate for poor products or services

If you core offering is poor (you can't deliver products on time or your widgets routinely break down after 6 months) then Social CRM is not a band-aid that will fix those issues. In fact, more likely, your customers will use social tools against you (see my post on "Star wars and Social CRM" – focus on the dark side of the force). Social CRM can however, help you to listen, understand the issues from the perspective of your customers and then improve and respond.

Learning and improving do not automatically follow listening

Social CRM provides a platform to listen to the customer's social voice. Many organisations who start deploying Social CRM technologies, start by deploying a listening platform. The key challenge, however, is translating the learning gained from listening to customers into improving products, services, offers etc. This is as much an organisational and cultural issue as it is a technology issue.

Social CRM does not replace CRM and cannot compensate for a poor CRM foundation

Customers turning to social channels to fix a service issue, often do so as a last resort once other options have failed. In a recent post on Virgin Media, I was recently positively surprised that someone had responded to my #fail tweet, however, I would argue that my service problem shouldn't have escalated to the level where I felt I had to tweet in the first place - all traditional CRM channels had let me down.

Social CRM does not guarantee customer participation or success

I recently read Jeff Jervis's blog post post where he recited the story of a newspaper published who asked Mark Zukerberg how he could go about building his own community. Mark responded; "you can't". The point he was making was that communities already existed and the right question to ask was how they could help them do what they wanted to do. The Social CRM world is already littered with the corpses of failed social marketing campaigns, that have tried to "engage" customers and entice them to participate in their viral community campaigns before they have listened and understood what their customers really wanted  (see example from UCC Coffee in Japan).

It's easy to get caught up with the hype of any technology. Most technology buyers end up buying far more functionality than they really need to solve the business problem that prompted them to begin evaluating technology in the first place. Whilst I am very bullish on the potential of Social CRM and constantly enthused by good examples of Social CRM in action, I think it's always worth looking in the mirror and considering with brutal honesty how your subjects (customers, employees shareholders etc) will feel about your new clothes!

"Customer to Customer" and the legend of Kachiwachi

Often I ask clients to describe their multi-channel capabilities. Most start by focussing on the channels that they own and control like their contact centre, their web site, their field sales force. CRM taught us to think that way. But customer's don't necessarily abide by those rules. For many customers, peer to peer is often the first channel they use to interact with an organisation and it is certainly the channel that they trust the most. We all use the customer-to-customer channel to ask what our friends think, recommend a local supplier or fix a problem with a product (see my post on outsource your marketing, sales and service to your customers).

Recently I attended the Lithium launch event in London and I was introduced to Kachiwachi. Kachiwachi is not a buzzword or a new fangled management practice from Japan. Kachiwachi is an individual and a customer of Logitech who interacts on Logitech's customer support forum. In the last few years Kachiwachi has posted around 40,000 comments on Logitech's customer support forum and has earned the status of "Logi Legend". Since June 2006, when he joined the forum he has posted an average of around 900 comments per month, or 45 per working day. If Kachiwachi worked for Logitech he would probably be as productive as a part time customer support agent!

If each customer problem takes an average of 2 posts to fix, then by my reckoning KachiWachi has helped around 20,000 logitech customers fix problems with their webcams, speakers, mice etc. I'd guess that Logitech might have expected to pay around $3-5 per contact if they had fixed those problems themselves, so, in effect Kachiwachi has single-handedly saved Logitech between $60-100k over the last few years (minus of course a share of their customer support forum build and run costs).

In addition, through his advice, Kachwach has most likely influenced the Loyalty of many of the Logitech customers that he has helped. We know from an abundance of research that customers who have a problem that is fixed to their satisfaction and more loyal in the long term than customers who never complain. Kachiwachi has also almost certainly driven several successful cross and up-sells on Logitech's behalf. I'm pretty sure that people trust his advice more than they do a corporate press release or product sales pitch.

It doesn't take many active contributors like Kachiwachi to build a successful customer-to-customer channel. The challenge is finding out what contributors perceive as important to engage their services. For some it's personal brand and status, others are product enthusiasts (like Apple or Harley Davison fanatics), others may want material rewards. If you can find out what customers and your contributors want to get out of their communities and forums, then you stand a chance of finding a Kachiwachi and building a vibrant community. For the moment though, let me add my Kudos to the 484 votes Kachiwachi has currently received!


Disclaimer and disclosure - I've never worked with either Logitech or Kachiwachi so the cost savings I reference are purely hypothetical. If either would like to be interviewed for a follow up piece though please feel free to get in contact! 

#VirginMedia - a customer’s perspective on Twitter service

Let me say from the outset that this is not a "Virgin Media lies Virgin Media sucks" post. I am a relatively happy Virgin Media customer and on balance I would recommend them to a friend; but my last customer service experience with them was mixed. I've chosen to case study the experience for precisely that reason. It's incredibly hard to create a good cross-channel, joined up customer service experience and get things right every time. Even the best companies struggle. Most organisations do some things well and some things badly. They are siloed, they fire-fight and they have done little more than dabble in social media. The purpose of this post is not to criticise Virgin Media, it's to highlight learning's from my recent dealing with them.

My experience with Virgin Media started when my broadband and cable TV went down. After 24 hours I called Virgin Media's help line. I hit their IVR, navigated the menu options to the technical support line, but just as I reached the end of the menu path my call was disconnected. I tried a further 4 times but was disconnected each time having spent around 4 minutes per call. Frustrated, I called again but this time I pressed random numbers on the IVR and I got through to an agent. The agent apologised and explained that there was maintenance going on in my area. He couldn't tell me when the maintenance would end but he offered to credit my account £10. Happy enough I hung up, but 24 hours later I still had no broadband. I used my iphone to check on Virgin Media's web site to see if there was a service update online but I couldn't find anything so I tweeted "#virginmedia broadband now down for 48 hrs. Disconnected from call centre IVR 5 times... #fail". To be honest I didn't expect a response to the tweet but within an hour I got a response. We exchanged messages and @virginmedia advised me that the maintenance affecting my broadband would continue for another 2 days; not great but at least I now had an answer. Sure enough, 2 days later my broadband was switched back on (co-incidentally, on the same day I received a marketing offer through my letterbox to sign up as a new customer to Virgin Media (!) I’ll leave Marketing, Sales and Service integration for another post!).

What do I take from this customer service experience?

The best service is no service

I don't know if the maintenance on my broadband was planned or unplanned. Either way, Virgin Media could have prevented my call. They could have written, e-mailed or sent me an SMS to let me know that maintenance was planned in my area before the event. Once a problem occurred, they could have identified accounts from the affected area and put a message onto their IVR or web site advising customers who called that they were currently experiencing problems that would be resolved in 72 hours and that they would be crediting £10 to all affected accounts. In some industries, consumer-to-consumer is becoming the best way to prevent service calls, with customer’s turning to support forums to fix their problems.

Multi-channel is dead; the challenge is cross channel

My experience with Virgin Media highlights the challenge that many organisations now face. I started my interaction in one channel (phone), shifted to another (online) and then another (Twitter). Customer's will increasingly look to switch channels at their convenience and expect to pick up processes where they left off. This challenge will only get tougher with the increasing emergence of social channels beyond the organisation’s formal control.

Customers don't mind self-service until it breaks

I have no problem with IVR technology per se, until it fails. I expect most customers feel the same. We now accept service automation but it has to be easy to use, crisis-proof and integrated into back up options. When Virgin Media's IVR failed, my call was disconnected; I couldn't navigate home and in the end I had to fool the IVR by selecting random options just so that I could speak to someone.

Technology doesn't build relationships; people do

When I eventually managed to speak to someone at Virgin Media they were both understanding and helpful. They didn't appear to be reading from a canned script, the agent seemed to be empowered to credit my account on the spot.

Expectations management should be ingrained across customer service

When the agent told me that maintenance was going on in my area he didn’t tell me how long it would continue, probably costing Virgin Media an unnecessary contact. My friend and colleague Reg Price nails this one. In his book Reliability Rules: How Promises Management Can Build Your Company Culture, Bid Your Brand, and Build Your Bottom Line, Reg lays out a comprehensive framework for setting and managing customer's expectations. 

Twitter is really starting to be a viable service channel and listening works

Virgin Media surprised me by listening to Twitter and offering to help. That unexpected surprise off-set the failings of some of their other channels which I think shows that Twitter is starting to become (at least in customers’ eyes) a viable service channel, however, I doubt this honeymoon period will last. Soon customers will expect organisations to adopt service channels that met their needs, whether that is Twitter or whatever social platform comes next.

Solid foundations

Perhaps above all, my experience with Virgin Media illustrates the importance of solid foundations for customer service. I admire Virgin Media for being an early adopter of Twitter for customer service, but, for me Twitter was a final resort, all other channels having failed.

Disclaimed and disclosure: I have never worked for or with Virgin Media. My only dealings with them have been as a customer.

Lean thinking in CRM and Social CRM

I first came across Lean thinking in CRM when I met with the COO of a large Dutch financial services company. At first I was sceptical, I had previously only associated Lean with Japanese automotive companies; particularly Toyota where the concept was created. But lights began to go on in my head when the COO described the application of Lean principles to customer-facing operations and I have been a fan of Lean CRM thinking ever since.


Lean thinking starts with the customer

With its supply chain origins, Lean stresses the importance of understanding customer demand, then "pulling" items through the supply chain. Any CRM initiative should start with the customer's value creation process, working out how mutual value can be created for both provider and consumer. Social CRM extends and accelerates our understanding of the customer by placing the customer in control of the conversation and connecting customer feedback (in the form of tweets, ideas, sentiment etc) directly with product development, marketing, sales and service.

Lean encourages customers to "pull" value themselves

Traditional CRM would see customer's "pulling" value as being self-service. Allowing customers to answer their own queries, place orders, track status etc on their own terms via the internet, SMS or via voice self-service. Again social CRM extends this principle, as it facilitates customer to customer collaboration. Customers participate in marketing, sales and service by creating content, answering questions, giving recommendations etc (see my post on "outsource your marketing, sales and service to your customers").

Lean eliminates waste

Lean works backwards tracking the value streams that enable customer value and eliminating waste. Toyota identified 7 waste types (overproduction, unnecessary transportation, inventory, motion, defects, over-processing, waiting). At first these all sound manufacturing-specific but think about the waste in front office operations, for example, a typical call centre. The call centre takes on too many agents for a peak period (over production), customers enter their account number on the IVR then again when the agent answers the call (over-processing), the first agent to speak to the customer can't answer the customer's problem (defects), the call is forwarded on to another agent and held in a queue (motion), the second agent asks for the customer's account number again… you get the idea. The same idea can also be applied to marketing (e.g. wasted spend on advertising) and sales (admin time versus productive time in front of the customer).

Lean focuses on standardising processes but allowing flexibility

The idea of Lean is to standardise processes, but not to straight-jacket an organisation so that it cannot respond to unexpected events. If you can standardise processes then people can perform multiple roles to maintain the "flow" of value to the customer. For example, consolidating down to one complaints process allows agents to deal with multiple complaints types, rather than having to learn a different process for each different complaint type. In this way, the organisation can flexibly respond to a sudden peak in a particular complaint type, rather than seeing one group's work load dramatically increase and stop the production line.

Lean drives a continuous improvement culture

One of the most important elements of a lean program is the creation of a continuous improvement culture. Lean is not a one-off initiative. Viewed this way it normally yields dramatic benefits for the first couple of months but then the organisation reverts to its pre-Lean state and the benefits fade quickly. All successful Lean programs place a huge amount of emphasis on cultural changes and working practices e.g. morning meetings.

Lean is typically technology-light

Most Lean purists would say that technology has no place in a Lean transformation. My own view is a little more pragmatic. Technology can help enable and facilitate Lean thinking through enhancing customer understanding (see my post on "customer listening mechanisms and Social CRM tools") and through enabling new business processes. Most CRM and Social CRM technology can be implemented in an Agile way which is strongly aligned to the continuous improvement / incremental element to Lean.

If you know of any good examples of organisations using Lean to drive their front office transformations please let me know.

For further reading on Lean I'd recommend Journey to Lean: Making Operational Change Stick by John Drew, Blair McCallum, and Stefan Roggenhofer.