Our Blog – Ecosystem Optimization
Social Media at Your Service
Posted Monday, October 12, 2009 at 02:50 PM by Norma Watenpaugh
One area in which social media is gaining traction is support services.When you combine partners in an interactive forum they become a self-help community.When you add customers to the mix, your partners become very competitive in demonstrating their expertise to the customer base.The result is very organic but very effective way of providing support services.
Lithium, a social networking CRM company, has carved out a niche among vendors supporting large developer communities. Lithium in particular has documented the ROI of community support and service. By leveraging the on-line expertise of the community, costs are offloaded from the enterprise support system and responses are typically much faster than traditional call centers. One respondent noted that a 5 minute service call costs $100. Since most customer inquiries can be answered in just a few minutes, support costs are dramatically reduced and customer satisfaction is dramatically increased through the rapid response of a community-based support model.
A few organizations advocated integrating Twitter into service and support operations.One organization reporting that they have a 5-minute response goal from the time a complaint is tweeted to when someone from the company responds with an offer of assistance.
Comcast has become a model case of how customer complaints can be proactively addressed through Twitter. Comcast Corporation is the largest cable television company and the second-largest Internet service provider. Its broadband Internet service reaches about 13 million subscribers.Comcast has been notorious for poor customer service, spawning anti-fan websites, and it won the dubious honor of being voted Worst Company in America by on-line subscribers of The Consumerist magazine. In mid 2008, Comcast began to use Twitter to monitor subscriber sentiment and to respond to customer complaints within minutes.Too soon to tell if they have rehabilitated their poor reputation overall, but it is clear that those individuals who receive a proactive and unsolicited offer of assistance were impressed. Comcast has received business press attention including the following article in BusinessWeek for their innovation.
» View Full Post and Leave Feedback
Tags: Social Media, self service communities
Managing Communities and Ecosystems with Social Media
Posted Tuesday, September 15, 2009 at 08:46 PM by Norma Watenpaugh
Findings from a Survey Conducted by Phoenix Consulting Group, June 2009
Social media is gaining presence within partner ecosystems
These are natural communities and naturally lend themselves to these media.There has been a trend for some time by large...
» View Full Post and Leave Feedback
Tags: Social media, partner ecosystem, ecosystem management, partner strategy
The ROI of Loyalty (Part II)
Posted Monday, May 11, 2009 at 11:17 PM by Norma Watenpaugh
Part I discussed how demographic segmentation allowedtargeting programs, benefits, and attention to engender greater loyalty and business through their developers. Part II addresseshow segmentation by 'Loyalty' itself helps to identify andto address specific concerns of developers. While...
» View Full Post and Leave Feedback
Tags: roi, loyalty
The ROI of Loyalty (Part I)
Posted Tuesday, April 28, 2009 at 11:17 PM by Norma Watenpaugh
I was approached by a client some weeks ago to present at conference some work we did on Developer Loyalty. Now there are a lot satisfaction type surveys out there, but my client presented a very specific challenge. She was new in the role as the Director of the Developer Community and...
» View Full Post and Leave Feedback
Tags: roi, loyalty
FUZE