Deloitte Customer UK

Having debuted in Dubai in January, the CloudWorld Roadshow reaches London this coming Tuesday 14th May when it hits the ExCel Centre.

In today’s digital world customer expectations and the rules of customer engagement are changing. As a result, organisations are beginning to transform the ways in which they conduct their business by turning to the cloud. The Oracle CloudWorld Roadshow has been travelling globally and has been designed to connect customers, thought leaders, executives, partners and those with an interest with leading cloud technologies to share ideas on how businesses can leverage the cloud; from service to infrastructure, platform to social – helping them get ahead of the business challenges they face today.

Within the specialised Customer track, our main focus will be on how the changing consumer landscape is setting new expectations and causing organisations to rethink how they provide a differentiated customer experience in order to retain and grow their customer base. Our session will also explore external market factors, looking at the internal capabilities required to support the experience and provide real life examples of where clients have achieved this already.

In previous blog posts, I’ve discussed the opportunities and challenges social media presents for organisations, and identified four areas that they must get right in order to ensure social media success. I argued that organisations must clearly understand how they are performing in the social sphere. And it is to this idea, that of social analytics, that I return to now.

The use of social media in business brings a distinct set of challenges. Foremost among these is the scepticism that C-suite executives often display towards social. While social is increasingly seen as a part of the complex, fragmented modern marketing mix, it is rarely seen as central to it. There is an understandable, natural hesitancy in many large organisations to adopt new channels for customer engagement; after all, they need to be certain that current trends are not just a flash in the pan.

But with social, there is another key limiting factor: the lack of proper analytics. Meaningful goals and outputs for social media are hard to define and, more importantly, difficult to tie back to business benefits. Setting targets for reach or engagement through social media platforms is all well and good, but these will only gain traction in the organisation if they can be tied back to key metrics such as sales and profitability. In short, then, executives want to know whether engendering social conversation is actually making them money. Without this certainty, many organisations simply use social ‘because we should’, without a clear strategy and, as a result, fail to realise the benefits of social fully.

Given this situation, the field of social analytics remains surprisingly underdeveloped. The market is certainly saturated with social listening services and social CRM providers; companies that can ‘scrape’ and summarise data on a particular organisation or product from social platforms. A smaller number then offer nominally analytical services, which work on the basis of analysing social media metrics and sales data in isolation. But what is lacking is a solution that can actually prove this direct link between social media conversation and sales and profitability, rather than simply assuming a correlation.

Claiming causality around social media – that seeing a particular post or taking part in a social conversation is the defining factor stimulating a purchase – is difficult, maybe even prohibitively difficult. But the same is true of all marketing channels. What organisations can legitimately desire, however, is a service that considers social buzz as just one part of the purchasing decision, and combines social media metrics with broader data on sales and advertising spend to identify attribution. Until this challenge is tackled, many organisations will continue to struggle to elevate social to the same level of importance as traditional and digital media channels as part of marketing campaigns.

Luke Howard
Luke sits in Deloitte’s Marketing & Insight practice. His work focuses on Customer and Social Analytics, particularly the use of business insights to improve customer engagement, increase marketing effectiveness and inform growth strategies.
Read Luke's previous blogs How social media is changing brand management and Four ways to win with social media.
Connect with Luke on LinkedIn.

During London Fashion Week the eyes of the world have been on the British fashion industry. Commentators have highlighted London as the ‘Digital Fashion Week’ and when you look at Instagram invites and real time streaming of the catwalks shows it certainly might feel that way. However, luxury fashion retailers still have a long way to go when it comes to their digital strategies.

From my own research reviewing a range of luxury fashion retailers who have had catwalk shows at London Fashion Week and who also have their own stores, 25% lack ecommerce capabilities and over 30% don’t have basic site search. Both are functionality that customers now expect as standard. Additional capabilities such as mobile and tablet optimisation, pre-orders, click-and-collect and real time stock levels are being seen more and more from their high street counterparts but yet still seem to be lacking from luxury retailer sites.

From a physical store standpoint, luxury retailers have always understood that creating a quality customer experience in-store that reflects the brand and the product is essential. So why does this seem to be lacking from their virtual brand presence?

Posting, blogging, pinning, tweeting and uploading videos became part of everyday life in 2012 - social media channels experienced unprecedented growth. The volume of channels, interactions and options can be confusing but with this growth comes opportunity for businesses looking to engage and grow their brands at a multichannel level.

What is still clear is that it is notoriously difficult for organisations to measure the efficiency of these social media campaigns. There is no exact science but instead a range of metrics to consider: sentiment analysis, page likes, retweets, video views and drive of new traffic to name just a few. As such, whittling down a year’s worth of social media campaigns to just five of the best is an inherently subjective process that will undoubtedly fuel debate. Regardless, here are some to whet the appetite:

Kellogg’s Tweet Shop 

• The idea: Kellogg’s opened a pop-up shop that leveraged social payments – people paid for products by tweeting instead of using cash, meaning there was real benefit to customers in promoting the Kellogg’s brand
• Why it was so good: the campaign turned social media into a currency, instantly turning something tenuous to tangible. It was entirely customer-led, meaning all of Kellogg’s promotion was done for them, taking word-of-mouth branding to a new level

Having established some of the opportunities and challenges social media presents for brand management, and having looked at some case studies of the good, the bad and the ugly, the important question to ask next is, “What is it that allows some companies to use social media effectively to boost their brand, while others see the same platforms seriously damage it?” I think we can identify four key areas that organisations have to get right.

First, they must have a clear social media strategy. It’s not enough to simply say “We need a Twitter account” or “We need a Facebook page”. There have to be clear ties between brand strategy and social media activity, and organisations’ social presences must be managed with a real purpose. Similarly, this strategy cannot simply be a repetition of broader business aims and goals. A social media strategy must explicitly take into account the specific nature of social media as well as the demographics and values of its users.

We can safely say that social media is here to stay. Key platforms have now reached a critical mass of users and their use has become increasingly embedded in people’s everyday working and social lives. This rise of social media has fundamentally changed the way brands and customers interact, turning existing brand-customer relationships on their head. We have witnessed a change
from organisations talking and the customer listening to dynamic, two-way, customer-led interactions.

This presents exciting opportunities for organisations, who can harness social media to grow their customer base and execute their brand strategy. Social media provides a wealth of data on consumer feedback, which, if harnessed properly, can help businesses to better understand their customers and, in turn, generate exciting, targeted content that strengthens their brand. This is about taking the social experiences we have outside of work, and carefully introducing them into the enterprise.

Starbucks is a great example of a company that has taken the lead in harnessing the power of social media. With 32 million ‘Likes’ on Facebook and almost 3 million followers on Twitter, the numbers alone are impressive. But it’s the depth of engagement Starbucks achieves with its customers that makes it stand out. For example, recognising that more and more users are accessing their accounts from a smart phone or tablet, Starbucks recently launched a Frappuccino Happy Hour photo competition. Each day for two weeks Starbucks gave its Twitter followers a different photographic challenge. Users had to tweet a photo of themselves, including the @StarbucksUK username, for the chance to win a £10 Starbucks card. This campaign achieved maximum exposure for minimal cost, recruiting many hundreds of thousands of unofficial ‘brand ambassadors’, who were generating online buzz about Starbucks.

The deployment of a collaboration tool can be a great addition to a business and bring real benefits – but once you’ve decided what system is for you and perhaps run a pilot, what next? How should the new tool be deployed to your firm? As a starter for ten, here is a simple three stage process for the deployment of a collaboration tool. It’s not exhaustive – but these stages should provide a good guide. The stages have borrowed a slightly overused rugby metaphor to describe the roll-out process – but it fits pretty well. Touch, Pause, Engage…!

Touch: Set your objectives, discuss the programme with stakeholders, and review the lessons learned from the pilot.

The first step should be to set your objectives. What do you want the tool to achieve? When will the roll-out start? Who are the users? Defining what you want the system to do by setting your goals will help everyone involved have these goals at the forefront of their minds.

When deploying a collaboration tool (or any other tool), senior stakeholder engagement is key. Visibility of senior stakeholder buy in is key to increasing adoption of the tool, while their input at an early stage of the project will make sure the system is designed to meet the needs of management (e.g. pipeline reporting) as well as staff and ensures alignment to the company strategy.

It's Salesforce.com's showcase event 'Cloudforce' today in the Excel arena in London and Deloitte is out en masse. We have representatives from our European practices with us to learn and collaborate on exciting emerging trends and possibilities in the industry.

This annual event is designed to bring Salesforce, customers, partners and developers together to showcase new and existing CRM functionality and how it is being applied to drive business value.

Integrated is the first word that comes to mind when thinking of the most fundamental change in marketing over the past 10 years. We are no longer living in a world driven by a mass of unknown customers. As the Economist says, we are living the era of mass customisation. The driving force behind this is that we know more about customers than at any time before. But that’s not all.

Compared with previous decades, this information is available immediately and on a massive scale. In the past, marketers used to gather external customer perception data from market research and internal customer relationship data from CRM systems. These are no longer the only sources. With growing adoption of social media customers are leaving a massive online digital footprint that can be linked directly with CRM data.

In an earlier blog post new approaches to customer services were discussed, particularly in the context of putting the customer at the heart of these interactions. This post examines how, as social technologies become ever more pervasive, organisations must prepare for a customer service revolution. Gone is the humble letter to a distant ‘Customer Relations‘ department and in are new social technologies allowing the customer and service provider almost instantaneous interaction.

Transformational customer service

Truly transformational customer service is more than just successfully handling a disgruntled customer on Facebook or responding to a Tweet criticising a new product. Herald a new era for customer relations as the traditional concepts of customer service are challenged and the power of social media drives forward a revolution in Customer Relationship Management (CRM). How organisations harness the data from these social interactions offers vital input to a truly integrated and valuable CRM system.