Don't Fear Social Media
Until this past July, David Carroll was known in relatively small circles. As the lead singer of his band Sons of Maxwell, the Canadian traveled around the United States generally without incident. But in 2008 when United baggage employees threw his guitar from a plane and he spent the following nine months unsuccessfully getting retribution from United for his broken guitar, he ended up posting a video called "United Breaks Guitars" in July on YouTube poking fun at United's baggage handlers. Four months later, and with six million hits, United now uses the video to train its baggage employees.
Carroll performed the song from the video at the RightNow Summt09 yesterday. The performance helped to crystallize RightNow's announcement of its new customer experience suite--RightNow CX--which packages the Web, contact center, and now social into one suite, enabling organizations to deliver sales, marketing, and voice of the customer across all three critical customer experience channels. The performance exemplified how customers have greater expectations than ever before and the social Web is increasingly enabling their voices to be heard. "We saw it with Dave Carroll," said Andrew Hull, director of product marketing, at RightNow. "The consumer has been given a megaphone that they've never had before."
Greg Gianforte, RightNow CEO, said that companies now need to control the customer experience they deliver and look beyond internally focused customer management systems to externally focused customer experience solutions to drive results. He's touting RightNow CX as not only the solution, but as the company's vision to help customers achieve that result.
RightNow Social Experience, in short, allows customers to monitor social communities (Twitter and YouTube currently) and integrate the search results with the agent desktop for immediate response. Other key capabilities of the application include a feature that allows social community visitors to view and search the RightNow Knowledgebase for answers to their questions all from within the community, and an ideation center to help companies uncover ideas and insight from communities and share them as voice of the customer data with the enterprise. There's also a do-it-yourself configuration that enables an organization to expand a community with no help from IT.
Jason Mittelstaedt, RightNow CMO, said his customer base represents a lot of growth potential for the Social Experience piece within CX. He likens the general fear from companies to leverage social media today to the hesitation with email 10 years ago. "I had a lot of conversations with business managers in 2000 and as we talked about email, they said 'We never reply to email from one of our customers. That's why we have a contact center.... Ultimately their business became irrelevant. I see the same thing with social media. It's amazing how many people I talk to who say 'We never monitor Twitter. If they need to contact us, they should send us an email.'"
For those companies with social media paralysis, he said the only way you can have a social strategy that works is to do it. "Roll up your sleeves and be pragmatic. "There are conversations that occur in the social sphere today regardless of what your brand does and you need to monitor them," he said. "People are forgiving. They don't expect a brand to be perfect; they expect a brand to be there."
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