All industries change and evolve. To illustrate, you’re now reading this on a computer. Hold on, maybe it’s a smart phone. Gartner say the mobile phone is going to overtake the PC as the most common web access device worldwide, where the web took five years to develop, mobile internet will take 18 months, the mobile internet is going to be 50% of how we connect.
Remember when IBM allowed Microsoft free reign to license MS Dos onto all their systems, easy for IBM not to look beyond selling hardware, a business that brought it such massive success, why worry about a software company like Microsoft?
Big business is now more wary of such decisions, but sometimes, even for the biggest companies it hard to get a handle on the competition. Having regard to that, could Google be the next IBM? Fortune Magazine ran an article entitled “Google: The Search Party is Over” At the time of the publication of the article in August of this year, Google’s share price was down 21% since January, versus the NASDAQ up 1% at that point on the year. (The stock has since rallied, but it’s been fairly stagnant over the last 5 years, when many others listed on the same index have been growing quite steadily).
The Fortune article alludes to the fact that Google has become a cash Cow, and that it needs to find a way to become social. You have to hand it to Google, they continue to invest large amounts in innovation and new products. People have been building businesses around Google for years, and I believe they will continue to. But Facebook is coming down the tracks and is getting up a head of steam. In the FT weekend Magazine from December 4th, Mark Zuckerberg stated that “This is really Just the Early Stage”. On the back of their launch of ‘Deals’, a new service that is claimed will transform the way local businesses reach consumers as they walk down the street, Zuckerberg said “our goal is to make everything social”. The impact of Facebook and being social means the evolutionary cycle for the way in which we communicate continues further, I wonder how prevalent it’s influence will be on the world of customer experience?
For businesses to connect with people, facebook is the now THE place to be, it’s THE social network. Being into all things feedback, I love to watch what’s happening in this space with great interest, in the B2C relationship feedback is one of the most social interactions that can take place. Remember listening is the best form of communication, and communication, is there anything more social.
It would seem, on the face of it then, that it will be hard to beat facebook as a place for customers to leave feedback. Facebook is now the stickiest site on the web, with 17% of all time spent on the web worldwide on the site, (followed by Googles’ You Tube which commands 10%).
In an interview earlier this year, Zuckerberg said, and he should know, he’s got all of the data, that “People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information, and different kinds, but more openly with more people”. This bodes well for businesses that want to gather information from customers, it would seem they are becoming more and more willing.
To be customer centric, a business is best advised to allow the customer the opportunity to provide feedback through the channel of their preference, in other words, multichannel feedback, i.e. over the phone, or online. But I wonder, with such a level of stickiness – facebook as the channel of choice is the place to watch EVEN more closely. It is conceivable to think that multichannel could evolve to mean, the channel through which the customer accesses their facebook account?
Also, just out of interest, I defy you to find a word in the dictionary that looks more like feedback.
Facebook has become the de facto place for people to share their personality online. It makes intuitive sense that it will be the de facto place for them to share feedback. I wonder how far the facebook and feedback relationship will go, because more than appearance wise, they are comfortable bedfellows indeed.
Customer Experience Management is now the key battleground in business. If something is not measured it’s not managed. Feedback is the key metric to measure CEM. It is envisaged that this blog will be a portal through which CEM and feedback issues can be shared, the objective of this blog is to try get more evolved thoughts and get insights from others, let’s see what happens….
