What great customer service looks like? Corp comms, PR folks take a hint.

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This is what great customer service ‘feels like’. Do you think that the message (in the above posted image) was crafted by a company executive? or Edited and reviewed by a corporate communications council? Did it require layers of approval?

Leaders in days of social business should take a fresh look at their communication processes and re-design them accordingly. The market needs and expectations have evolved.  The above posted interaction is a prime example of a great company culture.

It is no longer feasible to have a ‘crafted’ message for every single customer interaction as that is non-scaled, slow, fake, fluffy and unauthentic. Instead focus on having a consistent story and an empowered customer oriented company culture.  It becomes even more important for social media strategists who are crafting their digital comms processes and really impacts how they build their content calendars. Traditional PR processes aren’t viable any more.

As of right now, the above image has had over 120K shares and has gone viral. People within my network have indicated that they will shop at Sainbury’s whenever they are in England. Congrats Sainsbury’s!

Total cost: An empowered employee and ₤3 pounds.

5 Key Components of an Exceptional Digital Web Experience

Web 2.0 is all about our digital experiences. Our collective experiences become a social experience.  As I have said earlier in my posts, the experience of today will drive the business of tomorrow. I had a discussion with some of peers here at IBM and some outside of IBM. Here’s our thoughts on what makes a digital experience, exceptional.

• Context is key. The best Web experiences make all users feel like the experience was custom fit for them – based upon their preferences, device, location, social networks, and behaviors.
• Social is everywhere and everywhere is social. According to the latest IBM 2010 CEO study, eight-eight percent of all CEOs picked “getting closer to the customer” as the most important dimension to realizing their strategy over the next five years. Organizations hoping to meaningfully interact with, and listen to, customers must transform their online experience beyond one-way information sharing or “brochure sites”. A more socially-infused experience is now expected, one that supports true dialogue with, and between, customers.
• Web Experiences can be both visually pleasing and flexible. You don’t need to sacrifice scalability, flexibility, and manageability to create a graphical, persuasive, and responsive web experience.
• Integration must be easy. To create a truly interactive, context-aware Web experience, you must be able to easily leverage and extend existing data sources like CRM systems, social media sites, and back-end applications, as well as other product or cloud-based service you acquire in the future.
• Proper measurement can lead to competitive advantage. At a tactical level, analytics are key to determining if you are meeting your business objectives and properly engaging customers. At a more strategic level, analytics are also fundamental to gathering enough information about your customers to truly understand them, making it possible to deliver user-optimized Web experiences that deliver more to your bottom line.

What do you think? Any other key areas that you think are more important?