Adrian Swinscoe » Interviews

Following on from my recent interview, Customer service in the future will be a company wide mentality and not a department – Interview with Dave Carroll of United Breaks Guitars, today I am pleased to present to you a first: A follow on interview fro...

Following on from my recent interview, True customer engagement is not based on click throughs or contests – Interview with Wendy Lea, CEO of Get Satisfaction, today I am pleased to present to you an interview I recently did with Dave Carroll, a singer...

Following on from my recent interview, Build relationships with your customers that matter – Interview with Chris Brogan on The Impact Equation, today I am pleased to present to you an interview I did with Wendy Lea, CEO of Get Satisfaction, the leading customer engagement platform that helps companies build better relationships with their customers and prospects, through the best online customer community. Note: Hat tip to Guy Stephens (@guy1067) for the interview suggestion and for introducing me to Wendy. This interview makes up number thirty-one in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that I think that you will find interesting and helpful in growing your businesses. Below are highlights from our interview: The theme that runs through Wendy's career is how organisations and individuals can build long-term, relationships that matter. Get Satisfaction is a customer engagement platform that allows businesses of any size build relationships with their customers wherever they are online. Traditionally, companies have had to reach out to their customers from inside their companies using feedback forms etc but now through the use of technology tools, like Get Satisfaction, they are able to go to where their customers are to engage and interact with them. We have to give huge credit to much of what is happening now to what Doc Searls talked about (Markets as conversations) in The Cluetrain Manifesto that was published over a decade ago (1999). What is happening around us is a 'beautiful collision' of our natural instincts to share and talk about things and the development of technology that allows companies to talk to customers where they are, using the platforms that they are using. All of this, Wendy believes, is 'elegantly disruptive' to our traditional way of doing business and thats why she fell in love with what Get Satisfaction is doing. Businesses are having to (re)learn how to do business in a more human way. Wendy believes that we naturally want to help each other but the change to being more customer centric or customer service led feels unnaturally hard because we have put in place too much business process and technology that acts as a barrier to a more human way of doing business. Also, organisational culture and the level of investment that business has in these processes and technologies acts as a barrier to change. Apple CEO, Tim Cook's, recent apology about their Map App probably had a positive impact on their brand equity because it was a very human response to say sorry and to pledge to do better. Everyone that is involved in the Customer Relationship Management field from service providers to technology vendors to change management professionals have a responsibility to build the transparency and trust that is needed to support these new times and ways of doing business. This will force us not to hide behind the technology. Wendy says that 'she doesn't want to be the wizard behind the curtain'. The curtain needs to be pulled back so that we can be more open and able to build those personal and more human relationships. The world is changing around us, in front of our very eyes and business executives and business owners are looking for the 'answer' but there is no answer. Business is evolving and firms need to commit to evolution learning, being flexible, agile and collaborative. However, we need to be careful about some of the words that get used, like engagement and collaborative, that are being bandied about as they can get hijacked by industry players, consultants, vendors and the like. Get Satisfaction wants to help firms really understand what engagement means. Wendy doesn't think that true engagement is clicking through an ad or being part of a contest on a fan-page. Those interactions can be important as part of an overall journey or relationship but they are not the whole thing.

Following on from my recent interview, Social customer service can make your business more customer focused – Interview with Joshua March, Conversocial, today I am very, very excited (this was one of my blogging goals this year!) to share with you an interview that I conducted with Chris Brogan CEO & President of Human Business Works, a business design company using publishing and media to provide tools and insights smarts to help professionals and business owners work better. He's been blogging since 1998 and his site, www.chrisbrogan.com, is one of the most popular business and marketing blogs in the world, ranked at number 3 in AdAge's Power 150: A Ranking of Marketing Blogs. The Impact Equation is Chris' new book (co-written with Julien Smith) and is about how to get your important ideas distilled, spread across a platform that you’ve built, and cared for and understood by other people. It’s not a sequel to the New York Times bestseller, Trust Agents, but it does encompass a lot of what the authors have learned between the publication of that book and the years following. This interview makes up number thirty in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that I think that you will find interesting and helpful in growing your businesses. Note: this interview did get recorded as a video too. However, there was a problem with my video camera so you only see still shots of my ugly mug (thank God, I hear you say) but the video and audio of Chris are good. If you are that way inclined you can click here and watch the video. Below are highlights from our interview: Chris is focused on helping businesses from the solo entrepreneur to large 80k employee businesses to help people build sustainable, relationship-minded business that are focused on relationships rather than transactions. New book, The Trust Equation, is out on October 25th. The Impact Equation is about how do you take a great idea and get it to a platform of people who care and how do you get those people to take action. The previous book, Trust Agents, was about how do you build relationships and trust in this modern world. In other words, how do you be human at a distance. With The Impact Equation, they build on the ideas of Trust Agents to help people take the trust that they have built up, make your ideas stand out, help it travel as far as it needs to go, how do you help people trust the idea is worthwhile and how do you build a platform of value underneath you. Chris believes that people and businesses generally have one of three things: A good idea but not a big enough platform; A really great platform but have nothing to say; or Maybe they have a great idea and a great platform but they haven't been able to figure out how to make people care enough about what they have to say. The Impact Equation is: Impact = C × (R + E + A + T + E) Contrast x (Reach + Exposure + Articulation + Trust + Echo) where Contrast - how do you get your idea to stand out? Reach - how many people do you need to reach to be successful? Exposure - how often should you connect with people about your ideas/needs? Articulation - how can you be understood simply and quickly? Trust - how do you get people to trust you? Echo - how do you convince people that your goals are to their benefit? Chris goes on to say that before you say anything. Don't argue with the maths. I mean. Who cares, right? Read the book and make the principles work for you. The Impact Equation is a recipe and the book contains all sorts of examples about how this can work, in practice. The book is aimed at professionals, whether they are executives in a large firm all the way to solo business or individuals working for themselves, who want to work in the way that they want to and want to do it better. However,

Following on from my recent interview, Spread the love – Interview with Alexis Dormandy of LoveThis.com, today I’m very excited to share with you an interview that I conducted with Joshua March, the CEO and co-founder of Conversocial, back in August about his company and social customer service. This interview makes up number twenty-nine in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that I think that you will find interesting and helpful in growing your businesses. Below are highlights from our interview: Based on their experience of developing Facebook apps and seeing the conversations that were taking place on Facebook, Conversocial was developed to help brands manage the conversations that are taking place on social sites like Facebook and Twitter. It wasn't started as a customer service app. But, in late 2010/early 2011 started to see customers starting to use social sites to make contact with companies around real customer service issues and problems and not just complaints. Social will have to move into the call-centre. You need real customer service agents trained in social media to handle and solve customer problems. The area of social customer service has grown from nothing a year or so ago to now where it is being constantly talked about. Social customer service has moved into the Early Adopter phase. (This is supported by the latest data and research from Adobe and Econsultancy - check it out here). Every company, Josh speaks to is either in the process of setting up a social customer service team or, even they are not, they now accept that it is something that they need to do. Rather than adopting guerrilla tactics, the quickest and most effective way to set up a social customer service team and operation is to get executive level buy in as it requires serious budgets and levels of investment. It's not something that can be switched on overnight. However, another way that Josh has seen it get started is when Marketing, the traditional owners of social media, take the initiative and get Customer Service to loan them a couple of customer service agents so that they can set up a small pilot team. Conversocial focus on their software, the implementation and use of it but publish best practice guides on their Resources page to help brands get started. They also work with other agencies to provide other services around social customer service that their customers might need. Like Frank Eliason said in his interview, it shouldn't get to the stage where customers have to turn to social media just to get help with their problems. However, what Conversocial are seeing now is that customers are turning to social media for customer service as it is their preferred communication channel. Social customer service has to sit in the customer service department as they are much better equipped to deal with technical customer requests and issues of scale. Most companies that have implemented social customer service teams are seeing those teams grow at a rate of 2-5 times a year. But, their size pales in comparison to the teams that they currently have in place to deal with email and phone queries. However, Josh does expect that these service teams will grow to a comparable size in the coming years as social customer service becomes more mainstream. This will be driven by a number of things including changing customer preferences, increased adoption by businesses and a customer realisation that customer service via social media is a viable alternative channel. There is an interesting dynamic playing out inside companies due social customer service responses being so public that they become a part of the face of the brand. This is a very real part of the impact of social customer service and Marketing need to buy into it and be an integral part of it too. Marketing and Customer Service departments are evolving in that they are,

Following on from my recent interview, The Age of the Customer – Interview with Kerry Bodine about her new book Outside In, today I’m very excited to share with you an interview that I recently conducted with Alexis Dormandy, Founder at LoveThis, about his new venture: LoveThis, the place to find your friends recommendations on everything from restaurants to builders. Founded in 2010, and launched in 2011, LoveThis helps friends find the things their friends recommend in over 30 countries around the world. This interview makes up number twenty-eight in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that I think that you will find interesting and helpful in growing your businesses. Below are highlights from our interview: Huge amount of corporate experience launching and growing businesses for Virgin Group and Orange. LoveThis, his new venture, is a way of ensuring that you never forget a recommendation again. You can check out at their website: LoveThis.com and get the iphone app here. Allows people a way of remembering recommendations that are made to them as well as a way of sharing with friends those things that they find, be it books, restaurants or whatever. What the application provides is a meritocracy for businesses in that the best businesses should win and be shared the most. So, if you are a business that has a great product or service getting recommended or shared on LoveThis can help your word of mouth spread much much quicker. Great example in the interview of an Italian food importer that sells a lot of great Pesto because of this. Many small business use overt and subtle techniques to fuel their word of mouth and the trick is striking the balance. They know, however, that much of their business is driven by word of mouth. What LoveThis does is put the power in the hands of the customer and does not force word of mouth on the customer. It makes businesses focus on producing a great and sharable product, service or experience that is worth being talked about and is sharable. Launching a new business is hard but the key is to prioritise things. Whatever you do make sure that your first priority is making sure that you have a great product or service (one that the customer wants) because after that everything else is running downhill. It is very rare that we find companies that produce great products and when we do find them then it is incredibly easy to talk about them and share them with our friends and contacts. People want to share their moments of joy. So, make sure you are giving your customer a moment of joy. Prioritising also applies in marketing where many business do 15 things a little when they would be better off doing one or a few things a lot or a lot better. Alexis took a very different approach to spreading the word and developing LoveThis and did a lot of research around different people all around the world who would be able to help spread the word or help with development such that he ended up with a short list of 15 people that he believed had buckets of common sense, could add a huge amount of value and could imagine a very different future. When he reached out to them by whatever means and sent them a very well researched and prepared email or note, he got a 75% hit-rate. Given that we are now bombarded with something like 45 newspapers with of information per day, the very targeted approach can be very effective in cutting through the noise. Everyone should check out one of Alexis' most popular posts at his blog at The Telegraph: Businesses still don't 'get' social media – and it's 40-year-old marketing directors that are to blame and our discussion about it around 15mins into the interview. About Alexis (taken from his LinkedIn profile) Following training as a doctor and a first job at McKinsey, Alexis spent the big part of his early career at Virgin where he ended up as a Group Director.

Following on from my recent interview, Retailers and their customers – what’s now and what’s next – Interview with Ian McGarrigle of the World Retail Congress, today I’m very excited to share with you an interview that I recently conducted with Kerry B...

Following on from my recent interview, #PositivelySocial and why customer service in social media is a failure – Interview with Frank Eliason, today I’m very excited to share with you an interview that I recently conducted with Ian McGarrigle, Chairman...

Following on from my recent interview, Employee engagement is not something that is done to employees – Interview with Kevin Kruse, today I'm very excited to share with you an interview that I recently conducted with Frank Eliason, the father of social service or customer service on social media, about his new book. This interview makes up number twenty-five in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that I think that you will find interesting and helpful in growing your businesses. Below are highlights from our interview: Formerly at Comcast and originator of @comcastcares Now SVP for Social Media at Citibank A simple customer service guy Just published a book @YourService, which is a mix of marketing, customer service and PR but is really about what is the culture of your company The book takes a storytelling approach and social media is a lot about storytelling Storytelling is a really powerful way to drive change in organisations Stories can be just as important if not more important than big data in delivering insight and change in customer experience Social media is a channel that helps us build human connections with our customers, build understanding and build intimacy. Frank pictures a day when calls are routed to someone in an organisation who has similar interests. The best customer experiences that you have had were never the ones that were the most efficient or the quickest. The ones that you remember are the ones where you made a connection or shared an isight with someone. Facilitating those type of connections is at the heart of what Frank calls Scalable Intimacy Also, imagines a day when a company's marketing materials are not about the company's vision of things but are instead oriented towards what a customer would be interested in. But, intimacy is missing in a lot of businesses and things that we have done. We're getting away from the fundamental issue and that is understanding our customers. It's one thing that many small businesses do really well and many larger businesses need to do better on this. In most cases, customer service in social media or social service is a failure. Most people don't necessarily want social media customer service hey just want service to be done right. Often, many customers take to social media because they are frustrated with other service channels. Also, it sends the wrong message to all of your customers if customers have to take to social media to get attention. Fix the core first. Companies should focus on what can we deliver, how we deliver and how can we do that the best we can. Great case studies and stories within the interview so do have a listen. We need to help our people get out from behind our process, policy, technology and all the legal caveats and let them connect with people. Social media is much more personal than people realise. Trust comes from human to human connection. People don't tend to trust brands, they trust individuals. So, if companies want to build trust then they have to do it through their greatest asset…their employees. Encourage companies to get their employees involved in social media and teach them about it, what they can do and what they shouldn't do. Doing this will also send a message to employees that we trust them. Your employees will do it anyway so if you stop them then all you are saying to them is that you don't trust them. We need to start building Relationship Hubs in our businesses, environments that allow us to build connections and trust with our customers. We've done so much over the years to get as far away as possible from our customers. We've outsourced our customer service departments because it is seen as a cost centre. Also, many large company CEOs are not talking directly to their customers, they are not developing that personal insight and understanding, they're too distant from their customers.

Following on from my recent interview, Social Business: walking the talk and debunking some of the myths: Interview with Will McInnes of NixonMcInnes, today I want to share with you an interview that I recently conducted with Kevin Kruse, a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and NY Times bestselling author. He speaks and writes about human capital, startup success and how to unleash your inner entrepreneur. This interview makes up number twenty-four in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that I think that you will find interesting and helpful in growing your businesses. I caught up with Kevin at the end of July. Below are highlights from our interview: Note: Apologies for a few intermittent quality issues with the podcast. Over the last couple of years, Kevin has written two books. The first: We: How to Increase Performance and Profits Through Full Engagement (written with Rudy Karsan, CEO of Kenexa) was published in 2011 and was a New York Times best seller. And, the second: Employee Engagement 2.0: How to Motivate Your Team for High Performance (a Real-World Guide for Busy Managers) was published earlier this year. Kevin is an ex-Kenexa partner after Kenexa acquired Kevin's business a number of years ago. Kenexa is a leading player in the employee engagement survey space and provides employment and retention solutions to assist organisations in hiring and keeping workers. However, Kevin is a business guy not an HR guy. 'We' was written as a book on how we take the Kenexa research on engagement and make it more accessible to the regular business guy and not just for HR professionals. The book, Employee Engagement 2.0, came about due to requests from business leaders when they asked ‘what do I tell my managers to start doing on Monday morning’. Rather than being a 300 page book it is a 50 page manual that is very practical and a step by step guide about how to create an engaged team or workforce over a 90 day period. The employee engagement debate is being driven by the fact that employee satisfaction is at an all time low. That is being driven by many factors not just the economic recession that we now find ourselves in. Employee engagement is, in the main, talked about being something that is done to employees. However, in the book and this one of the things that makes it different, is that Kevin and Rudy talk about engagement that is something that managers and employees do together. It is a collaborative, two-way conversation with both sides having an obligation and a responsibility for their own contribution. Hence, the title: 'We' On an individual level, they talk about the 3 P's of the career-life bullseye: Passion (what do you like doing, what gets you out of bed, what do you like having fun with), Purpose (where do you want to serve, in what area do you want to make a contribution) & Pay (what can you earn a living doing, what standard of living do you want to achieve). From a company and managers standpoint, they talk about results from Kenexa's research that shows that over 70% of engagement (how one feels at work) is driven by three things: Growth (personal and professional challenge), Recognition (a feeling that you are appreciated) & Trust (which is not just ethics but that the employee trusts that the future is bright). Employee engagement surveys when done right can identify the areas that need work are money well spent. When done wrong then they are just cosmetic and a waste of money and resources. However, engagement surveys are not the be-all and end-all and changes in managers behaviour that focus on the growth, recognition and trust idea can generate much greater returns. Appraisal and development conversations should not just be an annual event but should be ongoing conversations that are tied to both real world objectives and career development, particularly when aligned with what the employee wants.

Following on from my recent interview, The customer service revolution is here and now – Interview with Mikkel Svane CEO of Zendesk, today I want to share with you an interview that I recently conducted with Will McInnes, Managing Director and co-Found...