Category: social

The spring North American conference is done (and I’m so glad to be home), which means that there’s time for a few webinars. I’ll be doing one next Thursday, June 14, on organizational change for social BPM, sponsored by TIBCO. Although they’re sponsoring, TIBCO is really taking a back seat, giving the entire time for me to present, which gives me a more substantial amount of time to dig into the subject as if I were doing a full conference presentation.

I’m spending a lot of time thinking, writing and talking about social BPM these days; from the first presentation that I did on it (before it was called that) back in 2006, I’ve been watching the market and technology mature, especially over the past two years. With all of the technological advances, however, adoption of social BPM (and social enterprise software in general) is lagging behind, primarily due to the cultural and organizational changes that need to occur in order to enable it. In this webinar, I’m going to look at some of these changes to give you an idea of where you need to start, and summarize the benefits that you can expect to see as you move to more social ways of doing work.

Sign up for the webinar here; we’re doing it at 10am and 7pm Eastern to allow everyone to join regardless of where you are in the world. It will be live both times, with Q&A following my presentation.

I gave the Monday afternoon keynote at Appian World 2012 last week on the topic of the impact of social technologies on the enterprise, with a particular focus on how social features and exposure are changing our business processes. I’ll post the entire presentation online – I’m thinking of recording a re-creation of my presentation and syncing it with the slides – but I wanted to focus on one slide that I feel is at the heart of what we should be doing with social enterprise.

I was discussing how important it is to link an organization’s external social presence with their business processes, and gave two examples from my own experience as a consumer: one good, one not so good.

The first case – the good one – was about Zipcar. Since I live in downtown Toronto, where the transit is good and the Zipcars are plentiful, I don’t own a car, but rely on rentals. Zipcar is perfect for me: book online, show up and have immediate access to the car via an RFID card, and rent only for an hour or two if that’s what I need. One of the rules of being a Zipster is that if the car has 1/4 tank of fuel or less, you fill it up before you return it; there’s a credit card included, so it costs nothing but a few minutes of your time and a bit of inconvenience. Some people, however, treat their Zipcar like their mom’s car, and bring it back with an empty tank and potato chip crumbs all over the seat. Heading out to the CASCON conference early one morning last November, I hopped in my Zipcar for an 80km round-trip drive only to find the tank uncomfortably low on fuel. At my lunch break, I started searching for a gas station close to my destination, and tweeted my exasperation:

In spite of my mistyping of “talk” for “tank”, the next day, I received an email from a Zipcar representative:

I received word that you experienced a low gas situation with yesterday’s reservation with Civic Champion. Please accept a 2hr driving credit along with my apologies for the inconvenience this caused.

That means that a number of things had to have happened:

1. Someone at Zipcar was monitoring Twitter for mention of their @Zipcar handle. (pretty standard)
2. Someone read my tweet and decided that it needed action. (good, but also fairly standard)
3. Someone figured out who I am based on my Twitter account, then linked that to my Zipcar account. (OMG amazing, and only possible because I tweet using my real name)
4. Someone decided that my complaint had merit, and gave me two hours of driving credit (total awesomesauce, not just for the two free hours, but for what it implied about their business processes)

All of this happened within 24 hours of the rental, which means that there is some sort of link baked in between their social presence (Zipcar Twitter account) and their internal business processes (complaint handling and customer refund).

When I told this story during my keynote, there was an appreciable murmur in the audience: everyone there understood the magnitude of what Zipcar had done to link their external social presence to their internal business processes, and in what must be a fairly efficient manner.

The second case was a perfect example of how to screw up that link, and likely is closer to what most organizations are still doing. The night that I was in DC giving the keynote, I had tickets for a concert at Roy Thomson Hall, a large concert venue in Toronto. A few weeks before, when I realized that I was not going to get home in time, I tweeted to @RoyThomsonHall asking if a refund or exchange was possible; a day and a half later, they tweeted back “please call the box office and speak with one of our customer service representatives directly”. Quite excited, I thanked them and told them that I would do that, then wasted several minutes on the phone only to find out that Roy Thomson Hall doesn’t give refunds or exchanges. I responded back on Twitter with:

Twitter silence ensued.

Comparing them with Zipcar, this is how RTH links their external social presence to their internal business processes:

1. Someone at RTH was monitoring Twitter for mention of their @RoyThomsonHall handle. (pretty standard)
2. Someone read my tweet and decided that it needed action. (good, but also fairly standard)
3. Their social media team gave me misleading instructions that are completely disconnected from their actual business processes. (WTF?)
4. I wasted my time figuring out that either they employ a bunch of morons to handle their Twitter account, or someone had a massive misunderstanding about how to handle customer requests for refunds and exchanges. (#fail)
5. They ignore my final tweet wherein I inform them that they wasted my time. (also #fail, but at this point, expected)

With a monopoly on certain concerts in Toronto, I don’t expect RTH to be as customer-focused as a more competitive industry such as rental cars, but I didn’t expect their social media team to be so clueless about their actual revenue-generating business processes and the customer service that supports it.

The point of these two stories is not that I love Zipcar and am not quite so fond of Roy Thomson Hall’s exchange policy, but that there is a right way and a wrong way to connect your social media presence to your core business processes. Complaints and requests arriving via social media need to be quickly passed along to customer support teams in the same manner as if they had arrived by email, phone, fax or letter, and handled with the same expediency and professionalism. Technology helps a lot with this – software is available to monitor social media channels for mentions of your company or products, and it’s pretty easy to feed those events into a BPMS or CRM system – but you need to figure out how to triage and filter those events so that your core business processes aren’t swamped by off-topic chatter by anonymous contributors.

Social media for business isn’t a game, and it’s not something just for PR or marketing to worry about: it’s a channel of customer engagement. If you do it wrong, it’s not only going to be noticed by your customers, but they’re going to make sure that their followers notice it, too.

We had a few unanswered questions left from our webinar on Tuesday, so I’ve included the ones that were not related to Pega’s products below, with answers from both Emily Burns and myself:

There’s a lot of discussion about the readiness of an org before social features are introduced to its employees. What would be a way to assess maturity/readiness of an org for such features with regards to BPM?

Emily: Boy, I guess I am on the more liberal side of that discussion and would err on the side of providing access to these features and seeing how they evolve—collective intelligence is pretty impressive, and can take things in many positive directions that a designer just wouldn’t think of. It’s hard for me to see the downside to fostering better communication and collaboration between people who are already working on the same cases, but may not currently be aware of who the other people are.

Sandy: There is a lot of work being done on social business readiness by organizations such as the Social Business Council (http://council.dachisgroup.com/) that can serve as a reference for how that will work with social features in BPM. In assessing readiness, you can look at the use of other social tools within the organization, such as wikis for documentation, or instant messaging for chat, to get an idea of whether the users have been provided with tools such as this in the past. However, just because they haven’t used these in the workplace before is no reason to avoid social BPM functions since users may be using similar capabilities in consumer applications, and as Emily points out, the best thing is to provide them with the tools and see what emerges.

Emily: For features that impact the application more, such as design-by-doing, that I think is an area that does need careful consideration. In the case of design-by-doing, more often than not, that is something that is limited only to certain roles, and even then, while the default is to allow the new type of case to be instantly in production, in reality, most of our clients use it more as a way of gathering suggestions for application improvements. As it becomes more widely used, and best practices developed around governance, I expect this type of thing to be used more aggressively to foster the kind of real-time adaptation for which it was conceived.

Sandy: Although many organizations are worried about users “going wild” with collaborative and social tools, the opposite is often true: it is more difficult to get users to participate unless they can see a clear personal benefit, such as being able to get their job done better or more efficiently. This may require creating some rewards specifically geared at users who are taking advantage of the social tools, in order to help motivate the process.

While the knowledge that we can glean from social networking sites is indeed powerful, and allows us to serve up tailored offers, it can also irritate some customers, or seem “creepy” like it’s a bit of an invasion of privacy.

Emily: I totally agree, and am just such a customer. In fact, I won’t go to a company’s Facebook page unless I am logged out of Facebook, because I don’t want them to know anything about me, nor do I want my friends to know about my interactions with different companies. In order to get around this sort of stone-walling, there are a few things that organizations can do.

1. Make the content and actions that can be performed from your Facebook page sufficiently compelling that you overcome this resistance.
2. DON’T BE SNEAKY! Do not default settings to “post to my wall” so that all of a client’s friends see that she just applied for a new credit card. Be frank and up front about any information that might be broadcast, and about how you are using the information that they have so graciously allowed you to access by virtue of logging in via Facebook. If you want to give people the option of posting something, make sure they are forced to make the choice. And make it transparent and easy to change settings in the future. This will help you gain trust and increase the uptake of these low-cost, highly viral channels.

Sandy: I completely agree – transparency is the key here for organizations starting on a social media path. Anything less than complete transparency about what you’re doing with the consumer’s information – including their actions on your site – will be exposed in the full glare of public scrutiny on the web when people discover it. Accept, however, that there is a wide range of social behavior for customers: some want to be seen to be associated with your product or brand, and will “Like” your Facebook page or check-in on Foursquare at your location, whereas others will not want that information to be publicized in any way.

Do you think there is a trust built up yet for customers to interact with companies via social as yet?

Emily: See my response above. I think that in many cases, organizations have started out on the wrong foot, taking advantage of how easily available the information is to really milk it for all its worth. The fact that many of the social networking sites had low-granularity privacy settings initially made it so that this wasn’t entirely the fault of the different organizations, either. Because of this, and in light of continually improving granularity and control over privacy settings, I think now is a time to try to re-establish trust, and establish what it means to be a good “social” corporate citizen.

Sandy: Social media is becoming a powerful channel for customer interaction, particularly in situations where the company is monitoring Twitter and Facebook updates to track any problems that customers are experiencing. From my own personal experience (and in part because I have a large Twitter following and use my real name on Twitter), I have had near-immediate responses to problems that I Tweeted about hotels, car rentals and train travel. In some cases, the social media wasn’t necessarily well-integrated with the rest of their customer service channel, but when it is well-integrated, it’s a very satisfying customer experience for someone like me with a strong social media focus. There are initiatives to create the type of trusted online behavior that we would all like to see, such as the Respect Trust Framework; early days for these, but we’ll see more organizations adopt this as customers insist on their online rights.

I’ve also included my slides below, although not Emily’s deck. I’ll update this post with the link to the webinar replay when it is available.

When I owned a boutique consulting firm in the 1990’s, our catchphrase was “Making Technology Mean Business”, and when we were coming up with a title for the webinar that I’m doing with Pegasystems next week, an updated version of that phrase just seemed to fit. We’ll be discussing the social aspects of business processes, particularly in the context of case management. I’ll be expanding on a discussion point from my Changing Nature of Work keynote at BPM 2011 to discuss the social dimension and how that correlates with structure (i.e., a priori modeling), triggered in part by some of the discussion that arose from that presentation. As with the spectrum of structure, I believe that there’s a spectrum of socialness in business processes: some processes are just inherently more social than others (or can benefit from social features).

Interested? The webinar is on Tuesday at 11am Eastern, and you can register here.