The Social Revolution: Customer Service and those who don’t get it

Gordon Moore on a fishing trip (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The glacially slow capacity of major companies to adjust themselves to the new world order of social media is going to cost them dear. Here’s a handy infographic to stick under the nose of your CIO/CMO/CEO. If you dare.

Seems a full 58% of Twitter users who have tweeted about bad customer experience have never had a response. Seems also that it costs, on average, three times as much to get a new customer as it does to retain an old one (I know, that varies enormously by industry; key thing to remember is that the impact is cumulative . . . an exponential factor that was around long before Moore’s Law). Ergo: duh.

We have noted repeatedly the lack of first-hand engagement by CIOs and other senior personnel in social, the continuing functional divisions that mar alignment between technology and strategic decision-making at C-Suite level, and the fact that (per Gordon Moore and his terrifying law) every single day these factors grow faster in their impact on customer retention and broader competitive advantage.

I’ve also suggested – further out on a limb – that it may be time to ditch the office of the CIO. As it has evolved, it is a tech-focused office; and in most major corporations it reports through that of the CFO (more horrors). Information now lies at the core of every endeavor, and with every passing day will drive value to a greater extent. Nobody should get anywhere near the C-Suite, whatever labels are being used, without a drenching in social media usage. Not that they all need to be coders (in fact that can be a negative; this is far from a geeks’ charter), but unless they are au fait, they should go do something else. At the leadership/management interface that the C-Suite embodies, they are incompetent. Whatever their other accomplishments. Sorry.

So back to the customer. Unlike the, well, institutionalized consumerism of a generation and two ago (think Nader), consumers are now directly empowered; and they will drive the culture of those companies sufficiently agile to be able to survive this revolution. The more numbers like those infographicked below persist, the faster we can expect new brands to emerge that get it.

Listen up, investors.

My earlier piece: https://futureofbiz.org/2012/04/13/social-risk-seems-cios-think-social-is-beneath-them/

And https://futureofbiz.org/2012/06/12/more-on-the-social-cio/

Social Customer Service – The Next Competitive Battleground [INFOGRAPHIC] – AllTwitter.