Why Social Needs to be Part of Your Portal

IBM’s 2014 Digital Experience Conference started Wednesday off with a great session by Mac Guidera, Social Workforce Strategist from IBM, titled “Why Social Needs to be Part of Your Portal.”  The session was very insightful blending a mix of statistics, trends, best practices and insightful thoughts.

Social Business Patterns

Patterns represent modernized processes with dynamic, repeatable and measurable “people interactions” created by building social into work and life.  These patterns are repeatable way to interact an engage, share innovative ideas, finding out who knows what and find information.  Key patterns include:

• Customer Engagement
• Marketing
• Sales
• Customer Service
• Recruiting
• Supply Chain
• Expertise and Knowledge
• Workplace & Safety

Each of these patterns has value propositions and ROI, for example Customer Service maps to customer satisfaction, increased revenue and efficiency.  Marketing can map to awareness, marketing effectiveness and trust.

Customer Engagement Implications

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Social experiences are critical to customer engagement.

• 51% switched mobile providers in the last 3 years.
• 42 people tell a good customer experience while 53 tell a bad one.
• Customers who receive social responses spend 20%-40% more with a company.
• Companies delivering customer support through social media achieve twice the gains of those who don’t.
• 66% B2B & 52% B2C leave from 1 bad service experience.

Social Increases Customer Engagement

Engaging socially through social business patterns clearly leads to opportunities to increase engagement.  This leads to being able to deliver on customer expectations for quantifiable ROI.

• Marketing to create targeted and personalized messaging to increase sales and loyalty.
  • Monitor campaign effectiveness.
  • Identify influences.
  • Manage reputation.
  • Publish social content.
• Sales to enable seamless cross channel customer experiences to increase revenue.
  • Work better together.
  • Intercept buying signals.
  • Customer collaboration.
  • Enriched insights.
• Service to anticipate behavior and customer service to build relationships.
  • Social customer care.
  • Early warning.
  • Knowledge management.
  • Measure customer satisfaction.

5 Ways Social Media Takes Customer Relationships to the Next Level

The key points are below but the full referenced article is here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/theyec/2012/12/24/5-ways-social-media-takes-customer-relationships-to-the-next-level-2

1. Make it easy for people to share their story
2. Leverage the social in social media
3. Make it about the Consumer, not about the product
4. Take every opportunity to gain feedback
5. Break through the barriers

 IBM Provides the Technology to help Achieve These Goals

• IBM Connections and WebSphere Portal are the tools.
• Collaborate in public or private spaces.
• Use social tools to create an extended intranet.
• Integrate and aggregate.
• Create content, forms and applications.
• Engage virtually anytime, anywhere.
• Infuse social communities into the digital experience.

The session continued with some interesting examples and insightful information.  If you get the chance to see Mac Guidera speak, take advantage of it.