Creating a better experience

Eric Camulli is such a believer in Yammer that he wrote a testimonial for the business-related microblogging site.

It’s been a very busy first week back from vacation. So many ideas and plans for making this year a great one…and then of course there’s a mountain of email to go through. Oh brother, is there an email end in sight? I would venture to say that most people have the same problem of taming their inbox. So I started looking around… found something, had and idea, then gave it a try. It’s a Web 2.0 micro-blogging product called Yammer.

Yammer is very similar to Twitter, which I thought was somewhat useless for business…until I ran into Yammer. While Twitter asks the question, “what are you doing?” Yammer asks, “what are you working on?” and people post short “yams” instead of “tweets.” Interestingly, it’s tied to your domain (virtualhold.com) and people who join with virtualhold.com in their email address are automatically placed in the Virtual Hold group. I asked two fellow employees, Rob Brazier and Jeremy Starcher, to sign up with me and give this a try because they don’t work for me, but I am very interested in what they are doing AND I did not want to get into email exchanges with them about it. So, I have my Yammer window open and it looks like a scrolling news feed, similar to what you’d see on facebook. More importantly, I’m getting little tidbits of information from my coworkers who are yammering on about an RFP for this prospect and yammering on about a technical problem for this customer and in just a few hours I feel smarter, more aware, and in a better position to help the organization with what it needs. Then Jeremy invites his whole department to join. Likewise with Rob. Then I invite the Marketing department and before you know it there’s 16 people at Virtual Hold yammering throughout their work day with one-liners and everybody knows what each other is working on. Suddenly I start seeing yams like, “I didn’t know they were a customer yet…I better look into a press release.” And stuff like, “I didn’t know you were spending so much time troubleshooting with this customer…let me come over and help.” 

Yammer is slowly spreading throughout VHT. I think we’re up to 24 people. I’m not advertising it and it’s not something you make people do. But when my associates yammer on… about this… and about that… and it’s all there in a public news feed for everybody to see, it increases awareness and this is the key to increasing responsiveness and pleasing customers, which is a goal of ours. 

All of this information, wow… and none of it came from an email (that may have gotten lost in the shuffle.) All of this information, and none of it came from another dreaded meeting. 

Speaking of meetings…department status meetings are amazing now. It goes something like this, “Ok, I know what everybody is working on and how it’s going. So, before we get back to work…does anybody have any questions or need clarification?”

Nice…very nice.

If you’re on Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn, then you’re like millions of others who are part of a revolution … and businesses better be ready to adapt or else they run the risk of alienating their most valuable resource, their customers.

The phenomenal growth of online social networking is creating a cultural shift in our society. Sharing experiences and opinions with one another gives us a sense of connection. The ability to identify problems and alert others gives us a sense of purpose. To participate in solving problems facing customers and businesses gives us worth and prestige. If this is the case, and I believe it is, then we must join this community,embrace it, and more importantly, engage it! 

This is a new wave of customer interaction. It’s a new style of communicating that businesses must learn in order to build and maintain customer relationships over the long term. Over time, more and more consumers will gravitate to companies that accept them for who they are, and treat them as equals in this virtual world.

However, in order to build these advanced relationships in the virtual arena of the internet, there is going to need to be reciprocity and outreach on the part of companies. I believe it’s going to take a bit of time for most organizations to get on board with this because participating in an online social network requires a degree of transparency and openness that may make folks a little squeamish. The social network is powerful because it’s an honest exchange. Honesty fuels participation, and participation creates the synergy that spawns positive (and sometimes negative) ideas and opinions about a range of topics, including your company!When someone detects that you’re not being upfront with everything … or that you’re just trying to sell something, then the fabric of the network begins to fade and trust begins to break down.

You’ve invited your customers to engage you on the web with your web self-service strategy. Good move. But now don’t be surprised when self-service isn’t enough and they slowly start to expect more through this channel. My closing advice is: join Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn and start figuring out the lay of this virtual land. It’s here to stay and it’s going to bleed into the business world. Companies that meet their customers on this new field of play will gain a significant competitive advantage.