In case any of you are living under a rock, the holidays are fast approaching. Therefore, what better time of year to spread some Ciboodle cheer! So go make yourself a cup of coffee, sit back and courtesy of some of our fabby ciboodlers watch our 2010 outtake reel!
Enjoy, and happy holidays from everyone at Sword Ciboodle!
If you read my previous blog titled “When does Ray Wang Sleep”, you’ll know that some very powerful information can be derived from social media data. In this post, I’m delving into how to make use of that kind of power to more effectively engage your customers. Continue reading…
For those of you that don’t know him, Ray Wang is a software analyst and all round tech guru. He is also an avid tweeter and was happy to take part in this social experiment. I’ve never met Ray in the real world, but I can draw a simple picture to tell you when he sleeps. Social media data provides an unprecedented level of insight into our lives, what questions will we be asking of the social media crystal ball, and how do we want to receive the answers?
I plotted tweets from @rwang0 on a timeline using the Twitter API and the Similie Timeline Widget:
Ray Wang's Tweets over 2 days
You can view the interactive version of this timeline here. By visualizing Ray’s Twitter data in this way, an obvious pattern appears. The bigger gaps between the Tweets show when Ray is sleeping. If you look at the live, interactive version of this timeline (his last 100 Twitter updates) you can see that Ray doesn’t sleep so well some nights, with a few tweets in the small hours of the night.
Marketing, sales, and service teams each have their own unique interests in and, thus, approaches to social media interactions.
Social media conversation from business to customer has been a largely ad hoc affair to date. Some companies have used the direct interfaces of Facebook and Twitter to monitor the social noise that concerns them through simply having a company Facebook page or by crudely searching for the company name in Tweets. Others have used monitoring tools, which seek to filter out some of the noise out, or broaden the number of media sources a team can easily monitor through a single application.
As social media monitoring matures, it will undoubtedly fall back in line with more traditional thought patterns, even though it is a disruptive new technology. Quite simply, companies still want to do the same things, it’s just the media and engagement model that’s changing, not the simple goal of making money.
Maybe I’m just getting older, but things seem to have changed pretty rapidly in the CRM world this year. Improvements to customer service technologies come thick and fast, and the next ‘next big thing’ is only ever just around the corner. However, when we are out and about speaking to companies at the front line, time and again we hear that while they understand the importance of providing an integrated customer experience across multiple channels, many just do not have the systems in place to be able to do so.
Many businesses are dealing with multiple legacy systems and structures which make it difficult to deliver the kind of multichannel, integrated experience that today’s customers demand. In other words, getting the basics right is still proving to be problematic, and without the basics, achieving fully integrated customer-oriented offerings is easier said than done.
Recently, when Mitch Lieberman was hanging out at US Ciboodler central we took the opportunity to put him under the spotlight of our flip camera again. Ever the star, Mitch talks contact center heaven, contact center hell, and how organizations can gain some divine inspiration to potentially shift from one to the other:
The buzz around Social CRM and the related types of media has got me thinking about good old call centers again – in the vein that sometimes a disruptive technology can shed new light on an old one. So, specifically I’ve been considering that while Social Media Monitoring tools helps you tune out the noise, are you listening to the silence in your call center? How much of your talk time is actually spent talking to customers?
Social Media Analytics is all about measuring the conversations out there; frequency, volume, sentiment, media, network of participants etc etc. There are many factors you can measure, and the most difficult part is probably tuning into the right signal and cutting out the noise. But what about the opposite, what about silence?
Here at Sword Ciboodle we are very proud of our all-star team, and we’re not ashamed to say that we host some of the cleverest, craziest, success stories out there… With new and existing client projects continuing to flood in, we are on the look out for more madly brilliant future ciboodlers to join our merry crew!
So rather than sit here and tell you how awesome we are, we got some of our top talent to tell it to you straight what a career in ciboodle would hold for you:
To view all our videos, visit our youtube channel by clicking here
Have we tickled your fancy yet? If so, check out out latest vacancies here, and then send your resume and covering letter us here. We’re looking forward to hearing from you!
User Interface (UI) design is really important stuff, every software professional knows this. No matter how performant and clever your application, if the screens stink people will hate it, and sadly this seems the norm rather than the exception. Why is this and how do those of us in the industry stop our peers turning out crud? How must our paradigms change as GenY become the predominant buyers and users of business applications?
There’s a huge range of different styles of UI, from the very simple (web things like Google Search) to the very rich (games like Call of Duty, Halo etc etc). There are a few obvious reasons for this, purpose being the most obvious. Searching the web should be mainly quickly and simple, fully immersing yourself in a make believe world calls for an interface that is as close to real life experience as possible.
Self-service is increasingly being recognized as a critical path of the customer experience, prompting some self styled business gurus to quip that in fact, “the best service is no service.”
While many of us prefer the hand-holding that only human to human interaction can facilitate, the data suggests that a majority of us prefer to be the masters of our own destiny; the captains of our own ships; the makers of our own fate. After all, if social psychologists are to be believed then those with a higher internal locus of control make far happier individuals. But enough with the pop-psychology 101.