Developing a product or service the customer wants is something I see very much linked to caring for the customer after purchase. So in this chapter we’re going to look at using your social media connections to develop new products and to work on customer service. You can ‘crowdsource’ what they want, in other words literally source the information you need from the crowd of people following you.

Customers also ask sensible questions, thank goodness. They ask things that improve stuff. And thanks to social networking they can do it en masse so you know it’s not just a rogue eccentric who wants, say, lavender-flavoured toothpaste (one of the companies quoted in this book actually sells that, and I’ll send a £10 Amazon voucher to whoever emails me and tells me which one it is first – seriously, ten quid, that’s probably almost £1 more than you paid for this book in the first place).

So in this chapter you’ll walk through:

• How to engage with customers in the first place so that you find out what they really want
• How you can start to develop products through asking many prospects, really inexpensively
• Finding good ideas compared to the ideas which will waste your time
• Sustaining a corporate voice throughout your communications and finding what the customers will respond to
• Understanding that every piece of communication is now part of your customer service
• Getting it right at the recruitment stage.

Brave New Products – a Word About Research and Development

Huge amounts of money go into research and development of new product offerings and the refinements of existing ones. Very few products emerge from businesses on the strength of ‘seat of the pants’ logic; the market is researched first to find out if there’s a gap, then if there’s a willing audience. Packaging, price, size – everything that requires investment into the final look and feel of an offering will ultimately be up to the market research. There are a number of ways of handling this in the traditional business world and they are still valid. The market researcher either standing in the street with a clipboard or hitting the phones and talking to the prospective customer. The focus group, in which a number of people are gathered together and discuss what they’d really like from the product. Both options can be very scientific when done properly. They should not be discounted just because the social option is now available.

Social media can, however, save a lot of expenditure on this area.

‘Ice Cream, You Scream’

One example of a company that changed its offerings as a direct result of social media was QVC UK. The company is well known for its shopping channels on television internationally but on this occasion it was selling through its website and added customer ratings and reviews, to engage customers but also to get some informal feedback on the products people were buying.

Agency BazaarVoice set up the interaction and quickly gained more than 300,000 reviews of products over the network. The people were definitely interested in taking part.

An unexpected bonus was the emergence of the social media as a sort of early warning system. There was feedback on household appliances which enabled the manufacturer to take action and rectify it, and a handful of feedback on a particular perfume was enough to persuade the vendor – rightly – that it was a dud batch.

More helpfully, one popular ice cream maker had no returns at all and no customer complaints, so QVC thought it was doing well. It continued to feature it both online and on television. Immediately the reviews started, however, the company realized it had a problem. Not only was it not doing the job but it was damaging the brand; customers reported in reviews that they were surprised QVC stocked anything so poor, but for the money they’d paid they didn’t want to kick up a fuss, they were simply binning them – while the presenters were extolling their virtues as the latest must-have bargain.

Through social media feedback QVC found it needed to discontinue the sale of the item and focus on genuinely well-performing goods that would enhance its own brand value.

The Tone Before Social

Innocent Drinks, a UK-based smoothies company, has been a social company for some time now. It has a particular personality which reflects in everything from the Twitter feed to the website and even the product packaging. It’s worth taking a little while to elaborate on the sort of corporate atmosphere that exists in the business. A few years ago I was editing an annual book on Britain’s Top Employers. I visited Innocent during my research. The first time I went, there was a notice above the door that said ‘Visitors’ – and one above the window that said ‘Burglars.’ The meeting room in which my interview took place was made – flooring, furniture, everything – out of recycled tyres.

On my second visit, just over a year later, the signs and tyres had vanished, but they had astroturfed the reception area following a vote on what sort of floor covering to go and get. Then to celebrate this they astroturfed the outside of a couple of their delivery vans.

I haven’t visited since. Frankly I’d be nervous of what I might find next. Reactions are of course divided; either you’ll love the idea and think ‘when can I start?’ or you’ll really, really hate the corporate culture and the idea of working in such a place just won’t appeal.

Entering a Conversation

This gives you the backdrop to a company that started life before any of this social media stuff began as a bit of an oddball. As a business, it believes it has been ‘social’ for longer than the technology that we know as ‘social media’ or ‘social networking’ has actually existed. Quite unusually the organization invites people to phone up, any time, just for a chat sometimes. Joe McEwan is currently head of engagement for the company and he believes this is what made the business a natural candidate for the more modern social engagement. ‘We want to show people that if they want to chat, then we’re here to listen about anything,’ he says. ‘You don’t have to have a product fault to get in touch with us because we’re open and friendly enough to just chat.’

Odd though it might sound to someone who wasn’t expecting customers to have a conversation with someone who was paid to sit and chat, the idea was a success. Innocent was doing this before anyone was talking about having ‘conversations’ with their customers and a lot of people will have seen the idea as outright lunacy. But in making this work, there’s an argument that says Innocent anticipated what would later become the entire social media concept from the commercial point of view. It shared so much in common with it:

• Commercially irrelevant conversations as part of the business
• Impossibility of tracking the exact commercial impact
• Deliberate informality throughout the company including the packaging.

It remains pretty much impossible to say why this sort of activity should have a positive impact on a business but by now it’s pretty certain that it does. Others have copied, and McEwan welcomes this. ‘I’d like to think we talk better nonsense than most,’ he adds. The company refers to the content as ‘conversation currency’ – just chat about stuff people find interesting.

Having all but fallen into social media before social media were really established, Innocent found quite quickly that it was a natural move to make the communications electronic when the market started to move that way. It was one of the earlier practitioners but as with a number of its business practices it broke a few of the rules. Specifically, as McEwan confirms, there isn’t a deliberate business plan or strategy behind the idea, it’s just an extension of something the company has always done. That said, it does offer benefits from the customer care point of view and indeed from product development.

Payback Time: the Research

So if there’s no actual strategy how does any of this stuff work? On the customer service front it’s important to put this into the context of the rest of the operation. Emails, phone calls, and letters are logged and tracked through a system the company has been using for a while and social media now feeds into that. ‘We have a great little system that we call Bertha that enables us to track and specify to quite a fine level of detail the nature of someone’s call. So we know exactly what it is that they were happy about, or what it is they were asking us about, or what it is they didn’t like about a product or something that we were doing,’ says McEwan. ‘And we’ve always monitored that feedback quite closely, and tried to learn from it, so something that Twitter and Facebook and other channels help us to do is to understand what people think about the things we’re doing across a much broader spectrum.’

The impact on all businesses is potentially huge. McEwan’s belief is that the idea of surveying a mass market, of looking into focus groups for the granular stuff and checking out the larger market research to find out what the trends are, have been severely modified if they’re not changed all together. What’s really altered is that a business can now talk directly to its customers in very large numbers.

Not that the older forms of research are dead. ‘You get different forms of contact through the different channels,’ says McEwan. It’s not right to look just at the mass market stuff, he says, nor to think ‘people are emailing on this subject so that’s the big one’ nor indeed to think ‘our Facebook page says this is very important so presumably that’s what we should be addressing.’ ‘If you glue all those together, then you get a much clearer and fairer and broader picture of what people are saying,’ he continues. ‘So we put what people are saying to us on the phone or on Twitter or on Facebook on the same kind of pedestal as we do the results of much larger survey based market research.’

This sort of mix ends up informing the business of what it needs to do for as many customers as possible, as long as they’re engaging with the company. As a business strategy it is inevitably riven with gaps because nobody can be certain a particular set of customers will want to engage, so of course you end up listening to the more voluble ones who are on the various media. This is why the more traditional forms of research, which target people who haven’t necessarily come forward as self-appointed spokespeople, remain important.

Of course none of this is free. In my previous book I spoke about planning for the actual cost of social media rather than falling for the ‘it’s free to join Twitter so it doesn’t cost anything’ flannel a lot of people push out there; it’s free only if you value your time and that of your colleagues at zero. This is an issue of which McEwan and his colleagues are well aware.

Costs

He compares an advertisement to a firework. It shoots up in the air, makes a lot of noise and light and then it’s over until someone shoots another firework up in the air. Social media, he suggests, is more akin to a bonfire. ‘Fireworks are impressive but they’re over very quickly. Social media is like a bonfire. Lots of people come together to build a fire and it lasts for a much longer time,’ he says. ‘And actually, in terms of going to see fireworks and going to a bonfire, if you go to a bonfire you tend to stay for longer. It’s a warmer, more personal experience where you get talking to more people, if you know what I mean.’

Before the metaphor collapses under its own weight it’s worth paraphrasing him a little more. A good mix of marketing absolutely needs those big pyrotechnics and displays or people will get bored with it, but you need to cater for the customers who want the more intimate, warmer experience. You need to be prepared to pay people for their time focusing on all of these components.

Product Research

And of course it can start to pay handsomely. Innocent doesn’t only make smoothies, it has diversified – slightly – into veg pots. It has seasonal as well as permanent ranges and like all commercial companies it listens to its customers’ feedback. Social engagement means that it can get this feedback more immediately than any unengaged competition. ‘To be completely blunt, we had one particular mushroom based veg pot recipe that just wasn’t performing that well,’ says McEwan. This contrasted with a piri piri based guest recipe that was doing better than anticipated. ‘Consumers were giving it great feedback on the rate and review section of our website, it was getting great feedback on Twitter, it was getting lots of positive comments on Facebook. By keeping an eye on these channels on a daily basis we could see that people loved the piri piri product,’ says McEwan. ‘We then pulled that data together, and did some comparative analysis to show that the piri piri recipe was being much better received than the mushroom recipe and this gave us our business case. So we replaced the mushroom recipe with piri piri. Simple stuff really, but stuff that other businesses often neglect.’

This is called crowd sourcing: put a message out into the crowd and ask for feedback and you’ll get more than one answer which you can start to build into some sort of overview. Crowd sourcing can apply to more than information – earlier in the book I discussed crowd funding, which is a variation on the same principle in which a group of people fund a business. You could apply it elsewhere as well,

And of course the company was in a position to act on its findings. ‘We saw something was happening, e.g. people loved the piri piri product,’ says McEwan. ‘We then pulled that data together, put some numbers behind it, put it in relation to how the previous recipe fared against it during the three month period we were examining. After that we had our business case, so we turned it into a permanent recipe and got rid of mushroom because that was just doing less well.’

This doesn’t happen overnight. If you are part of a business, you need a solid method to pull all of the data together. You need to apportion weighting to the various inputs you’re going to get, and you need the ear of management and decision makers to make the changes suggested. You might put together a diagram like this:

Those numbers could be way off beam but they illustrate how you might start apportioning the importance of different sorts of input into a company’s products. It’s a suggested start of a framework to support decisions in a business. Let’s say you sell musical instruments and sheet music in a shop and the online side has been growing. You might consider:

• Personal customers offer immediate feedback but account for only 30% of the business compared to 60% last year – so they need a lower weighting.
• Telephone feedback normally comes from people calling with an issue – this is important but it will skew any feedback so they also need a lower rating.
• Facebook is voluble but accounts for only 20% of your sales so that also gets a low rating – but higher than telephone.
• Twitter customers have almost always bought from you and are a growing number so you give them more weight.

… and so forth. You’ll need to work out your own metrics to fit your own business but it’s a way of allocating the appropriate weight to each channel from which you get feedback.

That said, if you find the personal customers are all complaining while people on Twitter are delighted with the service you might want to see whether there’s an underlying problem!

Content and Tone

What’s really distinctive about Innocent is, as I’ve hinted earlier in this chapter, the personality the company puts on display just about the whole time. There are, to be honest, a lot of people who are a little too informal and over-familiar on the social networks. The ‘what I’ve had for breakfast’ brigade have become such a cliché it’s not worth repeating; equally pernicious are the people who’ll tell you they’ve just got out of the shower (depending on who you are I may not welcome the mental image), are just about to put the dinner on, and so forth. There is a surprisingly large amount of that still around, even on some business feeds.

Innocent notes that it’s the people who offer the most amusing or interesting content who end up getting followed the most and are considered the most influential. This could mean they’re linking to some interesting stuff on the Web, or just saying things that make people laugh. ‘We got massive engagement with a Facebook post and Tweet about fish films the other day. We were having a chat here in the office, coming up with different films and changing the title of the film subtly to make a fish film. Like “The Codfather,” or “Bulletproof Monkfish.” We asked people to come up with their own and had hundreds of likes and comments from consumers. Some absolute gems like Loach Cassidy and the Sundance Squid.’ People joined in from all over the plaice (see what I did there?). ‘I think it’s good to post things that have nothing to do with what you do or for you to be promoting something else altogether because it’s a privilege that people have decided to let you into their Facebook news feed. You have to be really careful because if what you’re putting into that news feed is boring, or annoying, it only takes one click to unlike a brand,’

Recruitment is king

Getting people who are on the right wavelength is vital, of course. This is why I went into so much detail about the backdrop earlier in this chapter; one of the positive things about Innocent’s recruitment process is that if a candidate walks in and they aren’t in tune with the organization there’s a very good chance they’ll walk straight out again. ‘We’ve always recruited against our five company values. They’re all equally important but if I had to pick one that really stands out for me it’s natural. We use natural ingredients to make all natural products that are good for you, but natural is also about being yourself. It’s about being natural in the way we communicate with each other, so it’s about honesty and being genuine,’ explains McEwan. ‘Particularly in the roles where writing in the Innocent tone is part of a job. For those roles we take extra care to recruit people who are comfortable communicating naturally, and comfortable being themselves. You shouldn’t always have to change who you are to suit a business. People work better when they’re encouraged to be themselves.’ In fact part of the training, which still comes from the same man who wrote the labels in the first place, is not to try too hard. If staff make an effort to capture the Innocent tone and then redraft to get it right, the chances are it’s not going to work.

Recruitment, then, needs to take into account the tone and someone’s ability and willingness to engage. Underpinning this is a philosophy that customer service has expanded. Every engagement, every interaction with the customer is some sort of service you are offering even if it’s not labelled ‘customer service.’ An attempt to make them smile, a piece of product branding which would previously have come under the ‘marketing’ banner, you’re engaging with individuals now so there’s a lot more service happening with each online transaction.

Does It Work?

The chances are that all of this helps drive Innocent’s sales and would do the same for any business similarly getting it right. There is a proviso, and that is that you needn’t expect success in social media to be measurable exactly if you go through indirect channels like retailers.

That is, you can measure your ‘success’ in pure social media terms, You can establish how many people retweet your stuff, you can look into how many Facebook comments and ‘likes’ you get but none of this matters a very great deal when it comes to the bottom line business figures. For all the analytics available I believe there is one figure that’s going to matter to a business when it’s evaluating its social media engagement, and that figure is the profit. If it’s up after a social media engagement, and preferably a higher margin than before, then it’s a successful engagement. If it’s not, or worse, if it’s down, then the engagement has been at best a lukewarm success even if everyone’s Facebooking and Tweeting you like crazy people.

And an indirect channel adds another complication. Earlier in the book we discussed Penderyn, the distillers in Wales, and how impossible it was to say whether a customer had picked up a bottle in a supermarket because they were familiar with the brand through Facebook or for any other reason. The same will be true of Innocent and anyone else who can’t track precisely what the customer is doing and thinking at the point of purchase.

So your analytics really need one thing in them. Is the business doing any better since we started this stuff? And if not, why not?

Listening to What Works

There are – I hope – a number of learnings to take away from this chapter. First, customer research has to be king even when you know the customers are wrong. Alan Sugar rescuing sales by putting a spurious fan into his computers is an amusing story but also a mark of a wise businessperson who understood that addressing the surface concern would be easier and less expensive than marketing the fact that the computers weren’t overheating in the first place.

It’s also more important than ever to understand that your customer perception needs to be underpinned by an excellent service or product or else you might as well shut the business and go home. Innocent has done extremely well through a number of means. First it fell into the social business because it was already a social company. Nobody else, literally nobody (unless a reader knows better) had set up a for-profit business and put in a phone line for people who just fancied a natter. If social media hadn’t become so big we’d still be writing them off as a bunch of hippie weirdos (oh come on, we were all thinking it). But it anticipated something much bigger and was well equipped to deal with it when it arrived.

And it was willing to look at what worked in the new media rather than to be too prescriptive. Getting in early allowed it time to let the new stuff breathe for a while. Crucially the company understood that this was a new part of the mix and a great way of talking to customers but that it wasn’t a substitute for the market researcher approaching non-customers in the street and getting their views as well, or asking people something specific in the concentrated atmosphere of a focus group.

It found that listening enabled it to respond when particular products were going well and to withdraw them when they weren’t. It saved money on this sort of research and by detecting the trend early on it cut the amount of redundant inventory it could have had and pushed resources into more profitable areas. It also found that people responded well to a consistent voice rather than having the dad-dancing-at-a-wedding style engagements some corporate businesses have adopted when facing the social media for the first time. And it understood that in order for any of this to work, the business had to be working in the first place and this goes back as far as the recruitment process.