Only Empowered Employees Can Serve An Empowered Customer

Presenter: Josh Bernoff, Forrester

In his new book, Empowered: Transformed by Social Technologies, he talks about the importance of enabling your HEROs, because only an empowered worker can serve and empowered customer – can’t run company top down anymore.  HERO stands for Highly empowered and resourceful operative.

The sales funnel has been extended, and it no longer ends with customers.  Here’s the new flow – Eyeballs -> Awarness -> consideration ->preference purchase -> Customers -> Supported ->Empowered -> Delighted -> Fan -> Broadcaster – the message then goes to others and starts over again.

Social participation has grown, which only highlights the importance and impact of this new model:

Year	Creators	Conversationalists	Critics	Collectors	Joiners	Spectators	Inactives
2007	18%		25%	12%	25%	48%	44%
2010	23%	31%	33%	19%	59%	68%	19%

Bernoff believes there are four technologies empowering consumers: Smart mobile devices, Social technology, Pervasive video, and Cloud computing services.

How frequently do people tell others about products and services?  They looked at various social media and counted how often people told others about a product or service they were using.  They found 500 billion impressions, and during the same time period, total advertising impressions were 2 Trillion.  That means social media had 1/4 of the total number of impressions about products and services.  Which impressions do you think had more of an impact – referrals from friends and others on social media or advertising messages?

We need to start to treat our customers as a channel – they are another group which share our message.  The process for accomplishing this is – IDEA: Identify your mass influencers, Delivering groundswell customer service, Empowering with Mobile Information, and Amplifying fan activity.  Identifying the influencers is important because a small percentage of people control 80% of the influence online.  Delivering groundswell customer service requires reaching out and engaging in social media channels, such as Best Buy’s Twelpforce.  This requires empowered employees who can directly respond to customers. Empower people with mobile information, as the use of immediate information is most important.  Amplifying fan activity means enabling your fans to share their messages with others.  He used an example of a highly regulated health industry providing a way for customers to share their own testimonials on their site.

How do you run your organization to make this work? 3 groups that have to work together:

1. HEROs – know customer needs, use tech to serve customers, operate safely
2. Managers – Make innovation a priority, support Heros, work with IT to manage risk
3. IT dept  – Support Heros with technology, scale up solutions, provide tools to manage risk

You must embrace these new technologies, because HEROs will find a way around your controls.  A recent study showed that despite blocking technologies employees said this, they:

– use smartphone for work – 8%
– Download and use apps on work comp – 12%
– use tools to find access to blocked sites while at work – 27%

Resistance is futile, spend your time empowering your employees.  This requires encouraging experimentation, committing to collaboration systems, and using tools to share best practices across the company.