Capping IT Off | Capgemini | Consulting, Technology, Outsourcing

"Customer to Customer" and the legend of Kachiwachi

Often I ask clients to describe their multi-channel capabilities. Most start by focussing on the channels that they own and control like their contact centre, their web site, their field sales force. CRM taught us to think that way. But customer's don't necessarily abide by those rules. For many customers, peer to peer is often the first channel they use to interact with an organisation and it is certainly the channel that they trust the most. We all use the customer-to-customer channel to ask what our friends think, recommend a local supplier or fix a problem with a product (see my post on outsource your marketing, sales and service to your customers).

Recently I attended the Lithium launch event in London and I was introduced to Kachiwachi. Kachiwachi is not a buzzword or a new fangled management practice from Japan. Kachiwachi is an individual and a customer of Logitech who interacts on Logitech's customer support forum. In the last few years Kachiwachi has posted around 40,000 comments on Logitech's customer support forum and has earned the status of "Logi Legend". Since June 2006, when he joined the forum he has posted an average of around 900 comments per month, or 45 per working day. If Kachiwachi worked for Logitech he would probably be as productive as a part time customer support agent!

If each customer problem takes an average of 2 posts to fix, then by my reckoning KachiWachi has helped around 20,000 logitech customers fix problems with their webcams, speakers, mice etc. I'd guess that Logitech might have expected to pay around $3-5 per contact if they had fixed those problems themselves, so, in effect Kachiwachi has single-handedly saved Logitech between $60-100k over the last few years (minus of course a share of their customer support forum build and run costs).

In addition, through his advice, Kachwach has most likely influenced the Loyalty of many of the Logitech customers that he has helped. We know from an abundance of research that customers who have a problem that is fixed to their satisfaction and more loyal in the long term than customers who never complain. Kachiwachi has also almost certainly driven several successful cross and up-sells on Logitech's behalf. I'm pretty sure that people trust his advice more than they do a corporate press release or product sales pitch.

It doesn't take many active contributors like Kachiwachi to build a successful customer-to-customer channel. The challenge is finding out what contributors perceive as important to engage their services. For some it's personal brand and status, others are product enthusiasts (like Apple or Harley Davison fanatics), others may want material rewards. If you can find out what customers and your contributors want to get out of their communities and forums, then you stand a chance of finding a Kachiwachi and building a vibrant community. For the moment though, let me add my Kudos to the 484 votes Kachiwachi has currently received!

Disclaimer and disclosure - I've never worked with either Logitech or Kachiwachi so the cost savings I reference are purely hypothetical. If either would like to be interviewed for a follow up piece though please feel free to get in contact!

Laurence Buchanan leads CRM within Capgemini's Technology Services business in the UK. Follow him on Twitter or connect on Linkedin. This post was first published on www.thecustomerevolution.com

Weekly digest of week 10 2010

This week it’s about the changing face of social networks, how SeaWorld used social media to react quickly to a major crisis and do you wonder what happens to you website when you die?

Is Social CRM The Key To Innovation? We all want our businesses to grow and most of us can agree that growth comes through innovation. To innovate, a company must understand the needs of their customers
SeaWorld uses social media to react quickly to a major crisis The recent killer whale attack at SeaWorld could have been the end of the theme park. It was that bad.
Changing Face of Social Networks Five years is a lifetime for the average teenager’s habits. In 2005, MSN was top dog in the social-networking scene; two years later it was MySpace (owned by News Corp., publisher of this service), which was then quickly superseded by Facebook.
Flash Player: CPU Hog or Hot Tamale? It Depends. In part, Steve Jobs stated that the iPad didn't support Flash because it was a "CPU Hog," so Apple used a technology called HTML5 instead
What Happens to Your Website If You Die? You may not think that your website, your blog, your freelance business, is something you need to think about in your last will and testament, but it is. It’s an asset you own, and it needs to be sold, dissolved, or left to someone you trust to continue running it.

Light reading:

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Nielsen, Rogers and the lack of contribution

If you are implementing anything that is related to collaboration most of you will know and have used the rule for participation inequality or the 90-9-1 rule. This rule shows that in an average group of people 90% are lurkers, 9% contributes from time to time and 1% of the group members participate a lot and account for most contributions.

On the other hand there is the theory of the Diffusion of Innovations of Rogers, which shows us of how, why, and at what rate new ideas and technology spread through cultures. He defines adopter categories of the members in a group, the categories are: innovators (2.5% of the group), early adopters (13.5%), early majority (34%), late majority (34%) and laggards (16%).

If you combine to these two rules, you’ll notice why it is important to start with a group that is big enough:

Just the participation inequality rule

When you start with a group of 100 people, 1 will actively contribute (sometimes up to 90% of the content), 9 will contribute from time to time, and 90 will read. As you notice, 1 person creating 90% of the content is not that exciting, and only 10 people that contribute in total is also not that many. They might get out of topics for conversation.

Combining the participating inequality rule and the adoption categories

If you start with a group of 100 people, you know that 16% will be laggards (they are likely not to participate), leaving you with 84 people who might contribute to the collaboration platform. Taking into account the participation inequality rule, you will end up with maybe one person who will actively contribute, about 8 people will contribute from time to time and 75 people who will read the content.

Some even say that not only the 16% laggards aren’t participating but also about 50% of the late majority, which means that about 30% of the group will not be participating. Making the numbers to about 1 (if you are lucky) to contribute actively, 7 contributing from time to time and 62 people who will read the content.

Don’t despair

The group you’ll select will be not a standard group that will be a representation of your enterprise. Most often that group does not consist of any laggards and, but mostly of enthousiastic people who will help you driving adoption in later phases. However, always keep in mind that not everybody will contribute on your new platform, so be aware your group who will be using this platform is big enough.

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Enterprise2.0 is like a Business Function

Newer ways of working and emerging technologies were changing the way enterprises functioned, this lead to the existence of Enterprise2.0. The idea behind using 2.0 was to communicate that we are heading towards a next-gen enterprise. We all know the importance the technology plays in this transformation into the new enterprise of tomorrow. However many industry thought-leaders and experienced talents have expressed that most of us are over-involved in the technology aspect of it and tend to forget the real basics.

If you recall my post Enterprise2.0 is the new face of Knowledge Management from last year, then there was a reason for it. Both Enterprise2.0 and KM have come to existence for transforming an enterprise to be leaner and more agile helping them achieve their end objective. Both have the same set of advantages, challenges and myths. For me these two are like business functions – that are interrelated with most if not all, other functions within an enterprise. The name is not important – you call it Knowledge Management or Enterprise2.0 – but what and how it helps the organization in achieving its objectives is what matters.

We need to understand that Knowledge Management also helps the business to drive its mission towards success just as other established functions like HR, Sales, Marketing & Communication, and Finance etc. For example the way HR helps an enterprise to hire the right talent for each of the other functions, KM helps the entire enterprise to provide the right information at the right time to the right person in the most swift & efficient means. There are many tools/technology suites that support the HR function to do their job better, but that in no ways indicate that people in that function side-line thoughts of improving aspects like Recruitment, Employee Relations, Employee benefits and compensation, Career development, Motivation, or even Counseling. A tool could help facilitate some or all of the above aspects but cannot take away the prime focus of the thought of improving itself. Similarly, when we talk about Knowledge Management/Enterprise2.0, we need to think beyond the tool and look at aspects like communication, collaboration, behavior, awareness, evangelism, human psychology, society, enterprise culture, and demography to name a few. The focus should be on how we can go about managing these facets and which tool(s) can further facilitate in doing so.

So Enterprise2.0 is like a business function however the difference in this case is the factors that play a role in it are slightly subtle, intangible, human, and social thus making it more difficult to understand its application or realize their benefits. Some of the web2.0 (especially social) tools certainly go a long way when it comes to facilitating the cause when compared to some of the existing or traditional tools. However, enterprises are (and will) find it difficult to formulate an adoption strategy for these tools since they touch upon the factors that I have listed above. Implementing an ERP system is probably a simpler task since the part that is really crucial is setting the right business processes and workflows – input, process, output; but going about with an enterprise-wide 2.0 social collaboration or KM system it may not be the same. Another difference between the usual business functions and KM is the role that each employee plays in completing the scope. Each person is an equal part of the large pie of the enterprise2.0 function, not just as a consumer but as a contributor, connector and catalyst – which makes the whole system extremely complex as it’s no more just about fixed processes. It’s about a free-flow, dynamic situation where people perform an action and processes get created on-the-fly and workflows are not set but are formed in an unstructured route solely by the people involved in it. And these things are dependent on the various aspects we discussed above.

There was a reason why I compared the HR function with that to KM. HR is one of the functions that has made its mark in today’s businesses and more importantly because they deal with humans too! In fact there are a lot of areas in which HR & KM complement each other. In fact one can correlate KM to various other functions as well, such as Innovation/R&D, Sales and few others, but maybe it is something I will try to cover in a follow-up post.

So why am I saying all of this? Is Enterprise2.0 / KM really a business function? It all stems from the fact that, in today’s technology-heavy world, we really need to be reminded that in the end we all still deal with humans in whichever context / business. And the next-gen enterprise will be able to be successful if it can really comprehend this human element and the social constructs that play a crucial role in our businesses. HR as a concept probably started back in 1970/80’s and as we know has evolved a long way to support the organizational objectives. Enterprise2.0 is a similar function that is taking shape; evolving rapidly and will provide benefits that traditional KM had set out to, but it will do it in a fresh avatar and with innovative means.

So if your business is on a journey to 2.0 and want to leverage all the 2.0 tools that companies are trying to sell, be prepared to invest time, effort and money (& a little management support too) in planning, formulating a strategy and executing all things prior and post-deployment, before you even start thinking about any tool.In fact, these thoughts could assist you in your tool selection too; since you’ll know that “one size fits all” is a myth. As I end this post (maybe cliché but) remember KM / Enterprise2.0 is NOT about the tool but about a concept, a philosophy, a set of practices, and more like a business function!

Nikhil Nulkar is a knowledge management consultant within Capgemini and is passionate about web2.0, specifically in enterprise2.0 & social media. Want to know what he is up to? Follow him on Twitter

Who is the next Martha Lane-Fox?

Today is International Women's Day and to celebrate this last week the Capgemini's Women's Business Network held a special event where the guest speaker was Martha Lane-Fox. Martha talked about her work building lastminute.com, her involvement with Lucky Voice and her current work as Champion for Digital Inclusion. Sitting listening to her talk on how she helped to create one of the most successful online businesses inspired me to wonder why aren't there more women talking about their roles working with technology regardless of industry.

There are champions I would like to point out: Rebecca Thomson journalist for Computer Weekly who does a great job of advocating and pushing the women in IT issue, Jemima Kiss technology journalist for the Guardian, Casey Coleman, Chief Information Officer for US Government department: General Services Administration to our very own Una Du Noyer, Liz Benison as well Christine Hodgson, Capgemini CEO for Technology Services Northwest Europe - but it's not just about women in high profile positions.

It’s about women in all roles. I work in the marketing department and if I didn’t understand technology or use technology to do my job, then I wouldn’t be able to help market what Capgemini does, in fact this isn't just true for me it's true all the women who use technology whether they work in the Sales, HR, Finance, Legal, Marketing departments who wouldn't be able to do their jobs - these are the current and future champions.

Just think, you could be working with, married to, living with or teaching the next Martha Lane-Fox.

Rena Patel is a Marketing and Communications Executive for Capgemini UK. You can follow and connect with her on Twitter.

Weekly digest of week 9 2010

This week an explaination about what the difference is between ubiquitous computing and augmented reality, boomers slowly moving to the mobile web, should IT run like a business or a nonprofit and the next generation user interface: skinput.

Socializing with the Fortune 500 A longitudinal study from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research shows steady uptake of social media marketing activities by Fortune 500 companies, with Twitter a clear winner.
5 Reasons Why Chatroulette Is Addictive, and Worth a Try Everyone from the mainstream media to celebrities is obsessing over Chatroulette, the website that randomly connects users through one-on-one videochat with strangers around the world. Why is it so addictive?
Feature checklist dysfunction The tech press loves checklist comparisons. Let’s evaluate the iPhone to see whether it’s a good product:
Defining ubiquitous computing vs. augmented reality What’s the difference between Ubiquitous Computing (“ubicomp”) and Augmented Reality (“AR”)?
Boomers Slowly Warm to Mobile Web Baby boomers are on the verge of adopting smartphones and the mobile Internet, and in the vanguard of this movement are younger boomers.

Light reading:

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

The Music Industry Is Alive And Well, Thank You Very much.

The much heralded demise of the music industry is simply fiction and a gross exaggeration at best. I say this with confidence, based on a glimpse of the future of the industry, courtesy of the recent Music 4.5 Conference in London.

This event provided a forum for various Music Start-ups, Investors, Entrepreneurs and key Music Industry players (including the much-dreaded young consumers), to share and evaluate many potential solutions to the challenges faced by the music industry in the digital age. So far so good, but what makes this any different from the plague of other similar industry events out there you might ask? Well, without going into too much detail, especially as several blogs and tweets have already done a great job of that, below are some reasons for my unabashed optimism for music:

The Numbers Don’t Lie - According to PRS For Music’s Chris Carey, music is still worth some £3.7 Billion to the UK economy with, wait for it, Recorded Music and Live Performances accounting for some £1.3 Billion and £1.4 Billion respectively

Innovation’s Everywhere – If indeed it’s true that innovation is the offspring of necessity, then given the number of innovative offerings on parade at this event, she (i.e. necessity) and her rampant partner must surely breed like rabbits. A few of the start-ups that pitched at this event can be found at MusicAlly's live-blog of the session, but the overall impression is that such innovative music solutions can be found pretty much anywhere you care to look. This can only bode well for the industry

Don’t Blame The Youth - It is just plain lazy to blame the woes of the entire industry on young people, and shame on those that automatically think the youth are pirates by default. If anything, young people and other consumer segments should be better engaged in the search for ways out of the digital quagmire facing the entire content industry. This event did just that by including a panel of teenagers from the Digital Youth Project to provide direct feedback on the pitches of four very brave Start-ups. See more coverage by Dan Martin at BusinessZone.

In conclusion, music has always been a technology based industry, therefore the future, and even the route out of the current perception of an industry in demise, lies with technology innovation and some cultural evolution, period. The music industry is far from dead, if anything it is just about to get even more interesting, but the main stumbling block remains the instinctive fear of technology induced obsolescence by the recording industry combined with the glaring inadequacy of a non-global copyright system. So that's it then, all we need do is fix the divide between technology and copyright? No sweat, can someone please pass me the screwdriver? All joking aside, that will be no easy task, but that’s a topic for another focused conference. As far as I'm concerned, the future is assured; it's just the bleeding present that we need to get right!

What thing is this twitter !

During a recent backpacking trip in Indian hinterland, one of the evenings as I watched TV placed in corner of tea shop in a small town, news of an acrimonious war of words between a famous Indian movie star and a political party was playing on. News channel was reporting what the star had to say on controversy, not through interview given to news agency or channel but through tweets on his twitter account. As the saga was unfolding on twitter the new channel was merely picking it up and broadcasting. Someone seated nearby exclaimed "Ye twitter kya cheej hai (what thing is this twitter)" . And this could have summarized what many people in India have wondered for past few months. Twitter has been in constant news. If it is not a political leader who is fast building a reputation of getting into trouble in parliament because of his tweets ,then it is news about what some Hindi movie star has posted on his/her twitter account. In a way it is ironical that mainstream media that had labeled twitter as flippant when it was gaining traction with geeky crowd and early adopters, is now doing more for twitter's promotion.

Like elsewhere in world, twitter is rapidly growing in India in terms of number of users. Inflection point occurred after tragic Mumbai terror attack when traditional news media discovered how powerful and fast Twitter was in spreading information. For much of last year twitter's growth has been on upswing thanks to quick adoption by news channels and traditional media. There is hardly any news channel now which has not integrated twitter as a feedback and live user commenting tool. But with recent events involving popular movie stars which have brought twitter itself to news headlines and front pages of newspapers, Twitter's growth in India will perhaps go on a different trajectory. Hindi Cinema also sometime referred to as Bollywood is one of two major obsessions in India, other being wildly popular game of Cricket. And with movie stars, coming to Twitter in drove, a different segment of users is taking up to twitter. It is not then perhaps surprising that a news channel recently gave away Indian twitterer of year award to a movie producer and director who it claimed has got large chunk of movie folks and film fraternity onto twitter. Last year, Twitter itself hosted Mallika Sherawat, a Hindi film actress in its office and stated that she was instrumental in membership in India to skyrocket. It is easy to understand why stars and celebrities are adopting twitter as it helps them promote their movies, directly connect to fans and do PR without risk of being misquoted. And of course this is threatening existence of celebrity gossip magazines and paparazzi and is bringing hordes of fans to twitter if just out of curiosity.

It is worth to note that last year in October, Twitter had struck a deal with one of major Indian telecom companies , allowing its users to tweet through SMS on normal rates. It is significant because India has huge penetration of mobile phone users with almost 600 million mobile users as compared to just 50 million internet users. With mobile users projected to grow to 1200 million by 2015, India stands as a lucrative and expanding market for mobile twitter. Twitter CEO ,Evan Williams himself says that even though lots of twitter growth has come through web, their visions has been "to spread Twitter to the weakest connection in the world", which in this part of world happens to be a no frill mobile phone. In a recent TV interview, transcripts of which can be found here, Evans also hints at possible ways of making money through twitter ads as lots of information shared is commercial in nature. He also notes how companies are using twitter to connect to their customers and possibility of making money out of analytics data which companies will be interested in buying. So, as twitter chalks out plans of making money out of its platform, many new users will keep flocking to twitter if only to check ….what thing is this twitter. And as we know, that warrants a long answer.

A KPI too far

My colleague Rick Mans recently wrote that information overload was more a case of information gluttony ,a point of view I whole heartedly share. A quick review of your bookmarks will probably expose a list of useful sites that you've not visited in years.

The problem manifests itself in other ways, one of which is my pet hate of KPI overload.

I've worked with many clients who want to work on the premise of "measure as much as possible as it will reveal meaningful insight". However this often results in a scatter gun approach based on exploiting available information and seldom delivers any benefit. I try to convince clients of three fundementals when it comes to adding measures to their organisation:

A measure or KPI should influence behaviour - if it doesn't then it offers little value, and if it does, think through the likely outcomes and non-intuitive behaviours that might result. The then UK Prime Minister Tony Blair was caught out when his measure on how long people needed to wait to see their doctor had resulted in some doctors refusing to allow patients to book appointments in the future even though at times this was appropriate (e.g. to review test results) which resulted in a great deal of frustration with patients who could not plan ahead. There are numerous other examples and I'd welcome others to share their experiences.

The second fundemental is that measures should build to something and pull an organisation in the same direction. While it appears to be stating the obvious, the number of clients that come up with measures that appear sensible but don't actually support their corporate goals doesn't seem to be getting any smaller. I've seen a measure that rewarded the number complaints successfully addressed with no corresponding measure to reduce the actual number of complaints. A framework of measures, allocated appropriately throughout an organisation, and hopefuly not in conflict with each other is required. In essence, see your measures in the context of a portfolio of KPIs.

The third and possibly the hardest point to implement is that when deciding on the measures you need you may run into issues with your organisational structure or operating model. A major distribution company I worked with recently had a desire to demonstrate the performance they provided their large global accounts across a range of measures. On the ground however, each country was measured on its local P&L and these large customers often resulted in a major strain on their resources with little and in some cases negative margain. Consequently the countries often discouraged support of the global accounts and were undermining these global accounts.

While nobody can imagine working in a world without being measured, make sure those measures count and drive the right behaviour and not cause internal conflict or an inappropriate deteriation of customer service. They might then have a chance or working.

Why Facebook and not SharePoint 2010 could become your Intranet for 2010

With the arrival of SharePoint 2010 lots of new and interesting features arrive within most corporate firewalls. Old SharePoint licenses are renewed, new budgets are approved and new features are implemented. However is recreating your new Intranet with new features the best you can do? Should you be renewing your SharePoint license for new features in your Intranet?

Give it some thought, especially since you might already be considering to stop all developments for your Intranet. Every new feature seems to be challenged if it was worth the time, the money and the effort to thrive adoption. Why not use Facebook as your Intranet? It is likely that your colleagues are spending more time on Facebook than on your Intranet already and are having a better experience on Facebook than they ever did on the current Intranet.

Facebook is an immense Juggernaut with more than 400 million users (one out of every 4 people with access to an Internet connection has an account), billions of minutes are spend daily on Facebook and what is even better: your colleagues already adopted it, and even your business partners already have a presence on Facebook. So why create something new, while you can build your Intranet on an existing platform that is fully adopted by your colleagues? Even better: you don’t have to pay for development nor for hosting, since Facebook is taking care of that. And if you are afraid to make the move towards Facebook as an Intranet, keep in mind that Serena Software already did it a long time ago, with the introduction of Facebook Fridays

So why wait? Create that Facebook group for your company and let your colleagues join. The interface is familiar, almost everybody has got his profile filled in fully and people are already visiting Facebook on a regular basis (unless you are blocking Internet access).

However keep in mind that Facebook is a public platform, and therefore it might not be the best for sharing confidential information, nor there is an app for the integration of your SAP HR system. If that holds you back to go full fledge into Facebook, just use your Facebook group as a portal to get your colleagues to the news on the Intranet (which could be based on SharePoint 2010).

Save money, thrive adoption. Not every successful solution has to start inside your firewall or should be custom build. Use the tools your colleagues already know, use the tools that they already selected as the tools they prefer to use.

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

About the authors

"Customer to Customer" and the legend of Kachiwachi

Weekly digest of week 10 2010

Nielsen, Rogers and the lack of contribution

Just the participation inequality rule

Combining the participating inequality rule and the adoption categories

Don’t despair

Enterprise2.0 is like a Business Function

Who is the next Martha Lane-Fox?

Weekly digest of week 9 2010

The Music Industry Is Alive And Well, Thank You Very much.

What thing is this twitter !

A KPI too far

Why Facebook and not SharePoint 2010 could become your Intranet for 2010

Subscribe

Recent Posts

Navigate

Search the blog