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The Persistence of Relationships

by Paula Thornton

November 4, 2009 at 12:48 am · Filed under Social Media

This is dedicated to @martymorrow who bothered to ask.

The 2010 lists have started early. David Armano recently wrote “Six Social Media Trends for 2010“. I respect David’s contributions to the industry so I was quick to read and respond to his piece, noting first his closing question:

Thanks for filtering out some key items to focus on.

1. “Where do you see social media going next?” Social media doesn’t ‘go’ anywhere. Indeed, as others have said, it will simply become more ubiquitous. The comeback to requests for ROI on social media should be a request to see the ROI for the phone system, so you can use it as a guide for your response. It’s a channel.

2. Business is social. It turns out that the intimacy of the mom&pop era was all of the innuendos of the ‘persistence’ of relationships (the memory of the relationship transactions). Until the content that streams through social media is persisted, the intimacy will still be lacking.

3. Seems that the most common, high value use of social media mechanisms is to bypass bad operating designs (service models). At some point one will have to resolve to the other to relieve the schizophrenia (inconsistent identity).

So what do I mean in the second item by the “‘persistence’ of relationships”? To clarify, my use of the term “persistence” equals the “the continuance of an effect after its cause is removed”. A related term is “memory”. Many of the best recollections of great customer exchanges include some aspect of being remembered. Don Peppers used to give examples of hotels that remembered what your room service preferences were. These are the kinds of things that are part of ‘having’ a relationship. But a hotel doesn’t have a memory, and an international hotel brand has to know you wherever you go. The only way an individual can have a persistent relationship with a company is for there to be a persistent memory, somewhere.

A common comparison is often made to the mom & pop business, suggesting that business is more personal when you do business directly with the owner. It’s a simple matter of memory. Even salespeople will tell you how important remembering personal details are for impressing customers/clients.

While social media introduces a new channel by which to interact with customers, as I pointed out in #3, these new mechanisms are often used as the ambulance network — helping injured customers, one at a time, just like mom & pop. Only mom & pop would remember who was injured and why. They may have even changed the way they did business to improve. But the distance between the knowledge and the corresponding action was minimal. Not so in modern enterprises. Building connections between the two requires technology.

As enterprises historically embraced information technology, they started first with a focus on the capture of transactions — the things that were directly tied to the flow of money that kept the business alive. In these technical systems, people were appendages to the transactions. This was most classically seen in the telecommunications industry. As a phone customer you weren’t a name or even an address, you were a phone number (BTN = Billing Telephone Number, does it get any more transactive than that?).

MCI brought new pricing pressure to the telecommunications industry by competing against AT&T. In the early 90’s the pressure was increased by a marketing campaign that capitalized on…human relationships: Friends & Family. The discounts provided by the relationships relied on data — making sure that the billing system knew which phone numbers you’d specified to get discounts on. Setting up and changing these numbers was all managed by one-on-one relationships — talking to a call center representative.

Everything was fine if nothing changed. But life happens. If you moved, your phone number would change and so did your history…it was gone, you started over.

Relationships are expensive to maintain. We can all relate to what we invest in personal relationships. The types of relationships we have or want to have with a business varies based on a variety of factors. Oddly, most of what we really want is to be able to get through a business transaction or receive the services we believe we contracted for with minimal inconvenience. And most of the problems businesses face is when this basic need is not met.

Companies engage in social media to increase the intimacy of their conversations. We have to ask ourselves, is it the channel that makes the difference or the rules that are applied via the channel? Why can’t the same thing happen via the existing channels? At what point does the pattern of exchanges across all channels come together to serve as evidence for change in the business?

Would the delight of getting help via social media channels be as meaningful if as a customer you didn’t have any problems to be resolved?

Shouldn’t the real question for 2010 be more focused on how businesses changed/improved as a result of all of their channels of interaction, social media being just one of them?

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martymorrowNovember 4th, 2009 at 10:38 am

thank you for your thorough response.

Larry IronsNovember 4th, 2009 at 3:46 pm

Nice definition of “persistence” as the “the continuance of an effect after its cause is removed”. I’d suggest that brand communities that survive the brand that initially caused them to form provide an example of persistence that offers ONE answer to your question, “Would the delight of getting help via social media channels be as meaningful if as a customer you didn’t have any problems to be resolved?”

The research on the 3Com Audrey and Apple Newton brand communities I wrote about in a recent post provide good examples of what persistence means, and how it works, apart from the ongoing corporate relationship.

http://skilfulminds.com/2009/10/20/customer-competencies-co-creation-and-brand-communities/

Rachel HappeNovember 5th, 2009 at 6:48 pm

I love the thought that social media channels wouldn’t be so popular for customers if the old channels were working (from the customers’ perspective, not the companies). It’s like companies have been building up a dam and social media put a little hole in it and now a flood of activity is coming through those channels. People love @comcastcares because they get a fast, effective reply. If they thought they would get that over the phone, they would use the phone. Makes one pause as we start putting workflow and structure around social media. Are we just building more dams? I think you’re right on… we need to fix the root cause.

Paula ThorntonNovember 5th, 2009 at 8:48 pm

Larry: I always respect your input so I apologize if I’ve misunderstood your comments. It would appear that perhaps I might not have been as specifically clear in my points. The main point of persisting relationships that I was making is that we have to be able to create corporate memory that can be accessed by others. Persisting relationships requires the capture of data that goes beyond the typical CRM systems which is more focused on ‘attaining’ customers than on ‘retaining’ them.

Indeed the community example you gave is an explicit example that I’d want to rail against — an isolated environment whereby the individual is not connected back to any other existing relationships they have with the company. It’s a function of identity.

Companies have issues already with giving their own employees persistent identities by which their own work can be tied across a company (e.g. whatever I comment on, whatever I create, can all be found in a single collection, as relevant, for sharing). It will be a bigger hurdle to do the same for customers.

If I’ve missed something obvious, please clarify for me.

Larry IronsNovember 6th, 2009 at 10:49 am

Paula, I don’t think we are misunderstanding one another. I was simply pointing out that, from the customer side, persistence is sometimes an instance of identity. I haven’t seen much research or insight into brand communities formed initially around products, and persisting after the product is no longer sold by the owner, other than the research I discussed in the post I referred to in my earlier message. Something in the original product and relationship leads to the formation of such communities and persists apart from the a corporate memory, or even business process, to support it. Indeed, some communities form around service offerings separate from the provider before the company engages them (Netflix is a good example).

However, when it comes to your overall point, I certainly agree that relationships can’t develop without a corporate memory, whether across employees or between companies and customers. I think Ross Mayfield hit the point on the head recently. Referring to companies involved in monitoring conversations about their brand, Ross noted that, “Before they collaborate with the community, they have to collaborate with themselves.”

For example, there is no general rule that dictates a customer support agent at a call center must follow a scripted conversation to solve problems. There are specific rules developed by call center companies that certain questions are asked in a certain order, often irrelevant to the reason a customer is calling — all in the name of meeting KPIs. When I relate to employees of a company that provides me with a product or service I want to talk to them like I do to people in general, not like a machine. I think this relates to the point Rachel is making about a dam existing that social media opened up. Building another dam of rules around the social media conversation in order to control it in the name of corporate memory won’t solve the issues that you highlight IMHO.

RotkapchenNovember 6th, 2009 at 11:31 am

Larry: Great clarifications and more unfolding of the story that’s here to be uncovered from different viewpoints.

What you made me think of are all the things that ARE persisted that then become ‘fact’ and need to be challenged (like the time I was denied a trademark for something that existed but was ‘dead’ — the company had been purchased and the new owners had no intent of using the product). Especially all the ‘lore’ that gets repeated in companies.

Reminded too (based on an event just this morning) that more meaningful than an internal Wikipedia (which many companies mistakenly focus on as a first venture) would be an internal Snopes!