A slightly lengthier definition, also given by Paul Greenberg, would be:
"A philosophy & a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes & social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted & transparent business environment."
Thanks a lot Paul for ending the recent debate on twitter. :)
Now to the post itself. There is a debate going on about the outsourcing & especially offshoring of an organization's social media initiatives, which if for responding to the customers need to be termed social CRM initiatives.
My twitter pal & Boston based CTO, John F. Moore has posted his thoughts around the idea of offshoring social media campaigns.
John has some great points. There are some very sensible caveats for businesses considering offshoring. Do read it before you read this post further.
Welcome back. :)
What businesses need to understand is that Offshore is not a panacea, nor is it a quick fix.
One cannot just do a soul search, figure out stuff that do not fit core competencies of the business & ship those tasks to a "faceless" offshore. It is a more complex affair than soul searching & offshore has a face too.
Offshoring needs a relationship of trust & intimacy between the business & the offshorer to give the most benefit. Cost arbitrage as the sole reason or even the primary reason for offshoring is dead or should be. Else the business might be, dead that is. By cost arbitrage, I mean siphoning work to the lowest cost provider of human capital. Sweat shops.
John's caveats as well as my agreement above are pretty generic, and not really unknowns for the bigger enterprises who have some experience & maturity with offshoring. One that is new for all is outsourcing/offshoring social media technologies as well as processes. Lets tackle the processes first.
Social Media outsourcing doesn't readily belong in the direct customer interaction aspect of it, and certainly not for the real time/synchronous interactions with the customers - like on Twitter. Asynchronous interactions though could be considered. Most certainly the back end stuff.
What can be outsourced/offshored from the processes itself is the analysis part of the listen-engage-influence cycle while measuring through out. Sentiment Analysis & other NLP techniques have not yet matured enough to replace humans effectively. Think of sentiments like sarcasm. Nor do we have proper infrastructure for semantics to automate the stuff sufficiently. So humans are inevitable in figuring out the signal from the noise on the social web & also, most importantly, routing it to the proper departments/persons responsible for the various types of data coming in. Is it a product/service issue, is someone giving an idea for a product/service, is someone trying to defect to the competition, is someone being sarcastic about our WOM campaign, is it spam/ambush marketing in our hashtag, etc. etc. etc.
Some aspects like answering to FAQs on forums or live chat could be offshored since there is no risk of "accent" pollution. You could also automate them with bots. Look at the IRC channels used by the Canonical folks for Ubuntu developers & users. Its a crowdsourced model, that doesn't stop them from using bots to help organize as well as help n00bs with FAQs & basic definitions/explanations. People don't RTFM anymore there.
Automation isn't sufficient yet & humans don't scale for cheap. Hence a mix of automation (sentiment analysis, routing, assignment) & offshoring could help.
Further, even if considered for interacting with customers on social media, the issues with "accent" pollution faced in call center offshoring need not enter the equation by restricting the responses from offshore teams to written & asynchrnous content which could go through reviews to reduce errors.
But the real deal with outsourcing &/or offshoring Social CRM is in consulting, redesigning the business processes to incorporate social media into the current customer centric processes (BPX), designing the IT infrastructre/architecture, developing, QA & implementing the various social apps as well as the integrations with the traditional CRM systems, training & documentation, support & maintenance of the apps - the whole bunch with the backend stuff.
Almost all of the aspects of implementing social technologies/apps can be offshored. If you go for private clouds/hosting out of offshore, not even the implementation is onsite! But the business side of the stuff - gathering requirement, strategy development, OCM, etc. - needs to be done onsite. There is never an offshore pure play. Its always a blend. And offshore is never about cheap labor. Its about capabilities. Intellectual arbitrage is the way to go for thinking about offshoring.
Finally, the points written in this old post about CRM & Offshoring can pretty well be extended to Social CRM too. The article is not a rigorous academic or industry report but the success has been demonstrated many times since then over the 6 years & even before, if its validity is to be proven.
N.B.: As already mentioned in the header of this blog, this post contains purely my personal views on this topic & are not to be attributed to my employer, nor to be construed as their position on this matter either, which may or may not agree with my views.
P.S.: I have now added a graphic on some of the aspects of Social CRM offshoring that had been put forth by Gaurav Mishra under Social Media Outsourcing wave. There are a few old blogs that I remembered related to the topic of Social Media Outsourcing:
As always we agree more than we disagree. See my full response back on my original blog post, but high-level thinking is:
ReplyDelete- Background social tasks can be outsourced.
- Responses via social networks should not be.
See why back on my blog.
I am looking forward to continuing this conversation as it is an important topic.
John
"Cost arbitrage as the sole reason or even the primary reason for offshoring is dead or should be. "
ReplyDeletedisagree with this. cost is the primary reason why offshoring is undertaken. it is however not the sole reason.
Thank you joining the conversation Yadu. :)
ReplyDeleteYes, I am not yet sure myself if cost can stop being the primary reason for offshoring. But it certainly need not be the primary reason.
Once an offshorer has promoted themselves to the level of a partner rather than a vendor, cost is no longer the primary reason. We are more pricey than most of our competition but still many of our customers keep working with us. They even expect us to innovate for them!
Prem, you hit upon a key point that I hammer on as well:
ReplyDelete"Once an offshorer has promoted themselves to the level of a partner rather than a vendor, cost is no longer the primary reason."
Any vendor relationship needs to be treated as a partnerhip if it is to be successful. It is in the best interest of both praties, please never forget that.
John
"Once an offshorer has promoted themselves to the level of a partner rather than a vendor, cost is no longer the primary reason. "
ReplyDeleteagreed, cost is not the primary reason to change an ongoing engagement. all of us essentially are inert animals and the cost/risk of change is a downer: unless ofcourse the cost differential is making an offer one can't refuse.
however the very first driver to offshore, the motive behind the very first engagement is primarily cost driven.
i am a vendor myself and i too like to couch the motives beyond cost, but at the end of the day, like it or not, one would not contemplate offshoring if there wasnt a cost saving.
i have said this on john's blog, and will repeat (by the way, will be good to have the debate in one place than jump about page to page :) ), Cost is the the most important reason why organizations change their behaviour.
agree with both of you that partnership is what makes it work.
more often than not what makes ANY offshoring engagement fail is not the technology, not the costs, not the engagement model but the vary basic reasons of lack of communication and lack of maturity.
i liken an offshoring engagement to a marriage. if in a marriage there exists a failure to communicate or a lack of maturity, its a matter of time before the prenuptial gets dusted off.
offshoring engagements are no different.
ofcourse my analogy doesnt go down very well with those who are newly separated.