Mitch Lieberman

Sword Ciboodle

Analyzing the Contact Center with a modern lens. The intersection of Social Media, CRM and the Collaborative Enterprise (How about Coordination?); It is this intersection, and the fast pace of Social Media adoption - by customers; which make this topic extremely important and interesting. I am a process driven implementer, building solutions that make sense, taking into consideration people, process and technology, and finding the balance.

Do Customers Want or Use Social Channels for Service?

1 comments 834 reads

Posted on 2012-05-11

Customer Service using Social Media Channels is a nascent discipline, which is good, because fewer customers than most people think are actually using it – but its time will come. Just look at the usage from the customers perspective, barely 17%. American Express and ECHO just published some findings that paint an interesting picture. I would also challenge some of the results, or methods, or both. Not because I know better, but because I am confused about what exactly they are asking and how they asked. When these results are compared with some recent research (company perspective) I conducted with thinkJar, there is a bit of a gap between what companies are spending time and money on, and what their customers are actually using.

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It is time to move on to ‘How’ – Where the Rubber Meets the Road for Customer Service

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Posted on 2012-05-09

From products and pricing to service and social, there is no shortage of talk on what companies need to do to achieve service excellence. For the past many years, specific to ‘social’ the number of people who are more than willing to share ‘what to do’ is staggering. It is easy to say what to do, to be an advice giver. That said, telling someone how to do something is not nearly as easy.

There is not only a tremendous difference between ‘what’ and ‘how’, the ability to cross the chasm between is where companies succeed or fail. Transitioning from what to do to how to do it takes hard work, planning and execution – especially in the realm of customer service!

Customer Service Mission:
A mission is the very big, long-term end-result or achievement in your sights. A Customer Service mission is the biggest and most important thing you and your team aim to accomplish. Mission statements can be tied...

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How I Think About Things

0 comments 497 reads

Posted on 2012-04-24

I am not trying to define, nor redefine – been there done that. What I am doing is to simply share how I think about things.

Customer Engagement

Customer Engagement is the extent to which an organization commits, both emotionally and intellectually, to communicating and interacting with their customers, relative to accomplishing shared goals driven by customer need. Engagement can be seen as a heightened level of interaction and ownership where the company wants to do whatever they can for the benefit of the customer.

Customer Relationship (Management)

Customer Relationship (Management) is the proper balance of people, process and technology; practice and strategy required to meet the customer centric goals and objectives of your business. It needs to provide all business stakeholders the data, information and insights regarding current, past and future customers (people) and the ability to interact, inform...

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Personas with Passion

0 comments 676 reads

Posted on 2012-04-21

A persona is an internal model of the key attributes, motivations, and goals of your target customers (prospect, audience…). A persona is a statement from you to your customers and prospective customers that illustrates to them, that you understand their jobs-to-be-done, their needs, as well as, what keeps them up at night (the emotional component). It should be used to describe your customers to your internal teams, from Engineering to Finance – and all in between – making sure everyone understands it.

A business exists to provide value to, for and with customer’s. They do not exist to promote products; sorry. In a business to business (BtoB) setting, the ‘to, for and with’ is not likely restricted to one person or role on either side of the equation. From the customer side, the buying process includes a set of people who, at the end of the day, are trying to understand, “what’s in it for me”. Therefore, there is likely...

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Trusting Data Versus Trusting Your Gut

0 comments 858 reads

Posted on 2012-03-31

As if the CIO did not have enough to worry about; Cloud, Social, Mobile, along comes Data (BigData to be buzzword compliant). OK, I might have it a little backwards, Data has been a concern for a long time, but now, because of Cloud, Mobile and Social, Data is an even bigger challenge. The list of issues surrounding data is a long one; growth of, quality of, management of, storage of, interpretation of, access to and last but not least, analysis. Many of these are technological, but the real issue is when data crashes into a human…

Do You Trust Data or Do You Trust Your Gut?

The stakes are real – the future of your business. Leveraged well, data will provide an edge, properly used it is a difference maker. Do phrases like: ‘My instincts got us here, and we are doing just fine’ or ‘it feels right’ fly around your office? Hyperbole, maybe, but most of us know the type and have experienced at least a bit of it. There is an argument that...

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From the Long Tail to the New Normal

0 comments 266 reads

Posted on 2012-03-27

In this next installment of my ‘connect the dots’ series I am going out on a bit of a limb. My objective here is to help people understand the importance of ‘New Normal’, in writing this I have a better sense of it myself. Working backwards, the ‘New Normal’ is very similar in concept to what Seth Godin calls “Weird”. The best way for me to describe ‘Weird’ is that it is the rest of the story, left out in most Long Tail discussions. The Long Tail, as discussed by Chris Anderson, talks about the outliers, the ones who live and purchase at the edges of the spectrum. In other words, the Long Tail does not talk too much about the rest of the distribution, at least not from the customer-centric perspective. While I...

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From Connecting Dots to Connecting People and Back Again

0 comments 330 reads

Posted on 2012-03-22

To an economist, it might be about weather patterns. Weather is super complex with a mind numbing number of variables. Regional fluctuations in rainfall or temperature can cause a dramatic shift in supply or availability of a commodity good. This availability might lead to a change in the price of that good, then of course housing prices will change (now there is a leap, but hold the thought). I am sure there are many ‘dots’ I missed.

To an organization, it is about projects and investment decisions. To receive budget or get the go-ahead a projects need to be connected to stakeholder value (some even call it ROI). It could be to a business stakeholder or for customer value, ideally the two are related, but it is rarely a straight line. The idea is to...

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Simplicity

0 comments 754 reads

Posted on 2012-03-12
Without a doubt, I am a fan of Albert Einstein. Beyond his scientific genius, his logic based approach and his stylish hair, he had a way with words.

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.”

If you take out the ‘violence’ bit, what is left is that reducing complexity to simplicity is…well, not so simple. As I look around the technology landscape, the obvious examples of this jump out, Apple is the poster child, but that is too easy. Let’s consider your customers:
- What are you doing to simplify the lives (work or personal) of your customers?
- Do you have a good grasp on what they want? Need? (There is a difference).
Do One Thing Really Well

An example most people can easily relate to is ‘storing stuff’. Here is the physical metaphor; As a traveler, I am looking...
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Cues, Signals and Understanding

2 comments 751 reads

Posted on 2012-02-29

The intersection of, Customer Service and Social CRM is about being human, listening for signals and watching for cues. The secret sauce is understanding what you have observed and acting accordingly. On the one hand, you could call this a lesson in Social CRM, while on the other hand, you could call this being human 101.

It is a bit like being married – as any man will tell you, the spousal response “I am fine” means anything but that! It is not the words, but the context, which supports my key point, cues; verbal and non-verbal add context. The ability to understand the cues and act upon them is the difference between a good and poor experience (or sleeping on the sofa). In the world of contact centers and customer service, it is the difference between good and bad customer experience. As an aside, ‘acting’ upon something can easily be doing nothing.

The Wall Street Journal...

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Can you Leave Work at the Office?

0 comments 499 reads

Posted on 2012-02-16

I previously talked about Device Explosion, where I highlighted the need to allow employees to point personalize their experiences just as we are trying to do for our customers. Friend Mark Tamis commented on the post:

“Getting a new iPad from work is just as exciting as getting a good PC ‘back-in-the-day’. Now it make you more mobile, but these are still only access devices – the question is now what are they accessing and what is presented which helps the employee’s job-to-be-done. The ‘back-end’ is still more important than the ‘shiny new object’ device”

My answer to Mark is an answer he has probably heard me give a hundred times in the past few years: “Yes, but…” Here is my reasoning, there are secondary benefits to the device being owned by the employee. The benefits are that if it is a work device, then...

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