I’ve written a number of posts asking the question whether organisations understand these emerging literacies or if they simply assume them. To this end, organisational readiness is becoming increasingly important.

But I began to wonder over the weekend whether customers know what they’re doing when it comes to social? And following on from this, do customers even need to know what they’re doing?  Or is the equivalent ‘customer literacy’ simply one of experimentation?

Customers do what they do when they want to do it: experiment, channel-hop, change their minds - these are part of their lexicon. But organisations, for the most part, are not built with this in mind. Organisations are built on averages, constancy, likelihoods… I am reminded of Ozymandias.

In order to talk to each other, who will give in first? Who will compromise, who will cede their position? And at what cost?

But does this have to be an uneasy encounter where protagonist and antagonist clash? Or can we learn the role of the synagonist or do we need to create a hybrid role? And if so, what is the literacy of this newly emerging role? Who do we learn from? Each other…perhaps?

I’m not one of those people who went to university knowing what they wanted to do. I ended up reading anthropology, linguistics, Chinese philosophy, before eventually majoring in Chinese. A few years later I ended up living in Taiwan for about three years, or was it five? During this time I taught English, I worked as a translator at the National Palace Museum. After this I ended up in the UK where I went back to university and got my Masters from the University of Oxford reading Sinology (Chinese). My thesis looked at the popularisation of culture during the Ming Dynasty. For this I wrote about a work by Tu Long called ‘Kao Pan Yu Shi’ (‘Desultory Remarks on Furnishing the Abode of a Retired Scholar’) first published in 1606. This compendium was somewhat akin to the gentlemen guides of the 19th century. After this I got my first real job and set-up the South East Asia office for Bonhams, an auction house, and so my career began…until now when I am a consultant at Capgemini.

Did I know what I wanted to do? Did I have a career path laid out in my head? Was there a greater plan? No, to all of these. I’ve worked in marketing, knowledge management, customer service. I’ve had the opportunity to pick up skills in project management, ecrm, email campaigns, search, web site design and development, IA, UX, CEX and more.

I am the sum total of all these parts. I bring this experience, this expertise, these skills, the successes and failures into the workplace. All these things help me each day in different ways consciously and unconsciously. I do not have a blueprint or template. I am working out my playbook as I travel along my journey.

And so too with social media. Why should I think there is an answer, a template, a blueprint? When I began Tweeting as @guyatcarphone at The Carphone Warehouse back in 2008, did I have a strategy in mind, did I have a template to follow? No. I saw what @frankeliason was doing at Comcast and thought to myself it can’t be that difficult Tweeting – ‘I’m sorry, we seem to have got it wrong, how can I help?’

And yet, organisations put so much in the way. Organisations want a template, they want an answer, they want to be sure they won’t be proved wrong (it’s not even that they want to be proved right!). But how difficult can Tweeting be? We converse with each other every day of our lives. Why is Twitter so different? Why is it that companies need to understand what type of value is derived from conversing with their customers? Why is it that they spend time trying to figure out the ROI of Twitter customer service? What is the ROI of resolving a customer’s issue? Is the obverse, not resolving it?

Why has social media become this thing to be feared? Why is it the great unknown that makes you anxious? Your career is equally unknown. It unfolds as you go through it. Yes, you might say I want a career as a musician, or as a journalist or as a doctor. You play sport not knowing what the outcome might be. You do it knowing that the detail will be worked out as the game itself unfolds.

Social media is a bit like that. You want to converse with your customers whether it’s via Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, FourSquare, Pinterest, blogs, YouTube… because that’s where they are, and that’s what they use to converse. As to what the detail is, that will unfold as you begin to talk with them. It’s not that difficult. Talking was never designed to be difficult.

Over the last few years social media has been catalytic in disrupting ‘business as usual’. Channels of communication are democratising, the workplace is blurring, customer service is decentralising, information  is traded for free, it is hard to recognise who is your customer and who is your employee, technology is increasingly ubiquitous, smartphones and tablets give us the possibility to be always on, always connected, always in touch…

We live in a world where there are no templates to copy. Each of us is writing our own playbook as we experience it.

We question, we share, we provoke, we cajole, we challenge, we undermine, we disrupt, we interrupt, we experiment, we play, we explore. We click on one link and then another and another and another, each one takes us further away from where we started. Curiosity can get us into trouble online. It can also show us new things. It can also introduce us to new people. We trust. Here, in this space, we unconsciously pursue serendipity.

And it is in this context that organisations have to fight to survive. Organisations have to learn and relearn, define and redefine. Make that which is irrelevant relevant, or cut it out. Organisations cannot assume anymore. Organisations cannot dictate. They cannot tell you or me what to do anymore. Organisations need to stop and listen, hear what I have to say. Because if you don’t, I will let you know. And I will let you know now, not tomorrow, not in a week’s time, but as soon as it happens.

The other day I heard a customer service director say on radio that they could not respond to their customers in a particular way because their systems did not allow it. This type of customer-centricity is dead.

A different type of customer-centricity is emerging. One that is empathetic, responsive, nimble, participative, collaborative, critical…

We live in a time when so much is up for grabs, so much of what we know is being redefined, realigned, readjusted, retuned. We live in a time when we know things are changing, but we’re not sure what the outcome will look like.

I’m wondering how often you ask yourself: How important am I? And perhaps whether you are confusing importance for relevance sometimes?

As I was waiting to board the plane, my name was called out and I was asked to come to the front desk. I was upgraded to business class.

It was a fantastic experience and I can only put it down to the fact that I Tweeted them beforehand. My Klout score was below 50, so I didn’t think that was a factor. It was the first time I have truly slept on a plane, once I had figured out how to get my seat horizontal. I even had a duvet, yes a duvet.

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I had a really interesting conversation with a colleague a couple of days ago about social media and the utilities sector.

Themes we talked about: Decentralisation of service, culture not technology, changing business models, business transformation, empathy vs transaction, do companies have the right ‘literacies’ to even contemplate some of the things they want to do, will contact centres even exist in the future, understanding who is actually even your employee now…

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I read the following article a moment ago - Brazilian fashion retailer displays Facebook ‘likes’ for items in its real-world stores.

What struck me was not whether a retailer (or any business in fact) would do something like this, but at what point they might do it and why and how you could use such a mechanism tactically to lift sales?

How else could you apply the same approach to different scenarios to bring the online-offline (‘on-off initiative’) worlds closer together? One of the great unexplored areas and mechanics in my mind and a good starting point – the humble hashtag.

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Back to Royal Brunei Air. I Tweeted @RoyalBruneiAir a few days before I left. And if I’m honest, I Tweeted them intentionally to try to influence them to consider upgrading me on my return leg. No such luck. I flew economy back and boy is there a difference.

What was interesting and I was aware I was doing it, was that I was almost looking for negative things, I wanted things to go wrong, to not be right, to not be as good as my business class experience, not because I wanted to complain or be negative, but because I had had such great service on the previous leg. Go figure! When I sat in my economy class seat, I did find that the hand rest was loose, and there were other things that annoyed me.

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I’m finding myself in a gradual period of change. For the past five years or so I’ve focused almost entirely on social media customer service. I’ve seen the industry grow and new models emerge. I’ve seen more and more companies adopt the use of social media customer service. I’ve seen companies wrestle with social media customer service ROI and scalability. I’ve met some great people virtually and IRL. But perhaps as the industry matures, I am now finding myself taking a broader view of the organisational implications of social itself; perhaps this is a sign of an increasing maturity in the industry? Yes, there are still those yet to embark on their social journey, but increasingly I’m seeing companies begin to understand that social is more about culture and less about technology. I’m seeing a shift towards something that effects and impacts the entire organisation. I’m seeing companies begin to understand that their social journey starts with them and not with their customers. Empowerment starts with the recognition that you have to let your agents and employees go, that you have to trust them implicitly; that’s why you hired them in the first place, right?!. Empowerment is not a policy but a philosophy.

The recognition that social has far-reaching implications across the organisation, the impending realisation that the effect of the democratisation of technology will result in the increasing decentralisation of service, must signal to us all that the business and customer service models that have emerged over the past few decades are outmoded, increasingly irrelevant, increasingly in need of realignment and redefinition.

We live in a period of change, flux and disruption. We live in a period where we are all learning, of necessity, different literacies. The question we must all ask ourselves is not ‘if we have to change’ but ‘when will we make that change’?

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So where am I going with my Royal Brunei Air story? A couple of weeks after getting back to London, I reflected on the whole experience. Overall, I’m positive, and I keep telling myself not to be ungrateful. But the bottom line is that my great experience is slightly tempered. Rather than thinking – I love Royal Brunei Air, I’m telling myself not to be ungrateful.

I’m wondering to myself, what’s the distance between ‘being grateful’ and ‘loving’? I know my feelings towards Royal Brunei Air would have been 100% ‘in love’ if I had been upgraded on the return leg back to London. I would have walked off the plane being an advocate for life. As it is, I know I am being ungrateful, and in truth I am a fan of Royal Brunei Air, but at the same time I’m more acutely aware of the gulf between Economy and Business Class. The difference between a duvet and a blanket, the difference between a plastic knife and a stainless steel one, the difference between being served at set times and an ‘always on’ service. I keep reminding myself not to be ungrateful.

The white paper sets out five principles:

• Wherever possible we will increase choice
• Public services should be decentralised to the lowest appropriate level
• Public services should be open to a range of providers
• We will ensure fair access to public services
• Public services should be accountable to users and to taxpayers

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The five principles and much of the language used in the white paper bears a striking similarity to the language and thinking embodied by social media. Notions of authenticity, openness, transparency, choice, diversity, decentralisation are shared between the two.

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The white paper has been written during a time of great change. From a customer service perspective we are seeing a move from a transactional interaction to a more empathetic customer experience, where the experience becomes the service; at times, seemingly more important than the resolution itself.

We have seen something better, and are turning our back on a brand of customer service underpinned by Taylorism and returning to something more humane, intimate and articulate.

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This is a period of disruption, where the convergence of people and social, is resulting in moments of serendipity that challenge both individual and organisational habit chains.

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In 2006, Wikinomics was published. Don Tapscott writes about the ‘shared canvas where every splash of paint contributed by one user provides a richer tapestry for the next user to modify or build on’.

In 2010, Clay Shirky, in Cognitive Surplus writes: ‘We are increasingly becoming one another’s infrastructure’.

In 2010, Howard Rheingold in a YouTube video talks about the idea of ‘digital literacy‘.

in 2011, Lyle Fong (Lithium) in an interview with Ray Wang (Constellation Group) asks the question: ‘What happens when we treat customers as part of the company?’

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This is the backdrop against which the white paper has been written. The underlying aim of the Open Public Service white paper seems to be to replace the – old, centralised approach to public service delivery - with – government services wherever you are – by – harnessing the power of new technology to transform our public services.

The white paper talks about decentralising service to the ‘lowest appropriate level’, as if this was some kind of conscious decision on the part of the Government. It is the Government that will decide which services will be decentralised, and the lowest level to which this will happen.

And yet, I can’t help thinking that the decentralisation of services is inevitable. It will take place regardless of the government’s involvement. It is not a decision to be made solely by the Government alone. It will take place because we have seen something better. It has begun.

Howard Rheingold Digital Literacies

People of the Screen, Rick Prelinger and Howard Rheingold at IFTF

In the video above, he asks the question: What is it that we assume that people know in this day of everyone carrying a laptop, a phone that’s connected to the net?

He goes on to say: But they really don’t in terms of a literacy. By literacy I mean, a skill plus social. I think there are at least five essential literacies - attention, participation, collaboration, network-savvy, critical consumption (‘crap detection’).

I started thinking about this idea of ‘digital literacy’ in the context of customer service agents, the customers they deal with, and the organisation itself.

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What I have come to realise over the past few years is that social is a journey of discovery and exploration. I create my individual playbook as I go along. I add new gestures to it, I annotate existing ones. I learn different currencies. I remove those gestures that are no longer relevant, no longer have a purpose. There are those that I have simply forgotten about. And those that I collect like books on a shelf, to come back to at some future moment of quiet. But no one has taught me. No one has shown me their directory of gestures. I create my own index, my own categorisation. Yes, I have looked to others to see what they were doing, but only to learn, to re-interpret, to make my own.

I speak a language called Android. Instagram, however, is not a part of my dialect. Or not yet, anyway.

I rely on intuition, the desire to explore, the desire to understand… the knowledge that these literacies may result in something greater – moments of serendipity.

You rely on a different set of literacies that require a different set of gestures. But via Twitter, Facebook, AudioBoo, Storify, Instagram, WordPress, StumbleUpon, Ushahidi, Layar, YouTube we are able, for a moment, to converse, to sometimes share gestures, learn new ones, create new gestures of shared meaning.

This is my playbook and I share it with you for a moment.

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YouTube requires its own set of literacies.

Twitter does as well. And Facebook. And Kred. And Oolone.

What are the literacies that underlie these platforms that enable us to converse with each other?

Do they change if you are an individual? An organisation? A customer complaining? Someone looking for a job? Two people meeting by chance on a train?

Do we know all these literacies? Do we need to know them all?

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We live in a highly connected age. We have the potential to live – ‘on’ ‘now’.

Those who have iPads vs those who do not. But having an iPad is not enough. Understanding the literacy of the iPad and the new and emerging literacies it offers is. Do you dare accept the challenge? Or will you forever be stuck with ‘old world’ literacies in a new world device. Do you simply collect covers?

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We have lived in a time when we knew the answers. We became complacent. This is no longer the case. We do not have the answers. The answers lie in the journey, in each of our own playbooks, whether an individual, an organisation, or both.

…who will teach you the new gestures, the new literacies? Who will help you decipher the different currencies that are emerging all the time?

Those who understand vs Those who do not

Those who understand ‘how’ vs Those who do not

Do you trust ‘those who know how to’ enough to learn from them?

Do you trust?

Perhaps this is the first literacy?

But I’m wondering how much time we think about what the future of customer service could look like? We are living in a period of huge change, where every day we are challenged by things that are new, different, faster, more convenient. Offerings such as - Ushahidi, Zeebox, Google Hangouts, Layar, Facebook verbs, Storify, My6Sense - offer us tantalising glimpses into what that future could look like.

For each of us, these offerings will likely result in different responses predicated on different priorities, different concerns.  But whatever your response, whatever your priorities, whatever your concerns, the issue is not whether you ‘get social’, the issue is not one of cost savings, the issue is not one of ROI or a lack of senior management buy-in, but ultimately, whether you or your organisation ‘gets’ your customer.

• What’s the ROI?
• How do I scale it?
• What skillsets do my agents need?
• Who owns it?
• Where should I start: Twitter, Facebook or communities?

In his book, Petroski gives many examples of engineering failures, where bridges have twisted or buildings collapsed. But what intrigued me, and continues to do so, was the fact that none of these ‘failures’ set out to be. These buildings and bridges were designed with the utmost rigour, by engineers with expertise, experience and knowledge. And yet, a combination of events conspired resulting in ‘failure’. This notion of ‘failure’ is an interesting one.

Petroski writes (p43): “…engineers hypothesize about assemblages of concrete and steel that they arrange into a world of their own making. Thus each new building or bridge may be considered to be a hypothesis in its own right. In particular, one hypothesis of a structural engineer might be that so and so bridge across such and such river under these and those conditions of traffic and maintenance will stand for so many years without collapsing. Now if such a bridge were built and were to carry traffic year after year without trouble, the hypothesis would be confirmed time and time again – but it will never be proven until the so many years under the original plan had elapsed. But should the bridge collapse suddenly under no extraordinary conditions before those so many years were up, there would be no doubt in anyone’s mind that the original hypothesis was incontrovertibly wrong.”

He continues (p44): “The process of engineering design may be considered a succession of hypotheses that such and such an arrangement of parts will perform a desired function without fail. As each hypothetical arrangement of parts is sketched literally or figuratively on the calculation pad or computer screen, the candidate structure must be checked by analysis. The analysis consists of a series of questions about the behavior of the parts under the imagined conditions of use after construction. These questions may be easily answered for designs that are not particularly innovative, but a computer may be required to perform all the calculations needed to analyze a bold new design. If any of the parts fails the test of analysis, then the design itserlf may be said to be a failure. A design can be altered by strengthening the weak link and then analyzing the new design. The process continues until the designer can imagine no possible way in which the structure can fail under the anticipated use. Of course, if the designer makes an error in calculation or overlooks the possibility of failure or does not program the computer to ask the right question, then the hypothesis will erroneously be thought to have been verified when in fact it should have been disproved. Absolute certainty about the fail-proofness of a design can never be attained, for we can never be certain that we have been exhaustive in asking questions about its future.

“The fundamental feature of all engineering hypotheses is that they state, implicitly if not explicitly, that a designed structure will not fail if it is used as intended. Engineering failures may then be viewed as disproved hypotheses. …On the other hand, the past success of an engineering structure confirms the hypothesis of its function only to the same extent that the historical rising of the sun each morning has reassured us of a predictable future. The structural soundness of the Brooklyn Bridge only proves to us that it has stood for over one hundred years; that it will be standing tomorrow is a matter of probability, albeit high probability, rather than one of certainty’”

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Over the past few years a different type of customer service has emerged. One that is more intimate and humane. The challenge facing many eager to participate is, as that incredibly prescient book The Cluetrain Manifesto points out in the Introduction (pXXXI):

“Though corporations insist on seeing it as one, the new marketplace is not necessarily a market at all. To its inhabitants, it is primarily a place in which all participants are audience to each other. The entertainment is not packaged; it is intrinsic. Unlike the lockstep conformity imposed by television, advertising, and corporate propaganda, the Net has given new legitimacy – and free rein – to play. Many of those drawn into this world find themselves exploring a freedom never before imagined: to indulge their curiosity, to debate, to disagree, to laugh at themselves, to compare visions, to learn, to create new art, new knowledge.”

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Social media is a journey. The journey you make – individual or corporate – is intrinsic in finding the answer to your questions.

And when you do set out on your bold new journey, do you set out looking to prove or disprove the ‘failure’ or ‘success’ of your hypothesis? How do you know you have the right hypothesis? What’s your next hypothesis? How do you hypothesise about a ‘ freedom you never before imagined?

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 4,100 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 3 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

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Over the last eight to twelve months or so the use of Facebook as a customer service platform has gained increasing popularity amongst organisations willing to expand their social customer care repertoire beyond Twitter.

There is no doubt that Facebook is becoming more and more embedded into the social landscape that many of us now increasingly inhabit. When I first noticed organisations, such as Thomas Cook, using Facebook for customer service I was somewhat perplexed: I couldn’t understand how it could be used or why someone would use it.

After deciding to spend a bit of time trying to understand this ‘F-space’ a bit more, I came to the realisation that Facebook was simply a platform that enabled people to ask a question, write a complaint or help someone else out. Since then, I have seen Facebook used for customer service in a number of different ways:

• Native functionality: Responding to complaints and questions posted to a company’s ‘Wall’
• Plug-in: Lithium allows their community platform to be directly plugged into Facebook (BT), while Get Satisfaction allows customers to ask a question, share an idea, report a problem or give praise (Thomas Cook). Requires that a specific tab is set up
• Info-tab: O2 adopts a slightly different approach and via their ‘O2 Gurus’ tab provides a number of short videos with handy tips and hints
• Interface: Providing a series of links back to the company’s FAQs or Help homepage from a customer support tab (Dell)
• Directory: List of relevant email addresses or phone numbers (Tesco) from a customer support tab

The purpose of this post is not to provide an analysis of these different approaches (I’ll leave that for an upcoming piece I’m writing looking at the use of Facebook as a customer service platform in more depth), but rather something that intrigued me following on from the recent announcements coming out of Facebook’s F8 Developer Conference. And that was the use of ‘verbs’ to describe someone’s activity. This is part of Facebook’s play for the ‘open graph’. Interestingly, and this is an aside, Lithium seems to overlook the power of the ‘open graph’ and the potential to exploit it, by not integrating its proposition into the Wall itself. Lithium’s approach creates another activity stream that itself needs to be resourced.

I like the idea of this ‘open graph’ and I like the idea of almost treating verbs as a hashtag or a trigger for an event or activity. But it made me think that in doing so, Facebook was also potentially rendering customer service itself to the level of a verb. Perhaps the verb becomes the service?

Resolve, fix, return, deliver, hate, solve, help, repair, complain, dislike, dissatisfied, fail…

In this way, the space (or disconnect) between the service required and the verb used to express it condenses; they become inextricably linked.

I’m not sure what the implications of this are yet, if anything, but it strikes me that words in the online/virtual space may well take on more meaning. In the same way, a QR code unlocks additional information about a product or service, so too the ‘verb’ within a Facebook context may unlock a further action or information, whether that is a resolution, a complaint or a question…