A webinar on beginner’s guide to social customer care

The first ten years of social customer care

The advent of social customer care ten years ago signaled a shift in the way customer service could be provided. Traditional methods of service delivery were challenged by a type of service experience that was immediate and empathetic.

In this webinar you will learn about some of the key events, players and changes that have taken place since the first social customer care Tweet was sent by Frank Eliason, as @ComcastCares, in April 2008. You will also hear about the challenges social customer care is facing today, as well as consider what the future holds, in particular with the emergence of messaging over the last eighteen months or so.

Here’s what Guy Stephens spoke in the webinar

Key events that shaped social customer care
Characteristics of social customer care
Today’s challenges
Looking ahead

A beginner’s guide to social customer care: Webinar transcript

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening everybody to wherever you may be around the world and many thanks for choosing to spend the next 45 minutes with Akshara and I to talk about social customer care. As Akshara has mentioned, I’ve been involved in social Customer Care space pretty much since it began as a practitioner, a consultant and a trainer. I’m really looking forward to sharing the experience and insights I have gained over the last 10 years with you.

We’re going to start off with a quick poll.

So the question is, how long have you been doing social customer care? I'll give you about 15 seconds or so and the options are ‘thinking about it’, ‘less than a year’, ‘two to three years’, ‘three to five years’ and ‘five or more years’.

We’ll close the poll.

And so we can see that a lot of you are thinking about it. So, and we’ve got a few there who have been doing it for more than five years and a few more less than one year and others two to three years.

So really, it doesn’t matter where you are in your journey, whether you’ve been doing five or five or more years or whether you’re thinking about it or just starting out and hopefully, there’ll be something in this webinar for you that you’re going to find that resonates and you can take away with you.

Thank you for sharing your answers with us, but it’s great to see that, we’ve got a spread of experience as well. So that’s really great to see.

What the past tells us about the future of social customer care

When I was putting this the idea for the series of social Customer Care together with Freshdesk, we considered a range of different topics such as best practice, social Customer Care, handling a crisis, and performance metrics — there are lots of topics and a lot of those will explore over a series of webinars and blog articles that you probably see coming out over the next few months. But we thought we’d kick off the series, it was important to go back in the sense, the beginning so that in learning about how social Customer Care evolved, it would help us to understand what that future might look like as well.

So in a sense, this is a bit of a history lesson but hopefully there’s also a lot that you can take away from it.

So today what we’re going to cover is I’m going to be sharing with you some key events that have taken place over the last 10 years in social customer care that will raise something underlying characteristics and challenges that it’s placing on organizations today and then we’ll, we’ll finish off by looking ahead to what that future might look like.

Alright, so I hope that resonates with you and I’m just looking forward to sharing my experience with you around this.

But before I go any further. However, I just want to set the context, a bit and I’m going to do that over the next couple of slides.

So some of you may have seen these sorts of diagrams before it’s called a Rube Goldberg machine. Ruben Goldberg was American cartoonist and author and engineer and inventor. And between about 1914 and 1964, he came up with these really highly complex it totally impractical machines to do simple everyday tasks like getting an olive out of a bottle or scratching your back. The modern-day equivalent might be Simone Giertz who did a great TED talk this year, which was called why you should make useless things. I really encourage you to have a look at it. It’s called why you should make useless things.

And the reason I use this example of a Rube Goldberg machine is, I feel that that’s where customer service had got to by the time social Customer Care evolved. At that stage, we’d forgotten what customer service was about and somehow ended up creating highly complex highly transactional interaction which really let humanity and personality and ignore the fact that reduced to its simplest form. Customer service was about people. And social customer care reminded us of this; it reminded us that it was about people. That’s where customers started to engage and converse with each other more and more and look to each other more and more for help. Organizations were forced to recognize that they were approaching a tipping point where the existing customer service model was increasingly becoming outmoded, irrelevant.

We begin to see, with the emergence of social is the rise of the consumer and their voice is getting stronger and stronger. This rise is captured in the cluetrain manifesto. You can go online, you can find it at cluetrain.com. It was written in 1999, eventually turned into a book, but when it first set out it was a set of 95 theses describing the impact that the internet was having on traditional marketing. Bear in mind, this was written in 1999 — nine years before the first social customer care tweet was sent, seven years before Twitter was launched, and five years before Facebook was founded yet it contains so much about what customer service was to become and the forces that were changing the service lands.

The first thesis which I’ve got here begins ‘markets are conversations’ and last of the 95 ends with ‘but we’re not waiting’ — two really simple statements, but in my mind both incredibly profound gave an indication of what was to come, as social Customer Care started to evolve. Using the word conversations immediately implies a different type of interaction is taking place — an interaction between people and these people are equals, they’re talking to each other as equals.

And so while the last statement ‘but we’re not waiting’ has a somewhat menacing tone to it, almost a threat; the implication being we the people are going to have conversations — conversations that can take place about your company about the products and services you provide. We’re going to have these conversations at a scale and there’s a speed you’ve never experienced before.

And what’s more, there’s nothing you can do about it. So there’s a tension that exists between what companies do and what we the people have the potential, the power to do. And whereas, in the past, people, customers can do anything without a company’s postal address, email address, or telephone number. Those things are not needed anymore. It was Twitter. You don’t need a company’s postal address to get in touch with the company.

So it’s against this backdrop that the inevitable takes place. The rise of conversations inevitably impacted customer service and in April 2008 the first social Customer Care tweet was sent by Frank Eliason using the Twitter handle @comcastcares. When Frank replied to a customer with a question, he was literally just giving it a go to see what would happen and the rest, as they say, is history. And here we are 10 years on and social customer care is still going strong

I’m going to spend a little time on this slide. What I’m going to do is, I’m going to go through each of these examples was just trying to give you a little of background to them and free through that you’ll understand a bit more of the context of the kind where social Customer Care came from. I want to start off with a quote there by Frank Rose and he wrote a book called The Art of Immersion, which looks at how electronic media is changing storytelling and how participants have gone from passive observers to willing participants. He writes, “We’re in one of those 50-year old windows when an entirely new medium is being created and no one knows what to do with it. All you can do is throw stuff out there and experiment.”

And in a sense from 2008 to about 2010 that’s what companies did — they effectively threw stuff out there and experimented. Some things worked, some things didn’t, and it’s this idea of the unexpected or unintended consequences of these experiments that is really important in social. You can flip it around and look at it in terms of say serendipity. When you get two or more people coming together, the opportunity for creating a new type of knowledge of value is inherent within that interaction. Many of the events are described here have that sense of new value being created. The challenges, whether a company recognizes what that new value is.

In May 2009, just moving on to the next one, Best Buy a big US retailer launched Twelpforce. Best Buy essentially recognize that value and knowledge is dynamic and resides in people, not in knowledge bases.

And so what they tried to do is they created a program of putting customers and experts in direct contact with each other. All you have to do is tweet your question to Best Buy at the hashtag Twelpforce and one of the best buys three and a half thousand, yep, that’s right, three and a half thousand Twelpers, that’s what they were called, would answer your question.

The program was eventually stopped in May 2013, but in the space of about five years, those three and a half thousand Twelpers had answered well over 65,000 questions.

So imagine rather than just having a handful of SMEs or experts in your company, you’ve got a pool of three and a half thousand people to draw on in addition to your customer service agents as well. In my mind Twelpforce is still one of the best examples of social or a socially-designed program that really understood the characteristics of social and it gave a great insight into how a knowledge base could be brought to life and its people, not in a system.

If we move forward to a couple of months now to the sixth of July 2009, Dave Carroll published United Breaks Guitars on YouTube and this is probably one of the most well-known examples of the customer hitting back at the big face of an organization, in this case, United. I would really encourage you go onto YouTube just type in United breaks guitars and look at that video. It’s probably one of the most famous videos when you’re talking about social customer care.

United had broken Dave’s guitar. He was a musician, and he was on a flight and he was on his way to a gig. When he looked out the window, and he saw the guitar was being thrown around by the air staff, it fell and it broke. The saga went on for a year before he resorted to publishing the video. He did everything he could for a year to try and get an apology and United just to pay for the cost of fixing the guitar. For that year, United remained silent. They refused to acknowledge the part they played. So in the end, Dave thought ‘what can I do, here I am a budding musician, I don’t have a lot of money.’ So he thought ‘I’m going to create a video’ and in the end he actually created three videos. This is the first of those three and the most famous.

He even gave you the opportunity to appear in the video. But they didn’t reply at all. But Dave’s story is typical of many customers who have come up against these big organizations which refused to engage or to communicate. And for many of these organizations Dave was simply a number, a part of that statistical tolerance that companies have for what they consider being an acceptable number of complaints they receive. Dave is no longer even a person he’s just a number. Many people would have given up but not Dave and almost 10 years on that one video has over 18 million views and it’s still increasing.

So it’s now April 2010 and an ash cloud is over Iceland and it brought flights to a standstill over Europe. Thousands of passenger flights were delayed and cancelled and KLM, the Dutch airline realize the power of social to communicate and share information from that event.

They embraced social and they’ve gone on to probably become one of the most talked about socially aware companies. They get social right. So if you’re just starting out or a few years in or even if you’ve been doing social for a number of years, have a look at KLM and what they do.

KLM experimented; they tried different things. One of the things they did was they published their social SLA s or response times on their Twitter and Facebook pages. It was automatically updated every few minutes. And so you can see anything — that the SLA could be anything from a few minutes to a few hours so they weren’t frightened of showing the SLA. For a lot of companies who talk about being customer centric, being transparent, even to get them to publish their SLAs is a huge challenge. KLM embraced it and they did it. They one of the best exponents of realizing the inherent power of social, to not only help people but to also publicize the fact. And their brand of social weaves together customer service and PR into a seamless whole.

If we keep staying in 2010, it’s the year that Twitter launch promoted tweets. Three years later from Twitter launching their promoted tweets on the third of September 2013 something unexpected happened. @HVSVN tweeted British Airways about his lost luggage and after a day of getting nowhere he eventually resorted to purchasing a promoted tweet. So when Twitter came up with the idea of promoted tweets, they were thinking that this is what companies are going to do — to keep their tweets at the top of their Twitter feed. But what happened with @HVSVN is he got so sick and tired of the fact that British Airways was just seemingly not doing anything that he bought a promoted tweet. You can see the tweet here ‘Don’t fly British Airways their customer service is horrendous’.

So @HVSVN, he didn’t have a big following, instead of just a few people seeing it because he bought a promoted tweet and continued to pay for it until the situation resolved, his tweet was seen by not just a few people of thousands of people.

And if you go onto Google and you do a Google search for @HVSVN and what happened with British Airways, if you look you can see the whole thread of what went on. And it’s just a catalog of how not to respond in this type of situation. Neither Twitter nor British Airways expected a customer to pay for a promoted tweet to make a complaint and this event even gave rise to a new word ‘complaintvertising’.

The last one I want to look to is O2. It’s the European cell phone provider. O2 has been a part of the social Customer Care space since June 2008, a genuine early adopter. They’ve had time to understand the type of social customer care they want to provide. They’ve been through their social media crises. But what I want to focus on is a service that they launched in December 2013 called Tweetserve.

Tweetserve in my mind like Best Buys’ Twelpforce is one of the few times a company has really thought about the characteristics of social and designed a service built from social up. As Esteban Kolsky, a commentator on customer service and CRM and social customer care, has observed very few companies have implemented socially aware or social centric processes instead using the traditional processes and a hodgepodge of models to integrate data flows.

So O2 has not simply adopted, what many companies do, an existing program and just put on Twitter. They had actually thought about it and tweets have enable their customers who signed up to the program to automatically receive information about their account via direct messages on Twitter.

And there was a set of nine preset hashtags, including #charges, #minutes, #office. So all you have to do is DM to one of those hashtags and you get an automatic response to the hashtag. Even though the service was still quite rudimentary but for me it sets the example of the challenge for more companies to really consider the characteristics of social and then try to identify those service drivers, which can potentially be addressed by dealing with them in a socially aware or social centric way.

And I think, often all this really not that many examples where companies have really thought about social and said, how are we going to actually create a service or a social Customer Care response mechanism that really thinks about it with social in mind.

So if we quickly review these key events between 2008 and 2013 it becomes apparent that a number of common themes emerge within social Customer Care

Transparency
Openness
Experimentation
Mobility
Immediacy
Empathy

I’m just going to look at three of these over the next few minutes.

These are just trying to get to give you a bit more of a field, some of the characteristics of social customer care. There’s a lot more. But as I said, I’m just going to look at instant gratification, decide your mobile first, and something called the witness factor.

Immediacy

So if we start with instant gratification. I’m just going to start off with a few quotes, just to give you a sense of where I’m coming from with this. So, in the words of Chris Saad, Head of Product, Developer Platform, Uber, “You press a button and something shows up and fills your need”.

Robert Colvile in his book, The Great Acceleration, he writes “The logic of the on-demand, instant gratification economy is that consumers will reward services that offer them what they want, when they want it, and punish those that don’t or can’t”.

And I love this last one from Reid Hoffman co-founder of LinkedIn — “You jump off a cliff and you assemble an airplane on the way down”.

And I think that really captures some spirit of social that we’ve seen over the last 10 years or so. One of the defining characteristics of social is this sense of speed or immediacy and wrapped up in that is a sense of convenience.

It’s the idea of I wanted now in this moment. And if you can’t give it to me, we remember back to the clean check the clue train Manifesto, I’m not going to wait around. I’m going to either find the solution I need, the answer I need elsewhere. In this day and age of simply make it or build my own solution, social was instrumental in breaking down the barriers to entry in terms of building your own solutions that United and British Airways didn’t pay attention to this and Dave Carolyn and @HVSVN came up with their own solutions. Those companies were caught out to speed, and the agility required by organizations to adapt to the changing landscape. Speed is critical to a company’s future survival.

But if we think about speed and its impact in terms of how people complain, then what social has done is to condense the time between the event that triggered the complaint and the complaint being made. If you complain 40 years ago you were talking days before you might get a response. But in the last 40 years that response time, due to advances in technology, has decreased to two minutes or even seconds.

Sometimes, when you’re designing a complaint experience. Notice, I use the word experience here rather than transaction. Are you recognizing the importance of the moment in which the experience takes place? The experience takes place in this moment on this channel. And so the idea is that the customer expects that the resolution is also going to take place in this moment, and in this channel. But in terms of how you’re designing that experience because at the end of the day, it is an experience. Are you designing it with a legacy mindset or a social one?

The sense of speed or immediacy has much to do with the rise of the ubiquitous smartphone and how it has changed the dynamics of customer service. The smartphone represents that sense of instant gratification of being in the moment and it highlights a shift, and I think of customer service, from being bounded in a physical place to one that can literally take place anywhere at any time.

Mobility

I’m now going to move on to the idea of mobile first. When I talk about this idea of mobile first, I’m not really talking about the physical object that is a smartphone; I’m talking about a mindset, an approach or a way of thinking.

Social in my mind is forcing organizations to change their perspective. This is a much more profound change for an organization — the shift to a more responsive type of customer service requires a different model than the one we have today, which really emerged out of the automotive assembly lines of the 1920s.

When I talk about a more responsive type of customer service, I’m not talking about some kind of passive, reactive service model. I’m not talking about proactive or a more proactive model either. I’m talking about a model that’s far more in tune, in sync with the behaviors and motivations of its customers that immediately begs questions — How well do you really understand your customers? If as various studies have shown that if we look at Gen Z, somebody’s born after 1995, they typically use Snapchat or Messenger. They’ve got 2 to 5 screens open at any time they use to curating and sharing content. So when you design your social customer care experience, you are designing with that in mind, because that is today’s future, if we look at a technology like the smartphone through the lens of consumer for a moment, rather than a corporate one, we can see how it’s fundamentally changed over the generations.

As in this table shows from a choice to something that is now an inextricable part of me. Smartphone, my smartphone, has almost become a gateway to my own life. It’s not separate or distinct from me. It’s an integral part of who I am and how I interact with those around me. It’s a part of my identity. Now my smartphone, the apps that I download onto them says as much about me as the clothes I wear, the shoes I buy, the food I eat. My smartphone is inextricably interwoven into my life. And it only takes us, to realize the importance of it, if I leave my phone at home or if heaven forbid if I actually lose it the panic, the intense intake of breath, the loss of breath at the enormity of what’s just happened. The loss I feel from losing thousands of irreplaceable archived moments of my life, even if those moments are any pictures of lots of food that I’ve taken over the years, but it’s that real sense of loss.

So it’s really important, I know I’m laboring this point, that when you design your social customer care who you designing it for. Are you designing it for Gen X, Y, Z, baby boomers, millennials — who you got in mind? Are you thinking about their motivations and their behaviors or are you actually thinking about your legacy systems, the processes, and the workarounds that will drive it? It really matters now.

Social customer cares is challenging organizations to question and examine the way they’ve always done things and it begs the question — Is this as good as it could be?

So I just want to move on to this idea now it’s the last characteristic that I’m going to look at, which is the witness factor or this idea of the witness factor. In 2013, Dr Natalie Petouhoff started talking about this idea and she called it the witness factor. In her own words, she says “I wanted something that encapsulated the fact that for the ﬁrst time in history—how a company treats their customers is publically and permanently displayed for customers (current, past, and potential) as well as competitors to see. This online “inking” of the customer’s experience is affecting every aspect of business.”

This idea of inking is an interesting one. It implies that on social when a customer complains there’s a permanent record, not only of the complaint, but importantly how the company responds to it. It remains there for all to see. If you if you think back to Dave Carroll and United breaks guitars, it was obvious United didn’t respond, and that’s just as telling as the 18 million views, people who have already seen that video.

People as long as they were willing to take part in the life cycle of that complaint in a sense we’d all become willing voyers able to sit back and watch or take part with self-righteous indignation that any number and variety of corporate wrongdoings. So in a sense, the complaint itself took on a whole new life of its own. In the past, complaints were private but now in this changing paradigm people who had nothing to do with that complaint could now add to it, perpetuate it, give it a new lease of life, a new sense of purpose like to bring it back to life. Actually, complaining almost became a a shared activity of like-minded people.

You can even scale complaints and if enough people gotten involved, you can turn it into a crisis. But these crises are also part of that learning experience that a company needs to go through. Not that companies would necessarily agree with going through it. What social did for companies brave enough to do so in leveling the playing field, it also gave them the right of reply.

What mattered to consumers was the manner in which companies chose to respond because it was that manner of response to actually shone a torch onto the soul of a company. Companies that got social and understood their customers prospered, those that didn’t, struggled. And that struggle still goes on today for many companies. I think this is a convenient point to shift attention to the challenges facing companies today 10 years on from that first week sent by Frank Eliason in April 2008.

Many companies really have embraced the change brought about by social but others are still having their own internal squabbles about it, still debating the benefits of Twitter, who owns it, still figuring out the business case, the ROI, all the while their customers just continuing to tweet and post on Facebook.

So moving on, what I wanted to do now is is look at today’s challenges. I’m just going to choose agent literacy and identity to try to provide a little more insight around those two areas. So let’s kick off with agent literacies.

Agent Literacies

Howard Rheingold, an American critic, a writer and a teacher talks about five social media literacies necessary to survive in the digital age. These are —

Attention
Participation
Collaboration
Network awareness
Critical consumption

If we play his idea of digital literacy is to social customer care and in particular service agents, that for me, one of the biggest challenges is how do organizations create a space for their social customer care agents to provide a level of service that recognizes inherent challenges and tensions that social customer care exposes within the organization. But what do I mean by this? Organizations who are trying to find a way to scale social but realize that the reality is far more challenging to deliver. To balance the need for empathy and openness on the one hand, volume and efficiency on the other. And the two do not always sit easily side by side. Note, it requires an agent that’s courageous, proactive, and curious, an agent that’s confident in the scope, humble in the application, or the agent who recognizes that a fine line exists between service triumph a PR disaster.

But where’s that dichotomy likely? How many organizations are comfortable empowering their agents to play in this type of sandbox. Equally, how many agents themselves are comfortable and willing to take this on as well. For me, what’s critical is the degree to which an organization, not only understands why it wants to do social customer care but also the degree to which it understands itself, its inner voice and then doing the type of social customer care it wants to provide for its customers and agents.

Training is a critical part of this but so too is going on this journey from being social customer care novice to carrying the scars of the social customer care crisis on your Twitter feed.

Aleks Krotoski in her book ‘Untangling the Web’ writes about this idea of the online self and the need for experimentation. She talks about settling into an accurate definition of the self, which requires trying on a lot of inappropriate identities and making a lot of mistakes again and again by stumbling and falling and getting up again, we refine ourselves into something that we eventually become contend with.

And it’s my belief that organizations must go through this ongoing period of discovery and experimentation in order to understand the brand of social customer care they want to provide. It may take a number of years of stumbling and falling before that sense of innate confidence and humility comes to bear, but that journey is a necessary part and realization eventually comes that social customer care is not a tech play but it’s a cultural one.

In the last bit of this webinar, I want you to keep in the back of your mind the idea of the importance of organizational culture in your social customer care journey. We’re going to have another quick poll now.

I just like you to think about this question: What do you consider is the most important aspect of getting social customer care right for your customer? Is it sorting out the customer’s problem quickly, delighting, wowing your customer, making it easy for your customer to find the answer to their problem, or ensuring your agents can demonstrate empathy?

Okay, so give that a go. I’ll give you another just another few seconds.

Perhaps if we stop it there and just having a look; there’s no real answer to this. As such, there’s no right or wrong. And I think, and I’ll say the winner, but it’s not a clear winner, is make it easy for your customer to find the answer to their problem and actually this ties in with, there’s some research that was done recently by Gartner and they look at this idea of effort and they were looking at it because for so many years we’ve been thinking we should be delighting or wowing our customers. And what they found was the impact that comes from delighting or wowing your customer in terms of say loyalty is not as great as if you just make it as effortless for them as possible in, to get them to find the answer quickly. Don’t make them have to repeat the problem over and over again to a number of different agents.

Thank you for sharing your answers there and just going to move on to the last couple of sections here.

Looking ahead

Now before I wrap up this; I suppose what we’ve seen that, of the last couple of years there’s no doubt that I think, from my point of view, the biggest impact of social customer care has come from messaging, like Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat. Between them, these three messaging apps, serve over 3.8 billion users worldwide, which is staggering, considering the world’s population is around 7.5 billion people. That’s an incredible number.

But what’s interesting about messaging apps, is the relationship that seems to be emerging where social customer care for many years, as I referred to earlier, companies wrestled with trying to scale social and the terms scalable intimacy arose in 2009 where it was pointing to a more intimate type of relationship between the customer, the organization which through social could be scaled. However, social customer care never quite deliver the ability to scale, and generational preferences aside, it never impacted traditional service channels like the telephone or email in a way that many pundits thought it might. Who remembers predictions that social would sound the death knell of a contact center. It never happened.

But I think, with messaging, we may see a greater impact in terms of actually what customer service and social customer service moving forward might look like. I recently saw a tweet describing how the use of Facebook Messenger for a particular company has increased from 20% to 80% of all of their service volume. That as a result of companies being able to remove a phone number from their website in the same way that in 2018 Twitter highlighted the existing service model was outmoded. So messaging is having the same impact today.

If anything, the rise of messaging as a dominant communication channel in the social space signals the biggest shift to come in terms of current status quo within customer service. No recent conference highlights some statistics that we’re seeing in terms of WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. 16 billion WhatsApp messages are sent every day and between April 2017 and September 2018 there’s a fivefold increase in the use of Facebook Messenger for business from 2 billion messages sent per month 10 billion a month. Quite honestly, messaging seems a simple proposition to email or the telephone for consumers. For many, these apps are already on their phone. I don’t need to go to a website. I don’t need to find your phone number or your email address and I don’t need to explain the same situation to a number of different agents two, three, four times. As organizations may debate the benefits of creating experiences that delight or minimize effort, messaging is just happening and there’s a lot less effort to it. So why as a consumer wouldn’t I use it? Where does that leave social customer care, 10 years on from the first tweet being sent by Frank Eliason?

In a community that actually leaves me feeling more positive about the future of social customer care than I have for many years, do I think social customer care will take over the world? No, absolutely not. But it was never going to in the same way that messaging isn’t going to be the end of the contact center either. What they claim to have is a type of service that will change, is changing, needs to change and social customer care 10 years ago was that catalyst for change. It didn’t intentionally set out to disrupt, challenge organizations to examine the way they communicated and engaged with their customers and internally with colleagues. It didn’t set out to destabilize and decentralize customer service, didn’t set up, challenge traditional organizational hierarchies, norms and ways of thinking. These were simply or just byproducts of the shift that was being brought about by social.

The journey that each organization undertakes to provide social customer care, it’s not about learning a new technology. It’s a cultural one, often companies will start our thinking it’s all about the technology. But they will, over time, realize that, it has a fundamental impact on the way you run your company, the way you work with each other, social influences.

It has all the influence and social has on the company it is huge, resulting in the fact that, in practical terms, some companies are now looking to social more and more, taking away phone numbers, for example. But social also cajoles people in the organization to work in different ways to question. I guess the complacency, the assumptions, the habits of the status quo, not for the sake of it, but because there’s something better, more compelling, and that is a better, more compelling version of itself, ourselves.

Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger point two different types of service model, a model that is relevant for today’s consumer, reflecting their behaviors and motivations, there will still be phone calls and videos but perhaps not as we know it today. I think there likely will be AI and bots. It may even be Blockchain. We can’t really go through a webinar without mentioning blockchain these days and organizations, in my mind, They have all the parts they require. But what they don’t have is the blueprint for how those pieces fit together. And that’s the journey that’s taking place. Now as Frank Rose said, when I quoted him at the beginning of the webinar, “we’re in one of those 50-year old windows. When an entirely new medium is being created, and no one knows what to do with it. All you can do is throw stuff out there and experiment”.

So thank you for your time and good luck with your experimenting.