What I mean is, the idea that Twitter and social media can, and should, be used to enhance our service offerings will almost certainly fail if we just think of it as a service team challenge.

Let’s look at the math.

If you look at an average service team, let’s say a call center, they receive calls that generally meet three criteria:

- Definable: a discrete problem that can be identified, discussed, and either resolved or not resolved

- Significant: enough of a problem that a person saw fit to pick up the phone, wait in a call queue, and bring it to your attention

- Solvable: a problem for which one can generally visualize a defined, near-term solution

If the problem is outside of that criteria set, we will likely not bother phoning support as they will not be able to help us.

Given these criteria, which I would call the “something went wrong” set of problems, we staff our support centers. Rarely do the teams in these support centers find themselves lacking work, and they are often very strapped for resources, as we manage the budgets for the call centers to maximize utilization and minimize costs.

Then, however, if you look at the set of problems that might surface in social media you see that these three criteria are not met.

- Definable: a complaint can surface without being discrete, or naturally resolvable. General dissatisfaction with airline flight delays, as an example.

- Significant: a negative Tweet about a company or its products requires less effort than calling a service center, so the bar of significance is much lower

- Solvable: many problems that are discussed in social media are not inherently easy to solve, and success may mean guidance, coaching, or training, as much as technical support

I’m not in any way suggesting that these are not important problems, just that they are a much bigger universe of problems than the problems that make their way to today’s call centers. This is the “something failed to go right” set of problems.

So, if we are to staff our service teams to proactively reach out and deal with the “something failed to go right” set of problems, rather than reactively deal with juse inbound “something went wrong” problems, we are dealing with many more problems. Whereas there may be some mild efficiency gains from connecting in an online environment, I would guess that these gains are far outweighed by the increase in size of the problem set.

Where will this budget come from? My suggestion is Marketing. I have long believed that social media is forcing marketers to think of their overall brand experience, including product and service realities, rather than just the visuals like logos, when they are considering brand. Rather than set your service team up with Twitter handles and send them an article on Frank Eliason and the Comcast Cares team, proactive marketing organizations should realize that this new approach to service opens up a much broader universe of problems that must be addressed. Doing so will have a significant positive impact on your company’s brand, but may require a significant investment in service people.

Next time you allocate marketing budget to “brand”, think about whether the best investment in brand that your marketing team can to is to hire an extra few people for the services team and start tackling more of the “something failed to go right” problems.

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I was asked to write a response to this question, “In what ways have metrics evolved with the increase in digital B2B
marketing? Suggest one ROI metric that you have found to be very
effective.”

Read ClickInsights: What ROI metric should B2B marketers use in this digital marketing era?

Here’s my response….

The use of the Internet, mobile and other interactive channels has
certainly increased the number of leads marketers receive today. Many
organizations spend thousands of dollars each month on search marketing
to take advantage of this increase.  

This increase, however, causes many marketers to focus on the wrong
metrics. In order to generate leads marketers have to know how to use
the analytics. Many marketers focus on conversion rates of specific
phrases or banners and are ignoring other valuable information. While
conversion rate is one way to measure the effectiveness of a search
phrase, for instance, it can be extremely misleading. 

If marketers are spending a lot on search marketing and not capturing
visiting organizations (both those that convert and the many more that
don’t), they are making decisions based only on half-truths. And they
are probably routing dollars toward phrases and ad creative that appear
to perform better but in reality are really just clogging the marketing
database and sales pipeline.

The metrics of digital marketing is starting to slowly evolve.
Marketers are starting to realize that sales people care very little
about the cost of the leads we generate. What they really care about is
how many of those leads will actually become viable sales
opportunities in their sales pipeline.

For this reason, I think cost-per-opportunity measurements are the most
effective metrics. The most common metric, cost per lead, is irrelevant
unless we can answer other fundamental questions first, “What is our
rate of lead acceptance (a.k.a. sales pursuit) into the sales pipeline”
and then “What is the cost per opportunity?” Cost-per-opportunity is
the one metric that can help you understand how well your sales team
accepts and pursues leads.  Ultimately, it shows if your leads are
actually helping our sales team sell and if marketers are positively
contributing to their pipeline.

Cost-per-lead models drive down the cost of each lead by generating
more leads, which is good if the quality does not suffer. However, this
is rarely the case since there are a finite number of high quality
sales ready leads in your target market at any given time.

The real question is, “Are these leads helping our sales team sell more and will these leads become profitable customers?”
 
These are real-world metrics that every marketer should track in their lead generation program:

• Number of inquiries? (people who raised their hands)
• Number of leads? (qualified as “sales-ready”)
• Number of opportunities? (leads that move to pipeline)
• Number of closed sales? (generated from marketing leads)

If marketers know those metrics they can start to track the following key performance indicators:

• Inquiry to lead ratio (cost-per-lead) – this isn’t a enough
• Lead to opportunity ratio (cost-per-opportunity)
• Lead to pipeline revenue ratio (cost-per-pipeline revenue)
• Lead to sale (win) ratio (cost-per-closed sale)
  A value driven mindset requires leaders and marketers to plan and
  budget for the long term and to take a more holistic view that goes
  beyond cost-per-lead budgets.

What other metrics have your found are important to track for tracking your lead generation results?