Earlier this week I published Part 1 of the interview with Ben Hong, Sr. Mgr. Technical Services, Global Customer Care and Digital Home Group for Logitech.The first half of the interview gave you a brief introduction to Ben and his team at Logitech.

This is the final portion of this written interview.

Part Two: People, Process, & Tools- Logitech with Ben Hong

What kind of training is required for team members who are active online? And, does your company have a social media policy in place? Can you tell us a little bit about these efforts and how they help (or hinder ) the team.

We train our team on how to be online ambassadors and effective writers for blogs, micro-blogs and knowledge bases (SEO). So far, training has been extremely important to maintaining consistency and control. Without it there would be chaos. Currently, the online ambassador training provides our employees with knowledge of the social media policy. It’s helpful, not a hindrance.

If you could share your favorite tips, best practices, lessons learned or social media must have – what are they?

• Look before you leap….have a framework and plan before you get started.
• Start with social monitoring. It is incredible what you learn your customers are talking about and provides critical insight about where your early investments should be made.
• If you are managing a social media program for customer service you must be social internally as much as you are externally. Key learning’s and shared insights complement VoC programs.

There are many tools for tweeting, listening, and overall participating in social media – which ones do you use either personally or for your work?

Co-tweet, Radian6, TweetDeck, backtype, delicious, FriendFeed, NetVibes, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, WordPress, Yelp, Flickr, StumbleUpon, Digg, Google Buzz, ShareThis, Technorati

Whether you have your own community on your “dot com” or you participate in existing social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Get Satisfaction etc) – what do you do to build the community and encourage your community members to become ambassadors for the brand?

We have a reputation model in the community that helps us and community member identify and recognize key contributors. Our Logi Legends and Gurus have a close relationship with my team and we work side by side with them in the community. To help them with their work we often send them our products.

Do you reward community members for the work they do? If so, how?

Nothing formal … yet.

When helping customers in social channels do you reply publicly or privately? Does it differ by channel? Discuss how you make this decision.

We reply both publicly and privately. If we are managing a customer escalation in our forums or on Twitter we respond publicly but ask for specific information to be provided privately. We do this to protect customer information. Otherwise we respond publicly to all else.

Is YouTube a part of your support efforts? How do you use this and other video channels for customer service and support? Do you create the videos or is another team responsible for these? Do you engage with the YouTube community? How do you measure success for your video efforts?

Our plans for YouTube are in development. We plan to publish 1-2 videos per month.

Many companies have gone through some highly visible social media gaffs (Dominos, Southwest); while others have seen offline issues go viral due to social media (Graco recalls, Toyota recalls). In your opinion how should a company deal with crisis online? Do you have a process in place that helps you determine next steps in the case of your own “crisis”?

Responses should be quick, open and honest. To that end, Logitech was put to the test recently when the US National Labor Committee reported on Chinese labor issues back in April of this year. Joseph Sullivan, our Sr. VP of Worldwide Operations, responded with a letter to the committee and we posted in online. In his letter which he shared, he stated the plain truth. Thankfully we had severed the relationship with the offending factory, however, he was clear to state when and why. It was met with positive comments and response.

What is next for you and your team? What are you excited about today?

Twitter enhancements, YouTube and Facebook integration are on our roadmap. Right now I am working on Radian6 setup and configuration.

What is your favorite social media tool, network or other for personal use?

LinkedIn. I was an early adopter and have seen how it evolved. It helps me keep up-to-date with colleagues, recruit, participate in communities of interest/practice and share what I am working on.

Thanks to Ben for taking the time to share!

Often when we talk about social media in business we talk about “social media marketing” which is a term I dislike for various reasons -one reason being that it supposes it only lies in one department rather than an integral part of how we communicate with customers, employees, and stakeholders.

One area that should be part of the grand scheme when it comes to social media is customer service.  Today many companies are finding ways to connect with their customers directly via the web, often offering support and help. Since this is a focus in my work I wanted to highlight the subject on my blog.  Through my work I have had the opportunity to chat with many others that are using social media for support. I have learned a lot from them and want to share some of these conversations through a short series of interviews. My hope is that you will find this information helpful in building your online customer care communities.

In order to facilitate these posts I sent a series of questions to a few folks and they were kind enough to respond. The first interview is with Ben Hong, Senior Manager Technical Services, Global Customer Care and Digital Home Group at Logitech. Due to the number of questions I have broken this post into two posts. Part two will be published later this week.

Part One: Customer Care Online First Steps- Logitech with Ben Hong

Can you describe your career path that brought you to where you are today?

It has been one focused on creating the best possible experience for customers by implementing service innovations and managing for high performance.

How would you describe a typical work day?

Busy, busy and busy…so it usually starts even before I leave for the office by reading and responding to email, tweets and Facebook. When I arrive, I try meet with each member of my team individually to discuss projects/tasks and provide the team with feedback or direction.  The rest of the day is spent managing programs which normally involve participating or chairing meetings, preparing and delivering presentations, briefs and reports. For the last few months I have also been spending time throughout the day monitoring our discussion forums, Twitter, Facebook and Blogs. Putting into action our social media support program is what excites me about work these days.

What responsibilities fall into your department or team? Where does you team fall in the organizational structure ( eg. customer service? communication?)

My team and I lead social media, knowledge management, VoC and training initiatives within the Global Customer Care and Digital Home Group organizations of Logitech.

How many people work on your team?  What are you able to accomplish with this size team in the social space – e.g channels? quantity of daily responses?

My team is made up of two products specialists, curriculum designer, and various contractors that provide technical writing, training and video content.

• Blogs – We write one Tips and Tricks blog post each week for the corporate blog and respond to on average 2-3 comments each day.
• Customer Forums – We monitor customer forums from 20-30 responses per day for the team.
• Internal Forums – We monitor internal discussion forums for our customer care agents and respond daily to 10-20 posts per day.
• Twitter – We co-tweet with marketing/PR teams and respond to 2-5 customer care or technical support questions each day.
• Social Monitoring – We just acquired Radian6 as social monitoring tool. However, we have been using a variety of free tools to track blogs, twitter, product reviews and other social media. We typically report once a week on social media trends/buzz for our Harmony Remote Controls products.
• Videos – Currently creating prototype videos for publication on YouTube and Viddler. Our plan is to publish 1-2 videos per month.

Social Media plays a large part of your role, but typically people associate the use of Social Media with Marketing, what are the biggest benefits realized by your business due to your team’s participation in social media for customer service?

We are early on in our adoption of social media for customer service, month three. There are two early benefits to our participation in social media responding to and managing negative customer experiences, learning more about our customers through social monitoring. Our long term goals are tied to the mission of delivering an engaging online customer service experience.

How did you initially convince the business that engaging with customers via social channels for customer service was the right strategy?

It’s a work in-progress, but we asked to create an incubator team. Our chain of command from CMO to VP to Directors have all been extremely supportive and eager to see the program grow.

Generally, customers don’t care what department you work in when they connect online. Do you work closely with other internal departments to integrate social media communication efforts? If so, which ones?

Absolutely. We work closely with marketing, sales, PR, CX, QA and product/software engineering teams. Our marketing and PR social media programs are more mature and we have learned a lot by partnering with them.

There are many social channels where your customers will engage with each other – how do you decide which social spaces you will participate in?

Given where we are with the development of our program we have focused primarily on mass social media applications and networks. Social monitoring tools will help us to decide if and where we move next. For us it is critical to look before we leap.

As social channels grow, and customers come to expect businesses to respond online to their requests – there has been a lot of talk about scaling efforts. Is this a concern for your team? If it is how will you scale to meet the growing business? If not, why?

Yes, scale and resourcing is a critical part of our plan, which is why we have decided to take a measured approach to building out the program. Currently we have a small team, with a roadmap for adding resources.

How do you measure the success of your social media efforts?

Success is and will be tied to our corporate and departmental goals. So, NPS and cost will be key measures of our success.

Do you have KPIs for your team (for example time to response) if so can you share what these are and why they were chosen?

We are working on them.

Watch for part two…

In part two I ask Ben questions around the people, process and tools he is using to accomplish the work they are doing online for customer service.

When I joined the workforce e-mail was pretty standard as a method for communication and the Internet was commonly used for research purposes. But, in the early days of email many business owners and managers did not allow e-mail in the offices for fear that their employees would not get any work done, they were concerned over how to manage, store and capture e-mailed information, and of course they grappled with security issues surrounding e-mail. Today, business owners and managers have realized that e-mail has increased the speed of business communication, and concerns over data capture and management as well as security have largely been overcome.

Social Networks Stats and Facts

There is a new tool that has caused much consternation and hand-wringing for IT Managers and business owners – social networks and social media.  A new report by Nielson puts social networks ahead of e-mail in online activities according to a recent article in the Globe and Mail.  Neilson found that 1 in 11 minutes online is spent on a social network or blog site, bringing social networks and blogs to the fourth most popular activity following search, general interest portals and software manufacturers. More telling is the growth seen by social networks during the period of the study (Dec 2007-Dec 2008) which saw between 1.4 and 1.9% growth for the top three activities versus an incredible 5.4% for social networking.

There are 150 Million active Facebook users and a recent research study from Pew Inernet shows that 11% of online adults say they have used the social network Twitter. A Netpop report shows that 7 Million people in the U.S. are contributing to content online and that social networking sites have grown a whopping 93% since 2006!

Despite the growth in the use of social media and social networks specifically, many corporations have decided to bury their head in the sand and hope it goes away, much like they did when e-mail came on the scene. Instead of facing the issues these companies have decided to simply block employees access.

Blocking Access

The concerns for social media are similar to those in the 1990s when e-mail entered the workplace: productivity, data capture, privacy and security. The approach the same – block, refuse access, refer employees to old technology (oddly in the case of social media it is often e-mail!). But this is short-sighted, unrealistic and a passive approach that will eventually (if not already!) be seen as anti-productive.

Let’s look at the concerns companies have regarding social media:

Productivity: This has to be the most ridiculous of the reasons. 1) If employees want to be slack off all they need to do is go stand by someone else’s desk, go for a smoke break, chat at the water cooler, close their eyes and have a snooze. Let’s face it if you can’t trust your employees are doing their job…then you didn’t hire the right people or they are bored, unchallenged or unempowered. 2) If employees are allowed to use social media they can actually become more productive! (More on this in next post)

Data Capture/Management: Many social networks are easily followed, stored and saved. People have clearly moved beyond this issue with e-mail – and this can be accomplished with Social Networks. Ownership can be overcome by businesses as well by contracting space on sites for block of space that would be under control of the company as suggested by Salesforce.com precedent. Another alternative is to set up internal IM systems, social networks and Wikis for use with Internal Communication. While this does not help customer and vendor communication it can allow employees some use of tools that will help productivity while maintaining data security and capture.

Privacy and Security: This is a biggie, and closely related to data capture and management. Panic has ensued amongst business owners with regards to data privacy and corporate secrets. And, of course it can be an issue as more and more employees spend time on social networks discussing their lives (which includes work) with Facebook status changes, LinkedIn profiles, and of course the tweets on Twitter. Companies obviously want to limit and retain close control over sensitive company information, at the same time they also must find ways to engage and communicate directly with their customers (or risk losing them). As social media becomes increasingly interconnected and more customers EXPECT companies to be active on social networks it will become inadequate to simply block social media sites and use URL filtering. Instead companies can help alleviate the privacy and security (and avoid potential lawsuits) issues by creating policies and educating employees on safe data handling. (Note: There are also IT tools available on the market to help monitor, examine historic patterns of leaks and discover and eliminate malware that have in the past been issues with some Web 2.0 sites). Privacy and security is an issue whether your employees are using social media or not – but a easy to understand policy, and a central contact for questions related to privacy and security can help companies avoid future issues.

Net Generation at Work

Companies that decide to limit or block use of social media are not only unnecessarily limiting their communication with their customers through online methods, they are also forfeiting the chance to discover new tools for collaboration within the organization. By closing the company off from social media they are also driving away younger employees who are looking to work for companies whose culture fits their life and ideals.  Don Tapscott in his book Grown Up Digital says the “Net gener [age 18-32] arrives at work, eager to use his social networking tools to collaborate and create and contribute to the company. For starters he’s shocked to find that the company’s technological tools are more primitive than the ones he used in high school…And they are surprised, perhaps naively, to learn that corporations have antiquated ways of working.” These same Net Generation workers can, if given a chance, show companies how to collaborate in new ways more effectively and efficiently. But, these workers don’t stick around long according to Tapscott – they usually only last two years before moving on. Which is too bad since Tapscott’s research shows that those companies that embrace the Net Gen norms perform better than those that don’t..

This generation, of which I am a part of (well I missed it by a month…), view life and work different from other generations according to Tapscott – and that view is defined by 8 characteristics or norms: Freedom, Customization, Scrutiny, Openness, Fun/Entertainment in life and work, Collaboration, Speed, Innovation.

Tapscott definies these characteristics as they relate to work (summary):

Freedom: Net Geners expect to mix work and their personal lives, and this includes choosing when and where they work. They want flexible hours, the ability to telecommute, and other services that make their lives easier.

Customization: They want employers to treat them as individuals and this means giving them learning and development opportunities that are right for them. They want an adaptable work environment, job descriptions that are project based and customized, flexible benefits,  and more frequent discussions on their contribution to the organization.

Scrutiny: How we search for jobs has changed and how we research the company before we make a change has as well.  According to Grown Up Digital 60% of Net Geners check out a company before accepting a job offer. They want to work for companies that are transparent, share information, and have integrity. Tapscott says: “Young people respond well to management integrity…there is greater loyalty and lower turnover, and employees are more likely to do the right thing.” (For example more likely to get their job done even if they take a break to check Facebook, and more likely to hold company secrets sacred and follow company privacy policy).

Collaboration: Net Geners want to work with other people and collaboration is how they get stuff done. To them the workplace should be less about hierarchies and departmental silos and more about connecting with others to solve a problem. Using social networks, social bookmarking, Wikis, aps like LinkedIn Huddle Workpaces or Virtual worlds (Second Life) to meet, collaborate, plan, and execute.

Fun/Entertainment: Fun and work go hand in hand for this generation – they don’t need to be separate. Cultures that allow employees to have a little fun at work end up with more productive staff. We all need a break before diving back into another round of work – and if surfing on a social network is that little bit of fun – why block it?

Speed: This generation is used to speed and instant responses. Why not? We no longer have to wait for dial-up or snail mail! For Net Geners red tape is frustrating, feedback should be in real-time and bureaucracy can mean doom in the market. They use social media tools such as Wikis and IM to speed up communication within the workplace.

Innovation: This is a fascinating point Tapscott makes: “If video games taught this Net Generation anything, it’s that every problem has seemingly endless solutions” and so this generation is looking for new ways to their jobs, to be innovative in their workplace, to challenge status quo. Many of these young workers bring their knowledge of social media to the work place creating new communication channels, building collaborative work systems, and finding new ways to solve a business problem.

In the End

Social media such as instant messaging, blogging and social networks have gained ground as communication tools outside the workplace by leaps and bounds, and it is only a matter of time before they, like e-mail before them, become necessary and an acceptable part of the work place.  The concerns for productivity,  data management, and security and privacy are valid – however they can be overcome by education, corporate policy and new IT tools. Ultimately, if a company hires good people they will need less process and bureaucracy to police the space – as the employees in an open and empowered culture will be more likely to use social media tools wisely. Through using social media in the workplace employees will find new ways to harness collective knowledge, collaborate, and create ways to communication effectively internally and externally.

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Images from Stocl.xchng (bigevil600, brokenarts, glennpeb)