Fortunately for most businesses, technology is there to help. We now have a myriad of options including blogs and social media to enhance customer support. I recently used both to help my customers while many of my co-workers were on vacation for the holidays.

The first instance was right before the holidays. Everyone was already gone and one of my customers had a very technical question that was outside of my expertise.  Fortunately, I remembered that one of my colleagues had just written a blog post on that very topic.  I sent him the link—problem solved! It’s nice to have so many resources at your fingertips when customers need you to be there 24/7.

The second example involved a campaign we recently ran ultilizing a Twitter hashtag chat.  We had a great session with one of my clients that led to a follow up, face-to-face meeting to dive deeper into the topic.

Now here’s the tricky part: what do you do when your techology arsenal falls short? When the customer wants what the customer wants,  human intervention may be the best recourse. Sometimes good old-fashioned, personal attention (especially in a B2B scenario) is the only way to get the job done. Here’s another scenario that demonstrates that:

On December 28th in the early afternoon, I got an email from a client who wanted to talk about a big project.  I needed to get all the details.  Fortunately, I was able to drop what I was doing to meet with the client.  We had a very productive white-boarding session and came up with the solution.  Trying to do this via email a few hours before the holidays would have been difficult, at best.

So here are my “customer service mantras:”

• Use technology to stay abreast of a situation, but be involved in the follow up.
• The simple stuff can be handled via email, but the difficult challenges often require some real human interaction to solve.
• If someone is important enough to be a customer of your business, they are important enough to take care of in person.

Technology is truly an excellent tool to stay in touch with customers and increase engagement and loyalty.  But be cautious of becoming overly dependent on technology when the situation really calls for personal contact with the customer. In each of my examples, the result was increased customer loyalty and engagement because technology was used with discretion.  Staying focused on your goal of making your customers happy will enable you to find the perfect balance between using technology and personal contact.

In conversations with several clients recently, it seems many of us have not taken the time to determine the lifetime value of a customer (CLV). This is business, right? So let’s do it.

Since listening to Jimmy Wales speak recently, I find myself in Wikipedia often. Wikipedia defines CLV as “the net present value of the cash flows attributed to the relationship with a customer.” To someone who isn’t an accountant, the Wikipedia entry for calculating the CLV, can look a little scary—but don’t let that deter you. Worst case: simplify the math and do the exercise. It’s a team exercise, with sales, marketing and accounting all participating.

Once you know that the CLV of a customer is, for example, $100,000, and your goal is to add 10 new customers per year, you can begin to formulate return side of the ROI. I have worked with many organizations where this is more of a ‘gut feel’ than a science (I also know a couple of organizations that are scary good at this), and I am not sure that I am all that comfortable with that approach. However, I also understand that you certainly can’t spend a year trying to get a precise answer to the question. The business needs to keep moving.

There is a lot of conversation right now about doing something in social media because everyone else is there, but if you really want to hone in on where to be and how big of a splash to make, do the math first. It might surprise you how much it informs your decisions. If not CLV, how are you calculating ROI?

1. Integration – how do I integrate data from different places and platforms
2. One Truth – what is the definition of the measurement, or goal
3. Collaboration – how do I get people to work TOGETHER

There has been a lot conversation about email marketing, of course; but also SEO, SEM, CRM, technology integration issues, where social fits in, and so on.  ExactTarget got it right with their theme, ‘The Power of One’.  With the mulitude of options available we make things very complicated very quickly, so the best solution I can provide is to take it one step at a time.  Relax, take a deep breath, take ownership, be the solution – not the problem.  If you take ownership and get the right people involved, marketing, IT, management – these issues aren’t as hard to handle as you may have thought.

The best data I could find was our own internal statistics.  We here at Fusion Alliance are a Solutions Delivery firm; that means we do projects.  We have a quality framework and measure our results for our customers.  Our track record the past two years has been impressive.  98% of projects delivered on time and on budget.  We tend to scope 10-20% of the total development effort for Project Management and 40% for testing as a baseline.  Then comes the tailoring.  There a number of factors that influence these percentages; including complexity of the project, development methodology, client sponsorship, maturity of the technologies involved and so on.

Now on the question of lean.  One customer shared that they are averaging around 4-5% Project Management time and another estimated their overall Project Management component was lower still.  While these are not the numbers that we typically use, they may work, depending upon the factors described. Ultimately, the answer lies in the results.  If you are getting good results, e.g. 98% on time and on budget, no problem. You are doing it right.  However, if you are not, it may be time to consider increasing Project Management and or Testing resources to ensure quality and success. If you outsource software development you still need to manage the projects.  Finding that right balance can be difficult, but if you measure your results you will have the business case you need to adjust accordingly within your business.

Recently I was talking to a colleague about a project we did for a customer where we saved them $500,000 in their SEO marketing budget just by better managing it.  Sometimes I think we rush into technologies, tools etc. because we feel like we HAVE to be there without thinking it through.  It’s important to know what your competition is up to.  Our friends at Walker Information recently had a discussed what it means to truly have a competitive advantage.  Phil makes several good points, but the two I am talking about here are:

1. What’s important to customers
2. Avoid making poor investments

Don’t get me wrong, I love that we are willing to push the envelope, explore, evolve and innovate.  I just want to make sure we know where we are going, or at least have a general idea, before we leave.