The conversation has already begun. Are you a part of it? Building stronger customer relationships in the digital world.

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1 Online Solutions the way we see it The conversation has already begun. Are you a part of it? Building stronger customer relationships in the digital world.

2 How can an inherently open forum be managed? In just six years, Facebook s membership has swollen to 600MM users, a population that would now rank as the world s third largest country. 3.5 billion pieces of content are flowing through social networks every week. The explosion of both commercial- and corporatespecific sites, combined with the existing direct channels of communication have created the need for end-to-end, closed loop customer conversation management. Conversations can now be facilitated, monitored, measured, managed and directed to support a wide variety of business decisions related to advertising, marketing, product development and customer service initiatives. Social media represents a global network of living, breathing real-time relationships with your business. How you manage those relationships depends on how well you hear, understand, interpret and react to what your customers are saying and experiencing in relation to your product or business. It is no longer a choice whether or not to engage with customers in this realm, the conversation has already begun and they are way ahead of you. What path will you take to catch up? In this point of view, Capgemini will explore the ways companies can keep up with the dynamic changes affecting the technology and platforms supporting the social media environment. We ll look at the benefits of outsourcing a managed, integrated social media services solution and discuss the benefits in terms of cost savings, cost deflection and organizational agility. We will also discuss the key elements to consider when choosing a managed social media solution. The power of a cumulative voice. Never before in history have we seen a greater democratization of media. The street not only reports on but also mobilizes and inspires change. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week from the incitement of uprisings to the impact zone of natural disasters, people who have never seen the inside of a newsroom are providing the images, sound bites and video that are defining our times. News organizations from CNN to the BBC are constantly mining social media sites to supplement and enhance their own reporting capabilities. Social media now has the power to change politics, expose injustice, shed light on tragedy and to make or break brands. Social media: A snapshot of risk and opportunity. How much damage can be done to a brand such as Nestlé by organizing people via social media to digitally protest on social media. By using the power of the crowd to create an online campaign against a brand. How much power do two videoposting, cheese-wielding employees have over the reputation of Domino s Pizza, a company with over 125,000 employees? Just ask the majority of previous customers who said they would think twice before ordering again. A Domino s spokesperson, exasperated with how the one incident affected their reputation, said, It s not fair. Fair or not, this is one reality of how quickly social media can impact your business. Risk by the numbers. Customers trust the opinions of peer and expert outlets three to four times as much as claims made in brand sources. Four out of five consumers will go online to verify friends and family product recommendations, and those recommendations are mitigated by negative online information for 68% of consumers and enhanced by online endorsement for 80% of consumers. 1 Amidst the risk lies real opportunity. The fast, low-cost and transparent nature of social media has opened a direct line of communication between you and your customers. That relationship can create new fundamental business, insight and collaboration opportunities. 1 Online Influence Trend Tracker, Cone Inc., June

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4 Where there is opportunity there is revenue. Understanding, interpreting and acting on social media commentary allows companies to up-sell and cross-sell in unprecedented ways. Trust isn t built in a day. An ongoing relationship builds incremental trust over time and allows you to build a more human, emotional connection with your consumer. No organization gets it right every time. People understand fallibility and easily forgive when there is real transparency, admission of mistakes and resolution. Social media, if managed properly, allows companies to achieve favorable perception by acting more quickly, more strategically and being a little more human with their customers. Social media also gives you a platform to manage individual reputation. Focusing on key executives and other individuals in social networks and publishing platforms like blogs, can help strengthen trust and put a more human face on your company. A closed loop of insight results from well-managed social media. Social media can be a robust alternative to traditional research, through critical mass of customers reachable in social networks, and the ongoing commentary before, during and after purchases of your brand. Insights can include consumer price sensitivity through comparison and bid/arbitrage tools. Cost deflection is real and tangible in the social space. An effective approach to social media strategy brings two paths of cost deflection. The first occurs when a business avoids expenses around serious customer product issues, such as product recalls. The second focuses on reducing the number of contacts in the traditional call or contact center. Capgemini has found that a company can significantly reduce the number of contacts received by a call center by addressing an issue in the social media environment. The cost of responding in social space is cheaper than resolving it in a call center and the resolution information can reside on the social media site as a knowledge base for future customers, further reducing potential contacts and costs. Where there is opportunity there is revenue. Understanding, interpreting and acting on social media commentary allows companies to up-sell and crosssell in unprecedented ways. There is also opportunity to better respond to online customer ratings to boost or secure potentially lost revenue. Negative customer ratings can adversely affect sales and slow down the flow of revenue. In some cases, retailers will end a relationship with a company if online ratings fall too low. Using technology tools that monitor customer reviews and ratings, a social media provider can identify falling ratings and work with the company and the retailer to resolve the negative feedback. If an Amazon seller s rating falls below 92% they are eliminated from the site. For a client who sells through Amazon.com, Capgemini worked closely with Amazon to help the client improve its rating from 88% to 96%. Collaboration brings improvement. There is no better way to understand how your product or business is working than through the eyes of your customer. Through better categorization and solicitation of customer feedback, a well-managed social media program can uncover opportunities to engage and collaborate with customers around product and service improvement and development. The challenge of management and investment. It s becoming increasingly clear to most companies that social media should be treated as an enterprise information asset rather than a segment of business relegated to the marketing department. More companies are seeing the value in incorporating social media management into the overall enterprise information map, but the technology used to create social media platforms and the technology used by businesses to monitor and measure customer activity on social networking sites is ever changing. Companies are understandably reluctant to spend internally, knowing the rapidly changing environment could render their efforts, and budgets, obsolete before they get them up and running. Not to mention the chaos and confusion associated with reorganizing to meet he challenges of maintaining multiple relationships with multiple vendors using multiple tools and technologies. The difficulty of organizing around and proactively managing the fluidity of social media interactions requires dedicated focus away from your organization s core competency. 4

5 Online Solutions the way we see it In the long run, the costs to develop and maintain proprietary technology and manage social media interactions are imprudent, but when one in three customers who have had a negative experience is likely to complain via social media, the stakes are too high to sit idle. How will you meet the challenge? The Capgemini point of view: Flexibility and expertise are the answers. In light of the dynamic nature of social media, a flexible, outsourced and fully scalable social media strategy is the best approach for any size company to leverage the social media space. Working with a single provider eliminates the need for companies to reorganize resources to manage disparate vendors and support new technologies every time they change. Most importantly, with the right flexible approach to social media community management, companies also are no longer at risk for technology investments with poor ROI. Instead, the provider vendor takes responsibility for procuring the most current social media monitoring and measuring tools available that align with the company s unique social media strategy as well as managing the myriad of vendor relationships. This efficient distributedcost model can enable companies to stay up to date on social media technology at a fraction of the cost that they would incur if they managed it themselves. Human expertise is as important as technology. A trained, certified and skilled staff is an integral part of any effectively managed solution. A managed solution with this kind of human capability allows a company to focus on building its product or delivering its core service while a proactive and knowledgeable team of specialists provides high-quality service to its customers. Capgemini believes that strategy, technology and delivery expertise must be integral to any managed social media strategy. Our clients have learned that access to a social media consulting practice, up-to-the-minute social media technology as well as broad experience in delivery of managed services, bring the best possible outsourced solutions. Without access to all three, any social media model is incomplete. Listen, analyze, act. Capgemini also believes that the rapid growth of online social media, combined with traditional customer contact channels, presents a critical need for an end-to-end, closed-loop conversation management capability in customer operations management. Benefits of a Managed Social Media Solution Managed Social Media Care Solutions provide flexibility to rapidly change and evolve FORUMS, ETC. LISTENING POST TOOL TEXT ANALYTICS CUSTOMIZED SCORECARD A Managed Solution will allow easy expansion as new social media sites emerge and grow Seamless support of next generation of social media sites Client on new social media sites before competition Our Managed Solution will allow clients to pick Listening Posts dynamically and upgrade/move easily Remove risk when upgrading to new version of software Latest features automatically added to service Text Analytics is critical for leveraging social media data Our tools can combine traditional data sources like surveys to social media conversations to provide detail insights. Customized Scorecard can be continually modified based on the evolving needs of the client On-going evaluation and modification of score card to reflect needs of the client Expanded customized queries A Managed Social Media Solution allows you to focus on social media strategy and reduces the cost of operations

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7 Instead of a bits and pieces approach, we recommend a flexible managed services model that enables companies to easily change and evolve with the social media environment. Instead of a bits and pieces approach, we recommend a flexible managed services model that enables companies to easily change and evolve with the social media environment. For example, if an existing technology tool has not progressed with the changes in social media platforms, the service provider will identify, find and incorporate a new solution that fits with the current social media landscape. As a result, a company can avoid having to reorganize or replace their social media tools and restructure their workflows to fit them. This type of integrated methodology is centered on technology to empower companies to listen, analyze and act with customers all within a flexible, proactive strategy that delivers keen business insight into every customer interaction. Examples of the managed services enabled by social media technology include: Listen/monitor: Identifying, validating and gathering all relevant conversations by creating targeted listening posts across all social media platforms, including sites, blogs, micromedia and forums based on a strong understanding of your business and its customers. Identifying emerging trends or catching repeated customer issues on a near real-time basis by utilizing a global footprint of social media monitoring command centers before they escalate into product recalls or bad publicity for the company. Analyze: Providing analytics with detailed insight into social media conversations, as well as detailed analysis of customer sentiments. It also includes uncovering insight into product reviews and ratings, as well as tracking and analyzing performance of new products or promotional offers. An additional capability of combining social media conversations with traditional feedback mechanisms like surveys to provide a more comprehensive and end-to-end view of your customers. Act: Generating positive sentiment for a brand or product by proactively providing product support information while building a trusted social media presence. This also includes engaging in conversations with customers in real time, managing the company s social networking presence throughout the social media environment with an emphasis on real-time resolution of customer issues. Also, businesses can test or launch new marketing offers and fine tune brand messaging based on the real-time responses in the social media environment. Flexibility and expertise as a business catalyst. Regardless of how the technology or platforms change, an outsourced managed services model ensures that a company will be able to stay visible and active in the social media environment without interruption to any of their customer interaction strategies. This model can also be the catalyst for operational improvements and cost savings that could result in a competitive advantage, some of which we ve discussed above: Flexibility: Companies can be agile in the social media space without investing in new technology, which provides a foundation for operational cost reduction. Cost deflection: From product recalls to volume at contact centers, an outsourced social media solution can uncover new strategies for more efficient spending. Revenue generation: From up-sell to cross-sell to inline ratings improvement, there is revenue to uncover from properly managing the social media environment. Social business transformation: Aligning social media with enterprisewide transformation, sales and marketing, cost reduction, corporate branding and customer interaction. Each requires specific technology tools and platforms that must both integrate with existing systems and be compatible with the latest social media platforms. A managed outsourced services makes it easier and more cost effective for a company to integrate ever-changing social media technology and workflows internally.

8 Online Solutions the way we see it Conclusion No company of any size can ignore the impact that social media has on the reputation of its brand, products and services. To stay competitive, strategically connected and emotionally linked with customers, you must meld social media with your overall customer management strategy. Capgemini s point of view is that outsourcing managed services for an integrated social media solution eliminates the need to invest repeatedly in technologies that are at risk for becoming quickly obsolete. Instead, companies will achieve better ROI on social media strategies with a strong managed services model that delivers cost deflection and increased revenue generation through improved customer loyalty and retention. Customer Interaction Management (CIM) services. Capgemini provides a full range of integrated customer care and intelligence services that empower businesses to interact more effectively and efficiently with their customers through multiple channels. In delivering social media as a managed service, we offer a multi-layered product suite, which addresses each client s requirements across all social media platforms and channels. To achieve successful results, Capgemini draws upon its extensive BPO experience in many industries and global footprint to augment its social media services no matter where in the world they re needed. The managed services model makes it easier and more cost effective for companies to successfully enter and manage customer relations in this dynamic and ever-changing environment. About Capgemini Capgemini, one of the world s foremost providers of consulting, technology and outsourcing services, enables its clients to transform and perform through technologies. Capgemini provides its clients with insights and capabilities that boost their freedom to achieve superior results through a unique way of working, the Collaborative Business Experience TM. The Group relies on its global delivery model called Rightshore, which aims to get the right balance of the best talent from multiple locations, working as one team to create and deliver the optimum solution for clients. Present in 40 countries, Capgemini reported 2010 global revenues of EUR 8.7 billion and employs around 112,000 people worldwide. More information is available at Remko Reinders Online Domain Director remko.reinders@capgemini.com Cell: Phone: Rick Mans Social Media Lead rick.mans@capgemini.com Cell: Phone: Copyright 2011 Capgemini. All rights reserved. Rightshore is a trademark belonging to Capgemini. IN/1B