Empowered

Josh Bernoff: Well the first thing I should make clear is that while Charlene and I authored the book together we've gone our separate ways now and my new book "Empowered" looks at some of the same things that Charlene did in her book "Open Leadership." I think that the main thing that we're trying to get at is how can you actually run your organization in the age of the empowered consumer because the empowered consumer consumes with all sorts of technology at their disposal to get information and spread their opinions and are a big challenge to organizations so we're really looking at everything in the company from how marketing runs to how IT relates to management and how that looks in the age of the empowered consumer.

Rachel Salaman: And in your book "Empowered" you point out that engagement is not the main issue any more. Rather it's managing that engagement so how big an issue is this in your experience?

Josh Bernoff: Well, we find that companies who originally approach this saying, all right, well we're actually ready to have our employees start to build new marketing programs using social, do customer support using social, whatever. They're now finding that more and more of these sorts of programs are coming up within the company and it challenges not just what to do but how to manage it efficiently so this is a challenge because groups like Customer Servicing and Marketing and IT often are not typically working together very well within companies before this happens but they find that they're all now dealing with the same customers that have to face up to the same challenges. We introduced this concept in the book that we call "Hero, Highly Powered and Resourceful Operative." These are the people within any customer facing group that are building these new programs and the challenge for companies becomes how do you get those heroes to feel like they can actually do things that are helping the company and how you get them to work in ways that are going to be beneficial to you and not disruptive.

Rachel Salaman: If we can just talk for a moment about how you define a hero, you mentioned that it's an acronym for highly empowered and resourceful operative. Are these people naturally highly empowered and resourceful or can anyone be a hero with the right management?

Josh Bernoff: Well, I don't know that anyone can do this. In surveying information workers within companies in the United States we found that about 20 percent of the workers were both feeling like they were empowered to solve customer problems and resourceful in the use of technology but we've seen all sorts of people come up with innovations. At the large multinational insurance company Chubb, a guy who had been an underwriter for 21 years came up with a new idea on how to serve life sciences companies. The real challenge is do you run your company in such a way that someone who comes up with these ideas can actually do something that's helpful for the company because in many companies the policies as well as paranoia about social media means that these people are reinforced around the thought that they're never going to get anywhere with this and then when the CEO says why doesn't anyone innovate at this company I think you can answer the question it's because new thinking is punished rather than rewarded.

Rachel Salaman: Well you can see how some managers might be a little concerned that they're encouraging loose cannons or that people might go off and do something that doesn't reflect well on the business. What's your advice there, should they still manage the heroes as if they're going to do something that's helpful rather than hindering?

Josh Bernoff: Well, there are a few things that managers need to own. One is that well over a third of information workers are already using technologies that aren't authorized by the corporation whether it's a mobile phone that they are using work that they provision themselves or using a website like LinkedIn to do sales prospecting. So trying to lock these things down and tell people to just do what they're supposed to do is futile anyway. It's much better to give people a clearer idea of what the rules are so for example in a pharmaceutical company sending out a tweet about a new drug that you're working on is a violation of the regulatory rules and that's always been the case whether you sent a letter out or told your friend about it so it's much better to have policies about what is and isn't permitted and about how innovation will actually be supported than to attempt to lock everyone down. I'll tell you one of the things that we found most interesting is that the proportion of empowered and resourceful employees, one of the groups that has fewer than any others, is Customer Service and given that Customer Service people really need to understand what their customers are doing on social media the fact that they've been locked down and told that innovation is not something that's permitted for them is a pretty sad statistic when it comes to how workers are treated.

Rachel Salaman: Doesn't it come down to trust a lot of the time though because you need to really be able to trust your Customer Service representatives if you're going to enable them and indeed encourage them to innovate in this way?

Josh Bernoff: It absolutely comes down to trust. Now companies that cannot trust their employees have a large problem. It's not a technology problem, it's a management problem, and the way to be able to trust your employees is to have clear rules about what is and is not permitted. For example three of the rules that we suggest people follow are no one should be participating anonymously, that people should remember that they're an employee when they participate in social media and that if they make a mistake they have to go back and fix it. Now those are relatively simple rules but it's that kind of thinking that allows companies to be able to trust their employees. It also means that the employee trusts the management so that if you come up with an idea and you do an analysis of what's beneficial about it and how much it might cost and what the risks are that if the company comes back and says well for various reasons we can't do this that the employee trusts that the company is actually working in a way that's fair for them.

Rachel Salaman: And one of your management tips in the book is to evaluate a hero project before supporting it and you talk about the EVE score, EVE stands for Effort, Value, Evaluation. Could you tell us about that?

Josh Bernoff: Certainly and I guess before I go too much further I should let people know that if they want to evaluate their own ideas they can go to Forrester.com/empoweredtool and actually try this tool out themselves. So what this tool does and what anyone who's got a new idea should do is to basically walk you through all of the aspects of what you're considering. Often employees don't add visibility into the fact that their idea may affect the public relations and the company's image. There may be a policy change that's needed, it may require more sophisticated technology than they're really ready to do and all of these questions are included in the evaluation on the effort side so you begin to understand how big a deal is it of what you're proposing. On the value side also people are not disciplined enough and they need to understand the value could come from reducing costs, it could come from generating new customers, spreading word of mouth, helping to improve the company's image. These are all possible sources of value and what the effort value evaluation does is to stack up both the effort and the value to give you an idea of is it reasonable for you to proceed and also is this a huge project that could take six months to take on or is it just some little thing that you should just go ahead and do anyway. I'll just say one other thing which is that once that's done the tool makes it easy to e-mail that both to yourself or to anyone else that would be interested and that's where you and your managers can look at what you've got in mind and have a way to move forward with it.

Rachel Salaman: And I suppose that in a way giving that time and effort into evaluating a project is again some kind of validation of the employee who's come up with the idea and it helps them feel valued.

Josh Bernoff: Yes, I think you want to avoid the two poles. One of them is shut and do your job which sends the clear message that innovation is not valued and the other is do whatever you want if it seems good which sends the message that there's no strategy and there's no management here. Somewhere in the middle there is, yes, let's take a close look at what you've got planned, evaluate how valuable and useful it might be and understand what challenges we face and that way people can innovate within a framework of how the company manages.

Rachel Salaman: And there's another acronym in your book, IDEA, which you use to outline a strategy for connection with the kinds of customers who can help grow your business or promote your organization and the "I" in IDEA stands for "identify mass influences" so who are these?

Josh Bernoff: Well, IDEA is basically a reminder of the things you need to do now that your customers are empowered and it basically centers around the idea that your own customers have influence and you have to treat them as a marketing channel. The "I" in IDEA stands for identify mass influencers and the focus there is to actually, using the statistical techniques we have before us to research, to find out who it is in your market who has the most influence and I don't mean individuals. I mean the millions of people out of the hundreds of millions of people that make the most difference. For example I could tell you that about 16 percent of American consumers, and the proportions are pretty close to the same in the UK, about 16 percent of them account for 80 percent of the influence about price and services that spread within social channels. So obviously that 16 percent is the group you really need to focus on. By the way the "D", the "E" and the "A", just for people who are listening, "D" is develop groundswell customer service, "E" is empowered mobile information and "A" is amplify fan activity. What I have to say about mass influencers is that you have to be disciplined about it. Peer influence analysis is our technique for finding these mass influencers and you find things that you might not expect.

For example I recently for a client did an analysis of influence among African American consumers and we found that there are about two million very influential people in that group and that about three quarters of them have a mobile internet access which is much higher than the rest of the African American consumers on average and this caused the client to recognize that while a mobile application may not be the right thing to do if you just looked at all of their customers if they looked at the most influential ones that would make a big difference of getting them to tell others about how good the products were.

Rachel Salaman: And this is all about identifying mass influences. What do you do once they've been identified, what's the next step along that path?

Josh Bernoff: Well there are sort of three things to do, that's what the "E" and the "A" in IDEA stand for. On a sort of defensive purpose you want to make sure that if they're having a problem that they don't tell millions of people that your company is awful and that in fact is exactly what happened in the opening story in the book. A woman who's got a million Twitter followers had a problem with her Maytag washing machine and she ended up tweeting two million people do not buy Maytag so groundswell customer service deliver, groundswell customer service basically means reach out in the social channels and head off problems like that before they start spreading negative influence. The other things you can do are because the influential people are much more likely to create mobile applications that give them the information they need right at the moment they're thinking about it whether they're standing in front of an elevator or in a bar that's useful and the amplified fan activity is a sort of a positive that goes with the defensive stuff that we talked about in Customer Service. There you find the people who are both influential and think your products are great and give them every opportunity to talk about their positive perspective and take the things that they say and make them visible to as many other people as possible.

Rachel Salaman: And you actually include a five step plan for that don't you in your book?

Josh Bernoff: Yes that's right so we're getting down into the detail here but as far as amplified fan activity, the "A", the first thing you need to do is to understand what people are saying and by using listening tools like Radian Six or Neilson Buzzmetrics you can actually easily monitor what's being said out there about your products and then the other things you want to do are to respond to those requests, respond to what people are saying and then enable them to talk about your products through things like ratings and reviews, amplify their activity by finding ways to gather up all the positive stuff and put it places where other people can see it and then eventually you're hopefully going to be in a position to actually change your products so that they match up more closely to what your customers are actually looking for and this all comes from being engaged with the stuff that people are saying especially in social networks about your products.

Rachel Salaman: Do you have any examples you can tell us about where this has actually worked for an organization?

Josh Bernoff: We have quite a few in the book. I'll mention one that I thought was really fantastically interesting and that's from Microsoft. You may remember when Microsoft released its Windows Vista product it was widely perceived as a failure and it is really from the ashes of that problem that the Windows 7 launch was planned and they did a number of things that were really good in amplifying fan activity. One is they noticed that there were a lot of people saying really good things about Windows 7 when the beta release went out and they said well we need to make sure people know that Windows 7 is really good. So if you go to Windows.com/social you can actually see they've collected all of the tweets, Facebook posts, YouTube and so on all in one place and that actually was featured on the home page of Windows.com when the product was launched so they basically said you don't have to believe us, look at what all these other people are saying about how great our product is. The other thing they did which was really interesting is they put together a global program with a company called House Party for people that actually have parties in their houses where the people who liked Windows 7 could show it off to their friends and this program reached hundreds of thousands of people around the world. They had parties in all of the countries where Windows 7 was being released almost and it's another great example of taking people who like the product and taking advantage of the way they feel to influence many other people.

Rachel Salaman: In your book you also note some of the challenges associated with amplifying. For example you say that it can backfire sometimes, can you tell us about that.

Josh Bernoff: Well, there are a few things that you need to be careful of. One is if your product is bad or if people hate it then amplifying that activity is going to make it much clearer to everyone just how bad it is so this is certainly something that companies who have a lot of negative should be careful about. Even in cases where a product is generally well accepted there are going to be people who are disappointed and so along with this amplifying fan activity you also have to do the Customer Service elements that I mentioned earlier to make sure that you don't have detractors spreading all sorts of negatives about the company at the same time other people are saying positive things and I'd say some products just don't lend themselves to this kind of activity. There are not very many people who are enthusiastic about their cleaning products for example so I think this is a strategy that works best for companies that have enthusiastic customers and for a lot of companies that just doesn't apply.

Rachel Salaman: You devote one chapter to what you call do it yourself technology, what do you mean by this?

Josh Bernoff: Well, the same technology that empowers customers to say whatever they want and spread their opinions about your product also makes it very easy for employees to build their own technology solutions and this includes everything from mobile devices and text messaging people are using to renting server time from cloud services like Amazon, EC2, which enables you to use a credit card to actually build a web application instead of having to have a server. The result of all of this is that increasingly employees are building their own solutions and for corporate IT departments this can be a little terrifying. We're really recommending that they recognize that this is the source of technology innovation in companies and to provide guidance on how to use these new technologies because there's just too much innovation happening, too much do it yourself technology happening among these employees for IT to manage it. There's a great example in the book where a company that had customers all around the world, they put in place a new phone system and they said okay we can finally shut down Skype so they turned Skype off within the company saying it's no longer going to be permitted. All of a sudden they heard a very angry response coming from their sales reps in places like Pakistan and Vietnam saying this is how our customers contact us, this is a crucial element to how we do business, you just told our customers that they can't talk to us anymore by doing this, and the company had to end up reversing its decision. So from a security perspective you might say well Skype let's just get rid of it because there might be some risks associated with it but that do it yourself technology was actually responsible for a lot of the company's business in those parts of the world.

Rachel Salaman: So it was a case of really assessing it properly before making any decisions about getting rid of it.

Josh Bernoff: Yes, I think that there's a real knee jerk reaction in IT about new technologies and there are risks associated with them but it's much better as you look at these to understand that there are benefits associated with them too and when your employees are using these in ways that are beneficial to the company it's much better to accommodate that rather than to have a knee jerk reaction to shut everything down.

Rachel Salaman: Empowered is a very balanced book and you don't try to hide the fact that this empowerment approach does have its risks. Could you outline some of them, I'm thinking particularly around security and even productivity.

Josh Bernoff: Okay, well let me address both of those because those are two great examples of where companies feel challenged here. As far as security goes we found that in many companies the approach of trying to shut down technologies to keep things secure doesn't work anymore. So you say well we won't allow anyone to use Facebook because we feel that there's a security risk associated with that. Well that completely ignores the fact that people have their own computers at home and they have Smart Phones so they're going to be using these things regardless of whether the company has shut off access to them or not. The approach that we recommend for security people in IT and throughout the company is to look at this as a change in where the perimeter is. The perimeter is no longer the databases in the network, the perimeter, the security perimeter, is in the brains of your own employees and it's much better to train the employees in what is and what isn't appropriate than to just try to shut down these technologies as a blanket way of doing things.

As far as productivity goes I think a great example here is an insurance company I worked with where the CIO, Chief Information Officer, said to me so you're telling me that we should let people have access to things like Facebook and Twitter and I said yes if they're going to be building new ways to reach out to customers they need to have access to that. His response was oh well that sounds good, I'll let the marketing people use this but we still can't let the Customer Service people do this because of course if we do they'll just spend their time fooling around instead of doing work. Well, you know, if your employees are spending their time fooling around instead of doing work the problem is not a technology problem, it is a management problem and in fact Customer Service people need to know what their customers are doing with social technology so that they don't run the risk of having their own million twitter follower moment like Maytag did. So I tried to help him understand that this is just as important in Customer Service and that it really is a question of managing people about what is appropriate use of these technologies and appropriate use means using them for business purposes.

Rachel Salaman: Another possible issue is actually persuading employees, natural heroes and otherwise, that it's actually work their while tweeting and yammering etc because it's not everybody's cup of tea. Although a lot of people do use social media a lot of people just aren't interested and don't really want to. So what's your best strategy for getting people on board if a company does want people to go in this direction?

Josh Bernoff: Well the first thing is to have reasonable expectations so you shouldn't expect everyone to be contributing in this way any more than all of the employees are getting up and giving presentations. It really is a question of someone's personality, whether they're open to this, but you'll find that the value of some employees consuming this content even if they don't contribute to it is still useful. In terms of encouraging people I find that there are a lot of ways to do this but one of the most important is recognition. So if you have a quarterly company meeting and you say well we want to bring Sarah up here because I want to show you this incredible thing that she created and this is the kind of innovation that we want to happen here you'll find that a lot of other people will say, oh well you know my idea's even better than hers, if that's what they want I can show them I can do that. So that sort of internal recognition goes a long way towards sending the message that innovating with technology is something the company supports as opposed to something the company is afraid of.

Rachel Salaman: And we touched on this a bit earlier but what about quality. How can managers ensure that employee interaction with customers hits the right note particularly when that interaction is public, for example on Twitter?

Josh Bernoff: Well, this is all a question of training and I think that training in how to use these technologies is crucially important. At Kodak, for example, where there are a lot of employees now interacting in social technology they not only did training and developed a new set of policies they actually made that public so they said well here's what our policy is here at Kodak and we think it's so good that we've got it out there where everyone can see it. You know, if you don't trust your employees to interact with customers then you're going to have a problem and the only thing that's changed is that many of these interactions are now public but so is an e-mail, right. If your sales person sends an e-mail to a customer that's inappropriate then it's entirely possible that that will get published on the internet so really training people in the appropriate ways to interact with customers in all of these channels is a pretty important element of all how Marketing, Sales and Customer Service works now anyway.

Rachel Salaman: So in today's business world how important is it for organizations to start empowering their workforces and indeed their customers in the way you've described?

Josh Bernoff: Well, the last thing I would leave people with here is the idea that in this world where mobile social video and cloud based technologies are empowering customers more than ever before the companies that don't have a way to face up to this are really at the mercy of their own customers. Their brands will be redefined, their marketing programs will be blunted and their competitors will be tapping into those customers in a way that's much more effective than those companies. The only possible reaction is to take the most creative force you have at your disposal which is the creativity of your own employees and empower them to reach out to those customers. That's the main thesis of Empowered and it basically is a manual for helping people to take that step of empowering their employees to enable them to be competitive in this world where customers have so many powerful connections at their disposal.

Rachel Salaman: Josh Bernoff thanks very much.

Josh Bernoff: Thanks, it was great to speak with you.

Rachel Salaman: The name of Josh's book again is "Empowered - Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers And Transform Your Business." You can find out more about it and this topic at www.Forrester.com/empowered. I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview, until then goodbye.