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What do you think of when you think of a leader? This blog series is entitled “Women in Leadership and Management” yet we have never really explored what is (or is not) included. So many people define leadership differently; there is absolutely no consensus!

Amazon lists nearly 122,000 books when you search on “leadership.” A Google search for the term yields approximately 468,000,000 “hits.” Google Scholar yields about 2,750,000 options. There are a myriad of courses and degrees focused on leadership. Clearly people like talking about/reading about/writing about/learning about leadership.

Jaana Nyström might not fit your visual image of a leader. Jaana doesn’t wear a “power suit” or have hundreds of people reporting to her or control a multi-million dollar (euro) budget. However based on any of the following leadership quotations (which are some of my favorites), Jaana Nyström is unquestionably a leader!

“A leader is someone who has followers.” - Peter Drucker

“If your actions inspire others to dream more, to learn more, do more and become more you are a leader.” - John Quincy Adams

“Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.” - John F. Kennedy

“A leader is a person who guides or directs a group.” - Dictionary.com

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Think about the time when you interacted with a sales or customer-service rep. Let's say, you have a question about your airline reservation and reward points.

* You dislike being put on hold for more than 10 minutes, so you go to their website and try to find an answer on their FAQ.

* You use their web-form and email them.

* After 48 hours, you receive an auto-generated message filled with gibberish.

* You google to determine if others have an answer or if others had similar issues, but find nothing that relates to your account.

* You start a web-chat. It takes 5 minutes for someone to join but they ask you to call a 1800number as it is 9 pm and these agents do not address the set of questions you have.

* Now you take a deep breath and call the 1800number. Even though it is 9:30 pm where you are, you are put on hold for 15 minutes and then the rep comes on.

* The rep does not quite "get" your frustration and at the end, does not give an answer that is satisfactory.

* You take to Twitter and express your frsutration.

* You go to Facebook and express your frustration on the airline's Facebook page.

* .....

And the story goes on.

Customers and Prospects initiate an interaction via voice/phone, web, email, chat, face-to-face or social-media because they have a concern or they are encountering a problem or they simply have a question. Typically, they are not calling because they want to express their "awe" with the product or service.

The most important skill that a rep "must have" is the ability to identify the degree of your frustration and anxiety and then to de-escalate the situation adequately, such that they can engage you in a discussion and lead you to a satisfactory resolution.

When they are able to use this de-escalation skill, they can impact "first issues resolution" (FCR) and they can engage you in "solutioning" discussion. These in turn impact the "trusted adviser" score (in case of sales processes) and the "customer satisfaction" (CSAT) (in case of customer service processes).

If they are unable to use the skill well, it further escalates the situation that can lead to losing you as a customer. Also, in this day and age, the loss might not be only that one customer, but you can amplify the concern via any social-media channels (by tweeting with #fail that goes to your followers, by posting on Google+ and making it searchable everywhere and forever or by kvetching on facebook and getting your friends' attention) leading to a permanent and more severe damage to the brand equity.

Current estimates indicate that Google+ (which started in 2011), has 343 million active users and 100,000+ communities, whereas LinkedIn has 238 million users and 1.5 million LinkedIn Groups.

Most LinkedIn members use their profile for professional branding purposes. The active LinkedIn members engage in business development and job search/placement activities. In contrast, initially many Google+ users used the features for personal interactions such as photo-sharing with family, hangout with family and friends. Also many G+ users don't realise that their personal posts are making it to the public webspace and that they should reset their visibility preferences of posts and "About" page. Those users detered others from engaging with them.

However, the demand and growth of Google+ has been phenomenal this year. Moreover, after LinkedIn deployed an unprecedented and Members-UNfriendly policy called Sitewide Automated Moderation (SWAM), thousands of professionals and small businesses are exploring and migrating to Google+. Those who are active in Google+, are more than ever separating their professional profile from their personal profile and are engaging at different levels.

If you are considering to put your efforts into only one channel that helps you manage your customers better and more effectively, then you must start by comparing the features of each channel. The following tables compares all the known features available (as of September 1, 2013) with a free LinkedIn Membership and a Google+ profile (which is free).

The features marked in "blue" are the ones that we consider as very user-Friendly. The features marked in "red" are the ones that we consider as user-UNfriendly.

Overall

As a Social Marketing thought leader, triathlete and Head of Sales Solutions at LinkedIn.com, Ralf VonSosen is passionate about Technology enabling more meaningful and productive relationships among professionals. His experience spans from industry giants such as Siebel (now Oracle) and SAP, to a series of smaller companies including MarketLive, and most recently InsideView. He is a pioneer in the area of social selling and continues to be not only an active evangelist for Social Selling, but instrumental in creating the next generation of Social Selling solutions.

MD> Ralf, thank you for taking the time to talk to us today. We would love to hear more about your thoughts on the future of Social Selling and insights regarding LinkedIn.

RVS> Having lived through the evolution of CRM, and seeing how social media is changing CRM and also how social media is effecting online collaboration, I find that there is enormous opportunity for improvement.

There are great collaboration tools (and everybody uses something different) such as WebEx, Go-To-Meeting, and Skype.  My theory is that, there is enough human interaction in these kinds of collaboration software, that’s it’s time to throw all the processes out the window.  People logging on and off, some use the phone, some use the computer, different screens/one screen, different channels etc.  There is enormous need to unify the interactions and have a new CRM mindset.

My passion is for the technology being able to create more meaningful relationships.  Now, we can have these meaningful interactions and conversations and this technology enables us to get a better picture of each other and follow the relationships.  They provide a new level of trust and background with that person and that can change how we approach and do business.  It adds humanity and integrity to the process.

We all move on and leave behind the people we worked with in the past, but now we can have meaningful conversations with them and grow our future contacts.  Technology keeps us up-to-date and reminds us of the person and our previous interactions.

MD> So true.  My first question to you:  Are you a gamer?  If so, which are your favorites?

RVS> (Laughs.)  I’m not really a gamer, but the one thing that I do play with on an intermittent basis is the Game mechanics app FourSquare .  When traveling, I can take pictures and keep track of where I am going and what I am doing.    My brother-in-law updates his during his travels, too, and I try to beat other peoples’ high scores.  A trip to the East Coast with my family gave me a great opportunity to beat my maximum points, and now my kids wait for me to check in on FourSquare.

MD> You are competitive!  I am getting a better picture of you and have an idea of how you might answer this next question:  How do you learn?

RVS> I learn through doing and interacting:  very experiential.  I empathize with people and kids in school who learn that way.  I am starting to use sproutsocial to manage all the social feeds.   I was recently on a one-hour webinar where they were presenting a demo of the product and I realized I just needed to start using it hands-on and playing around with it.

What I think is so exciting about LinkedIn is that you are trying to create a new experience within the sales process. On an individual basis, you are talking about something that people are already using and are familiar with.  That’s one of the things, in trying to get user adoption, is that you get this concept of “this is intuitive and they are already using it”, rather than having someone learn the nuances of another software program or system.  It certainly makes life a lot easier.

MD> As you know, we effectively use LinkedIn as our primary channel of doing sales. In fact, we were discussed in a case study in a recent edition of Harvard Business Review. Last time we chatted, you and I were discussing the drawbacks of cold-calling since we can now use social tools and learn more about our potential client and how to meet their needs.  That led to a conversation about using CRM programs. Can you tell me more about the connectivity of LinkedIn and CRM programs?

RVS > We provide connectivity with Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics.  You can integrate the two, right within your CRM, as you are working with a contact or opportunity with the account.  You see all the information we have available on LinkedIn about that individual within the context of the CRM record.  It really brings the two together and gives you a more unified view and message.

MD> PAKRA uses salesforce.com in which InsideView is a great value-added feature.  All of this innovation has made for a much neater sales process.

You recently were brought in to lead the Sales Solutions’ marketing initiative for LinkedIn, what information can you share about the Sales Solutions?

So today I had an interesting customer service experience. Not only was it a waste of more than an hour, but I still didn't get my issue resolved.

Where to begin? A few months back, we purchased a copy of Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac from Staples. The computer we originally installed it on was for an intern and once the intern left, we uninstalled Office from the computer. The box that Office came in tells us that we could install the software on 3 separate computers. Well, today, we tried to install it on computer #2. Of course, the product key didn't work when installing on our new computer. What do we do? Go to Microsoft customer support, expecting some kind of help. Once there, I first look through the FAQ's. Nothing there really helps. They provide a number to call for help with your product key. So, I call the number. Concurrently, Rini, our CEO, starts an online chat with a customer service rep. After a 10-15 minute back and forth through chat, Rini was unsuccessful at getting any help. Keep in mind, I'm still on hold on the phone. 35 minutes goes by...and I still haven't talked to a human being. Finally, the person on the live chat gave us a different number to call. We call the number and finally talk to a human! Only to be transferred to a different department. After the transfer, the operator tells me I need to contact the store I purchased it from to get any kind of help since we purchased it retail and the license is through the store.

GoDaddy.com employs more than 3,300 employees with 8 locations, including Arizona, Iowa and India, and provides "follow-the-sun" 24x7x365 sales and support commitments.

In this series, we test the operational maturity of companies and organizations in how they leverage social media channels for sales and service processes.

For Go Daddy, we asked one simple question: How well does Go Daddy retain and upsell its customers when these customers reach out to them and bring their concerns via Twitter?

Delta Airlines employs more than 80,000 employees worldwide and has a fleet of more than 700 aircrafts and has 160 million customers.

It has a reputable social-media operation. Or so we have read...

In an article written by Dennis Schaal, Inside Social Media at Delta Air Lines - A Behind The Scenes Look on June 10, 2011, he mentions that they have a control room just for social media at their headquarters, and that they knowingly don't respond to all tweets, stating: "The social media staff doesn't respond to every tweet about the airline, and does its share of apologizing to customers."

At PAKRA, we decided to dive a little deeper and experiment with the Twittersphere for Delta Airlines and see exactly what is going on. We wanted to get few questions answered:

(1.) Since Delta knowingly doesn’t respond to every tweet about the brand, would they be more likely to respond to tweets that areincluded in the “Dreaded” hash-tag #Fail search? As you know, if this hash-tag is included in a tweet about your brand, the customer is probably quite upset with your brand and you are at risk to lose them as a customer. Surely, Delta will respond to all of “these” tweets. Right?

(2.) Why does Delta not respond to all tweets? As we see from the article by Dennis Schaal, Delta has about a dozen "Social Assist Agents" on a 24x7 follow-the-sun support schedule. What stops them from handling more tweets, especially potentially harmful ones like those that include "#Fail" in their tweet?

We analyzed all tweets in a randomly selected time period that included the name "Delta" with the hash-tag #Fail in the tweet text.

You must have read this recent article, “Three Months in Customer Service Limbo”, by David Segal in the New York Times. The article discusses the fate of a customer at the hands of customer service, customer's trials and small successes, and well! spoiler alert -- "Still! Unresolved issues". Oh! What drama. I suggest you read it too.

It is time for us to Occupy Customer Experience.

You, the (B2B or B2C) Customer

As you searched, vetted, purchased, used and reviewed products/services that will help you, you too experienced some degree of failure or had instances where your expectations were not met (if not to this extreme degree in the Times article). Some of you also use social-media channels such as Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, and Yelp to communicate your frustrations and delights. Some of you will also agree with me that Revenue and Operational Margins are the two KPIs that your company/organization/institution closely manages.

You, the Manager

Given that you and your team deliver products/services, you are always looking for ways to increase your revenue while reducing operating costs. Among all channels of customer interaction (voice, chat, web, face-to-face and social media), social media is still the cheapest way to find and manage customers who reach out to you via social media.  Also, let’s not forget the amplification effect on your brand. Who can forget the Alec Baldwin tweet on American Airlines, or the Komen Foundation fiasco with Planned Parenthood?

"Customer Experience" is why companies/organizations/institutions exist. Customer experience drives both revenue and operational costs. Your customers are just like you; they want to do business with you using these channels. What is stopping you from delivering exceptional customer experience?

Coming Soon at a PAKRA channel near to you – "Thought-provoking Discussions". Please join the discussion.