Manage My Stuff Communities

Definition

"The ability to help customers “manage their stuff” and coordinate their activities are key differentiators in both B2C and B2B worlds. Customers like to use mobile apps and online tools to manage their activities and their projects. But when they need help, they want to reach out to their friends, family, colleagues, and peers. Online customer support communities and social networks need to be integrated into the tools that customers use to manage their stuff." (http://www.psgroup.com/detail.aspx?id=1145)

See also Customer Ecosystems

Description

From 'Manage My Stuff' to "Comparing with Others'

Patricia Seybold:

1.

'Customers Want to See Where They Stand & Compare Notes with Others. At the same time that we've been doing online customer experience audits, we've been observing, interviewing, and facilitating group meetings with many of our clients' B2B customers. Here's an interesting pattern we've observed across industries: customers want to manage their stuff, benchmark their performance to others in the same situation, troubleshoot problems, and get and offer advice.

Your customers definitely want self-service tools that enable them to "manage their stuff" on your portals or web sites. They also want to be notified or alerted when certain events occur. The kinds of notifications people want differ greatly by role (managing operations, budgeting, strategic planning, etc. ) and by personality (proactive vs. reactive; want to see anomalies only, or see the status of only specific things, and so on). We've discovered that customers also value the sharing of best practices, collaborative problem-solving, and root cause analysis in and around their stuff!" (http://outsideinnovation.blogs.com/pseybold/2011/08/combine-manage-my-stuff-with-benchmarking-peer-community.html)

2.

" Online communities and self-service support are not new. What is new is the way in which customers now seem to presume that they should be able to access these peer communities and subject matter experts in and around “their stuff.” They don’t want to log on to a separate online community for support. They want that community to be available to them from within the product they are using and/or from the mobile app they are using to track status or from the customer portal they use to manage their assets and their activities.

Social networks are not new. What is new are the ways in which consumers and business users expect to be able to reach out and connect to those networks specific to the tasks at hand.

In just about every phase of consumer and business life, customers want help organizing and managing all the things they buy, own, do, and coordinate around. We refer to this as the “manage my stuff” customer scenario pattern1. Companies that do a good job of “managing my stuff” are much more likely to win and retain customers’ hearts and minds. Companies that integrate their customer support communities into their “manage my stuff” customer portals and applications will streamline customers’ ability to resolve issues quickly. Companies that enable customers to engage in social networking specific to the disciplines, issues, assets, and causes they are working on, will grow their own network of customer advocates and consultants.

Managing my stuff is a key, but subtle requirement that is at the core of the next generation of win/win business models: customer-centric ecosystems. Integrating online communities and real-time social networking in and around “my stuff” turns a multipartner-supported customer-critical workflow into a truly vibrant and growing customer-centric ecosystem." (http://www.psgroup.com/Build-Community-Around-My-Stuff.aspx)

Characteristics

Patricia Seybold:

Why Do Customers Need More Than In-Product Help & Basic Customer Support?

Every company that sells a product or service provides basic “help” in the use of their product. For software or intelligent devices, this help is often integrated into the product. You can press a button and get context-sensitive suggestions to help you understand how to do the basic things. If the in-product help doesn’t work, you can go online to the customer support area of the web site associated with the product or service and find more forms of interactive help—tutorials; FAQs; a searchable knowledgebase; and, often, an online discussion forum, where customers ask questions, and company experts (and sometime other customers) answer them. Many companies now also offer interactive chat sessions to answer customers’ questions in real time.

All of these customer self-service capabilities are provided in addition to the more traditional phone support for two reasons:

1. Many customers prefer to serve themselves, rather than to call phone support. They don’t want to wait in a queue. And they feel that the person with whom they finally get to talk may or may not know the answer to their question (which may be a product-related question, a technical question, or a business or policy question).

2. It is less expensive to provide the answers online to a million people than it is to try to answer a million phone calls. Even online chat is less expensive because a single agent can be engaged in multiple chats simultaneously. Interactive chatting or SMS messaging can be more immediate and more satisfying for many customers who want real-time answers without having to wait to talk with someone on the phone.

These basic self-service and assisted-service customer support tools are designed to answer questions like: How do I install this product? How do I perform this function? What kind of support are we entitled to? When does my subscription expire? These tools and support capabilities are generally not designed to answer questions like: What’s the best way to perform this activity (using your products and others’ products)? How well are we doing, compared to others who are using your tools and services to accomplish similar things?

Help Doesn’t Address the Question, “How Do I Get My Project Done?”

This basic in-product or about-our-product support is a necessary pre-requisite. However, there is an additional kind of support that many customers need and value. It goes beyond the basic “how do I perform this function or task?” to “how do I use these products/services to get something specific done.” A customer may want to plan and manage a multi-person business or family trip, get a car repaired after an accident or manage the maintenance of all of the cars in their family, manage their day-to-day cash flow, invest wisely for their children’s education, design a new product, launch a successful product, plan a business conference or plan a wedding, run a power plant profitably, produce a good harvest and sell their produce at the best possible price. Whatever project or activities a customer wants to manage or to get done, they often need help, advice, relevant resources, and/or tips.

Often customers’ issues aren’t directly product-related. The product or service the customer is using is only part of their context. The activities they’re performing are what matters most to them. Their use of your products and services is ancillary. So, when customers need help in and around your products and services, it’s often in the context of the specific scenarios the customer wants to perform.

Whose Advice Do Customers Trust?

We often run into problems related to activities we’re doing (commuting, managing our money, repairing things, working on a project for work, school, or personal). When we need help, where do we turn? Understanding how customers think about getting help with things they are doing or managing is an important first step to figuring out the kinds of interactive social help to build into our products, services, and into the tools and resources we provide to customers to help them get things done. In our co-design sessions, we’ve noticed that today’s consumer and business customers have an implicit priority in the ways in which they typically look for advice and help:

   1. Friends, family, and colleagues

   2. Highly-rated “How To’s” and Peer-Reviewed Resources

   3. Peers and Fellow Travelers

   4. Subject-Matter Experts Associated with the Brand

This order may seem counter-intuitive to you. It did to me at first when I saw this pattern emerging. Why not turn first to the experts in the area in which you need help? The answer probably lies in the fact that human beings are social animals. We turn first to the people we know and trust. Then we try to be self-reliant, by looking for answers ourselves. But we value most the resources that have proved helpful to others (people we know and trust, or at least people we know who are in a similar situation to the one in which we find ourselves).

Friends, Family, Colleagues. When you are trying to get something done, and you run into a problem, to whom do you turn? For most of us, our first choice is a colleague, family member, or friend whom we think will know something that will be of use. As human beings, we turn first to our inner circle—the network of people we know and interact with every day. Depending on our level of urgency, we may make a phone call, ask around, or post our query on Facebook, knowing that our inner circle of friends, family, and colleagues are likely to respond quickly. In a work setting, we turn first to our closest colleagues and then expand our reach to others we know at work who might have the answers we need.

Highly-Rated How To’s and Peer-Reviewed Resources. When you ask today’s tech-savvy customers where they turn when they can’t figure out what to do, they invariably say, “I Google it,” or “I search for YouTube videos.” If you ask them if they go directly to the supplier’s customer support web site, they usually reply, “I found more/better stuff by searching the entire Internet. I’m not looking for tutorials. I’m usually looking for answers to my specific question: ‘How do I do X with Y?’ or ‘What’s the best way to...?’ I usually type in my question and find the best answers by sorting by customer ratings.”

Of course, customers also look for self-help resources directly from the suppliers’ product, e.g., Help buttons or Customer Support forums. But it’s interesting to note that that’s not usually the first place they look for help. When you ask why, they say, “Because I don’t expect to find the best resources, the ones that really solve my problem, there.” Implicit in this answer is the notion that other people like me will be more likely to be able to tell me what to do in the ways that best relate to my particular conext and the activity in which I’m currently engaged.

(http://www.psgroup.com/Build-Community-Around-My-Stuff.aspx)

Case studies

1. How Well Does Amazon.com Let Me “Manage My Stuff?” http://www.psgroup.com/Amazon-Manages-My-Stuff.aspx
2. How Well Does Staples Help a Small Company "Manage My Stuff?", http://www.psgroup.com/detail.aspx?id=1127
3. How Well Does Bank of America Help Me Manage My Money Online?, http://www.psgroup.com/detail.aspx?id=1131

Example

• a learner-centric ecosystem for science (biology - ecology) learning, at http://www.nature.com/scitable/people

More Information

• "Manage My Stuff and Coordinate Around Our Stuff: What Tools and Information Do Customers Need and Value for Personal and Professional Use?" by Patricia B. Seybold, October 20, 2011, http://dx.doi.org/10.1571/csp10-20-11cc.