Sharing

Sharing is about people working together.

(Thanks again to www.wordle.net).

Customer Engagement Seminar

What's the difference between the engagement that I'm researching and customer engagement (CE)? I think that the model I'm using is fuller than that used for CE. Why?

The British Computer Society held a seminar on Customer Engagement with speakers from TripleIC. The speakers - and they were good - held our attention by talking about tools and surveys, and telling stories. The main speaker, David Butler, started off fine by defining CE as:

• listening and responding to human discourse
• combining human value with quantitative data to tell you how to run your business

He elaborated on the first point of having conversations by telling stories of communication, and of overhearing candid and profane language.

But when he and his colleague Alistair Russell, emphasised their two tools, I began to wonder if their concept of engagement was the same as mine. The tools are:

1. Advocate - a survey tool. Advocate calculates an advocacy score from your customer responses.
2. The Lambert Protocol - a tool that plots variables against each other. The Lambert Protocol (created by Tom Lambert) measures domains (understanding of needs, delight, loyalty) and stakeholders (top team, employees, customers). Why choose understanding, delight and loyalty for customer engagement?

Such tools assume that engagement is made up of these domains, and I don't know that they do, nor did the speakers justify the choices. Saks chose vigor, dedication and absorption for employee engagement - is that different from customer engagement? And if so, then why? What can customer and employee engagement have in common?

The subsequent slides brought our attention to the various technical tools now available for networking electronically with customers and markets.

It was when our excellently organised speakers got people talking together in groups of around eight, that the sceptism became more obvious because these tools are one-way measurements, not instruments that allow a mutual relationship and a sharing of knowledge. Peter Wood expressed it thus. He'd joined Ocado's Facebook group for users where Ocado asked for customer feedback on the service, but having given feedback, nothing more was heard - Ocado had no more to say. That's not engagement. Peter was rolling his hands one over the other as he explained that he wanted reciprocation for his efforts.

So, Ocado could through tools like a Facebook group have the sort of measurements that the above tools would provide. But that's customer marketing, not engagement.

Engagement has to go on and on, hence Peter's rolling of hands. You have to work at engagement, and continue working at it. Engaged relationships require mutual contributions and sharing of ideas not measurements.

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SAKS, A. M. (2006) Antecedents and consequences of employee engagement. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 21, 600-619.

Trade-off between security and sharing

The trade-off between security and sharing was the topic of a lunch time debate yesterday at the Government Computing Exhibition. Speakers were:

• Sureyya Cansoy, Associate Director, Intellect
• John Collington, Group Commercial Director, Home Office
• Toby Stevens, Director, Enterprise Privacy Group

Like the earlier debate, innovation was praised. Suraya Cansoy advised that collecting information across boundaries involved debates about data and security sharing. She had three points:

1. trust has been broken (statistical proof exists)
   
2. recognise the need for action by government and IT industry to restore that broken trust
3. benefits come from information sharing. e.g, the DVLA can access your passport photo so you don't need to entrust your passport to the vagaries of the post
   

John Collington talked without notes - impressive. He told the story of data loss last August, when a supplier lost a memory stick, and consequently a contract for £500,000. The Home Office investigated:

• the required data
• processes
• company
• the person (who lost her job)
  

He stated that we need a culture change to make people aware of the need to protect data.

Questions came from

• William Heath from Ctrl-Shift Ltd on the wrong way to share data
• Brian Williams from Innovation
• Roger Goss Co-director Patient Concern

This debate itself was interesting, but even more interesting was the chap I sat next to who is heavily against Phorm. Since my students have just had to write an essay on Phorm, it was particularly interesting to hear his views. He runs a web site http://www.inphormationdesk.org arguing that the key issue is the immense potential for harm offered by the unfettered interception of web communications.

"If the Royal Mail offered a service which opened letters in order to improve the quality of junk mail, then you would instinctively know it was wrong and appreciate its future risks. Phorm’s offering is no different."

He also offered to keep in touch to help me with my research, so I'm extra pleased.