Question 1-
Chapter 4 lists five
objectives that companies can pursue with interactive technologies. These five
objectives are related to existing business functions. Give an example of an
existing business function at your company that seems ripe for updating with an
interactive technology. Do you think your company is ready to make the leap?
Why or why not?
Five
primary objectives that companies can pursue in the groundswell include
listening, talking, energizing, supporting, and embracing. Although there are
areas of improvement that my company could work on within each of the
objectives, the listening objective is the most imperative. In order to truly
understand our customer and the needs of our customer, listening is crucial. As
Ricardo Guimaraes stated, "The value of a brand belongs to the market, and
not to the company. The company in this sense is a tool to create value for the
brand...Brand in this sense-it lives outside the company, not in the
company" (Li & Bernoff 2011, p. 79).
The
organization I currently work for is the Southwest Virginia Workforce
Investment Board (WIB), and we serve adults, unemployed workers, and youth
participants. While serving the participants, they are able to talk to their
career development specialist about any issues they may be having, however, we
do not have any other type of customer feedback system in place. This is a
challenge because it does not allow participants to express their satisfaction
or dissatisfaction with their career development specialist, or with our
services. Also, if we do not listen to our participants, then we cannot truly
understand their needs or understand where we can improve as an organization.
In
developing a listening objective for our organization, our organization could improve
not only in our services to the client, but listening would also help us to
develop marketing tools that would better promote our services. Listening would
also enhance productivity, and would give us an advantage over other WIBs
(Helms & Haynes, 1992). With listening, it is also important to remember to
listen all of the time, and not just a few times a year. As discussed by Helms and Haynes, listening
activities include 3 categories: information seeking, evaluating others, and
responding to others (Helms & Haynes, 1992). Learning to listen to our
participants on a regular basis, can also help our organization more
effectively pin point issues as they occur, and not six months later. As Li and Bernoff discuss, listening is
"Ongoing monitoring of your customers' conversations with each other,
instead of occasional survey s an d focus groups" (Li & Bernoff 2011,
p. 69).
Overall,
our organization is ready to make the leap to start listening to our clients,
because we spend a lot of time developing policies and procedures to what we
feel is best for our organization, however, the missing component is listening
to our actual participants, and understanding what they feel would be most
helpful. We often sit around discussing ways we could improve our services, but
in moving forward with a listening objective, it would be beneficial to develop
a listening plan and actually begin implementing it. Our organization could set
aside a specific research budget and develop a private community that would
deliver surveys to our participants, and would promote regular brand monitoring.
In the end, improved listening can help our organization better understand our
participants and will help us move forward in a positive direction in better
serving our participants.
References:
Helms, M. M.,
& Haynes, P. J. (1992). Are you really listening? the benefit of effective
intra-organizational listening. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 7(6),
17. Retrieved from http://ezproxy.bellevue.edu:80/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/215888773?accountid=28125
Li, C., &
Bernoff, J. (2008). Groundswell: Winning in a world transformed by social
technologies (pp. 9-61). Boston, Mass.: Harvard Business Press.
