Archive for the ‘Customer Service’ Category

Trolls or Contrarians? The Food Chain of Social Media

Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011

 We all have people who love us and what we do and we all have people who have different opinions of what we are and what we do.  Companies and Brands are no different.  If you have customers, you likely have people who disagree with other competing Brands.  They purchase your products for a reason and not someone elses’.  The same for contrarians to your Brand.  Those contrarians buy other things for a reason and complain about the way you run your business or make your products.  Before, those contrarians simply did not come to your store and said un-appealling things just in a way that you could not hear them.  And here is where I question the mindset of many companies and brands.

On the social web, you get to listen to what is being said about you (right, wrong or indifferent).  You have an opportunity to connect with that person in a way that was not possible before.  Companies who chose to ignore what is happening in the social sphere are missing an opportunity to promote their side, correct anything that is not factual and simply engage.  Not engaging is quietly agreeing with whom ever is posting negative information.  To be fair, this is not an enviable position at many companies however it is much needed. 

So what to do and how to get started?  This is a vexing question and certainly a conversation worth having.  Let’s suffice to say this is one of those instances where experience matters.  On this topic you definately want to avoid making rookie mistakes so getting someone who has “walked in those shoes” before is important.  This week, we are doing just that.  Peggy Fitzpatrick is a very experienced social media manager and has moderated many communities.  She brings a great perspective to this conversation around the following topic and questions:

 Topic: Trolls or Contrarians? The Food Chain of Social Media

Q1)  How should we address a troll like or contrarian type action within the walls of social media? Acknowledge it? or Let it go?

Q2)  From a marketers standpoint, is there any value to a troll or a contrarian?

Q3)  Have you ever experienced any negative or aggressive behaviors within Social Media? What did you do about it?

Q4)  Has previous negative behavior stopped you from attending chats or any other online activities?

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, August 2 at noon ET.  Follow #sm121 from your favorite Twitter client or simply go to our LIVE page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live.  The format will stay the same with the first question starting at noon and a new question coming every 20 minutes at 12:20 and 12:40.

 

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Posted in Branding, corporate, Customer Service | 4 Comments »

Changing the Approach to Customer Satisfaction with Social Media

Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011

The face of customer service and customer satisfaction has changed in recent years.  It used to be that customer service was managed as an in-store experience, then telephone, then the web and now customers have experiences across thousands of touch points or more.  Social media has changed the way the customers want to interact and certainly the pace by which they expect to be interacted with.  The numbers are there, hundreds of millions of active blogs, over 175 million registered users on Twitter, Facebook gets over 600 million visits /month and media outlets like Huffington Post reach over 30 million people / month.  All of these sites offer the ability to easily post anything to entire networks of loosely coupled “friends” in a way that creates a permanent digital record that is easily accessed by any search engine.

If customer satisfaction is a result of the combined experiences that a customer has over time, then every touch point presents an opportunity to improve or diminish overall satisfaction.  The challenge is the daunting amout of new possible outlets that customers use for those experiences that companies have to contend with.  As noted above, the numbers of people using social media and the amount of new social media channels being rapidly adopted are simply impossible to keep up with.

Up to now, dozens of vendors in the space have customer satisfaction indexes, net promoter scores, customer service measurements, etc to help companies keep track of their progress with customer satisfaction.  They all use different techniques to measure and capture sentiment including “secret shoppers”, exit surveys, online questionnaires, complaint websites and even better business bureau scores that are reactive in nature.  In today’s ever connected world, companies cannot afford to measure their effectiveness quarterly or even monthly.  The social web never stops working and customer service departments need real-time or near real-time measurements to stay on top of emerging issues.

So what is a good customer satisfaction score?  Today companies throw parties if they reach the 90′s out of 100.  However, having just one un-satisfied customer can be REALLY bad like here and here.  With the rising level of engagement using social, is it even reasonable to strive for 100% satisfaction?  To answer that question, you would have to assume that every customer is equal.  With new ways for customers to publish content, there are also new ways of measuring the quality of a customer as well.  Should you treat customers with a high Klout score differently than customers with a lower one?  Does an unpopular tweet by a customer with 30k followers make them more right than an unpopular tweet posted by someone with 50 followers?

The social web has certainly changed the way that customers expect to be treated and, consequently, the way that companies now have to start to manage customer satisfaction efforts.  How this ultimately plays out is still unknown as companies are still at the very first stages of trying to solve this vexing challenge.  To help us better understand the issues and help us start to discover possible solutions is our host this week Meg Fowler.  Meg manages public relations/social strategy for @Sametz and is a treasure trove of great information.  She will moderate our topic today and questions:

Topic: Changing the Approach to Customer Satisfaction with Social Media

Q1:  What is a good customer satisfaction score today — and why have/haven’t our goals changed?

Q2:  Is the customer always right in social media?

Q3:  How can companies shift to respond to the new reality of customer satisfaction?

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, May 3 at noon ET.  Follow #sm109 from your favorite Twitter client or simply go to our LIVE page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live.  The format will stay the same with the first question starting at noon and a new question coming every 20 minutes at 12:20 and 12:40.

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Posted in Customer Service | 2 Comments »

Is Retention the New Acquisition in Social Media?

Monday, May 10th, 2010

Take a look inside your company.  How much is your marketing budget?  Now, how much do you spend on customer service in relation to new customer marketing.  For most companies, the amount spent on new customer acquisition far outweighs the amount spent on retaining exisitng customers. 

Think about your last visit to the mall.  Go into any Sears, Macys, JCPenney, Circuit City or any other large anchor store and who’s the first ones you run into?  The sales associates hit you up at the door and never leave your side, even though you’re just walking through to get to your car.

Companies spend weeks training new employees, teaching them sales skills (and like Glengarry Glen Ross) then send them out to ABC (Always Be Closing).  No one ever asks if you have shopped there before or if you already know what you need.  They just offer ancillary products to upsell. 

Now take a look at the companies mentioned above. One is out of business, two are teetering on bankruptcy, one is doing OK…not great, but OK.  Then look at Best Buy who was able to flip the funnel over.  They have emerged from one of the roughest economic times in history stronger than ever.  When all the competitors are struggling to stay alive, Best Buy is doing very well by industry standards.  Why is this?

One needs to look no further than the doorway to get a sense.  The first thing you see when you enter a Best Buy is the very large, well-marked customer service center just to your left.  Try finding the customer service center in a Sears.  You have to walk around a good bit and ask a couple of people on your trip. 

Think about the context.  Companies spend so much on acquiring new customers and so little on keeping these precious customers once they get them.  Today there are more ways to stay in contact with your customer base, that you have to start making excuses on why not to do it.  Social Media in the great enabler that can help connect those customers who were always mobile, did not run the household but still influenced a significant amount of purchase power. 

To help us better understand the potential of connecting with our existing customers is a well respected and long admired practitioner in the social media space and accomplished author.  Joseph Jaffe will lead the discussion to help us understand the need and benefit of keeping our existing customers unequivically happy.  Joe is a recognized, global authority on the value of a customer and a legend in traditional and digital marketing industries.  The topic and questions this week are:

Topic: Is Retention the New Acquisition in Social Media?

Q1: What might “retention is the new acquisition” refer to in social media?

Q2: What are some of the ways to get customers to purchase again and become ambassadors?

Q3: How can you use existing customers to gain new ones?

Q4: What role do employees play in the promise of flipping the funnel?

This week we will change it up just a little and run with 4 questions instead of 3.  This means we will start right at 12 noon Eastern with Q1 and transition to the next question every 15 minutes.  Please join us Tuesday 5/11 and follow #sm59 or simply use our LIVE Page.

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Customer Service’s Role in Social Media

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

Budgets for social media are steadily increasing and all the analyst predictions say that 2010 will be the year of social media marketing.  It doesn’t take Confucious to know that marketing and social media are a cost effective alternative to traditional marketing.  What’s notable is the move to incorporate customer service as part of this plan.  Traditionally, marketing and service are very different parts of a company.  So different that marketing and communications are primarily inside-out focused (messagin starts inside and gets pushed out) where Service almost always carries an outside-in (customers call in to interact) perspective.  You can see some of the consolidation happening on the tools side (recently Exact Target aquired Cotweet) which often leads to consolidation within companies.  Beyond the social tools, communications vendors are getting into the action as well with Unified Communications platforms that manage phone, email, video, social, etc.

If social customer service is consolidating with marketing efforts then who owns customer service now and is customer service gaining importance at the executive level?  These are important questions especially as Comcast’s CEO, Brian Roberts announces that Twitter is changing the culture there.  This statement makes us think about the possibility of customer service with a much different influence within corporations.

Think about the process of setting up social media at any company (listen first, then engage…).  Just break down listening into it’s parts like monitoring for prospects, existing customers, brand mentions, competitors and detractors.  This includes duties normally performed by marcom, service, sales and public relations, yet one tool can be used.  So who takes charge, who’s accountable for “listening” at a company, let alone responding/engaging?

Next, at a time when companies are reducing headcount, can service departments possibly respond to the dozens of new social channels in addition to traditional phone calls, emails and sometimes chat?  In order to fully understand the breadth of what affects social might have within an enterprise, we must understand if social actually adds to overall inquiries or if an increase in social inquiries decreases traditional inquiries.  As companies discuss scale and social, they need to include people, hardware and software considerations to evaluate the true impact to the business.

Finally, companies have been dipping their toes in the social media waters for the past 2-3 years.  When Mr. Roberts talks about how social efforts have a significant impact on a large company’s culture, you have to start thinking about your social efforts with a bit more foresight and structure than short-term, dis-continuous campaigns.  To prepare a company for such an initiative, they need to consider long term strategies, systems integrations, employee buy-in….or do you?  What are the entry points that a company needs to prepare for to begin to shift to a culturally infused environment?

How can we possibly work through this topic in only one hour you might ask?  Luck for us we have “Famous Frank” or Frank Eliason from Comcast this week to moderate this topic.Frank has lead Comcast’s social efforts with a focus on service through Twitter that has made him world famous.  Frank brings first hand experiences and answers to all our questions and more.  Usually you would have to have a very serious problem with your Comcast service to be able to spend an hour with Frank.  Today, we will have the opportunity to learn and share our collective experiences in managing a socially enabled customer service department.  The topic this week is as follows:

Topic: Customer Service’s Role in Social Media

Q1: Is Social Media converging the roles of Service, Marketing and PR, if so who owns it?

Q2: How do you scale customer service in social media?

Q3: How do companies prepare for social customer service?

Join us at 12 noon EST on Tuesday March 9, 2010 for one hour.  The first question will come out at noon and then at 12:20 and 12:40.  To participate or simply follow along, tune into #sm50 on Twitter or just go to our LIVE page for a richer experience.

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Engagement Through Customer Service: Your Contact Center and Social Media

Monday, January 4th, 2010

CallcenterWe hear so much chatter that companies have to be participating in social media.  The chatter then leads into who should do it….and Viola! a single person is assigned to it.  That person is usually born of the marketing or public relations (PR) team and the goal is rather simple: 1. Listen and 2. chat it up in an effort to create customer relationships.  Customer Relationships! are you kidding me?!?!  Who in marketing or PR has ever had to directly sell or service a customer (let me help you – not many)?  So why don’t we ever hear about social media from the people who are responsible for managing direct customer experiences on a daily basis?  That’s right, the customer service teams, talk about resources!  Customer support, service, tech support usually have dozens if not thousands of company representatives waiting for you to call.  Ahh, therein lies the issue.  Customer service is typically reactive and most likely engineered to react via the telephone. 

It is interesting to consider though.  Customer service is probably the one department with the most experience in developing customer relationships across your entire organization.  Every executive understands the numbers associated with keeping a customer versus the cost of acquiring one, yet Service rarely has a seat at the executive table.  Executives all proclaim that Job #1 within their companies is to over-deliver on quality and service and yet none really have any idea on what the Experience is in buying from their company.  The experience is what social media is all about.  Every experience a customer has with your organization plays a part in developing not only that customer’s relationship with your company, but the relationship of that customer’s network too.  Developing customer relationships are about managing a series of defining moments with customers (ie: pleasant to talk to, was I treated with respect, was my inquiry answered timely, did rep answer or fulfill my question). Contact centers are traditionally very strong with telephone support so incorporating online social media into contact centers is certainly a challenge. There may be nothing more important however to developing a truly social enterprise than incorporating the contact centers in a meaningful way.

The challenges are abound.  Systems are all centered on a phone switch, representatives trained to be reactive and solve problems, integration into core infrastructure including ERP, CRM, even accounting and not-to-mention many contact centers are wholly or partially outsourced.  With that last part it now becomes an entire corporate ecosystem that has to change instead of a couple of people in a department.  The payoff though is equally impressive for any company who can transform their client relationships with customer service being at the core.  Consider a blog regarding a comparison of cameras debating which to get.  If your camera company was the only one to contact that person and offer a promotion or simply a closer look through a video demo, your chances of the sale are good, however your chances of developing a relationship through a positive defining moment are great especially when exposed to that person’s network.  Consider a tweet for someone in a strange town looking for some comfort food.  If you are the only restaraunt who responds and delivers on that experience, youhave created a tremendous asset in that customer’s network however large or small it may be.

 As social media has enabled citizens access to limitless information regarding your product and your company, it has also created a new class of customers.  These customers have access to insights, reviews and most of all – random thoughts regarding their most recent defining moment with your company.  The rules are changing and contact centers must change with them.  Social media is propagating a new class of defining moments for companies to deal with.  Those moments are no longer siloed to a channel of communication (ie. phone, email, letters).  They permeate all channels and the customer expectations are re-set to near real-time for answers and for attention by your customers. 

Companies at the front of this revolution to infuse social media into their service channels will most likely be leaders in their respective industries.  Our moderator this week is no exception.  Shashi Bellamkonda directs social media across Network Solutions, the de-facto leader in all things needed for businesses to manage a web presence.  Shashi is one of the few social media all-stars that actually is recognized in the industry for what he does as much as by what he says.  Shashi will lead us in this discussion coming with first-hand experience in how major corporations actually handle social media inside their service units.  The topic and questions follow:

Topic:  Engagement Through Customer Service: Your Contact Center and Social Media

Q1:  When should customer service engage with consumers using social media?

Q2:  How can contact centers scale to meet the demands of social media?

Q3:  How can you determine if Customer Service is being effective with social media?

As always, the chat will be Tuesday (01/05/10) at noon EST.  You are invited to join the discussion or at least follow along by tracking the hashtag #sm41 and be sure to include it in all your tweets.  Another way to follow along is to use our LIVE page as well.  We look forward to a tremendous discussion!

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Posted in corporate, Customer Service, SocialCRM | 2 Comments »