Marketing Roadmaps

Customer Satisfaction

Blogging, social media & customer service (Part 6)

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Part 6: Communities: Should you start one?

If your customers are already congregating online, in Twitter or Facebook or a private community, the best thing to do is to start participating there, following whatever guidelines the members set out for your participation. It may be your product, but it is their place. They aren’t going to want product pitches; they will want participation and they’ll likely expect help.

Before you build your own community, which can be an expensive proposition, make sure that your customers really want one. If there isn’t one already, the reason may be they don’t want a special place to speak with your company and each other online. Unless you are absolutely certain that your products engender that kind of loyalty, start small. Perhaps with a forum or suggestion box.

Starbucks and Dell have taken the suggestion box to the extreme, building sites on which customers can make public suggestions and vote on the ones they like best, but you don’t have to have something that complex. Start with a simple email alias for suggestions, and be sure someone responds quickly. What works about the Starbucks and Dell sites isn’t the voting. It’s that the companies are responding and taking action on suggestions.

Regardless of how much or how little technology you use, the key ingredient in customer care will always be the people interacting with your customers. Technology, whether the telephone, email or Twitter, is just the tool we use to do it. And the keys to success are the same as any other business endeavor: honesty, patience, consistency and commitment.

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And that brings us to the end of the main article. There are two more short posts to follow on Sunday: microblogging considerations (Part 7) and some recommendations for next steps for both individuals and customer service groups just getting started with social media (Part 8).

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Blogging, social media & customer service (Part 5)

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Part 5: Comments. They’re what keep you up at night.

Without a doubt, the issue at the forefront of most customer care professionals is how to respond to comments, whether on your own company’s blog or elsewhere. You are really worried about the negative ones. This is not only a real concern but also a realistic one.

Some folks out there are crazy and there’s nothing to be gained by engaging with them. The good news is, the Internet is a fairly self-correcting environment. If someone is talking trash about your products without cause, the community tends to self-police.

Some, hopefully many, comments will be positive. More importantly, the conversation will happen with or without you. The only thing I can guarantee is that if you make no effort, nothing will change. But if you do, your customers will notice.

When people say positive things online about your company and products, thank them. When they criticize or have a problem, respond. Solve the problem if you can. If you can’t, develop the mechanisms in your firm so you can escalate the issue. If there is no solution, explain, clearly and honestly. The customer may not be happy, but the rational ones will appreciate the response.

Depending on the situation this conversation could happen publicly on a blog or microblog like Twitter or privately in email. Choose the response that fits the situation and your company culture. What matters is that your customer spoke online and you heard him.

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Update: Netflix recently demonstrated that it is paying attention to its customers when it rescinded a decision to remove a popular feature after customers protested online. Hat tip to Sandra. 

Next up: Part 6, Should you build a community?

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Blogging, social media & customer service (Part 4)

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Part 4: What should customer service and consumer affairs do?

You’ve decided that some involvement in social media makes sense. But what should you do? I recommend a phased approach that I call the Four Ps of Online Engagement:

  • Prepare
  • Participate
  • Pitch or Publish

Let’s take them in order. First, you need to prepare by listening to the online conversation. Monitor the blogosphere for mentions of your company name. Find out who is writing about your products and industry. It’s a virtual, informal focus group that lets you take the pulse of your key constituents. You can do this monitoring on your own, using Google, the Technorati blog search engine and a myriad of free tools that do everything from track Twitter  to measure the impact of a blogger’s posts.

 

Or you can get some help. There are many third party options available, at various price points, from the custom and often costly monitoring programs developed by companies like Cymfony to do-it-yourself dashboards that assemble the information for analysis such as those offered by KD Paine & Partners and Radian6.

If you do proceed with a social media effort, these same tools can also help with the measurement of results, but don’t confuse the two steps. Initially, monitoring is done to assess the commentary about your company and products so you solve the right problems. Ongoing measurement is about results. Have you achieved whatever objectives you set for your social media effort?

Once you know what’s being said about your company online, and by whom, you can start thinking about how to participate in the conversation. This can be anything from simply replying privately, to posting public responses when and where appropriate, to starting a blog, as Dell did, to make it easier for your customers to communicate with you. All of these are perfectly acceptable responses.

The most important thing to remember about engaging publicly is that you have to be able to take action. Sympathy and empathy are a good start, but they are not enough.

Also, keep in mind that not all commentary is negative. When you start listening to what your customers are saying online, you might find evangelists who love your company and products, and are already sharing the love with the people who read their blogs or listen to their podcasts. These folks are a great channel for sharing information with other customers, and nothing would please them more than a little recognition and communication from you.

The final phase of online engagement is actively telling the company’s story, versus simply responding to the ongoing conversation. This is what I call pitch or publish. The company may choose to publish a blog, launch a community or start a proactive program of outreach to bloggers. For most companies, these efforts will be part of the marketing or corporate communications functions, but if your firm is considering one or more of these strategies, I highly recommend that customer care professionals get involved or at least stay informed. Guaranteed, whatever the company does will impact customer satisfaction, one way or the other.

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Next post, Part 5: Comments. They’re what keep you up at night.

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Blogging, social media & customer service (Part 3)

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Part 3: Impact of Social Media on Customer Care

Customers are engaging with social media. So are many companies. For example, nearly 12 percent of the US Fortune 500 companies have a blog of some kind. The benefits that accrue for both individuals and companies include deeper relationships with peers and customers, increased awareness of the brand, whether personal, professional or corporate, broader and deeper professional networks, improved search engine rankings and increased traffic to the website.

But what about the specific impact on customer care? How has the social media explosion changed the playing field for customer service and consumer affairs professionals?

As noted earlier, postings on customer care experiences influence purchase decisions. In the SNCR study, 74% reported that they choose companies and brands based on others’ customer care experiences shared online.

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Source: Society for New Communications Research, Exploring the Link Between Customer Care and Brand Reputation in the Age of Social Media

The SNCR study also reveals an opportunity. While consumers feel that one person can influence many about a bad customer care experience, only 30% of the respondents thought that businesses take customer opinions seriously. And that’s the opportunity – to start listening and acting on what customers may be saying online.

Source: Society for New Communications Research, Exploring the Link Between Customer Care and Brand Reputation in the Age of Social Media

This is a scary idea for many — indeed most – companies, mostly because we tend to focus on the negative. And there is negative, no question. There aren’t many people in business who don’t know the story of Dell Hell, and how one prominent blogger’s negative postings about Dell customer service exploded into a serious PR problem for the computer maker in 2005.

However, it’s not all bad. Customers leave unsolicited positive comments about the products and services they love every day on blogs, review sites and discussion forums. And for the most part, companies are just as silent.

But not Dell. The company launched its Direct2Dell blog in July 2006 to engage directly and publicly with customers about problems. Though the blog had a rocky start, Dell succeeded in showing even its most severe critics that it was both paying attention and acting on customer feedback. The company monitors consumer sentiment in the blogosphere and has seen its negative rating decline from 49 percent negative in August 2006 to 21 percent negative in January 2008 (Source: Presentation at New Comm Forum 08 by Richard Binhammer, Dell)

There are two very important lessons from the Dell experience. First, top management support is absolutely essential. Customer feedback must be actionable. Dell had that support from Michael Dell. Second, your best customer is often the formerly unhappy customer. Jeff Jarvis, the blogger who launched Dell Hell in 2005, wrote a positive piece about the company’s efforts for BusinessWeek in October 2007 and commented on his own blog Buzz Machine:

“After giving Dell hell two years ago, I may well be accused of throwing them a wet kiss now. It’s a positive piece. But it’s hard not to praise them when they ended up doing everything I was pushing in my open letter to Michael Dell. I’m not saying that I caused that, just that we ended up agreeing and they ended up seeing the value in listening to and ceding control to customers. They reached out to bloggers; they blogged; they found ways to listen to and follow the advice of their customers. They joined the conversation. That’s all we asked.” (October 18, 2007)

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In part 4, we’ll discuss what customer service should do about and with social media.

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Blogging, social media & customer service (Part 2)

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Part 2: Social Networks, Communities, Aggregators and Wikis

The third social media space where you will find your customers are social networks. These range from public networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube to private branded networks. You need to understand if your customers are actively engaged in these networks, and participate accordingly.

The easiest way to understand LinkedIn and Facebook is to understand their roots. LinkedIn started as a way for business professionals to connect with each other through mutual connections. Facebook, as the name implies, was the Internet version of the ubiquitous college facebook. Although it started as a closed network for college and high school students, it’s been open to the general public since 2007 and really exploded that spring. Both networks offer numerous interactive features and interest groups in which members can collect around shared interests.

Flickr, YouTube and similar networks are more specific to a certain type of interest; Flickr is photography, YouTube is for video clips, and so on. Conversation happens but it is about the photo, about the video clip.

For the most part, though, these public social networks are more enablers of conversation and community than places where folks “hang out” for any length of time. In my opinion, they have a flatness that stems from their primary role as conveyers of information. However, you need to understand how your customers are participating in these spaces. Some Facebook and LinkedIn groups are very active; if your customers happen to have joined together in one, you should be aware and act accordingly.

Private branded communities, enabled by social software like Ning, let anyone build a community around a set of shared interests.

Companies may also launch their own communities using enterprise-level software. For example, Saturn recently launched a community that exceeded its six-month estimate of signups in the first three weeks.

When these communities succeed, whether consumer-driven or company supported, the conversation and engagement level is generally quite high because the distraction factor of other interests is absent.

Some of the other social media tools and terms you may hear of:

  • Aggregators or memetrackers like Memeorandum and Tailrank collect the most linked/talked about posts of the day and present them in a threaded format – the original post and the follow-on ones so you can follow the online conversation. Another news aggregator site is Digg, which uses a voting system to promote articles to the front page.
  • Wikis are simply websites edited by a group versus an individual using specialized software that tracks changes, updates and access rights. The best known public wiki is Wikipedia but increasingly wikis are used by companies for internal project management and support knowledge bases. You will often find them built into online communities.
  • Podcasts and videocasts are online radio or video shows. They are typically pre-recorded. Unlike streaming audio or video, listeners/viewers can download the show to their computer or a portable device like an iPod and listen or watch whenever they want. Users can also sign up for regular updates.

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In part 3, we’ll discuss the impact of social media on customer care. If you’d like to read more about customer service issues, please check out my client Caras Training’s blog  For the Face of Your Business. Principal Ronna Caras has been focusing on customer service of late, and I think you’ll enjoy her perspective. I certainly do!

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