Customer Satisfaction

Blogging & social media: What customer service professionals should know, and do, about it (Part 1)

June 26, 2008 by Susan Getgood

This article is based on a workshop I delivered at the SOCAP International Symposium in April.

Part 1- Defining Social Media: Blogs & Microblogs

Customer service. It’s the new marketing.

Huh? Anyone who has been in business for more than five minutes knows that customer service has always been part of marketing. The scale of the modern enterprise and the realities of distribution may have separated them functionally, but practically, a customer’s experience with our product is just as, if not more, important than any ad, promotion or package.

Ah, but it’s different now. Customer satisfaction is more important than ever. Research conducted by global think tank Society for New Communications Research in Spring 2008 reported that 72 percent of respondents researched products and services online, and 84 percent considered the customer care reputation of the company when making a purchase decision.

Where are consumers finding this information? Not on your corporate website. Increasingly, they are turning to social media like blogs to both share their opinions and find out what others think. In the SNCR study, search engines, online rating systems, discussion forums and blogs were all considered more valuable sources of information than the company website.

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

Social media is a collective term used to refer to a variety of online tools including blogs, social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and online consumer forums. This article will give you a brief overview of the ones most important for customer service and satisfaction. The key thing about all of them is that they give consumers a way to communicate with each other, fast. Faster than sometimes the company can respond. As customer service and consumer affairs professionals, you need to understand which ones your customers are using, and develop strategies to use those same tools to improve your service and satisfaction.

We’re going to focus on the tools most relevant to customer service: blogs, microblogs and social networks.

Technically, blogs are simply websites developed using a lightweight content management system (CMS). They use HTML, just like your company website, but the CMS tools are designed to be simple to use for people without technical knowledge. Well known CMS include Typepad, Blogger, Movable Type and Word Press.

The things that most clearly identify a site as a blog are:

Content, or posts, presented in an article-like form, in reverse chronological order.
Ability for readers to leave public comments
Ability to subscribe to the blog’s RSS feed or by email

In practice, however, blogs are much more than that. Unlike your company website, which is probably a fairly static presentation of company capabilities not that different from a brochure, blogs are a conversation. Bloggers write about and link to other bloggers’ ideas. They create space on their blog for readers to comment, and they reply back. This dynamic is why news can spread so very fast from blog to blog.

Blogs typically have a point of view and they are not overtly commercial or promotional, even if they are a company or product blog. It’s all about engaging in a conversation in an authentic, honest way.

The easiest way to understand microblogs – services like Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce – is to think of them as group instant messaging. It’s real-time one-to-many; unlike instant messaging, when you post a public message, everyone in your network can see and respond to it. The most popular service is Twitter, and companies like JetBlue, Comcast, Dell and online shoe store Zappos are already using it to communicate with customers.

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In part two, we’ll look at social networks and communities.

Tags: customer service, customer satisfaction, blogs

The direction of Marketing Roadmaps

May 28, 2008 by Susan Getgood

Marketing Roadmaps has been going in a new direction for the past couple months, so I thought it would be a good time to articulate what you can expect to find here. And what you most likely will not find here.

First off — what you will find here. More on the practice of blogger relations, the impact of social media on customer care, practical tips culled from my workshops on social media and blogger relations. Conversation about online reputation management, measuring the return on investment, online communities and the impact of social media on traditional entertainment.

What you won’t find so much of? Sales process and marketing management tips. I’ll be writing and talking about those on Business Forward, the blog and podcast I produce for my client GuideMark. Too much talk about my family, pets, trips and favorite tv shows, unless there’s a marketing angle. All of that you’ll find at my personal blog Snapshot Chronicles.

You also won’t find too much discussion of the practice of public relations, as distinct from blogger relations, unless it is something really juicy like blacklists or gross unethical behavior by a top PR agency that I just cannot resist.

I especially will not be talking about the social media press release. For me to comment on the press release, as a form, in any form, at this point is like a vegetarian recommending a cut of beef. As my practice moves away from pureplay public relations, and toward blogger relations and online reputation management, I find that just about the last thing I recommend to clients is a press release. It’s just not relevant to what they are trying to achieve, which is to talk with their customers online.

Wait a minute, I hear you cry. Over the past few years, many marketing and PR consultants have recommended online distribution of releases through services like PR Web as a way to reach customers directly. By putting the release on the wire, the story goes, you improve the discoverability of your news by the search engines. Well, yes. But the operative word is NEWS. If you are issuing actual company news or material information, and you need to reach the news media, by all means do a news release, in whatever form floats your boat — traditional, social media, tom-tom drum. Whatever.

But if it isn’t actually news, as in new and interesting, it shouldn’t be distributed as news. I attribute most of the press release crap lining my spam folder to the mistaken notion that using the form of the press release somehow transforms mundane sales pitches into page one material.

If you are trying to reach your customers, the news release is not and and never has been the optimum form. Telephone. Newsletters. Email blast to your customer list. Personal email. Blogs. All of these are better, more easily understood ways to convey information about your products and services to your customers. Including bloggers.

So take it away, Todd Defren, Brian Solis, Chris Heuer and Tom Foremski. I’ll come over and comment at your places, but as far as Marketing Roadmaps goes, I’ve said what I’m going to say, I’ve said it again, and now I’ve said it for the last time.

Instead, I’m going to focus on helping companies meet their customers online.

Peace out.

Tags: social media press release, blogger relations, customer relations

JetBlue is listening, but are they able to do anything about what they hear?

May 27, 2008 by Susan Getgood

Well, JetBlue is clearly listening to what’s being said about them online — see Jenny Dervin’s comment on my previous post. Points for walking the social media talk. And this cranky blogger certainly appreciates attention being paid to my posts. Especially since I informally track how well companies are listening to what it being said about them online.

But, are they able to do anything about what they hear?

Corp Comm may be listening, but you wouldn’t know it from communicating with customer service. Here are the disconnects over the past day that lead me to conclude that the airline has a significant customer service problem.

First, the initial email, part of which is reproduced in my earlier post, definitely pushes the customer to accept the rebooking. The option to reschedule is below the BIG ORANGE BUTTON, and you can’t do that online. You have to call.

Which I did, as reported in my earlier post. Mostly to complain. The customer service rep also suggested I leave a comment on the website. So I did, repeating most of the points from my Monday post.

Points for speediness. JetBlue replied back almost immediately. And that brings us to the next set of problems. Here’s the email.

New concerns, in order of appearance in the email:

What do caps placed on flights to/from New York have to do with my original flight plan, which was roundtrip Boston to San Francisco?
Whoa Nellie. I had the option of canceling these flights?And getting a full refund? How come this is the first I’ve heard of it?
Finally — I don’t exactly recall choosing to keep the 1:35 pm flight.

So I sent another email to customer service. Here are my exact words:

In fact, I deliberately did not push the BIG ORANGE button because I needed time to explore my alternatives.

Here’s the reply to to that email. I dare you to find an actual answer to any of my questions. In fact, as my son would say, I double-dog dare you.

The apology is lovely. Really. And I do appreciate Jenny Dervin’s offer of assistance. But I still would have liked someone in Customer Service to answer my questions, not just pull some standard verbiage out of the manual. I get that the airline can change the schedule any way it wishes and there is very little I can do about it.

But… Once you start engaging with your customers online, as JetBlue is doing on Twitter and in responding to bloggers, we are going to expect the same level of honesty and yes, transparency, in our other transactions with you.

So, why not tell me why? I can guess at the answers.

Why wasn’t I given the opportunity to select a new itinerary in the first place, given the major shift in time represented by the rebooked itinerary?

The system is set up to handle things in one standard way, rebook and email. Doesn’t matter if the time shift is 10 minutes or 10 hours. As Jenny Dervin commented on my previous post: "We do an auto-rebook when we have a schedule change, because it locks a seat in on the other flight, and it’s definately something we can change if the rebooking doesn’t work out."

Why wasn’t the option to cancel presented to me upfront?

They don’t want you to cancel. They just want you to take the rebooking.

What in the world does New York have to do with flights to Boston?

Flight consolidation. They can sell out the JFK flight, and travellers to other destinations will suck it up and take the connection. I just screw things up by planning so far ahead.

Since I can figure it out, wouldn’t it be better to just tell me? And in the case of the cancel option, make sure it is in the very first communication about the change, if not for all changes, those that represent more than 3-4 hours difference?

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Since Jenny had reached out to me, I wanted to give her, and JetBlue, an opportunity to comment. I forwarded her the draft post, so she could see the unsatisfactory emails from customer service. She called about an hour later.

Note: my post is unchanged except for this conclusion.

We discussed my concerns and she told me that she intended to forward my post, once published, to the head of customer service as an example of how important it is to fully read the email and answer the customer’s question, not simply reply fast.

She also told me about a flight option, a red-eye out of Oakland, that has essentially the same times as the original flight we booked out of SFO: depart Oakland at 10:30 pm and arrive BOS at 7:02 am the next morning. We both agreed that this should have been provided as an option by one of the three customer service reps who touched my reservation over the past 24 hours. It wasn’t.

The message for JetBlue? Your Corp Comm group and your Twitter guy are representing you well online. Your customer service team has got to catch up, and walk the same talk. Just tell us the truth. Customers, with a few really nasty exceptions, are generally nice people. We want to like you, because we don’t like the big guys. We’re also not stupid, and pretty much understand the game as played. We just want to be able to trust that you are playing fair.

Because, you know, I get it. With the rising cost of fuel, it makes no sense for there to be two basically equivalent red-eyes out of the Bay Area to Boston. One’s enough. We just want to be on it.

Thanks, Jenny.

Tags: JetBlue, customer satisfaction, airlines