Customer Twervice: Protect Your Reputation with Social Media Customer Service

www.marketingsavant.com 888.989.7771 The MarketingSavant Group The MarketingSavant Group

Social Media for Customer Service

The MarketingSavant Group

www.marketingsavant.com

888.989.7771

[email protected]

Today’s Agenda

• What trends are driving social media customer service

• How customer service gets done through social media

• Case examples of companies doing well with social customer service

• Social media customer service – The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

• Best Practices and process Mind Maps

www.marketingsavant.com 888.989.7771 The MarketingSavant Group


Factors Affecting Customer Service



Why Customer Service is so Important…

• Customers buy more and choose good customer service experiences over low prices. – Across all industries, consumers said that customer service was more

important than low prices.

• Good customer experiences drive positive word of mouth and customer loyalty. – Across all industries, there was a strong correlation between good

customer experiences and whether a customer was likely to recommend a product to others

• Companies with good customer experiences are more profitable. – Forrester examined the revenue impact of good customer experiences for a

large bank and a large retailer.4 A large bank with customer experiences in the top quartile could earn $43 million in additional purchases and attribute $51 million to business they would have lost if customers had gone to a competitor



Social Media = Customer Service No-Brainer

• Why? – 74% choose to do business with company based on

customer care experiences shared by others online

– 72 % use social media to research customer care reputation BEFORE making purchase

– 59% use social media to vent their frustrations

• Opportunity! – Only 44% of retailers regularly monitor what their

customers are saying on social networks

• You’re giving your customers what they want!




Decreasing Corporate Influence on the Customer



How Does Social Media Help Customer Service?

• Reduce Call Volumes & Costs for the Contact Center

• Improve Customer Service & Experience



Social Customer Service

• To listen to your customers and ENGAGE with them – Find out how to improve your products

– Discover new markets you didn’t know existed

• To let your customers talk to each other…. – Save time in the contact center – why answer questions when

your customers will do it for you?

– “Collaborative Self Service” - link to a Forum/FanPage/Group/Community?

– Imagine FAQs that write themselves

– Brand Ambassadors

– People trust word of mouth

First Responder Program



Listening and Engagement

• Monitor Alerts

• Assess comments

• Respond appropriately + immediately

• Engage directly

• Move offline when necessary



Listen to the Conversation • Be transparent. Be open and

honest in all communication.

• Be ethical. Live by the WOMMA Practical Ethics Toolkit

• Be relevant. Share information and perspectives that are valuable to the online community

• Personalize and be personable.

• Address negative discussion head-on.

• Court evangelists & advocates.

Even if you’re not ready to join the conversation, it pays to have a sound strategy for dealing with any social media conversation taking place about your brand.


Social Media Response

• Evaluate each comment

• Determine course of action

• Pursue action and follow-through

• Seek to turn commenters into advocates



Commit to Customer Conversations

1. Be human. Use a respectful, conversational voice, avoid scripts and never use corporate doublespeak.

2. Encourage employees to use their real names and use a personal touch.

3. Anticipate that problems will occur, and set clear, public expectations in advance for how you will address (and redress) issues.

4. Cultivate a public dialogue with customers so they feel they are being heard and to demonstrate your accountability.

5. Demonstrate your good intentions by speaking plainly, earnestly, and candidly with customers about problems that arise

Facebook Page Notifications

• Facebook not the only or the right answer

• Hyper Alerts is the “feature that Facebook forgot”

• Watch you pages, competitors, pages you like and pages you don’t

• Daily digest of updates (vs. immediate emails)

• Alerts by URL or by FB User – ASAP, Hourly, Daily, Weekly,

Monthly

– Select your time

– Also alerts on your own content

• http://www.hyperalerts.no

http://www.hyperalerts.no/

http://www.hyperalerts.no/

Social Media Listening


Listening is Critical for Social Media

After getting a sense of the playing field, the critical and often overlooked first step is to listen.

Listen to what’s being said about you, about your industry, about your competitors

across the web.

Why this is important:

• Because the conversations are going to happen, with or without you. It is always better

• to be an informed participant in the dialogue, and to understand the lay of the land before

• you take your first steps. In the case of building your brand online, ignorance is definitely

• not bliss. You must be prepared to take a hard, realistic look at your brand through the rest

• of the world’s eyes so you can better understand how to talk with them and be a valued conversation partner.

How it fits into your plan:

• This is very similar to market research, or even just keeping a pulse on your customer base.

• Consider this a piece of reputation management, and spend 15 minutes a day perusing your alerts.



Listening Literacy Skills

The most important listening literacy skills are:

• Keywords Are King: Composing and refining keywords

• Seeing the Forest Through The Trees: Pattern analysis and synthesis of findings

• Engaging effectively: Don't just listen unless your mission is market research

• Information Coping Skills: Avoiding information overload


Learn to Listen

• Where are your customers online/offline?

• Blogs, Social media tools (e.g. LinkedIn Answers), Discussion Forums, Twitter, etc…/Events

• Monitor these conversations:

• Find your brand using Google Alerts, Keotag.com, Boardreader.com and Technorati.com

• Use a central tool to track the different conversations happening around your company. Most online conversations are RSS enabled, barring a few Yahoo! groups that don’t support RSS. Use a RSS reader (e.g. Bloglines.com) to gather all these conversations into a central repository and create a folder that you check on a daily basis.

For Example: Best-in-class organizations pursue social media listening as a daily discipline and have a response strategy to engage in the conversation if necessary.



Set up a Listening Post

• What topics or phrases do you need to track and why?

• How will you make the information actionable?

• How will you find the most influential voices in the social web to follow?

• How will scan and summarize and share in your company?



Listening Tools • Get yourself an account at Google Reader, and build a dashboard filled

with RSS feeds from searches you build on sites like these:

• Google Alerts: Build keyword searches for your company name, your industry terms, and your competitors.

• Twitter Search (HootSuite): Search for your brand name, your own name, terms from your industry, or even competitors terms to see what’s being said about you on Twitter.

• Technorati: Although not as powerful as it once was, Technorati is still a useful tool to get a bit of info about the reach a blog has (known as “authority”), at least within the blogosphere itself.

• Social Mention: A search engine specific for social sites. Treat it like you would a Google search.

• Backtype.com: Backtype aggregates and searches comments being left across the web on blogs. So even if the post isn’t about you, you’ll pick up mentions your community leaves in the comments.

• BoardTracker and BoardReader: Forums and boards aren’t dead! Make sure you’re picking them up in your searches.

Social Customer Service Cases



How Would You Handle?








Best Buy

• Best Buy Customer Service Twitter Handle - @twelpforce

• All employees are encouraged to participate and scour Twitter for opportunities to provide customer service

• Help followers with questions about returns, store hours, and tracking orders


Marriott Hotel

• @MarriottHotels

• Hotel Manager Zachary Long monitors Twitter to keep guests comfortable and anticipate their needs

• He has been known to offer room upgrades and complimentary beverages as a result of guest complaints via Twitter

• Mr. Long understands the potential damage that can result from a negative Tweet


Pottery Barn Facebook

One customer, Jennifer Hellum, sought customer service after the

glass top on her Pottery Barn table shattered in the extreme

Arizona heat last summer. Calling the customer service line and

the store where she bought the table didn’t get her anywhere. A

few weeks later, she posted photos of the tabletop explosion on

Pottery Barn’sFacebook fan page. Within 30 minutes she had a

call from a customer relations representative who worked with her

to find a new tabletop and reimbursed her for it.

http://mashable.com/tag/facebook

“The Good”


But like fighting fire with fire, Domino's smartly chose to fight their social media nightmare using social media. Patrick Doyle, president of Domino's USA, quickly posted a video response to the "Disgusting Domino's Pizza Employees" video on YouTube and setup a Twitter account (@dpzinfo) answer questions from concerned customers. As a result, Domino's is being praised for their actions and might be able to spin this public relations disaster into something slightly positive.



Case Study – ICICI Bank



Case Study – ICICI Bank



Social Channels @ Work

Verizon Support

Virgin Media Case Example

Customer Care via Twitter

Reactive

• Customer ‘tweets’ to @virginmedia asking for help, venting frustration etc

• One of the Twitter ‘Tweam’ picks it up and offers help on the spot if they can. If not,

they invite the customer to send details on to our dedicated team mailbox

• Owns issue to a resolution and ‘Wows’ the customer (case management)

• Feeds back within the business to ensure we learn from

Proactive

• ‘Tweam’ uses keyword searches on Twitter to locate customers talking about us,

reaching out to offer assistance as needed.

The Results

Happy customers advocating Virgin Media

• Net Promoter Score® (NPS)

• Cost to serve

• In customers’ own words

I picked 10 because there

isn't an 11. Sam in the Twitter

team was really really helpful

and a pleasure to deal with!

http://brendancooper.com/2009/02/03/virgin-media-is-about-to-activate-its-social-media/

http://www.bpodr.co.uk/blog/virgin-media-twitter-and-improved-customer-service

In Customers’ Own Words …

Fostering Advocacy

Making it all Worthwhile…

Virgin Media - “Top Twittering ISP” (July 2009)

http://www.top10-broadband.co.uk/news/2009/07/twitter_tweet_for_better_broadband/




What They Learned

• The conversation is happening about you, whether you join in or not

• If your products don’t work, social media customer service won’t fix them

• Don’t be daunted – get stuck in and do it now

• The power of case management

• Trust your staff’s judgment

• Importance of internal feedback contacts

• Instantaneous feedback channel

“The Bad”



Motrin Moms

On the surface at least, the company accomplished the ultimate in outreach goals: 1. Reach target audience 2. Get them to engage in dialogue about your brand 3. Find way to track message and outreach

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmykFKjNpdY&feature=player_embedded


Property Manager Sues Over Moldy Tweet –Infecting Their Own Brand

• A tenent in a Chicago apartment who had 20 followers in Twitter was sued by property manager for saying: “Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks it’s OK.” is being sued for $50k for defamation.

• As a result, this incident has received global attention on the Associated Press, Chicago Tribune and major news outlets.

• Horizon later issued a statement regarding their intention to “sue first, ask questions later”

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jAjOZqEaw7LujxNZao-4B5IgEsUAD99NOO7O0

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-ap-il-twitterlawsuit,0,3413839.story

http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2009/07/28/sue-first-ask-questions-later-not-so-fast-says-twitter-suit-plaintiff/

“The Ugly”


Nestlé’s Social Media Nightmare



March 17, 2010

• Greenpeace accuses Nestle of contributing to de-forestation as a result of its choice of palm-oil suppliers in Indonesia

http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/





March 17, 2010

• Collateral Greenpeace videos are tagged with message about Nestle palm oil policy1.1 Million Views (as of 3/28/10)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odI7pQFyjso

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odI7pQFyjso



March 17-28, 2010

• 68 related YouTube videos attract 1.2 Million views.

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=nestle+palm+oil&search_type=&aq=f

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=nestle+palm+oil&search_type=&aq=f



March 17-28, 2010

• Nestlé's Facebook Page is overwhelmed with negative comments




March 29, 2010

• Negative Twitter comments re: “Nestle Palm Oil” appear every 15 minutes



So, let’s look at the scoreboard

• 1 week before the Easter holiday in the US

• 1.2 Million Negative YouTube Videos

• 95,000 Nestle Facebook fans seeing negative messages

• Negative Twitter Tsunami

• The Wall Street Journal is spreading the story

• 1 week before the Easter holiday in the US

Social Media Customer Service

Best Practices


Don’t Feed the Trolls

• Remember not everyone is worth engaging online. Some people are looking to pick a fight, get free stuff, or just get some attention on Twitter. Ignore those trolls and have a real strategic or customer-centric reason for responding to content online. This relates closely to the scaling topic because you can’t scale without prioritizing your responses.



Ingredients Required…

• The Basics – Some free tools

• Facebook

• Hootsuite

• Google Alerts

• Social Mention

– Someone (or a small team) who loves social media • If it becomes a chore, it’s impossible to engage warmly

• And as a bonus… – Genuine buy in from “the Top” and commitment to communicate

info internally

– Employees that love your company

– Some paid-for tools?



Social Media + Call Center

• Integrating social media into the daily customer service routine

• Hours of service

• Monitoring & Listening responsibilities

• Policies and procedures

– Escalation procedures

• Publishing schedule



Roles

• Community Advocate

• Community

• Community Ambassador

• Social Media or Community Specialist

• Community Relations

• Community Builders

SM CS Process Maps Roles & Responsibilities

SM CS Process Maps Monitoring & Engagement

SM CS Process Maps Social Media Monitoring Toolkit

Smile if you liked it!


www.marketingsavant.co

m

888.989.7771

[email protected]

Thanks You for Attending!


Social Media for Customer Service


www.marketingsavant.com

888.989.7771

[email protected]

Business

Customer Twervice: Protect Your Reputation with Social Media Customer Service