Stop Losing Customers By Doing This One Simple Thing

As they say, there is a reason you have two ears and one mouth. This is especially true for those of us in social customer care, where listening is so critical. As customers are migrating away from phone and email channels when they need help, social channels like Facebook and Twitter seem to be the new channels of choice.

Let’s examine why. With the phone, I may have to fumble through a challenging IVR or wait on hold while hearing that “Your call is very important to us” message over and over. If it’s so important, why am I on hold for 39 minutes?

Once I get on the phone I have to repeat my name, phone number, and account number even though I already told the automated system.

It usually goes something like this:

Please say your name and press pound.

Me: Chad Schaeffer

IVR: Chet Schaeffer press 1 if this is correct, 2 if not.

Me: Chad Schaeffer

IVR: Jack Schaeffer, press 1 if this is correct, 2 if not.

Me: Jack Bauer, am I on an episode of 24, because this IVR is torture

Email isn’t much better, have you ever tried to find a company’s customer service email address? It’s like trying to find matching socks in the dark. Then you wait 24 hours to get a response that really just asks for more information, even though you filled out an email form with 76 fields on it.

No wonder social care is growing so quickly!

I can simply take out my mobile device (which is glued to my hand to save time), open my Twitter app, type up to 140 characters, and have the confidence of knowing the brand needs to bring their A game in social media. Thanks to the power of word of mouth in social, the consumer really does have your brand’s reputation in the palm of their hand.

Back to listening and why it’s so important for brands trying to improve their social customer service.

We have two ears which is good because there are two main types of listening in social customer care. “Managed listening” and “proactive listening”—another kind of listening that can help you retain even more customers.

Let’s look at priority number one—managed listening. Managed listening is when a consumer complains, praises, or asks a question of your brand on your owned social media accounts like Facebook or Twitter. As you can see in this example below, the consumer has mentioned the @BofA_Help Twitter handle directly engaging the brand. Make no mistake, consumers are expecting a response, and expecting it quickly (if you haven’t noticed!).

 

If you really want to start retaining more consumers, then you might be interested in proactive listening. That’s when a consumer names your brand or product in a tweet but does not directly @mention your Twitter account like in the example below. Notice this customer is clearly upset at Bank of America but isn’t directly asking @BofA_Help for assistance. Fortunately, Bank of America is doing an awesome job of proactive listening and they engaged this consumer.

How many more consumers could you retain if you started proactively listening in social media?

One important thing to keep in mind: If you were walking to your car late at night, you wouldn’t want the police—even though they’re super helpful—to jump out of a dark alley to ask if you need anything would you?

Well proactive listening is a little like that. The consumer probably isn’t expecting you to be listening to their social conversation with their followers, so be careful how you engage, make sure right up front they know you are there to help. Proactive listening is a great opportunity to surprise and delight when paired with friendly responsive engagement.

So let’s do a quick review on listening in social customer service.

Priority 1
Listen and engage on your owned social media channels where your consumers have directly asked you for help or taken the time to praise your brand. Your customers are expecting a timely response, that might mean in under 60 minutes!

Priority 2
Listen and engage proactively with consumers clearly needing assistance on Twitter but not directly mentioning your brand’s Twitter account. You may find this can double or even triple your support volume so plan accordingly with staffing before you dive in!

Good luck with your social customer service listening efforts! For more insight on establishing transformative social customer service within your organization, download our e-book, 8 Steps to Transformative Social Customer Service.

Switzerland: Chocolate, Cheese, Watches and Social Media?

Good Morning ‘No Fluff’ Social Media readers. Last week’s post on social ad’s was a hit, I’m thankful so many of you took the time to reach out and let me know you enjoyed the videos. I’ll understand if people take a break from my blog this week with the holiday weekend but if you chose to be here you have my gratitude.

Duty calls so it’s no holiday in the Schaeffer household. Especially for my unselfish, patient and understanding wife. I’ll be hopping on a plane for Switzerland today while she manages three kids by herself for a week. I don’t think my amazing wife reads my boring blogs but if you do, I love you honey! Did I mention your beautiful, stunning and gorgeous?

I’m going to be speaking at a workshop on Social Customer Service. A topic I love. I’m still finalizing the presentation but here is the outline. What do you think?

1. The History of Customer Service

• From the general store when the owner knew every customer by name thru phone, email and now Facebook and Twitter.

2. How the Customer Has Evolved

• The most important word in Customer Service is Customer, not Service. It’s always about the customer and the customer has changed. We are much more knowledgeable today, we buy what our family/friends recommend and want to do business with companies that align with our personal values.

3. The Customer Service Department is Dead

• Brands can’t afford to have customer service as a standalone department. It simply has to be weaved into the fabric of everything the organization does. It’s like culture, there is no culture department, it’s the way people behave and make decisions. Customer service is the same.

4. Marketing Will You Marry Me? Love, Customer Service

• Customer Service IS the new marketing. As consumers we don’t care about TV commercials, newspaper ad’s and big billboards. We get online and read reviews and ask our peers before purchasing a product or service. Customer service and marketing have to work in concert because customer acquisition and retention are no longer mutually exclusive, they are one in the same. Happy customers buy more, happy customers get new customers to buy. Dissatisfied customers leave, and take potential consumers with them.

5. Listening Strategies for Social Customer Service

• Traditional social listening is focused on brand/product mentions, competitors and campaign measurement. Listening for social care is proactively looking for consumers that need help, have a question, communicated a negative experience, took the time to share a positive experience or perhaps just in pre-purchase mode doing a little online research.

6. Social Customer Care Metrics and KPI’s

• As discussed in the previous point, because listening strategies are different between marketing and customer service so are the metrics. For example, social care metrics measure how many customers helped each day, top complaints and products issues. However, although different on the surface, service can learn from marketing because shouldn’t we be measuring likes, shares and reach of our service recovery engagements?

Well that’s an appetizer, there will be much more to the presentation including;

• Operational models on creating a Center of Excellence vs Localized support vs Centralized program structures
• Technology requirements and the ecosystem of tools required to deliver outstanding social customer service
• Social Customer Care Playbook. The process, training, certification, reports, and roles/responsibilities involved in launching a program.
• Social Customer Care Maturity Curve. Excited to be delivering a brand new creation to help brands with a crawl, walk, run, fly approach. Social care is a journey, not a project with a start and end date.

I’ll let you know next week how it goes hopefully with some really cool pictures of Switzerland, I’ve heard its beautiful.  Have a fun safe holiday weekend and thanks again to all of you who comment, share and like my blog.

What Keeps Me Up At Night

Good morning everyone! Happy Friday.  More importantly Happy Mother’s Day Weekend to all of you fortunate enough to have children, what a blessing they are thanks to you Mom. I’m very lucky, my mom Donna is an amazing mother and I love that I moved back to Detroit to spend more time with her. As lucky as I am, my 3 children have really hit the jackpot with Staci. One day is nowhere near enough to celebrate all she does for our children.

Mom’s….and Dad’s for that matter in social media I haven’t been getting much sleep lately. There are so many exciting opportunities and challenges in social that I thought I’d put a list together of the things I’ve been working on with clients that keep me up and night.

1. Social Sales – Everybody wants to know how do I make money with social, how do I show a hard ROI.
2. Social Customer Care – Executing the use case for customer retention and customer service in social media and showing the impact on retention/loyalty.
3. Social Marketing – Optimizing the most effective and efficient use of marketing investment across the social internet, social marketing is the last unaccountable spend but not for much longer.
4. Competitive Analysis – There is such a hyper focus on competitors in social media, wish more resources were focused on improving internally first.
5. Social Technology – Integrating social media listening, publishing, advertising and search strategies to optimize social investment, resources and results.
6. Social Partner Management – Define, document and present a preferred social media ecosystem including digital and creative agencies, media buyers, solution partners and system integrators.
7. Customer Experience – Present a coordinated Web/Mobile/Social customer experience every single time.
8. Employee Engagement – Educate, create and harness the power of a brand’s greatest social media advocates? Think about the power of employee advocates for a brand like Lowe’s with all those customer touch points.
9. Social Culture – Drive the same cultural revolution inside a brand at a faster speed than consumer behavior is changing on the outside in social.
10. Social Decision Making – Driving adoption to the point to where a brand routinely leverages social data and customer feedback to make improved business decisions.
11. Social Center of Excellence – Create a social media nerve center centralizing key functions including PR, Communications, Agency, Customer Service, IT and Marketing into one physical location all centered around the customer.
12. Big Data – Measure the impact of online to offline transactions on new customer acquisition, conquests and retention.
13. Social Media Playbook – Building a social media playbook outlining the key goals, metrics, roles/responsibilities, process, policies, content and engagement guidelines, education and adoption strategies.
14. Sponsorships & Events – Maximize the positive impact of social media on sponsorship opportunities and live events.
15. PR & Crisis Management – Protect the brand and mitigate risk from the tidal wave of negative sentiment.

I think it’s going to be a long night! See you next week. Thanks for visiting my blog.

Part 5 – Worst Social Media Advice (Listening)

I hope everyone’s morning was as good as the one I had! I turn 37 today and woke up to lots of extra hugs and kisses from the kids.

Before I dive in, thank you! I know life is crazy hectic but if you are reading this you decided to spend a few minutes with me and for that I’m very gracious.

I have a question for you. When it comes to social media, what’s that itch you can’t seem to scratch? That one thing you just can’t figure out? I’m always looking for new inspiration for a future blog.

Let’s get to it!

Like many of you, I consider myself a student of social media and therefore I read lots of blogs, online articles and follow industry leaders on social networks. I’m also lucky enough to work for Salesforce.com on the Marketing Cloud team with some of the most innovative social minds and technologies on the planet. Finally I get to spend time with our amazing clients discussing current challenges and where social is headed next.

Through all this experience unfortunately I come across a lot of really bad social media advice. So a few weeks ago I started a five-week blog series highlighting the dark side of social media consulting and how you can spot the boneheads from the real experts.

I started the series with pointers on getting the most out of Sentiment and how to turn a basic metric into an actionable insight.

Next I wrote about how to avoid wasting time on measuring Competitors and putting your limited time, resources and budget towards competitive research that will actually provide a return.

Third, I covered the buzzword social media Insights. As we all know, insights alone don’t get us promoted, drive sales or a better customer experience. Most consultants don’t take the time to take an insight and turn it into an input into another part of the organization to really drive positive change.

Last week, I covered the 2nd biggest black eye in social media and that’s ‘Big Data’. Like Stephen Covey, the key here is begin with the end in mind. What do you want to know and if you knew it, how would it help your business.  For example, is there a relationship between how active a customer is in social media to buying more of your products?

Drum roll, ready for in my humble opinion the single worst piece of advice in social media? It’s going to shock you!

…

..

.

Listening!

Before you disagree, let me explain.

You might be thinking Listening is where all great social media programs start. Listening is the most important part of a successful social program. Without Listening first, just diving into social media is like a sailboat with a rudder.

We are in 100% agreement on all those statements. Here is where I hope to give you something to think about.

Most experts would agree there are about five business cases for social media, in other words, 5 reasons to spend time, money and resources on social media in the first place.

1. Create brand awareness and more effective marketing

2. Provide social customer care

3. Social lead generation and sales

4. Public relations and brand protection

5. Social research & development

I realize there are many other reasons to do social media but most if not all probably roll up to one of these five higher level objectives.

Here is the problem with Listening.

1. Listening alone will not create brand awareness or improve marketing. You have to create compelling content based on your listening efforts.

2. If your customer has a problem or question, just listening and not responding is actually just going to make the problem worse.

3. When consumers in social show interest in your products and you listen but don’t engage or provide a call to action, there is no social revenue potential.

4. If you your brand is unfortunate and has a crisis, listening to the negative conversation about your brand and not reacting with a well thought out PR plan can cause significant long-term damage.

5. When listening in social across an entire industry like cell phones or tablets as a Samsung might do for R&D, none of the insights, trends or product improvements are going to happen from listening alone. It takes analysis, sharing the insights internally with product management and building new or better products to turn an ROI on social listening.

The moral of the story is, I think Listening because it’s so critical is where all social software and service professionals concentrate.  But we have let down our customers if we don’t drive beyond listening as an important first step in the process to actually producing results from that effort.

This is where I see brands really needing a lot of help. By now most companies get that you should have a Facebook page and Twitter account to connect with customers.  The roadblock to get to the next level of social maturity for a lot of major brands is being stuck on Listening only.

This is why I think Listening is the source of the worst social media advice in the industry. Did I change your mind?

I really enjoyed blogging for you with the five-part series on bad social media advice, hope you learned at least one small thing that can help make you and your brand a social media rock star.

Talk to you again next week, I’ll be blowing out a few candles today!

Part 3 – Worst Social Media Advice – (Insights)

What a week gang! I owe you an apology!

I let you down missing my normal weekly blog entry on Thursdays.

Worked all day Monday and flew out to the west coast getting to my hotel about 3am EST.

Tuesday and Wednesday I was up at 5.30am for 6am calls to support teammates on the east coast.

Both nights after a full day of meetings, there were networking happy hours until 10pm.

Thursday up for early calls again and then an all day intense case study competition that lasted until late in the evening.

Friday I actually slept in late, 6.30am!

My team was fortunate enough to win the prestigious case study competition Friday morning (more on that in a future blog post) before rushing off to the airport for the long flight home to Detroit.

Did I mention I think I also won husband of the year as the designated driver for my wife and her friend as they enjoyed themselves at opening day for the Detroit Tigers?

Needless to say hopping off a plane at 8.30pm, picking up my bride and getting home at 10pm I didn’t have a spare minute to blog.  If you can forgive me, hopefully you will enjoy your Saturday evening glass of wine with me and learn a thing or two about social media.

2 weeks ago I thought it may be helpful for my blog readers to share a few thoughts on poor social media consulting practices. So I created a 5 Part Series on the topic counting down the worst social media advice.

What did you think about Topic 5 – Sentiment and Topic 4 – Competitors?

This week let’s have a conversation about Topic 3 – Social Media Insights!  Insights may be the biggest buzzword in social media.  It’s also probably the single biggest frustration point among executives with their social media teams.

Let me expand on why that is.

A few years ago when social media efforts were just launching, new insights like measuring positive/negative sentiment, share of conversation vs competitors and number of twitter mentions were a great start.

But let’s fast forward to the aggravated executive of today demanding a hard ROI on skyrocketing social media budgets. The simple fact is ‘insights’ alone don’t drive increased sales, improved customer experience or more effective marketing.

This past week in San Francisco I heard Radian6 Co-Founder Chris Ramsey speak on this exact topic and he provided a brilliant summary.

“Insights are an OUTPUT of social listening, but more importantly, they are an INPUT into some other part of the organization to make them actionable. Only then can you start having a social ROI conversation.”

So let’s talk about how to turn insights to action.

This is a purely hypothetical situation.  Assume the Nissan social media team is listening and they notice a spike in negative sentiment.  As discussed in my blog on measuring sentiment, it only becomes valuable when you do things like the following;

1. Break the negative sentiment down by brand and notice the Nissan Leaf generating the bulk of negative sentiment.

2. Break the negative sentiment down for the Leaf and notice its the Quick Charge Port driving negative sentiment.

3. Dig one layer further and the sentiment data shows the Quick Charge Port is supposed to charge the Leaf in 30 minutes, but consumers are claiming it takes 60 minutes.

However, we still haven’t turned insight to action.

So what SHOULD happen next?

1. A meeting with product management and product quality to communicate consumer feedback and validate the battery charge issue and understand root cause.

2. Involve engineering to fix and/or improve battery so issue does not impact future customers.

3. Communicate with existing Leaf owners on how the battery situation will be rectified.

4. Create a model to communicate the impact of social insights to action.

• Recall cost savings
• Lost sales due to bad quality reviews
• Bad PR and negative word of mouth
• Lost customers as loyalty decreases

Hopefully its clear the difference between just delivering ‘insights’ like negative sentiment and turning insights into actionable behavior that can impact sales, customer experience and cost savings.

You can make this blog actionable by working with your social media consultant Monday morning on turning some of your social listening OUTPUTS into actionable INPUTS to other parts of the organization!

Have a wonderful weekend and I’ll be back with you again on Thursday, April 11th.