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.

How Can a Social Media Guy Hate Engagement?

I love Social Media but I hate the word Engagement.  In fact I might hate engagement more than Kim Kardashian!  I think it’s because I’m jealous.  Jealous because I embraced social media as an emerging customer service channel as consumers become more social and move away from traditional service channels like phone, email and chat.

My efforts to evangelize social as a consumer satisfaction channel on behalf of the customer experience community has hit a major roadblock, namely, the focus on engagement instead of service and I hate it if I didn’t mention it!

I’ve looked at several social media dashboards from some of the most respected consumer brands in the world and seen the following typical tracked;

1. Sentiment & Share of Conversation

2. Friends, Followers, Views, Likes, ReTweets

3. Word Clouds & Hot Topics

4. Influencer Analysis

5. Location/Geographic Insights

My dream customer centric dashboard for Global 1000 companies would include the following;

1. Social Customer Satisfaction Index

2. # of Consumers Helped

3. Social Retention Rate

4. Top 10 Complaints & Inquiries in Social

5. Response Time & Escalations

Don’t get me wrong, YES! I HATE THE WORD ENGAGEMENT!  I DO NOT HATE the incredibly talented marketing, PR, brand and agency professionals driving social media.  Without you, I wouldn’t have a job.  I’m just trying to get a little love on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for the little guys in customer service.

We in customer service actually want to help you grow ENGAGEMENT!

How?

Everyday, buried in the stream of 5,000 engagements from consumers on a popular Facebook thread are 25 people who either don’t like your product/service or at the very least have questions about it.  We have all seen the statistics, more than half or 55% of customer complaints on brand Facebook pages go unaddressed.  The numbers are even worse on Twitter, 80% of consumer complaints and inquiries on brand handles go ignored.  YouTube, FourSquare, Flickr, popular social review sites like Yelp or Trip Advisor the numbers are worse.

I say I hate ENGAGEMENT in jest, it’s what drives social media but I do have 2 messages to share.

1. I get it! I’m all about the customer experience, and customers love your cute fill in the blank Facebook posts, fun contests, cool surveys, exciting product announcements and of course the #1 reason consumers friend your page….coupons!

I would just argue the next major trend in social media is the tidal wave of customers expecting customer service on your social channels. Consumers aren’t stupid, they know the power they have in social media.  Making you look bad for the world to see if they receive bad customer service is their motivation, likewise they want to tell all their friends when you surprise and delight them.

Why not expand your engagement strategy to include proactive customer service support on all major social channels including customer communities on blogs, forums and review sites so you are ready when the customers you work so hard to engage need help?

2. Customers are impacted less and less by TV, radio & print ads.  Social and digital ads are more effective but not nearly as impactful as social peer recommendations.  The number one way to push product in social is to get me to recommend you on Facebook, Twitter or a review site.  My friends and followers think so too!

Social Media is 99% engagement and 1% customer satisfaction, in other words, the same percentage a marriage is ever going to work out for Kim.  I’m dedicated to changing those numbers but in the meantime Ms. Kardashian and I are going to hate on ENGAGEMENT!