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.

Marketing Will You Dance With Me? Love, Customer Service

It’s like the 8th grade dance all over again.

I can remember it like yesterday.

I wanted to dance with her, she didn’t even know I was alive.

I’ll write her a note “Will You Dance With Me? Circle One –> YES or YES” She’ll laugh and think I’m funny.

Def Leppard “Pour Some Sugar On Me”, my jam…its my time…I…just…can’t.

Get over it customer service, I know you want to be involved in social media so just ask marketing to dance!

You might be nervous on how to start the conversation and maybe marketing does just think you’re the complaint department but once they get to know you it will be like Dancing With The Stars!

Now you don’t want to use a cheesy pick up line like, “hey baby, marketing is the new customer service” so here are a few tips!

5 Ways Customer Service Departments Can Break the Social Media Ice With Marketing

1. Introduce Yourself & Start With a Compliment

“Thank you for owning social media for our brand, social media has become one of the most important strategies in our company. All the customer engagement has been fun to watch. Ironically, phone and email contacts are declining. It appears our consumers want to receive customer service on Facebook and Twitter. Can we work together combining our expertise to drive even more raving fans in social media?”

Who is going to say no to that?

2. Just Be Honest, Tell Marketing Your Intentions

Some customers on Facebook and Twitter who have questions, complaints or take the time to say I love your products/services are being ignored. You want to help marketing by doing what you do best, helping customers!

3. Don’t Step on Her Feet and Define Engagement Swim Lanes

Marketing is still going to own social media so its important to be clear how customer service interactions are going to be handled by creating response swim lanes. Here is what a quick example might look like.

Marketing/PR	Customer Service
Future Product Questions	Product Complaints
Campaign Complaints/Inquiries	Product Suggestions
Crisis Communications	Existing Ownership Product Inquiries
Blogger/Influencer Interactions	Warranty & Rebate Questions
Upcoming Events	Service & Policy Issues
Charity/Environmental Concerns	Thanking Customers For Compliments

4. Pick the Right Dance So You Stay In Rythm

Whether its an elegant ballroom foxtrot or the cha-cha, a successful performance requires partners that compliment each other well. Social media reporting is no different. Helping customers online with a timely response in each social channel compliments everything marketing is trying to accomplish with social media.  Hope these examples are helpful!

Social Media Marketing Metrics	Social Service Metrics
Sentiment & Share of Conversation	How Many Customers Thanked Today
Friends, Followers, Views, Likes, ReTweets	How Many Customers Helped Today
Word Clouds & Hot Topics	Volume of Service Issues by Source (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Forums, Blogs)
Influencer Analysis	Top 10 Complaints & Inquiries in Social
Geo-Location Insights	Response Time & Escalations By Source

5. How To Get Marketing To Kick Off Her Shoes!

Now its time to close the deal with what every marketer will love to hear.

• Customer service has low cost expert resources that can increase engagement without breaking the social media budget.
• Contact centers already work flexible hours and can help with off hours response.
• Ask marketing for their help in providing social media training for your contact center agents, social engagement vs phone/email engagement is like the waltz and the tango.
• Exceptional social service improves peer to peer recommendation and word of mouth, aka, THE most effective marketing

So customer service, stop being a wall flower, start with these 5 steps and you might end up like this happy couple on the dance floor!

 

(wait for it)

—-

Image source: Shutterstock.com confused bride

Should you respond to this? @liptontea I love your ice tea!

Look at any Facebook wall or Twitter stream for a popular brand and you’ll see comments that resemble the following;

I love relaxing on my deck with a glass of lipton ice tea

Looking forward to relaxing on the couch with a great movie from Redbox tonight

The sound of my hemi in the Dodge Charger is sweet

During my early days in social media I had a client that asked me if they should respond to the first comment above on Lipton Tea.  Like an idiot I said, “Of course not! It’s not actionable or a customer service issue.”  My client agreed that we should focus on questions and/or complaints that were directed towards the brand Twitter handles or Facebook page.  General comments and praise would be ignored.

Remember this was almost 3 years ago, a brand responding to a customer issue was bleeding edge, even today stats support that between 70-80% of tweets/Facebook comments towards a brand go ignored.

Nonetheless I’m wiser now and have acquired some wisdom along the way.  If someone came up to you in person and said, “I love your shoes!” or “Beautiful necklace!”  Would you ignore them? Of course not, you would say “thank you” or “how kind of you to notice”.  You may tell them where you got it or the story behind it.  Should it be any different in social media?

By the way, don’t we all in the social customer care industry work so hard to make customers happy?  So why don’t we engage more with the customers that already love us?

I’m embarrassed to tell the Lipton story.  Come to think of it..I’m also ashamed to admit I have those silly titles like social media guru, connoisseur and expert in my Twitter bio and LinkedIn profile.

No question I still have a lot to learn as the Lipton story suggests.  Some day I’d love to be a real social media mastermind, phenom or virtuoso.  In fact my ultimate goal is to become a social media super hero!  Wouldn’t that be cool?

I think for now I’ll just stay humble and change my title to “student of social media”.  One thing I’ve learned in my social education is to give some love to all your customers that take the time to compliment you on Twitter or Facebook.  You don’t have to be a social media snob to know that it’s just plain rude to ignore them!

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!