Customer Twervice: Protect Your Reputation with Social Media Customer Service

Social Media for Customer Service
The MarketingSavant Group
www.marketingsavant.com
888.989.7771
dana@marketingsavant.com

The MarketingSavant Group 888.989.7771

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

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. A large bank with customer experiences in
4

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


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

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.


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


Social Channels @ Work


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!

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

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


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”


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

March 17-28, 2010

• 68 related YouTube videos attract 1.2 Million
views.

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=nestle+pa
lm+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!

The MarketingSavant Group
www.marketingsavant.co
m
888.989.7771
dana@marketingsavant.com

Thanks You for
Attending!

Customer Twervice: Protect Your Reputation with Social Media Customer Service

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