Build Customer Relationships that Matter through Social Media

Photo by paul bica

As a follow-up to my post last Friday, “What Your Customers Say When You Don’t – or Won’t – Listen,” I encourage organizations that want to learn how to effectively engage with their customers on Twitter to read “How to Network with Influential People Using Twitter” by Jason Kosarek.

This article offers guidance on fostering relationships to increase your customer reach and to build a strong and engaged customer community: 

• Find the Influencers in Your Current Network
• Know Your Competitors’ Connections
• Search for Influencers in Your Niche
• Follow and Interact with People on Twitter
• Set Up Alerts to Track Where Your Influencers are Mentioned or Post Online
• Add Value Outside of Twitter

If you’ve been thinking about joining the conversation on Twitter and listening to what your customers are saying about you, now’s the time. To take it a step further, don’t miss these Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit sessions about building customer relationships that matter through social media:

• The Future of Social Business, Richard Margetic, Director, Global Social Media, Dell
• Move Brands Faster and Longer in the Social Media Era, Nestor Portillo, Director, Social Communities and Customer Experience, Microsoft

Join Richard and Nestor at Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit 2014 in Miami in April. To learn more about the event and register, go to www.iirusa.com/totalcustomer

Stay connected with TCEL:

• twitter.com/TotalCustomer #TCEL14
• linkedin.com/Total Customer Experience Leaders
• facebook.com/TotalCustomer

Peggy L. Bieniek, ABC is an Accredited Business Communicator specializing in corporate communication best practices. Connect with Peggy on LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, and on her website at www.starrybluebrilliance.com.

Customer Experience Conversations: Crystal Collier

In this next post in our Customer Experience Conversations series, we sat down with Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit’s keynote speaker Crystal Collier, CEO of CX Act, formerly TARP Worldwide.

CX Act has pioneered the science of quantifying, managing and optimizing the customer experience and has remained a leader in the CX market since 1971. Today, through its innovative research, technology and customer interaction programs, it continues to set the standard to improve clients' customer service performance, customer value and "The Profit of Interaction.”

In April, Collier and TCEL will explore these topics and the all of the new realities of building brands and relationships in today’s socially driven and data abundant world. The event will shine an important lens on the power of insights and the critical need for marketers to focus on factoring emotion into the bigger equation to get a return on customer relationships.

Here is what Collier had to say:

IIR: How is empathetic leadership changing leadership in customer experience today?

Collier: Without considering empathy—from the C-suite to the frontline employee—delivering a superior CX is nearly impossible. Customers are driven largely by emotions, and their behaviors result from feelings. If you don’t understand the emotions and leverage empathy to drive change throughout the organization, you are missing incredible opportunities to drive bottom-line results.

IIR: Why are empathy and emotion so important in when it comes to customer experience?

Collier: Emotions govern so many of the decisions we make, so CX must consider and accommodate that reality. Understanding the emotions associated with each customer touchpoint is critical—adding emotions to the customer journey mapping process is a great first step.

IIR: What are the key traits of a great customer experience leader?

Collier:  A great CX leader knows how to balance efficiency and effectiveness metrics for a complete measure of CX performance. A great CX leader knows that satisfaction is more than a score. A great CX leader taps into the voice of the employee as well as the voice of the customer. A great CX leader regularly, frequently, and passionately monitors and observes customer interactions. A great CX leader knows what touchpoints matter most to her customers and ensures they are best in class.

IIR: If your customers have a bad customer experience, how do you reconnect with them moving forward?

Collier:  One of the most important things to recovering from a bad experience is taking ownership. Ownership and accountability can set the stage for recovery. You need to own the issue with a genuine apology and deliver on promises to fix it. From there, putting measures in place to ensure it doesn’t happen again is key.

IIR: How has the digital revolution changed the overall customer experience?

Collier: The digital revolution has revolutionized access—access to customers, to data, to companies. Understanding what channels you control and where resources should be allocated is critical to an effective digital strategy.

IIR: Employee recognition can positively influence employee behaviors and cultivate a customer-centric culture. How do you recognize and motivate your employees?

Collier: Regular, timely, meaningful, and relevant employee R&R can help keep the focus on the CX; linking it to VOC metrics is also helpful.

IIR: How do you strategize and innovate on your company’s customer experience to continuously improve it as the marketplace grows increasingly competitive?

Collier:  You must understand what your customers want in 2 areas: 1- what do they need to make them totally satisfied and 2- how do you best deliver this service to them.

IIR: How do you make the connections between experience, brand and loyalty, which together create customer expectations?

Collier: The brand sets the standard for the experience and the experience drives loyalty. Delivering on the brand promise with employee behaviors is important exercises to increase loyalty and deliver a superior CX.

Want to hear more from Crystal on customer experience in person?  Join her at Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit 2014 in Miami in April where she will be presenting a keynote session entitled, “Bringing Empathy into Your Organization.”

Your experience at TCEL will include three full days of high-level visionary keynote presentations and in-depth case studies illustrating linking insights & data, data measuring & mapping, design thinking, synthesize intelligence from B2B and B2C companies across verticals, disciplines and cultures to march forward with a sound total customer experience plan.

To learn more about the event and register, click here:   http://bit.ly/1dQq6xh

About the Author: Amanda Ciccatelli, Social Media Strategist of the Marketing Division at IIR USA, has a background in digital and print journalism, covering a variety of topics in business strategy, marketing, and technology. Amanda is the Editor at Large for several of IIR’s blogs including Next Big Design, Customers 1st, and ProjectWorld and World Congress for Business Analysts, and a regular contributor to Front End of Innovation and The Market Research Event,. She previously worked at Technology Marketing Corporation as a Web Editor where she covered breaking news and feature stories in the technology industry. She can be reached at aciccatelli@iirusa.

Related articles

• Join Me for the Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit
• How to Create an Emotional Customer Experience

What Your Customers Say When You Don’t – or Won’t – Listen

  Photo by paul bica

 

“When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. Ideas actually begin to grow within us and come to life.” – Brenda Ueland, 20^th century American author

Ideas are the foundation of success. This timeless concept was best expressed by a Deutsche Bank advertisement in the Wall Street Journal, April 2001 that proclaimed: “Ideas are capital. The rest is just money.”

Listen to your customers. They are trying to tell you how they want to be served and how they want to engage with you. Their ideas will support your organization’s continued success and will lead to increased levels of customer engagement and loyalty.

If you’re not listening to your customers, they will find someone who will. The article, "We deliberately ignore customers who contact us via Twitter” by Philip Calvert, Social Media Sales Strategist, shows how an unengaged company culture can negatively affect the trust and credibility of an organization.

This example clearly demonstrates the importance of having a company culture that empowers and engages employees, who are the “key to delivering your customer’s experience” according to Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit (TCEL) keynote speaker Peter Neill, Former Chief Customer Officer, Level 3 Communications.

To take it a step further, Kerry Bodine, VP and Principal Analyst, Customer Experience Research Practice at Forrester, will lead a TCEL session that will show how “customers’ perceptions have a profound impact on business metrics.”

Want to hear more from Peter and Kerry on customer experience in person? Join them at Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit 2014 in Miami in April. To learn more about the event and register, go to www.iirusa.com/totalcustomer

Stay connected with TCEL:

• twitter.com/TotalCustomer #TCEL14
• linkedin.com/Total Customer Experience Leaders
• facebook.com/TotalCustomer

Peggy L. Bieniek, ABC is an Accredited Business Communicator specializing in corporate communication best practices. Connect with Peggy on LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, and on her website at www.starrybluebrilliance.com.

Is your marketing calendar chaotic? Take this one question test.

Wrestling social media to the ground

Every social media manager I talk to tells me one of two things.  One, they are relying on technology to get their mission accomplished.  Or Two, their collaborative process involves spreadsheets, word documents, emails and contentious moments deciding who on the team is going to react to a rogue social post mention.

Well kudos to those with technology, I just want to point out the advantages social relationship management software brings to the table.

Marketing Calendars Have Many Cooks

Think about your organization.  

Here’s the one test question:  Is your agency assembling content, putting it into a spreadsheet or word doc and then sending it off for approval? 

Then does the process involve approvals from:

• legal,
• the brand managers,
• the community managers,
• Corporate Communications,
• Public Relations,
• Marketing,
• (I don’t know…anyone else?  HR?)?

I suggest you do two things if this is true.  One calculate the amount of expensive labor expended.  And Two, think about how much important information can be lost in that shuffle.

Synergy Not Chaos

The alternative of course is to have a single view into the content so as to support a true team collaborative process.  Think about what life would be like if the team could log into the same dashboard, (each with their own security limitations of course). 

1. The agency can upload the content. 
2. The content can be routed via workflows to each approver automatically; alerting each of them it’s their turn. 
3. This single view of content can be scheduled, pushed, published and then monitored. 
4. Rinse Repeat

Chaos Squared

For those organizations with global reach, or many departments, stores, etc. you probably have many Facebook pages, Twitter handles, Instagram accounts.  Think about how the process to distribute approved content could be streamlined, curated with confidence and pushed out there if, again, your teammates were alerted by email to look into that single view dashboard.

The platform will also improve productivity by enabling your team to push out communications across multiple pages, multiple social networks at the same time.  Again, count the hours and do the math.

With a social relationship management system, the team at the hub can have confidence those folks on the tips of the spokes will be publishing What you want and in a Timely Basis.

Plus you’ll have confidence that all of your messaging will have a consistent Voice.  Even if those messages are in multiple languages. 

Measuring Performance

For those responsible for monitoring the content’s performance consider merely logging in to view the metrics, to eyeball what’s working instantly. This versus the monthly reports gathered by perusing multiple metric sources.  We all want to know “what’s working” and waiting is never easy.  With the technology monitoring your content’s performance you can specify time periods, social voices, channels, accounts in varied slicing and dicing fashion.

Wrap Up

So if you’re assigning tasks to others and want to monitor their workflow,

Technology shouldn’t rule the roost, but it can be the backbone that supports the creative energy of the smart people on your team.  If team collaboration excellence is your goal, then using a social relationship management set of technologies to manage your marketing calendar is absolutely the best practice.

Ron Shulkin blogs researches and writes about enterprise technology focused on innovation and social media. You can follow him Twitter. You can follow his blogs at this Facebook group.  You can connect with Ron on LinkedIn.  

Ron Shulkin is the Chicago area Director for Spredfast. Spredfast provides a social relationship platform that allows organizations to manage, monitor, and measure their social media programs at scale. Spredfast enables more people, in more places, to engage in more conversations from a single platform on supported social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ YouTube and popular blogging platforms. You can learn more about Spredfast here.

A New Twist on Storytelling: The Cleveland Clinic Empathy Series Continues

To follow-up on my post "The Critical Element Missing from Your Customer Experience Programs," here is the next video in the Cleveland Clinic empathy series. “You’ll be moved by these life-changing stories, and astonished when you learn what these patients have in common.”

Cleveland Clinic’s Empathy Series Continues – Patients: Afraid and Vulnerable

If the video doesn't appear, you can view it at http://youtu.be/1e1JxPCDme4

This year’s Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit (TCEL) focuses on “Return on Relationships: Factoring Empathy into the Stakeholder Equation.” Here are just two of the many TCEL sessions where you’ll "discover the emotional drivers that are critical in creating an effective customer story and how to factor empathy into the bigger equation to get a return on customer relationships:"

• “Bringing Empathy into Your Organization,” Crystal Collier, CEO, Tarp Woldwide and Dan Hill, President, Sensory Logic
• “Empathetic Marketing for Total Customer Experience,” Mark Ingwer, Ph.D., Founder, Insight Consulting Group

Want to learn more about customer experience from Crystal, Dan and Mark in person? Join them at Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit 2014 in Miami in April. To learn more about the event and register, go to www.iirusa.com/totalcustomer.

Stay connected with TCEL:

• twitter.com/TotalCustomer #TCEL14
• linkedin.com/Total Customer Experience Leaders
• facebook.com/TotalCustomer

 

Peggy L. Bieniek, ABC is an Accredited Business Communicator specializing in corporate communication best practices. Connect with Peggy on LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, and on her website at www.starrybluebrilliance.com.

Customer Experience Innovation: Treat Your Customers Like People

With the 2014 Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit just weeks away, I was lucky enough to catch up with Len Ferman, managing director of Ferman Innovation, and former Senior Vice President of Innovation and Ideation at Bank of America.

Today, corporate leaders often lose sight of customer needs in the constant quest toward next quarter’s earnings. But, what is positive for stock prices tends to conflict with long term customer satisfaction and shareholder value.

You simply can’t understand the customer experience if don’t empathize with your customers, Ferman told me. “You have to be able to see them face-to-face and listen to them talk about their pain points and challenges,” he said.

Ferman suggests that corporate leaders need to spend more time attending traditional focus groups – watching their customers talk about their interactions with the company and hear their first hand experiences and further, understand how these fit within the broader context of the goals and challenges that they have as people.

“When you see customers face-to-face, you pick up the body language and expressions that you cannot discern in the most disciplined reading of a market research report,” explained Ferman. “Only when you have seen your customers talking about your company, can you truly empathize with their needs.

Listen to the full podcast interview here: http://bit.ly/1fQymj7

Len will be speaking in just a few weeks at the 2014 Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit, taking place April 9-11th, in a session entitled, “Innovation a Roadmap for Customer Experience.”

This year’s conference will explore the new realities of building brands and relationships in today's socially driven and data abundant world. The event shines an important lens on the power of insights and the critical need for marketers to focus on factoring emotion into the bigger equation to get a return on customer relationships.

For more information about this exciting event, click here: http://bit.ly/OeuKLI

About the Author: Amanda Ciccatelli, Social Media Strategist of the Marketing Division at IIR USA, has a background in digital and print journalism, covering a variety of topics in business strategy, marketing, and technology. Amanda is the Editor at Large for several of IIR’s blogs including Next Big Design, Customers 1st, and ProjectWorld and World Congress for Business Analysts, and a regular contributor to Front End of Innovation and The Market Research Event,. She previously worked at Technology Marketing Corporation as a Web Editor where she covered breaking news and feature stories in the technology industry. She can be reached at aciccatelli@iirusa.

Related articles

• 12 Days of Innovation: May You Stay Inspired in 2014!

The Critical Element Missing from Your Customer Experience Programs

Following up on Tuesday’s post, “How to Create an Emotional Customer Experience,” here is another example of a powerfully compelling video containing the one critical element missing from many organizations’ customer experience programs: empathy.

Empathy: The Human Connection to Patient Care by Cleveland Clinic

If the video doesn't appear, you can view it at http://youtu.be/cDDWvj_q-o8

As you can see, making a difference in people’s lives builds trust and credibility and of course, creates a better world for all of us! To learn more about creating empathy through video, check out these articles:

• What is The Greatest Secret to More Empathy? Absolutely Amazing Video! by Michael Rogers
• In Video, Connecting is King by Russell Working

This year’s Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit (TCEL) focuses on “Return on Relationships: Factoring Empathy into the Stakeholder Equation.” Here are just two of the many TCEL sessions where you’ll "discover the emotional drivers that are critical in creating an effective customer story and how to factor empathy into the bigger equation to get a return on customer relationships:"

• “Bringing Empathy into Your Organization,” Crystal Collier, CEO, Tarp Woldwide and Dan Hill, President, Sensory Logic 
   
• “Empathetic Marketing for Total Customer Experience,” Mark Ingwer, Ph.D., Founder, Insight Consulting Group

Want to learn more about customer experience from Crystal, Dan and Mark in person? Join them at Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit 2014 in Miami in April. To learn more about the event and register, go to www.iirusa.com/totalcustomer.

Stay connected with TCEL:

• twitter.com/TotalCustomer #TCEL14
• linkedin.com/Total Customer Experience Leaders
• facebook.com/TotalCustomer

Peggy L. Bieniek, ABC is an Accredited Business Communicator specializing in corporate communication best practices. Connect with Peggy on LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, and on her website at www.starrybluebrilliance.com.

Never Eat Alone

Never Eat Alone was advice that I followed a few years ago when I attended the North American Conference on Customer Management.  I had lunch and conversations with like-minded people that wanted to learn more about customer service excellence.   Experts gave presentations of the best practices of building relationships with clients, as I nibbled on my croissant.   At the cocktail reception, I connected with other attendees and presenters as they shared their passion for customer service.   After I returned home, I connected with many of my contacts.  One of the exceptional speakers was Kelly Cook, Senior Vice President of Marketing at DSW.   As a founder and Board Director of Texas Women in Business, I asked Kelly to keynote at the annual anniversary luncheon.  Her presentation on Women in Leadership Roles was well-received and DSW even hosted a reception at one of their Austin locations.
  

Customer Service & Shoe Lovers!

  
At the Total Customer Experience Leader's Summit coming soon in Miami, Keith Ferrazzi, author of Never Eat Alone, will speak on Changing Behavior Towards the Customer Experience.  His insights on helping others and ourselves break bad habits will be helpful in our personal and business lives.   Ferrazi, son of a steelworker and a cleaning lady, developed the practice of connecting with others that helped him earn a scholarship to Yale, a Harvard MBA and top executive positions.   His principles are based on generosity & genuine relationship-building.  As you attend the Total Conference, a few key principles to follow are:  

• Don't keep score:  It is never simply about getting what you want.  It's about getting what you want and making sure that the people who are important to you get what they want, too.

•  "Ping" constantly:  The Ins and Outs of reaching out to those in your circle of contacts all the time - not just when you need something.  

• Never eat alone:  The dynamics of status are the same whether you're working at a corporation or attending a social event - "invisibility" is a fate worse than failure.   

Each day there are opportunities to follow thought-leaders on the topic of Factoring Empathy into the Stakeholder Equation.  Amazing speakers are on the agenda and you will have the opportunity to not only connect with the experts but determine your own strategy for exceptional customer experience.  Learn from my personal experience and set the intention to never eat alone but to create relationships with attendees and experts.  

Download the brochure for more information: http://bit.ly/1idxeUe