INFOGRAPHIC: The Great Social Customer Service Race

Earlier this month, we tweeted a link to "4 Customer Service Lessons from the Biggest Brands on Twitter." We're happy to present a guest post delving into that topic by Ashley Verrill, along with the great infographic. (To submit your own guest content, email mleblanc@iirusa.com)

I recently completed a five-week research project meant to assess the social customer service responsiveness of 14 top consumer brands in the U.S. Twitter specifically is rising in popularity as a medium for voicing consumer queries. I wanted to see how companies such as Coca Cola, Pepsi and Apple leveraged technology to fulfill this need.

To test these companies, I asked four of my colleagues to send customer service tweets to 14 leading consumer brands in seven industries. Each company received one tweet per weekday for four consecutive weeks. For two weeks we used the @ symbol with the company's Twitter handle, but for two more weeks we just mentioned the brand without the @.

The questions were either urgent, or we needed help right that second; positive; negative; or a query from the company's FAQ page. Here's a few lessons we learned about listening technology from the experiment.

Listen for Mentions With @, no @ and #Brand
There was a huge disparity during the race for messages with the @ and those without. Certainly brands shouldn't insert themselves in someone else's conversation, but these interactions also provide an opportunity for the company to express proactive customer service. These interactions increase the likelihood the customer will share the interaction and refer your brand to friends.

Marketing can uncover positive feedback that's perfect for retweeting and fend off competitors that are also listening for their brand. During the race, several tweets directed at Bank of America and Wells Fargo received a response from a competitor asking that we consider their institution instead.

Successful Prioritization Rules Are Key
Customers that tweet requests on Twitter are seeking instant gratification. For companies that receive thousands of mentions a day, it's impossible to expect them to catch everything, but businesses should have a system for picking out the most important messages. During the race, many of the participants missed messages that indicated huge risk of switching brands, or high purchase intent.

Social CRM programs allow users to customize prioritization rules with things like key word identifiers, social clout and customers history. So a company could for example make sure a tweet with “help,” “mad,” “#fail,” “thank you” and the brand name, is moved to the front of the service queue.

Identify Active Socializers
Also important to this message priority system is social customer service history. I hoped one of the companies in the race would see we were active brand followers and improve their response averages - but this didn't happen.

Companies could program a prioritization trigger that alerts agents when a brand advocate or detractor has sent a message. This is particularly important when paired with social clout considerations. Overall, the brands that participated in the race only responded 14 percent of the time. Whether the issue is one of technology or strategy, it's clear even the top brands in the world are still fine-tuning their social customer service strategy.

About Ashley Verrill 
Ashley Verrill is a market analyst and writes for the Software Advice website. She has spent the last six years reporting and writing business news and strategy features. Her work has appeared in myriad publications including Inc., Upstart Business Journal, the Austin Business Journal and the North Bay Business Journal. Before joining Software Advice in 2012, she worked in sales management and advertising. She is a University of Texas graduate with a bachelor's degree in journalism.

"Driving Best-In-Class Customer Experience" Webinar Recording Available

Recently we were pleased to present a webinar entitled "Driving Best-In-Class Customer Experience: Beyond Social Media Listening" in cooperation with EmPower Research, a Genpact company.

In this session, presenter Sagita Joshi explored the customer experience ecosystem, discussing the ways that listening and engagement can be performed on social media channels.  We learned more about the ways that Twitter "has become the help desk" with examples such as Lenovo and Best Buy's "Twelpforce" leading the way.

Joshi presented a "win me, delight me, keep me" approach to social media customer experience building, with Empower finding that over time increased awareness of a brand on social media lead to up to 37% more first timers visiting a brand's page. To learn more, view a recording of the webinar here.

Are you using social media for customer experience?


About EmPower Research:
EmPower Research, a Genpact company (NYSE:G) provides integrated media and business research services. We help our clients understand stakeholder perception and needs, empowering them to service better. We use proprietary methodologies to listen and learn about conversations in the customer ecosystem, deriving real insights for active stakeholder engagement.
For more information, visit http://www.empowerresearch.com 

Michelle LeBlanc is a Social Media Strategist at IIR USA with a specialization in marketing. She may be reached at mleblanc@iirusa.com

Another Chance to Win "The Hidden Power of Your Customers"

Last week we featured a guest post by author Becky Carroll. Becky will be presenting “Linking Social Media to Customer Behavior” during the Social Media CRM Symposium at the Total Customer Experience Leader's Summit. At that time we introduced our book giveaway trivia contest.

This week, we have a second chance to win The Hidden Power of Your Customers! Want to get your own autographed copy? Simply answer this trivia question:

What are the four principles that make up the ROCK acronym and help a business grow from their existing customers? (hint: you can find the answers on the Facebook page for The Hidden Power of Your Customers)

To enter, answer in the comments along with a valid email address. Or tweet the answer using hashtag #TCEL. We’ll be randomly choosing a winner from all correct answers, make sure to answer by 9am EST on Friday, Sept. 23rd to be eligible.

Connect to Your Customers With Social Media - Free Webinar

In association with Citrix, The Institute for International Research invites you to join us for a one hour complimentary Web Seminar.

Social Business: How to Create a Holistic Approach to Social Media
- Alex Beauchamp, Senior New Media Manager, Citrix Online

Thursday, June 16, 2011 1:00 - 2:00 PM EDT

Reserve your Webinar seat now

When it comes to social media, there's no single "right way" to use it for business. Within its channels companies of all sizes can engage with prospects and customers to drive sales and provide services in a variety of ways.

What matters, however, is that the social media experience your business provides be consistent across the board. A holistic approach is the key to a successful social media program.

Join industry expert Alex Beauchamp to understand the many components of social business and learn how to put them all together into a cohesive plan that best reflects your organization's personality and value.

In this webinar, you will learn how to:
• Engage and monitor in the social space
• Use reporting metrics, insights and advocates
• Create social content and execute social campaigns
• And more...

Title: Social Business: How to Create a Holistic Approach to Social Media
Date: Thursday, June 16th, 2011
Time: 1:00 - 2:00 PM EDT

Register Now. After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the Webinar. This web seminar is sponsored by Citrix.

About Citrix Online:
Citrix Online provides secure, easy-to-use online solutions that enable people to work from anywhere with anyone: GoToMyPC® for remote access, GoToAssist® for remote support, GoToMeeting® for online meetings and GoToWebinar® for larger Web events. A division of Citrix Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: CTXS), the company is based in Santa Barbara, California.

About The Institute for International Research:
The Institute for International Research (IIR) is the world's largest conference company and has been the leader in the provision of business information for over 25 years. IIR produces over 5,000 events annually through its network of offices in over 35 countries.

NACCM 2009: Do you outsource your social media work?

Guest Blogger Norma Huibregtse talked to Becky Carroll after her presentation about outsourcing your social media, how you should bring personality in to your social media when using it for customer service, where it's going in the future, and more.

NACCM 2009: The Power of Global Connectivity: Opportunities from a 24/7 Worldwide Alliance

Two billion Dell conversations are occurring each year online, through chats, forums, emails, etc. People are talking about you and you want to know what they are saying about you says Vida Killian who is responsible for Marketing & Online Conversations at Dell. She shared a quote from Michael Dell that states “These conversations are going to occur whether you like it or not. Do you want to be part of that or not? My arguments is you absolutely do. You can be a better company listening and being involved in that conversation.”

Killian says that Dell has three objectives: 1) Build the brand, 2) listen, learn and engage, and 3) rapid innovation. Dell knew that social media was having a huge impact and expanded social engagement over time. According to Killian, they started with customer forums in 1995, blogosphere and social networking platforms in 2006, IdeaStorm website in 2007, and sponsored offsite properties in 2008.

Dell developed its website IdeaStorm as a result of a need for a customer-driven, central location for new ideas. IdeaStorm.com allowed them to encourage ideas, feedback, innovation and dialogue with and between their customers. What were the results, you ask? The IdeaStorm website has received 12,000 ideas to date (2,000 in the 1st week alone), and has resulted in approximately 400 ideas implemented.

Killian shared key lessons that Dell has learned over the years about social media engagement.

1. Engagement –there is pent-up demand and customers want to talk to you.
2. Open source idea generation transformed the way they operate. They not only have the IdeaStorm website but have added a Facebook Application that allows customers to post ideas directly to Facebook.
3. Customers want to engage both on and off your site. Community Forums exist on Ondell.com and Offdell.com.
4. Transparency and authenticity are key. Killian says that social media is “forgiving” if you respond quickly to the negativity.
5. Social media responsibility no longer is just the job of the social media team. In the early days, Dell had a central team. Now they have distributed ownership to different company departments including sales, service & support, product group, and marketing.
6. Define measurement objectives. Keys include Technorati ranking, Net Promoter Scores, website traffic, etc.
7. Meet specific customer needs through social media. For example, when they needed to move inventory from DellOulet, they used Twitter to send coupons to their customers. Now, @delloutlet is in the top 50 Twitter accounts and has over 1million followers. They currently have over 35 official Dell accounts on Twitter and many more personal accounts.
8. Customers want to connect globally. It is a challenge because of language and cultural barriers. Growth potential is huge to connect with customers all over the globe.

Dell’s original goal was to simply build the Dell brand. What they’ve found is that Dell doesn’t own the brand, customers do. When you engage with them, you are building the brand together which is more powerful than doing it alone says Killian.

NACCM 2009: Creating a Customer-Centric Social Media Strategy that Works

Business owners want to jump on the social media bandwagon but just don’t know where to begin. Becky Carroll, founder of Customers Rock!, believes you must have a strategy to engage in social media today. In her presentation today, "Putting Together a Customer-Centric Social Media Strategy that Works: Deciphering the Hype from Reality", she discusses how to put together a customer centeric social media strategy that works.
Why consider social media? Carroll says because your customers want it or management wants it. She reminds us that 60% of Americans are using social media, 93% believe a company should have a presence in social media and 85% believe a company should interact via social media. Using social media helps to remove the “faceless veil” so that customers can get to know you on a personal level says Carroll.

According to Carroll, hitting the Social media sweet spot allows us to:
– build trust with customers
– build community
– WOM maximizer
– two-way conversations

Based on the book Groundswell, Carroll shares several reasons to use social media: to listen, talk, energize, help and embrace your customers. Ask your customers which social media venues work best for them.

How do you create a social media strategy? Carroll says you should participate by first listening, deciding what you want to do with your customers and choose the right tools. Establish social media goals. What do you want to do? Share your expertise, build relationships, create a conversation, customer service, or be more human?

Carroll shared several company examples which are successfully using social media. She mentioned the top three brands with the deepest brand engagement using social media Starbucks, Dell and Ebay. Other examples include Coca Cola, JetBlue and Cisco. Coca Cola’s Fan Page was developed by two loyal customers. JetBlue Airways uses Twitter for customer service and has over 1.4 million followers. Cisco CEO John Chambers was captured on video in his office doing duck calls. The video was posted on their blog and allowed customers to see his human side.

The key to social media is in the planning. Decide who is in charge of social media. Many are outsourcing to marketing companies and PR firms. Carroll believes you should not outsource this to someone outside of the company. Find someone in your organization who would love the opportunity to create conversations about your company. Everyone needs to be involved in strategy: marketing, customer service, R&D, C-level, and employees.

Decide which metrics are the most critical. Start with small, focused pilots. Remember, you must be consistent as it is a relationship-building activity for the long term according to Carroll. Ask for customer feedback and revise your strategy as needed.

You can engage in social media in a planned way. Set up the plan and get your organization involved. According to Carroll, it takes a little nurture and care. Little things like “thank you” matter to your customers. Begin by listening is Carroll’s strongest advice.

Customers 1st 2009 Podcasts: A Conversation with Deb Nelson, Hewlett-Packard

As we get gear up for the 2009 NACCM: Customers 1st Event this year, we're going to be interviewing and getting to know the speakers and sponsors who will bring their perspectives on customer service to you. We recently sat down with Deb Nelson, the Senior Vice President of Marketing, Technology Solutions Group, Hewlett-Packard, and is responsible for worldwide marketing of HP’s services, software, servers, storage, and networking. She will be presenting her keynote speech, "Preparing for Customer-Centricity 2020: How to Evolve the People, the Process & Technology to Meet Future Needs," on Thursday, November 5. Download the NACCM:Customers 1st Brochure to find out more about the program this year.


Subscribe Free
Add to my Page

Deborah Nelson is responsible for worldwide marketing of HP’s services, software, servers, storage, and networking. She leads marketing across five global business units to deliver technology solutions that help medium-size and enterprise organizations achieve better business outcomes.

Previously Deb was responsible for world wide marketing of HP’s personal computers, work stations, hand held products, and mobile and wireless solutions. Deb has held a broad range of marketing positions over her 20 year career. Her experience spans management of software, service, hardware products, channels, and partners, marketing communication, marketing research and business development in HP’s America and European Gail and worldwide organization.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your roll at HP.

Deb: So, as you may know, HP sells technology and technology solutions to consumers and businesses around the globe. In fact, just over a billion people around the world use our technology every single day. I am lucky enough to run marketing for HP’s enterprise business and we sell to businesses and governments around the globe. Our portfolio is a combination of business and IT services. This means different support services, consulting and outsourcing, as well as software, particularly around helping customers better manage their IT processes as well as information. And then a number of products ranging from servers to storage and networking.

What changes have had the biggest impact on customer centricity over the past few years? What do you think will change the most in the future?
Deb: Today, technology plays a fundamentally different roll in business. Technology today isn’t just supporting the business, but powering the business. Think about any business process whether you’re taking an order, replenishing inventory, even communication. It’s all powered by technology. And that means that today our customers, so CIOs, Chief Information Officers and their teams, they’re not just running IT projects, but they’re running business initiatives. They’re not just managing silos of applications and operations and strategies. They’re really managing and integrated IT platform that drives business change. That means that they need to measure technology results by the ability to either accelerate a company’s growth to help lower costs, something everyone is really interested in right now, or mitigate risks. And that means technology decisions today are really business decisions.

Now for the future, we think that customers will have even more choices about how to get accesses to different business services. And we refer to this trend as “Everything as a service.” And that means that anything from just raw computing power to a business process to personal interactions, I mean, think about your consumer life, whether that’s email or other services that you get out of the cloud. That everything will be available to you whenever and however you want it. That means that customers will get to choose based on the best value. And therefore understanding and really anticipating customer needs and preference are will be very very critical.

Why is it so important for a company to have two way communications with their customers today? How has this relationship changed?
Deb:In today’s environment, we are lucky to have so many options to have a two-way dialog with customers. It’s not mass communications environments of previous decades. Today the explosion of media channels really gives the ability to have a true two-way dialog with customers. We don’t have to guess what customers want anymore, they’ll tell us. Social media has given us so many more listening points that where we can get feedback and have interactions with customers. This means it’s really critical for any organization to be enthusiastically engaged with all of their stakeholders and be a part of these dialogues going on. In fact, for us, we know that our target audience the enterprise business it buyers are actually some of the most active users of social media. We actually did research with Forrester that looked at all the different roles that people play in social media. And they said that our customers are actually off the chart as far as social participation, whether it’s someone who is creating content, so publishing a blog or publishing our own webpages, all the way up to one who is just reading and accessing information through this wide plethora of media we have. So at HP, we’re responding to our customer’s adoption of this exciting set of new social media and we’re changing how we engage with our customers whether that’s through different online interactions, blogs and podcasts such as this. We’re changing how we buy media, we’re changing the breadth of people that are participating in that so that we have the folks inside of HP that customer want to talk to like our technical engineers and presales folks. (This is so these employees can ) directly interact with customer about the technology and our technology solutions. And our goal is to have business conversations that lead to business.

Tell us a little about what you’ll be presenting at NACCM this year.
Deb: My talk is about preparing for customer centricity over the next couple of decades. And I’ll share some ideas about what you can do today to help get people, processes and technology ready for whatever the future brings. As a part of this, (I’ll be speaking about) deploying effective strategies for listening to customer and communicating with them in ways that meet their needs now and in the future. And I’ll talk about what a company needs to focus on to achieve customer satisfaction and loyalty, which has changed rather dramatically over the last five years, and will continue to change. Before, in our space, quality, deliverability and reliability were the number one drivers of customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. But today, these are really just the anites to enter into the game. So I’ll talk about what HP is doing to increase and measure customer loyalty. And finally, I’ll discuss some of the things we’ve learned at HP about when and how to stick to business basics and when to embrace new methods and technology to maintain a strong customer focus.

Is there anything else you'd like to share?
Deb: It’s been a pleasure talking to you Jenny, and HP is a whole company that is really focused on delivering great experiences to customers. In today’s environment, we have a lot more tools to do that and to be able to have a two-way dialogue. I often hear about how some organizations feel threatened by social media, or feel that it’s a risky journey. But we really view it in a different way. We think it’s a super opportunity to be engaged real time to find out what’s on customers minds. And I’m really excited about speaking at the Customers 1st Conference in November, and it’ll be a great opportunity for me to hear from others to hear about what they’re doing to be engaged with customers.

We’d like to thank Deb Nelson for speaking with us today and a very special thank you to our listeners. Be sure to follow us on Twitter at twitter.com/customerworld.

See you in November!

Brought to you by:

The ROI Of Online Customer Service Communities

Natalie L. Petouhoff, Ph.D., a member of the Customers 1st LinkedIn Group, recently wrote the white paper The ROI Of Online Customer Service Communities: A Total Economic Impact™ Analysis Uncovers Big Benefits From Social Technologies. See the full white paper here.

Summary:
Consumers are rapidly adopting social media communication technologies and behaviors. Customer service professionals are beginning to look at incorporating these collaborative tools to deliver better customer experiences at a lower cost. This approach seems to have great promise; however, there is little documentation at present on the cost-effectiveness of incorporating social strategies and technologies for businesses. Forrester talked with early-adopter companies and reviewed the solutions from leading vendors to understand the variables to consider for determining the business value of online communities for customer service and support. The early evidence indicates that social technologies are a sound choice because they provide an attractive ROI in a short period of time while delivering better customer experiences.

Read the full white paper:
http://bit.ly/C20GuestPost