If you’re sorry to see a customer go, don’t tell them it using a script.

Posted on March 6, 2012 by Ted Sindzinski

This morning I got a call from a subscription based service I’ve used off and on over the past few years and recently cancelled with. The called opened as telemarketers so often do with a quick intro and an immediate before-you-can-say-hello lead into his pitch… But then the rep said something which just struck me wrong: we’re sorry to have lost your business. Right before he started into the next line of the script.

Now let’s step back and look at the other side of the picture: Just about every major brand has caught on to the idea of “engagement”, everyone wants to “have a conversation”, to “be authentic” and “get connected”. But authenticity remains a tactic relegated to a channel; it’s still social media vs marketing vs retention vs business.

This company already had a dialogue with me on Facebook that was actually pretty useful — they responded quickly, other customers even chimed in some agreeing and some suggesting that I had the wrong expectation, awesome [note: social to CRM still = huge opportunity ]. But why would they then call me and read a script to try and jam an offer down my throat?

It’s not that we should abandon every sales technique to simple have a casual chat with people but rather that we have to really accept that we’re making this shift in social channels because people have changed. No one cares if their interaction is via a Facebook post, a tweet, a cashier at the retail store or the retention team, in every case the expectation for what we as marketers call transparency is the same. Good business is good business.

So when we talk about bring social to the entire organization it doesn’t just mean get everyone a Twitter account. It’s about looking at the transformation in consumer expectations that’s happening and addressing that across the entire company because it impacts the entire process.

Had this rep opened with the same intro but asked me why I left I probably would have told him. Had he been given flexibility by his supervisors and autonomy to decide how to respond to my answer – to see if I was right to upsell now or simply file a note for later instead of being tasked with trying to close everyone no matter what into a reactivation his brand could have built goodwill and been the subject of this post in an inverse context.

Reputation isn’t made on a social network; it’s built by the product, by the service, by the value of the entire chain. Improving perception, getting reviews, driving sharing and all those related benefits that so desperately want from social means taking a social approach far outside the marketing cubes… otherwise we just fall flat on our face: one channel on its own is not change.

Social starts at the ground level: Changing how we approach “experience”

Posted on January 25, 2012 by Ted Sindzinski

This week while at a big box retailer I overhear a store manager telling her assistant manager to “not call backup unless it was absolutely overwhelmed and necessary”, talk about a way to approach customer experience. For the manager this is the everyday challenge: use as few people as possible to cover a myriad of activities all while the lights are on and customers are walking in. At the same time hundreds of miles away at corporate, that same retailer has a growing team dedicated to bringing the brand’s positive value to light through social channels – two track that simply don’t line up.

The approach, and the comment aren’t unique this one retailer or retail at all but rather it’s just one example of the growing gap that exists between how companies operate at the point of interaction and the growing focus on customer experience in corporate.

As this discussion was taking place I could see the lines growing… and yet employees were visibly scampering around to other parts of the store, backrooms, and out the frontdoor for their current task. Some consumers waited and filed the experience away into their own head while others likely chatted about the long waits to whoever they were with on the spot or when they got home and then of course there are the few people who pulled out their smartphone and shared it with the world right then and there. But no matter how they acted, no matter what the, tickets / cashier or any other store KPI may have been, the perception of the store was impacted.

Just about every company has or is in the process of creating a team tasked with building reputation and yet these teams are often kept away from the process where impressions are actually made, left trying to leverage the good outcomes and mitigate the bad ones. For stores, call centers, even web teams, the focus is often on the same metrics they’ve known for years: items per basket, cashier efficiency, upsell dollars – drive the bottom line. It’s not the two sides are at odds with each other, it’s simply how they look at the world – social attacks experience to drive results while stores look at results to determine what to do in experience.

When the idea of social business first started to catch, we could only see as far as our team – how do we in corporate marketing get more people talking, how do we drive more reviews – agencies did this, brands did this, I did this, well did this – it was, at the time, the right way to go. But now we know better, we know that while we may say “social”, we don’t mean what happens at Facebook or Twitter, we mean what happens at the store, with the returns call center, during the tradeshow that creates the experience which will make it to Facebook.

So when we talk about bringing “social” to the entire company it doesn’t just [just] mean get everyone on Twitter to respond to questions, it’s about changing the culture, the metrics, the very way we do business. We have to think about what’s going to make our reputation against what we want out of our business – is our price point low enough to really be able to get away with long lines? Is our service really what we think it is?

Social should start in corporate, it should be managed by a team, defined and run as a part of everyday operations but that’s not where it ends.

Customers form their opinions at every interaction point and the impact of each positive or negative is huge – even if it’s never put out with a public comment that the corporate team can see. This requires a complete shift; we can’t assign reputation to a small team and leave those on the floor who actually make it ignorant of the realities of the market. To improve reviews, shares, likes – social, we have to improve the experience first.

Why aren’t you asking your customers why? Using dialogue beyond the obvious.

Posted on November 4, 2011 by Ted Sindzinski

I’m on a lot of email lists, dozens, probably more and years and years I’ve collected emails from the internet 100 down to niche boutiques and specialized services, everyone you can think of and a few that surprise even me. From competition to best practices and trends, it’s a great way to see what’s going on in the industry but not surprisingly I don’t “act” on these messages very often. Still, in 5 years of collecting and tens of thousands of emails no one has ever asked me why.

Why. It’s a simple question with vast implications.

A guy starts receiving emails from Victoria’s Secret after placing a gift order – without the details what will those messages say? Are they going to assume he is a direct customer? Why tells the marketing team that instead of multiple-emails a week with personal offers, the message can shift to less frequent suggestions, gift ideas, even useful content that makes the brand useful to him to follow. And the results? Well, I don’t know about you but I don’t know many men buying products for themselves from Victoria’s Secret.

Every day Living Social plays on my Pandora stream, inviting me to become a customer… millions of dollars in ad budgets to reach people with a sign up message who are already signed up. I can close their popups but that’s the extent of the feedback… With a simple question, they could appeal to current customers with value, contextual relevancy, something that doesn’t just make them top of mind but invites consideration. And for the price of one answer, I’d get the benefit of not hearing the same boring ad day in and day out.

Why is the hardest question but digital gives us a medium to answer it every day.

Social has created a frenzy for businesses as well all vye for the customer’s attention pounding them about new products, offers and a host of other campaigns we want to see go “viral” but that’s not where it ends. Customers are ready to spill their guts… not in drawn out forms or lengthy processes but through dialogue.

Not just surveys or expensive focus groups, we can go out with messages to customers in an individualized basis and not only to ask them questions but even to show them that we are asking. And they expect it.

From optimized campaigns to operational learnings, there’s a heck of a lot of value in knowing why.