Tag Archives: responding

Combating the inevitable service issue: Building an army of advocates, or at least positive posters.

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I don’t work in the flower industry, don’t know much about the business  (beyond how to order products at least) but when Teleflora made a Facebook post with a customer service email address the day after Valentine’s Day, the reason why was pretty obvious – something had gone wrong – something which was making people very, very upset.

Of course anyone working in ecommerce, or any corporation, could have told you there would be problems. Tens of millions of flower orders , dozens of companies, and just 18 or so hours  to get them all there on time (but not too early), it’s only logical that some orders would fail within the process… Some complaints were inevitable.

And some level of complaints are inevitable for almost all b2c companies. No matter how perfect the process is, something will fail at some point and whether it’s the fault of the company or something entirely out of their hands, like the weather, it’s all going to come back on them, and these days back to social media. So knowing that something bad will happen, it’s up to us as marketers/ social strategists to insure that when problems come up we have the right plans to respond, but also that they don’t dominate the conversation or become the purpose of our page. We need to be more than just support channels .

Going back to my Teleflora example (and to be clear and not just pick out one company, the same issue is happening with ProFlowers and others that I checked), something is missing – balance. On the pages of most flower brands I visited just about everything was negative and support related. If these companies had happy customers (and I know they do because I am one) they were nowhere to be found and likely for good reason, no one had asked them to join up and share.

My suggestion to flower business earlier in the week was to provide an insert with orders for people to evangelize their great orders (or their bad ones, a review is what it is). All it takes is a simple note to remind people to comment, to tell them where you are, and out of the millions, thousands or even of just hundreds of customers you touch, you’ll get some balance… You’ll get light advocates.

Take this a step further, build a social program that encourages fan participation before the issue and you’ll be far more prepared when one does strike. This is where best practices really kick in – buying fans in masse with discounts, coupons and giveaways is easy and gets numbers, but successfully cultivating them takes a great deal more than good offers, it takes useful content, engaging directly around posts other than support, even how the business goes to market, the policies and programs that you have and how your fans react to them. But if you can build a dialogue and a regular flow (and yes, this is possible for even seemingly mundane brands) then you have moderate advocates on and around to help when there are negatives, to explain that there is a good to the bad, and to be talking about things other than support and trouble. And of course if you really go all the way, develop that full advocacy program and engage customers to become brand evangelists, community leaders, and the like, well now you have a whole force of people to balance and even better, aid.

Now don’t get me wrong, the issue customers are having with their flower orders are certainly very real and need a response, not to be buried or hidden by a flood of off topic discussions. Transparency is good, real responses are what matter. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have both – it is again a balance of what your social media channels do for you and your customers.

As for the support side, we all know it isn’t easy, or cheap, but it is something which companies tend to get… and here, the flower companies are doing a good job of responding 1:1, giving direct email addresses, and all of the other support processes you’d hope for when customers are upset and support lines are backed up with callers… they may not be perfect but they’re on it for this part. But while the support side is going well, when all people see is bad, they get more upset, the assume nothing is going right, and they lose the benefit of peer to peer support or comments to turn too.

 

And that’s why you need your fans to know, connect and be involved with your social media presence now, when things are good. Social media is not just about offers and sales generation, not just a support system, but when used right, it can be a dialogue platform to get insights, have the right discussions that curtail or stop issues early on, and yes, be a place where people share all the great things your product / service / brand are doing that may them advocates and repeat customers.

Social Media Strategies: You can’t afford to turn the computer off Friday at 5

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I think it’s safe to say we all enjoy getting away from the office at least sometimes but for many companies, social stops when the clock strikes 5 (or maybe 6). While there’s a lot of logic behind this in the eyes of those doing the posting it doesn’t reflect the reality of the channel – customers don’t stop knocking. The notion of responding 24×7 or close to it isn’t new, many companies have customer service on 7 days a week, 24 hours a day, potentially every day of the year, but with so much of social being handled by more “senior” staff this philosophy is often forgotten.

When companies go away from their channels two important things happen – first the questions stack up which is an annoying experience for the customer who is waiting and the employee who must wade through tweets all of Monday but more importantly an opportunity is lost.

Think about it for a second – a few years ago your web traffic was probably minimal on the weekend and big during the week. Weekdays may still be bigger than weekends but it’s a digital world and people are online all days of the week, from the office, from the home, even the mall on their cell phone.
Think about it some more – issues happen 24×7 and in a connected world no one waits to hear back on Monday. By the time you respond to provide the insight your customer needs, they already bought or that new nasty video with an incorrect fact is already out there.

The solution is of course an unpleasant one for anyone reading this but it is reality. You need to be on more than from the office. Whether it’s a customer service rep taking an hourly glance at automated reports or your staff actually getting into the weeds the biggest gains happen when no one expects it. Respond at 9pm on a Sunday and you’ll wow a few power users. Get product announcement clarified and you’ll avoid the confusion from that one blog. It’s not like you aren’t already on checking your own accounts anyways…

Social Media Strategies: Who should respond? Customer service or marketing

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We’ve all read the case studies about Comcast, Dell, Jetblue and a handful of other companies who have changed their business (or at least changed what the media said about their business) by engaging in social. But while it’s exciting to talk about getting your own strategy going and how to “blow up” your business social always come down to one simple question, whose going to respond and when?

On one hand you have your customer service team, a group accustom to working with customers, tasked with fixing problems and [hopefully] knowledgeable about your product, policies and other particulars.

On the other hand you’ve got marketing which is probably the group driving social and has the most access to specials, new campaign information and the juicy details the customer wants.

The problem with delegating out to customer service is that, unless you create new roles and train new staff, you’re responding 1 to 1 on a platform that’s seen by 1 to many. This may seem like a minor issue but when your response ends up on the front of a major blog it’s anything but. Marketing on the other hand is often out of touch with the details of the customer experience (and I’m saying this as a marketer) so getting into support requires learning those find points. Neither side is perfect.

The solution that I’ve always found to work best is the one that gets the customer what they want – the right answer, in the right format fastest. Whether this comes from marketing or customer service isn’t a matter of black or white, it’s a matter of who can do it and who can commit the time to checking Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, YouTube, Flickr, Your Blog, The Other Blog, the new video site, the old video site, the second twitter account and that one last blog all the time. If your entire customer service team is hourly it’s not going to be them. If your marketing team isn’t willing to get into the trenches they should stick to strategy.

Either way you slice it the best idea is always to carve out that person. This can be a new resource if budget allows or an existing repurposed one. New clearly has the advantage of being able to get trained and focus on nothing else but sometimes that long time employee who is looking for a new change of pace already has the insights to know how to answer the product questions.

What’s most important, the detail you can’t forget ever is that people who contact you through social are doing so because it’s the channel they chose to use. If your resource doesn’t check it frequently, doesn’t respond well or just ends up pushing them to other channels there’s no use in having them there so whoever you pick, they need to have the permission and backing of the company to go out, give answers and perhaps use a little different tone or brand than may be the status quo – after all, this is social media.