Having spoken recently with some of CCC’s European members (one from the Travel & Leisure industry and three from the Financial Services industries), one of the questions that invariably arise is: how should I use Twitter or Facebook or other types of Social Media for customer service?
Photo: Andreas Praefcke
In my last post about Social Media, I didn’t address this specific question, only venturing as far as to say:
Using Twitter [or Social Media in general] in the customer service realm is not about amassing the most number of followers or how many emails we send, it’s about measuring the number of customers we help and showing that to executives. Second, it’s using that customer feedback from Social Media to make real improvements, hopefully at the root-cause level, to our customer experience to boost satisfaction and loyalty.
That addresses what Social Media’s general goal/success measure should be, but that doesn’t address the question of how to take action in social media channels to achieve that goal.
The problem, however, is that asking how to use Social Media channels (like wondering how you should respond to Tweets about service feedback or asking how you should design your Facebook profile) is the wrong question. In fact, it’s a great example of putting the horse before the cart.
It’s like the trap that we can fall into with CRM. It’s easy to think that technology is the answer to improving customer relationships, but it’s probably our customer segmentation or internal processes that support our CRM that prevent us from a having global view of our customers.
So, rather than letting a Social Media strategy dictate how we help customers in this new world, I’ve been working with CCC members to instead:
- Define their Customer Service philosophy then
- Think how Social Media supports that philosophy
So, this may mean that certain Social Media channels aren’t good fits for a company, or that your approach to a channel may be different than your peers. But more importantly, it can open up new and innovative ways to use Social Media that can differentiate you from your competitors.
Think about how BestBuy is using Twitter. Having their frontline directly answer customer service questions via Twitter wasn’t something companies traditionally do, but it does highly leverage the strengths of their employees (with high technical and product knowledge) to fulfill specific customer needs (right-now answers about products). BestBuy probably didn’t start off by thinking about how to use Twitter for customer service, but instead began by thinking how they could help customers have better experiences..
In fact, colleagues in our sister program, the Marketing Leadership Council, told us that BestBuy began with the challenge, how can our Customer Experience differentiate us from Wal-Mart and Amazon, who can always challenge us on price? That’s a higher-order, strategic question that guides your Customer Service philosophy long before you ever think about how to execute on this with Social Media.
Social Media does has the potential to radically transform how an organisation functions and thus Customer Service has a role to play in this but let’s not get too preoccupied with the question of, “what’s my Social Media strategy for customer service?” This comes later.
The first step is to truly define your Customer Service philosophy for this new world and then think about how Social Media can help you execute on that plan.
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For more about the BestBuy case, my colleague Anna Bird recently posted a Q&A with John Bernier, Best Buy’s Social Media Steward.
Related posts:
on August 16, 2010
Respond
The feeling that everyone’s doing social media better than you are is to blame for company’s just jumping into Social Media without any proper planning. Everywhere you turn, the buzz is deafening, and just about every company you encounter asks you to follow them on Twitter, become their friend on Facebook or read their blog. And like any new thing, it’s got the sheen of new on it that’s hard to resist. But my advice is – before you spend money on building a social media presence, take a step back and apply few questions. It may be painful at first, especially if you like new things, but when you get real results, you’ll be glad you did. Asking few questions before you build a social media strategy will help you develop a strategy based on results, not hype. If you don’t spend money with a strategy in mind, you’re throwing money away. First ask these questions: a) what in our strategy do we want to use social media for? b) what exactly are we trying to accomplish here? c) why social media? d) is spending money on social media going to provide better ROI than other things we could be spending money on? e) what kind of social media will help us best achieve our goals? f) are we prepared to let go of control of our brand, at least a little and give customers a platform to take control a bit? Let’s face it, you can’t participate in social media without being…well…social. And that means engaging in a conversation with customers. Once you engage in conversations, you have to give up control. Are you willing to do that? And the last question is g) what will we need to start and how do we measure success?
on August 16, 2010
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I echo Catherine’s comment, and highly recommend that if you are a leader that is tasked with Social Media deployment you first read Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff from Forrester Research. I am in the midst of a SM deployment and the cultural shift and challenges of marketing and service departments lowering the walls to make this a succesful deployment are painstakingly real. This book will help you prepare for those conversations and challenges.
on September 16, 2010
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[...] This projects epitomises the notion of putting the goal or strategy (a better in kind customer experience) before the technology that implements that vision (similar to the theme of my last post) [...]