(I must admit, it took me a long time to write this, and this post sat in drafts for a couple of weeks. I feel challenged at times, because I produce so much content over on the Attensity blog, and contributing guest articles for other publications – I find it difficult to write more for my own blog on top of that. It’s not just a question of time, but also an issue of, I don’t want to say emotional (maybe mental is a better word), at least some kind of non-physical exhaustion. I am certainly not making excuses, but just wondering if other social media people / content producers, feel this way as well). Regardless, here it goes…
This post was inspired by a discussion over on the CRM Outsiders blog that was in turn inspired by a discussion over on the SocialCRM Pioneers group led by Jeremiah Owyang and Ray Wang. The original question was posed by my pal Mike Fraietta of Jive Software. The issue in question was: What impact does the number of Twitter followers have on your ability to get help via Twitter? What impact *should* your number of followers have? Mitch Lieberman states, and I agree, that we are starting to develop some bad habits. We are essentially rewarding people for whining online, by coming to their rescue… As long as they have a significant number of followers. With fiascos like Kevin Smith and Southwest Airlines, brands are scared, which is definitely understandable, that a vocal “influencer” will forever tarnish them beyond the point of repair.
Does the rest of the customer record matter? A vocal influencer may provide negative word-of-mouth, which may cost you potential customers. However, this particular person may not be a customer, or may not be a profitable customer (yes, sometimes, it IS ok to fire your customers). What’s more valuable: to keep this vocal person happy who may or may not be a profitable customer (or not a customer at all), or to keep happy someone who you know is an important and profitable customer? Ideally, you would do both; however, more often than not, it’s rhetoric. When you have to pick and choose: what do you do? John Bernier of Best Buy’s Twelpforce, aims to help every customer with no regard to who the customer is. He has built a well-oiled machine and he was able to do so due to his company’s orientation towards service and commitment of necessary resources to the cause. “It doesn’t matter who they are and where [what channel] they are coming from.. We provide value and service that’s valuable, going out of our way to service the customer,” John told me during our interview.
As part of SocialCRM, you should be able to have visibility into a customer record, marrying social data with internal data on that customer. Whether you decide to help everyone, or to help selectively, you (and other relevant personnel within your organization) need to have access to complete and current information to make the decision of whom you help. Moreover, being able to reference context (such as previous conversations and purchase data) when she sends you a tweet, is undoubtedly crucial to providing a seamless service experience.
Is it even possible to respond to all queries? And even if you could, should you? I think your ability to scale your reactive service depends on the type of business you are in, and the way you have structured your organization. Companies with consumer-facing products receive more Twitter messages than B2B companies (I have no empirical data supporting this, but it’s based on observation). There are simply more consumer customers than business customers. The type of good or service you provide is a consideration too. Products with higher repurchase rates create more opportunities for questions and service queries. Products with more intense purchase decision cycles also invite more assistance. Last and certainly not least, the more problems your product has, the more service your customers need. I call all of the above reactive service.
Proactive service, on the other hand, is structuring the collaboration channels within your company in such a way that they allow and strengthen collaboration channels between customer and company. For proactive service, your effort should not vary with how many inbound queries you get. You should be working your butt off to involve your customer in product creation, in a way that makes her feel valued, and not “used” for her feedback. You also need to figure out how critical roles within the organization allow for this collaboration, and how to get them to collaborate with each other. You should still engage in reactive service, but not at the expense of proactive service. Even though reactive service tasks feel more urgent and can thus crowd out proactive tasks, it is important to invest in forward-looking strategies. It’s the whole issue of short term fire-drill vs. a long term strategy.
In order to help you deal with the current fire-drills though, you should establish processes that allow you to do more and efficiently. There’s been some debate about automation and its place in social media. We are going through the process of figuring out how much of the Attensity product should be automated. My view is that the response itself should rarely, if ever, be automated. However, the system should figure out what the question is asking, find the right response (in internal FAQ or external user forum) and suggest this response to the company rep. This way, the rep can craft a personalized message, while cutting the research time (I actually blogged about this a couple of days ago).
How can you scale customer service? As I reference above, the key is to establish the right internal process and a smart system that makes you efficient. This system should result in activating the right resources within the organization, and for a large organization should involve at least some degree of automation and routing (by message type, content, tone, etc). But even more importantly than tools and processes, you need to become a culture that welcomes customer support – both kinds: not only reactive, but also proactive. Socialize your existing support teams to receive inbound queries and to collaborate with the product team. Instead of providing only phone support, encourage your service reps to jump on Twitter as well. Twelpforce does it well, and so does Zappos, so it is possible (I recently wrote about my experiences with various companies here). Socialize your product team to and establish channels for customers to co-create with you, making her a stakeholder of the product’s future. And we all know that great service and a great user experience is the best marketing and PR. And if you need me to sell you more on the value of being proactive vs. reactive, service-oriented vs. “salesy” – check this out: customer retention is cheaper and more effective than acquisition.
And finally… social (networking) responsibility:
To echo Mitch’s sentiment, we have created a system that sometimes (not always) rewards obnoxious socially visible behavior by providing the fastest customer service to the perpetrators. Our ecosystem makes it OK for the customer to hurl insults at companies, but not the other way. In the court of social media opinion, we side with the consumer before we would side with a company. Whereas that’s a welcome development, as it’s shifting the balance of power in the consumer’s favor, we have to be careful to not over-shift that way. We have to remember that at the end of the social media helpline, there are people too. We have to demand mutual respect, and we all as consumers and brands have to step up to the plate to set boundaries. I love this post from Jacob Morgan that urges companies to create SSCLAs that would establish proper expectations. I think it’s a great idea, and do hope it catches on. The SSCLA achieves several things at once. Firstly, it provides a better customer service experience, as she now knows what to expect (do all queries get answered? how often? etc). Secondly, it holds the company responsible to its promise. Finally, it holds the customer to a standard of social conduct.
And remember… With power comes responsibility, so if you are an influencer, you really need to set an example for people within your network by treating others with respect, whether they are individuals or companies.
To conclude:
What are your thoughts on this complex question?
I got the idea for this post while going through some travel mishaps caused by the Icelandic Volcanic Ash Cloud. Here’s a bit of background: I flew Air France to Moscow via Paris, and Delta was fulfilling my flight back to New York’s JFK’s airport (whose customer was I really? It’s still not clear). Although Air France was very helpful getting me out of Paris and into Moscow amidst the Paris CDG Airport chaos, and even managed to get me to Moscow before CDG closed for several days, they weren’t very helpful getting me back from Moscow to JFK. “Your ticket isn’t our problem, you are Delta’s problem” was exactly what they told me (translated from Russian). And Delta, in turn, told me the same thing. Ouch, way to make someone feel special! I understand that the situation was a bit untraditional to say the least, but if you are a uniform-wearing representative, you should still choose your words carefully, whether it’s online or off.
However, this post is not about bad customer service, it’s about failed social media customer service. When neither calls or website visits or personal visits yielded any further insight as far as the next flight I could take or rebooking on a partner airline, when everything else failed, I located Delta’s twitter account and tweeted them for help. This is what our exchange looked like:
And their response:
To which I say:
I was just looking for a little out-of-the-box thinking…. But instead we were going in circles:
Although I commend Delta on at least answering their @ replies regularly, I can not commend them on proactively listening and engaging, or at least attempting to provide a solution for a customer in need. Usually when I engage with a company customer service rep on Twitter, they provide help outside of what I may find on the website. I’d like to take a second to note that I am NOT by any means knocking Delta: the airline did put me on an flight standby, some time after the above exchange, and that flight got me home to the U.S. The assistance I eventually got at the airport was fantastic. In this post, I am simply using my Twitter exchange with them as a case study for constructive criticism for social support. Most companies are very bad at it, and Delta is by far, nowhere near the worst. However, some companies are light years ahead of their peers. For example, when I had issues with Comcast, @ComcastBonnie not only found me online through active listening, but booked a service appointment for me, without me ever having to call or email, or without me even knowing how the appointment was scheduled. Everything was 100% seamless and with maximum convenience; I was not bogged down with any scheduling minutae, but rather presented with a final solution (and note: Comcast is a BIG company with many customers complaining online).
And herein lies the lesson for companies who wish to use Twitter and other social channels for customer service. It’s not enough to just be on Twitter to direct people to the homepage and 800 number, while sharing one-way company news. It is certainly not enough to point the customer to a fairly obvious online destination. At a very basic level, you should be actively helping customers who seek you out. At an actually useful level, you should be actively listening, triaging and helping, while utilizing the expertise of the whole enterprise and beyond. People who contact you on Twitter either have a much stronger preference for Twitter over other communication methods, or have exhausted other methods. You should take the time to call customer service on their behalf, or somehow help them using your own channels. At the very least, just tell them you heard them and are working on it, even if you can’t guarantee an outcome.
I can hear your objections already in my head… But airlines (or insert industry name) are too big! They have too many customers! It is simply not possible to answer everyone! Although it’s possible that some queries will be unanswered, you should be striving for a 100% response rate. With a semi-automated routing and response system like Attensity360 (disclosure: I work there), for example, you shouldn’t have any problem scaling your response efforts while simultaneously reducing your response time. In addition, how about empowering all customer service personnel to aid customers not just by phone but also by Twitter? Zappos does this, and so does Best Buy with @twelpforce (more on Twelpforce in a forthcoming post). Companies should consider Twitter as a legitimate help channel, in addition to emails, instant web chats and 800 numbers.
And yes, even with airlines it is possible; just check out Virgin America, Jet Blue and Southwest Airlines. They engage effectively and efficiently, and even if an answer points to another web-based resource, you won’t find a generic, one-fits-all answer cut and pasted to different customers. Let me give you an example from my own experience… During the same trip, due to massive delays and uncertainty, I was facing missing my flight from JFK to SFO on Virgin America, if my flight from Russia was going to be delayed. So I DM’d Virgin to explain the situation and let them know that I may be late. The tricky thing was that I wasn’t going to know if I was running late to JFK until I boarded my flight out of Moscow. Without a way to call internationally or get online conveniently, I asked if they could rebook me if I sent them a DM from the Moscow airport. Although the rep couldn’t guarantee that I would be rebooked on the next flight, he did say he will do everything possible if I sent him my frequent flyer number and DM’d from the airport. And when I landed, they sent me this message, which made me feel so warm and fuzzy all over – both, as a customer and as a social media practitioner:
Yep, an airline was actually helpful and gave me an individualized solution for an out-of-the-box problem. I know, shocking! They could’ve easily pointed me to online help or 800 number, which would’ve been OK for a more standard and less complex situation. So how did Virgin succeed where most airlines fail miserably? Because customer service is Virgin’s DNA. Even before Twitter, they have always been helpful and went above and beyond in an industry that squeezes the customer more and more. Twitter is a tool; it is not a silver bullet, but rather a manifestation of your customer service orientation, your DNA, your culture. If the orientation is not there, no tool can help you.
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