By Jon Vanzile
First Published on www.btobonline.com
Customer service and social media are like “peanut butter and chocolate,” said Paul Dunay, CMO of social analytics company Networked Insights. “They're meant to go together.” But that doesn't mean many companies are doing it right.
Most customer service units treat the function as they would the obnoxious guy sitting behind you at a baseball game. They pay attention, but they only get involved when the guy gets really crazy.
Natalie Petouhoff, a former analyst with Forrester Research who spent five years writing about social media and customer service and today acts as a “chief evangelist and author of white papers and books on social media,” said this kind of reactive crouch only begins to realize the potential of social media and customer service.
Most businesses are in the reactive state because their adoption of social media falls in the "early majority' category,” Petouhoff said. “They are pragmatists. They require proof that something will work. They wait and see. Unfortunately, social media moves so fast that businesses that are not proactive end up losing customers, and revenue and profit.”
Proactive businesses, on the other hand, not only monitor the conversation and move to fix obvious problems, they also work to anticipate customer service issues before they erupt on Twitter. Then they incorporate that thinking into product development, public relations and marketing.
This is more important than ever before because the blinding speed of social media and its massive reach have effectively put companies under a microscope and magnified their faults. A single irate customer can reach tens of thousand of people with one tweet.
When that happens, a company must identify the issue and get ahead of it as quickly as possible. Applications such as Radian6, Sysomos and ZenDesk are useful for monitoring social media in real time, making it easier to recognize a problem and respond.
“A lot of people make a lot of noise because they just want to be heard,” said Zack Urlocker, COO of ZenDesk. “When that happens, you want to respond quickly: Take action, take responsibility and if possible make the conversation private.”
Dunay called this taking a customer “from adversary to advocate.”
“If you can take someone from an adversary to an advocate, you've saved a sale you didn't have to make,” Dunay said.
Dunay also stresses the importance of moving fast when criticism erupts online. He used to do just that when he was global director of services and social media at telecom company Avaya Inc., which he left earlier this year for his current job.
“When I handled social media [at Avaya], we had a program giving the customer the three A's: acknowledge, apologize and act,” he said. “We wanted to get it off the channel as fast as we could.”
This kind of listening is important, Petouhoff said, if a company wants to take the next step in using social media.
“When a company interacts in a genuine, direct and authentic way, millions of customers will see that and send millions of messages to people they are connected with,” she said. “In this way, customer service is the new PR and marketing department.”
Comments
Post has no comments.