5. Customer Service in the Facebook Era
“Twitter gives companies the second chance they never had
before to win back angry customers.
”—Isaac Garcia, CEO, Central Desktop
Customer Service in the Facebook Era
Some people say that your company’s relationship with a customer really begins after the deal closes. Certainly, we all know that it’s far cheaper to retain an existing customer than to acquire a new one. But for many businesses, offering quality customer service is an expensive headache. Support calls are often wrought with negative emotions such as anger, annoyance, and impatience, and often for good reason. Customers are put on hold for longer than they can stand, they need to call back multiple times and repeat all the same information that they gave to the last agent, and sometimes they give up out of frustration.
But for these companies and their customers, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are turning customer service on its head. With the social Web, customers have a voice for the first time. They are speaking up, and other customers are not only listening, but also helping spread the word, as evidenced by the countless examples from United Airlines, Domino’s Pizza, Comcast, and thousands of other organizations.
Social media adoption by businesses often starts with customer service because companies are discovering that customers are already complaining on Twitter and Facebook, and they have no choice but to react. Now that everyone has a voice, companies can no longer “get away” with providing bad service. I am certainly not suggesting that Twitter will replace your call center. But your communication channels with customers are expanding beyond the call center, traditional Web portal, email, and chat to include social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and social customer support communities.
Companies that master social customer service are finding not only tremendous cost savings, but also huge benefits to their brand and a reliable, low-cost conduit for feedback to continually improve their products, services, and operations. Whether companies like it, customers have been given a voice. If you choose to listen, you might be surprised at what you learn and find that your whole organization and value chain might be transformed. And that’s not such a bad thing if it keeps your business relevant, makes your customers happy, and wins you more of them.
In this chapter, we talk about how the social Web is reorienting organizations to the customer experience, walk through the five steps to social customer service, and suggest how to quantify cost savings.
Thinking Holistically About the Customer Experience
The social Web is blurring the functional boundaries inside your company. It’s no longer about marketing, sales, and customer support as separate departments with separate agendas. Customers view your company as a single entity. No matter who they are talking to at your company, customers expect a seamless experience that is consistent with your brand. The only agenda your company should have is your customers’.
Marketers and sales reps need to think about how to service customers. Customer service staff need to think about how to retain and up-sell customers. Most customers find it hard to love a brand if they hate the customer service. But if you help resolve their complaint quickly, chances are, you will have much better luck getting them to renew, upgrade, and evangelize to their friends.
More than ever, companies need to improve communications and collaboration across not only customer-facing functions, but also the entire company, such as accounting (how are your customers billed?), product development (is customer feedback driving new features?), and even purchasing (does your supply chain adhere to the ethical standards of your customer community?).
As part of this, companies must recognize that customer service is transforming from a reactionary function to a strategic cornerstone of the customer experience. In the following guest expert sidebar, Forrester Research senior analyst Natalie Petouhoff weighs in on the growing importance of the customer service function and why it needs to be more closely integrated with other departments in your organization.
Natalie Petouhoff, Ph. D.
Customer service is shifting not only its own paradigm in business, but also business itself. And although many people wouldn’t necessarily see customer service as a change agent, the addition of social media has made it exactly that. Customer disdain, combined with a rapid rise in the adoption and use of social media by consumers, has formed a perfect storm that is rapidly driving change.
When companies blatantly ignore product or service issues, customers now can use the Internet as a medium to broadcast, very publicly, their frustration to millions. This has switched the balance of power from corporations to customers. And now the press is routinely taking up the cause, reporting on companies that provide good or poor customer service experiences. The risk of corporate reputations being ruined by poor customer service interactions has greatly increased as consumers have gained the capability to share their opinions directly with each other.
This perfect storm has forced companies to switch gears and reconsider not only the customer experience, but also social media as a serious enterprise business solution that is transforming customer service to reach the new goals of enhancing the customer experience and providing voice-of-the-customer data to transform other departments, such as marketing, sales, engineering, product development, and even operations.
Dr. Natalie Petouhoff (@drnatalie) is a senior analyst at Forrester Research who focuses on social customer service and CRM.
Keep in mind a few points about customer feedback:
• Find value in constructive feedback—Customer rants on Twitter aren’t necessarily a bad thing. First, you can’t do anything to prevent them. (And if you try, it will look really bad.) Second, the best way to improve is to listen to your customers.
• Turn anger into loyalty—If someone cares enough about your company to tweet about it, treat it as an opportunity to win that person back with excellent customer service. Before the social Web, angry customers complained to their friends and simply stopped buying your product or service before you ever had an opportunity to apologize, clarify, or right the wrong. In the Facebook Era, companies have a second chance to divert angry passion into fierce loyalty. Take anger over indifference any day, and rise to the occasion to get better.
• Let employee personalities shine through—As we discussed in Chapter 2, “The New Social Norms,” social networking sites can help humanize companies. It’s easy for customers to hate a stodgy corporation, especially 40 minutes into a support call when they still haven’t been routed to a human to answer a simple question. It’s much harder for customers to hate a friendly and helpful employee that you have chosen to make the face of your company’s support page on Twitter. Comcast did this with Frank Eliason (@comcastcares), the senior director of customer care. You’ll hear some thoughts from Eliason later in this chapter.
• Respond quickly and with humility—Because customer service issues and responses on social sites such as Twitter and Facebook are public and searchable, how quickly companies respond and what they say are now part of the company voice and brand— creating radical implications for cross-functional collaboration. For example, should your company require that customer service reps be PR-trained before handling issues on Twitter?
• Tap into SEO benefits—Search engines are indexing customer support dialogue on social networking sites and customer forum sites, which has a very substantial impact on search engine optimization (SEO). In fact, some companies I interviewed told me that their primary reason for investing in a Twitter presence or online customer support forum was for SEO benefits from user-generated content, not actual customer support.
In the following guest expert sidebar, Kira Wampler from Intuit discusses the value of sharing in addition to responding, highlighting the increasing overlap between marketing and customer service functions.
Intuit’s “Care and Feeding” Approach
Kira Wampler
With online reviews being the second most trusted form of advertising according to Nielsen and with Twitter hitting its one billionth tweet, the way customers expect to interact with brands has fundamentally changed. It’s not just new—it’s a new normal.
For the online engagement team in Intuit’s small business division, the new normal brings with it a mantra:“Be where customers are or beware.” But with so many places to engage online, where should you focus a small team’s efforts?
By analyzing what channels influence product purchases, researching where small business owners spend time online, and testing a variety of efforts in social channels, the Intuit team prioritized Amazon, Twitter, and Facebook as the key external social channels along with the Intuit Community—the team’s home-grown site and the largest community of small business owners on the Web.
Intuit’s small business division takes a “care and feeding” approach. On Twitter and Facebook, the team “cares” by responding to roughly 85% of product tweets and “feeds” by sharing relevant information about Intuit’s small business events, grant opportunities, and articles to help small business owners grow.
Although the new normal might pose challenges, the rewards are high. Customers are more engaged and more successful with Intuit’s small business products, and new customers see that Intuit actually cares about its customers.
Kira Wampler (@kirasw) is a group marketing manager at Intuit Small Business Group.
Five Steps to Successful Social Customer Service
Customer service organizations need to embrace five specific tactics: listen, embrace transparency, respond (and own up to mistakes), crowdsource, and care about your customers.
1. Listen
The most important step (which should also be the first thing you do) is to listen. Even if your company hasn’t invested in building a presence on social networking sites, chances are good that if you have customers, someone somewhere is ranting or raving about your product and service, a competitive offering, or at least something related to what you offer. If you haven’t already done so, take a few seconds to search on your company name at http://search.twitter.com, and you’ll see what I mean.
In the Facebook Era, customers dictate where they want to be heard and, therefore, where you need to be to provide service and support. Research conducted by Natalie Petouhoff (whom you heard from earlier) and her team at Forrester shows that customers are increasingly turning to social channels instead of traditional call center channels because they can typically get a faster, higher-quality, and more empathetic response from the company, other customers, or both.
To automate monitoring on the social Web, use tools such as TweetBeep to set up notifications for brand mentions on Twitter and Google Alerts. Also consider free feed management tools such as Monitter, Seesmic, TweetDeck, or Hootsuite (see Figure 5.1) to easily manage and respond in-line to the continual stream of tweets about your company, your product, and related keywords that you specify.
Figure 5.1
Hootsuite and similar free tools let you simultaneously monitor (and respond to) multiple social feeds from one place. It’s especially handy if you have multiple Twitter accounts or you are tracking multiple topics.
2. Embrace Transparency
Be open about sharing uncensored customer feedback because people will find it anyway. Instead of hiding customer discussions behind a user login or obscure Twitter handles, actively point prospects to your Twitter support page or public forum on your Web site and stream tweets onto your Web site. Let people see for themselves on their own terms the uncensored things your customers are saying about your company and how your company reacts and responds.
Akron Children’s Hospital in Akron, Ohio, has built a presence across a comprehensive set of social sites, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and YouTube. The Web site not only links to discussions on social networking sites, but also actively educates and encourages the hospital’s community members to explore these sites (see Figure 5.2).
Figure 5.2
Akron Children’s Hospital has built a presence across a comprehensive set of social sites, including
Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube.
Reprinted by permission
3. Respond (and Own Up to Mistakes)
Handle negative feedback diplomatically. If it’s factually incorrect, consider responding with a polite explanation. Sometimes it’s best to do nothing and wait for someone from the community to speak up in your defense. It’s less work for you, yet far more credible that way. Several companies got in big trouble with the public when it was discovered that they had created a fake online personality to defend or promote their business.
If someone offers constructive criticism or complains about something that is genuinely unfair or broken, acknowledge, apologize, and thank them. Then actually do something about it. If enough people complain about the same thing, it’s probably worth listening to. People don’t get mad at companies for making mistakes, but they do get mad when companies refuse to admit their mistakes. They get so mad that they write songs that go viral on YouTube, such as “United Breaks Guitars” (see Figure 5.3). Musician Dave Carroll wrote the song, which has received more than eight million views on YouTube, about his nightmare experience as he watched United Airlines’ workers carelessly toss his guitar. Carroll decided to use the social Web after spending a year filing complaints, only to have United still refuse to take any responsibility.
Figure 5.3
“United Breaks Guitars” has been a public relations nightmare for United Airlines and a clear example of how the Facebook Era is changing the rules of customer service.
Reprinted by permission
Many customer support organizations struggle with the real-time nature of services such as Twitter. Customers tweet questions, issues, and complaints around the clock and often expect an immediate response. (Customers typically set a much lower bar for company-branded support forums.) So depending on how important of a channel Twitter is to your business and the volume of support inquiries you receive, you might need to significantly reorganize your support organization. For example, companies such as Zappos and Comcast began assigning dedicated support reps to focus on monitoring and responding to questions on Twitter. Other businesses have chosen to staff a handful of agents around the clock to respond to inbound Twitter complaints in real time for mission-critical issues or as a means of branding.
Admitting your mistakes scores you some points, but winning the hearts and minds of your customers requires action. Fix the issue someone found, deliver the new product someone suggested, and then tell everyone you did so and publicly thank the person who spoke up. This is how you create your biggest advocates who will stay with your company through thick and thin and rush to your defense whenever others criticize your company.
For this to work in practice, you need to create (or update) your business process for how customer feedback gets prioritized and implemented, likely by a different part of the company. This requires planning, cross-functional collaboration, and probably the use of some closed-loop project management tool.
Toyota made the courageous decision to do this when a defect was found in some of its cars (see Figure 5.4). It was a tough situation for any company to be in, but in light of what happened, Toyota did the right thing by widely acknowledging the defect in some of its cars and making sure every Toyota owner knew about the factory recall. The cliché works perfectly in this case: Actions speak louder than words.
Figure 5.4 Not only did Toyota tweet about a defect (as painful as it must have been), but the company also
placed a prominent red button on its Twitter page background, directing attention to the recall. Tweets from many customers suggest that people appreciated Toyota’s transparency, sincerity, and action-oriented response.
The following case study, which summarizes analyses done by Forrester Research, profiles how European mobile retailer Carphone Warehouse is bringing customer service to the social Web.
Carphone Warehouse Uses Twitter to Transform Customer Experiences
Carphone Warehouse (CPW) is Europe’s largest independent retailer of mobile phones and services, with more than 2,400 stores across nine countries. Because CPW’s customers began posting comments about service issues on Twitter and blogs, CPW was faced with the decision of whether to engage on these social channels.
After deliberation, CPW customer service professionals decided to publicly acknowledge customer complaints on the social Web. Their strategy was to take a brave stance and change customer–company interactions by harnessing the power of social media to say “I’m sorry.” This simple act of acknowledgment has improved brand perception and transformed the customer experience by letting people feel heard and valued by the company.
CPW has found that Twitter offers a new opportunity to truly listen and engage in customer conversations, address customer complaints and feedback more quickly, proactively provide information to customers, and positively influence customer’s opinions.
CPW also monitors RSS feeds on its brand and products. When customers post complaints or constructive feedback, CPW contacts the customer directly through traditional channels, such as email, to ask if the company can help resolve the situation. The customers often post a positive review about the help they have received from CPW (see Figure 5.5). Because customer complaints on the social Web are permanent, getting customers to update their original complaint helps CPW regain positive brand sentiment. Without this, the ongoing set of customers and prospects who see the post without the update might continue to have a negative impression of CPW.
Figure 5.5
This figure illustrates a few common scenarios of customer service transitioning between social and traditional channels.
4. Crowdsource
When your business has advocates, you can crowdsource—that is, outsource to your audience (“the crowd”)—a surprising amount of your customer service to the community. You don’t have to do anything special for this to happen. It happens automatically when your business has successfully cultivated fans and advocates through listening, embracing transparency, admitting mistakes, and taking action.
Companies are quickly realizing that it pays to encourage customers to talk to one another, troubleshoot for one another, and share tips and tricks in online forums across Facebook, Twitter, and company Web site forums. For example, a number of such customer self-support groups have sprung up on Facebook, often to companies’ surprise and delight, as these groups greatly alleviate the burden on their call centers. It might seem crazy that people would be willing to volunteer their time to monitor your customer support channels and help others free of charge, but that is the power of customer loyalty. Many also derive either direct or indirect value from demonstrating their knowledge and being viewed as experts in the community.
In addition to your customer community, your employee community is a powerful and highly qualified source of ad hoc customer support. This makes obvious sense for brick-and-mortar retail store employees who invariably experience lulls in customer traffic at different times in the day. For example, Best Buy famously created Blue Shirt Nation, an employees-only social network where employees from stores across the country are recognized for answering technical, product, or other support questions. In addition to reducing company support costs, this has had the added benefit of improving employee engagement and loyalty—employees no longer feel bored and unmotivated when fewer customers are in the store.
And not only will you cut support costs and improve engagement, but also the quality of your customer service could potentially reach new levels because customer and employee support volunteers are driven by the most powerful motivator of all, which money cannot buy:passion. The key is to invest in developing the right policies and training for employees, which (unlike customers) could be perceived or even held legally liable as speaking on behalf of the company. The right amount of policy to introduce is enough to safeguard against lawsuits and bad PR if an employee makes a false product claim or says something inappropriate, but not so much that employees are scared of participating. One potential option is to have trained customer support staff review employee-generated content. Another option might simply be to update the terms of service of your online support forum to indemnify your company from any potential liability.
A lot of customer service exchange ends up taking place on Facebook and Twitter simply because that’s where people are already spending time. However, in addition to these public channels, many companies are investing in custom online communities for social customer support from vendors such as Lithium. Lithium is a premium product with rich functionality, including blogs, a user-contributed knowledge base, live chat, and the capability to solicit and rank community ideas, which justifies the higher price (which is based on usage). In my opinion, it is the best solution for any company that receives a lot of technical questions in customer support, such as companies with a big ecommerce component or companies that are selling technology and telecom services. The following case study profiles how Best Buy uses Lithium to better engage with customers, effectively crowdsource to both customers and employees, and save millions of dollars annually.
How Best Buy Uses Lithium and Twitter to Save Millions Each Year
Three years ago, Best Buy began noticing a growing number of conversations taking place outside traditional support channels. Online community manager Gina Debogovich and her team quickly realized that customers were having these conversations regardless of whether the company was aware or involved.
Initially, Debogovich and her team scoured the blogosphere for negative mentions. When customers included their contact information, the team reached out privately in an attempt to right any wrongs. They hoped people would go back and update their previous blog post.
But few bloggers responded. So the team tried something radically different. Following a strategic overhaul, Debogovich and her team began tweeting responses and publicly responding on customers’ blogs on behalf of Best Buy. They also created a custom Best Buy support community to consolidate consumer conversation on the Web. Instead of having customers go all over the blogosphere to post, the goal was to have customers go to these communities, which are run on Lithium’s software behind the scenes.
On Best Buy’s community, users can access blogs, product discussions, operating system discussions, carrier discussions, and news and FAQs.
Today Debogovich leads a team of 22 individuals, including 14 community connectors who engage with the blogosphere on behalf of Best Buy. Displaying a strong emphasis on transparency and personal connection, the community has a “Meet Our Moderators” page with profiles so that customers know exactly who is responding.
Anyone on the Best Buy team can sign up for a Twitter account to engage in greater dialogue with customers, and any employee in Best Buy retail stores can sign up for a Lithium community account to help answer questions online during lulls in store traffic.
With these developments, Best Buy estimates a return on investment (ROI) thus far of $5M annually—an impressive payoff for something customers are demanding of companies anyway.
The improvements are numerous. Last year, out of more than 70,000 conversations that took place on the community, Best Buy customer support was involved in just 5%. Other customers and Best Buy retail store employees responded to and resolved the rest.
GetSatisfaction is another popular customer support community application that companies such as Nike, Zappos, and Yola use. Pricing starts at $19 per month and increases as you add features such as integration with other support applications, customize the look and feel, and custom features. Compared to Lithium, it’s a lot easier and faster to get up and running, but it has less functionality (see Figure 5.6).
Figure 5.6
GetSatisfaction is a popular community solution for crowdsourced customer support.
Reprinted by permission
Many traditional customer support applications vendors, such as Helpstream, Salesforce.com, Parature, and RightNow, also offer Web portals as part of their solution, and almost everyone has integrated with Twitter. If you are a large enterprise organization and don’t already have a case management tool with Twitter integration, another great option is CoTweet. It enables a social media administrator to assign incoming tweets to specific individuals and department queues for response instead of relying on employees to do so on a voluntary, ad hoc basis.
5. Care About Your Customers
In customer service and support, the issue customers are calling about can become secondary to their experience of interacting with the company. Customers want to feel listened to and valued by the companies they are providing business to. No one understands this better than the front lines of customer support, who are talking to customers every day. In the following guest expert sidebar, Frank Eliason of Comcast shares his personal story and thoughts on the importance of connecting with your customers.
Connecting with Your Customers
Frank Eliason
My name is Frank Eliason, and I am not a PR or marketing person, at least within the organizational sense. But as you have read in this chapter, the organization is changing. I am a simple customer service guy who has became known as @ComcastCares. I have worked in customer service for different organizations during the past 20 years. Throughout my career, I have seen dramatic changes, but none more dramatic than what social media is bringing to every customer service organization.
After years of service taking a back seat, social media is causing the customer to obtain the upper hand by owning the communications channel. Marketers and PR departments everywhere have been trying to work in the space, but customers don’t always want to interact with those departments. And let’s face the facts, marketers and PR are not always the best employees to have a dialogue with the customer. Dialogue with customers is something your customer service department excels at because they do it every day.
I have watched many companies start efforts within social media and fail. This happens for a variety of reasons, including not understanding the space, creating too many barriers (such as legal constraints), or pushing out information without participating in the dialogue. Other fears include being unsure of how it will scale. The scale question cracks me up because I remember hearing the same question about email. I also remember hearing a reluctance to personalize responses and hearing companies want the legal department to approve each email before it was sent. All this seems silly today.
When you care about your customers, they care about you, too. On July 26, 2008, I had to take the day off. It was a Saturday and the only day we could have a birthday party for our two-year old, Lily. It was the only day we could have the party because of scheduling, but it was with mixed emotions. I did not get into the specifics about why I was taking off, but, as I later found out, the community found out on their own. At some point, our customers Googled me and found out that it was also the anniversary of our other daughter’s passing. When we finally got through the day, I looked through my normal Twitter search and saw the most amazing thing. Other customers (not employees) had started to respond to people with tweets such as “Let’s let @ComcastCares have his day; can I help you?” or “@ComcastCares is not around today, but I had a similar problem and Frank had me do this ….”
Nothing is more powerful than connecting with your customers.
Frank Eliason (@ComcastCares) is the senior director of national customer service at Comcast.
Calculating Your Cost Savings
In addition to the benefit of improved customer service, you can calculate how much money your company has saved as a result of “going social.” You can use a few direct and indirect ways to perform these calculations.
• Cost savings from customers responding to other customers—Count how many questions or issues the customer community addressed instead of your support staff. Automate this based on message threading and Twitter @replies to figure out who responded to whom. Then multiply this by your average cost of a support call (effectively, average call length times the average number of calls to resolution times a prorated customer support rep salary).
• Multiplier effect from each customer solution being broadcast to everyone and made searchable—Add a multiplier to account for people who would have contacted your call center had another customer not publicly responded with a solution to a similar question earlier. This is harder to determine precisely, but you can approximate it by the number of searches on a support community site that did not result in a question being asked (implying that the person searching found a satisfactory solution).
• Savings from an improved knowledge base from community-generated content— Solutions contributed by customer experts not only help in real time, but they also expand and improve the support knowledge base over time so that future portal or call center cases are resolved more quickly. One way to approximate the impact of community-driven knowledge base improvements is to track how often and which cases are resolved using customer-submitted solutions. Then compare average customer satisfaction and resolution time of those cases against similar cases in which a traditional solution was used.
• Average case resolution time—Compared to phone calls and even live chat, tweets (because of their 140-character limit) are short and to the point, forcing customers and support reps to eliminate banter and cut to the chase. Early data shows that this is drastically reducing the average time for case resolution for many support organizations that have added Twitter to their channel mix. To calculate your average case resolution time, have a team of reps go through at least a few dozen tweets (the more tweets, the more accurate your measurement) and respond to each. Divide the time they spent by the number of tweeted issues they resolved, and that is your approximate per-case resolution time. It is interesting to compare this to your average resolution times for other support channels such as phone or email.
Companies’ social media adoption often starts in the customer service realm because people are complaining on public forums.
Thanks to the strategic marketing and branding value of Twitter and
Facebook, customer service is transforming from a reactionary function to a cornerstone of the customer experience.
The five steps to successful customer service on the social Web are to listen, embrace transparency, respond and own up to mistakes, act, and crowdsource.
Not only can you crowdsource questions and issue resolution to your customer community, but you can also tap into your employee community, especially if you are a brick-and-mortar business with retail employees who are not always fully occupied in the store.
Customer rants on the social Web aren’t always a bad thing. First, you can’t do anything to prevent them. Second, you can probably learn a lot from what your customers have to say.
Quantify your cost savings from investing in social channels for customer service. For example, you can approximate how much you avoided in call center costs based on the number of Twitter @replies answered.
The first thing any company should do is to listen to what’s already being said about the brand and products. I highly recommend that you add tools such as Monitter, TweetBeep, or custom integration into your existing CRM application for monitoring and responding.
Think of ways your marketing and customer service teams can work together to provide customers with both “care” and “feeding.” This potentially includes sharing a Twitter handle; running marketing campaigns based on customer feedback that was acted upon; and ensuring that marketers stay in touch with daily customer concerns, requests, and experiences.
Let employee personalities shine through, especially in the customer support scenario. Your customers will be much more forgiving and less frustrated if they feel they are connecting to and being heard by a real human being, such as Frank Eliason of @ComcastCares.
Have a policy and process in place so that you can respond quickly to issues that come up on Facebook or Twitter. Because everything is real time and searchable now, how quickly companies respond is becoming part of how their brand is perceived.