This week, in conjunction with @verygoodservice we’re running a series of articles and features looking at customer service and the role social media has to play for small businesses. You can catch up on the rest of the series here
We caught with Guy Stephens, Customer Knowledge Manager at The Carphone Warehouse who is soon moving to be Senior Consultant at Foviance, a customer experience consultancy, to get his thoughts on social media and customer services
Tell us about your new role?
Over the last 18 months or so I’ve been trying to understand how social media can be used to provide customer service, specifically via Twitter. My role moving forwards will be to try to help businesses understand how they can harness the power and unique characteristics of social media alongside their more traditional channels such as email, phone and self-service.
How important is social media in terms of customer service for businesses?
I think the use of social media is going to be a key component of how companies engage with their customers. It is going to be increasingly important for companies to use the same platforms that their customers are using. This is the first time that customers not only have the online tools to genuinely voice their approval or disapproval about the experience they have had with a company, but importantly they can do it as the experience literally unfolds before their eyes: right now.
Over the last eighteen months or so I have seen the rise of more and more third party feedback/complaint sites such as – ComplaintCommunity, Plebble, GetSatisfaction, Amplicate, VeryGoodService, as well as Q&A-type sites such as Vark.
What these sites are doing is providing an impartial platform for anyone to comment about the experience they have had. The implication of this is that a customer or person is now able to very publicly broadcast their satisfaction or discontent without ever coming into contact with the company who has provided that service or product to them. Not only is this directly challenging the traditional company-customer dynamic in favour of the customer, but it also perhaps at some level challenges the need for a customer to actually engage with a company at all.
Furthermore, the increasing ubiquity of smartphones, particularly the iPhone is resulting in a ‘anytime-anywhere-anybody’ type of mentality that allows someone with a smartphone, a Twitter account and the inclination to literally help anyone, at anytime, from anywhere. What will the impact of this increased mobility be on the more traditional approach to customer service of – fixed location, fixed time, trained staff?
What is the hardest thing about delivering great customer service through social media?
I am a huge advocate of social media and there is no doubt that it is a catalyst for challenging traditional ways of providing customer service.
At the same time, I also know full well, that social media, particularly Twitter, isn’t a universal panacea. Spreading a bit of Twitter pixie dust here and there isn’t going to suddenly improve the way a company provides their style of customer service. At the end of the day, social media is a channel, whereas something like Zappos’ first core value – Deliver WOW through service – is a mindset, an approach. If a company values their customers and puts them first, then whether they use Twitter or the phone that approach will run through the entire company.
Social media is also bringing customer service into the open and forcing upon it a PR potential it has never really had or wanted before. This change means that companies are having to re-evaluate how PR is provided, how they deal with a crisis situation or simply the types of individuals they hire to provide customer service.
Whilst there are undoubted changes taking place as a result of the impact of social media, there is also no doubt in my mind, that the challenges companies face now to provide customer service excellence are little different from what they were a few years ago.
How do you deal with negative comments?
I was wondering when we were going to get to this one!
Negative comments are happening all the time, whether you use Twitter or not. Being negative, passing judgement, complaining are all natural parts of the human condition. The big difference now is that we as customers have an incredibly rich set of tools at our disposal 24/7 to make our discontent known. And, if what we have to say is interesting enough, anyone who so wishes can further broadcast our discontent to an even wider network of people.
We can post a video to YouTube, record our complaint via AudioBoo, publish photographs via Flickr, write about our experience via blogs, let everyone know what has happened when it happens via Twitter. The flipside to this is that never has the act of complaining actually been such an intense expression of brand engagement. Who would go to the lengths of producing a YouTube video? Well Dave Carroll did when United Airlines broke his guitar. It is becoming the norm not the exception. And our increasingly voyeuristic tendencies perpetuate this need.
So, what I say to companies is this. People have always complained and will continue to, so get over it. Where you as a company can make a difference is to respond and acknowledge it. The power of saying ‘I’m sorry, how can I help?’ is truly phenomenal. Think about your own situation for a moment. When something goes wrong, all you want is someone to listen and empathise. Why should customer service be any different?
I’ve often been in situations where the experience is more important than the actual outcome. We’ll lose a customer, but gain an advocate purely because we handled their complaint in a sympathetic and understanding way.
What are the tools you use in order to do your job?
The tools are pretty standard for everyone.
Twitter: TweetDeck, Seesmic, HootSuite, CoTweet.
With all of them, you set up keyword searches and then simply respond as you need to. The major difference between TweetDeck, Seesmic and HootSuite is that HootSuite is online, so the searches you et up will be the same no matter where you log in from. With TweetDeck and Seesmic, you download the application to your local computer, so your set-up could be different for each computer you have, unless you synch the columns. CoTweet is similar, but it has been set-up with companies specifically in mind.
Twitter community: ComTweets http://comtweets.com/
Monitoring/searches: Tweetgrid http://tweetgrid.com/
Managing multiple Twitter accounts: http://mashable.com/2009/05/18/twitter-apps-manage-multiple-accounts/
I addition to Twitter, many businesses are now also using YouTube to produce short ‘how to’ videos to help customers or about their products:
BT (BTCare), The Carphone Warehouse (EyeOpeners, CPWHelp), TalkTalk (TalkTalkvids).
Many of the charities have great sites as well such as Oxfam (OxfamGreatBritain), Cafod (CafodTV).
I think the key to all these sites, however, is ensuring that if you are going to go down this route you keep the momentum going. It is very easy to start with great intentions, but find three weeks or three months later that actually it takes a lot more planning and resource to keep it going. My advice is find the right people who are passionate about social media, create a framework for them to work in, and then let them get on with it.
Other social media platforms include – blogs, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo. I think you will also see the rise of geo-locational platforms as well.
My advice is: start in one area and build up your confidence. As you become more familiar with the tools and your confidence grows branch out and experiment with other platforms. Some will work and dovetail nicely into what you are already doing, and some won’t. If they don’t, move on. Wherever you choose to start, however, make sure first that there is a relevance for your customers. See what they are using, and if they’re not there, find out where they are.
Here’s some more useful links. I created these sites using existing platforms simply because I couldn’t find this information in one place.
Companies using Twitter to provide customer service:
http://twitter.com/guy1067/twittercustomerservice/members
YouTube videos about companies using social media to provide customer service:
http://www.youtube.com/guy1067
LinkedIn Group for people interested in learning more about social media customer service:
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2105053&trk=hb_side_g
Blogs:
Dr Natalie Petouhoff: http://drnatnews.com/dr-natalies-blog/
The Social Customer: http://www.thesocialcustomer.com/
CustomerThink: http://www.customerthink.com
What are your top three tips for small businesses that might be looking to start delivering customer service through social media channels?
1) Do you really need to? This is more of a sense check, because it is going to use up someone’s time. Check also to see what is being said on Twitter about you. You may find your customers simply aren’t using it, and actually it may be better to use it as more of a PR tool.
I think we’ve also got to be careful that we don’t use the excuse that because we might not understand it, so we won’t use it; at the very least try to understand it so that you can make an informed decision about whether to use it or not. The thing is this. Whether it is Twitter or something else, customers will always be way ahead of where a company can be in its adoption of new technologies. What is important to remember though, is that while we all debate about these new technologies, our children are using them. Our children are not debating about whether Twitter is a fad or not, they’re talking about which apps they’re using or downloading; and they’ve never even seen a set of instructions either!
2) Find the right person. It is imperative they understand the medium. Someone can learn about a company’s terms and conditions, returns policy, or where to send a repair. It is far more difficult to teach someone about simply engaging with people and customers, and being able to show empathy and understanding at the right time.
Once you have found the right person, create an approach of ‘freedom within a framework’. By this I mean, as a company agree how you want to use social media, what your end game is, and then simply let that person interpret how they engage with customers within that framework. If you prescribe an approach you will take away what the key elements of social media, or specifically Twitter – personality, humour, being socialable, sharing, collaborative etc.
3) Measure the right things or not at all. Be very clear about how you use Twitter for example. If you’re using it to provide customer service, what are you going to measure? I have found that Twitter is great for identifying issues, but not necessarily for resolving them. So what measure do I attribute to that? If I am using Twitter as a promotional tool, do I really sell via Twitter or do I use it as a lead generator. Don’t attribute the success or failure of why you are using Twitter if you are only using it for one small part of the overall process. Furthermore, because so much of what we do today is transactional, we try to attribute transactional measures to it.
At the end of the day, it may be enough that simply because our customers are there, we too need to be there.
Thanks Guy! You can follow Guy on Twitter.
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