Thanks to plenty of helpful advice everywhere you turn, monitoring and listening to conversations is now the first thing you may think about doing online. This reminds me that in the public space, we’re taking eavesdropping to a whole new level.
How do you go from listening to participating without embarrassing yourself?
The first thing to consider is disclosure. You would not want to enter a physical room and pretend to be someone else entirely. So don’t do that in a virtual space.
If you’ve been listening, you’d want to offer good content and value to the community. This part is very much like networking. Maybe you help answer some questions and seek to be helpful. Think of it as an appetizer.
Then you earn the stripes to begin asking questions of your own. You’re now at the salad. You’re beginning to interact with members of the community.
Eventually it comes time to bring out the main course. After listening, contributing, and asking questions, you’re ready to offer content that is more targeted to the needs and wants of the community.
You may have noticed that this is about the slow food movement. You will need to commit time and resources to be successful. As well, you will need to understand that it’s about the value you bring to the community, and not about your message.
Dessert or the cake may be when you figure out that your product and service can help the community solve a problem, or do something you did not think about when you set off to participate.
Online customer conversations are very much the promise of public relations in the social medium. In the past, people may have invited you to be there in the print and digital magazine, courtesy of an editor. If you show up directly in the medium, make sure you have the right attitude about it, or you’ll just crash the party.
It’s not a secret that customer service has become more and more self-service. In certain situations that is quite alright. If we are in the service of each other within a community, for example. It is counter-intuitive, yet we tend to be more helpful to others when the mechanisms of reciprocity are engaged.
Companies that are listening and participating can and will be welcome into those communities. Leigh-Duncan Durst wrote a thoughtful post on Forrester’s Customer Experience Index for 2008. Understanding what a company delivers in customer service today is a starting point.
Many companies however, are too aware of what needs to be fixed to bridge the gap. It’s not that easy to align business groups to make the 360 experience happen. Many services are also becoming more complex to deliver and customers are learning more about what they want through personal connections and research.
The experience frankly would start with alignment between business strategy, go-to-market and service delivery. Is what happens on the outside and near the customer more important tan what happens inside a company? There needs to be balance between the two.
If I were to design a 360 customer experience, I would work to align what is said, with what is meant by it towards what is acted upon. The integration would happen by following some simple steps:
* Listening to what is going on - we do a lot of that today, for example with the Net Promoter Score.
* Sensing and engaging with customers on communities or forums begins to shift the company to participating within peer networks.
* Acting upon many of the suggestions and comments will bring the learnings from the community inside the organization and the dialogue with colleagues back outside into the community.
For 360 to work, everyone needs to take into consideration the feedback received and given at any point in time. After all, value propositions are situational, too.
Twitter, Digg, Facebook, Google, FriendFeed - there is no scarcity of networks and services that are free to users who enjoy a connection to the World Wide Web today. What happens when one of these services we have come to rely on experiences a problem? How does customer support for free services work?
In a recent conversation on business models and profits, Union Square Ventures VC principal Fred Wilson points out that technology and the Internet are allowing companies to reach large audiences and create scale that can be monetized in many ways - and still manage to stay small.
Doing a lot with little is the dream of many businesses. However it seems that most are unable to do so if they focus on things that may not be high value to customers - like service and support.
How do companies that are by and large free to users, do customer support? There are several options:
1. Users wait to learn what happened when the service goes down - we have become very impatient with this kind of option. We may just move on to another, comparable, and also free service. For example, I was working on creating a poll at PollDaddy.com yesterday and the free service kept timing out when I requested my password. I was ready to move on to another service when I remembered what my password was and was able to proceed.
2. We check Get Satisfaction to see if there are pending issues. Their motto is “customer service doesn’t have to suck.” I agree. We were first on the scene as this company was launching here. You will notice that 23 Twitter employees are on the site. Companies and customers can use the site for free.
3. Some companies communicate about the issue on their blog. Although sometimes it’s the communities of users who discuss what they are experiencing and trouble shoot it on new media sites. This happened in December 2007 with the Skype Outage. It also happened Friday when Google search experienced a problem with “this site may harm your computer” result given for all searches. The root cause and resolution were communicated on the company’s official blog.
4. Tech forums and developer communities have been a great resource for a number of years. Now these kinds of online support spaces are opening up beyond users and for other kinds of customer service. You have also probably seen that many companies are starting to offer customer support on Twitter - although I do not have ready examples of companies with free services doing that.
There are many ways to scale customer support for free services today. Now why can’t customer service work better for those companies whose products and services we actually pay for?
What can you do to get back on track? The first thing you need to learn is to listen to your customer champions in the service department. This will be a tougher year if you’re not willing to do that. They know what’s going on and what you need to do to to stay close to your customers.
A company takes its eye off the ball when it stops listening to customers and considers the customer service group a cost. You may already know it - customer service is such a large part of marketing that it makes sense to refocus your efforts. Some other areas to look at are:
Setting the tone from the top. Let’s face it, everyone takes their cues from what people do and less and less from what they say. Make your communications program a robust one, where everyone is seen doing the right thing and you’ll need to worry less about policies and rules.
Communicating more frequently and less formally. This does not mean that you’re not taking it less seriously, quite the opposite. It might inject a good dose of accountability and enthusiasm in your team when they know this is a regular appointment.
Embracing your communities. Sometimes a business gets lucky and communities form around it. The best way to approach that is to be a willing participant and not try to message or control the community.
Measuring what closes and not just numbers. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a really good idea to have leads. But perhaps the approach should be more about talking with the people who already want to speak with you, than focusing most of your time on generating new leads.
When there is little money to go around and many options, the companies that win are those who keep customers front and center.
I was researching The Body Shop for my post on National Day of Service and community at Conversation Agent and came across their Twitter account in the US. Perhaps it was started by a fan of the company? It looks sort of abandoned or just the RSS feed from the blog.
TheBodyShopUSA has a nice image in the background, complete with logo and tagline. If the company intends to become more active on Twitter, perhaps it cam tweak a few things there. Small changes sometimes provide big results. More active could mean building a stronger community for The Body Shop international.
Three tips on improving the profile:
1. Add a URL. It would make sense either way - whether this is an official account by the company, or it was started by a fan.
2. Personalize the account with an actual name from The Body Shop customer service team. Many companies are realizing that people want to hear from other people, specifially from those who actually work with them inside organizations, not the marketing folks.
3. Write a brief bio telling people what you’re about. For example, where you are, what you do. Maybe this is an opportunity to show how The Body Shop works: “This is the place to find out how we stand up for others, and how you can do it too.”
Three content ideas:
1. Share links to stories on how one can activate self esteem. For example, my friend Stephanie Quilao writes a great blog on finding the every day ‘live’ in living. You’d find worthy material there and within her community.
2. Form partnerships with publications on green living to align with protecting our planet. Take a look at Vida Verde Media for ideas and examples of the types of conversations you could begin. Take a look at their Twitter account and see that they manage to have conversations with readers.
3. Look for ways to engage and activate on public good initiatives. As a concept, this would be a way to let the people who received support from The Body Shop foundation tell their story by joining the Twitter stream with you.
Customers are becoming more interested in activating a dialogue with the people inside the organizations they support. There are many individuals on Twitter who embrace sustainable development and products. Which means greater opportunities to continue the conversation Anita Roddick started with her movement.
Mass personalization in customer care works only if your name is “mass”. Other customers may have been fine with a different kind of response, but they probably did not have the exact problem or question the customer in front of you or on the phone has.
With the decline of dollars earmarked for marketing activities, customer care is becoming an even greater differentiator for your business. How are businesses going to scale customer care? Here are three practical ways:
1. Listen aggressively to the question or problem, then provide exceptionally good customer service. For example, if something is not working, find out what it is exactly, get a technician to look it up and provide a status report on when it will be fixed. Then confirm all of it with the customer. Listening is a very important part of communications and it needs to be employed more often.
2. Hire the best people, train them well, and support their decisions. Scale does not mean only large numbers. It also (and mostly) means effectiveness. For what are large numbers going to do if you fail miserably across the board? Each good decision takes you a step closer to a satisfied customer and happy customers tend to tell everyone about your company - we like to look good when we provide referrals.
3. Close the loop on communications. Everyone in your company should be cross trained in customer service. It should be a requirement that senior management spend time on the front lines every month, listening to customers, helping with issues, and energizing their teams. This part will be easy to scale if you have a whole team dedicated to it instead of just the people who have a customer service title.
The Economist recently posted a discussion on behavioral pricing, to which Umair Haque at Harvard Business Review responded that we cannot organize tomorrow’s economy like yesterday’s. It’s not profitable to trick consumers. As he states:
as our research at the Lab notes, the fact is: companies who can build authentic, honest, open, collaborative relationships with consumers are significantly more profitable (and sustainably profitable) than companies who treat consumers deceptively, antagonistically, and manipulatively.
We could add personalized to the list as well. This has also been my belief: true power is the power to create.
Let’s say you have a problem with a system or a product that contains several components from different companies. To fix the problem, you need to contact different providers. What if those providers employed community service professionals who did the contacting and triaging on your behalf?
That would indeed be quite innovative and delightful from a customer satisfaction standpoint. We live in an increasingly connected society - social media or not, it takes a global effort to pull products together nowadays. The world may not be flat yet, but it is indeed much smaller.
I have been experiencing this kind of concept but as a one-off conversations with one provider - actually to be exact with a community manager of one provider who is volunteering to help broker information and a fix with another provider. Sometimes, your customers may be at a loss on how to explain even what the problem is, as in my case.
Wouldn’t it be much more efficient on your part and satisfying on the customers’ side to have this kind of set up?
You may be surprised to find this out, but many traditional businesses have been doing it for years - especially those where relationships are embedded in the business model. Commercial insurance is one of those.
It will become clearer in the coming months that true relationships and focus on product will trump a lot of other considerations - price, promotion, and placement among them. In fact, the product itself is becoming the strongest form of promotion with relationships filling in as the placement in many cases - peer to peer recommendations trump media messages.
If your concern is that customers will not pay a higher fee for your product, let me assure you - we would. On one condition - that the service be there and that the product be what advertised. I buy Apple because of the customer service and support that comes with the products. And the products are good.
It’s easier than ever to find out what consumers are talking about when it comes to your company or type of business today. Log online and run a Google Search, or a Twitter search - better yet, program Google Alerts with your company name or the name of your products and voila’. Not only that, but it is even easier to offer help proactively.
When using social media tools such as Twitter, you have the ability to listen to conversations and connect with your customers with an immediacy you may not even had at the corner store. Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers and messages.
If you want to learn what anyone is saying about a specific company on Twitter, start here. Enter “Skype customer service,” for example and you will find what everyone is saying about the company in real time. It looks like the company is having a hard time delivering good service. what would you do if you were them?
Since it is so easy t find out what your customers are experiencing, it is more than surprising that companies are not taking advantage of these tools to become more visibly engaged in how they support their customers. It has long been my belief that customer service is the new marketing.
Customers are watching and they are talking. Are you part of the conversation?
I canvassed my network on Twitter to find out how businesses innovate their way out of a rut in customer service. The three best answers:
John Marino at BRIO Publishing: we have challenges answering the phone so I offered $50 (cash in hand) to the person who answers the most calls. Employees felt if it wasn't ringing in their department, they didn't have to answer. The contest is weekly for all calls. It works!
Sam Decker, CMO, Bazaarvoice: We have clients using UGC (reviews & answers) to train customer service, change policies, & respond to influencers.
Mike Brewer: the more a company can put themselves out there by way of inviting feedback the better. And, if they utilize sites like Yelp in lieu of an internal feedback system, it suddenly has more merit. If you were to place a link or url address to Yelp on every piece of marketing material it would both invite and encourage people to participate in a conversation. In a perfect world that conversation would yield countless ways that you might serve your respective customer better. In a perfect world it would draw them into a participative and collaborative relationship that would not only yield better ways to serve but evangelist for your brand.
Seek feedback, communicate with your customers about what you are doing to fix problems, find ways to be proactive, and make yourself accountable - 2009 will be the year of execution.
The term quality is one that every single business likes to claim, yet since fewer and fewer come through when it’s time to back up that claim with execution, it has joined the list of other once powerful and now empty words like:
leader premier cutting-edge value-add
I stopped going to regular supermarkets a long time ago. Isle after isle of identically soggy breads, rows of similar cereal and canned goods, the sheer volume and quantity of goods as well as the drab lighting and sulky staff are discouraging.
Instead, I stop by the local Trader’s Joe store. They have a limited selection of items, and they don’t always carry the same products, in fact a few times I went back to find out they had discontinued a product. Yet, the environment is friendly, the staff actually want to be there, and the quality/price ratio is fair.
Plus, that kind of context facilitates a better type of experience.
Once I was standing by the cheese counter undecided between a Pecorino and an Irish cheese when another shopper suggested I try a Spanish brand. Not as pungent as the Pecorino, and very tasty, he said. And it was delicious - it made a friends’ gathering more interesting and exotic.
When you carry a quality product, you have quality conversations and experiences all around. Trader Joe’s model is fairly simple. They taste every product before they decide to sell it. They will give you a full refund if you don’t like it.
They pay attention to quality without sacrificing value. They don’t have to call themselves fancy names. All they need to do is deliver a great experience and back up their statements. What about you? Do you have an example of quality service that does not sacrifice value?c
“With few exceptions, every job people need or want to do has a social, a functional, and an emotional dimension.
If marketers understand each of these dimensions, then they can design a product that's precisely targeted to the job. In other words, the job, not the customer, is the fundamental unit of analysis for a marketer who hopes to develop products that customers will buy.”
This is the opening of an article by Clayton M. Christensen in Harvard Business School Working Knowledge. Christensen provides a delicious example of how understanding what job(s) the product needs to do leads to improving its performance and thus stickiness. He talks about milk shakes, but he could be talking about any product.
It’s important to understand the difference between a job-defined market and a product-defined market. Think about it, especially in a long-tail world, your competitors may be solving the same problem in completely different ways - and taking your customers with them.
As marketers we have this desire to connect with what customers want. There is way too much of everything, how do you stand out? How do you and your product become front and center?
Instead of focusing on the customer’s needs and requirements, you should focus on the job your customer is trying to get done and understand how customers measure value.
Anthony Ulwick provides the framework of outcome-driven innovation in his book and methodology. His principles may be considered common sense, but then again, common sense is not that common. Tell me if these resonate (from the book):
- As customers we have a hard time articulating what it is we want. When someone can help guide us, we are very good at articulating what we want to get done.
- As humans, we can't help but measure how successfully we were able to complete a task, even mundane ones. We do this using between 50-150 different criteria. These criteria are the "outcomes" we want from the task. A skilled interviewer can help customers articulate these outcomes.
- The responsibility to develop new features should belong to your experts, not your customers.
- Your experts deserve two vital pieces of information: (1) a list of exactly what tasks your customers are trying to get done, and (2) a list of the 50-150 outcomes customers use to measure how well a product or service helps them complete those tasks. This is where the service that has value comes from.
- A product or service has maximum value when it’s free of unneeded features and empowers customers to complete a task 100% successfully.
When you ask what do customers want? Go one question further and inquire what is the job that needs to get done?
