Last week, a major American airline fired one of their employees for having engaged with a customer after the latter had expressed his opinion on the poor usability of its website.

Facebook and Twitter, to name just two of these highly popular social media sites, give (un)happy customers / citizens a very powerful and instant platform to make their voice heard, to an extent that has never been seen before.  For fun I cherry picked some “customer experience related” twitter posts this week, which I’ll leave for your judgement (please note that they are strictly reflecting their authors’ opinion, neither mine nor that of White Hat Media).

“I had a very positive customer service experience with Green Mtn Power via email, very nice, #btv #vt”

“Just had a great customer service experience. Emailed Chef’n in America and got local support and replacement on the way. Thanks ”

“Thumbs up to @marksandspencer today for offering to reimburse a re-heel on a boot no longer in stock so couldn’t swap!”

“I had a good customer service experience at the Apple store in Cherry Hill, NJ. Apple Care is worth the cost.”

Customer care, customer support, customer insight..

The lesson is: social media really provide brands fantastic opportunities to listen to their customers and improve the customer experience. But whether they listen and take action or not will probably make the difference between those who will thrive and those who will, maybe, just survive. Knowing that customer acquisition costs on average 5 times more than customer retention, surely awareness of what is being said is not quite enough.

So how can brands proactively leverage social media to really listen to their customers and ultimately, both retain customers and snap customers from the competition?

I’ll be looking at 4 areas where social media can make a difference to your customers’ experience.

• Customer care

This is probably the area that most brands have difficulties dealing with.
This is not about ignoring problems, on the contrary. You have to have one or more (depending on the size of your business) people who are tasked with monitoring customer feedback and able to respond quickly and either solve their problem or questions, or refer the complainer to the person who will.  If an issue is difficult to resolve try to move the conversation away from the social media and into a more personal space, using telephone or email. Once the problem is resolved, make public the solution that settled it. Preferably put the information on Facebook, alert your customers via Twitter and add the solution to the FAQ on your website.

By doing so you can turn detractors into advocates if you treat them well and react swiftly.

With praises, don’t let them go unnoticed; when you can, thank your customers personally or collectively if a thread was contributed to by a number of them. It works both ways.

• Customer support

Point 1 if dealt with properly will have a direct word-of-mouth marketing effect and bring your business to the attention of other potential customers.
Encouraging customers to create a supportive community (self-service) via social media is a great way to reduce support services costs. I find a good example is the Sony Ericson World discussion board on Facebook ( http://www.facebook.com/sonyericsson?v=box_3#/sonyericsson?v=wall). It is particularly true of a company that sells technical products. Taking this one step further it is possible to reuse content produced by your customers in your own FAQs.

• Knowing about the competition

Social media are fantastic to know what your competitors are up to. But they’re even better to check what their customers think. What do they criticize about your competitors’ customer service? What do they like? Find the best practices and implement them.

• Customer insight

In the “old days” forums, but now Twitter/Facebook give you the opportunity to see where your customers’ interests are, what makes them tick. It is also a good way to measure overall morale. This can help building creative answers to solve their issues.

Social media give you the opportunity to gain insight in how your products or services are used and perceived. There are very good free tools to create instant polls / focus groups. Be proactive, you can ask questions to generate discussions, and pass interesting comments and suggestions on to your product marketing department / customer experience team.

Posted on Monday, November 16th, 2009 at 5:48 pm in Social Media, Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.