Customer service is at crucial turning point with the invention of social network spaces in public relations.
Retail stores, from the boutique clothes store to Harvey Norman, are having to re-market themselves to stay relevant. Book stores are going out of business.
And we customers now have control.
Case study
In 2009 United Airlines experienced a crash course lesson in 21st century customer service and the power of social media. What happened was, Dave Carroll, a Canadian musician had a misfortunate experience when he was travelling from Nova Scotia to Nebraska. In short, his guitar was damaged and after many complaints to the airline’s customer service, Dave was basically told he wouldn’t be compensated.
Dave decided to take matters into his own hands and record a music video, titled ‘United Breaks Guitars’. He said in a recent webinar, “I just wanted to vent my frustration and music was the best way for me to do that”.
On Monday July 6 at around 11:30pm, Dave posted the video to Youtube, then to Facebook. By midnight he had 6 hits. The next morning – 300 hits. By noon 5000 hits. When Dave finally sat down to eat his dinner that day, his music video had been viewed by over 25,000 people.
When consumer groups caught wind of this video, the views began to double and then triple. By Wednesday, CNN and the LA Times called Dave asking for interviews.
Then United Arilines PR team called Dave as well, but this time their approach to compensation was much different. They offered Dave vouchers to fly anywhere on their service. Dave refused the offer. The Times newspaper reported, that within 4 days of the video being posted online, United Airline’s stock price fell 10%.
Lessons learnt
So what’s the lesson learned from all this? With social media and digital communications, the consumer has an extraordinary amount of power. Companies should be listening far more than they should be talking.
In fact we can go one step further: social media works best for companies that want to listen. It’s not about should or could but want to. We talk to our clients about this. It’s a change of attitude that precedes the change of behaviour.
By engaging with your customers on Facebook or Twitter, you give your brand more leverage to be seen as a responsible community orientated organization.
Care – Listen – Create – Delight.
At Wilkinson Group we live by the above mantra. It’s how we treat our clients and it’s how we treat each other. You can read more about this mantra as an objective in another blog, but in short, if we really care about our clients we are able to listen easily, it comes naturally, and then understand what they really want. Then we can work in delivering that, plus a little of our own creativity as a real value add. The result? Delight.
Tactically this translates into some tips on how companies can benefit daily from using social media as a customer service tool:
- Be upfront and honest, when a crisis situation occurs, your customers will be looking at your wall on Facebook as well as sending you hundreds of mentions on Twitter. Reply to them or make a general post about what happened and how you’re going to fix it.
- Being timely is crucial in delivering good customer service. A 1-2 hour turn around period during business hours for answering questions is normally acceptable, anything more and it can be bad practice. Also inform you customers about your social media hours of operation, so they know when you are going to be there.
- Be Friendly.Don’t take negative comments personally on social media. Sometimes we take social media a tad personally and our indignant or defensive responses reflect this. The social media team needs to stick to key messages and leave any negative personal opinions and remarks to themselves. Respond with pride and be professional.
- Be funny. Humour is the best medicine. Many people use social media for information and entertainment. Try and keep your posts entertaining and amusing. There’s nothing worse than dictating dry and boring information to your fans and followers.
- Inform Inform Inform, and keep informing! Your customers follow you because they like your product. Keep them updated on upcoming releases, new flavours, or even new store locations. Throw in a few deals here and there. Add a social media competition and you’ll have lots of activity on your Facebook fan page and Twitter feed. This is the key to good public relations practice
