How to use social media to save customers: a few examples
Does The Hoff save customers by using social media?
If you spend any time around social media, you’ll quickly realize that it is one of the easiest platforms to voice a complaint. Some companies ignore the negative sentiment that may pop up online, but others are finding masterful ways to spin a negative into a positive.
There are a few simple steps we can all take to try to handle issues and save customers online:
1. Accountability – step up and own the issue
As a customer and consumer, I don’t expect perfection. At the same time, there are certain situations where a problem can cripple a business. The absolute, worst thing that you can do is nothing. People have some level of forgiveness by nature, but ignoring, covering up, or lying about an issue only makes things worse. Check out this Google Search for “apple antenna lie” to see how not addressing the issue quickly can have a disastrous effect. Admit the fault, apologize for the inconvenience you caused (not “may have caused” because clearly there is an inconvenience) and follow through towards a resolution to try to make things right.
2. Escalate – get the right person talking
Not every issue requires the CEO having a press conference. However, sometimes the Assistant to the Assistant Manager may not be the person you want on the front-lines. Pull in a superior, explain the issue, and setup a conference call with folks that aren’t satisfied with the explanation offered. In the examples that I’ll discuss later, in most cases… I was happy by the escalation alone and the end result was a bit irrelevant.
3. The Five Ps – Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance
If you’re hiking the Appalachian Trail with a friend, to what extent do you plan your trek? Do you just say “we’ll figure it out” or do you know where you’re sleeping every night? It never ceases to amaze me at the cases I hear of folks not prepared to handle a crisis. Pull in the appropriate parties, discuss previous examples – pros and cons, establish how to handle a worst case scenario, and have your infrastructure established.
I’ve had first-hand experiences with several companies that have knocked this out of the park and saved my business (I’ll also grade them for those of you that don’t read all the text).
GoDaddy – A
A crisis with your hosting company is never a fun experience. It is a great mixture of anger, frustration and disappointment – for you and maybe even for your readers. I ran into an issue with GoDaddy and they handled it smoothly. I even bought more domains by how they resolved the situation (thanks to The Office of the President). I’ve written about this before and you can check out the detailed blog post on how GoDaddy saved my business with social media.
Zagg – B+
My favorite pair of ear buds come from Zagg – they make incredible products. We had just launched Phonebooth Free at SXSW and rocked it. I boarded the flight to head home and my favorite buds shorted out. I was one month out of warranty and reached out to their team on Twitter. After several emails and DMs, I ended up with a new pair of my favorite listening devices. Unfortunately, their customer support staff wasn’t really on the same page with the outstanding Twitter outreach. Altogether, great work and absolutely awesome products that I stand behind. The Twitter team followed up with me post-transaction to make sure I was still happy. :)
DirecTV – A+
I was a few hours away from completely cancelling my DirecTV service. I had a technician show up six hours late for a scheduled appointment, an incomplete upgrade installation that left me with no TV (oh noes!), mud tracked in the house, and the next available appointment was a month away. I was pretty furious and my switching cost was immediately down to zero. I had an unsatisfactory call with customer support and voiced my displeasure on Twitter. DirecTV’s team on Twitter reached out to me, escalated the issue, worked with the cancellation department I had called, and had The Office of the President call me.
I had told the cancellation department that if the issue wasn’t resolved the next day, that I would cancel (not being a jerk, but there were better alternatives than spending more time on the issue). On my way home from work, I received a call from The Office of the President telling me that someone should be at my house before I made it there. When I arrived, an extremely helpful technician was already there working outside with his supervisor. They changed a ton of things that had been botched by the previous tech and convinced me that I had a single, isolated, bad experience.
I’m back in the extremely happy category with DirecTV and even a reference for other customers… if it wasn’t for their monitoring on Twitter and their outreach… I would be on U-Verse or just watching TV online. The fact that they followed through with other departments and had a qualified person reach out to me over the phone was awesome.
Beggars can’t be choosers
Too often, we only try to elevate the positive sentiment in social media… especially internally. While this is definitely a good thing and helps with job security, neglecting negative sentiment and failing to try to understand it will doom you. It can lead to product improvements, happier customers, and even save business… like in my case.
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How to improve your blog community by being yourself
As we all focus on search engine optimization, blogging, and social media… we tend to forget a very important element – Personality.
People want the real you (if they want you at all).
I’m not implying that we shouldn’t be professional and show subject matter expertise when we write, but is that it? There are millions of people talking about the same topics I talk about and probably yours too. Now that we know we aren’t the only ones talking about social media, how can we improve our blog communities by being ourselves?
1. Write down three important personal interests and put them in your bio.
Cheesy? Yes. Painful? Maybe. Useful? Definitely. If you’ve had a blog for more than six months and the three things you write down can’t be found in a post or in your About page, we’ve got a problem. If people take the time out of their days to read our ramblings, unless we’re THE thought leader in the industry crushing it with every single post… we’ve got to let them get to know us.
Three “personal” things about me influence a lot of what I write or talk about and have all served as conversation starters online and in person.
2. Write as if you are talking to your friends or colleagues.
I too get the Dictionary.com Word of the Day, but that doesn’t mean I need to use it in each post. The goal is to get people to take the time to read and hopefully follow a call to action (comment, subscribe, buy, download, etc.). Today the word is jnana. Do you know what that means? Do I look smart or intelligent for using that? Be conversational and serve your audience – if your audience knows jnana, you get brownie points.
3. Be passionate about things you believe in or are an advocate for.
Please understand that the tips and tricks to making a blog successful are important, but balance that with the fact that in less than 20 minutes… I can start a new blog talking about whatever I want. There is more noise than ever and to build a community, you must either serve a niche or build relationships – ideally both.
If you are motivated to write a post that evokes emotion, do it before you change your mind. To this date, my post with the most engagement (shares, comments, emails, direct messages, discussions, etc) is my most personal post. One that I debated writing. One that I reread four times before posting. One that I wrote at 3am. Passion and expertise differentiate.
4. Reply to comments and share, share, share.
If you receive a comment, take the time to respond – whether publicly or private. Reading and commenting takes time and to the best of my knowledge, we don’t yet have an infinite supply of that. Showing your community that you’re listening, processing, and thinking about what they say is extremely important.
Also, check out the blogs and tweets from your readers. Chris Brogan suggests that we should share 12 times as much as we self-promote on Twitter. Think about that before posting five tweets with different variations promoting that recent blog post. Reciprocity helps strengthen relationships.
5. Extend your reach and get away from the computer.
Since the beginning of time, human interaction has been extremely important. As we create more and more tools to facilitate this online, we forget that in-person interactions are still extremely beneficial. While I say that somewhat tongue-in-check, it is important to make those face-to-face connections when you can. It could be a customer a few miles away or a commenter attending the next industry conference you’re going to. Take the time to cultivate those relationships and you won’t have to tell them when you publish new blog posts… they’ll know. Be yourself and get out there and network.
The benefit of being yourself…
I’ll be the first to admit that most of these tips are not revolutionary or ground-breaking. Often times, the simple things are the ones we neglect. Personal branding is extremely important, but if your personal brand is simply a professional façade with none of the things that set you apart… you’ll just continue to be an information hub. Think of your favorite blog and I’m confident you’ll know at least three things about the person writing it.
While this post isn’t about metrics, in my opinion, repeat visitors are more critical than first time visitors. Far too often, we choose to monitor “Visitors” because it is the largest number, but there are far more variables there. Keep a constant eye on your Repeat visitors and try to narrow the gap between your first time and repeat folks. The smaller that gap is, the stronger your community is and the more engagement you’ll see. Being yourself is the fastest way to get there.
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