Looking back here is how we were able to accomplish this, we:

1. Created Valuable content - All publicly sent content was chosen based on its usefulness to the overall community.
2. Listened to the community – The team paid attention to the community on Twitter and beyond to understand pain points, frequently asked questions and topics of interest.
3. Acted as a concierge – 140 characters doesn’t give you a lot to work with, so the the team tends to act as a traffic director, leading people to the right content at the right time. This means of course that we  had to have great content on the Dot Com, YouTube, Blog and Community to point to.
4. Looked for opportunities for cross-promotion – We recognized that our  twitter channel shouldn’t  live in a bubble. We  include links to the twitter account on other branded channels and we cross link to those channels from our twitter account.  An example of this type of integration – some of our Twitter team writes on our support blog, and our blog content is always promoted via our twitter channel.
5. Took it offline - Social media gives you the opportunity to “humanize” the brand. Engaging in conversations with our customers has allowed us to better understand the needs of our community by having two-way conversations. Taking the team offline to events has given us the opportunity to promote what they do online and at the same time build deeper relationships.
6. Paid attention to “influencers” – We paid attention to folks who had influence, but we also ensured it  didn’t rule everything we did.  Most importantly we recognized that influence wasn’t always the number of followers.
7. Were interesting and unique – The team added pictures of themselves to the background, including their favorite food and their initial so followers would know who was responding to their questions. They also added a team mascot (a dog named Chico) who occasionally tweets for them!
8. Used relevant #hashtags - We used hashtags, but sparingly. We looked to understand what words customers might search for that may not already be within the content of the tweet and were relevant, and discovered #hashtags our fans were already using that would be fitting for our content.
9. Shared information internally – Having the ability to communicate directly to our customers on channels like Twitter allowed us to learn a lot. But, we also had to find ways to action what we learned and in some circumstances let the community know we were doing something with what the information.
10. Tweeted often, but not too often (conversational) – Our community told us when we tweeted to much and so we found ways to balance our public tweeting by using direct messages to offer support.

What has worked for you on Twitter?

Make sure your have a line item for “Internal Marketing” on your roadmap
and be be diligent about acting on it. Believe me, other things
always seem to take priority.

Some thoughts about how to keep the team’s amazing work front and
center with your leadership team:

Ensure they understand what a day in the life of a Social Support agent looks like.

• A lot of the work might happen behind the scenes (like over direct or private message) so no one will ever see this work.
• Provide customer service wins at least once a week. “Hey, with our
  listening tool we heard that a customer that ran into issue ‘X’ and we
  proactively reached out to her to solve it. She was delighted and
  tweeted that out to her 65,000 followers. BIG WIN”.
• Get in front of your Senior Leadship at their meetings for 15
  minutes once a month and provide stats you have and show them
  the positive tweets or posts that your satisfied followers are sending
  you.
• Set up a Blog on your internal collaboration platform (ours is
  called #justsayin) and talk about the authentic interactions you’re
  having with your customers. Talk about how customers are feeling about your
  product or service and share some of thier fun user generated content.

Don’t assume that this is happening organically through the grapevine,
you need to ensure that all the other leaders understand what the team
is doing and the value that they are adding to your support
organization.

What is Quora?

Quora is a website where you can ask a question on any topic and then the community will answer them. There is a potential to receive multiple responses to your question. The community can help you sort the good from the bad by voting answers up and down.  You can follow topics of interest to you, or search for existing questions before asking your own.

Why is Quora interesting?

Like any social network there are always naysayers who wonder what’s the point. For Twitter they asked who is going to want to hear what you had for breakfast? And, for Quora they question how it is different from other Q & A sites that exist.  It will be interesting to see where Quora goes if it goes mainstream but for the time being I think it will keep people coming back for a few reasons:

• With the ability to vote answers up and down, the good stuff floats to the top
• Quora allows users to create a summary of the responses (take a look at the response to Who are the best female speakers on the topic of Social Media?)
• With the addition of the “voting” on answers there is a bit of gaming excitment. Did your answer get voted up? Down? I love going into a question I responded to and see it at the top! Yes, public recognition matters – we are human.
• Ability to be thanked and thank others for answers. It is nice to know that someone read your post and it was helpful to them. #warmandfuzzy
• The quality of responses is currently amazing. With experts, influencers, and other movers and shakers participating you can find questions answered by “experts” on a variety of subjects. A question about Forbes received a response by the Executive Editor of Forbes  and a question about casting is answered by Ashton Kutcher. Yes,  Ashton Kutcher is on Quora.
• I can follow topics of interest and my friends which guarantess that each time I sign in there is new stuff that is relevant to me in my news feed.
• Easy to share content of interest on other social networks that I already particpate in.

So here is where I get really excited….

What is the potential for a customer service team in social media?

The obvious potential is for employees at brands to respond to questions on Quora.  If a company has active participants in social media channels they could respond to questions where the community has been unable to help (unanswered topics) or respond where misinformation has occurred.  In addition I see a few other opportunities for monitoring and gathering insight:

Monitoring: I would suggest companies should at the very least be paying attention to what people are discussing about their brands on Quora. It goes without saying that a company should have an ear to the ground on the entire web. Monitoring should be step 1 on Quora. Also noteworthy, thanks to @jowyang it seems Quora creates Twitter accounts for some brands (see comments on his recent blog post Quora for Business currently not allowed but you should still monitor).  These Quora created Twitter accounts can make it easy for a cutomer support team to monitor questions related to their brand. A few examples: BlackBerry; Zappos, Intel.

Gather Insight: By listening to the conversations a business can gather insight and feedback on their products/services. What are some of the Frequently asked Questions? Why?

An important note for businesses considering responding on Quora – Quora doesn’t allow accounts for organizations only humans. So, your staff will need to set up individual accounts and within their profile/title show association to the company. With any social network – remember to play by the rules, understand best practices and etiquette before jumping in. This post on Quora – a Marketer’s Manifesto does a great job of outlining guidelines for businesses participating in Quora.

What do you think of Quora? What is the potential for social customer service?

Picture thanks to Mike Duggan

Originally posted on MEGOagain.com

This year I had the incredible opportunity to attend CES (Consumer Electronic Show) in Las Vegas. This show attracts the biggest brands in tech and the people that love them. The word is that 140,000 people hit Vegas this year for CES! I think at any given time we had half of these people in our booth!

So what did I learn from attending #CES?

1) 5 Nights in Vegas is way to long

Late nights, bottle service, hard concrete show floors and your family in a different time zone. Enough said.

2) Expect the unexpected, and do the unexpected

Brands competing for attention at this large show pulled out all the stops with Celebs (our BlackBerry booth had Adrian Grenier, Olivia Wilde, Piers Morgan and Common) and fake Celebs (there was a fake Lady Gaga roaming the show, although the real one was also in attendance).

From David Berkowitz on Flickr

The most “unexpected” campaign was the attendance of the Hershey’s team promoting Reese’s Peanut Buttercups. A candy company at CES? They launched new Reese Mini’s at the show, including a press release and press conference “Reese’s Next Big Little Thing” hosted by tech guy Chris Pirillo. While I heard some muttering about why Reese’s was at a consumer electronics show, I think it was a clever PR play and judging from a quick review of a Google Search it worked. Of course I am a huge fan-girl for chocolate and peanut butter.

3) Technology is awesome

I work in tech, but my love of technology has always tended to lie in the ability to connect over social media rather than ooohing and ahing over gadgets, gizmos and shiny metal and buttons. After I walk around the show, I now have a much better idea as to why friends are obsessed with flat screen TVs and booming speakers and high tech appliances. Due to CES my appreciation for what goes into the creation of the products, and the incredible innovation that exists is today is 1000 x what it was pre- CES. I saw a mind blowing wall of televisions thinner than mobile phones; listened to headphones that made me feel like I was in the movie, and even high-tech vacuums that make me want to clean. This, along with the incredible integration and collaboration between brands makes me simply excited about what is to come!

4) Taking Online – Offline can be a huge success!

Our team from @BlackBerryHelp was onsite to do some live tweeting and offer tips, tricks and support to people who visited at the booth. Our @BlackBerry team was also running contests and live tweeting about events at the booth. These efforts proved successful in building awareness and engaging our community. And, even share of voice it appears on social networking sites.

Kodak also had a Blog Zone at their booth run by Thomas Hoehn and Chief Blogger Jennifer Cisney. The team was live tweeting, blogging as well as hosting talks on technology and social media.

I met a number of other social media types from brands at the show – who were tweeting to keep their followers looped in to the buzz at CES. I am sure next year we will see even more engagement from brands on the social channels around CES.

5) I want to go again!

Tweeting, Foursquare check-ins and blogs from CES…what will 2012 bring?

Still other expectations are set at point of sale.  Have you ever purchased a product or service that didn’t live up to the features outlined by a sales staff? Or perhaps the delivery of that service or product was not as was agreed upon at the time of the sale. I recently purchased some appliances from Sears, paid an extra fee for Saturday delivery so that my appliances would arrive before I moved in and before the Gas guy came in to set up a Gas line to my kitchen. Sears did not deliver on Saturday, and when they did deliver on Wednesday they took off the front door and asked us to put it back on as they were behind on that day’s deliveries.  Not only did they fail to deliver on their promises, they ensured that the next time I make a major purchase it won’t likely be at Sears since my expectations are very low for their ability to meet my requirements of service.

By meeting or exceeding a customer’s expectations a business has the ability to increase the chances of a repeat purchase  and positive word of mouth.  You can more often meet expectations by:

1) Improved and frequent communication with customer

I ordered a sofa from Joshua Creek furniture in Oakville. It was to arrive within 4-6 weeks. When I hadn’t heard from them I phoned for a status update.  They called the manufacturer of the sofa and discovered that the leather I had chosen was back-ordered and was expected in the following week. Joshua Creek followed up numerous times over the course of the next few weeks to keep me in the loop as to when to expect my new sofa. 

Constant communication allows you to reset expectations, as well as to continually gauge the state of your relationship with the customer. It also gives you an opportunity to proactively amend the situation before it goes off the rails again.

2) If you mess up, admit it and make amends.

Joshua Creek didn’t meet the delivery date and to make up for it they volunteered to deliver the sofa for no cost. In fact, the owner himself delivered it and also offered a leather cleaning package. All this was done, without my having to complain, or escalate to someone else in the business.

Have a process in place for frequent errors and mistakes. Doing this empowers your staff to make decisions quickly at the time of the customer issue without having to wait for management approvals or asking the customer to sit on hold only to explain the issue again to a supervisor.

3) Actively set realistic expectations at the beginning of the relationship with your customer

Too often staff are poorly trained especially in a retail environment. They don’t understand product features or have the information they need to properly explain the service they are offering.  This means that they don’t set realistic expectations for the customer.  At the beginning of the post I talked about a recent trip to Punta Cana where I was very disappointed in the lack of a la carte restaurants. Had the resort communicated their renovations and ensured cost savings were in-line with the decrease in service -  I would have no need to be unhappy during my vacation and certainly wouldn’t feel it was necessary to write the resort afterwards with my negative opinion of their service. 

By training staff and empowering them to say “I don’t know” – along with a process to find out the correct information means they will more frequently set proper expecations and make realistic promises from the beginning.

Communication, empowerment and training can go a long way to ensure you meet your customers expecations – no matter how they come by them. Of course even better than meeting expectations is exceeding them!

How do ensure your customers go away happy? How do you exceed their expectations?

Help has become a bad word. No company wants to admit that their customers might need help so they hide customer service under the fold in tiny print on their webpage as seen on the Nintendo Canada page.  Others call it “Support” so the connotations are that the manufacturer is sustaining or upholding their customers. The definition of support from Dictionary.com includes ”to bear or hold up (a load, mass, structure, part, etc.); serve as a foundation for”,  ”to sustain or withstand (weight, pressure, strain, etc.) without giving way; serve as a prop for”,  and ” to maintain (a person, family, establishment, institution, etc.) by supplying with things necessary to existence; provide for: to support a family.” Is this really what customers want when they visit your website? Don’t they just want you to help them get unstuck in whatever issue they are currently experiencing?

Why does the term “Help” have negative connotations to enterprise? The marketing assumption is that the website, the conference booth, the direct mail piece etc is  a sales opportunity to new or existing customers. If you want to sell something you want customers to believe your solution to their need is simple and easy. Having a “help” section on the website, or dedicated help staff at a conference booth could mean you have a complicated product.

The question is do customers really think this way? Aren’t a certain percentage of traffic to your website post-sales customers looking for how-to and directions? I don’t expect that when I buy new television that I will know exactly how it will work with the rest of my Audio-Visual equipment and I will go directly to the website to find the answers to the questions. What I do expect is that this information is easy and clear to locate. Too often this is not the case as manufacturers hide “help”  behind “Service”, “Support”, within the fine print and by pressing 10 for a representative.

Why not simplify? It is ok to ask for help and  to ask for directions. Better to encourage your customers to use your products to the best of their ability than to frustrate them in their search for help. Help after all means “to give or provide what is necessary to accomplish a task or satisfy a need; contribute strength or means to; render assistance to; cooperate effectively with; aid; assist” (Dictionary.com). Clear and simple.

Okay, surely there are best practices and industry metrics for this stuff I told myself. I was a social media acolyte, but now out of necessity I had to become a black-belt. I dove into social media like a guy doing a cannonball into the deep-end. Michelle inundated me with books, blogs, industry articles, and suggested I start following Social Media thought leaders like David Armano, Jeremiah Owyang, Brian Solis. I talked to other big companies about how they were measuring success. Everywhere I came up with the same result “well, you can’t really prove it”. I realized I was spinning my wheels on trying to nail down a definitive correlation and decided to start with the basics. Some percentage of those accepted solutions and RTs were mitigating calls, let’s low-ball it and call it a day.
What is interesting  was that as we looked at the data, we could see that as social media usage was increasing - the call volumes were decreasing. Was it a result of what the team was doing? “Well, I can’t definitively prove it” I thought with a crooked smile…
To summarize a few lessons I learned in my first 3 months
·         Don’t lose yourself down the rat-hole of definitive value metrics. Assume some small percentage of what you’re doing is deflecting calls. Ideally, work with a business unit specializing in business analysis/reporting  that the rest of the company trusts to do up your numbers, they’ll have more credibility. Create an unassisted or social media scorecard and have it presented along the assisted scorecard at monthly exec meetings.
·         Harvest the feedback you’re receiving through every social channel you have. Summarize and present this to senior management to help make your assisted or unassisted service offerings better. It can also l help you make the case for more budget/resources. Also, find ways to route other relevant information to the areas of the company that could benefit from it like Product Management or R&D.

Having good customer service doesn’t end with the sale.  Companies need to consider the relationships they have with the customers from the moment they walk in the door and remember it doesn’t end when they buy. Going the extra mile could be as simple as a follow-up call, a easy-to find self service option for help, or in Andy’s case help getting the purchased item to the car.

At any point a customer can decide to the relationship with a business-

At the beginning:

Example: A shop where I was looking to purchase a large appliance and the two staff working were helping one customer purchase filters. Neither greeted me or said “I will be with you in a moment”

Or, five years into the relationship:

Example: An IVR system that insisted I speak to it and kept telling me that they didn’t understand my request. Once I fought my way through the system I ended up going through three people to get a simple request complete.

Today, with growing competition and the increased ability to spread word of mouth due to the social web businesses are going to step up their game. It isn’t enough to be average.  It isn’t enough to follow through until the sale.

The essence of our conversation was that you need to think of everyone in social web land as falling somewhere between fanatical brand advocate and seething hatred detractor. The ultimate goal, when analyzing the data you are able to collect through social media, is to find ways to move people up the chain towards brand evangelism. It’s a simple but powerful idea. Michael said one good way is to first identify your advocates and empower the heck out of them so that it’s easier for them to do exactly this for you. They already have the integrity and trust of their social network, your job is to provide ways to amplify their promotion of your brand and leverage their reach.

@armano I am not but here’s the best way I can visualize it.

Customer service helps you find and help people with their problems. Serving customers with the information they need, at their time of need, empowers them and makes them better users of your product or service. In return for awesome customer service they may in turn talk about your product to their friends, family and social network (both on and offline) referring others to your company.  Essentially your customers create new customers for you. This form of word of mouth or peer influence  means that customers matter after the sale. Increasing positive touch-points with your customer after the sale simply gives them more reason to feel good about the purchase and your company. This is where customer service plays and has the opportunity to make a difference.

If great customer service can actually affect so much: brand loyalty, sales, sentiment then why are customer service departments often the ugly step sister? Unfortunately, customer service is typically treated as a cost center, the focus is on cost reduction (# of deflected calls) and efficiency (timed response). But customer service can be a powerful marketing channel. This has become more true than ever before due social networks where customers are referring and sharing product information; and where brands and customers are having two-way conversations. Frank Eliason says it best in Marketing is Smart, Customer Service is Submissive - we need to make the customer story central to decision making. It is time for customer service to tell and show the business the key role it plays in the success of the company.

Customer Service may only be a week long – but how important is it for your business?

We hope that you will enjoy this newly launched blog where we focus on passionate customer service in social media!