9. It’s About Them: Social Media Marketing Drives Customer Service

With the advent of company websites and early social media tools like message boards, company-sanctioned forums arose as problem-solving places for customers. Even though many were poorly designed and confusing, the company got by with the response, “Just search our support forums.” The answer to most problems could be found there, even though for many customers the finding was as frustrating as the problem itself. If companies had a customer service hotline, economies of scale often dictated the person who answered it was someone in a foreign country rather than down the street.

But social media marketing has changed what online consumers do when they have a problem with a company. Instead of spending an hour pilfering through not-exactly answers on company forums or trying to struggle through call center communications with nonnative language speakers, customers are venting their frustrations on blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and more.

One of the most notable stories of social media as customer service is that of cable giant Comcast. Its customer service issues, like many of its industry, could fill a book. These issues did fill an entire blog when On The Media host Bob Garfield launched ComcastMustDie.com in 2007. As the company’s employees began to take note of the growing dissension online, one of its customer service professionals, Frank Eliason, wanted to help. He began experimenting with Twitter in 2008 to see if he could help route issues and solve customer problems. He found that Twitter was not a replacement for traditional customer service help, but it was letting people get an immediate response, which improved their mood considerably—as opposed to spending several minutes waiting on the phone for help—and more important, it let them do it publicly.

Eliason sent tweets, using the @ComcastCares Twitter account, with “How can I help?” the minute he saw a complaint or a criticism about Comcast (see Figure 9.1). “Comcast sucks!” was, and sometimes still is, a common message. But Eliason still managed to respond with “How can I help?” He then followed up the message with another one about how to fix a problem, sent a Direct Message (a private tweet between the sender and the receiver), or even looked up the person’s phone number and called him to offer assistance.

Whether it was a billing problem, a cable outage, or even a problem with a service technician, Eliason and his team, which eventually grew to eight people after the company saw such positive traction due to the proactive customer service approach, were always on the case, managing the Twitter traffic and solving complaints, often faster than the phone and email service departments could.

An interesting thing happened with @ComcastCares’ customer service efforts: Not only did Eliason’s social media efforts make national news, including a spread in BusinessWeek magazine, but it began to show customers who were undecided about Comcast that the company was being responsive, responsible, and concerned about its customers. In short, Eliason’s customer service efforts became a marketing and PR function. All the stories about Eliason gave the company plenty of “free press” (read Chapter 7, “Relating to Your Public: Social Media Marketing and Public Relations,” about measuring public relations efforts), and it also showed customers that Comcast was on the ball and solving people’s problems. That helped change their minds about the cable company.

Figure 9.1. Although Comcast’s original Twitter customer service pro Frank Eliason has left Comcast, the cable giant still responds to customer complaints with the same dedication as when Eliason started @ComcastCares.

In his book, Customer Service: New Rules for a Social Media World (Pearson), Peter Shankman says that customer service in the social media world has to drive revenue, whether it “saves money, earns money, brings in new clients who will spend money, or cuts costs to let you keep more of the money you’re already earning.”

This makes sense. An American Express Global Customer Service Barometer released in February 2011 reported that 70% of Americans said they’re willing to spend more money—as much as 13% more—at businesses that provide good customer service; only 58% said the same thing in 2010.¹

In other words, you earn repeat business by making sure customers are happy. But it’s not enough just to make them happy. You also need to show other people you can make them happy as well. That’s what social media can do for your customer service efforts. The important thing is to remember to take care of your customers when they need you.

Why Do You Want to Hear from Your Customers?

“Our business would be great if it wasn’t for the customers.”

How many times have you thought that or even said that in jest? We know we have heard clients say it a few times. Customers can be annoying, demanding, and sometimes just a real piece of work. On those days, it’s easy to think life would be much easier if you didn’t have to deal with them. But then you sigh, rub your forehead for a few seconds, and remember where your revenue comes from.

Every customer counts and makes a difference. Customers contribute to your bottom line through sales, to your marketing effort through word of mouth, and even to your reputation. Whether you want to admit it, you need every customer. Well, almost every customer. There are those customers who are such a drain on resources and energy that you truly are better off in both the short term and long term not having them as customers. Despite them, you need to adopt the attitude that every customer counts. Your goal should be to make your customers feel well taken care of, happy, and satisfied. Happy, satisfied customers are returning customers, and returning customers means returning revenues. We learned that a long time ago.

As Pollyanna-ish as it sounds, every customer counts, and every customer affects your bottom line. (Even the energy draining, resource-sucking ones. They have an effect on your bottom line, too, just not in the way you had hoped.) And if you’re willing to shrug off one customer who is underserved, angry, or even disappointed in you, then why not shrug off all the customers who are underserved, angry, or disappointed? Why not save yourself the hassles and the headaches—and the customer service costs—by letting all of them go?

You know the answer to that already. Your company will upset each of them at least once in their life cycle as your customer, or maybe one day the majority of your customers will be angry at your company all at once. If you ignore them completely, they’re going to leave you, and they’re going to tell their friends. Worst of all, your profitability will plummet because you constantly have to find new customers to fill up the slowly emptying bucket. And any business consultant, advisor, or professor will tell you that it costs more to find new customers than it does to keep old customers. As your cost of customer acquisition increases, your profit per customer decreases.

So it makes sense to take care of the old customers.

You do this by listening to people and their complaints and then solving their problems to the best of your ability. You serve your customers as best you can, and you apologize when you screw up. Because you know that one day you’re going to need that person as a customer, and you don’t want your apathy or unwillingness to answer customer calls at 4:50 on a Friday afternoon to be the reason your company is now in the toilet and circling the drain.

The point of this little sermon is this: If you leave one customer underserved, unhappy, or disappointed, haven’t you failed in what you were trying to do? Isn’t your mission statement about being the best in your industry? This isn’t about making every customer happy because that’s impossible. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to make every customer happy as often as possible. If you’re not doing that, or that’s not your primary goal, go do something else because your competition is more than happy to do it. Your competition will show your customers how they’ll be treated with respect, listened to, and given great service and a lot of value. You’ll be left wondering where everyone went and why they’re so angry.

Putting Your People Where Your Mouth Is

Eric Eicher is an account manager with Momentum Group, a marketing and advertising agency in Indianapolis. He’s also a Forum Credit Union member and had a chance to learn firsthand how his credit union uses social media after he had a serious problem and received a pleasant surprise in Forum’s customer service’s response to him. Forum Credit Union is one of the largest credit unions in Indiana. Eric was making a cash deposit one Saturday evening at Forum’s drive-through ATM; the machine took his money, but did not acknowledge that it had received it. When he checked a second time, the money was gone, and he did not have a receipt to prove it.

Before he even left the parking lot, Eric sent a Twitter Direct Message to the Forum customer service department and explained what had happened. Sunday morning, Eric received a DM apologizing for the delay in getting back to him. Less than 18 hours later, and they were apologizing for not getting back to him. By Monday morning, Eric and his wife had received numerous calls from Forum explaining that they had audited the machine, it had his money, and it was already in his account. Eric said it was all resolved before 10:00 on Monday morning.

Jacki Teachnor, one of Forum’s customer service representatives, said the credit union wasn’t new to social media, although they were careful when they got into it. They started with Facebook and Twitter, but service reps also created seven different blogs to educate people on financial issues. She is especially pleased with social media as a customer service tool because the service reps can check complaints immediately. Whenever someone expresses his frustration with an issue, service reps can see it in real time and respond quickly.

Jacki said she had even salvaged a customer’s business and earned some new business because of Twitter. Someone had tweeted a message asking if anyone knew of any good credit unions because this person had had a bad experience with Forum. She replied back, much like Comcast’s Eliason, and asked how she could help. It turned out the customer had a valid complaint, which she resolved. Because of her prompt response and her willingness to talk with him on Twitter, he then asked to meet with Jacki about opening new business accounts with Forum.

“Social media fits in very well with what our customer service reps do,” said Jacki. “Because we are committed to listening to our members. Twitter is one more channel where we can do it.

“We have even done special social media promotions, giving people a good rate on a loan or CD promoted only on Facebook or Twitter. We have even done Facebook polls, which is almost like having a focus group on Facebook.”

You Can’t Help Everyone

Sadly, a time will come when you have a customer you just can’t help, no matter how hard you try. He wants you to honor a warranty that expired 10 years ago. She thinks you should replace the phone she dropped from 30 feet up. He wants you to return a channel to your lineup after it moved to a different package. How do you disappoint these customers and do it in such a way that you don’t come out on the losing end in the public’s eye?

Start with the same basics we discussed: You need to apologize, even if it’s not your fault, and explain why you cannot do it and what you can do instead. Try, “I’m really sorry, but we aren’t able to do a warranty repair on a digital camera that is 10 years old. I don’t even know if the parts are available anymore. But what I can do is give you 20% off a new digital camera if you would like to come in.”

Or, “I’m sorry. Our phones just aren’t made to be dropped from three stories up, and our replacement guarantee doesn’t cover that sort of breakage. But if you come in, we’re running a special on new mobile phones, and I think we can help you find a new one. We may even have a coupon around. Stop in and ask for Cheryl.”

Or, “I’m very sorry, but the channel has been moved to a different channel package as part of our programming restructuring. If you’d like, I can let you have a free one-month trial for that new package so you can try it out and see if you like it.”

Although these attempts might not completely satisfy the situation or the customer, you’ve done everything you can. These efforts certainly beat one of those cold responses that covers your own ass but does absolutely nothing for the customer. These types of responses are not only insulting, but they also make angry customers even angrier and more willing to put energy into telling as many people as they can about your unwillingness to help. By showing even a little courtesy and concern, you might be able to defuse the situation, even if you can’t help them completely.

Of course, some people complain just to complain. Some might have complained because they’re angry at you and they want the world to know it, but they don’t actually expect you to do anything about it. So it’s always a good idea to investigate the complaint before you react.

Erik’s company manages social media, including responding to complaints, for several clients. One of them sometimes receives complaints from people who started a Twitter or Facebook account just to complain. When his client offered to help, often these people never responded, so their complaint went unresolved. One complainer finally answered after three weeks, saying he never checked the account because he assumed no one would respond. He just started it so he could make his gripe public, but really didn’t want to go to the effort of getting a repair.

But when Erik’s client offered to help him, it wasn’t that big a deal to him. Sometimes you’ll receive complaints from people who have a higher sense of moral outrage and self-entitlement than most. But they don’t expect you to deal with them, and you certainly don’t have to. It’s also good form to not respond to anyone who is clearly incensed, using foul language, or obviously on some sort of personal vendetta against your company. While some initial, “Is there something I can do to help,” type responses to gauge the level of their anger are fine, and even expected, the ones you shouldn’t respond to should be very clear very quickly. Raving lunatics are not worth engaging. However, you should look beyond the vitriol to see if there might be some validity to their complaints before judging them as such.

You’re Not the “Jackass Whisperer”

Scott Stratten, Canadian social media expert and author of Unmarketing, once said during a talk, “I’m not the jackass whisperer. I don’t have time to deal with every troll who wants to give me a hard time or say nasty things about me.”

You’re going to have to deal with your share of jackasses, the people who complain just for the sake of complaining, once in a while. They’ll tweet out messages, usually with the hashtag #FAIL as part of the message. (A hashtag is a term preceded by a #. It means that term is the subject of conversation. It tells everyone else what that tweet is about and that they should use it if they want to be included in that conversation.)

The #FAIL tag should be used for truly momentous problems, like “The new TV I bought had a crack in the screen. #FAIL” or “Took my car in for service, and they forgot to put in new oil. Engine is ruined. #FAIL.” But you’ll still get the occasional jackass who wants to tell the world his life lies in tattered ruins in the mud because of a heinous wrong done by your company. “Ordered large Coke for lunch. Was given Diet Coke instead. #FAIL!” and “Pizza place forgot to put black olives on my pizza. #FAIL.”

Despite such histrionics, you do have to deal with people like these for a few reasons:

• They are paying customers. If you want them to remain paying customers, you need to deal with them. Fix the problem if it’s not too expensive and see if they stay happy.

• If you ignore them, they could make a bigger stink that might accidentally catch on and go viral.

• If you insult them or make them feel stupid, you’ll look like a bully. That absolutely will go viral, even if the other person is a total jackass. Everyone loves the little guy and hates the big bad corporations. Anything that looks like you’ve insulted them will come back to you a thousandfold.

• If you make them happy, they could become raving fans who not only never gripe, but actually become evangelists for you. Sure, they’ll go be a jackass to someone else, but your biggest concern is about getting this thorn out of your paw, and if that means making them happy, so be it. You’re not in the business of behavioral change—unless you really are a practicing psychologist. You’re in the business of selling products and making customers happy.

But you don’t have to bend over backward and treat them with special care. If you want to prioritize customers with larger than average social connections or the potential to do some damage, look them up on Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, and any other place where you found their complaints. Check out their complaint history, and see if they have made it a habit of making a mountain out of a molehill.

If they do, you’ll know you have a serial complainer on your hands. Fix the problem and be done with them. If they continue to gripe, state publicly that you have fixed their original problem, but if they would like to discuss it further, they’re free to contact you personally. This will at least show people who read the complaint that the person is being unreasonable, while you made an honest effort to help them.

If they’re not serial complainers, then maybe they do have real concerns, even if it is a Coke/Diet Coke mix-up. Apologize for the problem and promise you’ll do better next time. If the problem was truly a problem—their food was too cold or the new TV was broken—provide them with a solution, like buying them lunch the next time they’re in or replacing the TV and absorbing the delivery costs. And be public about it. Again, if they still complain, point out that you have solved the original problem and invite them to contact you.

But—and this is important—customer service never means you have to put up with rude or insulting behavior. If you have a complaint from someone who is insulting or makes threats or overly aggressive comments, make sure to record or copy the offending messages, then cut off all contact. Don’t respond, don’t try to talk them down, don’t try to defuse the situation. This is clearly someone who has boundary issues, and a rational discussion is not going to solve the problem.

Customer service professionals are going to tell you that this kind of behavior is typical and something they have to deal with constantly. It’s going to be the same in social media. The people who can be helped on the phone can be helped on social media. The people who are angry can be calmed down and then helped. And the jackasses are just jackasses and will never be satisfied. If you know you’ve done everything you can, then that’s all you can do.

Sometimes It’s Just Two Little Words

The words “I’m sorry” or “I apologize” can go a long way in solving a lot of problems, especially publicly. Don’t be afraid to say them to people who are complaining. A lot of executives are hesitant to say they’re sorry, either because they haven’t been trained to do so or the lawyers have said to never, ever say you’re sorry because it could be taken as an admission of guilt. Either that, or the customer service people are just so apathetic, they truly aren’t sorry.

The best way to use social media to solve most of your customers’ problems is if you just apologize once for their bad experience. It doesn’t mean you’re going to fix something. It doesn’t mean you’re going to accept the blame so they can sue you. It means you have some empathy for your customers and wish they didn’t have this problem.

Try, “I’m sorry our product didn’t work.”

Or, “I apologize for your delivery being late.”

Or, “I’m sorry your food was cold.”

The service team behind @ComcastCares apologizes quite a bit for problems created by other people in their organization. Why? It’s not the individual customer service Twitter operator’s fault that billing screwed up a customer’s account, that the technician didn’t have the right parts in his van, or that he didn’t show up at all. It’s not his fault that a channel got dropped or a game was interrupted by technical delay (see Figure 9.2).

Figure 9.2. Comcast’s service agents apologize a lot because they know this can go a long way toward salvaging a relationship that can be worth as much as $1,200 per year. Isn’t one apology worth $1,200?

Comcast’s service agents apologize a lot because they know that it’s worth a lot of money to them if they don’t. If a single customer spends only $30 per month for basic cable or upwards of $99 per month for cable, Internet, and phone service, she has an annual value of between $360 and $1,200. If she’s a Comcast customer for 10 years, her value is between $3,600 and $12,000.

But one unresolved problem, unanswered complaint, or even the slightest hint of indifference and uncaring can cut those funds off immediately and lose that source of revenue forever. Because more people are dropping their expanded cable and switching to web-based television programs, Comcast needs to keep its customers happy for as long as possible. So service agents do it by apologizing. Two little words can mean the difference between getting $1,200 and, well, not getting $1,200.

There will be additional follow-up to the apology, of course, but you get the idea. Just be sorry about your customer’s experience, and that will generally soften the mood and tone of the person making the complaint. It can turn an angry customer into an annoyed customer, or even a surprised and humbled one. Few disgruntled customers expect a response from customer service, especially a nice, positive response.

Another of Erik’s clients is in the travel business, and when Erik’s company interacts on social media on behalf of this client, each conversation begins with either “thank you” or “I’m sorry.” So when a customer complains that a piece of equipment broke or he couldn’t get anyone on the phone when he called, the first response is, “I’m sorry that happened to you. How can I help you?”

It’s almost funny to see. If people could stammer and backtrack on Twitter, we think you could actually see people backpedaling furiously after their initial shouts of frustration. Of course, it’s important to actually fix customers’ complaints and answer their questions, but those two little words change the tone of the entire conversation. An apology actually lets things get done, rather than getting stuck in an argument or pointing fingers.

Make sure you’re solving customer problems in a real, human way, but if you can’t, explain why. Don’t hide behind PR language, corporate policy, or legal department dictums. That may be the actual reason, but responses should generally never include “company policy says...” or “our legal department won’t...”

“Never try to solve customer service issues with PR bullet points,” said Amber Naslund in Jason’s 2009 Customer Twervice. She’s the director of community for Radian6 and coauthor of The Now Revolution. “The Twitter community is hyper-sensitive about scripted, corporate-like interactions. You have to engage people in a conversational tone or, in most cases, they won’t listen to you at all.”

Although we discussed it in Chapter 5, “Make Some Noise: Social Media Marketing Aids in Branding and Awareness,” on branding and marketing, the lesson applies here as well: Your customers are looking for a relationship with your company and your employees. They want to feel respected and heard and any response that includes PR bullet points, corporate policy, or lawyer’s CYA (cover your ass) language will only make your customers hate you and tell all their friends about the rotten treatment they received at your hands.

This is why, even if your final answer is “no,” you have to deliver your “no” with an “I’m sorry.” It won’t fix the problem or make the customer deliriously happy. But it will make your company look like it actually cares about its customers. (Of course, it’s better if you actually do care about your customers, but that’s a different book.)

Putting Metrics Around Customer Service

Anyone with a grasp of the big picture begins to realize that PR, marketing, sales, and even customer service are not four distinct silos that compete for dollars and face time with senior executives. They’re four sides of the same square. What one side does affects the other side.

Focus a lot of attention on marketing, and sales go up. As sales go up, customer service gets busy. As more people complain about problems, the PR department has to monitor the social media landscape to keep track of any problems that threaten to damage the image the marketing department has worked so hard to develop.

On the other hand, if marketing screws up, the PR department is going to pay for it. When the customer service department screws up, the sales department suffers through a loss of repeat business. So, a strong link exists between these four departments, and when one of them sneezes, the others get the flu.

What most companies fail to grasp is that a dissatisfied customer isn’t just one less customer. It’s a dip in sales, a loss of revenue, and a direct impact to the company’s bottom line. When one customer leaves because of bad customer service, it means the sales department has to work that much harder. When the sales department signs another client, they didn’t improve sales, they just brought sales back to its original number. Every lost client means the salespeople have to work that much harder to grow. Each dissatisfied customer means a blow to the reputation, which marketing has to work to overcome.

Erik’s travel industry client once put his finger on the problem with bad customer service: “I’d hate to think how much business this would cost us if we weren’t on here listening to people.”

Of course, he identified another problem as well: You can’t easily measure the effectiveness of good customer service. You can get a good estimate and figure out how much you might have lost, but even then it’s not completely accurate. If you could calculate the lifetime value of a customer—we discussed it in Chapter 4, “Here’s the Secret: There Is No Damn Secret!”—you could keep track of which customers your customer service department saved. You could total up the lifetime value of them and conclude, “We saved the company this much money.” But that completely ignores a lot of other factors, such as the following:

• Would the customers really have left?

• Would they have taken other customers with them?

• How many people didn’t buy from you because they saw the tweets and blog posts of the complaining customer?

• How extensively did these public complaints damage your reputation so that negative word-of-mouth marketing reduced sales even further?

That’s not to say that you shouldn’t try to measure your social media customer service efforts. You can easily measure some aspects of customer service and determine whether you’re saving any money or not.

Measuring Customer Service Savings

Measuring your company’s customer service savings starts with the goals you set for the department. And those goals aren’t limited to simply customer satisfaction. They are often varied and even tied to the bottom line. Some examples of strong customer service goals include the following:

• Reduce call center costs by X% or $X.

• Increase customer satisfaction by X%.

• Increase positive online mentions/sentiment of the brand by X%.

• Decrease negative mentions/sentiment of the brand by X%.

We’ll dispense with the easy ones first, goals three and four. Your social media team, or at least your marketing or PR department, can tell you whether you are accomplishing those goals. They can use any of the social media monitoring tools to look at the sentiment people use when they talk about your company and your products. If positive mentions go up—say, “I love my new electric pancake maker from Pat’s Pancakes”—and negative mentions go down—like, “Burned my pancakes again on my new Pat’s pancake maker”—then you’re accomplishing those goals. Although it will be harder to measure these, you can at least be assured that you’re meeting these goals.

Goal number two is similarly dealt with. Customer satisfaction surveys, referrals of friends, participation in special offers, and the amount of repeat business all go toward determining whether a customer is satisfied with your products or services. If you can count these—and anyone with a good market research bend or background should be able to—then you can see if customer satisfaction is increasing.

Customer satisfaction is also a little easier to assign a dollar figure to. Referrals of friends can be easily tracked as sales. Participation in special offers, such as the redemption of coupons, number of purchases on special days, and people using promo codes or claiming special prizes, all have a monetary value. Because these are all typically marketing functions, your marketing team should be able to tell you whether you achieved a positive ROI on your efforts.

Goal number one is the most important one. This is how you can determine whether your social media marketing is paying off. You could measure the reduction of call center costs in a few ways:

• Measure your typical number of calls per hour. Also measure the average number of hourly calls per customer service rep. Have they gone down? By how much? Are you receiving fewer calls per hour during a normal day? If the number of calls has gone down, but you’re seeing an increase in social media complaints, does that translate into savings? Typically, a social media complaint can be handled in a few minutes, not several. If a customer service representative (CSR) can only handle six calls in an hour, but a social media rep can handle 8 to 10, there’s an increase in productivity right there.

• Measure your number of calls per hour during peak times. If you run a cable company and your service goes down, how many calls do you get? How many calls could you eliminate if you could send out tweets and Facebook notifications that say, “We’re sorry about the outage in #Cleveland right now. We’re working on it and hope to have it up and running within the hour”? If you can reduce the average number of peak calls, that also translates as a savings for your company because it means you’re able to save CSR resources for regular calls as well.

• Measure the total number of issues your customer service department handles as a whole. That includes phone and online issues. Has that number gone up because of the use of social media? Then that means a lot of those customer complaints were already out there, but you were able to identify them and solve the problem. It might mean you’re handling more issues on the whole, but it also means you’re increasing customer satisfaction.

• Compare the cost of handling a single customer issue with the cost of handling an issue online. Let’s assume a single issue costs $10 to handle in the call center, but only $8 online (these numbers are not a real indication of how much this would actually cost). A $2 savings per issue is going to have a dramatic effect by the end of the day when looking at the cost of helping your customers. If each service agent handled 50 incidents in a day, the cost for an agent to handle 50 calls is $500; the cost for an agent to handle the same number of issues online is only $400. What if you could retrain a couple of your phone agents to handle social media customer issues instead?

We’re not suggesting that you should either fire your entire customer service staff or do away with the phones and only deal with customer issues online. Rather, you need to pay attention to your customers who are talking to you through social media channels. Those customers are critical to your organization. And what they say about you online, good or bad, is both powerful when used against you, but also when you can use it for you. This is what happens when you mine those conversations and mentions for research and development opportunities.

Endnotes

1. “Good Service Is Good Business,” May 2011. http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110503005753/en/Good-Service-Good-Business-American-Consumers-Spend.