With “everyone” on social media today, it is so much easier to complain. And on Monday this week, a customer paid for a promoted tweet to vent about a British airline losing his luggage and its slow response to his predicament.
Millions of us are on social media talking about our experiences as consumers. And it seems that the negative stories far outnumber the good ones. Remember too, the negative tends to go viral. Who can forget the irate musician who wrote a song about his guitar broken in transit by a US airline, placed it on YouTube and then hit global viral immortality within days!
Businesses are challenged by this social-viral access that their customers enjoy. But clearly, this presents huge opportunities for them to engage and develop stronger relationships with consumers as well.
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| Social CRM: Re-defining Customer Engagement | |
Recall Peter Shankman’s half-kidding tweeting while his flight was about to take off for home that fetched a Morton’s Steakhouse delivery man to Newark to receive him with his favorite steak. And, guess what? Peter tells the story on his blog, himself calling it “The Greatest Customer Service Story Ever Told, Starring Morton’s Steakhouse!” The blog fetched hundreds of comments and went viral on Twitter.
Given this “people power”, our ability to listen to them and to act in real time, has assumed the greatest importance in sustaining brand experience. In fact, as Jeff Bezos said, “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.”
So are you listening to what’s being said about you online? And are you able to act on such insight in real time? Are you engaging positively to build credibility and trust—even when some customer experiences go wrong?
Social customer service must be delivered in a seamless way replicating the cross-channel world our customers inhabit today. The traditional contact center would be far out of its depth in the social-mobile-real world. However, an “integrated” one with multi-channel capabilities could at once listen, engage and resolve customer issues.
Not just that, with that social listening data combined with other demographic and financial databases available today, you could even target new sales/cross-sales offers to customers.
What is your social CRM strategy? Have you implemented a closed-loop approach to successfully get on top of what many are challenged by today?
Republished with author’s permission from original post.
