Imagine Your Reality

One of the prevailing attitudes about customer service is that its just about damage control: Dealing with customer complaints. But customer service shouldn’t just be about damage control, and while social media is a wonderful medium for tracking what customers are saying or aren’t saying about your business, it also offers the opportunity to simply get into conversations with clients.

It seems to me that one part of customer service that’s ignored is customer retention. So while customer service will handle customer complaints, they won’t necessarily be proactive and actually talk with customers to establish a relationship with them based on trust as opposed to distrust. With social media, it’s easy to actually get involved in the conversation with a customer.

Here’s a tactic I use with my clients, that could also be used by other businesses, (even large ones) provided they are willing to assign customer service reps to specific clients. In Twitter create a specific list called clients and put all of your clients on there. On Facebook become a fan of their fan pages (if they are a business) and make it a point to visit those pages once a day. For each social media site there is a way to check up on clients, and engage them in conversation, provided you are willing to invest the time in doing so. Start conversations with your clients, or make a response to something they say that has nothing to do with your business. In short, show support for what matters to them, instead of waiting for them to contact you when they have a problem. By doing this you’ll be showing them that your interested in having a relationship with them, regardless of whether or not you’re doing business with them at the time.

Customer service should be about relationships first and damage control second. No business has an excuse for not investing in customer relationships, because each business is ultimately successful because of the customers. The product or service offered is only useful if someone wants to buy it, use it, and tell people about it. So ask yourself this: Is your customer service about damage control or actually getting to know your clients?

I was recently told by a new client that the reason she chose to do business with me is because I made the time to follow-up and didn’t brush her off when she had questions. It’s quite a compliment to get from a client, but it also illustrates my own philosophy. Relationships first, bottom line second.

Many businesses focus on the bottom line first. They want to know when they’ll get paid, and sometimes will refuse to answer questions because they worry they are giving away too much, but I think making the time to answer questions is important, because questions indicate interest and a desire to understand more. They also indicate the person isn’t sure if they want to do business with you and need some more information in order to make the right choice.

But I also see questions as an opportunity for building relationships. Sure, I’m providing information, but I’m also getting to know the person and by making the effort to find out more, I show that person that I see his/her needs as opposed to a check.

I also think that business is never just business, but also relationships. If I’m doing things right, I will be seeing my clients regularly at networking events and other places and I will continue to get to know them, just as they will get to know me. I’ll become a client for some of them, and I’ll want to know they’ll take care of me, just as I took care of them. If I treat them less like people and more like a check, I’ll probably get the same treatment, when I need them. But if I take care of my clients and focus on building a relationship first, they’ll treat me the same way when I need their services. I’ve seen this occur time and time again, because in the end people do care more about how you treat them than how much they’ll get paid. The bottom line will occur, but build your relationships and your bottom line will really grow.

The phrase Return on Investment (ROI) has become well associated with social media and is used as a way of measuring if social media is effective for helping the bottom line grow. But I think another phrase that social media has introduced or at least emphasized is Return on Relationship (ROR). The difference between these two terms is important to understanding how business is changing.

Return on Investment is focused on the bottom line, “What’s in it for me”. It’s mainly about determining what the benefit is from doing all the activities, and it is useful in the sense that its important to know that your effort is yielding results that you can integrate into your life. A business does need to measure ROI in order to understand what strategies and actions are effective.

Return on Relationship is focused on what’s in it for everyone involved. In other words, the measurement is on relationships and determining how everyone has benefited from the relationship, as well as how everyone can continue to benefit from it.

Social media has made the return on relationship more visible, because its a very public medium where people can and will discuss the relationships they have with businesses. As such businesses are starting to recognize that their behavior is a lot more visible and that they need to consider the relationship as well as the bottom line. Businesses can do this by adopting a perspective that examines ROR and determines how it fits into ROI, while also still developing a relationship with clients.

It’s important to acknowledge that relationships can effect the bottom line. A client’s loyalty can turn into a lot of business, both from him/herself and and also from people s/he refers, but its contingent on how much a relationship the client feels s/he has with that business. If a client feels like s/he is a number, then there is less incentive to stay in a relationship with the business. If a client feels that the business is invested in the client then s/he will be more likely to return. Businesses that recognize that also understand that ROI alone can’t fully measure the success of a business, if there is no understanding of the relationships that enable profit.

Yesterday my mom called Avis in a panic. She’s visiting me right now from the East coast, and as such she’s feeling the jet lag. She was supposed to pick up her rental car at 10am, but hadn’t realized what day it was until I mentioned that tomorrow (today now) would be Thursday. When she called the 1800 number she was greeted by an attitude of rudeness. Not only was she told that the car wasn’t available, but she was also informed that there wouldn’t be one the next day and that she should have been on time. She ended up calling the local branch of Avis and they were able to get a car for her, but the local branch was also surprised at the rudeness she’d gotten.

The local rep did point out that they probably wouldn’t have had a car for her if so many other people hadn’t also not shown up to get their reservation. But he was also very polite about the situation and didn’t shoot her down from the start. All the same , she and I agreed that the attitude of the first customer rep at the 1800 line for Avis had soured us on Avis as a car rental place. And to me it illustrated a fundamental reality of customer service: You only need to have one rotten experience to overshadow all the positive experiences you’ve had with a company, and it takes a lot more effort to undo the harm of the negative customer experience.

At the root of customer service is attitude. The attitude you convey to your clients is what tells them whether you value them or think you could do without them. The truth however is that you can’t do without them, so a bad attitude hurts you far more than it does them. Customers who have bad experiences are more likely tell people about those experiences because they want to tell their friends to avoid the businesses that don’t provide superb customer service.

Customer service isn’t just about rectifying mistakes (though its usually thought of in that capacity). Customer service begins from the moment of first contact and occurs in every situation, in every context. If you are interacting with a customer, you are performing customer service. As such customer service is a full time job and no matter what job title you have, customer service is always something you’ll provide, whenever you come into contact with someone else.

What do you think? What’s your attitude about customer service?

I recently came across the story of a disabled person’s recent customer service nightmare with United Airlines. While the initial experience was a nightmare, she was able to leverage social media and her network of connections to get a response from United Air. Since then it appears that United Air is talking with her about not only the bad customer service experience, but also what they can do to improve their disabled person’s policy. And what does this illustrate?

It illustrates that more than ever companies need to monitor social media so that they can act on situations such as the one I mentioned above and resolve it, while also taking time to listen to the customer so they can improve their services. At the same time, such an example also shows that companies need to improve customer service, specifically making it more oriented toward helping the customer and less about helping a business evade responsibility.

This example also illustrates that insensitivity to a person’s health status is something which can and will haunt companies, because people are much more likely to take the side of a person than a company. In fact, loyal customers can suddenly, on finding out such details, realize that they don’t want to be customers of a company. Now this isn’t to say every customer will leave, but certainly many will, if only because a person’s story resonates and speaks to how that person feels.

It’s good that United Air, once they were aware of the situation, made an effort to contact the person and handle this situation in as proactive a manner as they could. It shows an increased awareness of the need for sensitivity with customers and also will hopefully lead to better training of employees. Certainly the passenger who complained had every right to be unhappy with the level of service she received, and while a company can apologize and do their best to rectify a situation, it’s even better if they can train their employees to handle situations with an eye toward recognizing how their own actions can effect the company. People, after all, will remember one negative experience over ten positive experiences, so it becomes very important to think of that and be proactive from the beginning.

I needed to redo the last two episodes of social media coach because of poor sound quality. They’ve now been redone and you can hear them this time..

Social Influence and Customer Service

Social Media Policies

In this video I discuss how customer service can be proactive on social media and what the benefits are.

A brief announcement about my available services

I have changed my services for social media. While I still offer some training, the majority of what I offer is social media management. For more information about social media management and my prices for it, please go to my website.

Carri Bugbee pointed me to this article about the suckiness of Facebook customer service, when she noted on her twitter stream recently that they had yet again complicated the User Interface (UI) by requiring users to add a plug-in in order to upload pictures. My guess in regards to the plug-in is they want to get more data, but needlessly complicating the UI in the mix just seems to create more problems and potentially gets people to leave Facebook. So why doesn’t Facebook care about what its users have to say?

My guess is they’ve gotten too big and like many other big companies they don’t think what the user has to say actually matters. It seems rather odd that its a social media company that thinks this way, if only because social media has proven that if enough customers speak out, the company will feel the pain and pressure. Than again, for that to occur, as I’ve mentioned before, it’s important to get enough people with substantial social influence to speak out, so that their followers accordingly bring the pressure to bear on the company.

At some point, the continued changes that Facebook makes to the user interface, which are done in a manner that inconveniences the user, will catch up to Facebook and more people will leave then join. It might be useful for Facebook to remember that if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it, and to also remember that good customer service engenders the loyalty and trust that keeps people using the site.

Realistically, customer service can’t solve or satisfy every customer, but ideally the majority of people should come away feeling that the problem was addressed in a manner that showed them the company cared. When companies don’t handle customer service responsibly, it may for the moment cause the customer to leave frustrated, but in the age of social media, it can bring the torches and pitchforks to the gates, while causing current customers to start questioning whether they will really be taken care of.

Hopefully Facebook will appreciate that and improve their customer service, especially as there business is based on the very medium that so many people are starting to use to get their voices heard by big companies who’d rather ignore them.

The Latest Episode of Social Media Coach Radio is up! In this show I discuss social influence and who has it and who doesn’t as well as how it can be used.

Next week’s topic will be about the do’s and don’ts of developing social media policies.

Also be on the lookout for more interviews from Imagine Your Reality Radio. I’ve got a two shows scheduled, with two more in the wings!

In this video blog, I discuss the connection between social media and customer service.