Customer service has always been that business competency that either makes or breaks the customer experience. Over the past decade, many large organizations recognized this fact and have heavily invested in ensuring extraordinary customer service. In recent years, social customer service has become a necessity.
Social customer service can increase revenue in five ways:
Increased Awareness: Addressing customers issues via social media provides interesting content. The more you help, the better the chances customers will find you.
Increased Customer Satisfaction: The great thing about social customer service is that other customers, who are satisfied with you get the opportunity to observe & participate with other customers. This has the potential of increasing their satisfaction through education. I've seen a discussion board with customer service interactions between a software company and its customers; many of the posts indicated that the customers reading the posts discovered additional functionality they'd never have known about. Of course, simply solving a customers problem increases their satisfaction.
Public Customer Reviews: Each time provide customer service via social media is another opportunity to have a public customer review. It shows the issues customers have, and shows how your company deals with those issues. In public forums, an unsatisfied customer doesn't necessarily mean a bad review. If the company does everything it can, but the customer is unreasonable; the public will often express it's admiration of the company, and dismiss the customer as unreasonable.
Decreased Return-Rate: As with all good customer service, good social customer service can help turn a brand dissident into a brand advocate. Additionally, social customer service can act as a qualifier in the sense of making sure potential customers are buying the right thing. (i.e. If the Twelp Force informs a customer that the printer he purchased isn't compatible with a Mac, it could help ensure other Mac owners don't buy that printer.)
Increased Brand Loyalty: One of the best ways to create brand loyalty is by showing how a company deals with customers who've had issues. I recently saw a series of blog posts about a bad experience a lady had with a hotel chain. The post outlined her issues, and the email she sent to management. Subsequent posts outlined responses; and a credit issued for the cost of the stay. This type of story could have made me skeptical about staying at the hotel chain she stayed at; but the way the company handled the issues actually made me confident enough to try them. Additionally, the lady was satisfied with the outcome and probably would be willing to try them again.
How do I achieve the best results?
Step 1: Choose a customer service model
(If you don't chose a model, your customers will resort to model A)
Model A: Customer seeks customer service
This model could be indirect; where customers are posting complaints about a company. Essentially, this model applies to any customer that requires customer service and is willing to engage in social media.
Model B: Brand seeks out customers in need of customer service
This model involves a brand, or a brand collective, searching out and responding to customer issues.
Model C: Brand encourages & supports a customer support community
This model often has an aggregation site where customer inquires are vetted or categorized and responded to by both brand employees and other customers. Sometimes, brands simply have an account on a particular site and encourage customers to respond to customers with issues.
Step 2: Communicate responses to questions customers need answered prior to engaging in social customer service
Question 1: "What can I get support with?"
Question 2: "How do I request support? How do I communicate after I've made the request?"
Question 3: "How long will it take to get service?"
Question 4: "What quality of customer service can I expect?"
The ability to tell stories has always been one of the most powerful ways to connect with other people.
Social media has given us a unique way to to tell stories as a collective. Here's a roadmap for collective storytelling.
Stop #1 - Define Your Story
The process of discovering what you want to tell a story about is always different, but the most important step in storytelling. You need to be an expert on what your story is about.
Starting a story without knowing what it's about will likely cause confusion. If the collective is confused by a story, it's unlikely that they'll participate in telling it.
The collective will look to that person who started the story for reinforcement and reassurance that the story is still on track. Ensure you monitor your story and continue to participate in telling it, or risk the story ending.
Stop #2 - Spark a Conversation
In collective storytelling, stories are made up of wide-reaching conversations. Those conversations begin with a 'conversation spark'.
A conversation spark shouldn't be the entire story. It should provide enough information to be provocative, but leave the next chapter of the story open to be told by the collective.
Consider the Burger King "Subservient Chicken" campaign. The story begins: A human-sized chicken has decided to set-up a webcam. It's asking that you come to it's website and give it orders.
That's an example of a conversation spark.
Stop #3 - Participate in the Conversation
Conversations spread through social media like ripples across a pond. Consider the conversation spark as the pebble dropping into the water. The ripples dissipate as they move farther away from the center, just as the conversations have less impact the longer they continue without a new conversation spark.
Ok, consider this model:
The conversation spark could be the site created for the Burger King "Subservient Chicken". The longer the campaign runs, the greater the reach will be; however, the longer the campaign runs without a new conversation spark, the less impact the conversation will have. Eventually, the conversation will end.
Note: You can't control when the conversation ends. You can only control when, and how much you participate. Here's a great set of guidelines (PDF download) for responses to changes in your story.
This model shows the first two ripples as a conversation spark begins to propagate through a network:
Notice that each connection doesn't emanate directly from the conversation spark. Ideally, the originator of a conversation will encourage other storytellers to interact with each other. If you look at the "Subservient Chicken" example; Burger King actually provides customers with some tools to continue the conversation: a downloadable chicken mask, and a way to share the site with friends.
Of course they could have provided more tools. They could have allowed users to save a video of the chickens responses to a certain set of orders, and provide a link to send to friends. They could have created a gallery of user-generated video's of people responding to orders while wearing the downloadable chicken mask. These types of tools could help to extend the story.
Stop #4 - Extend the Story
A story could end after one conversation spark; but the best stories continue. As new conversation sparks are created and added to the story; the story grows, and reaches more people.
Innovative and provocative stories are often enough to inspire other storytellers to create their own conversation spark. Take the "Subservient Chicken" example again. It inspired this YouTube video, which reached over 2,000 people and got 7 comments. Not a huge conversation, but extending the story often includes conversations of many sizes.
Collective storytelling isn't necessarily about branding, or making money; it's about spreading a message and allowing that message to be malleable enough to be changed by its audience while maintaining its integrity. Link to original post