Dr. Natalie Petouhoff, a close friend of Get Satisfaction and me personally, is teaching a 2 day course at UCLA this Friday and Saturday. I highly recommend you attend.
This is going to be much more than a how-to on Twitter and Facebook…. what Natalie will present is a comprehensive review of how companies are re-inventing themselves as a result of how social media is transforming the customer relationship. Not surprisingly we have a view on this… however as social media becomes more ingrained in the customer experience our view is not that radical or surprising.
Customer service, marketing, and commerce activities are coming together and creating new opportunities for companies to acquire new customers as well as get more out of the ones they already have. The latter point can’t be overstated and this forms the basis of the argument that customer service is marketing… which itself is not a new proposition as companies as diverse as Nordstrom’s and Avis have been differentiating themselves on the basis of customer service long before social media existed.
But here lies the rub, having a good customer service experience is not by itself equivalent to having a good customer experience and part of the challenge that Natalie’s course will unravel is how companies must reinvent their approach to customer engagement and employee empowerment as much as embrace social media technologies.
We had an interesting situation yesterday that caused me to consider how this plays out in real life. At Get Satisfaction we have defined some company values that we aspire to live up to and far from the highly polished company values statements that are expressed in pitch perfect Victorian English, our values are easily expressed and often find their way into our conversations… yesterday we considered “walk in your customer’s shoes” and “we got your back”.
Starting early in the morning yesterday we received calls and emails from people inquiring about a $1 charge on their credit cards… and not knowing anything about who we are or why we were charging them. After 5-6 of these calls I started looking into the details and could find no customer or transaction records for any of the people calling in, and a review of our credit card gateway records revealed no $1 transactions. Very quickly I came to the conclusion that we were not the source of these transactions and the working theory shifted to a malicious third party spoofing our merchant account to an unrelated payment gateway and using it to run credit card numbers through at low value authorizations to see what would work.
We had a choice to make at this point. The traditional company response would be to respond with as little detail as possible, essentially that “these transactions are not from us and you should contact your bank”. That is exactly what you or I would get if we were on the customer end of a call to pick-your-favorite-big-company. We, Caty Kobe and myself as we were primarily dealing with this, talked about how we would want to be treated and decided on a different strategy.
We contacted each person and asked for some additional information, which revealed a pattern in that the majority of people impacted lived in the Santa Cruz area and all the cards affected were debit cards, and then we shared everything we knew, what we had done, and what we were going to report to law enforcement. We also were explicit that they should contact their bank and cancel their card, as well as report fraud, and to give our name and contact information to the fraud departments so that we could share all the information we had. Basically we tried to be as empathetic as possible because credit card fraud is stress inducing, and to share all the information we had to remove any possibility that we were not doing our level best to help.
The response we received was positive and if I have one overall objective for managing this experience it would be that I would want each of the people we talked with yesterday to think about us in their next customer experience and say “I wish Company X was like those folks at Get Satisfaction”. No one told Caty and I how to handle this, we did not have to have a series of meetings about policy and procedure, we consulted with our on staff legal person about what we could do to stop the fraud but not about our response, and then we just did it.
If more companies declared their values in simple terms and then empowered people to actually live up to them then the world would be a much easier place. This is why you should attend Natalie’s class, it will prepare you to not just use social media in business but also introduce you to how your business will change as a result.
ATTENDEES WILL:
- Leave with a social business blueprint and know how to execute with social media applications and software
- Learn practical tips, techniques, and how to use social media monitoring to levelset where your social media program is
- Take an assessment to benchmark the “as is” state of your social media initiatives and compare them to “could be” via best practices
- Learn how to gear your initiatives to higher monetizations of social media investments
- Create strategies and tactical plans that make sense to traditional organizations (even those not familiar with social media)
- Learn how to use business cases and ROI to ease the approval process for initiatives and implementation simpler, more efficient, and effective because they are grounded in business fundamentals that maximize the ROI in social media.