Chapter 14

Provide Customer Care and Increase Customer Satisfaction

Social media listening is a customer care game-changer. Some advocates, like Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, believe it should go further: “Customer service shouldn't be a department,” he claims. “It should be the entire company.” Hsieh took his own advice, building Zappos on a culture of social media listening and engagement. The company grew from zero sales in 2000 to $1 billion in just eight years (Fresh Networks 2008). That stellar achievement led Amazon to acquire Zappos, and confirmed Hsieh's reputation as a business model innovator and management icon. Zappos’ strategy of listening to market signals serves as a blueprint for many young companies that see outstanding service, engagement, and transparency as the path to growth and profits.

Social media listening-based customer care is growing; companies large and small, local and global, handle customer complaints, take suggestions, answer questions, and provide information with little more than a free Twitter account or Facebook presence. Southwest Airlines, Comcast, Whole Foods, L.L. Bean, neighborhood coffee shops like Groundz, San Antonio's Maggiano's restaurant, and New York City food trucks are just a few examples.

Social media listening-powered services not only help with traditional in-bound needs, like taking a call or replying to an e-mail; they also enable businesses to follow and continuously monitor their customers in near-real time. A new breed of software that combines social media management with workflow and collaboration tools allows companies to listen for concerns, reach out to the people voicing them, and engage with them as appropriate, and then analyze and report their customer care activities. For example, when reps from organic grocery chain Whole Foods spot customers tweeting about what to make for dinner, they can make general suggestions to them. They can even go a step further by consulting the tweeter's profile and past tweets and make truly relevant recommendations that are tied to their preferences—say, for fish or certain flavors.

The cases we review in this chapter highlight a key difference between traditional customer service and the growing “social service” movement: Relationships are not just private two-way conversations between a company and customer. Nowadays, they take place in the public square. A single tweet, post, or wall scribble can quickly ripple through and across blogs, review sites, and social networks in ways that influence brand preference and perception, for not just one person, but for their entire social graph—even people they don't know, as the following findings show (Barnes 2008):

• People choose companies or brands based on their customer care experiences (95 percent).
• People choose companies or brands based on the customer care experiences that others share online (74 percent).
• People believe that blogs, rating systems, and discussion forums can give consumers a greater voice in effecting changes in customer care (81 percent).
• People do not believe that companies take their opinions seriously (70 percent).
• When asked, people claimed that “protecting others” was one of their motivations for sharing their customer service experiences online.

Getting customer care “right” in the social media era is essential for sustaining customer relationships and contributing to business growth. Social media listening signals help steer companies in the right direction. The following company examples will lead the way.

Winning Plays for Customer Care and Customer Satisfaction

The tactics and company cases we reviewed led us to develop five winning plays:

• Align goals that social media listening approaches can achieve for customer service. Companies that garner value from social customer service began their mission by stating clear goals. Zappos viewed service as a pillar supporting its entire business. AT&T sought to mollify Apple iPhone customers disappointed in its wireless service and keep them until new infrastructure went online. Comcast wanted to overcome the negative perception that it didn't care for its customers. In addition to their clarity, these goals were well suited to a social approach because they involved the emotional aspects of products and services, as well as people's opinions of companies.
• Supplement traditional customer service with social media listening customer service. Utilize multiple channels. Even companies known for their social media listening customer care prowess have phone centers and e-mail/chat support; handle mail correspondence; and sometimes host and participate in support forums, where customers are encouraged to help each other. For most companies, social media is a small but important part of the mix. For example, cable provider Comcast's e-mail volume is more than three times that of its tweet management on a daily basis, and in-bound phone calls are 99 times greater than e-mail (see the “Manage Customer Expectations” section).

  The question of scale is one that every company needs to address. Organizations must balance their tactics appropriately for the quality and level of service they want to provide. Figuring out how to do this involves more than financial analysis. Businesses also need to consider their company culture: whether it's appropriate to engage with customers through social media, and whether these operations can, or should be, outsourced as customer demand increases. Almost every company will need to make that decision: Half of all Americans and two-thirds of people 25–34 belong to at least one social network (Pick 2010).

• Leverage social media support to shape customer perception toward your company, products, or services. Although social media volume is typically lower than other channels, it's also much more visible. These customer care communications occur in full view of other customers, and are often accessible through search engines. Whenever possible, businesses should recognize this opportunity to demonstrate their efforts, responsiveness, and satisfactory problem solving for the individuals seeking assistance—but also with a view to their larger customer communities. Comcast repaired its image and Zappos built a successful company this way.
• Engage with permission—respectfully, civilly, ethically, and transparently. Customer service requires that engagement between companies and individuals succeed. Precisely because these conversations are public, organizations that participate in them need to hold themselves to a high standard, for all to see. The examples from JetBlue, discussed later in the chapter, show that companies must secure permission from customers. With permission, JetBlue delivered great service in one case. In a second instance, however, it did not receive advance permission, and by failing to do so, inadvertently ended up with a disgruntled flyer and raised a secondary issue, which the airline then needed to address. Wine retailer Naked Wines handled a difficult customer on its Facebook presence by outlining every step it took to resolve the issues at hand, which resulted in a vote of support from the company's Facebook friends. Because of its open nature, direct engagement is new for many companies, and potentially affects company perception and reputation, both negatively and positively. It's vital to develop policies that guide employees, as retailer Nordstrom did, to govern the way they connect with your customers and share information.
• Mine and leverage customer support interactions to provide insight and share within customer service and across the company. Derive greater value and listening power from social media customer service by analyzing the marketplace signals that agents aggregate and filter. Take advantage of the number-crunching and reporting tools available in monitoring software to identify trends that highlight important service issues. At a minimum, let your company's traditional support operations know about these; go further, and share them with departments like marketing, sales, retail, purchasing, and product development. Doing so will both promote acceptance of social media data and provide your colleagues with the kind of customer insight capable of helping the entire organization satisfy customers. For example, if Whole Foods found itself answering a torrent of questions about the spicy condiment sambal oelek, it could feature the ingredient in its magazine's recipes, feature it throughout the store with displays and sampling, or offer dishes including it in the prepared food section.

The winning plays we recognized were derived from four tactics:

• Listen, assist, and engage in near-real time.
• Engage openly, respectfully, ethically, and civilly.
• Manage customer expectations.
• Make sure solutions satisfy customers.

Let's look at each of these tactics, and the companies that used them so successfully, in more detail.

Listen, Assist, and Engage in Near-Real Time

Using a Twitter search several years ago, JetBlue's communications chief, Morgan Johnston, found that some people were asking questions, and others were making inaccurate statements. Wanting to set the record straight, Johnston (with JetBlue's approval) created the company's corporate Twitter account, in 2007. The airline's Twitter page establishes the value proposition up front, in its bio: “Have a question? Follow us and let us help!” It also personalizes the account by naming the staffers on duty.

Travelers responded enthusiastically to JetBlue's initiative. By early October 2010, the airline had attracted 1.6 million followers, and was following back 115,000 of its customers (Twitter 2009a; Twitter 2010). Johnston and his team use commercial off-the-shelf software to schedule tweets for known events, like announcements and fare deals; respond to inbound tweets expressing questions or concerns; and listen and respond to their Twitter “waterfall.” Their software provides a rich set of tools for collaboration and teamwork. They are able to profile authors through their conversation history, follower/followed status, and other measures that establish a person's authority or influence. Many other companies have followed in JetBlue's footsteps, with such varied examples as Virgin Trains, I Can Has Cheezburger, the Martha Stewart Show, and the White House.

A quick glance at JetBlue's Twitter account while writing this chapter showed tweets providing service, information on destinations served, updates on weather affecting travel, promotions, charity events, instructions on checking flight status, and resolutions to ticket issues (“We will honor the lower airfare and issue you a JB credit if your flight prices drop before departure”). Specific details of customer service issues are typically handled by direct tweets off the main page. There were also some JetBlue customers who used the airline's Twitter account to meet up and pass time with one another before their flights. (“Stop by if you're in SF! RT @xyzzname @jetblue @nikewmsmarathon sitting in a JetBlue seat waiting for a free manicure.”)

JetBlue customers use Twitter to get help just when they need it. The screenshot in Figure 14.1, from Dave Raffaele's (2009) blog post titled “How JetBlue Used Twitter to Treat Me like a Human” provides two very good examples of what can be done for a traveler on a single journey. First up, a complaint regarding an overheated cabin.

Figure 14.1 JetBlue responded to an after-midnight tweet regarding an overheated cabin within two minutes after receiving it.

Raffaele made it clear how much he appreciated being listened to, so much so that he became motivated to share the positive response he received:

In under 2 minutes, JetBlue responded with this tweet acknowledging my concern. It may seem like a small thing, but think about it. Here is a huge organization listening to me complain about the temperature on their plane over a channel that is far from mainstream. Even more impressive is that it was not an automated response. There was a real person writing that little note. It may not sell more plane tickets, but it definitely made me want to tell this story.

Raffaele was actively tweeting during his return trip, as well, when he arrived early at the airport and wanted to check luggage, but no one was around to help him. He fired off the tweet shown in Figure 14.2.

Figure 14.2 JetBlue responded to a service-related complaint at an airport by explaining the reasons, sizing up the situation, and then involving the local general manager and supervisors in its resolution.

JetBlue's response was thorough, as Figure 14.2 shows; but another aspect of the experience really impressed Raffaele—community involvement:

Not only did JetBlue respond to me directly, but other folks who follow me on Twitter also gave me insight based on their own experience. With the help of the crowd, [JetBlue] was again able to turn a situation that would have normally annoyed me into one of understanding and outstanding customer experience.

Assuming Raffaele represents a certain type of traveler, these excerpts show that he, and others like him, not only expect great service and prompt resolution to problems, but that JetBlue is dedicated to his well-being by constantly monitoring his “traveling EKG” and engaging in an appropriate way at any time. This example also sheds light on another aspect of customer care: the fact that it is a community activity. While brands need to listen to customers, they also need to listen to how customers interact with and help one another, and make it easy for the community to do so. This creates another source of insights, such as learning the rules of thumb, tips, and tricks customers use to accomplish some task that suggests new ways of doing things or confirming/debunking the merits of various company approaches.

Engage Openly, Respectfully, Ethically, and Civilly

Of course, people and their preferences differ vastly. For every Dave Raffaele who is comfortable with benign surveillance, there are others who may find it unnerving when companies start to “follow” them. Brands seek connection for all types of reasons, so it's up to them and their individual customers to agree on the relationship type that fits best. This may well mean no relationship, and the consensus is that brands must be ethical in these matters, transparent in their aims and benefits, and authentic in their voice. If all goes well, transparency leads to openness and, eventually, to trust. Historically, ethical practices for online communications emerged in the early days of e-mail, and have since been codified into features like permissions and unsubscribe options. But friending, following, and adding contacts are fairly new business practices, so companies are still working on proper techniques.

To begin here, we'll stick with JetBlue and take the example of two friends conversing on Twitter one evening. After mentioning JetBlue during their conversation, they soon received e-mails notifying them that they were being followed by JetBlue. The friends found this to be a bit spooky, and one suggested that the airline was using bots to do updates—far from a personal approach. A few minutes later, one of the friends and a social media consultant, Joel Postman, received this post on his blog (shown in Figure 14.3), explaining JetBlue's motivation and agreeing to their unfollow requests.

JetBlue's response clarified things for Postman, and also gave him a deep appreciation for the airline's willingness to adjust based on social media listening. Postman's take on the interaction is shown in Figure 14.4.

JetBlue's action may appear to be just a personal reply, but there's reason to believe that the response served a larger strategic purpose: to spread the word about JetBlue's actions and the reasoning behind them. Recall our mention of the software a few minutes ago; JetBlue used its author profiling feature to quickly see that Postman had some authority on Twitter. Around that time, Postman's followers/followed ratio was 8,632/8,222, and he had tweeted 12,203 times (Twitter 2009b). Further, by posting on Postman's blog, JetBlue helped ensure that its response would be available outside of Twitter. The reason: Although Twitter was not indexed by all leading search engines at the time, most blogs were. So if someone does a search for “JetBlue following” or something of the sort, the searcher would find JetBlue's post in Postman's blog.

JetBlue used listening to anticipate and respond to important concerns that Postman shared with others, and set wrong-headed opinions straight that might have escalated into large-scale concerns across social media. Giving a thoughtful response to an influential person like Joel Postman—and, by extension, his entire network—allowed JetBlue to explain its position in a way that would help maintain a favorable brand perception.

Engage with Civility

The JetBlue examples show respect to customer conversations and to their authors. But there are some scenarios in which people are downright ornery, mean, or insulting—behaviors that can bring out the worst in a company's social media voices. Doug Zanger tells a story of how one cranky listener's comments on Portland's alternative station, 94/7, escalated into a nasty series of personalized remarks that could impact its business (Zanger 2009):

Whoever was at the wheel decided to get a little personal, and it made the station look really bad. This station prided itself on getting feedback across the board and, in one swing of the tweet, completely abandoned [their approach] because [they] didn't like what [they] heard. Firstly, this episode should remind us [that] ill will could rub off on advertisers. Secondly, and more important[ly], if you have someone officially Twittering on behalf of your agency, you must remember at all times that everyone is watching.

This is an assertion that startup online wine shop Naked Wines completely understands. Its example shows that respectfully dealing with a challenging customer not only can lead to a satisfactory outcome, it can have a positive effect on the entire brand's community (Charlton 2009).

A customer complained on Naked Wines’ Facebook page about a delivery that did not arrive. The company initially tried to resolve the problem offline, by calling the customer and offering a full refund. For whatever reason, the customer went back to complaining online. After some back and forth in public view, the company outlined everything it did to resolve the situation, including refunding all the money the customer had ever spent with Naked Wines.

Facebook fans supported the company, which strengthened Naked Wines’ image and may even have won over some new customers, as we see in the thread shown in Figure 14.5.

Figure 14.5 Naked Wines’ Facebook fans expressed support for the way the company handled a difficult customer.

Develop Policies for Engagement

The radio station and wine company examples underscore a point made earlier in both the introduction and JetBlue case study: Customer service and satisfaction conversations are held in public, and exposed to interested parties. Before the advent of social media, customer service was essentially a series of one-on-one encounters with anonymous agents in a call center. Today, it's not only the quality of the problem's resolution that matters to customers. They also take careful notice of a company's conduct and etiquette throughout the entire process.

This is why so many companies have developed explicit social networking policies that encourage their employees to connect with customers to deliver information they are seeking, and to do it in a manner the company has deemed acceptable and proper. Most of these guidelines advise employees to act in ways that seem like common sense: Use good judgment, and be respectful, transparent, humble, human, and good listeners. Policies like these also serve to protect confidential, private, and personal information; safeguard intellectual property belonging to others; and prevent linking to unknown or unreliable online resources (Nordstrom 2010). If your organization does not have such guidelines in place, or if you simply want to do some benchmarking, you might take a look at Chris Boudreaux's (2010) analysis of 46 social media policy documents. It provides helpful guidelines for organizations that are just beginning to become active in social media or are old hands.

Manage Customer Expectations

When large companies with hundreds of thousands or millions of customers encounter a product or service issue, they usually feel the brunt of their customers’ dissatisfaction in short order. Their opinions and problems spread swiftly through social media. In many instances, the primary job of customer service representatives is twofold: tactical (assuage customers), and strategic (establish a level of goodwill that will carry the company through until it can make changes and offer solutions). We'll see this in the AT&T example we now discuss.

People who want an Apple iPhone have only one place to go (at the time of writing): exclusive mobile provider AT&T. Apple's attractive, capable, coveted mobile device has legions of loyal users, who value its simplicity, design, features, and apps. However, many of these same users are extremely dissatisfied with AT&T's network quality. They experience nagging problems like dropped calls and interrupted Internet service, and complain that AT&T's Web site services break when demand is high. They won't leave for another carrier because the cost of giving up the iPhone and switching to another provider is too great. So they stay and turn to social media to vent and commiserate with one another—which they do quite frequently. The company racks up about 10,000 mentions per day, a number that can skyrocket when there is important product or service news.

AT&T decided to counter dissatisfaction by forming a dedicated team to monitor comments and respond to them on Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. Almost half of the people reached by AT&T's social media reps take the time to engage with someone on the 20-member team. Heavy demand puts a lot of pressure on the staff: By June 2010, the number of service tickets was running about 32,000 per month. The team acts as a concierge, handling some requests and making connections to other departments that can resolve the issues.

The reality is that networks need to invest in infrastructure in order to solve their problems. AT&T took that step by budgeting nearly $20 billion dollars to improve both its wired and wireless infrastructure. The company's social customer service aims to keep subscribers reasonably satisfied until the fix is in place, and to stave off defections when contracts expire. Team leader Shawn McPike explained, “From a care perspective, I don't worry about [the network complaints] from day to day. What we worry about is that there are customers out there who have problems. We need to at least get them engaged to show that we're listening, and that may turn the tide over time” (quoted in Patel 2010).

Commitments to outreach through social media listening do pay off. Comcast's Twitter-based effort, @ComcastCares, responded to customer problems and complaints seven days a week. The program was the brainchild of then-Comcast executive Frank Eliason, and it worked to change—and markedly improve—Comcast's reputation for service. It's important to note that Comcast's social media customer service, like that of AT&T and other companies, supplements traditional channels like e-mail, chat, and the call center. E-mail, in fact, is the most active channel in Comcast's support operation.

According to Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, Comcast receives 300 million calls per year—more than 800,000 on a daily basis. In contrast, the social media group receives about 2,000 tweets per day; reaches out to about 600 people per day; and engages with about 200 to 300 people per day (Kawasaki 2010).

Comcast shows that adding social media listening can be a judolike strategy, one that enables companies to leverage a small fraction of the customer base to repair broken reputations. As a result, social media listening for customer service has strong business appeal. Although Comcast does not report hard metrics of success, the company claims that bringing the customer's voice into the company has value. Comcast CEO Brian Roberts provides a ringing endorsement, publicly claiming that “Twitter changed our company” (ForaTV 2009; Solis 2008).

Make Sure Solutions Satisfy Customers

Using social media listening, furnishings retailer Crate & Barrel discovered that one of its products—a $400 children's table—was too soft, and easily damaged by a child's normal use. Wanting to correct the problem, Crate & Barrel redesigned the product and offered replacements to owners of the faulty design. Kudos, right?

Well, not exactly.

In order to get the new model, owners had to disassemble and return the old table, a process that rendered returns and exchanges minimal. By keeping its social media listening ears open, Crate & Barrel learned that taking apart, boxing up, and shipping a “clunky table” was just too much hassle for most consumers. However, the retailer did not act on these insights and, as a result, the number of returns simply did not increase. We can assume that most parents just threw up their hands and hung on to the original (Klaassen 2009a). Not only did the lingering dissatisfaction throw these parents’ future purchases from the company into question; it also exposed a vulnerability that competitors took the chance to seize.

Here's a case where social media listening might best be considered “hearing.” Diane Hessan, CEO of online consumer insight company Communispace, counsels: “‘Social media listening’ doesn't mean getting one small piece of data and taking action. Sometimes it means getting a piece of data and probing it further” (quoted in Klaassen 2009b). For example, Crate & Barrel could have listened for possible solutions that came up in discussions, such as: “Yeah, it's a hassle, but if they only…[insert potential consumer suggestions].” Had the company engaged in conversation with owners, it might have learned of some tried-and-true return methods that manufacturers and suppliers use to appeal to customers. For example, instead of sending back the whole table, would owners have been open to sending in a receipt or credit card statement? What about some other proof of purchase, like a UPC code, manufacturer's lot number, or even a minor piece of the table? How about sending a box and shipping label, and then arranging for a package pickup, at owners’ convenience? If the company had listened, drilled down, and explored, it might have come up with a workable solution that was best for their customers—and, therefore, their brand.

Different business functions need to be coordinated in support of serving customers, especially at companies that deal with physical items. It is a holistic company response, not the province of a single department. Crate & Barrel probably made its decision in this case based on input from marketing, legal, customer service, manufacturing, and shipping and receiving departments. The policy requiring customers to return the complete table was a company decision, which apparently could not be changed, even in light of the guidance social media listening offered, and could have provided, had Crate & Barrel continued to listen to the returns “conversation.” This is another clear example of how effective customer service responses depend on fully engaged organizations and “always on” listening.

Summary

Companies use social media listening-based customer service best when it is matched to the right goals. Social support should supplement other forms of support, in order for companies to meet customer needs as customers would like. Companies must realize that social support is often carried out openly, which means that their response timeliness, quality, and “human-ness” influence not one individual but a community of customers, with the perception of a company in the balance.