My radical prediction

Times they are a-changin'

It’s probably not so radical, but it’s a prediction, anyway, and one that I’ve heard rumblings of but not seen anyone else lay so flat out.

I think that social media/asynchronous communications will completely replace the 1800 number for customer service.

Why do I believe this? So glad you asked!

1. The rise in popularity of customer service ‘chat’ on company websites
2. Remember the Pepsi packaging discussion? It’s far easier to present a universal username than a long 1800 number that people won’t recall.
3. It’s efficient! A single customer service agent can ‘chat’ with multiple customers at the same time. Plus, as a customer, I’d prefer to voice my question and have an agent respond with an answer than sit on my cell phone burning through minutes (or my ear, as cell phones still tend to get hot!) listening to crappy muzak.  Cisco has an intriguing whitepaper outlining the value of multi-channel customer service with a great matrix explaining the priority given to a customer via different channels (though they still include Live Voice Call as an initial contact method, which obviously I’m arguing is outdated).
4. Public visibility keeps things honest – if more customer service happened through channels like Twitter, I as a customer could tell what sort of solution is common and (presumably) fair even BEFORE I reach out for help. Also, public accountability on the side of the customer service agents means a single bad apple can be picked out more quickly by management.

I’d love to see any additional reasons or counter-arguments!

Long awaited observations

I tweeted about this topic the other day, but I’ll get on a little bit bigger soapbox here today to say that, like it or not, all roads in communications lead to customer service.  With ever increasing demand for transparency and responsiveness, step one down the road of greater customer engagement is to tackle the issue of customer service.  I’ve even blogged about this in the past, but not from the same perspective of actually tackling customer service head-on.

It’s been some time since I posted, and part of that is because of the high level of activity I’ve been doing on behalf of my current employer.  I’m not certain exactly where my freedom to share ends, so let’s just say up front that none of the ideas, comments, yada yada yada reflect the opinions of the company I’m talking about/working with.

My role is to help this company start to press forward more definitively into social media activities.  We did some planning, looked at some goals (the biggies for most companies? Keeping up with the competitive marketplace, name recognition, reputation management, and so on, at least in my opinion) and began pushing out on the tools we have set up.  The tools we’re using for outreach at the moment are a collection of social shopping websites, Facebook (with a newly launched Page that’s still in growth stages), Flickr (also in growth stages) and Twitter which was quite precocious and virtually popped fully grown and demanding attention from the computer monitor.

As a consumer goods company (ultimately), Mother’s Day is a very serious holiday for the company.  With a fairly recently launched presence on Twitter, we were all girding ourselves for what may come without really knowing how it may shake out for us or for our competitors.  We’d had the discussions about handling complaints in a timely matter, who we thought should ‘man the account’ for the holiday weekend and whether customer requests through Twitter would be handled by customer service team members or by marketing team members referring to the general company guidelines (every company has service guidelines and I’m coming to find the best companies make sure that EVERYONE is aware of these guidelines so all company employees can fairly represent that stance).

We pride ourselves on great customer service so that, also, had to shine through in anything we did on Twitter.

I’m not going to lie; as a former PR person, I thought I could handle these complaints without feeling berated or overly hassled by clients.  I also thought that I understood how emotional a gift purchase can be and what Mother’s Day means to many people.  But let me tell you – this is a new experience.  If you’re a n00b to social media marketing (though I prefer to call it communications), let me tell you, there is NO preparing unless you’ve previously worked in customer service.  I’m not talking about working in a customer facing job like a waitress or a retail store.  I’m talking straight-up customer service where all you connect with every day are people who have had problems with your product/service.  Some people’s complaints may strike you as minor and petty, while others catch even you off-guard by their magnitude.

What I CAN prepare you for, however, is that you cannot break through into real conversation until you have proven that you are willing and capable of handling these customer service issues.  The best conversations we’ve had on our Twitter account have resulted from people who started with complaints and were helped.  I know most people hear this in marketing classes (if you’ve taken them) that turning a customer’s poor experience into a positive experience is the best way to build lifelong customers.  Well let me tell you, the best way to build positive conversation in social media?  Prove that you can handle complaints and criticisms responsibly and politely.  You don’t have to be a whipping boy, but you do have to accept blame for the things that are your fault and support the customer no matter who made the first error.

All in all, we made it pretty well through Mother’s Day.  There were slips and errors, but there always will be.  In the end, however, we learned that the best way forward was to be open and honest and helpful – all things we proved through our customer service.  So I’ll state again – the first barrier to climb as a company entering the social media landscape is that of customer service.  Overcome that obstacle and you’ll see a fruitful landscape out in front of you.  Not an easy one to travel, but fruitful.

Where is PR headed?

I’ve been really intrigued this week by the discussion of the future of public relations.  I think that the discussions that have unfolded are crucial to making a long-term stand for our industry, since with increasing convergence in media we will obviously witness increasing convergence in communications roles out of necessity.  

There were two posts that sparked me on this the most:

1. Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research who had an intriguing idea which helped fuel much of this conversation 
2. Todd Defren of Shift PR (a social media PR firm) who mounted what I thought was in the larger case a spot on counter argument regarding the business principles 

There are some differences I see, however, as someone working on the front-lines.  My points are these:

 

• PR council is expensive – if I’m not wrong, PR is more expensive than customer service by quite a bit, that’s why companies have warehouses of customer service people and offices of PR people (or hire outside firms, which might cost even more)
   
• Basic social media monitoring and response skills are pretty similar to instant message or e-mail based customer service – so why pay PR people to do your customer service when you can have your customer service people do your customer service?
   
• If you’re worried about handling ’special cases,’ monitoring tools are coming to the point where they’re sophisticated enough to raise the alarm for ‘flagged’ influencers you may want to give special care to *
   
• More and more, PR efforts with social media are less like media relations OR like customer service and more like marketing (at least from where I’m sitting)

 

My conclusion, then?  Customer service will wind up with the social media piece of the pie at some point down the road; maybe the PR or social media experts will slide to those departments and customer service procedures will change up a bit.  In the long run, media relations will still exist as a specialty with one hoary old coffee drinking, cigarette smoking ex-journalist working in a paper-filled office alone
.  The rest of the little PR girlies?  They’ll be swallowed up by the marketing department and out working events and pushing samples and test drives (which, funnily enough, is part of the monetizaton and metrics strategy I hear for social media firms).

 

*(though that kind of takes the transparency out of things, doesn’t it?  It would be best to let customer service have enough information and freedom to serve everyone equally, but that’s likely not going to happen with people like Robert Scoble making a fuss as Defren pointed out in the post I reference above)