Improving Customer Loyalty with Social Media

Figure 1. Twitter Stream Graph where the subject includes "Toyota" (Image Provided by Neoformix

Most companies are still struggling to deploy VoIP, IP Contact Centers, and Multi-Channel technologies to create a more customer-centric service experience. Meanwhile, Social Media (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, YouTube, etc.) is quickly “moving the cheese” again. Executives concerned about customer loyalty find themselves facing a torrent of unsolicited customer input from the web.

The cascading impact of one consumer’s web input feeding another, compounded by the shear volume of data that can be generated by the viral connections of social networks has put the reins of brand management in the hands of consumers on the web. Where even ten-years ago word-of-mouth gave companies at least days to mitigate customer service issues, today hours are an eternity.

The recent customer service and brand debacle at Toyota is an albeit out-of-control, but useful case to examine. Figure 1, is  a “stream graph” created by a technology from Neoformix of 1000 twitter messages that included the topic “Toyota” on Feb 5, 2010 at approximately 4:00 to 5:00PM EST. The Y-axis represents the number of messages and the X-axis represents time in 5 minute increments. Each band of color represents a different sub-topic (I suggest clicking on the picture to expand it and the link to play with it). The graph shows the volume and tenor of the discussion on Twitter that afternoon raging albeit out of control like a wildfire. Every Toyota owner who ever had their foot slip off the brake and onto the gas pedal is blogging, twittering, and video posting about how they were nearly killed by a faulty gas pedal assembly.

While the Toyota incident maybe a tsunami, smaller but nonetheless important consumer input is winging its way across the SocialSphere influencing other consumers and creating shifts in consumer loyalty for all types of product and service companies. In the call center world of just yesterday, Post-Call Surveys by voice, IVR, or web have been the traditional measurement to gauge consumer sentiment about the customer care process for at least 15 years.  Polling results were rarely published unless the story they told was nothing short of phenomenal and then only anecdotal. Poor results and trends, are reviewed behind close doors, and in complete secrecy.

Social Media has completely turned that world, upside-down. Today, consumers (and God forbid call center agents) have a self-directed and additively simple way to make their opinions a public broadcast to millions. With the average Twitter user gaining 5 to 25 new followers everyday, the viral impact of good or bad consumer sentiments ripple quickly across millions world-wide within minutes. Customer care departments live in fear today of a clandestine recordings forever chronicling bad customer service experience, on public forums instead of controlled corporate websites.

A few examples from Twitter on Friday afternoon between 3 and 4pm:

• Lauren writes: “I have been on hold with [national office supply chain's] call center for 15 minutes. Unacceptable. And their store here won’t answer their phone.”
• Manuel a call center agent writes: “If yall work or have worked in a call center yall know how thankful we are for HOLD. lmao I’m sick a u can I place u on hold?? POW!!”
• Rachel writes: “On hold with [Large Bank] for over 20 mins now. They said it would be a “short” delay b/c of storms in their call center area.”
• Jamie writes: “i’m a horrible person for yelling at the poor indian guy at the [Large Bank] call center trying to sell me credit monitoring during card activation
• Rachel another call center agent writes: “i work at a call center temporarily. its not to bad but sometime i just want to slap a bitch through the phone!!”
• Last, but not least there is Mark who took the time to record a 10 minute video (like a news story) about how  [large credit card company] would not help him solve his identity theft problem.

All of these gems were generated in about 30 minutes, and are the tip of the iceberg. These messages and thousands like them are influencing millions of current and potential customers everyday. Nielsen surveyed 25,000 online consumers worldwide, and their analysis of social networks indicated, “Peer recommendation is the most trusted channel, trusted ‘completely’ or ’somewhat’ by 9 out of 10 respondents worldwide.”

Now that we have determined that the sky is falling. What should Customer Care executives be doing? While the future may bring complete integration of social media and customer information systems, the path today has to be more practical. Unfortunately, it will create another silo of information and customer service processes.

The first step is to develop the goals and objectives of a Social Media Directorate within the Customer Care organization. Different than their Marketing brethren, this unit will be focused on the post-sale and up-sale world of customer care. While the goal is similar the tactics are different. Marketing groups are generally trying to generate an image of the brand for new customers that resonates with their goals as consumers, while the customer care unit is trying to maintain or improve customer loyalty. The goals will fall into the responsibility of four teams: SWOT, Crisis Management, Redirection, and Brand Support and Improvement.

• SWOT Team – SWOT (i.e. Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) is an Intelligence Unit within the Directorate. As it sounds the objective here is to monitor the social media world for consumer sentiment about the company or competitors and to feed that information in the form of daily and weekly reports to an executive steering committee that can quickly react.
• Crisis Management Team - More of a process than a team, a single manager may be given the role of pulling together a crisis management team when a problem erupts. This manager will have the role of organizing a series of activities in reaction to a crisis utilizing each of the other groups, as well as liaising with the rest of the Customer Care organization.
• Redirection Team - This organization will be focused on real time monitoring of social media feeds (in conjunction with the SWOT Team) looking specifically for prospective, new, or existing customers. When they find them they quickly move them off social media and into a special handling queue where there issue can be resolved. As much as possible these “rescues” need to be carefully documented to help create changes in policy or process in the rest of customer care. Generally these are problems that are slipping through the cracks. Jumping on these issues is critical to the Social Media Directorates mission.
• Brand Support and Improvement Team – Where the Redirection team is involved in reacting to problems, the BSI Team is focused on aggressively improving and maintaining the image. This type of function should be closely aligned and integrated into the Marketing strategy, but represents a grass roots approach to changing consumer sentiment by finding new or existing customers that can be community influencers and then enlisting there help (or paying them) to support the effort by moderating social networking communities, or creating an brand image based on their personal experiences.  The BSI team is focused on hammering through Marketing and Advertising’s plan by reinforcing the brand image within the ordering, fulfillment, delivery, installation, and support processes. While this has been the purview of marketing in the past, this is a critical customer care function in the post-Social Media world.

These represent the major functional  areas of a practical Social Media Directorate. In addition to this activity CRM/CIS managers need to begin to develop methods of capturing the Social Media handles of customers so that information can be cross referenced, and eventually these capabilities can be integrated within the Customer Care operation.

Ed Fullman
Partner, Adam Smith Consulting
ed.fullman@adamsmithconsulting.com
www.adamsmithconsulting.com