Are You Really Listening to your B2B Customers?
By Jeffrey L. Cohen
Wed, Jan 6, 2010
Every discussion of social media begins with someone telling you that you need to start any social media campaign or program by listening. What are you really listening for? Mentions of your brand, your industry, your competitors? Maybe you find and follow blogs from industry thought leaders to understand the social media landscape in your niche. But once you start tweeting, blogging and creating content on the social web, it becomes even more critical to listen for mentions of your company or brand.
Social media outlets, and especially Twitter, have become a communications tool for customers to reach out to their vendors. It has become publicly acceptable to complain online about your experiences. And make sure to use the proper Twitter account in your complaint. Sometimes it is venting to feel better, while other times it is done to warn others about the experience. But from the vendor side of things, this is some of the most important listening that you do.
The following example comes Bandwidth.com, a business phone and data provider in Cary, North Carolina (disclosure: and a client). I had nothing to do with this situation, but because they are a client, I also monitor their brand mentions, so I observed the following in real time. (Note that screenshots of customer tweets were captured immediately, while those from Bandwidth were captured the next day, so the time stamps don’t seem to match even though they occurred in the same time period).
An existing customer makes a comment about a problem that customer service wasn’t able to solve.
That comment is retweeted.
A new customer wonders what he has gotten himself into.
The original customer responds to the new customer and says he is normally a fan, but expresses a bit of frustration the customer service rep didn’t try hard enough.
The company replies to the user and others who tweeted the complaint or tweeted about it.
The original customer tweets that he received a phone call within minutes of his tweet of frustration.
That comment is retweeted.
The company publicly replies to the customer that customer service is dealing with the issue, even after the phone call talking to him on the phone. They also include an email address for additional contact.
The company thanks those involved for their patience.
The next day, the original customer tweets that customer service followed through.
That comment is retweeted.
This is a real example where a company monitored Twitter and saw a tweet from an existing customer that required follow-up. And that follow-up was a phone call. The person was a customer so it was easy to find their phone number and call. The one piece of inside information that I have is that the social media person, in the marketing department, is the one who followed up with the customer. After the phone call he followed up with customer service so they could solve the customer’s issue.
These situations are easy to find on Twitter, but you need to make sure you are looking. Whatever tool you use to manage your company Twitter account, even the Twitter website, makes it easy to spot Tweets with your account name, but you also need to set up searches for the company name without the @ and some common misspellings. Do this even if you have a simple company name (search Twitter for Goggle). The other part of this was that social media person has the authority to perform customer service. There is no need for approvals up the command chain. Note the three parts of the customer’s tweets: 1. follow-up to tweet 2. quick response 3. follow-through to solve the problem. This situation also points to the importance of setting up monitoring tools across the social web, because the comments are just as likely to appear on forums or other sites.
So the next time you discover a customer service situation on Twitter, as a marketing, pr or communication person, or even an agency, what is your customer service role? What are your means of response and time of response? How do you connect the dots back with the traditional customer service department? And how do you enter this as a resolved case into your CRM system, because you know that you should?
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Tags: bandwidth, customer service, Listening, Monitoring, Twitter
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Thanks for the post and shoutout!
The customer service folks here went above and beyond to make sure that we did everything we could do to solve the problem. That even involved getting in touch with other vendors for support.
The coolest thing about it to me is that it helped everyone work as a team to improve the customer experience. Social media helped to elevate the issue and the customer benefits from that.
Thanks again!
Chris Moody
@cnmoody
In addition to monitoring twitter, I also suggest monitoring what is being said on the web about your company. I use the “Google Alerts” for this. My company name is pretty unique, so I don’t find many false positives in my Google Alerts feed. But if your business name has commonly used words in it, I don’t know how well it will work for you.
Chris:
Thanks for the comment and adding a bit more to the example. Twitter is becoming an important customer service channel and you showed how it can be used successfully.
Interesting, I’ve tried to ask @bandwidth multiple things on twitter, never get a response. Sigh.
(@natecarlson)
If social media does anything it accelerates–everything. It gives us fast notification of problems, higher expectations on customer service response, and I tend to think speedier resolution.
This is a great example. The next trick is finding away to centralize all of the social media channels that may contain complaints and calls for help.
Then I agree with you Jeffrey, how do you tie it back to the CRM for continuity of customer experience?
Nate: Follow up with Chris Moody (@cnmoody) to get your questions addressed.
Jagath: Thanks for the suggestion. Yes, Google is definitely another piece of monitoring, but it doesn’t have the real-time results of Twitter. And the above post was showing one single example on Twitter.
Bill: Thanks for your comments. The CRM aspect of this requires discipline to enter this sort of case in after the fact. However, the bigger issue is getting customer service reps aware of problems by integrating social media monitoring into the CRM, like you can currently do in Salesforce.com, and training them on social media response expectations.
Jeff:
Great example. I think the key on this one is that in order for this to happen, you really need a team to monitor. An issue I run into sometimes is that if I’m not checking this stuff frequently (on the road, in shower, asleep, taking a break, etc) it can go unnoticed. Also, sometimes I’m busy with other aspects of my job (blogging, speaking, planning, measuring, etc). Then what?
Chris – do you have a team @bandwidth? If not, what happens if you are not “on?”
DJ Waldow
Director of Community, Blue Sky Factory
@djwaldow
Interesting point, DJ. A community manager’s job has become a 24/7 endeavor, but they still need others help out. A team approach is not always an option, so sometimes you need to count on friends or others outside the organization to draw your attention to things. You left this comment on a Saturday morning, and in all likelihood Chris would not respond until Monday, but I could just as easily alert him to the question.
DJ,
There is one other person here that has access, but for the most part it is me. I’m working on ways to be more accessible all of the time, but I usually check my Tweetdeck columns over the weekend as well.
DMs are pushed to email which I get on my mobile device.
I also have some alerts set up with the social monitoring software we use. And there are other friends and coworkers that may see it if I happen to be away.
So essentially, it is rare that I’m not “on” in some capacity and we will continue to get increased adoption to help in times I am away.
We should chat sometime about good ways to manage this for small teams or individuals. DM me.
Best,
Chris Moody
Chris:
Thanks for sharing some of the details of how you keep connected. While social media is much more than a 9-5 job, especially as it relates to monitoring a brand, as time goes on, we will develop a set of expectations for both our company and our customers for dealing with online comments.
Great point Jeff.
As we continue to build awareness (internally and externally), I think we’ll increase adoption and our expectations will only improve the customer experience.
I know of a few folks joining Twitter and creating Google alerts for keywords already.