Our Top Ten Posts of 2012

Posted on December 31, 2012 by Nupur Chatterjee

The Percepta team in Europe have spent this past year understanding, analysing and making the best out of customer service, experience and insight trends and news to deliver the best for our clients and partners. This process has led to some great blog posts and we’ve put together ten of our most popular ones in this roundup of 2012. We hope 2013 brings our clients and partners across the globe, as well as our teams working with them, heaps of success, knowledge and joy. Wishing all our readers a prosperous 2013!

Our top ten posts of 2012:

Succeeding at Social Media Customer Service

Posted on September 18, 2012 by Nupur Chatterjee

An article published on PR Squared last month gave us all something interesting to think about. It consisted of an overview of what Frank Eliason, the SVP of Social Media at Citibank felt about social media as a channel for customer service, and how companies are failing at it. Eliason addresses several issues within the customer service business, and I was pleasantly surprised to see how many of these issues we’ve spoken about here at the Percepta Blog. Briefly condensing Eliason’s and our views:

Who owns Social Media Customer Service?
Where does customer service via social media sit within your company? Is it considered a function governed primarily by your Marketing Team, your PR team or your Customer Services Department? This needs to be defined by every organisation, social media isn’t just a plug-in channel to rest of your business. It has the power to alter your brand image, because it gives you the power to connect with consumers and potential consumers, and also gives you the power to decide what you want to do with social media. There are no fixed rules. Define your strategy, and get the support you need by:

Getting senior management buy in
Everyone within the company, specially those with the power to make decisions, needs to understand the significance and potential of social media. As with Customer Experience Management, social media needs to be supported by every department, and the heads of these departments should be aware of the strategy. Social Media provides opportunity for several functions within an organisation. There’s no reason why your organisation shouldn’t be making the best of it.

Social Influence
Frank Eliason believes an organisation shouldn’t channel their focus on to customers with high Klout (social influence) scores. Previously on this blog, we’ve spoken about influence measurement and its importance in social media customer service, as well as the Net Promoter Score and its relevance in today’s digitally focussed times. While we know social influence scores and the NPS score do convey an important customer insight, it isn’t and shouldn’t be a standalone metric. They need to be used in conjunction with customer surveys and other methods of customer insight gathering. After all, if a customer has a higher social influence score, he/she isn’t necessarily an influencer in your field of business, and a customer with a low Klout score has the potential to create content that could go viral.

Bigger doesn’t always mean better! The key to successful customer service, whether online or offline depends on whether you place the customer at the heart of your business. Make customer and customer service and integral part of your business strategy and you will be able to serve better. That seems obvious enough, but considering social media customer service and all the debate around its success rates and calculating RoI, remember success is a metric you define for your business. Make your approach to social media service customer centric and you will be able to understand your customers’ needs and create a winning strategy. Those are my thoughts, what do you think are the key steps in delivering successful social media customer service?

Social Influence and Customer Service

Posted on July 20, 2012 by Nupur Chatterjee

A recent Forbes article outlined the plans of how a major customer service solutions provider now integrates Klout (a social media influence measurement metric) into their social customer contact solutions. This comes after a lot of debate around Klout, created by a San Francisco based company of the same name, which measures a user or brand’s ‘social influence’ across social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Klout does this by calculating an overall Klout Score by assessing a user’s presence on social channels, their followers, activity and the popularity of their content. There are other applications that measure social influence, Kred and PeerIndex among them, but Klout is the one that seems to be the most widely accepted.

The entire industry still is in the learning stages when it comes to the use of social media, and while tools like Klout do give us an understanding of how much we influence people with our social media activity, there still exist widespread concerns about the method in which this is done, and how relevant it is to each company. Another Percepta Blogger, Lindsay, previously wrote about the Net Promoter Scoring (NPS) system and its application and effectiveness on social media channels and how relevant it is for companies to use this metric to measure their customer service on social channels. With Klout and NPS 2.0 among the plethora of tools and applications available to analyse your company’s social media presence, a company needs to understand what exactly they’d like to measure, what actually impacts their business and aligns to company goals. This goes right back to your social media strategy – where does social media sit in your business strategy and what do you aim to achieve from it? This is by no means fixed, it will keep evolving as the medium and your company grows, but we know for certain you need to have a vision which these tools, if used correctly, will help you achieve.

There are several ways of looking at the effectiveness of social influence, Klout and NPS on social media customer service. Do you use them for your business and are they important? Let us know through your comments!

Facegram or Instabook: What Does It Mean for Users?

Posted on April 11, 2012 by Nupur Chatterjee

We’ve all read how the 13 Instagram employees woke up Monday morning richer by much more than anyone had imagined! Facebook acquired the photo app company for $1 Billion, which has managed to raise quite a few eyebrows, because Instagram was valued at $500 Million on the 6th of April, 2012; that’s four days before it was bought for double that amount.

Does Zuckerberg intend to annihilate his competition, since Facebook’s strength lies in photo sharing, or does he intend to turn it into another channel to push ads through? Instagram has an impressive user base of almost 30 million registered users, but almost no revenue. I’ve read a couple of articles today that explain how Instagram puts the soul back into social sharing, making the experience more personal and intimate through the art of photography, tinged with nostalgia through multiple filters. Facebook, on the other hand, is seen as a social media conglomerate, which has managed to turn friendly social interactions between friends into highly targeted marketing campaigns for advertisers. Will Facebook keep Instagram alive as it is and as users like it or should we expect a hybrid photo sharing app for our timelines soon?

Another reason I’m writing this blog is to address the impeccable timing of the acquisition. Instagram launched its app for Android devices just last week, prior to which it was available only to iPhone, iPod and iPad users. Is this another way of staying ahead of Google, Facebook? No matter which angle I consider, it seems like a very interesting scenario, for the two companies involved, their users as well as their competition.

What do you think this acquisition holds for you as a user, and for the market? Let me know through your comments!

Who Owns Your Social Media Customer Service?

Posted on March 30, 2012 by Nupur Chatterjee

Last year, we discussed Customer Experience Management and whether the development of its strategy should be owned by Marketing, HR or Customer Services. I came across a similar question the other day, while listening in on a presentation about social media customer service. Who should define your social media customer service strategy? Should it be the Marketing department who owns all the content linked to your brand or should it be the customer services department whose aim is to find and resolve customer concerns?

One very interesting point of view offered by the presenter was that customer service on social media is actually a part of an organisation’s PR strategy. It is as important as content and as critical as good customer relations. And just like Customer Experience Management, it should be owned by the entire company. One could argue that a representative from the marketing team could work alongside customer service representatives to define and execute search and rescue programmes for customers on social media. This is possible, of course, but is risky due to the evolving nature of the medium and the exponential exposure all social communication is subject to.

Experts would advise you to spend a significant amount of time planning your social media strategy across the board – figuring out the budget, the approach, the tone, resources and the tools you’d need. Another aspect to keep in mind is that social media strategy will have to be revised every few months, because it is a dynamic medium; the forums, tools and your social customers are constantly evolving.

It could be that only one department in your company cannot effectively own your social media customer service, and just like Customer Experience Management, the buy in and effort put into its execution should come from your company as a whole. Where does customer service through social media sit within your company? Is your current approach working or would you consider splitting its ownership across different departments? Let me know via comments. Thanks!

Customer Expectations and the Impact on Service Quality

Posted on March 9, 2012 by Nupur Chatterjee

The results of a recent study conducted by a leading professional services company revealed an interesting insight into the differences in perception of services to customers. The study surveyed nationals of different countries living in Dubai, and while nearly 60% of the respondents felt customer services in Dubai were better than that in their home countries, 85% of British expatriates felt that it was worse than customer service in the UK.

This stark difference in the quality of service as perceived by customers is obvious in this case. Britain’s high expectations of the quality of customer service has brought about a change in industry, with UK brands opting out of outsourcing customer services and bringing them back to be based out of the UK. Brands are also investing resources and training in their customer services, with Tesco (Britain’s top retailer) adding 20,000 new customer servicing roles over the next couple of years.

We know that Britain expects a good quality of servicing, but how fast is the rest of the world catching up? There has been a lot of debate around outsourcing and what 2012 holds for this sector. Many companies continue to work their customer services from overseas, and invest the time and resources to instil brand cultures and values in customer service agents. With companies aiming to improve and customers expecting more, this seems like a good place to start a discussion about customer expectations and loyalty, and how companies can strike a balance in cost and quality of the services provided. Do companies tailor their services to suit customer’s expectations or are they looking ahead to truly understand their customers, predict shortcomings and address issues before they affect customers?

What do you think, from your experiences in the sector and as a customer? Let us know in the comments section!

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