Resources

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!

Bigger Doesn’t Always Mean Better

Posted on March 29, 2012 by Alan Bates

With the announcement by Lloyds Banking Group this week that they are about to ‘overhaul’ the handling of customer complaints came a small reminder for me from recent experiences of working with clients. A well-recognised brand which attempts to portray confidence, professionalism and customer focus isn’t always representative of what is happening on the inside.

In this age of consumer focus and customer-driven strategy (there are many more buzz words that I will avoid), you would be forgiven for thinking that such big organisations who employ thousands of people in customer marketing, customer service, customer relations and customer insight actually have the customer at the heart of the culture.

Not so, it would appear. And so Lloyds’ announcement that it was about time it had ‘one customer view’ is a big move, albeit a bit late. Now, maybe they can be cut some slack in that they have just joined three big brands in a very difficult market. But it would seem that, even within the individual brands, delivering a coordinated and choreographed service was slightly beyond their reach.

It’s not easy to change quickly, in fact for most businesses that just won’t happen. And a lot of the delays aren’t just about finances and technology, but in the heart of the business – it’s culture. If you drive and reward success on call targets, sales volumes and the odd half-hearted customer feedback round on the ‘front line’ then we shouldn’t be surprised that the whole business might just be run that way.

Some of the best businesses for customer engagement are those that have always had a culture for loyalty. Being the best for great customer experience is much more important than just being the best in a sector or industry. The energy sector demonstrates this point; it may be great to be the top of the big six for customer satisfaction, but if that top place only comes with around 68% satisfaction in an industry where 70% of customers said they were not fully satisfied but only 20% switched provider, it’s not much kudos.

My view.

Run your customer service like a small business (especially if it is a small business). If each person/team/department looked after their customers as if they were their very own, as if that customer coming back for more relied on that one interaction and experience, satisfaction and loyalty will follow.
Give your people the tools. A customer won’t care that you have seven different teams who deal with seven aspects of their account. If you want your customers to have a great experience, you need to let everyone see what that experience looks like. In addition, trust those who deliver for your customers to make the right decision. Give a policy to hide behind and an environment that doesn’t foster ‘do the right thing’ and don’t be surprised when your bland service doesn’t break any records.
Use customer feedback. If you take time to find out what customers really want, and you act on those wants and drivers of satisfaction (not just cherry-pick the ones that suit you) then you will see the results.
Reward and recognise outcomes, not outputs. Sometimes the smallest and simplest of reports show the greatest of results. If you want your customers to come back, to recommend you to others and to expand the services they need from you then recognise it won’t come from a hard focus on handling times and volumes alone.

Of course, there are many more ingredients to a great customer experience. I would love to hear your views on making your experience better. Who does it well and who deserves your loyalty?

Social Media Management – Personalised or Personal?

Posted on March 16, 2012 by Emma Kennedy

Vodacom, the largest major mobile communications provider in South Africa, has developed its customer service strategy through utilising social channels within their call centres as new platforms to better engage with customers. As a result, customer service agents will be able to seamlessly switch from social media interactions to another mode of contact without losing context or data.

In relation to this, a colleague of mine was recently writing about the multi channel approach to communication, highlighting the importance of face to face communication as an integral part of an overall communications strategy.

With many companies recognising the potential benefits of adopting a multi channel approach to customer service, and much discussion of late surrounding the concept of personalisation within the service industry, how important is it to be able to put a face to a name when dealing with customer service advisors?

Perhaps looking at two different examples can help provide some food for thought.

KLM Royal Dutch airlines are no strangers to social media. The company has been at the forefront of some of the most innovative social media initiatives designed to enhance the customer experience. In November 2010 it launched the ‘KLM Surprise’ programme. This involved flight attendants searching passengers’ social media profiles and meeting these passengers at the gate with a personalised gift. Following this, the airline announced its new ‘Meet & Seat’ programme, where participating passengers could view each other’s Facebook or LinkedIn profiles and use this information to choose who to sit next to during a flight. Despite this level of personalisation, the people behind social media at KLM are faceless – the company Facebook prohibits any personal details, such as names or email addresses of employees being disclosed and any tweets come from a generic KLM account. Wouldn’t we like to know the people behind the corporate accounts? Get to know the people themselves who champion these personalised campaigns?

Jaguar Land Rover’s approach to social media management, however, is a different one. Employees who manage and contribute to the JLR UK PR Twitter page are named, which they believe creates a much deeper connection between the brand and the customer. Furthermore, Jaguar Land Rover deploys a strictly personalised approach with each individual client. When a client first interacts with the brand they are assigned a dedicated advisor who will manage their case from start to finish, regardless of the number of interactions the customer may have with the brand. The customer knows their dedicated advisor on first name terms and is given their email address and direct line so they can call their advisor directly. But does customer service need to be this personalised? Should it matter that we know who we are speaking to as long as the overall service is efficient?

Some may argue that you do not need to who you are interacting with as long as you are pleased with the overall service but for me, it is the human aspect that makes these interactions that little bit more pleasant. It begs the question – why would a company want to be known for personalisation but not for being personal?

Percepta at the DMA Ball

Posted on December 2, 2011 by Lindsay Morrison

On the 11th of November this year, Percepta attended the Direct Marketing Association’s 17th Anniversary Ball, held in Edinburgh’s Prestonfield Hotel, located at the foot of Arthur’s Seat. The beautifully decorated stables adjacent to the hotel itself would host the event, providing guests with a spectacular setting for the evening’s festivities. Those attending were greeted to a champagne reception upon arrival, followed by a three course meal, ceilidh and late night disco, giving them the chance to chat and get to know other members of the DMA from throughout the UK.

The event also saw the welcome return of the Percepta sponsored “Groovy Booth”, where attendees could pose for photographs dressed in various comedy wigs, hats and oversized sunglasses (those of a nervous disposition have been warned). This year’s revellers did not disappoint, with queues for the booth stretching across the dance floor at times.

The highlight of the night was the ever popular Orcadian Strip the Willow, which got the majority of the crowd off their seats and onto the dance floor. As many of the attendees headed for the DMA after party, they were thankful that there was no repeat of last year’s weather (2010’s ball marked the beginning of the heavy snow, which lasted well into the New Year).

Overall, the night was a huge success, and the grandeur of the setting was matched only by the party atmosphere throughout the evening. Very much looking forward to next year!

Featured Vacancy – Marketing Executive

Posted on June 1, 2011 by Percepta HR

Many people feel marketing is a strange and specialised area, with numerous complications and a slightly different view on the world from the other departments within the company. That simply isn’t true, as everyone has experience of marketing, whether they know it or not. There is one product that everyone should be able to sell, a special package of skills, experience and knowledge that is unique. That product is simple: it’s you.

Your marketing pitch is your CV; it’s how you present yourself, how you to get an employer to buy into the brand that is your skills and what you can bring to the company. Percepta are in the market for the right candidate.

We are looking for an experienced B2B Marketing Executive to join our marketing team. The successful candidate will be at the core of the marketing department, supporting Percepta’s regional strategy.

Should you be the successful candidate you will have a wide variety of duties including owning all activities around online, digital and external presence, external communications, brand design and development, CRM and supporting the lead management and brand engagement programmes.

We are looking for a flexible candidate with a variety of skills, particularly in digital work and a passion for marketing who wants to help Percepta make an impact both on and off the web. You’ll likely be qualified in marketing, or have equivalent experience, a strong creative side and great communication skills.

So jump into our elevator and apply here. We look forward to hearing you pitching your personal brand package.

The Power of Social Media

Posted on August 23, 2010 by Alan Meldrum

Social Media really works! Percepta offer social media support as one of many customer experience tools for our clients. It is therefore important to “do as we preach” and I’m delighted with the results we achieved recently when we recruited a new manager level recruit through LinkedIn. Well to be exact the conversation started through our blogs, web site and LinkedIn communications. The conversations started on a mutual interest basis about Percepta’s passion for customer experience to be at the centre of our clients businesses and resulted in a meeting of minds leading to a strategic vacancy being filled by a candidate who truly understands our business. I was always convinced of the importance of engaging our clients customers where they congregate including the internet but I was unaware of how powerful social media is for recruitment.

The individual we selected was by far and away the best candidate for the job and outshone his conventional candidate competitors through his genuine understanding of our business. He had not merely studied up on Percepta by looking at our web site and getting some industry opinion but he was fully conversant with our culture, aspirations and understood our challenges. His engagement with Percepta staff through the vehicle of social media produced in-depth understanding about Percepta along with appropriate empathy with our culture to be a real advantage to our business.

Communication is a two way thing and the opportunity for a prospective employee to get to know a company and its people has turned out to be a fantastic advantage to this candidate and this business.

I would love to hear your stories of success and failure with social media as a business tool.

Targeting B2B Prospects – What’s Best?

Posted on August 4, 2010 by Greg Middleton

The face of marketing has changed so much in the last few years. All organisations need to ensure that their marketing materials are not only clear, but are being presented to their targets in a way that will interest them.

There are many things to take into consideration prior to formulating a marketing communications plan such as who am I targeting? What am I selling to them (product or service)? Why would they be interested? How can I ensure my message is appropriate to them?

Having worked in B2B marketing for many years, I’ve come to realise that the more intelligence gathered on a target, before actually targeting them, the better the outcome of that contact.

So, what channels should be used to gather intelligence and should these same channels be used to target the prospect?

There’s the obvious means of finding out what target organisations/people are up to, like trade press, corporate websites and so on, but with the social media boom still going strong – how much else can be found out through professional networking sites, blogs, twitter etc?

Even after this intelligence is gathered, the decision is then how to target the prospect and gauge their interest in what you can offer. Is cold calling still the best way to do this or should organisations look at using newer methods like the social media channels used to gather the intelligence in the first place?

I guess there’s no right or wrong answers to any of my questions – it will ultimately depend on what you’re selling and what you need to do to get your message across i.e. can a free trial be offered, is there a ‘door opener’ for you to use in the hope of getting a bigger sell?

I’d be really interested in hearing about other experiences with this thought process – I’m sure there are plenty or marketers out there who have had to think the exact same way in recent times, so please leave a comment for us to discuss.

Little Things

Posted on July 2, 2010 by Brian Hamilton

My last two blog posts (here and here) really pushed out the boat in terms of length. Apologies for that… The fact is that they were originally written as one post that was deemed too long by our blogmeister (meaning you really got off lightly!) Having learnt my lesson, I thought I would give myself the challenge of keeping this posting as brief as possible.

On the subject of keeping things short and sweet, one of my favourite stories is the one that Ernest Hemingway allegedly wrote, either as a result of a bet with his drinking buddies or to rise to the challenge of writing a complete story in six words. He absolutely nailed it. Here is the unabridged version:

“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

In these times of Twitter, SMS, et al it seems incredible to me that, way back in the 1920s, ‘Papa’ somehow managed to convey a powerful story in less than 27 characters. Who needs 140?

Here at Percepta we pride ourselves on our Microsoft SQL Server based data warehouse and its ability to provide in-depth analysis of customer support calls captured by our CRM application(s). As we move towards supporting multiple channels that, by their very nature are unstructured (particularly if we are trying to analyse customer sentiment from Twitter feeds, product forums, SMS and chat), we recognise the enormity of the challenge we face in trying to interpret this vast unruly data set. Whilst there are tools out there to trap key words in verbatims there are pitfalls here too. Individual words by themselves can’t convey sentiment. They need to be grouped together. Even when they are skillfully grouped together by a master storyteller like Hemingway, what is the sentiment behind his famous short story? Different readers pick up different things. For some it is a tale filled with melancholy and loss. For others it might be seen as a sign of hope – especially in the re-cycling community! Waste not, want not! Either way, you get the drift, I’m sure.

As contact centres move away from simply handling phone calls (where at least the sentiment of the caller could be interpreted by other means – e.g. the increasing decibel level in the ear of the hapless agent when the customer is venting her / his anger), we need to find new ways of picking up these meanings correctly if we are to act upon them. I haven’t found a solution (yet) – though some recent technological offerings show some promise.

True to my word I am going to end this post here.

But, before that… I would like to suggest my own six words’ worth, with an IT manager theme:

“AC dies. Servers fry. Situation Vacant”

If you have any of your own that you would like to share feel free to post a comment back.

To get you started, here’s a wee cracker from Stan Lee in response to a similarly themed article on wired.com :

“Automobile warranty expires. So does engine.”

Or, this great one from author Graham Swift featured in the guardian.co.uk:

“Funeral followed honeymoon. He was 90.”

Until next time…

A New Kind Of Hard Labour?

Posted on June 19, 2010 by Alan Bates

I was interested to read an article recently about a BPO organisation that has employed prisoners to conduct data management tasks on behalf of global clients. 250 ‘convicts’ are to work on the Indian prison site, earning the equivalent of £80 per month, processing and transmitting data for mostly government, insurance and banking clients. The same company reportedly operates services for RBS and even M&S.

It did get me thinking. Whilst I do recognise that this kind of experience for prisoners can be invaluable when they are released, especially as many are reported to be well educated, it created the question in my mind as to whether this was simply a way for companies to cut the cost of outsourcing and offshoring even more. The plan is expected to be rolled out further if this trial is a success.

Predictions are that the offshoring (and outsourcing) trend is expected to rise, with many public and private organisations eyeing the opportunity to make much needed savings. Economies that have come out of the worst of any financial crisis are also those holding some of the greatest offshore opportunities, like India. With great educational standards, and now vast outsourcing and offshoring experience, they have a great platform. But organisations also have to consider the bad press in recent years over the quality of service and, for example, that the British consumer likes to believe they are talking to someone in Britain – something to do with media hype I’m sure – but also some fears over communication errors and security. A MINTEL survey showed that 74% of consumers in the UK had fears about the handling of their data outside of the UK. I’m sure that the idea of prisoners processing and handling their personal and financial data won’t do much to calm any negative perception over security – even in the UK.

However, there remains the argument that this setup provides a new opportunity for work experience to those serving prison sentences. A similar scheme in Austria launched in 2008 to much protest. Fears over security were raised, but there are no reports of any real security issues. In that case, there may well be an opportunity for the UKs outsourcing companies to jump on a similar wagon, keeping the work in the UK, supporting prisoners to reduce re-offending and cutting the cost of their operations.

So how do you really feel about employing prisoners to conduct this kind of work? Is this the new alternative to the traditional practical lessons and further education in prisons? Are organisations at risk of exploiting cheap labour in a new way? And as a consumer, would you feel any different that your personal data was being processed by a serving prisoner – never mind sent offshore?

I look forward to reading your views and comments.

Alan

Percepta Europe

Creating customer loyalty