Risk being an has-been if you don't follow social networks
Its one thing to provide technical or customer service but quite a different thing to do so really well. What’s really changed the whole concept of outbound service as compared to say twenty years ago is that a company’s customers can now find each other and talk. They can discover and publicize your weaknesses with a speed and depth of commentary that, if they are annoyed, can be astounding and result in significant brand damage.
It’s one thing to provide technical or customer service but quite a different thing to do so really well. What’s really changed the whole concept of outbound service as compared to say 20 years ago is that a company’s customers can now find each other and talk. They can discover and publicize your weaknesses with a speed and depth of commentary that, if they are annoyed, can be astounding and result in significant brand damage.
Great balls of customer service
Way back when I was running technical support for the likes of Novell UK our customers had no way to get connected unless it was at a tradeshow or a local user group meeting and even then it wasn’t a really “close” connection.
Now it’s very different. Users find each other through all sorts of channels and they get connected via e-mail, instant messaging, Twitter, Facebook, Plurk and forums. The result is that your product or service problems are now a public issue and managing your company image and brand requires a lot more effort.
There are several things you absolutely have to do to make sure that you have the greatest opportunity to control this environment rather than have the environment drive you.
1. Make contact: Most products and services ask for registration and you should ensure that you maximize the incentives for users to register and when they do, make sure you persuade them to allow you contact them by e-mail (and test the e-mail connection … there’s little point in going to the trouble of asking them to be engaged and then wind up sending messages in the black hole of a spam filter).
2. Stay in contact: Keep a regular, relevant connection going. Once a month is good, once a week is usually too often, once a quarter is usually too infrequent (your industry mileage may vary). Be concise, be relevant, by engaging. Dry tech messages aren’t engaging. Sales pitches can get annoying. News about internal company matters (for example, photos of the company picnic) are usually naïve and irrelevant. If your product or service allows for it make your communications channel part of the product. That said, do not, under any circumstances ignore the e-mail connection … if the user stops using your product or reconfigures it so your messages aren’t seen for whatever reason e-mail may be your only choice.
3. Mind the market: Social networking is where many of your users will find each other. Use the various services that scan Twitter and Tumblr to look for references to what you do. Search for news about what you do in blogs.
4. Engage the market: Set up a Facebook account and create groups about your product and markets, get a LinkedIn account and connect to your users, get a Twitter account and follow anyone who is your customer, reseller, or in any way relevant to your business.
5. Seek feedback: Actually put yourself out there with the users. Make it so that your users know where to go when they have suggestions, comments, and problems. Set up a GetSatisfaction presence (I’ll discuss this service in the next Web Applications Alert newsletter).
6. Respond: If anyone communicates with you via any of these channels about anything be sure that you respond in a timely fashion and keep it positive, relevant and constructive.
7. Monitor: Measure your markets. How many questions did you get last week? How many people had the same question? How serious were the issues raised? How long did it take you to respond? How happy were the people with your responses? How many product improvement suggestions did you receive?
8. Act: If you don’t take all of the insight that you’ll be gaining about your market and your customers and do something with it (route it to product development, tell sales, inform marketing, etc.) then you will be wasting one of the biggest opportunities for improvement you will ever have.
Here’s the takeaway: None of these rules are hard but they do require diligence, organization and planning. In particular the universe of stuff we call social networking has completely changed the game. As always, you have to either get to grips with the new realities of business or be an also-ran.
If you have any tales of how your technical or customer service has engaged your market and succeeded or failed let me know.
