Posts Tagged: Customer service

News / Social Media Stats — No Comments
9
Jan 12

Do Social Media Postings Always Require A Brand Response?

Not all social media users are convinced that connecting with companies on social sites will be more than a passing fad, according to research from Conversocial, but those that do seem to expect that the connection will be two-way.

The study asked about user attitudes toward companies that left their questions on Facebook and Twitter unanswered; most said they would be at least a little bit angry, including over a quarter who would no longer do business with the company. At the same time, nearly 28% said they understood that companies don’t have time to respond to each consumer.

Brands may run into an even bigger problem, however, if potential customers see others’ questions going unanswered: just 11.7% said they wouldn’t care if they noticed this on a social media page, while the rest would be at least somewhat put off about buying from a company that ignores its customers.

Read more details on this study at emarketer.

Report / Social Media Stats — No Comments
22
Dec 11

How Consumers Are Using Social Media For Customer Support

In less than a decade, social media has delivered a huge amount of change and value for both brands and consumers.

A new study has revealed that while many customers have already used social media for support issues, more than three-quarters would readily embrace these methods if they better understood the tools and options available to them.

The Following Infographic Illustrates Key Findings From This Study:

View the full infographic and more details on this study at mediabistro.

News / Report — No Comments
20
Dec 11

Facebook Introduces Private Messages Between Business Pages and Fans

Facebook has begun introducing a new feature which allows business pages to receive private messages from their fans on the social network.

The new communications option, which has appeared for Asia-based admins only so far —  is a significant introduction that will allow businesses to interact more closely with customers on the service than ever before.

Benefits for consumer facing businesses:

- More personal communication with individual customers, opening the possible of a greater level of customer service on Facebook.

- Likely less off-topic comments on company pages and reduce communication lost when Facebook fans fail to take their comments to customer service channels outside of the social network.

Read more on this new Facebook feature and how it can benefit your business at thenextweb.

Report — No Comments
29
Nov 11

How Blogs Influence Purchases and Recommendations

Bloggers, from hobbyists to professionals, often write about brands, and their growing influence should make brand representatives continually evaluate the relationships they have with these bloggers.

According to the “State of the Blogosphere 2011” report, 38% of all bloggers post about brands that they love or hate and 34% write product or service reviews.

Key Findings which will be of interest to enterprise social media practitioners :

- 68% of bloggers are influenced by other blogs they read.

- Most bloggers have a good relationship with brand representatives. 49% characterized their interactions with such representatives as somewhat or very favorable.

- Of all bloggers, 17% said brand representatives had asked for things that would compromise the credibility or content standards of the blog.

As bloggers continue to grow in influence, their coverage of brands will be of greater interest to companies. Brand representatives who connect with bloggers must be sure to keep the relationships thriving.

Read more on how blogs are influencing purchases and recommendations at emarketer.

Analytics / Report — No Comments
25
Nov 11

Facebook Users Are Slow to ‘Like’ Brands and Retailers

Brands and individuals have shared space on Facebook for some time, blurring the line between social networking and marketing. Both rely on “likes” as a yardstick for popularity, even if their intentions differ.

Branded Facebook pages do not fare as well as other types of content, though, according to a Crowd Science survey. They had the lowest number of “likes” (9% of users) compared to wall posts, photos and comments (16%) and videos (12%).

Most important features for those who ‘Like” Brands:

- Presence of sales and promo codes.

- Customer service aspect of a brand’s Facebook page.

- Those who “like” brands also like sharing experiences, whether positive or negative.

It is not easy for brands to compete with friends and family on Facebook.   Instead, marketers would do better to focus on being there to answer questions, provide customer service support and broadcast promotions.

Read more details on this study at emarketer.

Case Studies — 2 Comments
8
Jun 10

3 Opportunities to use Social Media in the Airline industry – Best Practices from Virgin America, JetBlue and Southwest

Virgin America

A few progressive airlines are quietly using Social Media to re-invent client-facing parts of their businesses. Their success makes them great examples for the rest of the travel industry and big brands at large. A study of social media outreach in the airline industry reveals three major transformative opportunities:

Monitoring Feedback and Issue Resolution

Twitter is proving to be a very efficient way to monitor feedback in real time and resolve customer issues quickly. JetBlue, who is often cited as an example of smart corporate use of Twitter does a terrific job at it. Started as an experiment in the spring of 2007 by Manager of Corporate Communications, Morgan Johnston, their Twitter feed @JetBlue has now over a 1.6 million followers. During its 10th anniversary summit, @JetBlue even created a dedicated hash tag, #jblc10, to push people to voice their feedback.

Southwest learned the need to monitor social conversations in real time the hard way. In February 2010, an incident involving movie director Kevin Smith and the Airline almost turned into a PR debacle for the brand. Thankfully, Southwest, an early adopter of social media (July 2007) was ready to respond quickly and personally to the incident, using twitter to make public amends. Today @southwestair has over a million followers.


Obviously, waiting for an unhappy customer to ‘call’ customer service makes it unacceptably late in the new real time world.

Increasing Branding and Brand Loyalty

Engaging customers using Social Media networks are a great way for airlines to build brand experiences outside of the actual flight. One brand that does an outstanding job of building brand loyalty via personalized conversations on Facebook and Twitter is Virgin America. @virginamerica has almost 80,000 followers on Twitter and about 60,000 fans on Facebook. This week, Virgin America’s Facebook page featured the story of a couple who first met on a Virgin America flight and got engaged this week at the airport in front of the baggage carousel. These types of posts are usually interspersed news and announcements effectively humanizing the entire communications stream. Virgin America has earned a lot of good press for extending their customer-focused, tech-savvy and fun branding on to the web using social media. Twitter even selected them as one of the first brands to roll out their paid ‘sponsored tweets’ program.

Direct Marketing

It should surprise no-one that airlines are capitalizing on customer engagement goodwill to sell tickets. JetBlue has a separate twitter feed, @jetbluecheeps, to post deals (typically on Mondays) giving “the already spontaneous audience of Twitter users a chance to grab great last-minute fares”. @jetbluecheeps has over 78,000 followers. Virgin America and SouthWest broadcasts deals on their main feeds, effectively merging sales with customer stories, service and corporate communications. Occasionally these airlines run contests to stimulate growth and engagement, say 50% off the ticket for the next 50 Twitter followers. As with other channels on the web, actual ROI in dollars can be measured by embedding web analytics tags into outbound message links.

It will be interesting to see how the recent Passenger Bills of Rights affects airlines’ use of social media. David Martin, CEO of the social networking site Kontain.com probably articulated it best as quoted in a CNN article “You can’t just write in a complaint or call customer service anymore… social media, it’s the only weapon,” he said. “Airlines need to be more terrified of that than the actual bill, because they’re going to have to compensate passengers anyway each time they get held up on the tarmac, but they’re also going to lose passengers because their brand will be destroyed every time a passenger uses social media.”