Here at Dachis Group we frequently field requests from current and potential clients on how best to establish and implement a social servicing process. It’s really not that surprising. Widely publicized successes like ComcastCares combined with fiascos like Dave Carrol’s “United Breaks Guitars” have forcibly made companies understand the value of a rock-solid social servicing process. What is surprising to me is how infrequently the conversation turns to wringing additional incremental sales out of social media by focusing on social handraisers.
Social handraisers are those individuals that like to hop onto their social media platform of choice and ask the world (or more accurately their friends) stuff like:
- “McDonalds or Wendys??” – @ DuhMonster
- “which one is better a dell laptop or a mac laptop?” – @ rrking08
- “iPhone 4 or Blackberry Torch? Hrmm…” – @ debonair247
It feels like many brands stay away from social handraisers for two main reasons. First they have a (very reasonable) fear of being ‘creepy’ and alienating potential customers. Second, they lack a process for actually doing something with the handraiser once they’ve got them.
This sense of fear and lack of preparedness is, in part, what pushes brands to experiment with services like FourSquare. Location-based checkins let brands identify potential customers and hit them with a meaningful offer at a moment when their purchase intent is relatively clear. This is timely, straightforward and blessedly non-creepy. Nonetheless, despite the value in low-creepiness approaches like location-based offers, I still have this nagging feeling that brands are leaving money on the table.
It seems to me that it is possible to aggressively court social handraisers without being ‘that weird guy in the corner of the bar’ you just need to be tactful about it. Here are a few suggestions:
- Set expectations around service and fulfillment - This doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to have a full-blown social sales team in place. What it does mean is that any channel in which you are placing an offer needs to have the people, process and technology to actually fulfill your promises and address complaints if they can’t. My colleague Tom Cummings’ post on Social Media Middlemen may be a good place to start.
- Rebuild your lexicons - If you are like most brands you’ve built up your social media monitoring strategy around listening for crises and major service issues. There is nothing wrong with that, but if you are going to assess the value of a social handraiser strategy, then you need a comprehensive picture of what your opportunity looks like. Plus, that information needs to be reviewed, captured, and filtered in much closer to real-time than you’ve probably done before. It’s unlikely that your crisis avoidance and servicing lexicon is going to do the job in this case. Kate Niederhoffer’s recent blog post about biases in your lexicon might be an interesting place to start.
- Experiment in your own spaces - This one may be obvious, but it is WAY less creepy to reach out to someone that pops up on your Facebook page with a product question than it is to hop into the middle of a conversation on Twitter.
Hopefully, these thoughts will spur a few of your own – What do you think? What are you doing to court your handraisers?
Photo attribution: Jeff Wright on Flickr
I replied to a friend’s handraising tweet this week about a bad experience we had with our old Samsung refrigerator. I felt it was creepy when Samsung sent me a customer service direct message tweet in reply. The fact is, I was just voicing an opinion and not asking for help with a fridge (that was so lousy we got rid of it over a year ago).
Hi Jonathan,
Thanks for your comment. I completely understand your feelings about the interaction with Samsung. I have two questions that come to mind based on your comment.
First, was it evident in your tweet that you’d long since gotten rid of the faulty refrigerator? If so, this may have been a breakdown in Samsung’s social servicing policy (meaning that they should have just left you alone).
Second, now that you know Samsung services aggressively on Twitter do you think if your Samsung phone or television broke you would now turn to Twitter for service?
I’m just wondering if this exposure will change your behavior in the future.
Thanks again for stopping by!
- Brian
Brian:
Well, you read my mind because I *almost* mentioned that the problem is in a tweet there simply aren’t enough characters to elaborate on anything — either the problem (on my part) or the solution (on the part of the manufacturer). Our experience with “customer service” regarding our fridge was laughably awful. Long story short, the company did not have one single authorized repair person in the ENTIRE San Francisco Bay Area who could come look at our fridge. Four million residents, and not one contractor?
Also, this happened on a weekend near Christmas and their service center numbers (NOT toll free, by the way) were all closed– took us days to get through.
We finally found an independent repairman who said he could fix it if we could get the part. Which, of course, Samsung would not sell to us (we finally got it on e-bay, of all places).
So I’d say, no, I would never buy a Samsung ANYTHING ever again for the rest of my life. The fact that their corporate offices have tools to monitor Twitter tells me it’s a marketing/PR concern for them, but not a customer service oriented thing.
-Jonathan
Jonathan,
I can’t speak specifically about Samsung here since I don’t know much about their servicing processes, but that really does sound like a mess.
In regards to the length issue with tweets – we generally advise companies to handle outreach via the social medium, but to escalate the conversation to live chat, phone or e-mail as soon as possible. This is due to the length constraints you mention, but more importantly for ensuring quality of service and security.
Your final point (regarding marketing) is an interesting one to me because we’ve encountered it as a bit of a sticking point with clients in the past. The question being – who should own servicing? The marketing department that ‘owns’ the channel or the servicing department that ‘owns’ the traditional process?
There are a lot of models for distributing responsibility for social servicing, but one approach is to forge a partnership between the two groups (usually using a Social Business Unit-type body which my colleague Dion Hinchcliffe covered in a blog post earlier this week). In the end, if things work out correctly social servicing can function just fine as a joint venture between Marketing and Customer Service. Marketing can sniff out problems and Customer Service can fix them.
Thanks again for your comments. They definitely got me thinking.
Best,
Brian
p.s. I agree with your blog post on In The Loop… a lot of times the easiest thing is just to make better products that don’t break.