People Talk. You Should Listen

Below is my second article for The Danish Communication Association, this time about social media and customer service. Enjoy!

People are talking. You must be there to listen.

Social media has pushed customer service from being something that used to involve a two-hour phone call at your expense, to something that is an intrinsic part of an organisations marketing and communication. 

As I mentioned in my last article, intangibles have become the new currency. Choice and cost are no longer as pivotal in decision making as they once were, and as a result, organisations must now focus on these intangible methods, such as customer loyalty and reputation, in order to stand out from the crowd.

A good reputation is an extremely valuable asset – maybe even more valuable of tangible or physical assets – yet it is also uncontrollable. Reputations are bestowed on us – on organisations – by society in an intrinsic effort of self-preservation, and are built on and destroyed by consumers’ conversations – conversations that are going on every minute of every hour of every day on social media.

Just a phase?

So when I read Social Semantic’s latest report on social media use in Danish businesses I was flabbergasted to find out that just 9% use social media for service and support. If 40% believe that social media can increase customer loyalty and sales, and if 87% of management believes that social media can be used to create a positive reputation, then what better way to increase loyalty and create a positive reputation than via social media?

Apparently 12% of Danish businesses still see social media as a one-day wonder, and 21% haven’t carried out any kind of social media search for their own organisation as they don’t deem it to be important. Words can not express my incredulity at these figures. In the 1990s, interactive marketing and design agency Razorfish started with the simple premise of everything that can be digital, will be. Today, this has changed to everything that can be social, will be. It’s really very hard to overemphasize this statement. With 2.6 million Danes on Facebook (according to the report), and about 28,000 Danes on Twitter, all of whom are talking about brands and organisations, making and breaking reputations, it’s nigh on impossible to understand the opinions of those 12 and 21 percent.

Fullrate break the mould

Earlier this year, I had an experience with what I considered to be outstanding customer service from a Danish company, Fullrate. My internet connection kept cutting out, and one evening I tweeted, ‘Getting really sick and tired of #Fullrate. Massive complaint email coming soon.’ The next day, I received this email;

Once over my shock, I answered, and within hours the problem was solved (faulty router, new one on the way). I posted a screen dump of the email on Facebook, where it was picked up by a journalist, and before you can say customer service, Fullrate were being accused of breaching my privacy and being ‘big-brothery’. My Twitter profile is set to public precisely because (amongst other reasons), I hope that brands and organisations will be carrying out searches and will hear me. While others might have been put off by receiving such an unsolicited email, I was positively overwhelmed. My email address can easily be found online, and how different is it to a letter in my letterbox?

Berlingske, B.T, Klean, and of course Fullrate were among those which covered the story (with varying levels of sensationalism), and I’m happy to say that Fullrate emerged unscathed – and with a new loyal customer. B.T’s headline of ‘Beware of companies monitoring your moaning on Facebook’ (link is the same as the other BT one so wasn’t sure if I needed it?) might have been intended to worry people, yet for me – and many, many others – it simply confirmed what I had hoped was true in the first place; that companies were monitoring social media.

A Danish mindset?

What worried me the most about the whole episode was that other Danish businesses might have been put off by the initial reaction, the melodramatic shock and disbelief that organisations are using social media as a research tool. There’s always a first, and as is so often the case, the first tends to be received warily. But what about abroad? The internet is positively packed full of cases;Easyjet on Twitter, Air Asia on Facebook, Twelpforce Best Buy on Twitter, and let’s not forget KLM, Lufthansa and Eyjafjallajokull – Google ‘social media and customer service’ and take a look.

Act now

While 93% expect to invest in social media in the next one to two years, I believe that that is far too long. Invest now. It doesn’t have to cost a penny. I know I speak for many when I say that I hope many more Danish businesses will follow Fullrate’s example and use social media as a channel through which they can deliver efficient and effective customer service. It doesn’t have to be a whole dedicated channel – just use the search functions available. Search in Facebook, check pages, groups, and posts by everyone. There might be blog posts, Tweets, or comments that can give feedback.

 

You don’t even need a profile to search on Twitter – just use the search box.

Overskrift.dk allows search in Danish blogs, Twitter feeds, tags, content etc, providing a wealth of information for any organisation.

 

Google blog search, Social Mention, Addict-o-matic – there are a lot of free tools available for keeping track of what is being said, and there’s a lot being said. It’s not a breach of privacy. If someone hasn’t set their profile to private, then it’s public knowledge.

In short; if something is found; act. Make contact, no matter if it’s a compliment or complaint. Companies have to monitor social media, just as they monitor traditional media. People want to be heard, they want their voice to be acknowledge, and just sitting back and thinking that this social media lark is just a fad is not going to help you.

P.S. Fullrate actually have an advert in the report; 'Social networks demand good relations. For us, social media are a natural part of our customer service, and are essential for the future to make sure we have the happiest broadband customers.' I can vouch for that.

P.P.S. I do not work for Fullrate.

I Shop Online, Therefore I Am

This post is a copy of an article I wrote for The Danish Communications Association (Dansk Kommunikationsforening) this month. I'll be doing two a month over the next year and thought I would also share them here. The original link follows the post.

This article is based on my MA thesis (Digimodernism; the Future is Now!), and takes a quick look at the new paradigm of digimodermism, and what this means to communications. Hopefully it makes some sense. 

I shop, therefore I am I shop online, therefore I am

Postmodernism is dead. At least in the traditional sense. Society has been pushed into a new paradigm, a paradigm that author Alan Kirby calls digimodernism. Of course, as with modernism, postmodernism will never truly will be dead but it is impossible to deny the fact that society has undergone revolutionary changes, changes which can be attributed almost wholly to the internet. The world has changed, and theory must change with it.

One of my all-time favourite faux-pas is that of Clifford Stoll in a Newsweek article from 1995, entitled, ‘The Internet? Bah!’ In it, Clifford discusses how the internet is nothing but ‘techno-burble’, and how his local mall does more business in one afternoon than the entire internet does in a month. Needless to say, Clifford was wrong, but the he could be forgiven for his thought – the internet of 1995 was hardly the internet we know and love today. Yet in the same year postmodernism was in its heyday. This is the paradigm that ‘produced’ consumerism, which in turn, produced ‘us’; the postmodern consumer – restless, fragmented and fickle. Postmodernity is consumerism, and consumerism is postmodernity – do remember, though, that this was all before Amazon.com existed. Before email, before Facebook, before Twitter, before any kind of social media existed. If we were the postmodern consumer in 1995 before all of this, can we really be the same postmodern consumer today?

Society today still resembles postmodern society of 1995 in many ways, but what has changed, monumentally so, is technology – specifically, the internet and our use of it. It has infiltrated our lives, democratising information and paving the way for social media, which in turn have thrown open the doors to instant, global communication fundamentally changing the way we live.

Consumers have never had so much authority. The balance of power between brand and consumer has been levelled to a point where it can quite easily be argued that the consumer is an integral part of the marketing mix. In postmodernism you read, watched and listened. Now, we click, surf, and download. We are active, demanding, experience seeking, and channel-hopping. Media have become so entwined with life, physically interacting with it (think of QR codes, SMS X-Factor voting etc) it’s hard to see where we end and our media begin. We are no longer a society of the spectacle – we participate. Constantly.

This changes marketing and communication immeasurably. Consumers demand to be, and need to be, engaged. Examples of interactive communication abound – the ‘Hunter shoots a bear’ YouTube video, or the ‘Choose a different ending’ anti-knife crime video from the Met Police. Closer to home there was the Swedish ‘Hero’ television license campaign, and the controversial ‘Hit the bitch’ campaign. Each example is incomplete until the view interacts with it. We produce the communication. QR codes are another excellent example; they provide the means through which we can access further information but only as a consequence of direct action on our behalf.

While this kind of communication can be entertaining and while we might pass it on to our friends, they aren’t always optimal. One thing is providing an entertaining viral video, another thing is making the consumer work for a marketing message (a message which might very well be lost in the ‘fun’ of the video or advert). QR codes ultimately require work from the consumer, work which all too often only ends with a marketing message of some kind.

What must be remembered is that in this digimodern market, intangibles such as trust, loyalty, and relationships are being catapulted into the spotlight. Marketing must shift from a ‘market to’ philosophy, to a ‘market with’ philosophy, making the consumer and whole supply chain collaborators in the production and marketing processes. It’s probably the biggest shift yet in the history of business.

‘Marketing with’ doesn’t simply mean creating interactive, incomplete videos or adverts, it means being on the same level as consumers. Meeting them on their turf and finding out what they want. Social media presents the greatest opportunity yet for this to happen, so why the reluctance? The recently published report by Social Semantics, The Social Media Factbook, showed that use of social media in Danish businesses is finally at a tipping point. More and more businesses appear eager to acknowledge the fact that society – Danish society – has changed, and that if they want to keep their fans, their customers, and their clients, it has to in ways that create intangible value, through channels and times they ultimately can’t decide.

While postmoderism created the rebelling consumer, wise to the antics of advertising and unwilling to entertain, a digimodern consumer is one who is wise, but eager to talk, to listen, to share, and to collaborate. The digimodern consumer is ready and waiting, there has never been a better time to reach out. 

Original aritle - I shop online, therefore I am

Update on 2011-04-17 05:38 by Lara Mulady

I think I should have named this 'I am online, therefore I am.' Just wanted to say. 

IDEmøbler

I don't want this blog to turn into some kind of rant about my experiences with bad customer service, but it's something that really gets under my skin for a number of reasons. Today, it's IDEmøbler.

I know there are those people who just don't give a shit about their jobs or the company they work for which is unavoidable, granted. Then there are those who do love their company, perhaps it's their own, and therefore (you'd think) have every want to be nice to their customers to keep them satisfied but for some odd reason, they just don't seem to care. There's also a group who are just lazy, and won't believe what you tell them, and will refuse to seek assistance from someone who might know more, a colleague, for example. 

I think I got one of the latter when I wrote to IDEmøbler to ask them about a table I wanted to buy. 

We had seen this table online, and it was everything we wanted. Big, wooden, chunky, and the kind of table you can chop on, spill stuff on, and prepare food on and it would all just add to the character.

Lovely. So off we went to IDEmøbler to see it. This is what we found;

In my eyes, these are two different tables. If I ordered the first, and recieved the second, I'd complain. It's much, much darker than the first. So, I emailed IDEmøbler and asked if each table was totally unique, as they were made from recycled wood (which it says on one of the signs on the table, and IDEmøbler pointed out to me via email). 

Alsa, IDEmøbler didn't seem to understand. They said they couldn't guarantee what the table would look like. Ah, I replied, so that means that each table is unique. No, they said, it is as on the IDEmøbler website. Hmmm. But what about the photo from in the shop? They told me I could make the table lighter by using polish. Seriously? 

I find it hard to believe that there was no one at IDEmøbler who could have told me, truthfully and honestly, that the picture on the website was misleading. I told them as much, and said that if I ordered the table from the site, and the one from instore arrived, I would not be happy. Then suddenly all email communication stopped. I popped by the shop the other day and asked a nice man in there about it. He said that the one in store is how they look. How they all look. They're all the same. I told him about the website and he said he'd look at it. I don't think he will though.

I don't want to come off as a bitter 30-something, but why put a picture on your site that is a completely different colour of what you'd send to the customer? These things just don't make sense in my head.