Want to lend a hand? A few years back I authored a book entitled “Perfect Phrases for Customer Service, which was published by McGraw-Hill. It’s now time to do a second edition, and one of the additions will be on social media/networking and customer service.
The book itself is oriented towards practical ways to use, and communicate to customers, and/or prevent doing things that will upset customers. It’s very specific, down to things you can say, and it’s more the type of book people reference rather than read through, although it has enough meat to read straight through.
Anyway, I’m looking for examples, case studies, guides, books, ideas, and anything else that I can integrate and synthesize to fit the format and content of the book. I’m learning rapidly, but I’d love to hear from others on the use of social media and customer service.
Please leave comments with links, ideas, what ever you have. If you provide really good stuff, I can probably acknowledge any significant contributions in the acknowledgment section.
Over the past few years, so much has changed about the way companies sell to, communicate with, market to, and maintain relations with their customers that comparing effectiveness of both media and message content is very little more than an academic exercise. These are not fleeting trends but fundamental and long-term realities.
Today, marketers must be aware that customers are so inundated and overwhelmed with messages, impressions and the availability of product and service information that they’ve gone, in large measure, to alternative, informal and less traditional methods of helping them decide what and where to buy. At the heart of seeking sources for decision input is trust.
This is an era where spam, pop-up ads, telemarketing and other types of targeted advertising and marketing communication, indeed most long-standing forms of electronic and print messaging and promotion, receive low trust and believability scores in survey after survey of customers. Beyond permission email, supplier and brand web sites and the like, customer trust is consistently highest for word-of-mouth. How high? More than 90 percent of consumers, as identified in a 2004 Forrester study, said they trust word-of mouth, compared to less than half of that for most other forms of advertising and communication.
While the aggregate value of print and electronic advertising as a decision-making influence has remained about the same since 1977, word-of-mouth has doubled in leveraging power to the point where it is the dominant communication device in our society. Through our studies, we have learned that more than 90 percent of customers identify word-of-mouth as the best, most reliable and relevant source of ideas and information about products and services. This is about the same percentage who find it the most trustworthy and objective source.
Strategy and tactics
As a result, no matter how well suppliers believe they understand their customers’ needs and their behaviors on an individual basis, they must have both a strategy and array of tactics which will help customers create influence and personal leverage, peer-to-peer and situation-by-situation. This is truly customer divisibility–the management of customers by transaction and venue, as well as longitudinally–in its purest form
What this means as an end goal is creation of active advocacy, a state of elective, personal, often deep-rooted and emotional engagement between a customer and supplier that goes beyond satisfaction, beyond delight, beyond loyalty and even beyond commitment. Advocacy represents the highest level of customer involvement achievable; interaction with suppliers on an individual and emotional level well past the typical functional, passive relationship between supplier and customer; and having them proactively and voluntarily convey their experiences to friends, relatives and colleagues.
Advocacy is not merely a different spin on gaining insight about customer purchase, referral and communication behavior. Arguably, because the name of the game is value optimization, learning about how customers perceive suppliers, brands, products or services and then having them carry their experiences and consideration forward as active advocates is, or will become, the only way to think about them.
What are the specific benefits to sales, marketing, and customer service associated with understanding and leveraging customer advocacy? There are several, and all are vital:
• It helps companies identify how emerging trends, image, service performance and reputation relative to competitors, problems and complaints; response to new product or service ideas; and even rumors and back-fence Internet gossip can affect customer behavior.
• It is a means to understand and address the strength of the customer franchise and how this will differ by segment within the base. In a word – but a critically important word to all marketers – advocacy monetizes.
• It helps companies determine the amount of momentum behind the franchise and if competitors are undermining it.
• It identifies exactly why and how these perceptions have developed so that companies can act, both tactically and strategically.
How and why does advocacy differ so substantially from customer satisfaction or loyalty? Satisfied, unconnected customers exhibit little or no loyalty behavior toward a particular brand or product, and therefore, they make predominantly functional and rational rather than emotional purchases. They tend to have a fairly benign, transitory, or passive relationship with the supplier. An example of this may be a customer buying Corn Flakes one week, enjoying them and buying a different cereal the next week.
Positive customers, at the high end of satisfaction, are somewhat more active, but they still have just a shallow and commodity-oriented relationship with their supplier. While they are fairly happy with the product or service that they receive, it is still almost completely on a functional basis, focusing on the tangible aspects of value. Going higher up the scale, engaged customers are somewhat more loyal, with regular patronage behavior and even demonstrating willingness to be cross-sold and upsold; but they still have a rather passive relationship with a supplier. An example of an engaged customer is one who buys a Sony television set or Kenmore refrigerator every few years but doesn’t have the type of emotional bond with Sony or Kenmore that would result in positively talking to others about the brands, unless prompted.
Active advocates are fully engaged and committed, with an emotional connection well beyond the typical relationship of customer and supplier. They are the customers with the highest level of involvement–active, vocal and proud. These are the crème de la crème: the people who “live” the brands that they regularly use. Their lifestyle often mirrors that offered by the brand, and they are active in talking about their experiences.
H.O.G. wild
Owners of Harley-Davidson motorcycles who are members of the H.O.G. (Harley Owners Group) clubs around the world, for example, are very visible advocates for the brand. They not only buy the motorcycles, but also they actively accessorize with Harley-Davidson equipment for their choppers, wear a vast array of Harley-Davidson clothing and enthusiastically participate in Harley-Davidson events. Starting with fewer than 50 members in 1983, H.O.G. has grown to more than 800,000 members, more than half of whom attend at least one Harley-Davidson event per year.
How important is advocacy to the company? Harley-Davidson does almost no advertising, depending instead upon its community of advocates to purchase both motorcycles and logo gear–and spread the word to others. Customer advocacy has an impact on virtually every area of company activity. As John Russell, managing director of Harley-Davidson Europe, has said: “If it is important to the customer, if it’s a good insight, if it’s a good point of understanding and connection to the customer, it makes its way into business processes and becomes part of what we do.”
Beyond operational impact, the direct financial return for creating active advocates is both real and substantial. The following data shows comparisons of behavior over time of customers who gave high ratings on typical satisfaction and recommendation likelihood questions. The top line is the actual performance of consumers who were identified, using a proprietary series of questions and model, as active brand advocates.
What’s abundantly clear is that, compared to customers who were highly satisfied or even highly likely to recommend (as those who promote this metric as the single number that can be used to understand the drivers of growth), those who were active brand advocates used products more recently, more frequently and with higher share of spend than either of those two groups of customers. Once again, advocacy monetizes. Moreover, even though word-of-mouth is very much in an embryonic stage of sophistication as an actively utilized marketing and communication tool, active advocates were higher on this measure.
Word-of-mouth endorsement and positive communication about interactions are key results of good customer management. Deeply connected customers will tell others about their positive experiences, so customer management is there to facilitate this process, and provide continuity, by utilizing new and more effective marketing techniques that create awareness, proactive peer-to-peer communication and endorsement and even “buzz.” However, customer advocacy, by our definition at Harris Interactive, is much more than simply word of mouth. Advocacy is the fusion of understanding customer needs; interpreting value perceptions, motivations and consumer behaviors; and then leveraging the customer’s emotional relationship with the supplier.
Going forward, having the tools to address and treat customers on a divisible basis in the traditional ways probably will not be enough to assure competitive superiority. It will take active customer advocacy. Advocacy incorporates every link along the relationship chain between suppliers and their customers–from the employees connecting with customers at each touch-point, to the touch processes themselves (both messaging and individual experience), the corporate structure and culture and even the way intermediate and senior management considers customers. The percentage of customers who are active brand or supplier advocates will become the new, and most sustainable and reliable, standard for success, guiding all customer-related activities.