Monday, 1 August 2011

Social Media Marketing and Customer Service – an Interesting Intersection

There is a lot said about social media, from a personal or truly ‘social’ perspective (or anti-social if you ask some parents of teenagers) through to the organisation gain delivered through harnessing it. I feel like I am fairly across the social aspect of social media but when it comes to how it applies in a business sense I am less clear.  Social media is a really intriguing area of marketing, I see great potential gain and also recognise the potential damage to brand reputation it can bring about. At least for now it is an area, as marketers, we cannot ignore.
In the August edition of Marketing (marketingmag.com.au), Brendan Lawley shares his perspective of social media – determining it to the “the new basic customer service”. I wanted to pick up on this point as it interested me. I’ve heard a lot about organisations like Westpac being absolute dynamite on responding to customer issues that crop up through social media. Optus use Twitter as a means for customers to raise issues and seek support – this is a really interesting application of the technology and presents some real business gain – for example, if Optus customers are communicating via Twitter there could be a potential reduction of staff in call centres and in retail stores, as well as the deeper customer connection which is harder to value. So, I wanted to share my two recent interactions via Twitter as part of this view.
I recently had a great customer experience at a Commonwealth Bank branch. Having an interest in how businesses are using social media I decided to tweet something about my experience and included CBA in tweet so that it would be picked up in any social listening they were doing. I was expecting a thank you or acknowledgement of my positive comments – and I got nothing.
I also recently objected to the use of an offensive term used in a Channel 31 program. As another test I also tweeted, making it clear I didn’t appreciate the use of this word. And again, I got nothing. To add to this I recently saw an ad on Channel 31 encouraging viewers to get in touch via Twitter or Facebook and share their thoughts; I am hoping that they have a new social media team ready to go and respond to comments subsequent to mine.
I guess we will continue to watch this space.

3 comments:

  1. Welcome to the blogosphere, Amity. An interesting issue you've raised.

    I'm not convinced that it's a good idea for companies to actively encourage customers to complain via open, public social media channels. Sure, use these channels to actively listen and respond to conversations already taking place, but why ask dissatisfied customers to share their problems with the world?

    Secondly, how thoroughly is the company listening? Do they follow every combination of their brand name that customers may use (e.g. CBA, Commonwealth, commbank, netbank, "which bank", etc... the list goes on!). If they set expectations that they will respond through these channels, then they ignore some of the questions and comments that are posted, how do customers then feel about the brand?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Great blog Amity.
    Your examples are really good. It's interesting how some companies such as telstra really uses SM and some not at all. If I was working at CBA (provided I picked up on your tweet) I would have posted something to thank you, further emphasising the fact that you were really satisfied with your service.
    I'm with Wags, if you are going to promote customers to use SM to communicate with you, you need to answer every message, and have some really strong contingencies in place for those really bad messages.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Interesting post, Amity. I've put the link of your blog post in my blog, hope you dont mind!

    ReplyDelete