Last week I keynoted the Virtual Community Summit 2012. In my talk I shared how most companies are failing to live up to the consumer expectations around customer service in social media - and how community managers play an important role in fixing this, by helping to bridge the gap between marketing and customer service teams. The video and slides are embedded below.
This evening, I spoke at the Social Media Week London event on social analytics. Thank you to everyone who attended for your questions and thoughts! I shared some of the key things companies need to be tracking in order to deliver great customer service through social channels. The slides from my talk are embedded below.
We hosted a webinar last week showing what social customer service is, why it's important, and how Conversocial helps to manage it better.
I covered some of the research we've condcuted (available on our resources page), and then went on to show how Conversocial's visibility, priority and proactive features help to deal with the problems uncovered by this research.
For anyone who missed the live webinar, here's a full recording.
I'll be giving a webinar every month; the next will be in March. If you have any suggestions of what you'd like to cover, it would be great to hear them!
Last night we hosted a meetup for people in London learning to code on Codecademy - an online platform that teaches you how to code. It was pretty awesome.
About 20 keen coders-to-be turned up, brandishing laptops and snacks from Tesco. We herded them into our jazz cafe (our little eating/meeting area), where there were two or three "quiet" tables for people getting with collaboratively working on Codecademy exercises. A bunch of other people were then by the sofa standing/sitting and generally chilling out, getting their geek on with some awesome banter on JavaScript, computers, startups and more! A big shout out to Gareth, one of our developers, who helped people out with their code, and generally making people feel welcome! Here's a picture of him listening to what one of the chaps had to say.
The range of people was pretty wide - we had all sorts turning up to learn how to code. Not only was the age variety colourful, but the professions they had was very flavourful too- ranging from banking and lawyering to being students! And of course, there was a Customer Happiness Manager in the mix :)
We're very proud to be supporting people learning how to code in London, it's such a valuable skill to have, and definitely the way of the future!
Fans and followers are engaging with your brand in their thousands, and leaving a trail of feedback in your social space. But how can you mine this mass of information and put it to good use?
Customer insight from social media has been established as valuable to businesses: in 2010 a survey reported that 85% of businesses saw customer insight as the best potential advantage of using social media.
“Social media really offers the eye onto what people are really thinking”
Mark Blayney Stuart, Head of Research at the Chartered Institute of Marketing
Feedback from social conversations can benefit your whole business and two departments in particular are set to gain from using this data: Customer Service and Marketing. For Customer Service, understanding recurrent issues can help speed up the work of customer service agents: solutions and responses can be organised ahead of time, and any significant problems can be reported back to the company. Social media also provides an organic source of market research. Unlike traditional methods, customers report back on successful products and marketing strategies unprompted. Mark Blayney Stuart, head of research at the Chartered Institute of Marketing describes social media as offering unprecedented opportunities for accurate market research.
So the opportunity to benefit from this source of customer feedback is huge, but most companies are letting the information slip through their fingers: only 6% of companies are actually using social media to collect customer feedback, according to a survey last year by Market Tools.
The main reason for brands ignoring this insight is that when it comes to trawling the mass of responses and comments on social platforms, most companies don’t know where to start. The valuable pieces of customer insight are hidden in a huge volume of data. There’s no way to get to the heart of your customers’ behaviour without a tool to help you get organised.
A great way to overcome the information overload is to sort your feedback as you deal with incoming messages; Conversocial users have an easy solution. Adding tags to comments and tweets provides a quick and painless way of sorting feedback into more digestible groups. You can set up tags that are appropriate for your company’s needs; be these areas of complaints, reactions to a particular product or service, or insight into future requests. Each team member who has something to learn from this data mine can then analyse relevant feedback, and start to do something about it.
If you’d like to know more about how Conversocial how could help you leave the 94% behind and start learning about your social customers, get in touch!
