When negative issues spiral out of control in social media it can have devastating effects. Bad news can spread like a virus to thousands or even millions of people in minutes. Some crises may be caused by problems within your control; others you can't do anything to help directly. What can you do to avoid, or failing that, manage social media disasters?
It’s a problem that affects the bottom line; social media crises can have a real affect on your share price. As reported in the McKinsey article Demystifying Social Media, last year a hoax photograph was posted online, claiming that McDonald’s was charging African-Americans an additional service fee. After appearing on Twitter, the image went viral just before the weekend, re-tweeted and shared thousands of times. On Saturday, the company’s director of social media released a statement through Twitter declaring the photograph to be a hoax. The social media team asked key influencers to let their followers know about the hoax and continued to reinforce that message over the weekend. They even responded personally to many individual Tweeters. By the end of the weekend, they'd quashed the rumour, and on the follwing Monday McDonald’s stock price rose 5 percent.
Last week, Conversocial sponsored the Social Media for Customer Service Summit in London. I chaired a session with Catharine van Dijk, Social Media Manager at KLM, who spoke about avoiding social media crises. I'm sure you remember the volcanic ashcloud that disrupted flights across Europe in April 2010. KLM will never forget it. A few months before, they had tentatively launched a Facebook page and Twitter account. When the volcano struck, their phonelines were clogged, and their website started crashing under the weight of so many desperate passengers looking for help.
To KLM's surprise, their customers moved to social media to get help. They didn’t want to let them down, and managed to put together an emergency response team with 150 volunteers – from senior managers to runway workers – who worked around the clock for 48 hours to give passengers all the help they needed straight over Facebook and Twitter. They weren’t just giving information – they were even able to rebook flights.
These efforts paid off. KLM helped thousands and thousands of customers directly through social media, keeping customers happy and maintaining brand loyalty in what could otherwise have been a disastrous episode for the company.
This close shave proved the value of social media to KLM’s management. They went on to set up a cross-functional social media hub, with staff from communications, marketing and customer service. The social customer service team provides help to customers over Facebook and Twitter twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.
KLM’s social media team has defined which issues customer service agents can deal with day to day, and which could potentially escalate to become a widespread problem. These messages are escalated to 'issue managers' who can deal with higher-level problems and ensure the company response is appropriate. If a frequent flyer is tweeting about bad service, for example, they will shift gears to ensure the real problems are resolved (e.g. speaking to the first class lounge manager to get the problem fixed), and then show how they're helping in public responses.
For emergency issues (ash clouds, plane crashes etc) the social team goes into listening mode – nothing is posted to social networks until they have a full understanding of the situation. They've prepared for some specific scenarios, but can't predict everything When an emergency hits, KLM's social media manager has a direct line to the executive team, to feed back what they're hearing in social and to formulate the company response as quickly as possible.
These stories show the importance of around the clock social media monitoring and engagement. Having a trained, dedicated social media team (with real customer service agents) monitoring and responding to customers openly and honestly, 24/7, with the ability to communicate directly to PR and comms teams, will ensure that issues are spotted and resolved before they get out of control. Your customers don't stop just because your agents have clocked off - and with their issues being shared and talked about publicly, the risk of not responding is higher than ever before.
By responding to customer issues on Facebook from a fake profile account (or staff personal accounts) you are putting your customers at risk and making great social customer service harder.
When you respond to a question on Facebook, the response is 'from the brand' rather than from an individual agent. Some companies, concerned by the corporate nature of this, have responded by setting up fake profile accounts (e.g. Holly at BrandName) which respond to questions on the Facebook wall. Their agents share log-ins for the personal account in order to respond. Others have their agents respond directly to customers with their own real, personal profiles. In this post I'll outline the risks, and show why you should always respond as the page your customer is talking to.
Putting your customers at risk of criminal activity
In minutes, anyone could set up another fake account with the same name and profile picture as the personal profile you responded as (including saying that they're working at your company) - and your customer has no way at all of telling it apart from the real thing. When you respond as a page, the user can hover over the name or picture and see it's genuine; or verify by clicking, and seeing they're on the same page. This is impossible with a personal account; there's no way of telling your real one from a criminal fake one. When a customer writes an issue on your wall, a criminal could easily message them with a fake account that looks exactly like your real one, asking for personal details. You're opening yourself up to a big risk, and an even bigger one for your customers.
Fake profile accounts are against Facebook's Terms of Service
By setting up these accounts, you are breaching Facebook's ToS, which explcitly prohibit profiles which are not real individuals. They have multiple systems designed to find and shut down these accounts. If this happens, not only have you lost the face of your Facebook customer service, but you will also lose all of your private messages with customers - some half way through being helped. Facebook won't help you retrieve these or re-activate your account, as you are in complete breach of both their terms and their recommendations.
No audit trail
With a page, you can use software like Conversocial to control access and ensure you have a full audit trail of all employee actions. This is not possible with a personal account, putting you at risk of bad employee behaviour - or even of employee mistakes, with no way of knowing what happened.
Private messages for brands are only from the page
With the launch of Messages in the new Timeline, customers can private message you. But you can only respond as the brand. If you then respond to their public comments with another account, you're not only confusing your customer - but it makes it impossible for software like Conversocial to provide a full conversation history, which we can do if you respond only from the page.
Customers expect you to respond as the page
Millions of people are interacting with brands every day on Facebook. And the vast, vast majority of the brands are responding as their pages. It's what Facebook users are used to, and all the leaders in social customer service follow this best practice. This doesn't mean you can't make your posts more human - a common practice is the finish the end of posts with the name of the agent who responded, so customers know the name of the agent they're dealing with.
There are many benefits to responding to customers as the page - on the other hand, responding with personal or fake accounts makes great customer service in Facebook more difficult, and puts your customers at serious risk. We strongly recommend to all of our customers to stick to best practice and focus on how to deliver the best possible service without using personal accounts.
Who’s Keeping Up with Twitter? A Study of the Customer Service Performance of Major US Retailers and their Customers’ Expectations is our latest whitepaper, looking at the standard of customer service delivered by top clothing retailers on Twitter. For this study, we tracked response times to customer service inquiries raised in nearly 8,000 tweets.
We found that five of the top ten US clothing retailers do not respond to customer service complaints on Twitter at all, and only 13 percent of tweeted complaints received a direct response. Of those tweets getting a response, 37 percent of replies came more than 10 hours after the initial post.
The research shows that retailers don’t appreciate the importance of responding to customer service complaints on Twitter quickly.
“When grievances are taken to social media, it is often the customer’s last resort. But despite this, a positive customer service experience here can make a real difference and can even turn your critics into brand evangelists,” said Joshua March, our CEO.
American Eagle was the most responsive of America’s top clothing retailers, directly answering nearly 70 percent of complaints on Twitter. Despite this high mark, American Eagle has not mastered social media best-practices. Failing to monitor its feed over the weekend and inconsistent response times, with some replies provided in as little as 20 minutes while others languished for more than 50 hours were some key weaknesses in their social customer service.
The study showed that many companies have yet to match up to emerging standards in social customer service. For example, when looking at Gap’s presence on Twitter than week, we found that customers posted a sequence of @mentions discussing clothing malfunctions, damaging Gap’s brand among its base. While all of these posts mentioned Gap’s Twitter profile, they all went unanswered by Gap’s official account.
Here are some takeaways from the study, to help other business to tackle customer service effectively:
Customers Have Questions: The majority of complaints on Twitter are direct questions rather than general defamations – to which customers expect a response and direct communication.
Conversations on Twitter Move Quickly, Even if Retailers Don’t: Companies are slower than other Twitter users, and they are deeply engaged in conversations about brands. There are more customers than there are social media managers, and conversations move quickly.
Direct Response Required: In general, the biggest challenge to social PR is dealing with negative comments about a company. These comments make up less than 10 percent of tweets, but they have the highest probability of going viral and can inflict the most brand damage.
Brands Are Visible on Twitter: When people search for a company’s handle or a hashtag incorporating the company’s name, companies want the results to reflect positively on their brands. If companies are not adequately dealing with social customer service complaints, the search results for their company may broadcast this fact to a larger audience of current and potential customers.
Although Twitter has established itself as a leading social media platform, our research highlights the fact that most companies aren’t using it properly.
“Distracted by posting information and generating a Twitter presence, brands are significantly underestimating the importance of listening to their customers,” March said. “With Twitter’s numerous and fluid news feeds, every tweet is a gamble. You never know, and can’t control, how inflammatory an individual complaint can be.”
Last week I wrote the below for business2community.com. Read the original post here.
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“Simply put, a brand is a promise… it delivers a pledge of satisfaction and quality.” – Walter Landor
“A brand is the sum total of the entire customer experience. A collection of perceptions in the mind of the consumer.” – Mark Burgess, Blue Focus Marketing
The brand experience used to be defined in carefully controlled consumer experiences and company messaging. Advertisements and press releases are still crafted to convey the right brand image, but what does this really mean today? The rise of social media has exposed those companies who don’t live up to their promises. If your brand isn’t backed up by real experiences, it will quickly be demolished.
Before the social age, companies’ images were largely untouchable, save their product quality and any huge PR disaster. But the reciprocal relationships in spaces like Facebook and Twitter have exposed brands for their real behavior. This has had a positive impact on the growing importance of Corporate Social Responsibility. How companies behave beyond their transactions is important. Are they trading ethically? Do they watch their carbon-footprints? Businesses need to be good to the core to maintain a positive brand reputation. It’s not just the best marketers who can create brand power, but the best products, service and conduct.
Customer service in particular risks damaging a company’s public face more than ever. No longer the experience of isolated customers, the collective experience of your customers is now being shared, discussed and on display to the world. Social media speeds up the word of mouth process that could gradually erode your brand image over time – a bad experience that would have spread just between friends can now be distributed to millions in just minutes. On the flip side good customer service is no longer just a cost – it also benefits and affirms your brand to other customers. What your customers say about you has greater power than what you say about yourselves. Establishing your customer satisfaction by asking customers if they’d recommend you or not, as in the Net Promoter Score, is hypothetical. But in social media, when a customer shares a positive experience, or complains publicly about a negative one, promotion and detraction are happening for real.
Unfortunately for most companies, their brands are suffering because they just can’t keep up. Every customer service issue in Twitter you ignore; every time you make claims that can’t be backed up; every time you try and shore up your image by deleting negative comments, you are chipping away at your brand value. Brand is no longer what you say – it’s what you do, and what your customers say about you.
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.
