Building customer loyalty by social media transparency

Once upon a time, what went on inside a business, and what was represented externally, were two different things. Companies went to extraordinary lengths to present a serene, problem-free exterior, hiding whatever technical, political, operational or commercial wrangles going on behind the scenes.

The advent of social media, though, gives companies an opportunity to do something that many will inately feel deeply uncomfortable with. The idea that you might actually want to be transparent, sharing your problems and issues, your decision making processes and your decisions about future direction will strike fear into the hearts of PR folks, board members and legal types. But a new style of thinking spurred on by the social media revolution is starting to permeate more adventurous businesses, and could be a key tool for corporates to adopt in differentiating them from their competitors and winning and retaining business.

Here’s an example. Let’s take two airlines. Both run simillar routes, with similar aircraft and at a similar price point. They both have their share of delays.

Airline A resoultely keeps customers in the dark, and trots out the usual routine of predictable excuses; “air traffic control restrictions,” “delayed inbound aircraft,” and so on. They only ever really reveal these if you really press them for the information on what’s going on, so for the majority of people most of the time, all they know is that there are delays.

Airline B also faces the same problems, however they take a different approach. With this company, when you make your booking, they offer the ability to keep you updated with info about your flight via Twitter, Facebook, and traditional channels like email and SMS. And rather than just tweet you the same generic excuses as Airline A, they do something novel – tell the truth. They say “this morning’s ice means we’re expecting a 30 min queue to get de-icer”. Then “the de-icing queue is not as bad as predicted and we’re now expecting a 15 min queue.” Or they might say “our flights from Heathrow due to go between 6 and 7 averaged 35 min delay over the past week, which was mainly caused by the normal ground congestion at that time.” Or when you’re stranded at some outpost and the departure board just says “indefinite delay”, the airline is tweeting with the real story. “Your aircraft had a technical problem on it’s first flight of the day, which meant it was 35 mins late taking off, it then had congestion getting into it’s 1st destination, and a take off time restriction getting back out. All combined this put the crew over their hours for your flight, so we’re calling in a standby crew. They’re due in by 1600 latest but it could be sooner, so we’ll keep you updated”. And so on.

So on one hand you could say that Airline B are completely mad to be so honest about their problems. But on the other hand, as customers start to develop closer ties to their suppliers via social media engagements, that honesty can start to translate into loyalty. You always expect some kind of delay when travelling, but would you prefer to know nothing and grin and bear it whatever happens, good or bad, or would you actually like to be treated like a grown up and kept informed. Not just ‘lip service informed’ but real, actual accurate information? Where companies choose the latter, it opens the door to a totally different kind of customer-supplier relationship. It shifts from “I buy from you and I get what I’m given” to “You’re my partner, and I respect what you tell me.”

Of course this flies in the face of tradition corporate wisdom – admit nothing and deny everything would seem to be the norm for many businesses. But taking the time to engage with your customers, especially via social media, and you open the door to a new kind of relationship. As you build up more trust, you can start to have different kinds of conversation with your customers. Their opinions can start to inform your business decisions, and a customer who has helped make a decision and direct your future will be far more loyal than one whom you’ve constantly kept in the dark. With a critical mass of engaged Facebook followers for example, you can have honest, difficult conversations that no focus group would ever give you real insight on. “In the last monh we told you 16 times out of 30 that our 6am flight would be delayed due to take off air traffic restrictions, which led to an average daily delay of 20 mins. We’ve had to build in the cost of extra aircraft fuel used waiting to take off into your ticket prices. If we changed our departure time to 7am, there’s 30pc fewer fligts taking off and we predict a far more on time set of departures, and with reduced fuel costs we can reduce the ticket price. Do you support us doing this? Vote yes or no”. And so on.

This approach won’t be for everyone, and only those with courage, commitment to provide the customer information on on ongoing basis, and a desire to stand out from the pack, will make it work. It’s not without risks, some customers might prefer to live in ignorant bliss and believe that reading nothing negative must mean that everything is positive. But customers are getting smarter at using the opinions of the crowd to make purchasing decisions, so why wouldn’t you want to be doing your bit to help inform those decisions? Honesty and transparency will ultimately repay in loyalty and advocacy, and with more people actively using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media to get real time intelligence on everything from football transfer rumours to who has the most reliable mobile network, brands need to make a decision. Are they in, or out. If it’s in, then it has to be fully in and not just lip-service. It won’t be easy, but I think the bold will ultimately be repayed.

Twitter for business – the basics

A short, fictional story about Twitter

“Twitter, we need to be on there, now!” says the boss. And so off scurry the troops, urgently designing a presence, getting the PR and marketing folks involved, working out how it works, how they’re gonna use it, how they want to be perceived, what message they want to get across. Within days they’re up and running… .

“Hmm, we need followers, lots of followers, so we better say some cool stuff to find them.” And so starts the tweeting. The first few days sees a relentless flurry of tweets. Company news, special offers, that kind of thing. Follower numbers gradually pick up from just those in the team. Nothing groundbreaking. “We’ll follow Stephen Fry. And Wossy. And send them a few tweets too. That should help.” A few more tweets, a few more followers. Hmm, boss’s gonna want an update soon. It’s pretty uninspiring so far. “Let’s search for people saying stuff about us.”

Wow, there’s thousands, and they’re pissed off! “This is fantastic, it’s the followers we’ve been looking for.”

“@joebloggz hey sorry to bear about the problem, can we help?”

“@TheWidgetCo your widgets are rubbish, I’d rather boil my head than deal with you”

Shit, didn’t expect that. Best we help them out, quick!

“@joebloggz sorry to hear that, give customer service a call on 0800 12344″

“There, we sorted that one. Yeh, feels nice, we found the hacked off customer, and pointed him in the right direction. And he did follow us so when we tweet some offers and stuff he’ll hopefully buy more widgets, result!”

And so it goes. Within a couple of weeks the followers hits 100. The boss’s gonna love this. The PR messages are flying, the marketing team are raising an interested eyebrow, and what’s more, they’re helping distressed customers (to find the call centre number).

A few more weeks pass. The buzz is wearing off. Sales haven’t budged, the brand tracker shows no movement at all in awareness, and the customer service folks are decidedly underwhelmed, “can’t say we’ve noticed anything”.

The team get another call from the boss. “Facebook, we need to be on there, now!”

And so ends the Twitter experience. For months people continue to complain about the brand, but their tweets go unnoticed. And their final tweet, dated 4 months ago, remains:

“@dr13as hi, give our call centre a call for help with your problem”

I’d love to say that my little made up account is purely the work of fiction, but alas it’s far from that. You will I’m sure know of several examples of companies doing just this – getting involved in Twitter as it’s the cool thing to do, because they feel a compulsion to say “Yeh we’re on Twitter.”

But as many brands have shown, Twitter really can be a massively successful channel for the savvy business. Whether it’s in marketing, PR, service or a combination, Twitter can help. But it requires careful planning, preparation, and – importantly – a long-term commitment to making it work.

Having had first hand experience of just how valuable Twitter can become as a customer service channel, I thought I’d share some thoughts about how to use Twitter for business.

1 – Clearly define your objectives – what are you trying to achieve? Sounds obvious, but as we saw in the example earlier, a half-hearted dip into Twitter is always going to fail. Being clear about how you plan to use the channel, in what circumstances you’ll Tweet, and what success will look like, is crucial.

2 – Get your stakeholders on board. It may well have been instruction from above to just get on with it, but your Twitter existance is going to be pretty short and doomed to failure if you don’t have the right people bought in. So for example, if your primary objective is to use Twitter for customer service, make sure the Service Director, all the ops teams and so on all understand what you’re planning to do, how it’ll work, and how it’ll affect them. Never underestimate the importance of ‘what’s in it for me.’

3 – It has to be a team effort. You are not going to launch and maintain a thriving Twitter presence if you don’t have the right people involved. For example, a virtual team made up of PR, marketing, brand and customer service advisors is the minimum you’ll need for a decent service presence.

4 – Clearly define your online personality – what does your brand represent? Clearly this will vary by brand, but at minimum you need to make sure that your brand is accurately represented in the way that you tweet. Getting the brand langauge appropriate to represent you, and suitable for the channel, isn’t easy but is necessary.

5 – Be prepared for the long haul! If you get this right, customers will start to engage with you over Twitter as a primary channel, and so you need the commitment to resource it and operate it in perpetuity. Quitting after a few months could potentially be even more damaging than having not bothered in the first place.

6 – Get the technology right. In the early days you can exist well with just native Twitter, but as things get more complex, you begin to deal with a hundered (or more) people a day, you’ll easily lose track.

7 – Dont just use Twitter as a signpost to traditional channels. Specifically in the service world, there’s nothing more irritating than being tweeted by a company that you’ve mentioned only to be told to call them, or visit their forums. If you’re not prepared to deal on channel, don’t bother!! Which is linked to…

8 – Respect the medium that your customer chooses to deal via. If a customer chooses to frequent Twitter, chances are they’ll expect to be served totally within Twitter. Veering off channel is only acceptable under certain circumstances e.g. passing personal details.

9 – Be quick! Although technically asynchronous, most people see Twitter as real time, so you’re going to have to treat it as such. Set demanding targets for responding to tweets and stick to them. Once people know you’re out there, they will expect a lot from you.

10 – Constantly revisit and refine your objectives. If you go into this with your eyes open, a decent plan, lots of preparation and undaunted commitment, you will make a success of your corporate Twitter life, but it is crucial to maintain your focus on your original goals, whilst adding new goals as your experience progresses.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of things to think about when embarking on your business use of Twitter, but it will give you a decent start. There’s countless examples of Twitter being used really well by business, @BTCare and @easyJetCare in the UK being the two foremost examples of Twitter used as a new primary service channel. And as both of these firms have found out, turning a negative experience with a company into something that leads you to tweet just how well you got served, with all the brand advocacy benefits that that brings, is priceless.

2010 – The year social media gets serious for business

Before I start, I should mention that this is my second version of this post. The first fully completed version mysteriously vanished when attempting to publish it from the WordPress iPhone app into live. Apparently it’s a known bug. How helpful… anyway here goes mark 2.

When we look back at 2009, it will no doubt be seen as the year that big businesses finally got round to getting involved in social media. Many large companies did of course very successfully develop social media presences way before 09, for example Sony and Logitech with their excellent forum communities, but the explosion of social media into the mainstream last year meant that it was time for more than just a couple of firms to get pretty seriously involved. Twitter was the fashionable social media platform of choice, and many businesses made a great use of it, for example BT and easyJet in the UK developing brand new service channels exclusively via Twitter, and a host of companies from one man bands to multinationals like Dell creating new marketing opportunities using Twitter. Away from the Twitter noise, LinkedIn continued to grow it’s featureset and active userbase, and of course Facebook continued their quest for world domination.

In parallel with all of this, 2009 was the year that saw smart phones progressing from being a business user niche product to totally mass market. It wasn’t just iPhones and Androids; Nokia S60-based handsets started to appear in more general consumer markets, and a raft of new proprietary mobile OSs from Samsung, Moto and others came packing native Twitter and Facebook apps on eat-all-you-can 3G data tariffs.

So as we enter 2010, the stage is set for businesses to seriously step up a gear in their social media exploits. In the B2B space sites like LinkedIn and BT Tradespace should (if they choose to embrace the opportunities) morph from being predominantly information-exchanges to more transactional environments. But it is in B2C where things get really interesting for business. And for B2C potential in social media read Facebook. Facebook’s userbase growth continued in 2009 at an astonishing pace, a pace that shows no sign of slowing (unlike the slowdown seen in Q4 from Twitter for example). In parallel with piling on new, active and loyal users, Facebook also quietly released some major Facebook mobile updates. Seemingly out of nowhere, managing your online social media presence became, well, the norm – why wait until you get back to your desk to tell the world what you’re up to and keep in touch with friends?! The releases have kept coming and with that, the opportunity for businesses to leverage this new world has exploded.

A few months ago I wrote about how businesses need to end their sole obsession with their own websites and take their online services – in a fully featured form – to where their customers hang out online. That place is, for a scarily large (and rapidly growing) number, Facebook. Savvy businesses will already be building Facebook apps extending their traditional website capabilities for sales and service into Facebook, and there are some signs of this starting beyond just the most basic of Facebook fan pages. But I think that it’s the Facebook user growth and Facebook via mobiles combined with one new magical ingredient that will really turn relatively simplistic opportunity into something way bigger. And that ingredient? On-platform financial transactions.

Paypal is one of the web’s leading payment services for small businesses, and they along with a host of other transaction providers process payments on many thousands of websites around the world every day. Facebook hinted last year that they might enter this market themselves – a tiny percentage commission on an incredible volume of transactions on their own platform can’t have escaped their interest – and although there’s been no confirmation of what – if anything – they’re proposing, the timing does feel right. And so here things get interesting. With a Facebook-powered transaction processing capability, Facebook users really never need veer off piste again. They and their friends are constantly in touch on Facebook wherever they are, the real time search developments of late are bringing a Twitter-style information inflow tuned to users own needs (so forget ever needing to trawl dozens of other websites daily for your news fix), and so the sharp businesses in 2010 will make a big push to be developing fully featured Facebook presences that allow their customers (or prospects) to do all they could ever want to – buying, managing accounts, resolving service issues and so on – without ever leaving Facebook’s platform. These Facebook presences will need to integrate back to companies’ own systems, but the key for consumers will be the ease of transaction management. I can see a situation arising pretty quickly where you can pay for pretty much everything via Facebook, from impulse purchases to your utility services. Facebook’s transactions capability could even morph into some kind of new breed of retail bank, rapidly responding to changing consumer spending habits, needs and wants. For companies, forget developing bespoke mobile apps platform by platform that you might never manage to drive any traffic to use, the smart business in 2010 will be taking advantage of Facebook’s dominant position and relentless growth.

Of course this payments platform might never materialise, or if it does it may not be this year. But all signs from Facebook in terms of their overall capability growth and development signify that they aren’t just interested in building a multi-faceted platform for people to pass the time of day on, and that’s even before you throw the extra opportunities that geo-locating brings into the mix (they aren’t throwing millions behind developing awesome mobile capabilities for the fun of it). Even if the scenario I describe doesn’t come into being this year, I still maintain that businesses with any form of consumer relationship cannot ignore the reality of Facebook’s dominance. Social media for business is today still pretty rudimentary, and whilst the tentative steps made by some fairly adventurous companies to engage in discussion with customers in the social sphere in 2009 is a start, it is by no means enough if their interest is in building and developing long term relationships with their customers. 2009 gave those companies with an ounce of creativity and a willingness to take a bit of a punt some fantastic rewards from their social media exploits. In 2010 though, things will get a lot more serious, and the game is upped from just conversation to full-blown transaction.

One thing’s for sure – whatever Facebook do, or for that matter whatever any of the prominent or new social media platforms do this year, the bar will be raised hugely from that of 09. Businesses who choose to continue to ignore social media will find the barrier to their entry to the game becomes progressively higher, both in terms of technology catch up and on being accepted into the fold. Those who do see the opportunity however, and who act on it early, will reap the rewards. Customers already are pretty choosy about who they do business with, and as social media takes an even firmer grip this year, no business can afford to not take the rapidly changing face of the web extremely seriously.

Happy new year!

Twitter Service Assurance… Please!

Twitter is – as anyone with a pulse now knows – absolutely everywhere. From Terry Wogan to geek conferences, from trashy celeb magazines to ultra cool fashonistas, it seems you can’t go for long in a morning without hearing or seeing your first unsolicited Twitter reference of the day.

And of course businesses, both big and small, are gettig well in on the act too. Why wouldn’t they! I mean, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out the potential value of Twitter to firms. Whether it’s used for passive monitoring of brand mentions, proactive PR, or as a sales or service tool, there’s a ton of potential just waiting to be tapped I to. Where I work we’re about 3 months into our Twitter journey. At present we’re primarily using Twitter to proactively search out and reach out to any of our customers showing signs of distress, either tweeting in general that they’re having problems, or (alarmingly worryingly) tweeting to their followers about their frustration about trying to interact with us via a traditional service channel.

Interestingly – and very positively – we quite quicky have seen news of our presence on Twitter spread virally, and now regularly we get people tweeting us as their primary contact channel without ever trying phone or email. So in no time at all we find ourselves with a completely new service channel, and what’s more, it’s one via which we conduct pretty much everything (excepting personal details etc) in public for all to see, we communicate using the same language that our customers choose to (no corporate speak!), and we try to be as ‘converged’ as we can. By that I mean that we are trying to offer a simple service where we can help our customers out whatever their query may be about. So no press 1 for billing, press 2 for technical, contact this department for x and that one for y. Nope, none of that, it’s all in one place. We’ve built a team to make sure we can help with as much as we can without having to refer to elsewhere internally to sort something. It’s not perfect yet, but it’s getting there.

All of this is great and of course whilst it’s early days for us, and we’re very much still learning, we’re already starting to get some amazingly positive feedback from our customers. And when they tweet their praise for us, all their followers also get to hear about us – bringing the holy grail of customer advocacy tantalisingly close.

But none of this is the reason for this blog. A week or so ago Twitter had a little wobble, and with no warning at all we (and countless other Twitter users) found ourselves with our account suspended. Cue panic! Had we done something wrong? Contravened some rule we weren’t aware of? Nope. Had we exceeded some kind of limit? No. Well lets not worry, we’ll tweet Twitter and I’m sure they’ll have us back online in no time. If only it were so simple. I mean, have you tried getting a reply from them?! As it turned out we needed to pull in favours from a myriad of angles to get our account quickly re-activated, which thanks to our network and their friends in high places, we managed in an hour or two. So actually, in the end, we survived the episode with nothing more than a couple of tweets from customers asking what was up. But this rammed home to us just how exposed we felt when we had the problems that night. It’s not like we’d ever dream of building our contact centre infrastructure on a platform that we had no formal support for, no service availability agreements in place for and so on, so this has brought us into a very different kind of place. As everyone knows, Twitter are yet to declare how they plan on making money from their product. But I can guarantee you that there must be a stack of companies of all sizes just desperate to PAY to get some kind of service assurance from Twitter. Maybe Twitter are being extremely astute in watching their product become ever more depended upon by businesses, and at some point in the future they’re gonna pounce on the market with a killer set of propositions tailored to different needs. Or maybe they are just paddling so damned hard to even just keep things running that actually working out what the market is willing to stump up to have the confidence that their new found channel isn’t gonna collapse and die with no warning is low on their agenda.

I suspect that their actual position is a mixture of these. Maybe their little wobble was actually planned, intended to gauge just how dependent on them we had all become. I doubt that, but whatever, I expect to see some commercial propositions from them hitting the market soon. How Twitter will price them remains to be seen, but they are very much in the driving seat. One thing’s for certain though, the chapter of using social media as mainstream service channels for businesses is only starting to be written. For us, 3 months of tweeting already feels like an amazingly positive experience, and the reaction internally to what we’re doing is almost exclusively overwhelmingly positive. But I really would love the security blanket that comes with a supported, paid-for, assured service…