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Does Online Customer Service Encourage Dissent?

10.03.16

One of the highlights of South By Southwest for me so far was the Customer Support in a 140 Character World panel with Caroline McCarthy (CNET), Frank Eliason (Comcast), Lois Townsend (HP), Toby Richards (Microsoft) and Jeremiah Owyang (Altimeter). With a wide-ranging conversation tackling many different aspects of online customer support, I found it fascinating.

One of the most interesting lines for me came from Owyang, who said (forgive me if I’m a word or two off here):

“Responding to people on Twitter is encouraging them to yell at their friends when they need your support.”

Running scared

This is an issue I’ve run into several times with clients, especially those who want to maintain a divide between their traditional customer service channels and what they sometimes see as promotional online channels.

Companies have a (perhaps justified) fear that if people see them responding to online complaints, they’re going to take their complaints online first – publicly – before calling customer support. That leads to:

  • More negative online chatter
  • More work for online reps
  • More potential for others to jump onboard with the complaint

Online reps are customer service reps

The flip side, though, as Jeremiah also pointed out, is that customers don’t care what department an online rep is in. As far as they’re concerned, the company rep is customer-facing so they expect a response to their concerns about that company.

Instead of trying to funnel everyone through your channels, how about helping them in the place they are already inhabiting? In the process, you can go a long way to addressing their issues before they become a support ticket number.

Frank Eliason mentioned that each day his team of 12 people at Comcast go through:

  • 6,000-10,000 blog posts mentioning Comcast (although most are due to Comcast email addresses)
  • 2,000 tweets
  • 600-1,000 forum posts

All of this, with the aim of improving customer experiences.

What’s the ROI of ignoring the phone?

David Alston of Radian6 has a good way of referring to online customer engagement. He asks conference audiences who ask about the ROI of this kind of engagement, “what’s the ROI of you not picking up the phone?” After speaking to someone tonight who mentioned that her organization shuts down their online communication during big issues because their PR folks are scared of peoples’ reactions, I’d throw that question out to them too:

Have you considered how much you lose every time you ignore someone online?

Many companies know exactly how much revenue they generate from the average user. Those companies therefore know how much revenue they lose every time they drive a customer away by ignoring their pain points. Those same customers often volunteer information about those problems online proactively, yet the organization responds with unhelpful canned lines or doesn’t even respond at all.

Eliason also mentioned an obvious but salient point – sometimes you just need to agree to disagree with people. Transparency doesn’t mean agreeing with everyone – it means that you help those you can and explain honestly why you can’t help the others. That very act of explanation might not make people happy (and, yes, let’s be honest, it may upset some) but with the majority, it’s enough to know that someone is listening and acknowledging their concern.

So, there’s my take. I acknowledge that public-facing customer support is scary, for a variety of reasons. However, the potential repercussions of ignoring people, anywhere, is so large that to do so is irresponsible, both towards them and towards your company.

What do you think?

Posted in: customer service, social media, social networks, uncategorized

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Book Review: Switch – How To Change Things When Change Is Hard

10.03.15

Every so often, a book comes along that somehow boils really complex topics down to such a concise form that you wonder why no-one thought in that way before. Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, by Dan and Chip Heath, is one of those books, combining theory from change management and persuasion in a clear, practical way that everyone should learn.

Switch outlines techniques for inspiring change , be it at work, at home or out in your community. Dan and Chip Heath break the topic down into three simple sections:

  1. Direct the rider
  2. Motivate the elephant
  3. Shape the path

The authors liken change management to an elephant with a rider. The rider is the logical, thoughtful part of the equation, responding well to reason, facts and long-term thinking. However, it only has limited control over “the elephant,” which responds to emotion and short-term gain.

Switch argues that, for change to be successful, both of these sides need to be convinced – if you only address one side of the equation you greatly reduce your chance of success. Meanwhile, along with the elephant and rider you should also consider the path they follow – the context in which the two operate. By tweaking the path (adjusting the environment for the subject of change), you can ease the difficulty of the change or perhaps even accomplish it through that alone.

Seems a little abstract, yes? Fortunately, from start to finish, Switch shifts easily back and forth between abstract concept and practical examples and tips. I saw many direct similarities between the examples used in Switch and those in Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persusaion, which I read directly before this. Switch is full of examples, both those based on scientific research and more anecdotal stories, which clearly illustrate the nine steps outlined within the book:

  1. Find the bright spots – focus on the success stories around your change, not the negative examples
  2. Script the critical moves – remove the opportunity for decision paralysis by making the key steps clear
  3. Point to the destination – describe a compelling goal to which people can relate and aspire
  4. Find the feeling – make an emotional connection
  5. Shrink the change – break the change down so it’s more digestible
  6. Grow your people – help to create a new identity to which people can relate, and shift towards a “growth mindset” that sees things in flux rather than fixed as they are
  7. Tweak the environment – make changes to surroundings and processes to point people in the right direction
  8. Build habits – change peoples’ habits to change long-term behaviour
  9. Rally the herd – understand the power of group dynamics (peer pressure, to an extent) and work with them

Whether you’re trying to help your son or daughter do better in school, trying to motivate change in your team at work, or trying to rally support to improve your community, Switch offers a practical, simple and easy-to-understand formula which provides a great framework for enacting that change.

What’s more, it does so in a friendly, entertaining style which I thoroughly enjoyed.

If you’re looking to enact any kind of change in your life, I recommend you read this book.

Posted in: books

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Radian6 Launches Real-Time Monitoring And Engagement Console

10.03.10

Radian6 has announced a new tool that has the potential to be a paradigm shift in how companies manage their social media monitoring programs.

The Radian6 Engagement Console combines two of the best tools out there – Tweetdeck and Radian6 – in an Adobe Air-based desktop tool. In doing so, the console makes radical improvements to the workflow process for Radian6 users. We’ve been test-driving the console in our office for a little while now, and I’ve been very impressed by the utility – and future potential – of this new tool.

The Low-Down

Some of the key features of the console:

  • Supports multiple Twitter accounts and Facebook, so you can combine your personal and professional engagement – posting and replying on both of these services
  • Allows you to set up “stacks” (as they call columns) from multiple Radian6 profiles, based on numerous criteria
  • Incorporates Radian6’s search functionality, pulling from searches covering blogs, Twitter, Google Buzz, forums, Flickr, YouTube and more
  • Far, far faster than the Radian6 web interface – both in terms of interaction but also refresh frequency, which can be as frequent as every 30 seconds
  • Supports conversation threading – a feature missing from Radian6 previously
  • Built-in URL shortener
  • Allows team-wide collaboration on engagement, as you can see updates from colleagues in near-real time and can view previous conversations with people
  • Resizeable columns (hear that, Tweetdeck??)
  • Incorporates all of Radian6’s workflow features within the tool
  • Allows you to create custom macros for bulk management of posts.

Check out Radian6 CEO Marcel Lebrun discussing the console in this video:

Workflow At Your FingerTips

These last two features are central to the console’s value. One of the biggest barriers to using the full potential of the Radian6 workflow has, in the past, been the slow speed of the web interface and the 15-minute refresh cycle within that interface. This, combined with the preference people for tools such as Tweetdeck for their own personal posts, makes it hard to ensure that messages all flow through one system from a workflow perspective. This all changes with the Engagement Console.

The Engagement Console is intended for use as a front-line tool. In contrast, the Radian6 web interface is built much more around its reporting functionality. By taking the popular layout of Tweetdeck, building-in Radian6 data and workflow, and also essentially co-opting many of the features that have made tools like Hootsuite and CoTweet popular for team-based approaches recently, Radian6 is releasing a tool that has the potential to dramatically ease the monitoring and engagement process for companies.

Of course, the web interface remains for report generation purposes – this tool is intended as an addition, not a replacement.

Macros are your friend

The macro feature is another very cool addition. Macros aim to streamline your interactions by letting you automate recurring tasks. So, if you have a type of post that frequently comes up, you can set a standard way of dealing with them, save it as a macro and then click one button to handle all of that post’s workflow actions.

Confusing? Imagine a macro for product complaints, for example. You could create a macro that sets sentiment to ‘negative’, sets the post classification to ‘product complaint’, adds a post tag of “support” and assigns posts to a particular team member. Then, when future complaints arise, you can click the macro and all of that is taken care of in one click.

Bottom line

The Radian6 Engagement Console really could be a game-changer in their market. It combines the powerful search, workflow and team functionality of Radian6 with an easy-to-use interface which is a front-line person’s dream come true. Given all of the relatively similar social media monitoring services out there, this tips the balance. Once this tool rolls out fully (it’s in private beta until April), I see no reason why companies looking for both social media analytics and real-time engagement wouldn’t choose Radian6.

Now, where’s that mobile app…?

Posted in: monitoring, social media monitoring, tools

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FourWhere Mines Foursquare For Venues, Tips

10.03.09

This morning, social media monitoring and analysis provider Sysomos launched a new service, FourWhere, which mashes-up Foursquare and Google Maps to show the places visited by Foursquare users and see the tips that they’ve left.

Frankly, I’m surprised that Foursquare doesn’t already have this feature itself – this would be a nice addition to the mobile app, especially given the potential to combine this mashup with your friends list to show where all your friends are.

Sysomos says it will continue to enhance FourWhere by adding content analytics down the road. It’ll be interesting to see how this works – it might prioritize places by the biggest number of check-ins, for example. This is another great example of the wealth of data that monitoring and analytics companies such as Sysomos, Radian6 and Alterian SM2 possess, and the uses to which this data can be put.

FourWhere is free and open – you don’t need a Foursquare account to use it. Check it out at http://fourwhere.com.

Posted in: location, tools

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Evolving the Social Media Marketing Ecosystem

10.03.08

In January this year I put forward my thoughts on the social media marketing ecosystem in which we operate in 2010. It looked like this:

While this relatively complex model is great to help shape the thinking of organizations wrestling with a plethora of products, it’s also a little complex for organizations without those massive resources. These organizations, which comprise the majority of the market, just don’t have the staff, resources or time to deal with such a complex set of properties.

So, I went back to the drawing board – not to re-think the model, but to boil it down to one simple enough for the majority of people to digest. The result: a simplified model of the social media marketing ecosystem:

All of the complex dynamics within the original system are still accounted for within this simplified diagram, but the framework as a whole is much easier to digest.

In addition to earned, paid and owned media (summarized as “company website” and properties on other sites), this model has an additional sphere on top of Sean Corcoran’s framework, on top of which the original ecosystem model was developed – social networks. This raises the question – should Corcoran’s model have an additional row? What might it look like? (thanks to Joe Thornley for prompting this line of thinking)

It’s a tough call. For one thing, the “social media” row might look a lot like the other rows in many ways; borrowing aspects from owned and earned media in particular. For another, any definition of the role of social media is surely going to be controversial.

I’m a glutton for punishment though, so I put together a starting point – Corcoran’s model, revised with a new row for social media.:

Does social media deserve its own row here, or does its rapid evolution over the past few years simply mean it is intertwined among the other media types in today’s communications environment?

What do you think?

Posted in: communications, marketing, pr, public relations, social media, social networks, strategy

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Social Mediators 3 – Privacy and Personal Brand

10.03.04

In this week’s Social Mediators, Joe Thornley, Terry Fallis and I discuss our take-aways from two recent social media events in Toronto.

I was impressed by presentations given by Brad Buset, Miranda McCurlie and Dave Bradfield at PodCamp Toronto 2010 in late February, highlighting privacy and the impact of what we share online. My take: “Be careful, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t be out there.”

Terry, Joe and I all participated as student mentors at the recent Personal Brand Camp 2. Each of us has a slightly different take on the term (I preferred to take some of the scariness out of the term by asking to people to think in terms of the reputation they would like to have); in the second half of this week’s episode we discuss our take-aways from the event and some of the advice we gave to students.

What advice would you offer to students starting to think about how to build their own reputation?

Posted in: Social Mediators

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Book Review: Influence – The Psychology of Persuasion

10.03.02

When I pulled together my reading list for 2010 (side note: two months down, four books read. Rawk!), there were a few different types of books on the list:

  • New books I wanted to check out
  • Fictional books to lighten the load
  • Older books highly recommended by others

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini certainly fits into the last of those categories. Person after person recommended this book, so it was a shoe-in on the list.

Having now read it, I’ll add my voice to that chorus. This is a book that, if you work in any form of communications, is a must-read.

As the title suggests, Influence… is based around the psychology behind the tools used by what Cialdini describes as “compliance professionals” (from salesmen to fundraisers to advertising folks). Despite the potentially dense subject matter, Cialdini approaches it in easy-to-understand terms which you don’t need a Ph.D. to absorb.

The book covers six “weapons of influence” in turn, doing a deep dive on the variations and nuances within each before examining how to avoid their effects:

  1. Reciprocation – giving a little in order to take more
  2. Commitment and consistency – playing off our internal need to be consistent with ourselves
  3. Social proof – the power of what other people are doing
  4. Liking – positive associations
  5. Authority – amazing what we’ll do for someone who appears to be in authority
  6. Scarcity – we want things more when they are few

One of my biggest complaints about many books I read nowadays is their tendency to make broad, sweeping claims about complex principles with no supporting materials. Thankfully, this is one area in which Influence… is a clear winner. From start to finish, the book is jam packed with case study after case study to both make Cialdini’s case for each “weapon” and support it many times over. To data-focused people (like me), this was a god-send and added great credibility to the book’s contents.

One of the great points about this book is that, even after just the first few pages, you become very aware of people using these psychological tools around you. From store salespeople to advertisements in the media, I’ve found myself constantly thinking “ah yes, they’re using the rejection-then-retreat principle” or the like. By demonstrating how people use the tools, Cialdini better prepares you to deal with them.

Of course, the flip side to this is that, for communications professionals, learning about these principles helps us to use them more effectively. Many are common nowadays (social media often leans heavily on social proof, for example… think “Facebook Connect fan boxes“).

If there’s a down-side to this book it’s that Cialdini can be a little long-winded on occasion. Every so often some of the repetition feels a little redundant. Bizarrely, on the flip side there seems to be a bit of a tendency to over-generalize on some of the concepts, leading to “huh? really?” moments. However, these moments are certainly in the minority.

So, should you buy this book? If you work in any facet of communications, then yes! Even if you don’t, this book is a worthwhile read. Two thumbs up.

Posted in: books

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Work/Life Balance… or Blend?

10.02.24

How do you think about your approach to your personal time management?

A couple of years ago I heard something on the Manager Tools podcast that made me sit up and think – that you shouldn’t think about “work/life balance,” but “work/life choice.” Their message was that you have control over how you use your time; that “balance” wasn’t the right end goal, but rather you should choose how you want to prioritize things.

Personally, I’ve chosen to prioritize work for the last few years. Balance went out the window, along with many of my other hobbies. I’ve found that choice hard to live with mentally at times.

However, at PodCamp Toronto this weekend, I encountered another way of thinking about things that really made sense to me. As Rachel Segal tweeted, Leona Hobbs suggested we should be thinking about work/life blending, not balance. While I unfortunately wasn’t in Leona’s presentation, the concept itself spoke to me.

This is so simple, it’s brilliant. Unless, through some extreme effort, you can completely shut-out your personal life from your time at work, the two will overlap. What’s more, the more you are passionate about the work you do, the more that “work” BECOMES “life.”

This fits perfectly for me – I often say that my day doesn’t feel like work, and my activities outside work often closely follow the things I do in the office. So, work and life blend smoothly for me – that’s why I’m happy with the choice I made.

Does this make sense to you? How does this fit with how you see your time?

Posted in: events, miscellaneous, podcamp, podcamptoronto2010

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Social Mediators Episode 2: Are You Always One Of Us?

10.02.22

In this week’s episode of Social Mediators, Joe Thornley, Terry Fallis and I discuss work/life boundaries. Specifically, are you always “one of us?” Should a company have any domain over its employees once they leave the office? This was prompted by a heated debate over our company’s new online communications policy over on MetaFilter recently.

From my perspective, employee guidelines should be considered to extend beyond 9-5 in some part. While a company doesn’t “own you” outside work, your actions outside work do reflect on the company. You might draw a line between work and your time outside work, but consumers and the media don’t. If you do or say something that offends, it’s not uncommon for the story to become about your job.

While the “don’t use social media” rules, which some organizations unfortunately have, shouldn’t apply, it’s reasonable to ask that employees not badmouth competitors (for example) or do anything that would actively work against the company’s interests when they’re outside the office. So, you’re not “always working for us” but you are “always one of us.”

Social media policies (if done well) can be a two-way tool. On the one hand, they protect the company by drawing boundaries around what is acceptable and what is not. On the other, they protect employees by clearly communicating what is acceptable, so people can interact online without any fear of reprimand.

What do you think?

You can subscribe to Social Mediators through this RSS feed.

Sites referred to in this episode:
Marketers Miss the Mark with Twitter, Mitch Joel
TTC Staffer caught apparently sleeping on job, National Post<
Alleged TTC napper under investigation, National Post
TTC union shocked at uncaring response of riders to “sleeping” staffer, National Post
Second photo emerges of another alleged TTC napper, National Post

Posted in: Social Mediators

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Hanging Out With 900 Friends At PodCamp Toronto

10.02.22

This past weekend, roughly 900 people came out to attend PodCamp Toronto 2010.

Since joining the organizing team for the event in 2008, I’ve seen PodCamp Toronto grow from a couple of hundred early tech adopters to a large, diverse group of people from all along the adoption curve. This year more than perhaps any, the sessions reflected that diversity.

Dave Fleet presenting at PodCamp Toronto 2010My highlights from the weekend:

Jerome Paradis presented a mind-expanding take on semantic commerce – the idea that people could purchase from multiple vendors through one website. Effectively turning the e-commerce model on its head, semantic commerce would be driven by APIs from vendors and result in personalized sites for every person. What’s more, it would give consumers control over their own purchase histories, preferences and identities.

Some presentations make you better at doing things; others make you smarter. This one was the latter, and was easily the highlight of PodCamp Toronto for me.

Brad Buset gave a thought-provoking talk on personal privacy. This was the first time I’d seen Brad present, and he did a great job with a timely topic – even handing-out copies of George Orwell’s 1984 to people who hadn’t read it.

Jeremy Wright and Melissa Smich earned a lot of laughs from the audience (and a “hrumph” from me for highlighting photographic evidence of my farmer tan) with their session on Twitter and dating. An interesting presentation format, cupcakes for active participants and the obligatory hashtag-ridden visuals, this was a nice light end to my PodCamp.

Unfortunately, once again I missed Sean Power’s session – this time on Applied Communilytics. I heard it was great; one day I’ll finally see this guy present. At the time, I was attending David Bradfield and Miranda McCurlie’s presentation on when social media become unsocial. The session had a very interesting topic; however, the most interesting part for me was seeing how the presenters have learned from their own past mistakes and grown as a result. Well-attended and interactive, this was another good session.

For my part, I thoroughly enjoyed presenting my session. With a good turnout and great audience participation, I was actually sad when the half-hour was over.

Once again, thanks to all of my co-organizers at this year’s event. I played a small role this year, and the rest of the organizing team did a really great job. Well done, folks!

If you attended this year’s PodCamp Toronto, what were your highlights?

(Photo credit: Looking over the audience at my session – by evablue)

Posted in: events, podcamp, podcamptoronto2010

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