Rethinking Customer Service:

The Call Center as Corporate Information Hub

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2011, Social Media Today, LLC

Part:

Rethinking Customer Service:

The Call Center as Corporate Information Hub
3 Introduction
Emily Yellin

Part 1: The Networked Call Center

John Burton

10

Part 2: The Death of Customer Service

Barry Dalton

13

Part 3: Take Sides With Your Customers!

Tristan Bishop

16

Part 4: The Rise of Conversational Commerce

Dan Miller

18

Part 5: Virtual Sand Kicking

Natalie Petouhoff

INTRO

Part:

INTRO

Introduction
By Emily Yellin
Companies have learned so much in the past 30
years about what to do, and what not to do, when
communicating with their customers from a distance.
Since the 1980s, when the spread of desktop computers
and toll-free phone lines enabled the modern call center,
companies have been trying to figure out how to keep
up with the technology that is supposed to connect
them with customers.
All the while, face-to-face relationships have become
rarer. Numbers, not names and personal relationships,
have driven much interaction between companies and
their clients. So call centers have gotten a reputation
as places where humanity and technology are not in sync.
Too many companies have failed to bring dignity and
civility to their relationships with call center workers
and the customers they are supposed to help.
At most companies, the customer service departments
primary goal has been to manage complaints as cheaply
as possible, not to help customers and build enduring
relationships with them. The whole equation was created
by the company, from the companys point of view, for the
company and at the companys convenience. The message
that customers and call center workers got was: Its just
business. Deal with it.
The problem is that human needs never really changed.
Ignoring those needs is not a sustainable way to treat
either your employees or your customers. And sure
enough, it has started to fall apart as a business strategy.

Whether on the phone, via email, on company web sites

or via social media, companies have been forced to learn
the etiquette of each new communication channel that
their customers use. And customers have gained power
from their ability to come together and demand more
from companies.
Many in the business community have been blindsided by
these new demands. And yet the rise of social media is
an exciting prospect for customer service professionals.
It gives them an opportunity to escape the margins of
the corporate hierarchy and lead the change that all
companies need to make in this increasingly informationdriven world.
Customer service is the nexus where companies and
their customers meet. So much information comes
into customer service from customers every day about
the products and services a company sells. So much
information goes out to customers each day too, about
the company and its offerings.
Companies are finally starting to realize that customer
service creates unique opportunities to make their
products and services better, their customers, happier,
and their bottom lines healthier.
This e-book looks at how the call center in particular
can help drive a proactive, rather than reactive, approach
to business. Experts from the call center world share
strategies and mindset shifts that must take place
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Part:

INTRO

Introduction (contd)
within companies if they are to be vital and nimble in
the 21st century.
Dan Miller shows how social media can help call centers
provide more proactive customer service. Barry Dalton
explains how companies can use call center data to create
seamless, satisfying customer experiences. John Burton
argues that if companies arent actively monitoring,
responding to and engaging with customers via social
media, they are missing opportunities to collaborate with
them and gather valuable feedback.
Tristan Bishop articulates the benefits of breaking down
internal corporate barriers and coming together for the
good of the customer. For this to happen, companies
must shift from a transactional mindset in customer
service to one based on human relationships. And Natalie
Petouhoffprovides useful advice to help companies deal
with what she calls bullying customerswho use social
media to to extract unfair advantages from vendors.
To be sure, most of us see indifferent customer service
from companies as a more pervasive problem than the
odd bullying customer. But as Petouhoff says, engaging
in the online conversation about your company is the
best way to know your customers, help them, and create
good will, thereby giving you an anchor should you ever
have to navigate through the rough waters of customer
anger online.

We examine the rise of social media and all the other

channels by which companies and customers connect, or
disconnect. A consensus emerges that companies can no
long afford to see customer service as a necessary evil, or
as a firewall between themselves and their customers.
Instead, smart companies view vocal, engaged customers
as invaluable resources. Companies must harness the
massive volumes of information that call centers harvest
every day to inform and reform their business processes
and product decisions.
Customer service agents must become empowered to
drive change for the good of customers. Every part of
the company must be accountable to the customers and
therefore responsible for customer service.
Silos must come down. We hear that cry all over the place
these days. But amazing things start to happen when
customer service, marketing, product development, IT
and even legal all get in the same room and start working
together for the good of the customer. The bottom line
improves and can be sustained.
Read this e-book and envision customer service in the
future as more proactive and humane. See its role in the
corporate world as consultative and strategic, rather than
reactive and peripheral. Its an exciting prospect and one
that companies must increasingly embrace as customers
demand more and more information about the products
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Part:

INTRO

Introduction (contd)
and services that they consume. Customer service will be
a vital strand in the DNA of every successful company,
not just a business function or an afterthought. This
e-book shows how that is happening already in some
places, and how it can be made to happen everywhere
as we go forward.
Emily Yellin is the author of Your Call Is (Not That)
Important to Us (Free Press 2009) and Our Mothers
War (Free Press 2004), and was a longtime contributor
to The New York Times. She has also written for Time,
The Washington Post, The International Herald Tribune,
Newsweek, Smithsonian Magazine, and other publications.

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Part:

INTRO

The Networked Call Center

Telling customers to Google harder is not a viable service strategy.
Luckily, theres a better way.
By John Burton
Customer service isnt for the squeamish. In order to
quickly resolve difficult issues you often have to get
sweaty, if not downright dirty. Theres a reason why
turnover rates and attrition are so high in the call
center. Its a crappy stressful job. On average, call center
agents have 90 seconds to soothe an unhappy caller,
fix the issue, and then pitch any relevant up-sell or
cross-sell offers.
But while we can certainly applaud the hard work of
customer-service professionals working in call centers,
we shouldnt over-glorify it. After all, the main function
of the call center is to resolve problems. The very fact that
someone is taking the time to call your customer service
department presumably means that something has already
gone terribly wrong.
It also means that the customer wasnt able to resolve the
issue using Google, social media tools, or the companys
self-service website. While most of todays Web-savvy
customers are willing to search for information themselves,
at some point telling customers to just Google harder
stops being a viable customer service strategy.
If customers cant solve their problems online, they
will eventually pick up the phone and call your service
department. Or at least that used to be the case.

Increasingly were seeing that many customers no longer

bother to call in their complaints. Instead customers
are turning to social media to vent their anger, and to
publicly trash brandsin front of friends, family, coworkers, and followers.
If that isnt bad enough, negative comments and reviews
are cached and served up whenever anyone searches for
your productsfor eternity, or at least until Google goes
out of business. While a few negative tweets might not
be enough to tank your companys share price, we have
seen more than one recent example of companies that
have suffered tangible financial losses after being publicly
embarrassed via social media. If you need a primer,
check out the AdAge feature Social Media Screw-ups:
A Brief History.
But fear not. While social media can certainly hurt you,
they are not your enemy. In fact, social media can be a
valuable tool to help you understand what your customers
are saying (and feeling) about your products and services.
Perhaps even more importantly, social media channels can
provide you with opportunities to extend customer service
beyond the walls of your brick-and-mortar call center.
Fundamentally, customers dont care much whether
their issues are resolved via social media, a corporate
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Part:

INTRO

The Networked Call Center (contd)

self-service website, or a companys call center. Most
customers dont actually care who (or for that matter
what) they speak to; they just care about getting fast
and accurateanswers.
However, companies do need consistent processes in place
for handling customer issues across all channels, from
traditional contact-center channels such as telephony to
more contemporary venues like Twitter, Facebook, blogs,
community forums, and product reviews.
Following are three points to keep in mind as you work
to integrate social-media channels into your traditional
contact center with the goal of creating a truly channelagnostic customer service center, or what former Gartner
analyst Esteban Kolsky calls a Customer Interaction
Hub (CIH).
1. Social media wont replace your call center. Social
media do provide legitimate opportunities to reduce call
volumes. When an unpaid peer army answers a customers
question, they solve that particular customers issue.
But thats only the beginning. In future, any customer
who faces that same issue can readily find the solution
onlinepotentially avoiding thousands of calls to your
call center.
In the best-case scenario, your call volumes plummet, you
are able to reduce staff or repurpose call center agents to

other tasks, and your remaining agents experience greater

job satisfaction as they perform more value-added work
rather than just answering the same 20 questions all day.
Alternatively, they can just sit around playing Angry Birds
all day while they wait for the phone to ring.
The reality is a bit different. While social media generally
do reduce customer service call volumes, they tend to
increase the total volume of customer interactions that
reach the call center. The reason for this is simple. Using
social-media Web crawling and analysis tools, you can
detect, capture and respond to many more customer
conversations than you were previously ever aware of.
2. Social media raises the bar for customer service
in your contact center. Back in the good old days it
didnt much matter if a company provided lousy customer
service. A disgruntled customer might tell a few friends
and family members about the bad experience, but the
word didnt spread very far. It was fairly easy for brand
owners to mask product or service weaknesses with clever
marketing campaigns.
Today, customers use an array of social media tools
and services to share information, rate products, and
post detailed reviews. Theres no longer any place for
companies to hide shoddy products or subpar service.
If any flaws exist in your products or customer service,
social media will expose them.
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Part:

INTRO

The Networked Call Center (contd)

In the past, companies could get away with deploying
untrained agents and creaky call center infrastructure.
Today, companies cant afford slipups. You cant toss
an untrained agent into the mix and call it on-the-job
training. Even one poor customer interaction can go viral
and ruin or severely tarnish your brand.

Services like Klout.com can potentially help you identify

which of your customers might be highly influential
(based on their usage of social media sites such as
Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn), and therefore more
likely to hurt your company and brand with a negative
Tweet or blog post.

3. Social media makes it more important than ever

to know your customers. CRM has always been about
providing differentiated customer service, which requires
a great deal of knowledge about your customers. By
definition, not all customers are equal. Some customers
are more valuable and more important to your business,
and should thus receive preferential treatment.

If youre not actively monitoring, responding, and

engaging with customers via social media, you are
conceding the opportunity to participate in (and
hopefully steer) conversations about your brand. Youre
also missing out on the chance to gather valuable
feedback about your products, and you are passing up the
opportunity to collaborate with customers on potential
new product ideas and enhancements.

But at the same time, you cant afford to treat any

customer poorly. Even lower-value customers need to be
handled professionally and fairly. As weve seen numerous
times in past few years, it can take just one motivated,
disgruntled customer to ignite a social media firestorm
that burns your brand.
Granted, not every angry review, blog post or tweet will
go viral. In fact, very few do. Most whiny tweets fall on
deaf eyes. However, you must be vigilant and watch out
for those customers who have the power to sway public
sentiment against you online. Thats why its important to
consider the extent of your customers influence when
creating 360 profiles of them.

By integrating social media into your contact center as

another communication channel for customers to choose
from, you can help your customers and also position
your company to benefit from their feedback. In essence,
youre killing two birds with one stone. Or, in more
contemporary vernacular, killing two pigs with one bird.
If you dont get that last reference, just Google harder.
Im only kidding, let me Google that for you.
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INTRO

The Networked Call Center (contd)

John Burton is a Director of Product Management at
SAP, responsible for several areas of CRM including Social
CRM and Contact Center Customer Service. John has been
involved in contact center and customer service applications
since he joined SAP in 1999. When not blogging about
Social CRM, John enjoys ultra-marathon running in the
mountains of California.

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INTRO

The Death of Customer Service

Consumers have been firing companies right and left lately.
Heres how to adapt.
By Barry Dalton
So, youre the Vice President of Customer Service at
Acme Corp. Your empire includes all of customer service
and support for your global operations; 15 contact
centers; 9,000 customer service agents; 2,000 technical
support and help desk staff and all the brick and mortar,
technology and telephony goodies that drive the machine.
Its January 2, 2012. Youve just had a great holiday
season, and your batteries are fully charged. Youre
ready to begin executing on your 2012 strategic plan
to improve customer service and finally measure the
impact of your service delivery on brand equity. Youve
built your financial models, staffing projections and
volume forecasts. And youve worked with colleagues in
marketing and product development to understand their
plans so that you can be a supportive business partner.
Its time for your Monday morning one-on-one meeting
with the CEO. You close the door, sit down at the
conference table, and he says: Your mission for 2012
is to eliminate your job, and your entire function in this
company as it exists today. You have ultimate authority
to drive decisions in any area of the organization that
you think impacts your ability to accomplish this
mission. Well meet back here on March 1st to review
your progress. With that, he stands up and walks out
of the room.

Sound crazy? Well, in case you havent noticed, thats

exactly what your customers have been doing to you
for the past three years or so. Theyve been firing you,
or rather pushing your function lower and lower down
the list of resources that they turn to for service and
support. Its not happening all at once or this
dramatically, but more slowly and ultimately more
painfully. Its kind of like ripping the bandage off
millimeter by excruciating millimeter.
Because the change hasnt happened like the bosss
sledgehammer across the side of your head in the scenario
above, many customer service professionals have been
caught off guard. So its worth stressing: The social
customer is driving customer service as weve known
it to the brink of irrelevance.
IBM researchers reached the same harsh conclusion in a
recent study called From Social Media to Social CRM. They
found that customers would much rather seek information
and advice from friends, family and even strangers that
look like me than from brands. And their definition
of brand includes customer service functions that
support the brand. Alarmingly, the study found a sharp
disconnect between what customers care about and what
companies think customers care about. More than half of
all customers surveyed, for example, dont even consider
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INTRO

The Death of Customer Service (contd)

engaging with companies on social sites. For them, social
networking is about personal connections.
What to do? Telephone-based customer service will most
likely not disappear in my lifetime. However, the contact
center may. Self-service, peer-to-peer engagement and
the proliferation of information and mobile technology
are driving agent-led customer service and the entire
profession to a tipping point. As the social consumer
goes mobile, so too will the customer service agent.
The customer service organizations that survive this
massive disruption will be those that effectively align
service delivery channels with customer preferences.
They will reinvent the customer service function to create
a more relevant value proposition for both internal and
external stakeholders.
So how will you plan your customer service strategy?
And in this social customer-driven paradigm, how does
customer service remain relevant to the enterprise and
create value for the company and the consumer? Taking
a quick trip through the past in our wayback machine,
we find vivid examples of strategies that have been,
lets just say, less than value-creating. Remember the
customer service/contact center as revenue center
craze? How many of us have broken out in a flop sweat
when weve been on the phone with our credit card
company and heard this script?

Have I addressed your issue today to your satisfaction, sir

or madam? Yes? Ok, great! One more thing before I let you
go. I see here [in my CRM system that my employer just
spent $10 million and and five years implementing but that
everyone hates] that you are a preferred account holder.
As such, you are eligible for our super deluxe credit score
tracking blah blah blah
Exactly.
Or, how about those good old Six Sigma days? I
know, I know. Six Sigma is alive and kicking in many
organizations. We still see armies of black belts, green
belts and every other color of the rainbow, crunching
data to figure out how to get average hold time from
237 seconds to 221.2345 seconds. Statistical analysis of
contact center data can be extremely valuable. Im just
of the opinion that all that Six Sigma effort has been
focused in the wrong direction. A good idea with poor
execution, if you will.
Which brings me to my point. Given the scenario painted
above, Id argue that the real value of customer service in
future will be its ability to impact, at the enterprise level,
those issues that push customers to engage customer
service in the first place. The contact center as data hub
is an interesting concept, one that typically involves
using CRM data to better engage with customers. But I
happen to think the real untapped value lies in how that
data is used to drive sustainable change in the
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Customer Service is Dead (contd)

enterprise business processes that lie at the root
of customer satisfaction.
There is a treasure trove of insight in the flood of daily
contacts between your customers and the contact center.
Customers talk about all sorts of things. In reality, few
customers call to say how much they loved the look
of their new utility bill; or how great it was that their
new Professor Dumbledore bobble head doll arrived in a
box the size of a postage stamp. No. Customers call the
contact center, by and large, because some process in
your organization broke down; somebody messed up.
Bill Price, the former head of customer service at Amazon,
outlines his approach to this challenge in his book The
Best Service is No Service. Price argues that contact
centers should focus on eliminating what he calls dumb
contacts, those driven by some upstream process that
is broken in the organization. Use your contact center
personnel (all those black belts) armed with statistical
data to go fix those things. Billing errors, product defects,
shipping delays, stock outs, back orders, the list goes
on. Empower your customer service professionals to step
outside the contact center and drive process change,
not just deliver call reason code reports. Eliminating the
demand for service driven by these internal process flaws
will in turn free customer service personnel to focus on
high value interactions.

clear lens into all that is good and not so good within
your organization. It demonstrates an undeniable truth:
Every corporate function is responsible for the customer
experience. Customer service is not the new marketing.
However, marketing, sales, finance, HR, manufacturing,
purchasing, name the department, should ultimately
share responsibility for customer service and the customer
experience. Customer touch points happen throughout
organizations, often in places that are not immediately
apparent. It takes some effort to identify these touch
points and uncover how they actually impact the customer
experience.
Whos going to do that? Acme Corp. VP of Customer
Service, come on down. Youre the next contestant on
The Time Is Right.
Barry Dalton is a customer service strategy and
technology leader with over 22 years of experience
designing and implementing loyalty strategy, business
processes and technology architecture for Fortune 500
and mid-market companies.

The data contained in those contacts provide a crystal

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Take Sides With Your Customers!

How to navigate the era of the empowered consumer
By Tristan Bishop
Weve entered the era of the empowered customer.
The digital age has brought consumers both the power
to discern quickly and the platforms to speak boldly.
Modern companies have an unprecedented opportunity
to cull customer perspectives and extract actionable
insights. These insights can lead to powerful adjustments
in business practices, resulting in superior customer
experiences and robust customer loyalty.
Wise brands know that every customer comment carries
meaning. As discussed throughout this e-book, contact
centers can use the wealth of newly available knowledge
to evolve from transactional support to relational
engagement. To initiate this transformation, forwardthinking organizations must craft a culture of customer
advocacy, demolishing internal silos along the way.
The Vocal Customer
The rise of social networking has totally transformed
consumers. In years past, passive, price-driven shoppers
dealt with brand frustrations by grousing to friends and
family. Today, these same customers are becoming vocal
activists who can transform disrespectful slights into
PR disasters. Customers have adapted to the speed of
social media much faster than the companies who serve
them. In fact, customer PR crises often shock brands into
investing proactively around social customer service.
Wise brands choose to watch and learn rather than to

live and learn. It makes little sense to wait until your

hard-earned brand equity has been sucked out by a social
media crisis before you start figuring out how to satisfy
this new breed of vocal customer.
There are endless examples of brands that were caught
unaware and paid for it with a public drubbing. In 2009,
two Dominos Pizza employees made a video of themselves
defacing food and uploaded it to YouTube. The video
quickly went viral, but the brand was slow to respond.
Since then, many companies have learned the importance
of paying close attention to mentions of their brands on
social media channels.
Many corporations have also crafted crisis response plans
to address social media problems before they become
widespread. The goal is to avoid crises like the one Nestl
experienced in 2010, when the companys Facebook fan
page was quite suddenly populated with a steady stream
of complaints about how its production practices were
harmful to the environment. Nestls reputation had
already suffered in the time it took the company to assess
the situation and devise a response.
The Relational Brand
The 20th century notion that success is measured
primarily by quarterly revenue is fading fast. Instead, wise
brands now realize that their path to longevity is to stop
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Take Sides With Your Customers! (contd)

extracting value from customers and start exchanging
value with them.

impacting relations between companies and

their customers.

Brands that view the contact center as a cost to be

contained have little incentive to delight any given
customer. If an agents performance is measured on
Average Handle Time, her incentive will be to give the
fastest possible service and the minimum satisfaction.
This tends to produce a steady stream of disrupted,
rushed and disappointing customer interactions. More
often than not, these customers will then broadcast their
disappointment over social networks.

Now imagine the exponential impact that a vocal

customer can make over social channels. For every
customer you publicly delight via social channels, how
many more people view the positive interaction and
make a silent mental note about the reliability of your
promises? For every social customer service interaction
that ends with a disgruntled customer, how many dozens
(or hundreds) come away with lower trust in your brand?

The wise organization values current customers much

more than prospective ones. Forward-thinking companies
realize that delighted customers come back for more.
Customer retention is about relationships. And because
retention is fantastically more cost-effective than
customer acquisition, the service experience becomes
an investment in future revenue.
Exponential Impact
Wise brands also recognize that happy customers provide
free marketing. According to well-known statistics from
the White House Office of Consumer Affairs, customers
who have their problems resolved successfully will
tell between four and six people about their positive
experience. By contrast, an unsatisfied consumer will
tell between nine and 15 people. These statistics were
gathered before social media started significantly

These impressions quickly add up, hamstringing your

ability to make sales in the near and long term. When
consumers hear bad things about your brand from
people they know and trust, they will tend to view
your advertisements to the contrary as little more than
expensive lies.
The Customer-Centric Culture
Here are a few key steps you can take to change
your customer service organizations mindset from
transactional to relational:
Lead from Conviction, not Position. You dont need
a seat in the C-Suite to ignite a customer-centric
revolution in your organization. You only need to
decide that only two entities matter, the customer
and the brand. If you eliminate that proprietary,
department-specific focus from your own thinking,
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Take Sides With Your Customers! (contd)

youll be well on your way to making choices that
benefit your customer.
Align with Like Minds. Youre probably not the only
one in the company who cares deeply about the
customers and is willing to go out on a limb for their
benefit. From product design to accounts receivable,
every employee influences customer experience.
Find team members from other departments who are
vocal proponents for customer advocacy. Sit with them.
Dine with them. Learn from them. Share what you
know. Find ways to help each other. Before long,
youll have built a cross-functional team of customercentric visionaries.
Share Genuine Stories. Myriad customers are talking
about your brand right now. There are a number of
ways to start listening today, even without a budget.
Visit the following sites to gather free insight into
what your customers are saying about you:
www.socialmention.com
http://www.google.com/alerts
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/

colleagues how well-meaning customers are getting

frustrated despite their best efforts to work with your
brand. This should inspire them to take positive and
immediate action.
Conclusion
In modern business, connecting with customers is an
investment, not a cost. The social customer requires
respect and is prepared to fight for it. Brands who respond
proactively to this shift are likely to thrive. Brands that
choose denial will progressively lose market share as they
march toward obsolescence. Wise brands will capture the
concerns of their customers and use them to improve the
customer experience.
Customer loyalty is built by delivering genuine value
in a respectful way. If you nurture a culture of genuine
customer concern, the benefits will bloom.
Tristan Bishop is Senior Manager of Digital Strategy at
Symantec. Currently, Tristan is driving Social CRM adoption
from within the Chief Technology Office. A devoted
customer advocate, Tristan is known around the web as
KnowledgeBishop.

After you visit these sites and enter your company or

product names, pull together the most compelling stories
and pour them into a presentation. People relate more
powerfully to stories than to statistics. Show your

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The Rise of Conversational Commerce

Customer service reps are human beings with social networks of their own.
Increasingly, companies see those networks as assets rather than liabilities.
By Dan Miller
Put yourself in the shoes of a modern customer service
representative. During off hours, he or she is likely
to be a frequent texter, Tweeter or Facebook user.
The chances are also quite good that, in addition to
Facebook friends and Twitter followers, the rep will have
a shorter list of contacts that reside in online mail and
messaging systems.

These workspaces often amount to a downgrade from

the service reps own smartphone or laptop. By design,
they restrict the agents activities and responsibilities.
The various communication tools, widgets and windows
may seem colorful and dynamic, but are usually designed
to restrict user activities according to the strictures of
workflow optimization.

Work is a different story. Contact centers tend to be

well-oiled machines that are calibrated to specific KPIs
(Key Performance Indicators), themselves the byproducts
of workforce optimization systems. Incoming calls are
answered within three rings. Interactive voice response
systems ascertain the purpose of a call in a matter of
seconds. Call processing systems route each call according
to its purpose, the status of a caller and the availability
of appropriate agents or resources. All these systems tend
to discourage service reps from interacting with their
social graphs while on the clock.

Increasingly, however, companies are seeing the social

graphs of their customer service reps as assets rather
than liabilities. The online pharmacy Drugstore.com has
published the following social media usage guidelines
for its service agents: Most of us tap into online social
networks as part of our everyday life, both at work and at
home. The Companys aim is not to discourage usage but
to ensure that all of us are following the same guidelines.
Your conduct, even while off-duty, can reflect on and affect
the Company. In light of this, drugstore.com asks that
you observe the following guidelines when representing
or referring to Company online, including our employees,
products and services, customers, partners, affiliates,
vendors and suppliers, and competitors.

At work, service reps are often confronted with

workstations that feature a static layout along with
periodic screen pops displaying information about
incoming or outgoing calls. Standard screens enable
agents to read scripts for a pre-defined set of call
types. After each call they may be prompted to input
notes regarding specific issues, customers or incidents.

This conversational commerce model of customer

service creates its own tensions for companies. In a
recent presentation at a social CRM conference, Drugstore.
com customer care director Lisa Larson presented her
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The Rise of Conversational Commerce (contd)

companys strategy of empowering agents and customers
to answer questions about thousands of products.
Revealingly, the next bullet in Larsens PowerPoint
presentation was: Improve agent productivity and
decrease call handle times.
Larson also argued that customer service representatives
should add colleagues from legal, marketing and PR
departments to their social networks, because all these
departments help shape the practices and policies that
are permitted in the name of conversational commerce.
Drugstore.com correctly divides its social networking
efforts into proactive and reactive categories.
Proactive social networking includes marketing-oriented
activities that support branding and promotional efforts,
including amplification of positive posts. These activities
demonstrate how social service reps can reinforce the
millions spent annually on advertising and marketing
campaigns designed to drive traffic to local retail outlets
or make the phone ring in sales-oriented contact centers.
They are bolstered by refinements in all manner of
mass marketing vehicles. URLs for Facebook fan pages
emblazon billboards and print ads. So do Twitter handles
and scannable quality control codes that navigate to
relevant Web sites.

Reactive, care-oriented activities are the result of social

media monitoring, mining and quick reaction. These
are the less predictable activities that are folded into
traditional workflow optimization efforts by assigning
agents to monitor specific sites or email aliases and
respond as required.
Because individual customers or prospects choose the
time, place and medium for each interaction, companies
need to monitor multiple communication channels and
social media platforms and apply analytical engines to
detect issues as they arise. They must then respond
rapidly and resolve issues expediently.
Dan Miller has over 20 years experience in marketing,
business development and corporate strategy for telecom
service providers, computer makers and application
software developers. Dan founded Opus Research in 1985
and helped define the Conversational Access Technologies
marketplace by authoring scores of reports, advisories and
newsletters addressing business opportunities that reside
where automated speech leverages Web services, mobility
and enterprise software infrastructure.

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Virtual Sand Kicking

How to deal with customer bullies on social media
By Natalie Petouhoff
Executives often worry that if they engage customers on
social media channels, customers will respond by trying
to take advantage of the company. The fear is that if
the company has a social media presence, customers will
circumvent normal channels, i.e., phone or email, and
go straight to Twitter or Facebook with a horrible,
damaging post.
While this fear is not unfounded, brands should consider
the following points to help them formulate coherent,
useful social media policies:
Customers Are Talking About Your Brand Whether
You Are Listening/Interacting Or Not. In the years
that Ive been covering social media in the context of
customer service, marketing and PR, Ive found that some
customers do use social channels to complain. Whether
that becomes a problem has to do with several things:
Product & Service Issues: Is there something wrong
with the products or services that you provide? Are
your customers so frustrated that theyll go to any
length to say bad things about your brand? If so,
that information must be provided to the departments
within a company that can fix it. Oftentimes we dont
think of customer service as an information/feedback
distribution center. But weve learned that customer

service and especially social media customer service can

provide valuable, real-time feedback that companies
often cant get any other way. Brands need the ability
to collect, analyze and distribute that dataand then
fix the issues so they dont create brand crises.
Poor Customer Service Experiences: Is there
something wrong with the experience that your
customer service department is providing? If so, that
needs to be fixed. It can often be a combination of
strategy, technology and execution. Do the agents not
have helpful answers? Do they have enough information
about the customers other attempts to resolve the
issue? It could be that your interactive voice response
system (IVR), website, chat and other social media
channels arent connected to one another, forcing
customers to restate their problems to each agent
with whom they interact. Weve all experienced that
as customers, and we know it doesnt feel good.
If thats the case, then you need to create unified
customer interactions, business rules, policies,
knowledge bases, workflow and analytics in a common
cross-channel platform. If you have insight into what
customers have encountered across various touch points
in your organization, you can dramatically improve their
experience. You can even drive down costs.
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Ill-Managed Expectations: Is there something
misleading about the promise your brand is making?
Is your marketing not truthful? Is it setting customers
up for disappointment? You need to review your
products and make brand promises that create realistic
expectations. If your brand over-promises and underdelivers, it will create customer service nightmares.
Marketing, PR and customer service functions often
dont collaborate closely within companies. But in
the end, aligning these functions serves not just the
customer, but also the enterprise.
Get the Basics Right: Can you truthfully say that you are
providing the best products and services you can, that
your PR and marketing teams are delivering accurate brand
promises, and that your customer service department
is creating great customer experiences? If so, youre in
pretty good shape. First and foremost, companies must
address these business basics if they hope to succeed.
Ive found that when sincere customers go ballistic, its
because the company is misfiring in one or more of these
basic areas. Lesson learned? Get the basics right.
Beyond the Basics: That being said, how do you handle
customers who air their frustrations on social media
channels? Just like anywhere else, there are customer
bullies who think they can trash a brand via social
media to get free stuff, better service and so on.
Unfortunately, this is partly due to the fact that many
companies provide better service to customers who

complain via social media than to customers who use

more traditional channels like phone, e-mail and chat.
The lesson? Reward behaviors you want repeated.
The Witness Factor: Companies need to realize that
customers are very smart. They figure out quickly where
they can get the fastest results and the best answers. If
your company consistently provides poor customer service
through traditional channels, you are encouraging bullies
to take advantage of the publicness of social media.
I call this the Witness Factor, the idea that public scrutiny
changes how companies treat customers. You cant
treat customers one way when they email or call on the
phonei.e., poorlyand then a different way when they
use social channelsbetter and faster. Bullies will figure
that out and use it to their advantage, because they know
you dont want them to go ballistic in public.
Know Your Customers: You need good systems for
identifying and understanding your customersi.e.,
contact center solutions, CRM, etc. I interviewed many
clients as I was researching this topic. I asked all of them
how they deal with bullying customers. The collective
wisdom is that when a company can tell the difference
between a real issue and a customer who is using social
media to take advantage of the situation, they can make
better decisions on how to deal with the customer.
Companies often dont have good contact center/CRM
systems, so they dont know much about their customers.
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And their information systems often arent integrated
with social channels, meaning that they cant connect the
person tweeting to their contact center or CRM database.
Lesson learned: Update your systems and processes so
that you can track customers and their interactions across
all channels.
Fire Your Bully Customers: One client told me that
when they get a customer who consistently complains,
they mark that persons account. They set a limit on
how many times they will allow that customer to try to
get more out of the company than he or she deserves.
And in some cases, they fire the customer. While this
may seem extreme, these companies have found that
some customers just want to take advantage of them. So
rather than trying vainly to please these customers, they
establish criteria that warrant firing them. Once bullying
clients realize that you are firing them, theyll either leave
or change their behavior.
To be clear, Im not talking about customers with real
problems that need solving. Im talking about customers
who consistently complain in order to take advantage of a
company. Its important to identify these conversations
early, which is why its essential to monitor your brand
on social channels. You also need the ability take the
interaction offline, into channels that are less visible
to the public. This will make it easier to discern if the
customers concern is valid or if you have a professional
complainer on your hands.

Gratitude is Repaid in Spades: When you help customers

who have real issues, they often express their gratitude
unpromptedon social media channels. You cant
buy that kind of publicity, especially in a world where
customer service has become PR and where bullying
customers use social media in an effort to take advantage
of companies.
Brand Advocacy Matters: If you have worked hard to
create strong brand advocates among your customers, this
crowd will do one of the following things when a social
media bully goes off on your brand. If they think the
complainer is a legitimately frustrated customer, they may
offer solutions and help. Thats great because advocates
or SuperUsers often know more about your brand than
your own agents do. But if the crowd thinks that the
complainer is really a bully, they will intervene to police
their social sphere. As a result, bullies become known as
brand bashers, and neither the brand nor its clients pay
much attention to them.
Dr. Natalie Petouhoff (@DrNatalie, doctornatalie@gmail.com)
serves as the Chief Strategist for Social Media, Digital
Communications and Measurement at Weber Shandwick, with
a world-wide practice role spanning client work, practice
development and thought leadership. Dr. Natalie consults
with clients on their strategy for social media, marketing, PR,
customer service and integrating them using organizational
change management, new technology deployment and social
media analytics, measurement and ROI.

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