Yesterday,
we pondered if it's time for companies to invest in a social media strategy. Now thanks to the Internet and sites like YouTube, more and more
customers are making vengeance theirs with just a click. No more lines.
No more phone trees. No more complaining to only 20 people about lousy
customer service. In an instant customers can broadcast their
complaints to 100's or even 1000's of people and there's very little
that companies can throw in their way to keep them from taking a digital
hammer to their corporate reputations. Basically, customers have figured out how avoid the Labyrinth of customer service by using the Internet to go
around you instead of
to you to complain.
So if customers can now complain so instantly and so publicly, you would think corporations would be ramping
up their customer service and support to instantly answer every
tweet, blog post and online video, right? Well, the customer centric
companies are working hard to adapt to new consumer channels. But the
customer antagonistic companies, not so much.
Last year, BusinessWeek published
Consumer Vigilantes,
with a subhead that warned, "Memo to Corporate America: Hell now hath
no fury like a customer scorned." Regarding the "venom-spewed tales of
woe" that customers publish online, PeteBlackshaw, EVP of Nielsen Online Strategic Services, told BW
that, ""There's a certain degree of extremism that's popping up, [a
sense of] I'm going to get results, whatever means necessary. Companies
can brush these off as being atypical, mutant consumers, or they can
say there's a very important insight in [their] emotions."
Other warnings abound:
- The Tweet Is Mightier than the Sword: "Social CRM is about joining conversations between customers
and prospects while resisting the urge to control those conversations.
Customers today have more power over who they do business with, and how
that business is conducted. And the Web is totally entrenched in their
buying process. So if you’re not on the Web in ways to capture their
attention, you won’t be able to compete."
- Social CRM Showdown: "Change is occurring outside the enterprise whether businesses decide to
embrace it or not. [Forrester analyst Dr. Natalie Petouhoff] took a stab at summing it up: 'Customer
disdain, social media, and customer service ... have formed a perfect
storm that is super charging change,' she said."
- Social Customer Service Remains "A Breed Apart": "For the most part, very few companies are using formal contact center
agents to handle customer service interactions via these emerging and
new channels,' [Ian Jacobs, senior analyst for customer interaction technologies at Datamonitor,] says. 'Generally, there are social media specialist
groups within companies. Some of them may have contact center
experience or even physically sit in the same room with agents, but
they are a breed apart.'"
- CRM, Meet Your Future: "It is really difficult to discuss CRM today without addressing some
component of social media. Web 2.0 and social media practices have
created the Social Customer. Companies that are not in a position to
embrace their customers through social CRM strategies will quickly lose
touch. Social media is not a separate entity but a blend of CRM
interactional tactics. The same issues that caused CRM failures in the
past will rear their ugly head in social media if the fix is to simply
throw technology at them."
So what's your social media strategy?
