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Posted on April 8, 2009
Why Social Media is Succeeding at Qwest
BY JASON CORMIER
Qwest announced its "Talk to Qwest" program today - a comprehensive social media effort effectively helping Qwest customers resolve a range of issues online - including billing, tech support, product/pricing inquiries, etc.
Starting on Twitter, @TalkToQwest, Qwest has put together a super-group of people clearly demonstrating their care for customers through daily outreach and response (in 140 characters or less). That is actually the short answer to why they are succeeding in social media: their people.
As the social media agency hired to assist them, it's a privilege to share a little personal insight on Qwest with respect to both challenges and opportunities. But first, I have a confession.
Frankly, I was a little concerned about the project before we even started working together. It's one thing to focus on a project within a department of a large company - but when multiple departments are motivated to participate, and impassioned individuals are talking about literally changing how the company does business… well, I'll let you fill in the blanks from your own experience. Exciting? Yes. Quickly and effectively executed? Often not.
My internal questions were simple. How quickly is Qwest really going to be able to move on this? Would even necessary things like "messaging" and legal stand in our way of doing it right? Could they be relevant? Could they be cool? Could they be timely? Would the people we worked with have enough buy-in from the rest of the organization to really show the world that Qwest "gets it?"
Today, you (and Qwest's customers) are in the position to answer some of the more important questions I had early on. Socialmedia.qwest.com is a good start for seeing how the company is introducing and addressing the relevance factor.
And cool?! How about those Viddler videos of the people behind Qwest's Twitter presence? I can't tell you how glad I am about the avoidance of over-production that could have so easily been present here. And you just gotta see what this Qwest guy does at the bowling alley after hours (see video below). Classic!
In answer to my own questions - it's refreshing to say that early on, what we discovered within Qwest were groups of extremely committed people excited to work across multiple departments to make this happen.
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Posted on October 2, 2008
Customer Service as the New Marketing
BY JAMES CLARK
"My role was just a pleasant accident," Craig Newmark quoted in a recent article with Susan Kuchinskas of iMediaConnection.
The role Craig is talking about is going from founder and growing Craigslist, to being the public face of the company, working with the media and being part of a team of customer service reps.
I personally find this role fascinating and refreshing. What better way to serve your company than to be directly involved in helping solve customer issues or responding to customer inquiries.
Imagine the insights and knowledge he gains from personally interacting with the customer.
Which begs the question: Why do so many companies look at customer service as a necessary evil?
Answer: EGO
The people best suited to handle the vast array of customer service issues are not people manning phone banks in India. It's high-level management with a true and deep understanding of the products and service offerings. But these individuals would need to check their ego at the door to start manning the gates.
I do think there is an opportunity in elevating conversational customer reps, those individuals responsible for the Twitter and GetSatisfaction pages to be more senior as these individuals will most certainly become a public figure in the company.
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Posted on May 27, 2008
Talking Back to Your Customers – The Web 2.0 Way
BY STEPAN MAZUROV
Twitter has been getting a ton of complaints lately that stemmed from them having downtime and not adequately reporting the issues or keeping people posted. The interesting part of this debacle is that most of the complaining wasn't due to the service being down or extremely slow, but rather because the Twitter team was not utilizing the tools to talk back to their users and acknowlede the problems. Eventually Twitter realized its wrongdoing and started to update people on Get Satisfaction, their blog and their site. While they managed to control the damage, it was after negative comments hit mainstream and after everyone at TechCrunch to Scobleizer shared negativity and named a replacement. While most doubt that FriendFeed or anyone else will be able to overtake Twitter anytime soon, negative publicity can have a detrimental effect on your product/service. Here is a quick bullet point list of things you can be doing to avoid bad customer experience:
- Blogging - keep a company blog updated with latest news and status updates
- Get Satisfaction - a place for your customers to express their opinion and help you identify bugs. A Suggestion Box 2.0
- Easy access to contact information - let customers know that they can always call, email or mail in their issues, never hide your number
- Respond to complains quickly - never go silent.
- Never deny the obvious - its much better PR to admit your mistakes than to actively deny they exist.
Read on as I touch on some of the points above.
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“Oh, we only check that email once a week”
BY BEN CASTELLI
This was the response I received today from a Yahoo Search Marketing representative when I called to find the status of my account upgrade to the new sponsored search. This was after I did not receive the phone call and email I was promised last week to answer the same question. The notion that a large company such as Yahoo has a service email address that they only check once a week is laughable. I was psyched that Yahoo upgraded their Sponsored Search interface/structure and added some great new features, but the actual upgrade process and service over the past few months has been sub-par.
Have you ever heard the quote “If we don’t take care of our customers, someone else will.” Well, unfortunately there are not that many players in the web search game and you cannot afford to ignore Yahoo’s 28.5 percent share of the market. Maybe Yahoo has just become complacent with no threat from #3 Microsoft and the realization that they will never catch Google.
“Oh, we only check that email once a week” - Around here we call that a crap sandwich, C’mon Yahoo.
