Everything should be Negotiable

How many times have you called a customer service help line and not gotten a satisfactory response? Or a human one for that matter? Customer service should not be a chore that is farmed out with limited training to people that can’t really do much for you. To often customer service gets a bad rap for being unable to solve your issue and you often leave the conversation angrier then when you began it.

What can you do then to stop this wave of frustration? Pay customers for their time on the phone? Offer incentives for quality answers? Casual Friday? Maybe, but none of these solutions offer any real progress to solving the customer service headache.

Ways to Change:

1.    Reward Innovation. The best solutions usually come from the call center floor. The people in the trenches know the best ways to find out whether something works or not simply by testing it. So ask them to come up with solutions.

2.    Don’t block access, enable it. If you can’t trust your customer service employees to do the right thing and solve problems by giving them access to a system that would allow this. Why are they employed by you? What value could they be possibly adding?

3.    Utilize every channel (and make sure people can access your services from where THEY are and not where you are). This is getting more and more important as time goes on. People don’t use one form of communication to reach people anymore. They utilize several…until they get a response they prefer. The phone and email have been the standard for to long: let’s open up the door for a variety of services.

Empowerment is the only way to ensure customers have a more positive experience. You need to allow people to actually help people in order to help people? Not exactly rocket science but in today’s world it seems pretty damn close.

Does your company have the same commitment to customer service as the rescuer? It should.

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This is a guest post by Stuart Foster.

Stuart Foster is a marketing/PR consultant in the Boston area. He specializes in brand management, social media, and blog outreach. He authors a blog at Thelostjacket.com

The B2B Case Study That Made My Day

While doing some research into B2B case studies and social media, Sandy came across this blog post and passed it along to me. As I read the post, I was thinking, “this is cool.” And then I got to the comments. And that is when I began thinking, “this is awesome!”

The blog post, written by Beth Harte, is called: Lured in by Social Media: An Unofficial B2B Case Study. In this post, she chronicles her journey of a company (whose name is revealed at the end of the post) first coming up on her radar, her use of social media tools to find out more about it, and her interaction with the company–culminating in her hiring them. Then, at the end of the post, she wrote a challenge:

And finally, because I really want to see if they are on their social media game and if they are listening, here’s the company name Hubspot. I’ll know for sure if they leave a comment.

From what I can tell from the date/time stamps, within a few hours (HOURS!) someone from the company had responded. They had been listening! Not only did one person respond, but FOUR people did including one of the founders and the VP of Marketing. They knew that Beth had been doing her due diligence. They knew she was asking questions, poking around. And they DIDN’T interrupt her! They waited til she was ready, and then they were there, present and responsive.

In the comments, one of the founders of Hubspot, Dharmesh Shah, addressed their actions and said

The idea behind social media for business is to build a relationship over time with people that might benefit from your products and services.

Building A Relationship

As a social media junky and consultant, I know that social media is about relationships. I know that it isn’t a get in and get out type deal. But it’s amazing how many people don’t get it… They want to know how a Facebook page is going to get them a sales lead - tomorrow.

So, while Beth’s experience may not be revolutionary, and the idea of building relationships is not new (at least to me), I was thrilled to read this post and know that some companies out there are getting it. Thank you Beth for sharing this with us, and thank you Hubspot for doing what you do.