michael pucher

 Social CRM Best Practices - Part 2: listen to your (social networked) customer

In todays world, listening to your customer not only belongs to your customer service or complaint departments. Customers complain about or praise your products and services on blogs, facebook, twitter and whatever may be the next big thing.

As a first step, you need to listen. The following screen shot of Seesmic Look shows an example of how that would look like if you were Toyota. I’m not sure whether social media can help that much in the Toyota case, but Toyota should have taken those concerns more seriously from the beginning…

Based on tools like that you can listen, monitor and measure reactions to your activities.

The next step would be to interact. There are already tools on the market to interact with social networks. One of those is RightNow Cloud Monitor. Have a look at the Demo:

RightNow Cloud Monitor

More and more CRM Vendors including Oracle, salesforce.com, Microsoft and other major vendors are starting offerings like that one.

So for the “best practice” part, I’ll give you an example how my favorite airline could interact with me on social media (twitter in that case):

Many companies like my airline use twitter as a one way channel for their press releases and marketing. You could mention them or write about them, you won’t get any response.

Lately I had a bad experience with their booking site and complained about it on twitter. As already said, no reaction from the airline. Using the tools mentioned above, the airline could start to interact with me:

dear @mpucher, we’ve seen you complained about a bad experience you had on our site. Would you like to share your exp. so we can improve it?

Well, you can be sure that I’d recognize it and would be impressed. And I’d spread that on twitter for sure! Now, it would be my turn to interact. I could not complain any more in the future because I had the chance to make things better.

You could even go further and create a contest: the best improvement suggestion wins a free flight. And of course you use a social media app to do the contest.

Now that would be what could be called social media engagement. Engagement with your social networked customer. Social CRM.