Download Boiling Point

5
Tips to
Engage Customers
Before They Hit Their
Boiling
Point
By Danica Jones
I
n our industry, there are a lot of lively conversations going on around engaging customers
across social-media channels. That’s because a
growing number of brands are diving deeper
into understanding the social customer journey
and the impact it has on customer service teams and
customer engagement.
For many consumers, however, the journey doesn’t
end on social-media channels; it extends to thirdparty review sites. From January through May 2016,
ConsumerAffairs.com has seen over 550,000 unique
visitors to the site directly from social-media channels, resulting in dozens of reviews left by consumers
trying to get their voices heard by the brands they
buy from.
Customers typically begin their attempts to contact a customer service team through brand-owned
properties, moving next to social media and then to
review sites. This customer journey and the resulting increase in negative sentiment is a symptom of
brands poorly monitoring feedback channels and/or
lacking a cohesive strategy for handling feedback and
resolving issues quickly when reported through social
media. The result? An increase in negative sentiment
scattered across multiple social-media and third-party
consumer spaces, making engagement even more of
a challenge—especially for smaller customer service
teams.
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SUMMER 2016
It’s time to help
customers where
they are at online,
not just where
you think they
are.
Making Engagement Work
Consumers want to be heard—
and helped. Here are ways to better
understand and engage with them.
n Many consumers reach out by
using search engines and queries,
not just social media.
n Collecting and consolidating feedback can help customers and your
business’ bottom line.
n It’s time to align marketing and
customer service for better customer
engagement.
n Don’t force customers to change
channels to find a resolution.
n Pay attention to review sites.
Consumers are.
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CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT
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5
To help keep customers engaged before they hit
their boiling point, keep
these five tips in mind:
1. Find out which
channels you may be
missing. Conduct a discovery session to uncover
channels that your customer
service teams may be overlooking. Not all customer
service channels are considered social, but that doesn’t
mean they’re not community spaces where your
audience could already be
engaging. Many times, customer service and marketing
teams find customers trying
to reach out in every way
possible, and review sites are
often the last resort.
It’s easy to drop a brand
name into a social-media
monitoring platform and
assume that it’s the best
solution for finding consumers who are talking
about a company. But many
consumers actually reach
out by using search engines
and queries like “brand x
reviews,” “brand x complaints” and “problems with
brand x product,” and social
media is not always the first
place search engines point
them to.
Not all customer
service channels
are considered
social, but
that doesn’t
mean they’re
not community
spaces where
your audience
could already be
engaging.
2. Look for engagement and feedback. Once
your team has identified channels where you haven’t
been interacting with customers, determine which
ones will best facilitate engagement. This will allow
you to collect and consolidate more customer feedback, which will help derive real value from the data
collected. Balanced and authentic feedback across all
channels means your team gets access to real insights
capable of completely transforming your company’s
reputation, products, customer experience and operational processes. As feedback helps your organization
improve, it can also play a role in generating increased
revenue. In addition, by proactively collecting cus-
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tomer feedback, you gain a
more authentic picture of
the customer experience and
increase credibility among
consumers.
3. Develop a strategy
tailored to each channel’s
unique mode of communication. Social media is
constantly evolving, and one
platform’s conversational interface can differ significantly
from another. For example,
Twitter offers limited characters, and even direct messages
used to require this format,
but it has since changed to
allow long-form direct messaging. Facebook now allows
consumers to message brands
through their company pages.
Instagram allows direct
messaging with a chat-style
feature.
A recent survey conducted
by The Economist and
Marketo revealed that 86%
of CMOs surveyed believe
marketing will own the customer experience by 2020. If
your marketing team is not
already aligned with customer service to better monitor
and engage with customers,
now is the time to make this
alignment a reality.
4. Try to keep the
customer engagement process in one channel. Nothing is more frustrating for a customer than
reaching out across multiple channels, finally reaching someone, and then being asked to jump to yet
another channel (or multiple channels, in some cases)
before getting an issue resolved. With so many social
and review platforms offering a private mode of communication to engage in more conversation and share
order and contact information, there’s no real reason
to force a customer to keep jumping through hoops.
Less friction means the customer issue will be resolved quickly and prevent customer churn.
5. Don’t leave review sites in the dust. Socially
engaged consumers are community-minded beyond
Danica Jones
is the marketing manager of
brands partnerships for
ConsumerAffairs,
a top U.S. thirdparty consumer
news and reviews website. Her background in social-media marketing
and reputation-marketing strategy
helps customer service and marketing teams understand and develop
ways to turn customer engagement
into revenue by using customer
feedback to make lasting improvements.
social media, and review sites
offer the same kind of social
engagement and conversational
space, just delivered in a different format. With nearly 90% of
consumers using reviews to make
purchasing decisions, this is not
a customer service channel that
should be ignored or neglected.
Social-media channels have
evolved to allow companies to
better facilitate deeper customer
conversations, and review sites
have as well. They frequently
offer free business accounts to
allow brands to respond and
resolve issues.
The time has come to truly
streamline customer engagement
across all customer service channels, from brandowned to social media and review sites CRM
By proactively
collecting
customer
feedback, you
gain a more
authentic picture
of the customer
experience.
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