1.  Exposure.

In the MarketingProfs Brands Undervalue Social  Media for Customer Service post, they point out that when social CRM is done well, it provides added benefits of increased exposure for your brand and helps acquire new customers, retain existing customers, and drive brand awareness.

2.  Guerilla Marketing Techniques.

Here are five guerilla marketing techniques offered by Ann Evanston to improve customer experiences in the social sphere.

• Set up strategic search phrases key problems your target market faces such as “slow internet” or “internet connection.”
• Set up search phrases for your business name. These types of searches are easy to set up in Twitter, Market Me Suite, Hootsuite,  and Social Mention and will search blog posts as well.
• Watch the mentions and respond to them! Offer empathy, help, and respond with a suggestion. Show them that you listened.
• When people use your business name positively, saying “thank you” creates a way to “keep in touch” as they are becoming fans and also referral sources (or potential customers).
• If something negative happens, deal with integrity and provide good communication. Don’t delete the negative feedback as this would be like putting your head in the sand. This can show others how gracious you really are in the way you respond.

3.  Interface Across Functions.

In the Community Roundtable’s 2011 State of Community Management Report, they state that community management is increasingly a distinct and separate role with explicit responsibilities for interfacing across many functions to ensure its continuity of care for their community members.

4.  Structural Hole.

This can be seen as the person between two groups who has been taken away. This creates a disconnect between the two groups. According to Community Roundtable, they suggest that recognition may cause companies to rethink about outsourcing their Twitter accounts to their Public Relations Company.

5.  Hub and Spoke

In Jeremiah Owyang’s  hub-and-spoke model,  he illustrates how the model provides a centralized resource to companies. Also, Drew McLellan, in his blog post dated April 20, 2011, recommends that companies should build the web of content creation in a hub-and-spoke model as shown below. He says you need to have a core or hub for all for your social media activity. This means having one place set up as a repository for your core content.

                Image Source:  Altimeter Group.

6.  Variety of Functions.
According to Heidi Cohen of ClickZ Marketing News & Expert Advice, she states that social media has changed how both consumers and companies view customer service. Customer service now fulfills a variety of different functions in addition to enhancing your marketing opportunities. See below 12 ways you can use social media to enhance customer service.

• Give business a human face. Become more personable and build customer trust.
• Listen to what customers are saying. Listen to what consumers are asking, provide a timely response and determine early the warning signs for PR and other issues.
• Proactively engage with prospects and customers. This shows that you are a real company that cares. Accomplish this through tweets, Facebook postings, or eve blogs.
• Provide additional product-related content. Try using other formats such as online videos to blogs showing how to use your products or services.
• Answer product-related questions. This allows your customers to respond to a confused customer with a direct answer and may even turn out to have more authority than coming from your customer service dept.
• Supplies as an alternative contact channel. Remember many companies have not yet started to really embrace suing social media for customer service. This can translate to better service for your customers.
• Gives customers a channel to talk to each other. This is where customers have an environment to have customer-to-customer conversations.
• Share customer feedback. Reviews can help qualify and endorse your products in ways that your team members can’t.  Customers trust other customers.

7.  Questions.

Often answering a consumer’s question takes a back seat to responding to customer complaints. However, providing a timely response to a question will make a customer feel heard and potentially can alleviate customer dissatisfaction.  Be sure to apologize for any missed communications as shown below by L.L. Bean.

8.  Key Stakeholders.

It is important to keep in mind that key stakeholders will care about different parts of your social media and will need access to different types of social media metrics.  In reading Forrester’s white paper titled “Social media Marketing Metrics that Matter: Communicating the Right Data to Internal Stakeholders,” the author points out that the focus of the company was to various internal stakeholders and how each one differed in their company.  Be sure to create frequent reporting of digital metrics to community managers within your company and identify the social media strategists. Reporting metrics are key for annual reporting of branding and reviewing the financial metrics for a return on investment of both time and money spent in social media efforts.

9.  Why Measure.

To have a successful community management, you need to regularly measure your efforts.  According to Dion Hinchcliffe, he points out that if you are not looking at your overall levels of participation, in addition to growth rate of new likes and new members, and making a list of recently disengaged and following up on them, then you are not managing your social media environment at all. There needs to be an understanding of your overall health and momentum in the social media arena and how you directly respond to issues and how you do it every day to be vital for long term success for your efforts.

10. Processes and Policies.

Having a marketing department in place to address customer service and social media needs is essential, but much more is needed in today’s marketplace. Companies are encouraged to put in place a thorough process and policy system for handling customer interactions through social media and technology efforts. According to Drew Kraus in his Gartner paper Emerging Technology Analysis: Social CRM for Customer Service, he stresses that one of the inhibitors for the adoption of a social CRM customer service technology is the lack of having defined processes and policies. Many companies hold off on bringing the new technology into their business practices until optimized processes and policies have been adopted. Instead, many companies are allowing their marketing departments to handle their customer service.  

11.  Template for Social CRM. 

With emergency technology and social media growing at a rapid pace, putting into place a Social CRM for customer service is becoming a best practice format for many companies. Drew Kraus offers actions for technology and service providers with his developed “template” for social CRM using a customer-service delivery process for your customers. This process template allows your business team members to deliver the same quality of standard for customer service through the same services and messages throughout your company.

  12. Wisdom.

Social CRM is about moving your fans and followers to becoming customers and advocates. This is a wise practice as it starts off first as a strategy and then moves to a back-end process and system for managing customer relationships and data within your company in an efficient and process-centric way. The key is being able to understand the business challenges you are looking to solve and then finding a way to solve them. Social CRM is one single component to developing a social or collaborative business that is both internal and external.

13. Zealous.

All of the 13 tips from last week and these 13 tips from this week require constant dedication and devotion. Becoming zealous about maintaining good customer relationships requires forethought and a quick response time from listening in your social media community.

DJ Heckes, CEO & Author
EXHIB-IT! Tradeshow Marketing Experts
www.exhib-it.com
Full BRAIN Marketing
www.fullbrainmarketing.com