DIAGNÓSTICO:

The point is made in the preface of this book that many – if not all – of the various subjects covered in this book are inextricably linked, and those addressed in this chapter are no exception. However, there is fi rst an issue of what is it called to be addressed.

This book is called An Introduction to Social Media Marketing and yet in this section of the book I am going to ask the question of what is marketing?

The reason it must be addressed is that marketing is normally seen as attracting customers, and once they become customers a different department of the organization takes over. For example, advertising might attract people into a Tesco store but would that organization’s marketing department be responsible for the store layout, its cleanliness and staff? Similarly, a marketer in a B2B engineering company might be responsible for making a sale to a customer, but after that they play little or no part in the design, manufacture and delivery of the fi nished product.

So why should customer service be one of my stated objectives for any social media marketing strategy? A marketer might put forward the argument that this is the case because the service offered by a supermarket is actually the product that the customer has bought, therefore the delivery of the product – in this case a service – falls under the remit of the marketing department.

Naturally, in a smaller business the demarcation lines are less obvious, with staff and departments working much closer together. Which brings us to a marketing paradox that existed long before the Internet was developed.

Small to medium business owners and managers will frequently say they have no formal marketing department, plan or strategy, and yet in reality they practise – almost naturally – marketing that larger organizations strive hard to achieve. This is because as the small business expands it is necessary to employ more people who are specialists in aspects of the business. Human resources and accounts are obvious examples – as is marketing. As soon as departments exist, cohesion between the functions becomes problematic. (Note that this is an extremely simplistic interpretation of how businesses develop, but it is – I think – suffi cient to make the point.) However, as has been covered in the earlier chapters of this book, digital technology in general and social media in particular have changed the relationship between the organization and the

customer – and it is the organization that accepts that every employee has a role to play in its marketing (the concept of market orientation) which has gained most from the digital revolution. And if we accept that this is the way that busi-nesses must now operate if they are to be successful – then service and support is most certainly part of marketing. Think of it, perhaps, as post-sales ngagement.

But hold on for just a second, we marketers are fond of new terms and phrases to make it look as though we are always on the cutting edge of our subject (marketers aren’t the only ones guilty of this: human resources used to be the personnel department). Isn’t post-sales engagement another term for – or aspect of – relationship marketing? And note that the discipline of relationship marketing is relatively new and yet the practice has existed since mankind started trading.

The customer experience

Although the concept of the customer experience has been around for a long time, in recent years it has risen to be a hot topic in marketing circles. It is no coincidence that this rise has coincided with the ascend-ancy in the popularity of social media. A concept I have endorsed since the fi rst days of the Internet is that marketing has moved from helping the seller to sell to helping the buyer to buy. As digital marketing authority Gerry McGovern (2011) says, ‘old-school marketing is about getting customers to do things. Web marketing is about helping customers do things.’

This refl ects the shift in the balance of power between the customer and the marketer; in the digital environment the power belongs to the customer and in social media this is an absolute. No longer can products, brands or organizations dictate how customers think about them, customers make up their own minds – and it is inevitable that it is in social media that the contemporary customers’ minds are made up.

Naturally, the concept of customer experience extends beyond the digital environment and depending on the brand, product or organization ‘digital’ will have more or less of an infl uence. For the offl ine retailer it is the help the cus-tomer gets in selecting the right product or the smile they get at the checkout.

For the small garage it is the prompt parts delivery that means the customer’s car is ready for them to collect on time. However, for the contemporary brand that experience not only extends online, but the digital experience may dictate the overall customer experience. However, it is also the case that although the digital marketers can infl uence how the brand, product or organization is per-ceived and even have a positive infl uence, the offl ine customer experience must match the online promise. Indeed, this refl ects the fact that the social media marketer either suffers from a vicious circle where bad service is trumpeted on

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moved from helping the seller to sell to helping the buyer to buy

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68 Strategic social media marketing

social media sites – or they benefi t from a virtuous circle where excellent service is shouted from the digital house tops. It is within this notion that social media has brought such a benefi t to the consumer.

Customer service and support

When researchers at eDigitalResearch (2013) asked respondents, ‘If you were going to get in touch with a company, by what means would you expect to be able to contact them?’ the results were: 92 per cent said email, 71 per cent telephone, 45 per cent post, 22 per cent live online chat (presumably via the organization’s website) and 11 per cent social media (see Figure 5.1).

Similar research from, J. D. Power and Associates (2013) found that 67 per cent of consumers had accessed a company’s social media site in search of service and research from Nielsen (2012) found that one in three users prefers to contact brands using social media rather than the telephone. Although there seems to be some disparity in these fi ndings, it is obvious that social media is not only an option for organizations in providing service and support – but for customers who now make purchase decisions through multiple channels it is the option of choice for some of them.

However, the migration to social media for the provision of service and support has been slow. There are a number of reasons for this, not least that for some industries, markets or products, social media marketing in general is not right for them and so social service is unsuitable. Another signifi cant reason is

Figure 5.1 Customer expectations for means of contacting an organization.

that for many years service and support has been effectively out-sourced by many companies with the focus being more on cost reduction than actual customer satisfaction. Once again, this rather refl ects the nature of the organizations concerned, in that short-term profi t took precedence over long-term security through customer satisfaction (note that it is the latter which were, and still are, failing to make the digital transformation).

Dell, one of the fi rst

Computer technology corporation Dell was one organization to spot its advantages and became an early adopter of social customer service and support, opening its social media command centre to all employees – regardless of their function – in 2010. A year later the company had trained over 25,000 of its employees in ‘social listening’, monitoring over 25,000 social mentions of the organization daily in 11 languages. As a result, the insights gleaned from social media were spread throughout the organization rather than being ‘hoarded’ in a single department.

Source: BI Intelligence (2013) Social Customer Management. Business Insider.

Although many aspects of the advice offered by Brynley-Jones (2013) could apply to other elements of social media marketing, the 12 points he raises are specifi cally for developing social service and support. They are:

1. Build local teams – they understand the local marketing conditions and the people and can often solve problems far better than a central team.

2. Take public conversations somewhere a little more private – which means empowering the people on the front-line so that they can be fl exible in doing their job.

3. Put the whole organization on call – every team and department should be available to help resolve customer queries when required.

4. Keep your inter-departmental communications well-oiled – in order to have the whole organization on call – different teams and departments should work closely to deliver customer satisfaction.

5. Respond quickly, even if you don’t have the answer – Customers appreciate knowing that you don’t have the answer to hand right away, but are working on it.

6. Don’t always have the last word – don’t interact with people who want to make a point, but don’t necessarily want a response.

7. All you have to do is make sure you’re there – when customers fi nd out that someone is there and ready to help, they response well.

70 Strategic social media marketing

8. Unite your CRM and your monitoring platform – so that customers receive a coherent service, the organization needs to be able to see the whole customer journey.

9. Escalate infl uential complaints but prioritize your customers – be prepared to look for who the most important customers and what can be done for them.

10. Create back-up teams – spikes in social demand can happen any time, so have back-ups from other teams who are trained and able to engage during a spike or to cover sickness and holidays.

11. Monitor your performance – cross-check the performance of the social customer service team against other teams.

12. Back your staff – the team needs to be able to make decisions and know that they will be supported – even if they don’t make the right decision every time.

Readers will note how many of these tips require the organization’s owners and managers to have ‘bought in’ to the philosophy of social marketing as covered in the previous chapters of this book.

Many of Brynley-Jones’ points emphasize that social support has to be timely – in much the same way as they expect a phone to be answered immediately, people presume that comments on a social site will get a swift response. Edison Research (2012) found that when customers attempted to contact a brand, product or company for customer support via social

media, 32 per cent expected a response within 30 minutes and 42 per cent within 60 minutes. Furthermore, in the same research, 57 per cent of respondents expected the same response time at night and on weekends. However, it would seem that those expectations are not being fully met, with eDigitalResearch (2013) fi nding that only 24 per cent of all customer contact was answered within six hours and 10 per cent of people making contact through a social media received no response at all. Although a 90 per cent response rate is to be applauded, one does wonder if that is because the organizations care about their customers or the fact that queries or complaints on social media are available for the world to see is the reason for such response. And do the 10 per cent appreciate the damage they are infl icting on their brand?

A fi nal note to this section is that in Chapter 1 the point was made that addressing one objective effectively will have the potential to produce a trickle-down effect on other objectives. In the case of social service as an objective, the obvious spin-off is that if a customer is satisfi ed by service or support provided on social platforms then that can only serve to improve the brand value of the product or organization.

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Chapter exercises

1. Discuss the notion that digital marketing has played a signifi cant role in marketing moving from helping the seller to sell to helping the buyer to buy.

What role has social media played?

2. Do you use social media for service and support? If not, why not? Is it the case that you expect it in some industries or markets but not others? If this is so, why is it the case?

3. This book was published in the autumn of 2014. In this dynamic subject that means that some of the statistics shown in the chapter could well be out of date by the time you read them.

a. Go online to see if there are any more up-to-date statistics.

b. Discuss your fi ndings. If there are no signifi cant changes, why is that the case? If there are changes, what are they and what has caused them?

c. Check the statistics against responses in your classroom for the same research. If you repeated the exercise with your friends or family are the results the same as with your classmates?

The archives of the websites listed below are a good place to start your search for new research and data (note that for full access you may need to register; do so, it will be free and worthwhile).

clickz.com econsultancy.com emarketer.com marketingcharts.com marketingland.com marketingprofs.com

References

Brynley-Jones, L. (2013) Social Media Monitoring for Customer Service. Oursocialtimes.

Available online at www.oursocialtimes.com/social-media-monitoring-for-customer-service

eDigitalResearch (2013) Customer Experience Management. Available online at ecustomeropinions.com/survey/survey.php?sid=462774064

Edison Research (2012) The Social Habit. Available online at socialhabit.com/

downloads

J. D. Power and Associates (2013) 2013 Social Media Benchmark Study. Available online at www.jdpower.com

McGovern, G. (2011) Help People Do Things, Don’t Keep Them on Web Pages. Available online at www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2011/nt-2011-09-19-Help-people.html Nielsen (2012) State of the Media: The Social Media Report 2012. Available

online at www.womseo.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/The-Social-Media-Marketing-Report-2012. pdf