if anyone knows what the combustion chamber in this is supposed to look like, would like to know. had a box that had collapsed, but did not see the dish target wall most of these have.
old Vallant.
How important is customer service via social media?
According to J.D. Power, 67% of consumers have used a company’s social media channel for customer service.
And when they do, they expect a fast response. Research cited by Jay Baer tells us that 42% of consumers expect a response with 60 minutes.
So, how’s your social media customer service?
For this post I was excited to research a set of 14 amazing examples of customer service using social media.
Let’s get started!
As a loyal Samsung customer, Canadian Shane Bennett asked for a free unit of their latest, soon-to-launch phone. To sweeten his offer, he included a drawing of a roaring dragon.
Not surprisingly, Samsung said “no”. But to say thanks, they sent him their drawing of a unicycle-riding kangaroo.
Shane then shared both messages (and drawings) to Reddit where it went viral. In response, Samsung Canada sent him the phone he asked for – and customized it with his fire-breathing dragon artwork.
Takeaway: Have fun with customer interactions. Don’t take yourself too seriously.
While waiting for takeoff in Tampa, Florida, Peter Shankman jokingly asked Morton’s Steakhouse to deliver a porterhouse steak when he landed at Newark airport.
While departing the Newark airport to meet his driver, he was greeted by a Morton’s server with a 24 oz. Porterhouse steak, shrimp, potatoes, bread – the works. A full meal and no bill.
When you think of the logistics of pulling this off, it becomes even more impressive. The Community Manager needed to get approval and place the order. It needed to be prepared and then driven by the server to the airport, to the correct location and at the right time. All in less than three hours.
Some of the comments on Peter’s post suggest that this isn’t an anomaly. Another reader shares his experience of ordering a baked potato and getting a full steak meal – delivered and for free.
Takeaway: Do something unexpected for a loyal customer – when they want it most.
After numerous stays at Nashville’s Opryland Resort, Christina McMenemy wanted her own spa-sound clock radio that comes standard in each room. The sound helped her sleep better than ever, and she couldn’t find that model anywhere. So she asked the hotel for help finding it.
Turns out, that model was exclusive to the Gaylord hotels. She thought that was the end of it, and went to her conference.
Upon returning to her room that evening, she found a gift waiting: the spa clock and a handwritten card. The staff had given her the product she was unable to find. Not only did they make a long term customer very happy, they also received significant media coverage for their act of kindness.
Takeaway: Make customers happy one at a time.
While it’s great to give away phones, steak dinners, and clock radios, this might not be sustainable customer service.
Why not? When other, loyal customers hear what these companies did, they might expect the same treatment. Can Morton’s deliver a free steak dinner to the airport for every customer who asks? Can Gaylord hotels give every loyal guest a free clock radio?
A more sustainable approach is to provide outstanding customer service on a daily basis. These next examples have lessons that can be implemented right away and on a consistent basis.
During a four-hour flight, EsaĂ VĂ©lez’s seatback TV gave him nothing but static – while the rest of the passengers had normally functioning screens. How did he respond? He tweeted a complaint to JetBlue. Nothing inflammatory, but he was clearly disappointed.
How did JetBlue respond? While they could have made an excuse or even ignored his tweet, they didn’t. They took his side and empathized with him.
“Oh no! That’s not what we like to hear! Are all the TVs out on the plane or is it just yours?”
After he confirms that it was just his TV that was out, they respond:
“We always hate it when that happens. Send us a DM with your confirmation code to get you a credit for the non-working TV.”
Not only do they imagine his frustration, but they also offer him a credit for his trouble.
What was the result? Just 23 minutes after his complaint, he tweets: “One of the fastest and better Customer Service: @JetBlue! Thanks and Happy Thanksgiving”
Takeaway: Put yourself in your customer’s shoes when responding to complaints.
While attending the #PSEWEB conference in Vancouver, Mike McCready tweeted that, while he liked his room at the Delta, the view wasn’t so nice. He didn’t tag the hotel, and he wasn’t asking for anything.
Within an hour, Delta responded – offering a room with a better view. And when Mike returned to his room after the conference, he found a dish of sweets and a handwritten card from the staff at his hotel. It made such an impact that he wrote a post about it – the very same day.
Takeaway: Set up a social listening strategy to listen to all customer conversations.
While every customer comment is important, some are going to be a little more urgent than others. Like locking a customer in your store.
This happened to David Willis last year at Waterstones Trafalgar Square store. He tweeted:
Not surprisingly, this tweet went viral, with 16,000+ retweets and 12,000+ likes. Because someone was monitoring Waterstones Twitter account, they were able to tweet 80 minutes later that they had freed their previously captive customer. Imagine how this could have turned out, if Waterstones customer service had stopped listening for the day.
Takeaway: Always listen to customer conversations.
Before I do business with a new company, I like to see if anyone is listening. It gives me confidence that they’ll be there if I have a problem or question.
When I was looking for a premium related-content service, I signed up for a free trial account with Contextly. The process was smooth, and I was excited about the app, so I tweeted about it. They responded with a positive, helpful tweet.
As a result, I’m confident that they are interested in me and will help me if I have a question with the app.
Takeaway: Use social media to streamline customer onboarding.
Back in 2010, Xbox added a dedicated Twitter account. Since then, their Elite Tweet Fleet has posted more than two million support tweets. In fact, when I visited their account page, they were averaging two tweets per minute! And they have a team of 27 support experts.
Any company that assigns a dedicated Twitter account (and 27 people to manage it) is amazing to me. Check out some of their interactions:
Takeaway: Be committed to your social media customer service.
Nike Support is one of the strongest customer service accounts on Twitter. They feature a dedicated Twitter account, support seven days a week and in seven languages (English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Italian, German & Japanese.)
An example of their approach is here in this customer interaction: A customer contacts them to ask for help finding an order number. Although the question was unclear Nike’s customer support made the customer feel cared for. And when the customer realized they had the information all along, their response is super supportive.
Takeaway: Be kind, even when it’s not your fault.
Seamless is an online service for ordering food from local restaurants. Food orders are full of variables and when you add in time frame and delivery – it has the potential to be a nightmare. To manage customer service, they have an active Twitter account where customers can share their love and voice their complaints.
In a recent comment, a customer tells Seamless that on his recent order he received white rice, instead of brown. He wasn’t upset – he said: “Don’t mind terribly, just FYI.”
In response, Seamless asks for the order number so they can check into it. In response, the customer tweets:
Takeaway: Pay attention to all customer service issues. Passive complaints that are left unaddressed can easily cause a rift between the vendor and customer.
As a way to listen to customers – and get tons of great new ideas – Starbucks created My Starbucks Idea. To date, customers have submitted more than 210,000 unique ideas. To support this program, they have a dedicated Twitter account. It is a great place for users to share their observations and coffee wishes.
A couple of the recent ideas include solar cell equipped umbrellas for device charging and morning coffee delivery (looks like it’s going to happen).
Takeaway: Make it easy for customers to tell you what they want. Listen to everyone and implement the winning ideas.
Sainsbury’s is one of the largest supermarkets in the UK. They’ve got a pretty active Twitter feed with lots of customer questions about products and sale prices. The tone of the account is helpful and positive.
There are lots of good examples of interactions. But none better than Fishy Sainsburys. This fishy exchange took place over a three hour period, between David (Sainsbury’s Twitter manager) and Marty (a customer). The puns will make you groan – many made me laugh out loud. Remember, this interaction was not a marketing play but a real conversation between the company and a customer.
Takeaway: Let your customer service team have fun.
Holidays can be challenging times for customer service. When customer service closes for the observance of a holiday in one country, users from other countries will still have questions.
This recently happened with a HubSpot customer in London. She had workflow issues and couldn’t contact anyone at the US-based call center because it was closed for American Thanksgiving. When she took her concern to Twitter, she found a customer service representative in Ireland.
Like many companies in this list, HubSpot has a dedicated customer service Twitter account. To manage international schedules and time zones, they have two Dublin-based representatives and another three in Cambridge, MA.
Takeaway: Be available for your customers.
If you take a quick look at Buffer’s Tweets & replies feed you’ll see how engaging their customer service is. Responses are personal and friendly. And they are usually signed by the team member you’re chatting with.
For example, my wife has been impressed that when she mentions them in a tweet, they acknowledge it, even using her name in their response.
Takeaway: Treat each person with respect. Use your name (and theirs) when interacting with customers online.
Here are some key takeaways:
I recommend following a few of these companies on Twitter. Watch how they handle customer complaints and comments. I’ve learned so much doing this.
What to do next: Review these points with your customer service team. Decide which apply to your business right now and assign a team member to implement them.
Have you had an amazing customer service experience via social media? How are you using social media to provide customer service? I would love to hear both in the comments!
The post 14 Amazing Social Media Customer Service Examples (And What You Can Learn From Them) appeared first on Social.
There’s often a critical time (or two) in a business’s journey when it’s make or break and time is at a premium.
There’re often times beyond this, once a brand is established, where time is still scarce and efficiency is the name of the game.
The team at Smart Pension has felt both sides of this in the past couple years and has experienced the time crunch particularly on the social media side (sound familiar at all with your experience?). One of the UK’s leading pension companies, the Smart Pension team pulled through in an incredibly inspiring way.
Here’s their story of how they’ve come up with their social media strategy, saved time, and found the best tools to use.
Jack Saville, a marketing executive at Smart Pension, built his startup to be the go-to source for UK pension and auto enrolment. And one of the key marketing strategies he chose for traction was content.
One of the first jobs was to put as much great information and helpful content on the website as possible. However when we finished creating content, we also wanted to shout about it on social media.
We were churning out so much content in the beginning that logging and posting each article on each social media channel was becoming a real time consuming exercise. If we had had Buffer in the beginning we would have saved a great deal of time (and money) in the crucial start-up, make-or-break phase of our business.
Smart Pension made it through this early critical stage and is grateful to now be a more established entity. They’ve kept right on working.
The content team crushed it early on and put together the majority of the foundational, main topics needed to be a thought leader on pensions and enrolment. The next phase was tackling current news and changes, being more of a real-time resource for Smart Pension’s growing audience.
This shift to timely content also needed timely distribution, which is where social media marketing has really paid dividends for the team.
The news section is where we direct most of our efforts now. This is important, as investing a lot of time in your news section shows your customers that you are well aware of the changes in the industry, and that we know that the services we provide need to be altered and suited to the current market and the current pension laws. Social media is the channel in which we communicate our knowledge of industry changes to our customers.
In building out this news hub, Smart Pension ran into a slight problem:
We work so hard on making sure our news section addresses the current topics in the pension industry, that sometimes we finish a number of articles at the same time.
It’s a similar problem that might crop up for publishers, news organizations, online magazines, and others. It’s not that there’s any trouble coming up with content to share, it’s more a matter of knowing what to share and when to share it.
Jack and his team found the solution here with social media scheduling from Buffer.
Smart Pension spaces out new posts every few hours so that there’s room between each update.
The articles don’t all go up as a wall of similar-looking tweets and posts.
The buffered schedule makes it so that content hits the timeline at all times, helping to reach people who may be online at different times throughout the day.
And the beauty of it all: All this scheduling can be automated.
The scheduling function is also helpful to the work flow of the team. The team member who wrote the article can schedule the post for times of the day that we are posting less and then proceed to the next task. The team members do not have to try and remind themselves of when to post their articles.
Additionally, with the scheduling function we can then post articles at night and at weekends when team members would not necessarily be working. This means that we can have a round the clock presence on social media, without having one of our team members staying up all night!
Lots of content to share and a set number of times to share it all: When do you get the most bang for your buck with social media sharing?
The Smart Pension team came up with a few experiments to test the best time to post for engagement.
Here’s an example:
To find out if it’s better to post extra content at night or over the weekends, set up a schedule for both and check the results.
After a few days, log into the Analytics section of Buffer and check to see which time slots have tended to perform the best. You can see this from the Analytics view with a quick glance and intuition …
… or you can export data from your past period of experiments, and filter the results for each different time.
Here’s a sample spreadsheet using data from my own sharing:
(Couple this with the takeaways from Buffer’s optimal timing tool to get even more confirmation for which way you’re leaning.)
As we are a start-up, we cannot afford to have a graphic designer to create the imagery for our social media posts every time we need to post something. Pablo give us the ability to make our social media posts look interesting and exciting, whilst not having to pay for a graphic designer to design them and create them.
According to our most recent data here at Buffer, we’ve found that tweets with images get 150% more engagement than tweets without.
The takeaway: Test content with images!
We believe in this so strongly that we built our own tool for making this as easy as can be. The free image creator at Pablo makes it simple to create images for Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and more, all at the ideal image size, all looking beautiful—no matter your design skills.
Here are some that the Smart Pension team has used on their latest social media updates:
Click to read The Employer's Guide To Auto Enrolment Contributions. https://t.co/9bUmJBNxA9 pic.twitter.com/El3z1lFPjU
— Smart Pension (@smartpensionuk) December 14, 2015
Click to read our guide on lost pensions. https://t.co/JwLXr8PQlg pic.twitter.com/BLJ0v3e7ar
— Smart Pension (@smartpensionuk) December 14, 2015
Click to read our guide on spotting the tell-tale signs of a pension scam. https://t.co/ZVRzn4DCwT pic.twitter.com/PAl8FdoV3s
— Smart Pension (@smartpensionuk) December 14, 2015
And another key piece to the team’s workflow and system is keeping all this distribution organized. One of Buffer’s newest features works great in this case: the social media calendar.
Our content calendar is designed to make sure that we are regularly completing and posting content through buffer. We can all log into buffer and see what other people are planning, and then we can plan our content around the existing scheduled posts.
Smart Pension uses Buffer for Business to manage its social media profiles, share multiple times a day (without having to think about it), and work together to identify the content that works and what to share again and again.
Join Smart Pension and 5,000+ other brands and business with a free trial of Buffer’s most powerful social media features!
Image sources: Iconfinder, Pablo
The post Saving Time and Money: How Social Media Works for an Early-Stage Startup appeared first on Social.
We’ve talked about how important of a tool video is becoming for marketers.
Every day people watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube, Facebook has 8 billion daily video views and Snapchat users watch 6 billion videos daily.
Video views are growing so fast that if you don’t jump in now, you might miss out on one of the biggest opportunities for you and/or your company.
And that’s why I wanted to talk about Twitter video, which is something not a lot of marketers have embraced yet!
Let’s get started.