Customer Service 2.0
November 30, 2009 at 9:04 pm
A good post from Darragh Doyle last week has got me thinking more about customer service and how big corporations can use social media tools to solve it. Darragh’s been spending some time with eircom’s online customer support team recently, sharing some of his wisdom about how to engage online.
This isn’t rocket science
It’s saying ‘hello, I’m here to help, can I?’
He wonders if eircom management actually look at all the call centre logs and email queries and identify problems that need to be fixed, then throw their weight behind getting them fixed? (Sadly I think not).
He makes a good point that to engage successfully using Twitter or in the broader sense of online, it requires a shift in metrics – not to measure the number of calls that were answered, but the number of interactions to get things done.
This reminded me of a post by Seth Godin who imagines a new type of customer support. One in which asynchronous results are not guaranteed, but one in which senior management are hired and fired on their ability to solve problems. It requires a new approach to customer service, but it makes a lot of sense to me:
1. Customer service problems go into a system and work their way up the customer service pyramid. Each person who touches it either takes responsibility for solving it thoroughly and completely, or passes it up the hierarchy. Any problem not solved within 20 hours goes to some senior level executive who gets it solved or gets fired. (I’m serious).
2. At the end of the month, there’s an easy trail to follow. You can see who solved the most problems. Who’s passing the buck when they should be grabbing it. You can identify the delighted customers and what delighted them.
I guess what it boils down to is ownership and transparency.
If customer service teams are incentivised on number of problems solved, rather than number of calls answered, it will push a new ownership mentality into teams.
If corporations continue to embrace social media tools as they are, then there will be transparency as we can all see if problems are being addressed or not.
The two go hand in hand.
Tags: customer service, Social Media, Twitter
Flashmob Friday
November 27, 2009 at 12:41 pm
Ireland’s largest flashmob to date took place in Cork earlier this month. Well organised and oh so Irish. Grey sky, warm winter coats. Lots of girls looking sort of embarrassed and flicking their hair, but still doing it! I love Flashmobs. They make me feel all emotional and in love with humanity again. I think I might make flashmobs a regular feature here on Fridays – what do you think?
Thanks to Piaras Kelly whose blog I found this on.
Tags: flashmob cork
WordPress Lovers
November 23, 2009 at 12:58 pm
Lovers of the world’s finest content management system and blogging platform unite this March in Kilkenny.
Wordcamp Ireland is a two day extravaganza where you can learn all about our favourite blogging software, network with top Irish bloggers, and party on til the wee small hours in that great party town that is Kilkenny.
I’ll be giving a little talk about how to make your blogs be read online. I’ll be up on day 1 right after Sabrina Dent. If anyone has ever heard the great lady speak, she should moonlight on “Saturday Night Live”. If there are any comedians or presentation skills people out there who can counsel me through until March – I’d love to hear from you.
Tags: Wordcamp Ireland Kilkenny 2010
Always Remember Kids – Facebook Isn’t Private
November 20, 2009 at 11:02 am
Unless you’ve got your privacy settings turned ON. Here’s the now infamous case of the young one giving out about her job on Facebook and her boss’s stunningly worded reply:
Tags: Fired on Facebook
Beautiful Example of Email
November 19, 2009 at 8:45 am
This lovely specimen landed in my inbox yesterday. It’s a beautiful email – nice design, the right amount of content, a few little things I’d tidy up such as the ‘click here’ button but overall it’s nice to see a business that’s not got a huge budget doing something so right.
Tags: Nice Email
LinkedIn Tip To Save You Time
November 18, 2009 at 8:33 am
If you’re on LinkedIn and you’re in groups, then you like me will be well used to receiving the ‘high class spam’ that comes daily to your inbox. Lots of it is repetition; same people starting the same discussions on different groups. Increasingly, I’m noticing spammy ‘get rich quick’ schemes being posted in their CAPITALISED GLORY promising FREE STUFF. It’s too much. I resent the time and energy it takes me to delete it from my inbox.
LinkedIn Tip: remove yourself from all updates
Log in to LinkedIn. Click on groups. Select a group that annoys you a lot. Click on More/My Settings and deselect all the contact settings:
Now you’ll still want to keep up with what’s going on right? Simply diairise it to go in and have a little look around. I don’t live on LinkedIn as much as I do on the other social networks. In order to remind myself to keep my profile up-to-date, I add little reminders to my Google Calendar that send me to LinkedIn. Now I go in once a week and check out all the (in)action I’ve been missing out on by removing the daily emails.
It works for me. It might work for you too.
On a similar note, last year I deactivated the setting on Twitter that notified me whenever anyone was following me. I did this when I was at around 500 followers. Now I’m on more than 800. That’s 300 emails of no substance I’ve removed from my consciousness!
Again, you’ve got to make sure that you’re not missing out. So I have a custom landing page for people who are checking me out on Twitter. It asks them to say hello to me on Twitter and that way I’ll know them and follow them. It works for me. Might work for you too.
Tags: LinkedIn tip, Twitter tip
To Close The Blacknight Matter
November 17, 2009 at 11:29 am
I posted on Friday about my disappointment that Blacknight doesn’t properly use the tools available to it in times of crisis. While many people commented on the blog, seemingly Michele Neylon (MD of Blacknight) wasn’t able to. He claimed to have posted his comment twice and insinuated on Twitter that I was receiving these comments and choosing not to publish.
That is not true.
It’s also irritating that someone who was clearly having technical difficulties at his end chose to publicly insinuate an untruth about me on Twitter (a very public space) – about something that was factually incorrect.
On Friday I emailed Michele and asked him to email me directly and I would publish his comments. I heard nothing back. I emailed him again yesterday because I believe in open discussion and sincerely wanted to publish his comments as they would add to the discussion. He came back to me late yesterday and I’m happy to publish what he has to say below:
Most of what I would have said has been said by other people in the comments. In common with a lot of companies in our sector we maintain two separate blogs:
http://blog.blacknight.com – news, offers, marketing etc.,
http://www.blacknightstatus.com – technical service notifications both from us and from companies that impact on our services eg. domain registries or bandwidth carriersWe have not posted technical information to our main company blog in well over a year. All our technical support staff would direct clients to the status site and it’s also linked to from all pages on our main site and in all outgoing emails from the support desk
The status site is 100% independent from the main Blacknight network etc., and doesn’t even use our DNS servers. Basically as long as we can get online in some way we can get onto it to post updates to our clients.
All updates posted to the status site appear on Twitter as well. See: http://twitter.com/blacknight/status/5709231280 for but one example. You posted a screenshot of our Twitter account to your blog. If you’d gone further down (back) you’d have seen several posts in relation to the issue on morgana from Thursday afternoon.
So there you have it. The word from Blacknight.
I’m doing a lot of reading around how people engage online. The academics would tell us that people tend to engage more quickly and more deeply due to the levels of anonymity; that they feel they can hide behind the anonymity in order to express themselves in ways that they wouldn’t do face to face. I think Twitter is an interesting phenomenon (for many reasons) but mostly because I’m noticing a variety of people who act like it’s anonymous when clearly it’s not. I wonder if Michele would have published his derogatory remarks about me on another online forum – I think not? Obviously Blacknight keep their blog to the superficial PR/marketing level. They wouldn’t blacken it with a personal attack that is unfounded and not proven. But yet he feels that it’s OK to do this on Twitter? Same size audience, same damage done.
What ever happened to the telephone? If I was heading up a company that was in crisis management mode, and a client (ie. me) published a blog about their poor handling of the situation, I would do everything in my power to get my opinion across; to attempt to rectify the situation and to clarify things. If I was unable to publish a comment and the client expressed concern at not receiving my comments, I’d pick up the phone. Or I’d email. Or do something to make myself heard. I wouldn’t go ahead and publish a derogatory remark to an audience of the client’s peers and colleagues.
Maybe that’s just me and how I do business?
Tags: Blacknight fail, Twitter behaviour
Your Blog Like Writing From The Middle Ages?
November 16, 2009 at 8:14 am
Before you shake your head and say “I thinketh not”, consider this:
According to noted linguistic academic, David Crystal, ‘blogs are as close to the way writers talk as it is possible to get’. This is similar to spontaneous letter writing of the Middle Ages which has a very similar set of features. Back then it was the norm to write a stream of consciousness when sharing one’s ideas with others. The only difference was that the medium was letter and so there was a bit of a time lag between idea generation and receipt.
This style of writing was wiped out late in the eighteenth century when publishers developed copy editing standards to ensure that magazines, newspapers and books conformed to an in-house style. I wonder if that will happen to blogging?
For now, however, blogging is ‘written language in its most naked form’, it has no editorial interference.
That will be all. Carry on with your blogging now!
Blog That Doesn’t Bother To Update In Times of Emergency
November 13, 2009 at 12:20 pm
Blacknight regularly wins awards for its blog and its use of internet marketing. Today I received a desperate call from a client who is hosting with Blacknight – the Blacknight server Morgana was hacked yesterday. All the information is gone. And shock of all – the last time it was backed up was 27 August.
The client found out by someone notifying them their site was down. I visited the blacknight blog just now and there’s some ego-driven article about ‘me in Seoul’. While the MD is gallivanting around the world, the server has been hacked and no-one is telling customers about what’s going on.
In the meantime, I telephoned Blacknight, got through to someone on support who had no answers, got put through to supervisor (Jonathan) who also had no answers. He told me he didn’t want to disturb the engineers who were fixing the problem by asking them why it hadn’t been backed up since August. As the client facing supervisor, isn’t he supposed to have those kind of answers? The one bit of information in relation to backup that I did manage to extract from him is that all their other servers are backed up everyday. Woopy doo. But can he prove it?
When I asked him how they were notifying clients about this failure in service, he said they posted a notice up to Blacknight Status.com – a first for me, I’ve never heard of that site before, but seemingly I’m supposed to know all about it and I”m even supposed to have RSS feeds so I can keep myself updated as to what calamity has happened next.
Blacknight have failed to deal with this problem effectively in my opinion.
- A blog is not just for vanity stories, it is also an ideal vehicle for communicating when errors have been made.
- A simple email to all clients they know are affected would notify people what’s going on – and possibly even instil some confidence that the issue is being well handled.
- Blacknight are all over Twitter. But there is silence on the Twitterwaves about this.
Once again we see another Irish business who uses social media tools for promotion purposes only. File this one under the same category as The Big Switch who forgot all about their Twitter account when people were urgently contacting them when the laptops and data went missing.
Update: read Blacknight’s response to this post.
Tags: Blacknight Server Hacked, Poor Customer Service
The Intention Economy
November 6, 2009 at 8:36 am
If there’s one thing you do before knocking off for this weekend, read this: Digital Strangelove (or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Internet), by David Gillespie (Aussie in Canada working for McCann Erickson. Found by way of We Are Social.
I believe we’re getting ahead of ourselves, confusing the growth of the Internet with it growing up, but I also believe we’re doing some amazing things..
Reminds me of this comment from Euan Semple:
There is something else going on here that is to early for an ism but that is really interesting. It is about small people loosely joined. It is small and personal in essence but powerful in combination. It is not about people being insignificant but about being unassuming.It is not about being individualistic but about being loosely joined.
If I tell my Facebook friends about your brand it’s because I like my friends, not because I like your brand.
- Mike Arauz
Tags: Intention Economy, Social Media
