Tag Archives: twitter
How are you connecting the dots?
Connecting the dots. It’s all about connecting the dots. And it’s never been more important and more relevant than it is today in this information overload world we live in. Or is it?
I don’t claim to have all the answers on how to connect the dots but I recently received an interesting comment regarding this unknown activity and it got me thinking about it. My buddy basically says that those of us who engage in curation/filtering are crazy.
Why?
Because since we curate information that we find useful for others, we’ve got ideas to spare. We’ve got ideas about how to have ideas and then some. And if you curate information about diverse topics, we have ideas about stuff that doesn’t make sense to the majority of people. And this makes others feel overwhelmed because we can criss-cross from one topic to another.
On that last point is where a lot of ‘dot connecting’ happens. (more…)
Why every customer service “success” on social media is really a customer service failure
One of the main benefits of social media is to provide instant customer service. While this might be true, I think we’re seeing it from the wrong angle. Companies are looking at it as a way to put out fires, to delay an customers eventual frustration.
Sure, we should be exploring how social technologies might change customer service. But first, we should look at how we actually conduct customer service away from social media.
A few weeks ago, as soon as Google+ was unleashed, Michael Dell asked people if they would like to connect with Dell Service teams via Google Hangout. Lots of people thought it was a great idea, but one comment in particular caught my attention:
Danny Sullivan - Jul 18, 2011 - Public
No +Michael DellI don’t want to use Hangouts to connect with Dell customer service. What I want, from you or any company, is to ensure I actually get the best customer service experience possible when I actually use your “normal” customer service channels.Eventually, I’ll finish my long-planned blog post on how every customer service “success” on Twitter, Facebook or Google+ is really a customer service failure. In short, consider this.If I walked into a store and started yelling about how bad the store was, to get my problem resolved, who would consider that a successful customer service model? But that’s basically what we are encouraged to do through social media, yell there as an attempt to get problems solved as a last resort.OK, it’s more nuanced than that. I have have great respect for the people who do perform huge customer service through social media channels. But these shouldn’t be end runs your customers need to use because your regular customer service channels are so convoluted and so often backed by people who aren’t enabled to just solve problems.That’s where I’d like to see you or any company put your energies, before we get more social media candy.
And that (in bold), is the point.
People are using social media as a last resort to vent their frustrations. And businesses are reacting to it by asking customers to post positive reviews online to counter the hate. Sure, businesses will react positively after an unhappy customer (who is well connected) posts his frustrations on Twitter and Facebook. It’s common sense. But this doesn’t help things, it just creates a never ending loop of reaction.
They’re not delighting customers, they’re merely delaying frustration.
What we really need to do is look at social media as another way to win the hearts of customers. To delight them. Not as a way to put out fires.
While you may see Zappos using social media for customer service, they don’t really see it that way. For them it’s another way to connect with their customers and as an opportunity to win their hearts. One more way to ‘Deliver Happiness’.
Problems will arise no doubt because no company worth mentioning never makes a mistake. Just don’t keep on making the same ones over and over again because that is what frustrates customers.
Bottom line is delivering customers service through social channels should not be seen as a silver bullet solution, simply adding more touch points to your mix but not solving the customers problem isn’t going to to save you. The customer doesn’t care if you experiment on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin or Google+, what they care about is being treated with respect and getting their issues resolved.
And lastly, don’t ignore them. I repeat, don’t ignore them. If you’re on these channels, they expect you to be there for them.
P.S. I’ll leave with a few more comments to reinforce the point:
Related articles
- Is social media marketing causing you to lose money? (smartblogs.com)
- Yes, Customers Are Willing to Use Social Media for Customer Service [Infographic] (readwriteweb.com)
- How social media can save your business from a customer riot (smartblogs.com)
Why you need to break out of your network to innovate
Yesterday @JuhaLipponen shared his post on how gathering people from diverse backgrounds to brainstorm breeds new and fresh insights. This idea of bringing in outsiders to shake things up isn’t new, but it’s definitely one that you don’t find being practiced more widely.
And this brings me to an important point about innovation: Where all think alike no one thinks very much.
You can start seeing this on the web where the tools we use to communicate and find information (Facebook, Google, Twitter) play into our biases of familiarity. The more we use them, the more they know us and become personalized for us.
If in the past you hadn’t thought about this, today it’s even more imperative that you do. Why? (more…)
Fast response is the new normal in customer service
Do you know what kind of service drives people crazy? Poor attention.
According to research from Zendesk 82% of people stop doing business with a company because of poor customer service. And poor attention is in my opinion is where it all starts because nobody likes being ignored.
Here are a few things that happened to me last week…
This morning I received an email from Sxipper, a password management program for Firefox that I used, replying to a ticket I submitted over a month ago. Yes, that’s right. It’s been over a month and they just answered.
But get this, it’s just a reply that they’ve seen my email. Not a solution. Well guess what, they’re too late.
Since I submitted my inquiry and didn’t get a fast answer I changed to another provider, LastPass.
Result: Ni modo, you lost out. If you would have answered quickly I would still be using your product.
Earlier in the week I noticed that bit.ly was not functioning when clicking on links through Tweetdeck. So I asked if anybody else was having the same issue and two minutes later I got a response from the folks at bit.ly:
Result: Now I know what’s going on. Great! It wasn’t that hard.
Another example, this past week I switched the ‘share buttons’ on this blog to AddThis. Not everything went smoothly, the buttons were not showing up initially. I checked with them on Twitter but they don’t seem to use it as a customer service channel, so I went over to their forums and posted my inquiry and got a response within a few hours. They pointed out that I was missing some code for it to work, told me what I needed to do and they fixed it for me. This wasn’t their problem, it was my themes problem.
Yes, AddThis fixed a problem that wasn’t theirs so that I could use their plugin. BEA-utiful!
Result: I post about how cool their plugin is and recommend you use it too.
Worst is not responding
When you don’t respond, people are going take it as a ‘‘we don’t care about you’ signal. The result is they’re going to tell their friends about how much you suck and will switch products to someone ‘who does care’ about their needs. It’s that simple!
Even if you have a high cost to switch (telcos), people will put their money down to switch because in the long run they much prefer not to deal with you. High switching costs are no longer an excuse for ignoring people. Get over it.
Getting it right
Customer Service is the new marketing because your customers don’t live on your time, they live on theirs. You have to acknowledge that they have control to tell others if you’re the best or the worst. And if you have a web presence (which you should), customers expect you to be there for them if an issue arises. There are countless ways to provide support and answers such as forums, Twitter, phone and email but still, in most cases people still prefer to talk to a live person for customer service.
Do you really want to talk to them? How committed are you? Do you see customer service as an added cost or as a difference maker?
While fast response is not a new idea, it’s execution is. The world has changed and so has customer service. People are on social networks talking to their friends about either what a great or bad service they got with you. One of them can win you loyal customers, the other one can make you look like the worst business on the face of the planet. Which one do you want to be? The balls on your court.
Fast response when we have a problem. Today and tomorrow, that’s what we expect from companies who’s products or services we use.
Related articles
- Twitter for Customer Service? Fortune Puts it to the Test (marketingpilgrim.com)
- Twitter vs. Phone vs. Web: the Customer Service Smackdown (heidi-miller.com)
- Social customer care: Rethinking the definition of customer service | CustomerThink (serve4impact.com)
- Social Media has Revolutionized Customer Service Forever (customerthink.com)
Useful and valuable
One of the things that stuck with me from reading Braden Kelley’s book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire is something that is rarely mentioned when deciding on an idea to execute, the distinction between useful and valuable.
Usually we have products and services that are useful but not valuable. But then again what’s useful and valuable to you is not the same for me. For example, Evernote is both useful and valuable to me because I can write, save, edit, clip notes and access them from wherever I am. Evernote is a tool for the information obsessed like me. I’m on the fanatic end of their users where I can’t imagine going back to not using Evernote.
On the other hand, an opposite example is Facebook while useful is not really valuable to me. I could care less if Facebook disappears tomorrow. But if Twitter disappeared tomorrow I would feel empty. Twitter is both useful and valuable to me for many reasons.
Like I said, this might not be the same for you.
One size fits all makes it difficult to be both
This is the complexity of creating products or services that aim to satisfy a specific need with a one size fits all approach. Some customers will see your product or service as both useful and valuable while others may just find it useful. This is where it’s our job to help those customers ‘discover’ the usefulness in what we offer either by educating them or by influence through fanatic customers. This is also why word of mouth works, it’s more likely that we like what our friend likes from his ability to show why his new toy is the greatest thing in the world and we might just give it a shot.
Complementary ain’t that bad
Taking the FB and Twitter example, another thing to consider is that while the media likes to put them head to head, they’re both different. And that makes them more valuable. Some of us can imagine life without FB and others without Twitter, but can you imagine life without both?
Both complement each other and that makes them, IMO, more valuable. That’s also why it’s so important to differentiate!
But still it’s not ‘either’ ‘or’, it’s ‘and’
There are certain products and services that will be both useful and valuable to some, but those are very scarce. But that shouldn’t stop us from considering thinking about how useful and valuable it is for the customer when creating a new product or service.
Braden nails it in this short paragraph from the book:
Often usefulness comes from what a product or service does for you, and value comes from how it does it. If you’re looking to truly deliver innovative products and services into the marketplace, then once you succeed at the designing and developing the ‘what’, don’t forget to also focus on achieving excellence in the ‘how’.
Bingo!
Remove the associative barriers that hinder new ideas
Image via Wikipedia
Last week I mentioned that the number one creative skill you need to master is the ability to free associate, to make connections between dissimilar things. I just stumbled into Ellen Di Resta’s post on the innovator’s perception where she probes further into the concept to which I left a comment:
Hello Ellen,
You’re right. I think it comes down to people’s ‘associative barriers’, or the ability to make new connection between dissimilar things.
For example if I say ‘car’ someone might say ‘tire’ because our minds make that connection automatically because we know it exists. But how about if I say ‘granola’ and someone else says ‘water’, which makes no sense to some of us but if you put the two together that person might see ‘river’.
So in other words when someone sees something different out of the unknown it’s because that person has very low associative barriers.
One of the reasons why most of us can’t make insightful new connections between dissimilar things is because we have ‘high associative barriers’. A person with high associative barriers will quickly arrive at conclusions when confronted with a problem since their thinking is more focused. He or she will recall how the problem has been handled in the past or how others in similar situations solved it. A person with low associative barriers, on the other hand, may think to connect ideas or concepts that have very little basis in past experience, or that cannot easily be traced logically.
The question then is how do we remove these barriers?
Understand why
If you’re on the ‘high barrier’ side, it has nothing to do with your parent’s genes, it has to do with with how our brains evolve. Our brains evolve to find order in things, grouping concepts together and finding structure in the environment surrounding it.
Be aware and destroy
I think they key is to be aware of this and then systematically break down those barriers by exposing yourself to new stuff like traveling to new places, talking to people whom you have nothing in common with, reading about stuff outside of your interests and then questioning your own assumptions as to how you think the world works.
The internet provides us with all this and more, and right at the center of it is other people (social media ring a bell?). If you don’t have a Twitter account, get one right now. You’re going to want to follow some people so go to Listorious and instead of looking for people that fit your interests do the opposite and follow dissimilar people (Ex. if you’re into art, follow people in science!) and see what they’re sharing and engage them.
Combine both
If you take two people — one with high barriers, the other with low barriers — and you give them the same information about a problem, they’ll approach the problem in a completely different way. So the objective is to be able to achieve ‘whole brain thinking’, where we can shift from divergent to convergent thinking in the flip of a switch. The more fluid our thinking is the better we’ll be equipped to adapt and make sense of things that look like a puzzle with no shape of form.
What would you add?
What are your needs? Ask Twitter
Twitter is vast repository of information, conversations and individual thoughts. It’s hard to keep up and make sense of all of it but sometimes you get some concrete insights from people like Tom Peters telling you he’s underserved:
