Customer service is the new marketing

By Katie Paries

Your brand is made up of millions of little experiences.

There’s a lot of buzz these days about the value of customer experiences. The gist of it is that your brand is not what you tell consumers it is. Your brand is made up of all the millions of micro-experiences customers have with your brand. The implication is that companies not only need to attract new customers and make sales, they have to be aware of what existing customers are saying to them or about them, and be able to respond quickly, in a personalized manner. This has the potential for creating positive experiences, which contribute to brand health. One effective way companies are doing this is by providing great customer service.

There is no end to the stories about angry, unhappy, dissatisfied customers (that blog about it) distressed about not receiving the support they need from customer service. And there’s nothing like bad service to damage a company’s brand. However, companies that surprise and delight customers with authentic human interactions, satisfying real or perceived needs, become beacons for best practices in customer support. Satisfied customers will communicate with their friends and loved ones, or broadcast across multiple online communities their satisfaction with a product or service, becoming brand evangelists. The flip side is that dissatisfied customers can and will widely broadcast their unhappiness with your brand, and they have the tools to do it quickly and easily.

Zappos Core Values

A customer service company that just happens to sell shoes …
Maybe you have heard this one already. It bears repeating for those who haven’t. Zappos is an online shoe store. They call themselves a “customer service company that just happens to sell shoes” and they really do it right. In May 2007 a woman ordered several pairs of shoes for her mother, who had lost a lot of weight and none of her old shoes still fit her.  Not all of the new shoes fit her mother either, so she contacted customer service to tell them she would be returning some shoes and requested a shipping label. Weeks passed and the shoes never came back. Zappos emailed her to check on the status, as the 15-day return period had ended. The woman apologized for the delay, mentioned that her mother had died and that she would send the shoes as soon as she could. The Zappos customer service rep told her not to worry and that the company had arranged for UPS to pick up the shoes from her. She thought this was very thoughtful, especially because it broke with company policy. The next day, a large bouquet of flowers was delivered, accompanied by a condolence card from Zappos.

This woman is Zaz Lamarr, who writes a personal blog called Writing, Cooking, Life. In July 2007 Lamarr posted an article entitled “I Heart Zappos” about her experience of “exceptional service from an online retailer.” That post has been viewed by millions, has generated hundreds of responses, and is now being held up regularly as a testimony to good customer service. Zappos has it baked into their DNA. So, not only did Zappos satisfy a customer, they created an evangelist. Not only that, the story is viral. Just try a search on Zappos customer service and see what you find; a perfect example of why customer service is the new marketing.

Brand loyalty = revenue
Great story, but what does this have to do with you? As everyone is painfully aware, fewer people are buying new cars these days. In the U.S., the average age of the car on the road is more than nine years and climbing. As a result, dealers are recognizing that there is a real opportunity for building loyalty through the service department. A recent article that appeared in Dealer Marketing Magazine noted that customers who service their vehicles at the same dealership where they made their purchase are six times more likely to buy their next car from that same retailer.

Obviously, the goal is to build brand loyalty – to keep customers from taking their business to the competition or to the corner garage. One way you can differentiate your brand is to start concentrating on the customer experience. To do that you have to be where your current customers, and possibly future buyers, are and respond to them personally.

Act like a concierge
So how can you get some of the same magic Zappos has? According to Lane Becker of Get Satisfaction, what you need to do is act like a concierge. Acting like a concierge means putting conversations with the client at the center. It means going to where your customers are and astonishing them with personalized responses. It means cutting through red tape to solve problems. It is about building brand loyalty.

At the Web 2.0 Expo in New York in September, I attended a session at which Becker gave several examples of companies doing that. Although he did not give any automotive-related examples, Becker’s insights are not limited to a single consumer product category. I will relay a few of them here:

Listen and communicate. Put conversations at the center.
Don’t kill conversation by blocking out customers. Friction-free conversation is the new norm in Web 2.0 – except when it comes to talking to companies. Companies don’t necessarily have their strategy in place for how to join the conversation, but are at least open to encouraging conversations about their brands, rather than squashing them. For example, Timbuk2, the messenger bag company, got a lot of questions on its customer service page from customers who wanted to know if a diaper bag was in the product line. There wasn’t, and the company had no plans to add one. However, a customer service rep happened to post instructions for how to modify a Timbuk2 bag to be a diaper bag, using other products and sewing it together. This spawned a large response, including other examples of how to do it yourself as well as an even greater number of requests for a diaper bag. Ultimately, Timbuk2 leveraged the user input as a sort of focus group to influence development of a diaper bag for their line.

Timbuk2 diaper bag hack kit

Timbuk2’s site has instructions for how to create your own diaper bag using one of the company’s cargo totes.

Reduce your sphere of control to increase your sphere of influence
Create customer-service splinter cells. For example, Comcast has a big problem with customer service. Many people are highly dissatisfied. The company claims to be opening or expanding almost a dozen customer call centers. But they aren’t moving fast enough for many of their dissatisfied customers, who have been venting online about poor service.

Here’s what they have done about it in the past year: Starting in September 2007, Frank Eliason, then an Executive Support Manager at Comcast’s Philadelphia headquarters, took on a part-time assignment of trawling blogs for negative company references. In February Eliason became Director of Digital Care for the telecommunications firm and devoted his energy full-time to monitoring Comcast complaints on Twitter. By April a number of bloggers, including TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, had written about their experience of receiving messages from @comcastcares on Twitter and Eliason’s solo efforts were supplemented by five hires.

How does it work? If you mention a problem with Comcast on Twitter, “Frank” reaches out and responds to you, acting like a concierge. He can help to resolve problems quickly and cut across regular channels to provide quality service. The Comcast Customer Connect group he oversees continues to grow – it had grown to seven by August, with plans to ramp up to a staff of 10 by yearend.  It functions as an “early warning system” for Comcast customer service issues and is starting to get good press for this effort. This team is  changing minds about Comcast and changing Comcast’s idea of itself.

How fair is it that someone can get better, more personalized service if she is tech-savvy enough to use Twitter to get customer support, while everyone else waits on the phone forever to reach a real person? Is this preferential treatment for people who are more likely to be influencers? Author Shel Israel posed this question to Eliason, who replied that Comcast provides the same quality service for questions coming in from Twitter, the blogosphere, website and call center alike.

“My goal is [to] change the perception individual customers who may have had a bad experience or reinforce the positive opinion of anyone who has a good experience.  I have one real goal, and it is a common start to conversations:  ‘Can I help?’  That to me is what it is all about.”

Smash the silos
Cut through boundaries. The overlapping of products and services we experience today are complex. You have a Nokia phone and a T-Mobile account and use Twitter. When things go wrong, who do you contact? When you try to call any of these companies individually you get the “it’s not our problem” runaround. This is what happened: T-mobile decided to shut off SMS to Twitter. T-Mobile customers who tried to use Twitter suddenly found it wasn’t working on their phones anymore. Twitter received many complaints about the issue, but the micro-blogging service knew the problem was not on their end. Eventually, users determined what had happened and communicated it out. Once customers learned that T-Mobile was the culprit, they flooded the company’s call centers and forced the carrier’s hand to start working with Twitter and reinstate SMS.

The benefit of working this way is that these communications are an early warning signal from related apps. Network support can occur across ecosystems, and customers don’t need to necessarily know which company to call.

The moral of the story?
Use the tools and technologies of Web 2.0 to listen to the conversations your customers are having.  You can start doing this fairly easily by going to Twitter Search for real-time results of mentions of your brand or by setting up an alert with tweetscan and monitoring the results.

Twitter Search results

Twitter Search provides real-time results for keyword searches.

If you decide to do more than lurk, set up a Twitter account for your brand. However, you need to determine what type of conversations you wish to initiate. Do you want to be customer service-focused, like Frank Eliason at Comcast, or are you more interested in increasing positive brand perception? A good example of a more PR-focused effort is the work that Scott Monty has been doing for Ford.  Monty, the automaker’s new head of social media, has at least six Twitter profiles – ScottMonty, FordDriveOne, FordMustang, FordTrucks, FordDriveGreen and FordCustService . The eponymous handle is his original account, which he uses to communicate with his personal network of 3,600-plus followers and to have conversations with them about Ford and automotive-related issues, comment on social media trends and other topical subjects. The five Ford-related profiles are more recent and in various stages of readiness. Ford’s stepped-up social media efforts appear to be paying off already: Last week überblogger Robert Scoble took a test-drive of a Sync-equipped 2010 Ford Fusion Hybrid and spread the word on Twitter, FriendFeed and other outlets.

I should note that there appears to be a number of automaker brand name accounts on Twitter without any activity. The owners are either parking them while they develop a strategy or, in some cases, are potentially brandjack victims. So, if you think Twitter is in your future, you may want to go register the brand names you want – much like you would register the domain names you want for your website.

Applications like twitrratr can be used to gage consumer mood. It isn’t perfect, but it’s interesting to look at. Also, consider opening an account with the aforementioned Get Satisfaction. This online service enables conversations with customers using that site.

Before you go too far down the path, determine a strategy for how to reach out to customers online. Don’t just dash in without a plan in place. You should have a clear understanding about what your goals are, who will engage in these conversations, and how you will measure success. There is high potential for coming off as either inept or inauthentic. Take the time to set it up right. Talk to your digital agency about developing your social strategy. Educate yourself. Determine how you can make customer service the new marketing for your company.

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Posted in Marketing on November 2, 2008
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4 Responses to “Customer service is the new marketing”

  1. CX and Micro-experiences on November 3rd, 2008

    […] few days ago, Katie Paries continued this discussion on the Razorfish blog with her post Customer Service is the New Marketing. She makes some good points about how to […]

  2. Grant Owens on November 3rd, 2008

    Bravo Katie!

    This is a huge automotive opportunity suffering from an aging digital myth - that digital experiences can’t be personal and that high consideration personal experiences can’t be digital (see Katie’s Zappos and Comcast examples).

    In this tough sales mkt it becomes even more important. I know this isn’t an inexpensive endeavor for auto mktrs since time equals money, but you can either put the time you have into things or into people. And when things aren’t flying off the shelf (or lot in this case), you might as well put some time into people.

    JD Power recently studied email responses from dealerships and the responses were still disturbingly low/delayed. In this industry, the gap of online customer service is so large that even the smallest effort will echo in the chasm and and everyone will hear the buzz like with Zappos.
    Cheers,
    -grant

    PS… Love the splinter cell idea. “Go rogue!”

  3. Anonymous on November 3rd, 2008

    I whole-heartedly agree!

    But as a part of an agency, how do you communicate this to your client, when you’re engaged only in a web dev or application project?

    Is there a point in creating a snazzy website or a cool banner campaign if the customer is ultimately going to call customer service and receive poor service, resulting in a horrible brand experience (and undoing the brand equity that resulted from the agency’s work)?

  4. Katie Paries on November 3rd, 2008

    Good question. A lot depends on the relationship you’ve established with your client, as well as the ability of your client to effect change at that level. Regardless, I don’t think it hurts to offer your agency’s point of view and a recommendation for a solution. It can be as simple as saying that after digging into the assignment you have noticed a few things and have some suggestions about what can be done. It will, at the very least, demonstrate your desire to partner with your client — and it might open the door to new opportunities.

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