Customer care evolution | B&T

Gone are the days of customer service hotlines. instead, brands are going social and encouraging customers to help each other. But there are risks involved and, as Jessica Kennedy finds out, the changes have heralded an increased awareness of the need for advocates.

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The public airing of dirty laundry has never been a good look. But times change and brands which may have once preferred to solve issues behind closed doors are now putting their cards on the table and addressing grumbling consumers publicly.

This openness has been driven by the rise of social media. With consumers transforming brands? Twitter handles into service hotlines, businesses have had no choice but to respond.

The explosion of social media has driven customer service into the public arena and given rise to a new form of customer care ? or ?customer advocacy? ? where consumers can help themselves and grievances are aired, and resolved, in public.

Hill+Knowlton Strategies? creative and digital director Ben Shipley says customer service has become much more visibly present.

?A person waiting for 30 minutes on the telephone feels frustration, but it doesn?t become cognoscente for other people who are waiting or considering the company?s service,? he says.

?Add a platform like?Twitter or Facebook into the mix and bad experiences have a much more tangible reach and effect on the whole brand.?

In an environment where complaints and criticisms can go viral, brand fans are integral. This evolution of customer care has amplified the importance of advocacy. Advocacy is consumer endorsement of a brand, while word of mouth (WOM) is the act of sharing experiences or points of view.

Sharyn Smith, chief executive of WOM agency Soup, described advocacy as now being ?more important than any other time in the recorded history of marketing communications?.

"Studies out of Harvard have indicated that the level of positive recommendations your brand has correlates to 79% of sales, i.e. most of your brand growht," - Paul Rhodes

Her assertion is backed by recent Nielsen research which found trust in earned media, such as WOM, is growing, while confidence in paid is falling.

Recommendations from friends and family are now trusted by 92% of consumers, up 18% since 2007, compared to just 47% who trust more traditional forms of advertising such as television and newspaper ads, down 24% and 25% respectively since 2009.

?Studies out of Harvard have indicated that the level of positive recommendations your brand has correlates to 79% sales, i.e. most of your brand growth,? explains?Paul Rhodes, co-founder and director of brand advocacy and WOM marketing agency T Garage.

?Therefore word of mouth or brand advocacy is a critical element of the communications mix.?

As Tourism Australia?s executive general manager of marketing, Nick Baker, surmises, ?the power of the negative is actually more powerful than that of the positive?.

As a result, brands are now pouring resources into their customer care in an attempt to drive brand advocacy and positive WOM by providing a superior experience and faster resolutions.

The focus on service has changed business structures, with the new-found customer-centricity driving marketing and customer care departments closer together.

Michelle Hutton, chief executive of Edelman Australia, uses the term ?social business? to explain the evolution. ?The framework approach and tools in social marketing are now being used across businesses across different departments almost to reengineer?how organisations are responding externally to customers,? she explains.

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The changing face of customer service

The need to focus on customer care is clear according to Greg Joy, Australian and New Zealand vice president of social customer experience company Lithium. ?Data shows that 80% of customers are less likely to buy a brand?s products again after a poor support experience and 88% are less likely to buy from a company who ignores complaints on Twitter,? Joy claims.

In 2009, marketing firm McKinsey updated its purchase funnel from a linear journey to a circular one to take into account ?the increased prevalence of consumer generated sources of information, from word of mouth endorsements, social networks, review sites and forums?, explains Shipley.

?Good customer care increases the chances that someone in a purchase cycle will filter a brand into the consideration set they head in store with,? he adds.

Now, instead of phone hotlines, brands are increasingly dealing with complaints and queries on social media.

?This is a massive change,? Joy said.

?Social has completely transformed business. Customer expectations and demands have shifted to create new challenges and new opportunities for brands who deliver a superior social customer experience.?

Telecommunications giant Telstra is one company that has embraced the evolution of customer care with its peer-to-peer support platform CrowdSupport and its Live Chat service which is available 24-7.

Telstra?s NPS program director, John Parkin, says customer experience is the telco?s ?number one driver?.

?We want to create an experience within Telstra at a level that our customers are so delighted with that they are also then referring us to others.?

CrowdSupport is Telstra?s community forum where customers can post questions which fellow customers can answer.?Since its launch approximately 10 months ago, the forum has accrued more than seven million page views, according to Nick Adams, Telstra?s director of one-to-one marketing.

"A member of the public is more likely to trust information that comes from a person like themselves," - Michelle Hutton

?The insight that we recognised was there are over two million conversations a year happening off Telstra properties about Telstra in places like Whirlpool, blogs and other forums,? he explains.

With CrowdSupport, Telstra is hoping to re-claim those conversations and house them on its own public forum so the company can better engage customers. The move is a smart one. By encouraging customer discussions and only stepping in to provide light?moderation to ensure accuracy, Telstra is tapping into changing directions of trust.

?A member of the public is more likely to trust information that comes from a person like themselves than from the actual company,? says Edelman?s Hutton.?Earlier this year Edelman released its Trust Barometer study, which found that most consumers (62%) trust ?people like me?, an increase of 31%, while trust in a spokesperson has dropped 8% to 42%.

At the same time, consumers are increasingly aware that their opinions count and, therefore, more willing to voice opinions, says Ed Keller, chief executive of WOM firm Keller Fay Group. ?They are less tolerant of poor service and experiences, and are vocal about what they like and dislike.?

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Business benefits

Consumers are now so vocal that their complaints can claim national headlines. Target was recently blasted on social media for its ?hooker-style? clothes for girls while Qantas was criticised for putting one traveller on hold for 15 hours (a claim the airline denies).

Ten hour-plus waiting times are unusual, but it is safe to say the call centre experience is rarely pleasant. With community platforms and social channels, brands can turn the customer care experience on its head, making it richer for both customer and company.

Joy from Lithium ? which was behind Telstra?s forum ? says these less traditional forms of care are effective drivers of loyalty and advocacy.

?When someone contributes to a community, they make a mental and emotional investment, which results in a loyalty that translates into purchase preference,? he continues.

?Community visitors and members stay as customers for longer and buy more than customers who haven?t visited the community.?

Shipley believes it makes sense to have varied points of contact as ?channel fragmentation means that consumers no longer all have a telephone as their main preference?.

?This loss of a ubiquitous preference is coupled with an expectation that any branded social media channel is also a legitimate customer service channel.?

Telstra?s Adams says CrowdSupport has been positive on two fronts, allowing the company to drive advocacy while delivering a hard dollar benefit through call-centre deflection.?In August, Telstra slashed 650 jobs in a revamp which saw the closure of two regional call centres.

?Support costs can be staggering for large brands,? says Joy.

?AT&T is just one example, with 65k agents and a support spend of over $3.6bn. Community enables brands to save a fortune on support costs, while increasing customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.?

Computer brand Lenovo drove down service calls by 20% within 18 months of launching its Lithium-built platform, while GPS brand TomTom saw $150,000 in savings in the first 30 days.?

Adams says CrowdSupport acts as a ?listening page? for Telstra by highlighting issues the company needs to address quickly.??If there is a technical problem, this tends to be the lightening rod for us to let us know where we need to respond quickly as an organisation much faster than the traditional channels.?

Joy says communities are good at absorbing those spikes in demand where hundreds or thousands of customers are affected all at once. ?And, over time, community visitors notice that the answer to their question is often ?hot? in the community before the average support agent has the problem solved.?

Maura Tuohy, digital strategist at MercerBell, says businesses are cottoning on to the fact that online communities can provide richer customer experiences, but she discourages brands from thinking creating a customer forum or solving issues on social media will allow them to ?sit back and disengage?.

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Risks

?For most companies, creating an online customer support forum ? whether in an existing social platform like Facebook and Twitter, or built from scratch ? is usually more time consuming,? Tuohy claims. ?And also carries more risk.

?A lot of companies don?t understand that they cannot control advocacy messages in the same way they would approve an advertising message, and they are doomed to get it wrong.?

Her advice is to plan for the bad and leverage the good. ?This means using online social listening tools to understand the current sentiment before you launch, so you?re prepared to respond to your detractors,? she says. ?Neutralising detractors is even more important than building advocates in the first instance.?

Edelman?s Hutton says it goes wrong when businesses are not responsive, transparent or authentic.

In relation to social media and advocacy,? Shipley says ?the big risks are where there is a gap, perceived or otherwise between what you?re asking your advocates to do, and the behaviours you as a company exhibit?.

"The freedom to complain throws off an odd set of benefits," - Greg Joy

For instance, in November last year, Qantas launched a social media competition asking followers to describe their dream luxury flight experience with the hashtag #QantasLuxury.?This came only one month after the Qantas fleet was grounded at the height?of the airline?s long-running industrial dispute with multiple unions.

Unfortunately for the flying kangaroo, the memory was still fresh and #QantasLuxury was hijacked. Instead of spreading positive messages the hashtag trended nationally with tweets poking fun at?the airline.

When it comes to complaints, solving a problem publicly on a social platform can be a powerful and visible way to demonstrate customer care and turn anger into advocacy, according to Shipley.?Lithium?s Joy agrees, and says businesses simply have to accept that consumers will complain.

Rather than suppressing and ignoring complaints Joy suggests making use of them.

?The freedom to complain throws off an odd set of benefits,? Joy continues. ?It enhances engagement, strengthens relationships and improves trust in the community. It displays a company?s confidence, receptivity, and humanity that rallies fans to your defence. It gives you the opportunity to convert naysayers to advocates. And it provides a real-time barometer of sentiment that can help you improve your services.?

Furthermore, when customers take pride in a brand and feel invested in the community they will stick up for it. ?When you have an engaged brand nation, members don?t take lightly to people talking smack,? Joy adds.

Some consumers can become so invested in a brand and its community that they become, essentially, mini brand ambassadors.?

Baker says Tourism Australia?s three million-strong Facebook fan-base has countless enthusiasts who act as champions and self-regulate the page. Similarly, Telstra?s Adams is ?flummoxed? by how many ?super users? CrowdSupport has.

?I often wonder if they have a day job because of how quickly and how often they respond, and the sheer number of posts is just amazing.?

But how do you identify potential brand advocates and encourage them to get involved?

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Super fans

An advocate can be anyone from a Facebook fan, to a semi-professional blogger, to someone that walks through your bricks and mortar store.??Every interaction with a brand is an opportunity to build an advocate ? you just need to give them the tools to share,? Tuohy explains.

?Finding the right advocates is an art. It?s about listening to who is already talking positively about your brand and then understanding what additional value you can bring them ? like the basis of any relationship.?

Joy describes the most prolific and knowledgeable customers as ?super fans? ? about 1-2% of the base ? who make the investment of going social worthwhile.??They have desire. They have the influential connections and they use them. A lot,? he says.

?For marketers, they bring a significantly greater ability to influence other customers, driving them more quickly than regular users can down the purchase funnel to awareness, interest, and the action of purchase or early adoption?.

While anyone can be an advocate, Hutton says brands should be targeting those top influencers or consumers with large social networks.

But she believes this is more common in marketing in the United States, where ?they are more advanced than we are? she explains.

Adams freely admits Telstra is not yet sophisticated enough to do this.

?We do have some tools ? what we call ?influencer networks? where we know people who take a lot of calls versus people who make a lot of calls,? he says. ?But we haven?t actively released that data into channels. But we will drive our competencies and strengths in that area.?

In comparison, Tourism Australia (TA) has its Friends of Australia Program, which sees the agency connect with big names, such as Richard Branson and fashion designer Collette Dinnigan, who talk positively about Australia in their own social channels, as well as?in the media.

In addition to this, TA has its Visiting Opinions Leader Program, which brings international opinion leaders and leading bloggers to Australia. By targeting top bloggers, Baker says TA can also tap into niches such as popular wine, fashion and food bloggers. The?largest advocacy project TA has ever undertaken was bringing Oprah to Down Under.

Once advocacy has been fostered and those consumers are spreading positive WOM, the next step is working out how to reward them.

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Rewards

?Whether this is through allowing community ratings or doling out loyalty points or discounts, your advocates need to feel valued and important,? Tuohy says.

Telstra avoids grooming its super users and does not hand out gifts or discounts. Instead, the telco gives them digital badges?recognising their status within the community. Joy says super fans dedicate so much time and effort to branded communities because it is both fun and rewarding.

?Super fans are motivated by the twin desires to help other customers use your products?and to help you build better ones,? he says. ?They do this because they care about what a really great community has to offer them.?

But he is sceptical about the motivational powers of monetary rewards.

"Brands will pay...for social advocates that can connect with and influence an audience," Ben Shipley

Shipley, however, does not see an issue with paying advocates if the arrangement is made clear.

?Brands will pay, and already are in some cases (mummy bloggers), for social advocates that can connect with and influence an audience,? Shipley points out. ?The key for brands is in recognising the difference and benefits of reach, resonance and relevancy in?selecting advocates they?ll pay or actively support.?

Carmela Netto Soares, digital creative director MercerBell, is on the other side of the fence. ?I think this behaviour [paying for advocacy] will trend for a while but ultimately fade. A paid advocate is not an advocate, it?s a media channel.?

To figure out how successful your advocacy efforts have been, it?s necessary to measure sentiment and loyalty that actually exists in the market.

While the Net Promoter Score (NPS) may be one of the best known and most recognised forms of measuring attitudes, the experts have a love hate relationship with the tool.

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The Net Promoter Score

Put simply, NPS asks consumers how likely they are to suggest a brand, service or experience to their family and friends.?Those that score from zero to six are labeled detractors, sevens to eights are passive, while nines and 10s are promoters.

Previously, separate departments within Telstra would use NPS after a customer interaction.

But NPS is now (as of July 1) imbued across the entire organisation meaning that the telco surveys consumers at each stage of their customer lifecycle, from in-store to the arrival of their first bill, to see which departments need to pick up their game. Parkin says 20% of Telstra?s customers have indicated they would advocate the company, but points out that it is still early days.

?We are not at a stage where we are actually making any business decisions based on the NPS results,? he explains.

?We are targeting to have a mature baseline after six months.? Adams adds: ?This is an enormous job we are undertaking but it is a multi-year journey and we are building advocacy into not only how we interact directly with our customers but also our decision?making processes as well.?

"This is an enormous job we are undertaking...it is a multi-year journey," ?- Nick Adams

Soup?s Smith describes NPS as ?much maligned or confused? because brands adopt the metric and lose sight of what actually creates advocacy and understanding the dynamics behind it.

Keller Fay?s Keller points out that NPS only measures willingness to advocate and not advocacy itself. ?Measuring actual behaviour alongside NPS type measures is important,? he says.

?Some who are willing to be advocates (score high in NPS) are not in?fact active advocates ? the brand they like may not be doing anything noteworthy to stimulate conversation, for example. Or, they haven?t been asked to advocate and, left to their own devices, don?t actually volunteer their opinions.?

The key, he says, is understanding how to trigger the conversations.

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Future of advocacy

?I believe organisations will be increasingly asking the question ?how can we create conversation? and apply this more holistically through the mix,? states T Garage?s Rhodes.

Soup?s Smith agrees and says they will start to focus more on advocacy. ?They?ll start the relationship building and customer support as part of their marketing budget,? she says.

Keller feels brands increasingly understand the power of advocacy and how it can be harnessed, although for some it is still a ?nice to have?.

?We?re also seeing better integration between WOM/advocacy marketing and other communication activity ? brand owners realise that marketing and CRM activity needs to be coordinated and integrated ? with advertising and promotions reflecting the true brand experience,? he adds.

Society?s open-armed embrace of all things social and growing awareness amongst consumers that their grievances carry genuine weight has ushered in new methods of customer care as business move to meet expectations.

In turn, the changing nature of customer service has driven an awareness of the need to foster advocacy.

As Hutton explains, organisations need ?to be in the moment 24/7 and responding quickly to customer questions, issues and complaints?.

Whether it?s on Facebook, Twitter or a dedicated forum, customer service is going public. And in this new environment, where public complaints can cause a storm, advocates are vital.

Source: http://www.bandt.com.au/features/customer-care-evolution

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