Eggblogg

Customer service, or 'Big Brother is watching you'?

A tweet from Chris Applegate this morning brought this article to my attention: 'How BT Sarah spies on your Facebook account' - the Mail Online getting all outraged about BT doing a bit of pro-active customer service by monitoring negative comments online and jumping in to respond.

It's easy to dismiss articles in the Daily Mail as being, well, not exactly the height of reasoned, critical comment (see the rather funny Daily Mail Song...) but it raises an interesting point.

I've seen many good examples of companies using Twitter for customer service, and I've also been the 'victim' (in print media speak) of these kinds of approaches, not only when I've moaned about a firm but also when I've asked something of my twitter followers.

Personally, I don't feel my privacy has been invaded because what I say on Twitter, or on my blog, is in the public domain, and anyone who thinks that what they say on the internet is NOT observed or noted by others (for whatever reason) is naive. Attending to privacy settings, learning how to use the tools (eg the difference between @ and D on twitter), and understanding the transparency of the internet is down to the individual. It's the old responsibility issue - it's easier to rail at others than to recognise one's own failings.

If I had sent a (private) direct message, or email, and then had an unsolicited approach, that would be a different thing altogether, because it would suggest that a private conversation had been intercepted. Surely, THAT would be 'spying' - not the use of freely available and well-documented tools to look out for disgruntled customers and offering to help them?

Clearly pro-active customer service of this kind is in its early days -  people don't always expect it, so it perhaps makes us feel we're not in control of the situation. Ironic really -  we complain about how hard it is to get through to customer service call centres, and yet when they come to us, we don't like it!

Let's stop blaming PowerPoint for poor presentations

Here's something that never seems to go away - people moaning about PowerPoint. (Notice it's never Keynote they moan about - maybe Mac users never give a bad slide presentation?)

Seth Godin got stuck into PowerPoint again recently - after having written about it seven years ago, apparently. And hardly a day passes without someone criticising it or flagging up examples of bad usage.

It would be nice, for a change, to read about what constitutes a good slide presentation - if we were to see more examples of that, we might share them with other people and standards might be raised. A kind of 'best practice' trickle-down effect.

Most of us learn things like PowerPoint by example, not on a training course. Or if we do, it's likely to be your typical 'presentation skills' training course, where you're thrown a few tired rules such as 'no more than 6 bullets per slide'.

Personally I prefer Guy Kawasaki's 10/20/30 rule, favouring images over text. I'd go a step further and say try to avoid having ANY words to read on your slides - not always possible, but a good guiding principle. My reasoning is that people are there to listen to you, and not everyone takes in information in the same way. They may not connect with the auditory (what they hear) but a related visual (what they see) can do the trick. Combining the two can be a powerful way of embedding something in the memory. In contrast, reading bullets while while listening to the speaker can easily result in an attention clash, with neither message sinking in.

I've often been asked about something after a presentation, with specific reference to the image used. By keeping presentations short and visually exciting, people will stay with you and the time will fly by for them. It's also a wonderful thing to watch people reacting to an interesting image, rather than furiously copying down a load of information or looking at their watch.

PowerPoint and Keynote are wonderful tools - let's not blame them for the shortcomings of the presenter!

Image credit: http://colinliang.com/

'Social' is dead

Well, not right now, but it will be.

In the same way that 'new' as in 'new pence' (c. 1972) and 'new media' (c. 2000) is also dead.

In the future (in my lifetime, if I dare say that) all business will be 'social'.

That is the way it will be, there's no going back.

In the meantime, we have work to do - working out what social media, social search, social e-commerce and so forth looks like, how it works, how we adapt to it... but it's happening, whether we like it or not!

On robots, road rage and why faces matter on Twitter

I saw a TV ad last night that got me thinking. The ad, for AXA Insurance, features people barging into each other on the street, pushing each other out the way and yelling abuse at strangers. The idea is 'you wouldn't behave this way on foot, so why would you do it when you're driving?'

Now I don't think I'm the sort of person to behave rudely on the road, and I've never suffered from road rage. But I do get 'customer service rage' from time to time - and it's invariably brought on by the feeling that I'm not dealing with a real person. I suppose that's what happens to drivers who get angry with others - perhaps they see the vehicles but don't connect them with actual people, and the anonymity that the cars provide is a kind of cushion. ("I don't care what they think, they don't know me and I'll never meet them face to face.")

When it comes to email, customer service replies are quite often automated, or near enough (to a standard template with 'insert case number here'.) People working in call centres abide by a script and are often unempowered to deviate from that. Although I know that it's real people who answer the phones or (sometimes) trigger the emails, I am enraged by their anonymity, their inflexibility, and, if I'm honest, the whole cultural premise that the standardisation of customer service and the reduction of humans to little more than robots is a desirable thing.

There was an example of this today on Twitter. I noticed an argument brewing between O2 and @bengillam who claimed they didn't adequately respond to tweets. I joined in the discussion - having contacted O2 through Twitter several times over the Christmas period to complain that their '12 Days of Christmas' promotion included an invalid 'opt out' number, and having had no reply.

O2's position was that they can't be expected to respond to all the tweets they receive, as there are so many. Why not? Is that also their attitude when a customer writes them a letter? Why isn't a company the size of O2 employing enough people to 'man the Twitter deck' - Dell can do it, and so according to Ben Gillam can Vodaphone and even BTCare.

I do think that if you're going to use Twitter you need to be prepared for what it will unleash. Alternatively you could make it clear that your twittering staff aren't there to perform customer service, but rather to broadcast offers, information or updates. If you state what you're able to cover and are honest about it, that's surely less aggravating than saying "Let's talk - we're happy to help where we can!" as O2 say on their Twitter profile.

Another way of diffusing disgruntled customers is to personalise it. Drop the anonymity, forget the scripts and the 'is there anything else we can help you with?' bullshit. Remove the 'corporate' veneer, show faces, use real names, listen, do something to show you're human, and it's surprising how less inclined people are to get bolshy in public. Because that's what these conversations are on Twitter - visible to all.

Large companies CAN do this - look at the twitter page of Frank Eliason, Senior Director of National Customer Service Operations for Comcast. Now I don't give two hoots whether it's actually Frank replying to everyone, or even whether that's Frank in the photo (although I'd be a bit sad if it wasn't). My point is that it looks and feels like real, human customer service.

Am I being over-sensitive? Is it unreasonable to expect corporates to have got their act together when Twitter is still such a new tool and we're all still figuring it out? Are employers requiring humans to behave more like robots and if so, isn't that ironic given the amount of time being spent on trying to create robots that have even a fraction of the intelligence of a human being?

Social media marketing isn't about the numbers game

One of those marketing tenets I often still hear is that people typically have to see your marketing message nine times before they'll act on it.

I've never been entirely happy with this. If a marketing message comes at me nine times (and I still haven't bought), all I can think is that the company concerned hasn't bothered to get its targeting right. And in the case of email, I'll have unsubscribed by then anyway.

It all reeks of the old-style numbers-game marketing that says the more people you hit, the more often, the better - because then you only need 1% of them to succumb and you're laughing. Imagine a huge upside-down pyramid - millions of 'prospects' at the top and a handful of conversions at the bottom. Which is of course how spammers operate.

I wonder if social media marketing is turning the old pyramid on its head. Better to have one conversation with someone who's interested in what you're selling, then allow/encourage/enable her to talk about it in her network, and her friends in theirs.... than to tell her nine times about something irrelevant. (And have THAT talked about.)

Forresters reported on this over two years ago, questioning the received wisdom of the purchase funnel and noting that the internet was making engagement into the new key metric for marketers. And this well before the current social web frenzy took hold. But you'd hardly know it - as recently as last week, Mark Ritson in Marketing magazine blustered about 'pointless' name-changing and how we need to get back to 'the four Ps', as if the last 10 years never took place.

Ritson is well-respected and influential - in his own words he 'trains the next generation of MBA students who aspire to a career in marketing'. But how are marketing qualifications to be taken seriously if they are still based almost entirely on theories from pre-internet days?