When it comes to keeping your customers happy, it is going to take a lot more than that colorful song and dance of yours, because today’s customers are increasingly wary of brands and are more apt to trust a recommendation from their friends than a wishy-washy advertiser.
Accordingly, it is not all that surprising that social media has become the first place that consumers turn to and brands are clamoring for ways to hone successful customer engagement strategies. But the first place to start, according to many industry experts, is to be where your customers are –Facebook, Twitter (News - Alert) and other social media outlets.
“Being everywhere is only the beginning,” writes Mashable writer Wendy Lea. “It turns out that online, just like in real life, the key to building relationships is trust. Cultivating trust online is tricky and takes work, but is by no means impossible. When you respond to your customers in the right way, you earn that trust and build the foundation for a real, long-term relationship.”
According to Lea, companies must follow four steps to ensure that their customers remain smiley and positive: acknowledge with empathy, enable the right outcomes, educate through experience and keep the momentum going. But before following Lea’s four steps, brands ought to do one important step first – sit back and observe.
The social stratosphere is full of clues as to whether your customers are happy with you – just start by typing your company name into any social media monitoring tool like Social Mention, Twilert, Google (News - Alert) Alerts, and Radian6, just to name a few. By typing in your company name you can see up-to-the-minute musings about your company. Before ever diving into the conversation, you need to see what exactly is being said about you.
After taking a step back and observing, you may want to try Lea’s first step of “Acknowledge with Empathy.” While brands might know enough to respond directly to customers’ social media rantings, particularly when they are negative, it is not just about the answer but how the question is answered. Specifically, tone is of the utmost importance.
“The worst thing you can do is respond with the attitude that your customers are yet another problem to be solved. They will sense it,” Lea said. “For example, if a customer tweets asking for help with a lost password, winning their trust might be as easy as adding an, ‘I’m sorry’ or ‘that must be frustrating’ to the response.”
And for the positive responses, an appropriate response is also just as important. Experts suggest acknowledging the accolade by passing it onto your social networks and thanking them publically.
After completing that step, companies ought to make sure that they are enabling the right outcomes, or making sure that they can bring resolution to their customers. To bring peace of mind to customers and ensure successful customer engagement, brands are encouraged to allow their customers to have multiple platforms to express themselves –from a company website, to a product page to a Facebook (News - Alert) and Twitter account. It’s about giving customers a channel to voice their concerns, according to Lea.
The third step in managing your customers online is making sure that customers experience a company’s values as opposed to being lectured about them.
“That requires a system for archiving, organizing, and sharing conversations, the rallying point for your community of customers,” Lea said, noting that it is important for customers to be able to browse other testimonies.
Finally, companies must keep the momentum going or, in other words, keep the conversation going once it has been started.
“Ultimately, real relationships are a two-way street, and your customers know that,” Lea said. “Trust is the foundation of a relationship, but to keep that relationship going, you need to prove that you earned it, every day and everywhere."
Edited by Rachel Ramsey