Workforce Management Featured Article

Companies Must Engage with 'Fans' and Capitalize on Those Relationships

“The Customers is King.” “The Customer is Always Right.” We see slogans like this emblazoned on the walls of consumer facing companies, in their sales brochures and in their call centers. While the customer may NOT always be right, he or she certainly is king. Without customers, companies wouldn’t exist.

In the digital age, and particularly in the age of social media, certain customers are more important than others. While it’s critical to handle each customer’s call to the highest standard (of course), some customers have more influence than others, and good customers are worth their weight in gold.

In a Harris Interactive (News - Alert) study, researchers found that 72 percent of adults who, “had a memorable product purchase, use, or service experience,” responded with some positive action, such as communicating about their positive experience with others (57 percent) and recommending that others make a purchase (41 percent). Couple this with the ability to broadcast such opinions via Twitter, Facebook (News - Alert), Instagram and others, and it’s obvious that companies need to pay extra attention to their “net promoters,” or their fans. Smart companies might even be able to get them to work on their behalf, according to a recent blog post by Teleperformance’s (News - Alert) Mark Pfeiffer.

“Customers are uniting to form communities of common interest, to support and evangelize your brand—or destroy it if the brand is not living up to their expectation,” he writes.

This means it’s absolutely critical to know what your customers are saying about you, even if this means hiring a dedicated customer support team in the confines of the call center (strongly aligned with marketing and sales, of course) to do so, and building that work into your contact center’s scheduling and ordinary operations. But it’s about more than just monitoring.

“It is now an important role of the customer service team to find what customers are saying about your brand and to help support those who are evangelizing your products without any reward,” writes Pfeiffer. “If they love your products so much they are telling friends then how can they help your team to support other customers – a C2C (customer to customer) interaction rather than B2C (business to customer).”

So while many companies are monitoring social media, it’s no longer enough. You need to be engaging with your net promoters (and soothing your net detractors) and turning those relationships into positive gain for the reputation of your brand. (Even a complaining customer, handled properly, can become a fan and a promoter). Yes, this will take extra effort. Yes, it will involve some cost. But the cost not to do so in the long run will be far greater.