Many companies fear social media.  But the good ones have less to worry about than they might fear. While SM can be intimidating (especially with all those lawyers out there chomping at the bit in our sue-happy America), the truly good companies will find that social media is a friend.  In fact it is their key ally. Why? Because Social Media may expose your vulnerabilities but it also amplifies the good.  GREATLY! Here’s why.

Four companies in the past month have so impressed me with their service that after just this one experience with each of them I am probably a customer for life!  So what did these companies do?  Simply put they:

• indulged in good old fashioned customer service
• delighted me, the customer, especially when I was down /stressed
• simply kept the promises they made in all their ads and promotional materials when they signed me up or attracted me to their business.

Sidenote; If you know my philosophy of marketing then you know I simply call this marketing.  Everything else especially when people say “yeah it’s all just marketing…” is very simply, lies.

So how did this good get amplified?

1. I am a customer for life. And what’s my life time value compared to what they gave me in terms of goods and service?
2. I am so impressed that the competitors can quit calling or writing me. No matter how good their marketing they are wasting their time — not until there are exaggerated instances of bad service from my current companies in the future — highly unlikely! A good culture, like a bad culture, sticks!
3. I am telling everyone – on Yelp, Twitter, on my blog here, everywhere… And where I used to tell 10 friends I am telling all my followers in Twitter, I have told everyone on Yelp and this blog post even shows up on LinkedIn since my posts on this multiple through all my networks.

Some old fashioned stuff is not a fashion after all; it’s a classic.  Know how to recognize it, preserve it, cultivate it with great care AND let social media amplify it for you!!

In case you’re wondering, those companies are:  Geico, America’s Tire, Enterprise Rent A Car and Zappos.

Reena Kapoor, of Conifer Consulting, (www.ConiferInc.com) helps organizations with new product & marketing strategy.  She brings over 18 years of new products & brand management experience from Fortune 100 CPG companies and venture-backed Silicon Valley companies.   Reena has deep consumer brand, product management and marketing leadership experience and brings this background to her work in helping organizations define their businesses based on a strong marketing/customer focus.

I have emailed about 8 small tour companies in Europe and in every case, received a response in less than 10 hours (and in a few cases, an immediate email auto response indicating that I’d definitely get a response within 24 hours)—no small feat since there is at least an 8 hour time difference.  The responses were personal, customized to some degree to respond to my specific questions, and very thorough.  I had all of the information I needed within 10 hours of my request.

My experience trying to find a shuttle to the airport in San Diego for my Mom was entirely different.  I still haven’t gotten a response to 3 different emails after 48 hours!  And I have no idea whether I ever WILL get a response, meaning that if I’m really serious about needing a shuttle, I’ll need to get on the phone and probably will book the first company I talk to vs. making an intelligent decision based on several choices.  Someone is going to get my business only because I don’t have the time to do more work on this…not necessarily because they deserve it.

In the case of the European ‘service delight’ examples, after the first response, I thought it was an exception…but when I received consistently amazing service from all 8 vendors, it made me think “Maybe they are really hurting for business there…”  And then after the consistently disappointing experience re: the airport shuttle, it made me think that there may be something bigger at work here.

This challenging economy we are in has shaken companies up, however, I’m concerned that many companies are responding by slashing prices vs. providing more value.  Understanding what your customers value and delivering on that very well is much more effective when it comes to customer loyalty than price cutting (see this great article on the topic).  But, obviously, not all companies practice that approach.  Is it possible that Europeans in general, or at least those in the European travel business, understand this better than American companies?

Note: I definitely did not get the impression from the travel vendors I heard from that they were ‘desperate’ for my business and ready to bargain on price…they were proud of what they had to offer and eager to provide an exceptional experience, not only in the ‘shopping’ process, but extending to the actual tour.

I tried doing some Googling to see what I could find on European customer service levels vs. American customer service levels, but came up empty…perhaps some of you have personal experience to either confirm or deny my hunch?  Would love to hear from you…and would love to see some major focus from our U.S. companies to make it easy to work with them vs. slashing prices.  It may be key to our long-term recovery…

An excellent video talk by Joseph Pine on What Consumers Really Want. He talks about how we’ve evolved from economy that was based on commodities, to goods, to services and now its about creating and selling experience.  In this context, authenticity is the new consumer sensibility and it’s what consumers want to experience.  We’re hearing this with social networking/web 2.0 taking off as well.  But the question remains: what is authenticity and how do we (as businesses) render it effectively?

I just happened to check my online credit card account info last night and saw a long paragraph in red letters telling me that a “recent merchant database compromise” may have put my account at risk and that my card was no longer active and I would be receiving a new one…WHAT?!

My immediate reaction was “Why didn’t they call or email me with this information?”  I have always been pleased with CitiBank’s service in situations where they suspected ‘fraudulent’ activity and called me proactively…why didn’t that happen this time?

I immediately got on the phone to customer service…and got an extremely frustrating response from the customer service rep who was very vague and never answered my questions about what merchant database was compromised, when did it happen, why didn’t I get a call to inform me of the situation, etc.

Instead, I got a ‘party line’ repeated to me over and over again: “We suspected that there might be fraudulent activity, so we cancelled your card.”  Got it…you were being proactive…cool…thanks…but how about that NEXT step of ‘proactivity’ and letting me, the customer, know what was going on?  BEFORE I try to use my credit card and get rejected by a merchant/store/gas pump?

I asked to speak to a manager to express my frustration and to get answers to my questions but he not only wouldn’t accommodate my request, but expressed his OWN frustration that I ‘was making him repeat himself’.   Ay yi yi…

This is a wonderful illustration of how companies lose customers.  I could have been talked off the ledge if the customer service rep had handled our call just a little differently using some very simple (common sense) steps:

-          Apologize for the problem/stress/concern that their message caused

-          Clarify what exactly had happened and what they had done and what would happen now

-          Ask whether I had any remaining questions/concerns

-          Apologize one more time for the inconvenience

-          Assure me that CitiBank is looking out for me and wants to protect my assets

-          Thank me for my continued business

It’s quite simple (hey!  Let’s give it an acronym: ACAAAT!)…and I think that this formula would work with any reasonable customer…it astounds me that respectable companies (which I truly consider CitiBank to be) still aren’t getting this…for those of us who work with organizations to help them monitor customer satisfaction/loyalty and retain customers, let’s all make it our mission to keep spreading the word that the SIMPLE things are what will help them keep customers…it’s not the fancy stuff…loyalty programs are great, but if you can’t get the simple human interaction stuff right, they are wasted.  And for those of you who have ANY influence at all over your own organization’s service policies and/or strategy, please keep this in mind.

What the @*!# are they thinking?

By reaching out to proactively talk to your customers, you can learn a lot about the pressures they are dealing with which may include:

- their customers are pushing to get more for less
- cutting expenses
- attempts from your competitors to get their business
– and more!

If you show an interest in understanding their pressures/challenges, you could gain their undying loyalty which is ultra-important in times like these.

Talking to your customers can be as simple as just picking up the phone.  Once you are clear that your intent isn’t to sell them anything, but to just talk and understand where they are coming from and what has changed for them, your clients will be grateful for the opportunity to vent.

Who should talk to your customers?  The higher level the person making the call, the better—nothing impresses a customer more, or makes them feel more important, than a call from a senior exec.  Obviously senior execs can’t connect with all of your customers, but you could develop a strategy for assigning some of your key/highest stakes customers to each of them…and coordinate a plan for salespeople and/or support staff to reach out to others.

It’s quite simple…and something that can have a very high return on the investment of time… a simple phone call can differentiate you in a huge way from your competitors…and that’s a good thing in times like these.

See our paper, 7 Good Reasons to Talk to Your Customers in a Bad Economy, for more information about how to take the next step in talking to your customers.

Like many of you, I have gone through the process of asking the following questions about blogging:

- WHY blog?
- WHAT do I have to say?
- HOW can I set up a blog?

It’s natural to go through this questioning process unless you’re one of those early adapters of all things new. I am definitely not an early adapter type, but tend to be a ‘mid adapter’ (waited to get an iPod until the 2nd generation device was launched). And I like to be sure that any new activity I add to my already too long ‘to do’ list is something that is really going to be advantageous to my business.

To answer these questions, I first did some research (how appropriate!) by reading a variety of blogs, testing out my blogging ‘legs’ on the Women in Consulting blog, talking to fellow consultants, and discussing the whole blogging idea with some of my clients as well as with my valued business coach, Casey Dawes, of Wise Woman Shining. All of this information helped answer the ‘why’ and ‘what’ questions quite thoroughly. I learned that blogging is a great way to create a dialogue with not only my target market, but with other people who share an interest in two areas that are near and dear to my heart: customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.

As for the ‘what’ question, I recently wrote my first ‘white paper’ which received a warm reception from my clients and colleagues. I have also been experimenting with Twitter and don’t think that I’ve said anything too embarrassing yet! And by reading other people’s blogs, I realize that you don’t have the most radical concepts or most ingenious insights to be an interesting blogger…you just need to be able to facilitate interesting dialogues and get people thinking…I can do that quite naturally in person, so why not in the virtual world? I also realized that the concept of sharing the ‘load’ of generating content with guest bloggers is quite acceptable and is actually becoming more and more common.

The ‘how’ question definitely got into technical issues which led to migrating my website to Wordpress. The process wasn’t too painful at all thanks to the help of Ken at The Web Mechanic. Now I have a very agile site which allows me to do a lot of things, including hosting this blog with all the right bells and whistles…and I have a support team behind me if I run into glitches…that is very comforting and allows me to focus on content vs. technical issues.

I already have a list of topics that I’ll be blogging about regularly and this will be put into my list of things that need attention along with the other marketing activities I try to keep on top of. We’ll be talking about the importance of customer focus, why/how to measure customer loyalty, sharing examples of great service, and more…if these topics interest you, please watch this spot or subscribe to our feed. And I encourage you to add your comments along the way…this IS a dialogue!