Social Media Darwinism » Customer Support

10 Best Posts of 2010

Paul Dunay — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 18:00:29 +0000

Far and away one of the best blog posts I wrote this year was on the new 4′c of B2B Marketing – it was read over 15,000 times and 3X more popular than the next most read blog post of the year. This inspired me to do a quick 10 Best Posts of 2010 as we slide into the New Year.

I hope you enjoy it …

4 C’s of B2B Marketing – We’ve all heard about the four P’s of marketing: Product, Price, Placement, Promotion. The four P’s were created mainly to describe the ideal “marketing mix.”
4 P’s to Social Media Marketing - Ok ok – based on the great response I got from my readers on my last blog post The 4 C’s of B2B Marketing I thought I would try to apply the same principle to Social Media Marketing.
Fire your Director of Social Media! – At a recent ANA conference I was interviewing Brian Wallace VP of Digital Marketing and Media for RIM when I heard him say “2 years from now- if I still have a Director of Social Media – I should be fired!”
Is The White Paper Dead for B2B Marketing? – In a recent conversation I was having with the Bloom Group they believe “the practice of publishing white papers must come to a close because of the utter proliferation of white papers, and the poor content contained within so many of them.”
Customer Service is the New Marketing – Zappos was founded in 1999 and sold to Amazon for $1.2 Billion Dollars just barely over ten years later. Zappos is powered by its customer service and was built on the premise of WOWing each and every customer.
Using Content to Build Trust in B2B Marketing – In the recent Edelman Trust Barometer report they detail out how trust is rebounding in a handful of Western countries especially in the United States where trust in business jumped 18 points to 54 percent.
LinkedIn Search Optimization (LSO) Critical for B2B Marketers – Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via natural search results.
Social Media Budget Ratio in B2B Marketing – In my new advisory role for the members of MENG I have been getting a bunch of questions from the members that are making great fodder for blog posts.
How to Choose a Social Media Listening Platform for B2B Marketing – In the last post we covered how to create a Social Media Lead Flow. And once you have identified the conversations where you think a sales opportunity …
B2B Marketing: Trust + Community = ROI – Trust is not a new thing when it comes to marketing and communications as evidenced by one of the most awaited studies in the communications world is always the annual Edelman Public Relations Trust Barometer.

4 C’s of B2B Marketing

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What a Trifecta of a Year!

Paul Dunay — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 18:00:11 +0000

Last year I wrote about how some weeks are hard to top and how lucky I was to have launched my first book – Facebook Marketing for Dummies (Wiley) with my co-author Rich Krueger, and I was nominated for BtoB Marketing Magazine’s (a Crain’s publication) list of the Top 25 BtoB Marketers of the Year 2009. And appeared on the Facebook Halloween episode of HubSpot TV (my favorite web TV show) all in one week! I was in awe of what you can accomplish, I was even more touched when I heard my 16 year old son say “I have no idea how Dad does it all” (thanks buddy)

But this year is going to make last year look like I was slacking off …

Each year I set goals (written ones – because you would be amazed at how the mind works when you write goals down!). So here they are … I wanted to create a social product for Avaya, I wanted to write another book, I wanted to win a Social Award, I wanted to win an industry award,, and I wanted to get nominated for BtoB Marketing Magazine’s list of the Top 25 BtoB Marketers of the Year again.

Not a shabby list. Unfortunately I not only “Achieved Expectations” on that list … I actually “Exceeded Expectations”!

In January I started on a product with the Avaya Labs (formerly Bell Labs) team to create what is now known as the Avaya Social Media Manager. It’s a gateway server and software that works with popular listening engines and applies our own Natural Language Processing (NLP) to the “stream of data” coming out of the listening engine to find Support related Tweets, Facebook Comments, Blog posts, Forum posts and pushes them into the Contact Center where they can be answered and tracked with all the other support related issues. In the process I found that this was the BEST place to get an ROI in Social Media. This was so well received by our clients that we have more demand than we can handle for this product (a High Class problem as I like to say!).

I even wrote another Dummies book (well booklet) about it that Wiley custom published for us called Social Media and the Contact Center for Dummies which you can get a FREE digital copy of at the link above or email me.

I also contracted with Wiley to do another book called Facebook Advertising for Dummies. This just came out on November 16, 2010 according to Amazon. But we were working on this book for the better part of the first half of the year.

But wait that’s not all!

Starting in November I had a 9 day streak of winning and accepting awards from 3 different organizations. November 3rd was the ITSMA Marketing Excellence awards where my Avaya team won an award for Sales Enablement, followed by November 10th where I made this years list of Top BtoB Marketers for 2010 and accepted an award at their gracious ceremony in New York with my wife, my mom and long time supporter and former colleague Diana Butler Buxton by my side and then on November 12th I accepted an award for the work we did in supporting customers using social media – this was the Social Advocacy award from AMI Partners.

With the year rapidly winding down I am almost afraid to set any goals for next year! But who knows what next year will bring but it is my sense that it will be great!

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11 B2B Marketing Predictions for 2011

Paul Dunay — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 18:00:43 +0000

Around this time last year I wrote about the 10 B2B Marketing Predictions for 2010 and while I would say 7 out of 10 have already materialized and the others are on their way. So that begs the question – what’s on the horizon specifically for B2B Marketers next year?

Here are 11 concrete ways I think the environment in which B2B Marketers operate will evolve in 2011.

Enjoy!

Facebook Advertising – will continue to improve and unfortunately get more expensive. After 9 years of Search Engine Marketing – I think it is safe to say any keyword you are going to buy is maxed out when it comes to the Google AdWords auction process. So people are looking for an alternative and that’s Facebook Advertising. I even wrote a book this year on just this topic called Facebook Advertising for Dummies (Wiley). And as more people find out about this gem of an advertising experience CPC and CPM prices will continue to march upward – I have already begun to see this in my own ad buys!
Mobile Marketing – I know I said last year was the year of mobile marketing but I just saw a stat from a Mary Meeker presentation that smart phones will eclipse PC sales in 2012 (that’s just a year away) which will lead us to more mobile usage than PC usage so you better start your Mobile Marketing program now. Keep in mind we all start in the same place and that’s at ZERO! Mobile it totally optin and you need to start building your mobile optin list now.
Facebook will move into Mobile Ads – having said what I just did about us marketers not having a good mobile optin list – its just so natural for Facebook to ask you (you will ask us first Mark right?) if he can extend his advertising into your mobile device which he already has (if you put it on your profile). I have been thinking about this play for Facebook for a while – glad I am getting it down on virtual paper for my grandkids to see!
Social Media Strategists will become Chief Customer Officers – ok so you know I am also @Avaya_Support on Twitter so perhaps this is a closet fantasy for me but it may just come true – perhaps not this coming year but in years to come. Think about it marketers have been given this gift of Social Media which is reinventing areas of your company on the fly. In my company alone we have seen it touch Product Development and R&D, to Billing and Finance, to HR and Recruiting, to Customer Service and the Contact Center. You need someone to own the customer experience now in all those external channels and your internal channels as well!
Ecommerce will hit Facebook – Next year the deal that Facebook has with oodle.com for the Facebook Marketplace will be over. My predication would be they cut the cord there and open up a marketplace of their own. Startups like Payvment, and Alvenda will help companies large and small to open up shop in Facebook. Delta, Levis and 1800 Flowers are already there – can Victoria Secret, Brooks Brothers, and Godiva be far behind?
NFO is the new SEO – that’s News Feed Optimization on Facebook. Basically .2% of fans return to a fan page and in some cases it’s more like .02% (hat tip BrandGlue) So people on Facebook who “like” your Fan page basically never go back to it. So stop thinking of it as a micro site and making it all fancy. What you need to focus on is the content and optimizing the content to get comments and likes which will help you drive amount of people that Facebook will show your page to. It’s all based on Facebook’s algorithm called EdgeRank.
Advocate Marketing comes into Focus – you know all those people we are delighting with great customer service using Twitter – well they have become a strong voice for our brand. Now we are looking at ways of collecting and harnessing them. Tools like Zuberance are helping to do just that and allowing firms to do special things with their advocate base like provide them special events, invites to live events etc. We are just scratching the surface on this one but I can tell you its going to be big!
Reputation Management emerges in organizations – Toyota, United Breaks Guitars, Dominos Pizza, Motrin Moms, Dell Hell – we have had some major disasters all brought on my lack of speed in this market. Many firms are listening now for their brand (I know I spoke to 50 of them this year about this issue) but I don’t think they are ready for a crisis. I did a Reputation study on this topic two years ago and it proved how many companies lack the infrastructure then – we have come a long way since but do you really have a process to react quickly?
Real Time Marketing makes headlines – ok so I am reading David Meerman Scott’s latest book called Real Time Marketing but you know what – he’s right! He’s got tons of examples of firms that capitalized or failed to capitalize on Real Time issues (United Breaks Guitars!) We all need a lesson on how to be more real time – it’s a great book, I can’t put it down – I have read every book David has published and I can tell you – you need to read this one!
Someone better win the SmartPhone Application race soon – I can’t keep building 4 versions of the same application in order to cover the SmartPhone market – Blackberry aps, iPhone aps, Android aps (what the growth rate on Android) and Windows aps. Ok yes HTML5 should help this but throw in iPad and various other tablet aps and marketers are starting to look like Technologist which brings me to my next prediction.
The Rise of the Marketing Technologist – Marketers for the last few years have been closet techno geeks and its time for them to rise up – companies need digitally fluent marketers who can apply technologies to help make marketing more measurable and scientific. Then we can really change the dynamic from marketing as a cost center to marketing as a profit center!

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Brand Advocates vs Brand Adversaries – it’s a Very Thin Line!

Paul Dunay — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 18:00:02 +0000

Everyday I provide support on the social web to customers. For the last 18 months we have solved hundreds of issues both small and large for customers around the globe, some as quickly as 15min others as long as 24 hours. But what’s becoming clear to me is that real time communications is essential in this new multi channel world where you better be listening for your customers and delighting them with Social Customer Service.

Xbox Support found that people they help on Twitter are far more satisfied than people they help via the call center, not to mention the cost of providing that service is significantly cheaper as well.

It’s a great double sided ROI story for Social Customer Support. It saves customers who are having an issue call them Brand Adversaries and delights them into becoming a Brand Advocate while it also provides a cost reduction ROI when it comes to the call center.

I see this in my travels talking to Avaya customers about how social media can be integrated into their contact center.

But I also hear all the horror stories about the customer who they ignored and it got worse. I like to say I never read a Social Media case study that was titled “We Ignored this Tweet and everything was Great!” in fact it is always the opposite of that.

I think there are 2 factors at play here – the first is listening and being able to react quickly – if you don’t have a listening engine in place and a routing for that complaint to get fielded you are just tempting fake – its not IF there will be an issue its WHEN is there going to be an issue.

The line between a happy customer who is now having an issue (a Brand Adversary) is VERY thin. Which brings me to my next factor which is time – when a customer is having an issue they want action – when they tweet you they expect you to be there and unfortunately Twitter doesn’t have an Out of Office feature so you better be ready to help (I have seen Xbox Support post hours of operation – lets see how that goes for them).

You can use this to your advantage and make your Brand Adversaries your best Brand Advocates if you surprise and delight them with outstanding customer service in by using social. Then it unlocks all the great things about social when they tweet and tell others about the great experience they had with your brand.

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3 More ROIs in Social Media – Conversations Leads and Advocates

Paul Dunay — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 15:00:41 +0000

If you follow me you know I talk a lot about the ROI of Social Media since I happen to have stumbled on a great ROI using Social Media in providing support for our customers at Avaya.

Social customer support I would argue is the single best place to focus your social media efforts since it can reduce customer churn and increase your retention rates faster than any other program I have ever seen before thereby delivering a strong ROI. Listening for and spotting a customer issue, responding to them and solving their problem in minutes using social media not only lets you conquer social media but delight your customers in the process.

But I think there are 3 more ROIs out there where you can build a great business case with Social Media

Conversations – PR needs to move from publications to conversations and if you take that concept and really track and engage in conversations where you brand would fit – I could see that leading to an ROI over time – similar to the way the long tail works for books or movies – this is the long tail of conversations and it would be like having 100s of ads out there for your brand that were all relevant and in context. Which leads me to my next ROI …

Leads – Listening for mentions of your brand or product or even competitors brands is a great way to find leads – evidence I have when listening for the competitors of Avaya – if I hear someone say “replace Cisco” – don’t you think that’s a conversation Avaya should be engaged in? Grant it there haven’t been a ton of those conversations but if you add up all your competitors and your own brands product lines it becomes meaningful.

Advocates – Here is the last one where we have had some success as well. How are you building and taking care of all those really avid followers on Twitter or die hard fans on Facebook – perhaps if you were able to harness them like some companies are doing now with service like Zuberance – you can get them to make recommendations and build your brand with the power of their voice. We are seeing some success with this but some clients of Zuberance are really killing it with this one strategy.

Dell has been talking about how they made $3 million dollars off their Twitter site – how did they do it? With a Coupon Code! – We have plenty of tools both old and new at our disposal to measure and track so many things on the web – so much so – that I have lost all patience for the concept that “we cant measure social media” – if Dell can measure with a coupon code just think what can you be doing to track the flow of social media with special 800#, special email addresses, special landing pages.

That’s how we did it at the beginning of the web – I don’t see why this time is any different!

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Social Customer Support: AT&T is doing it Right!

Paul Dunay — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 16:00:42 +0000

I have been an avid iPhone user almost since the day it came out. I just had to have one and it killed me that it took a week to get one when it first hit the market. I love everything about the iPhone except the fact that it has been hard to actually use it as a phone! To make matters worse it is almost impossible to use in my home but that is a network issue rather than an iPhone issue.

So recently AT&T sent me a letter offering me a FREE 3G Microcell, which is like a mini cellular tower for your home! It connects to AT&T’s network via your existing broadband Internet service and is designed to support up to five simultaneous users in your home. I quickly asked my social network if it was worth it and I got a unanimous YES back from my Twitter and Facebook connections. So I decided to give it a try. The only issue … is it was impossible to get one! I tried every store in a 30 mile radius, first by showing up and then just by phone but it was sold out everywhere.

So I asked my local AT&T store to keep an eye out for a shipment for me and let me know when one comes in. I finally found one about a month and half later. So I asked them to hold it for me and promised to be in the store within the hour. When I showed up they took one look at my letter and informed me the promotion had just ended and that if I wanted one I would have to pay for it. I mumbled something underneath my breath and left the store.

On the way home I decided to share my customer experience with my social network …

And within 24 hours ATTSusan came to the rescue with a tweet asking for more information …

And with a few back and forth tweets we decided to communicate directly and bingo within 72 hours I had my new 3G Microcell courtesy of AT&T with special help from ATTSusan. And best of all it makes my iPhone work really well in my house!

There is a customer service lesson in here for all B2C and B2B Marketers – this is the type of support customers are expecting today on the social web. I think a lot of B2C and B2B Marketers are listening but they tend to think that actual customer support is someone else’s job when in reality Marketers need to own customer support! It’s your most pure form of customer advocacy and lot easier and cheaper to save an existing customer than it is to do constant marketing campaigns to get new, ambivalent customer to sign up with your company! Bravo AT&T!

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B2B Marketing needs to Curate a Vibrant Community

Paul Dunay — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 15:59:44 +0000

If you ask the members of my leadership team – they will tell you I keep talking about how I think we have B2B Marketing backward.

Let me explain …

We focus a lot of energy on the acquisition part of marketing looking for new customers and getting them up the awareness to consideration to purchase cycle. The results being most of the time we get ambivalent buyers into the top of our funnel and we have to work hard to close them in order to prove value to the organization and contribute to growth.

But what if we focused on those buyers who have already purchased from us? Those already predisposed to buying our products and create a level of service and differentiation for them that is commensurate with their buying habits?

I think we owe it to our organizations to really take care of them. If you look at the interview I did with Sean Geehan – he talked about the typical number of customers in B2C versus B2B and the high concentration we have in B2B that account for the most of the revenues.

My suggestion would be to create a vibrant community with them – one which is both online and offline, one where you can get instant feedback, one where their ideas matter to your research and development groups, one where they co-author thought leadership with you and one that rewards them for their loyalty to your firm.

This is something I am working on for FY11 and will be more than just a social network for our best customers. Stay tuned as I begin to launch this for next year.

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Getting a customer is not the end goal it’s the middle

Paul Dunay — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 16:00:15 +0000

In a recent speech by Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research at the ITSMA Marketing Leadership forum it occurred to me that customer acquisition is no longer an “end state” for marketers its somewhere in the middle. Let me explain …

Many marketers focus their efforts on the customer acquisition angle which has the benefit of measurability and thus the accountability for ROI. This is great in a world of tightening budgets and ROI on every campaign but getting the customer up the scale from Awareness to Consideration to Purchase is just part of the deal now that social media has arrived.

I would argue (and so did Josh) that the real work comes on Day 2 of the customers purchase. It’s the experience they had with your company over the entire sales cycle and the ongoing relationship they will have with your company when it comes to long term support. This end of the spectrum pales in comparison to the time frame it took to sell the customer (dare I say 12-18 months). If they have committed to your technology or software as a service they most likely will be with you for twice as long unless you do something horribly wrong.

B2B Marketers need to examine and invest in this area of the spectrum – the customer retention area. Why? Because unlike our B2C Marketing cousins we sell to very few customers comparatively – so a top priority should be for you to retain as many of your existing customers as possible!

Think of your budget as a B2B Marketer and just do a back of the napkin examination of your spending on Acquisition vs Retention.

Are you over weight in Acquisition?

It’s not uncommon that this would be the case – the question is what to do about it. One great spot to invest in is Social Support. Social Media is hot and I can guarantee someone is out there talking about your product or service right now. Perhaps it’s a new customer telling of their experience with your company or perhaps it’s an old customer longing for the good old days with your company – either way you need to be sure you are listening and ready to engage with them if they have an issue. Just letting them know you are out there to help is always a good idea as well.

The role of the B2B Marketer has changed over the last 10 years but what hasn’t is the need to be sure you are retaining those customers your sales team fought hard to land from your acquisition efforts.

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Social Customer Support delivers Strong ROI

Paul Dunay — Wed, 19 May 2010 16:40:55 +0000

In a recent poll by the TSIA of firms using social media – 68% of companies don’t know or can’t measure the ROI of social media. Which is a real shame and if that’s the case for you I would argue that you are focusing your social media efforts in the wrong place!

Certainly there are tools out there to help you measure your efforts in social media but sometimes it’s not the tool’s fault it’s the business case.

Many people take a classic approach to social media and treat it like just another media channel and expect to see instant results like they do with other online media like banners, text links and search. This is why they find it hard to see results that make for a strong ROI.

In the case of social customer support I would argue that this is the single best place to focus your social media efforts since it can reduce customer churn and increase retention rates faster than any other program we have ever seen before. Spotting a customer issue, responding to them and solving their problem in minutes using social media provides what can only be called an exceptional customer experience.

Not only that but a recent Forrester study showed that customers actually prefer a better customer experience compared to everyday low prices, and moreover great customer experiences drive positive word of mouth (WOM). So why wouldn’t you center you social media efforts in this area?

Layering on social media tactics for support can also decrease your contact center costs. Tactics like providing free support forums, peer to peer collaboration and discussion threads on social networks and support through microblogging can act as a string of defensive before a person calls into you contact center which is the highest cost support vehicle any company can have.

Not everyone enjoys calling into a contact center and more and more as social media evolves they will expect to get support using the channel that the customer prefers and feels most comfortable using.

The downside of poor customer service has been well documented on the web more and more people are taking to the web to warn other would be customers of their dissatisfaction with your customer service so don’t let that be your company! Great customer service enabled by social media is a no brainier and it is the single best place to build your business case for social media!

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Location is important for your Contact Center too!

Paul Dunay — Thu, 13 May 2010 16:33:59 +0000

Location Based Services (LBS) are becoming all the rage now. Start up companies like Foursquare which is a web based check in service where you can declare your location to your friends, and even popular sites like Twitter and Facebook are getting into the act and attaching location based information about your status updates.

Clearly people are becoming more comfortable and seeing reasons to allow location based information to be used. But what does this mean to your company?

I believe every single company will need to understand the power of location. And marketing need to get used to thinking location + business can equal big money.

Let’s take the combination of Twitter and location as an example. Comcast provides customer care through its Twitter account “comcastcares”. They use their twitter account to provide customer support if their cable, internet or phone service is out. And it’s become a critical piece of their support organization getting 5,000 – 8,000 tweets per week. They have a team headed by Frank Eliason, the man behind the comcastcares twitter handle with 10 people level 2 and level 3 support people working with him.

Now that Avaya has developed our Social Media Manager solution (get our new book on this) to help folks like Frank to automate what he and his team currently does which is reading tweets and other social data to find support related items. So they can begin to focus elsewhere.

Now that we have all the data about these support related tweets in our system – what if we map where complaints are coming from? Then we can easily visualize using some form of a mashup – where the company should invest in improving its infrastructure and hence their reputation.

This is really a natural extension of the next generation contact center that uses social media to provide superior customer service. We have learned a lot about how social will impact the contact center over the past few years. And I can promise you this is only just the beginning of the age of Social Customer Service.

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