Using social media to increase your company’s touch and reach with each of your customers may be the most important reason to jump in to this game changing strategy. Social media can help bridge a long standing gap between customers and the companies they trust with their hard earned cash. There are many ways to use social media for this purpose, but the main thing to keep in mind is to make sure you are using the tools to listen and engage, while considering making changes to how your company operates based on the precious feedback you will certainly receive. That said, when a customer posts on Facebook that you should lower your prices by 50%, perhaps this is not something you should spend too much time on. However, if your customers don’t post anything at all, good or bad, perhaps your pricing is too high overall. There are many signs to look for when receiving candid feedback from your customers, here’s a few examples of things Make It Work customers say and what we are doing about it:
Customer (from a Delight Survey email): Why don’t you offer billing as an option, rather than require payment on demand at the end of the appointment?
MIW: We offer our pre-paid support option to satisfy this need. While it does require you to pay in advance, we provide a great deal of value for doing so and an anytime refund of the balance, no questions asked. We require payment in these two methods to ensure our ability to provide focus on responsive call center operations and extraordinary abilities from our technicians in the field, instead of building a accounts receivable department complete with collections and mounds of paperwork that deters us from what we do really well.
Customer: I absolutely love doing business with Make It Work, but why are you late sometimes?
MIW (Facebook message): Our business is like surgery, you just cannot predict to any certainty how long each appointment will last. That said, we have extra technicans (surgeons) standing by to overlap and take over appointments to alleviate this problem. More importantly, while you may sit in the hospital waiting room or the airport and have really no idea when your loved one will be out of harm’s way or your plane will truly arrive, at MIW we call you, often more than once, immediately and the conversation usually goes like, “…our technician is on the 405, traveling 11.5 mph and he is 12 minutes from your house. Can we stop and grab you a cup a coffee on the way?”
I could go on and on with stories like this, but this is the type of feedback that we have received over the years and while we must remain fiscally responsible, we always try to tweak our business to be more aligned with our customers needs.
Recently, I invited all of Make It Work’s customers (approx. 40,000) to join me on Facebook. My message to them was this:
A few months ago, I used social media to interact with In-N-Out Burger, one of the most loved restaurants in the West. I hunted for their Twitter handle and their Facebook page. I couldn’t find either, or at least one that appeared to be legitimate. So I switched to the old-school means of communication and emailed them asking for them. It took almost two days, but here’s the response I got:
Dear Mr. Eric Greenspan:
Thank you for your e-mail and interest in In-N-Out Burger®. Our customers have made us the Company we are today, and we appreciate hearing from you! In response to your inquiry, we do not have an official Facebook or Twitter.
Thanks again for your e-mail.
Sincerely,
Brian P
Customer Service Representative
I responded back immediately asking them why and to elaborate. Another 23 hours later, I got this:
Dear Mr. Eric Greenspan:
Thank you again for contacting us.
In response to your question, it is nothing we are currently participating in, but I will be happy to share your comments with our management team. We appreciate your consideration.
Thank you again for your e-mail.
Sincerely,
Marianne S.
Customer Service Representative
Ok, I get it, they’re either not interested in discussing it, they truly have no interest or they simply haven’t figured it out yet. Whatever it is, I’m going to continue eating there (once a month at most, too fattening) but I can’t stop thinking about how a company that truly has “fans” wouldn’t be interested in a Fan page on Facebook.
Actual fan pictures of their In-N-Out Burgers
Now, suppose the number of people willing to eat a delicious but fattening cheeseburger is in decline due to awareness by Jamie Oliver and the rest of the die-hard healthy food proponents. These same people love In-N-Out, as I do, but simply can no longer eat a burger a week (yes, I’m referring to me) as they have realized the harm this can do to their health. A person thinking this way may seek a healthier alternative and if In-N-Out Burger is not aware of this shift in the paradigm, how will they keep growing? My point is they will learn about people’s perspective on this and other matters through their interaction on social networking sites like Facebook. I for one would eat at In-N-Out more often if they had a healthier alternative but they aren’t listening. Remember when this happened to McDonalds and they saw the first decline in sales growth in their existence? While In-N-Out is one of the best tasting, most well run, and cleanest restaurants I’ve ever experienced, they are not exempt from change in consumer sentiment.
Recently my son was Jackson Greenspan was born, as many of you already know by my repeated postings of his pics on Facebook. As a father of a newborn, I’m a diaper buyer now. Of course, my diaper of choice was the same they used in the hospital, Pampers Swaddlers. I liked the diaper and this new drymax technology was supposed to be the biggest breakthrough in diaper technology in the last decade. Great, except the technology is too good–apparently, parents are complaining about the brand “chemically burning the bums of babies” causing them to turn very red and sometimes even more severe symptoms. I noticed a red bum when using these diapers, but never thought much about it. Then, I visited the Pampers website to learn more about their products and see if they had a more bio-friendly version (very important to think green). I couldn’t find anything, so I used Google and eventually ended up on the Pampers Facebook page. There, I learned about the “burning problem” as one after another mom was posting frustrating comments about the product and demanding that the company fix the problem. The conversation was often one sided and Pampers really didn’t seem overly concerned. I asked a few questions on the site and I wasn’t happy with the responses, so I simply stopped buying their product, regardless if the claims were substantiated. I switched to Earth’s Best bio-friendly product and guess what happened next? The diapers fit him better, they were $.01/diaper cheaper and they had no dangerous chemicals to burn my baby’s bum. Thanks to Facebook, I’m reducing the risk to my baby, saving money and reducing the landfill. Social networking is powerful huh? If I were Pampers, I’d listen.
Our grandparents bought Jackson an Orbit Baby G2 stroller with infant car seat. First, I LOVE this product. It’s revolutionary, brilliant in its design, incredibly functional and takes everything into consideration possible. After test-driving and researching many brands, I bought an Orbit Baby G2 ultimately because my interaction with the company through social networking led me to believe they really cared about their customers, their products and the most important part, our children.
Recently, I posted a comment on the Orbit Baby Facebook page. I asked them for an accessory to attach the handles of the G2 to form a single bar for one-handed pushing. I assumed this would be better. Here’s their amazing response:
The best case for our relatively superior one-handed strolling is the fact that I routinely stroll two G2 Strollers (the few perks of being the founder) with one in each hand, which is the ultimate test of one-handed steering. There’s just no way a Bugaboo, or any other stroller really, could pull off this 2-at-once test as well. Of course, this is a relative standard, as I’m not saying our stroller strolls extremely easily with one hand, just that it performs better in this regard than our competitors.
The longer and more involved explanation: with loop handlebars like Bugaboo’s, it intuitively seems better because you can push with one hand along the center-line of the stroller; in reality though, since the stroller needs constant steering corrections in order to track straight, placing your hand in the center actually works less well. These constant, sometimes small and sometimes big, steering corrections result from weight imbalance, road irregularities, or just slight differences in the force used for pushing the stroller. The ‘uni-bar’ handles work less well because the only leverage you have to make the steering corrections is across your one hand. (They do, however, work great on jogging strollers with a fixed front wheel.)
By contrast, the key to why our stroller is designed to steer better with one hand is a combination of factors:
1. handlebars not too close to the center: again, in contrast to the ‘uni-bars’, our handlebars have enough distance from the center-line to give you adequate leverage for making steering corrections.
2. handlebars not too wide: unlike say a Maclaren though, our handlebars are not too wide such that pushing on only one would itself cause the stroller to not go where intended; the other key to this is that our handlebars are in-line with our in-board front steering wheels, and farther in than the rear wheels.
3. ergonomically shaped handlebars: the shape and angle of our handlebars allows steering corrections to be made more easily than the shape of uni-bar handlebars; loop handlebars are shaped entirely according to manufacturing limitations, I say this as a fact as tubes have minimum bend radii and such; by separating our handlebars out, we were much more free to design them fit a natural orientation that your hand would fall into.
Thanks for listening,
Joseph Hei (their CEO)
In hindsight, he was right and the fact that he took the time to respond to my comment on Facebook in this way…well, you get it.
After writing this blog post, I found this on Facebook. Another great example of the power of social media and customer service.
In conclusion, we can see the power of social media in action in our everyday lives. Never before has information about products and the sentiment of our customers been more accessible. The days of waiting on a customer service phone call are over. 24 hour email responses are ok, but losing steam too. What consumers want is instant, open feedback. Social media and social networking make this possible. While some companies may choose to avoid it, their competitors have an advantage. For me, if you don’t care enough to make yourself available to my questions in a truly timely manner, I will choose another. Or, if you choose to ignore my concerns…
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