… being a company that genuinely cares will!

i went to dinner the other night and received some really bad customer service (infact i’m sure she secretly spat in my dinner, but that’s a whole other story!). anyway, as i left the restaurant i mentioned it to the manager and he casually apologised but somehow it wasn’t enough. i knew that i wouldn’t be going back there again and it got me to thinking…. i am the first to admit, that this is probably a bit of a tangent, but nonetheless!

smiles

gone are the days where a smiley face at the customer service desk or at the end of a phone are sufficient. customer expectations are higher than ever and rightly so, with ever growing competition in the marketplace. nowadays, your whole company has to be genuinely smiley, from inside out.

whilst this can be scary for many companies to accept, you have to open up, to be receptive to criticism, pro-active with improvements and not afraid to admit you might have some flaws – people will love you more for it.

cool kid culture

so many companies love the idea of “social media”, they want to be seen as one of the “cool kids” leading the way. however (and this is a big however!), unless the culture of your company is adapted to embrace such a change, you may as well be banging your head against a brick wall.

if you’re going to embrace new technologies and communication tools, you’re going to also need to embrace the way that you use them (and… wait for it… even change your processes!! yuck i hate the word ‘process’). for example, if a blog post has to be passed through ten levels of sign-off, it’s no longer genuine and loses it’s meaning. i know how scary that can be for many companies, but it’s true.

wanting to build a community around your product or service is great, but as soon as you’re doing it purely to monetise, all of your hard work is undone and you’re back on that scrap heap again - those good old internets folks will sniff it out a mile off.

trust your team

be okay with the fact that you’ll have to empower your team to become brand ambassadors. no, they probably won’t be a part of the team forever, but that’s life, it happens. one thing that IS guaranteed, is that they’ll be a hundred times more committed and dedicated to helping you succeed whilst they’re there. if you worry the whole time that you don’t want to give them too much power, you’ll end up having someone for a few years giving maybe 80% - unleash their full potential.

open the floor

it’s natural to want to maintain control, no one doubts that. however, by realising the huge opportunity presented to you by opening up the floor to your users/consumers you’ll be putting yourself way ahead of your competitors. the honest feedback that you’ll receive will give you the information you need to adapt your offering to precisely match the demand of the market. this is raw data that companies with a more traditional approach would pay a fortune for. take advantage of that.

the tools are there for you, use them!

the first thing that i would recommend for any company is to set up an account with get satisfaction. i personally believe that this is the future of customer service. tons of companies are now using this service to support customers, exchange ideas, and get feedback about their products and services. the thing that i love about get satisfaction is that anyone with an opinion or some information to give can contribute to the conversation, plus it’s free!

monitor feedback using tools like summize, tweetscan or google alerts. this allows you to respond immediately to someone who wasn’t 100% satisfied rather than waiting to be contacted by someone who was really displeased. without a shadow of a doubt, they’ll tell your friends about you and what better advocate than your users?

i recently had some difficulties whilst using campaign monitor. i made a flippant comment on twitter to say that i was struggling and before you know it, there’s a response for me asking if i need help. it’s that kind of service that makes me choose them above other email clients and that’s the kind of care and attention that i want from all companies that i interact with.

rambling

i know that you’ll probably think that a lot of what i’ve rambled on about above only applies to web companies, after all, it’s mainly tech-savvy people that use sites like twitter etc. i’d agree with you, this isn’t mainstream practice for companies at the moment. but that in itself is a huge opportunity – it’s a chance to put yourself ahead of the rest and be really good at customer service when mass adoption does take place rather than playing catch-up.

don’t settle for being okay, go be damn fabulous and people will thank you for it.

i should set the preface that i’m just a normal girl, working in an industry that i love, doing a job that i’m passionate about. i have as much as the next person to learn, but hey i’ve got fire in my belly, so just roll with me on this one…

i spent this afternoon doing my favorite sunday pasttime, reading blogs. yes i know, i really should get out more, but to be frank, it was just damn cold today. anyway, back to my original point, i came across this site where it taught you in 7 convenient steps how to build a community:

Step 1: Develop a networking plan
Step 2: Select a networking “platform”
Step 3: Market to your users
Step 4: Training and technical support
Step 5: Set up and manage a public online information forum
Step 6: Use networks for collaboration and problem solving
Step 7: Creat the spirit of the community

this is the part where i go into a bit of a ramble, so you might want to make yourself comfortable. whilst it’s all good and well to advise on building communities in 7 lovely steps and they make sense, there’s SO much more to it than that.

i’m often asked which sites i choose to build communities - the answer to which is whatever sites your “people” use (for me personally i’d use every site i could - every pocket of community is important no matter the size). I could go ahead and list sites like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Digg etc, but in honesty, I believe that social strategies should be fluid and always changing.

let me put that statement in context for you. when the likes of Tara Hunt, Kathy Sierra and Gary Vaynerchuk do their fantastic work to show people that communities are the way forward for organisations, i agree. i agree that 2 years, 1 year or heck ever 6 months from now, we’ll see a ton more community manager roles out there and i sincerely believe that’s a positive shift.

but, here’s the thing - i don’t believe that companies or individuals should try and build communities because that’s the cool thing of the moment. do it because you care, because you want that interaction and because you’re genuinely passionate about what you do, the service that you provide or the products that you sell.

i expect that the last thing that you want to hear is me telling you that you can’t just hire anyone to fill that role, but it’s true. you can’t just hope to pay someone enough for them to become passionate about your brand. they have to be your biggest advocate - to love what you do and embrace each and every community member - no matter the size of your community.

when i started work at Carsonified, i was taken on as event manager because of my experience in that field. at that point if i’m honest, i would have made a terrible community manager (even though i had a background of marketing). i didn’t know that much about the web or online communities, but the MOST important factor of all is that i didn’t have the fire in my belly (there’s that fire again ).

within 6 months of doing the role, i had fallen truly and deeply in love with the industry and everyone within it and that’s when things finally clicked for me. i believe now, that i can build communities in any industry and i say that because i “genuinely” love bringing people together, empowering them to communicate and to create their identities. i’d like to think in return that people know that anything i associate myself with is genuine - i really care about what i do and i REALLY care about people.

you need to realise that you have to be able to “listen” as well as speak, there needs to be open dialogue and you won’t always get an ego stroke. the first thing that you should be doing is setting a google alert for your name or brand (including misspellings) and tweetscans. the reason that i say this is because it gives you a chance to reach out to people and put things right as soon as you hear they’ve not had the greatest experience - and trust me, that direct contact, showing that you care, will have a deeper and more meaningful connection than any “customer relations” you could do.

if people are interested, i can of course write a more detailed post about exact steps that i think are worth taking, but i leave you with my final thoughts. love what you do. do it from your heart. be open and transparent. collaborate. remember that every member is important. reach out to as many people as you can. care. be true to yourself.

ok, rant over, i’m off to have a nap - all this community stuff is exhausting. i’d love to hear your thoughts.

m
p.s it would of course be just wrong not to take this opportunity to thank everyone for taking 5 minutes out of their day to read my silly blog. i love you all. really
p.p.s there’s a spot prize for the first person to guess the amount of times i used “communities” in this post!