• Shawn McPike (@shawnmcpike) with AT&T
• Kevin Cole (@BofA_help) with Bank of America
• Sean Doherty (@srdoherty) with Sprint
• Diana Plazas (@dianap) with Doubletree Hotels

Moderator: Bert Dumars (@Bwdumars) with Newell Rubbermaid

From the program:

It is becoming more and more common for brands to turn to platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and online forums not as a marketing opportunity first, but as a service opportunity. Each company faces specific scale, platform, and response challenges with this task. Join us as these service brands share their successes and challenges in turning to social networking platforms to augment their customer service efforts.

The following is in Q&A form. I’ve paraphrased a little, making full sentences out of my notes.

Examples of customer service through social media:

 Doubletree: gives hot chocolate chip cookies at check-in. Fire alarm, guy was tweeting how bad it was. Said it a plate of cookies would make it better. They gave him some. He checks in at Doubletree hotels every time now, after 15 years of staying away from Hilton hotels.

 Bank of America: guy’s credit card compromised for 2^nd time in a month. Wanted to see if there was anything else that could be done. B of A employee saw his tweet complaint. Employee spent some time with him. Guy blogged and tweeted about his experience. Changed his mind from closing his account. Treat customers like people. Great customer service through connecting with individual. Put customer at ease. Just listening and reaching out to people is important.

 Sprint: Customers that change from mad to happy can be better advocates than customers that never had a problem at all. Lady tweeted about her phone problems, asked Sprint to help out. Sprint contacted her, set up an appt with her store to get it fixed. She now tweets about how great their customer service is. Says she loves them and will stick with them forever.

People want to know that the company they do business with is engaged with them. It’s not just about taking care of problems.

Customer services & social media – what’s changed?

AT&T: We are customer service people first and foremost. In all ways : in person, social media, over phone. The way you engage with customer is no different. Our main goal is to make the customer happy.

Bank of America: If you don’t satisfy a customer they’ll tell their friends. There’s so much information; we can take what we see (feedback) and take it back to business. There is a fundamental difference in the way people respond to tweet (with picture of the person tweeting) than just text. Social media changes how transparent we can be both with customers and with ourselves.

How do you measure?

Sprint: We pay attention to the percentage of care cases started through social media.

Bank of America: We take into account positive tweets, then see how many followers they have. The potential reach. (brand marketing value) We also look at retention rates for customers that we service. Social media offers a higher touch interaction. A lot of customers interacting in social media are more tech savvy. Do more electronic and automated options. It’s easy to lose connection with them. The process is all about the evolution with how you provide that personal contact in social media forms. You want to retain these customers because they’ll be using all of those channels.

Doubletree: We pay attention to people checking in on location-based platforms, and the people coming back into our hotel doors.

AT&T: Social media has the most opportunities. These are the first channels where you’re notified of an outage or problem with website. It can affect more customer than the poster, and millions of dollars for the business.

 How did you convince management?

Bank of America: We had great support from the get-go through some of our executives. The best approach we found was to not talk about it, but to pull up page. They asked, “What if they say something bad about us?” We said, “That’s why we want to do this.” Of course, there are also concerns around privacy and security, so when we reach a level of more than just diagnosing a problem, we move toward secure conversations (i.e. DMs and then taking it offline. We also have to look for imposters; anyone acting like they’re us. We find them in minutes, and shut down any imposters immediately.

Sprint: Showing the page is a great approach. Saying, “These are all the people talking about us and asking for assistance. Shouldn’t we be a part of this? Out there helping?” Also, show significant volume. We have the need to put people on this full time.