When someone is watching what you are doing it’s often more difficult to get a task done and in a way social media feels a bit like this. You know you should respond but when you know the world is watching you don’t know quite what to say, especially if it’s an unhappy customer, so you decide to ignore the post. This has happened a lot in the hotel industry where customers have boldly revealed all in places like Trip Advisor about their hotel stay and their reviews have largely gone without a response. In fact according to Revinate[1], only 4% of negative hotel reviews on Trip Advisor actually got a response. Whilst some hotel review sites allow hotels to respond, others currently do not, but this is likely to change.

 

When responding to social media reviews you need to take a hard look at your current processes and determine how social media is likely to change them. Speed of response is likely to be a big change followed by style. If you are accustomed to getting all customers to write in, you will want to make your posts more informal, as if you are writing an email. It’s best to first show some empathy and then advise the customer what you have put right.

 

When writing your social media guidelines for staff it’s best to give concrete examples of good and bad practice so people have something to work with. For example in the case of a bad review it’s best not to be defensive but to show empathy with the customer and explain what you have done to correct any issues raised. If it’s not apparent in the review it’s also best to check if they have already raised their issue with your guest relations team so that they have had an opportunity to put things right.

 

It’s not always easy to match customer posts with their real identity given that many customers use a screen name but you can use a site like Trip Advisor to check their profile and location and you can sign up as the owner or manager of the property so you can be advised of any posts relating to your property. You can also sign up to free alerts like Google Alerts to check what customers are saying about your brand online, although it will not pick up everything. You can also register for one of the many social media monitoring tools which will pick up more posts and tweets across the web and help you with the workflow and tracking and resolution of customer posts.

 

When you look at the huge growth of Trip Advisor with 58% growth over the last 12 months[2] you can see that the number of eyeballs influenced by the reviews has grown considerably. In fact I was astounded to read that already visits to social media sites have overtaken search engines, as of May 2010 according to Hitwise, so travel  players cannot ignore this trend. In addition consumers are now using more hotel related review terms than ever before so they are making a review site one of their first ports of calls when booking hotels.

---

We’ve just had an interesting client workshop and I thought the process might be of interest to other companies that are wrestling with where to begin when it comes to how to roll out social media channels.

 

A good place to start is to talk to those people in your company who are the first point of contact for customers and ask them for the top 10 pain points for their customers. Often this may be an information need that is not well served on your website or it might be something that is misleading or it may be customers are looking for an answer to a frequently asked question that has not been posted on your website. The next step is to brainstorm how to fix this customer issue using social media.

It could be that you have an opportunity to use Twitter as an extension to your call centre to offer more of a 24 hour concierge service and this has been used by BT, Dell and Hyatt to good effect. Alternatively it could be that you can post updates on Facebook on daily matters such as the weather, a new service or product launch or latest events or situations which may be of importance to your customers.

Some companies like Alton Towers have been using special offers and vouchers as a way of building their fan base to over 225,000 on Facebook and players like Disney have been posting interactive video tools which are then encouraging customers to share their Facebook profiles with Disney which then gives the company a deeper understanding of their fan base.

 

Social media is a fantastic channel for encouraging word of mouth marketing amongst those customers who enjoy your product and/or service. However it’s clear that they are unlikely to want to be spoon fed instructions as to how they should spread the word and it’s best not to be overly directive as to how they do this.

 

Measuring the impact of social media channels on your business is very important and is key to getting buy in from those controlling the budgets. For this reason having a benchmark against which to measure future performance is critical.

 

Key benchmarks and measurement of social media channels can be as follows:

 

 

I have been chasing a few clients for a decision over the past few months.  They appear not to be able to make up their minds about whether they want to go ahead with a social media project. My hunch is that they know that it will change everything and they cannot stop it but are somewhat reluctant to dive in and get on with it. I can rightly understand their hesitation. As I pore over the postings for the client I’m working with I realise that you have to respond in a special way that call centre staff are unaccustomed to. Most call centre managers shudder at the spelling skills of their teams and know that they are going to need significant training to handle the posts in the most sensitive way. In addition companies know that they cannot set their PR managers loose on social media or customers will be turned off straight away as customers don’t want to receive any broadcast messages but most importantly they want to be listened to. This is where social media guidelines and training are essential to ensure that the right response is given. I’ve seen too many interventions on sites like Trip Advisor that have damaged company brands.

 

I’ve had the opportunity to do quite a lot of reading and my conclusion so far is that customer postings highlight the unmet information needs that customers have. If they cannot find the information they need easily they can’t be bothered to trawl through website FAQs if they don’t have any search facility. They also don’t want to pay to get through to a call centre where they may not trust the call agent to give them an honest answer so they post a question on a customer review site. This means that you are not only dealing with the postings but are having to take a hard look at how you organise and disseminate your information.

 

The speed of response expected by customers is another challenge that social media throws at an organisation. Gone are the days when they have to use snail mail if they have a complaint and you’ll get back to them in 30 days. Companies cannot afford to ignore complaints as reputations can be damaged in a “tweet”. I was doing some research on what is the norm regarding response times to posts and although those companies that are using Twitter as a concierge type service aim to respond in real time, most companies are now looking at 1-4 hour response times. This is a huge shift from current promises and explains the current state of indecision about diving in to social media.

My conclusion is that companies have no choice and they have to start listening and setting up their processes to interact with customers via social networks. Time spent on social networking sites has increased from three hours a month to 5.5 hours in the last year, representing an 82% increase in the use of social media, according to a NielsenWire report.[1]

 If companies don’t get involved there are plenty of other players out there willing to have an online conversation with their customers.

 

   

---