Social Customer Care: Apps and Processes for Success

How does your business respond to customer concerns and inquiries?

Do you have a social customer care plan in place?

To explore how to improve customer care for your business, I interview Dan Gingiss.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode, I interview Dan Gingiss, author of Winning at Social Customer Care, head of global social media at McDonald's, and host of the Focus on Customer Service podcast.

Dan explores the most important qualities of social care representatives.

You'll discover tools to make providing social customer care easier.

Share your feedback, read the show notes, and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Social Customer Care
Why Social Customer Care Is Important

Offline experiences don't stay offline for long, Dan explains, particularly when they're bad. They get discussed online and things can get out of control. (Just watch the news!) Marketers need to care because they're the ones at the helm of social media handles.

Plus, whenever you do social media marketing (organic or paid, but especially paid), people ask customer service questions. When people see your brand in their feeds, they remember their questions or problems. Your marketing is their reminder.

More marketing leads to more people talking back. And that can be a good thing.

Listen to the show to discover what marketers should never say.

Who Should Do Social Customer Care

The ideal people for social customer service are those who are naturally empathetic, want to talk to customers and solve their problems, and can remain calm when an angry customer is yelling at them. You don't need to involve everyone, and the people who are involved should like talking to people.

These days, social customer care agents are doing work that blurs the line with community management. Which role deals with someone commenting on your really cool sponsorship with the NFL versus someone asking a question about your product or service versus a customer who is really angry because you screwed up? That line may not always be clear.

When the marketing department owned all of social media, they were okay with the first two. They loved talking about football and could answer questions. However, when they started getting complaints or complicated questions, they had to call customer service for backup. Customer service's job was to know about the products and services, how to fix things when they went wrong, and most importantly, how to talk to other people.

A social customer care agent could be a phone rep, an email rep, or a chat rep. Depending on the size of your organization, the social person may need to have phone skills as well as writing skills. In a large company, people in customer service may work only on the phone, chat, or social. But in a smaller business, one person might handle phone calls and Twitter.

However your organization divides up the work of customer service, Dan emphasizes that everyone involved should have the same customer service training. Customers should have a consistent experience, no matter which customer service channel they choose.

You've probably seen examples of people calling a company, talking to an agent, and not liking the answer. So they go to Twitter to get a different answer. The biggest mistake the company can make is to give a different answer on Twitter because then you teach everybody to just go to Twitter.

Listen to the show to hear Dan discuss what skills customer care agents might need in the near future.

Customer Support Bots

Although bots have a role in customer support, they still have a ways to go.

For instance, Dan tried using a bot to buy flowers and when he needed...