What is holding you back in creating your Web care activities into a money machine? You have the latest tools, you have a team, however still you are not living up to your expectations or even worse: to the expectations of the people who give you the budget for your work. Small changes can make a big difference in improving your Web care activities. Here are seven ways you can improve your existing Web care and make a bigger impact on your business.
1. You have a Web care team
Creating a team might sounds like that you are taking Web care really seriously, at least more seriously than the organisations who use interns for their social media efforts. However did you create a fax team 20 years ago, or a paper time before that? Probably not. You should not isolate your efforts in a team or in a department, you should add this skills to the skill set of people who are already doing similar work on other channels.
2. You have a reactive approach
If you have to respond to a complaint, you are too late. Your customer already had a poor experience and with Social Media they already have shared with their friends and basically with the world. Even though the reactive approach is the easiest one to adopt, since you type in a few key words to monitor the Web and wait, it is also the most deadly. It is like watching your car crashing into a wall and pushing the brakes instead of trying to avoid the wall in the first place. Use the content that people are sharing on social media as your strategic advantage you can find issues before they become real problems, which means that you reach out to your customers before they experience the problem and solve it on time and prevent it next time.
3. On Social Media you are more willing to go the extra mile
Similar customer interaction different rules. Phrased this way it might sound weird, however this is what most organisation do on Social Media: complaining on social media will get your problems to be solved faster and your refunds will be likely bigger than if you tried the traditional route. Customers talk with each other and they know if they can get more on one channel they will demand more everywhere, not just on the channel you are differentiating on. Leaving you robbed blind by your own fault. And if you don’t want to give more on other channels you already can predict what the next deluge of complaints will be…
4. You are the channel switcher
Not every issue can be handled and solved via social media, however why do organisation ask their customers to take the effort to make the switch. Too often you’ll see an organisation ask a customer to call a certain phone number for further help. To reiterate this: your customer has a question or a complaint doesn’t throw away your product in anger and decides to go out on social media and ask you a question. Instead you are asking your customer to even invest more time and effort by asking him to go to yet another channel with his question.
5. Sample size is n=1
Klout, the standard on influence. It couldn’t get any worse than that if you assume that tagline is actually the truth. The worst decisions you make while doing Web care are probably based on a lack of data. Whether it is by prioritising customers on Klout score, or by ignoring people with less than 100 followers on Twitter. It is never about these numbers, it is about the context, whether it is followers, Klout scores or problem statements, you need the context to know what you should do with it and how fast you should act on it. It might be obvious that a security exploit reported by a information technology student could be rather urgent, however if you filter him out based on his Klout score you might leave your business exposed by ignoring something really important.
6. Web care is a goal on itself
We are handling X messages per hour/day/week/unit of time. To be honest: nobody cares. Web care is no goal on itself, the goal that Web care should have to make sure there is as little Web care necessary as possible. Since the less complaints you have to solve the most likely it is that your product is rather good. Web care is (just like most service activities to solve issues) wasteful, it shouldn’t have happened in the first place and you should make sure there is a feedback loop that ensures that the issue won’t occur in the future. Not having Web care on the other hand could be something you want to do in the end, however not as a goal on itself, but as a byproduct of having a big amount of loyal customers doing Web care for you.
7. You listen to your customers
The worst thing you could do is to just listen to your customers and act upon their demands. It is not bad to listen to your customers in general, however if they dictate what you are doing, you will find yourself in limbo. You should be flexible on the details, however stubborn on vision. You don’t have to be the popular kid in the class, though you can allow yourself to give in on certain items. However as soon you as you treat customer as king and let him give orders to you, you are nothing more than just a peon on the road to bankruptcy.
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