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Necessary Steps to Avoid a Social Media War on Your Organization

by Carmit DiAndrea, Vice President Research and Client Service, Customer Relationship Metrics - March 25, 2013

Necessary Steps to Avoid a Social Media War on Your Organization
by Carmit DiAndrea, Vice President Research and Client Service, Customer Relationship Metrics 

The old saying is true, “Good news travels fast, bad news travels faster.” When it comes to your customers, tales of a bad experience spread like wildfire. You better believe that an unhappy customer is telling everyone they know about their ordeal. Family, friends, colleagues at work, strangers in line at the grocery store, anyone who will listen will hear their tale of the terrible customer service experience they had with your organization.

To add more fuel to the fire, within minutes, the incident is posted on their Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter for all the world to see. Who knows? Maybe they become one of the millions who create groups to spread the evil word about your company. Essentially, this customer has declared war on your company and your brand, destroying all that you have worked hard to build. Sound a bit dramatic? It’s not. We’ve seen this time and time again.

Let’s look at new customers first. Your very first interaction with a new customer is a vital point in a budding relationship. A great first impression helps build a halo effect, where the positive experience with the contact center “bleeds over” to create a positive impression of the entire organization. The same can be said with existing customers. Existing customers stay loyal because of the nurtured, good customer experiences they’ve had thus far each and every time they’ve engaged with your contact center. For either of the two, one bad experience with any of your agents could sour the relationship and potential relationship, forever.

So, what’s a major factor in long-term customer retention? Consistency. Consistency is key in creating advocacy. How can you ensure you are being consistent with your service? Here are some steps that will increase your customer’s satisfaction, advocacy, and ultimately, your company’s bottom-line:

Step 1: Train consistently. New-hire training is your company’s first opportunity to communicate to your new employees the company’s vision for its future and how their job fits within this vision. Explaining to new employees how their performance will be assessed is a key first step in aligning company vision to individual priorities. Educating each new employee in the same manner on company policies, products, services, and how to use the resources available to them to reach and exceed expectations will ultimately determine whether customers experience consistency across their interactions with you.

Step 2: Set consistent expectations for performance. The contact center is among the most measured segment of any organization. We collect dozens if not hundreds of metrics about every contact center agent; measures of efficiency, compliance, quality, customer experience, etc. With all of those metrics, it is all too simple to send contact center agents a mixed message about what is important and what is a top priority. If your company’s aim is to satisfy and delight your customers, the performance expectations you communicate to your contact center agents must perfectly align with this focus.

In all stages of the customer lifecycle, new and budding or existing and nurtured, you want to ensure you are delighting your customers each time they contact your organization. In today’s social and economic environment, it’s vital to make peace, not war. Consider consistency, your peace agreement.

Carmit DiAndrea
Vice President Research and Client Service
Customer Relationship Metrics
Ph: (402) 334-4822
Carmit.diandrea@metrics.net

About the Author: Prior to joining CRM, Carmit served as the Vice President of Behavior Analytics at TPG Telemanagement, a leading provider of quality management services for Fortune 500 companies. While at TPG she assisted clients in measuring behaviors, and provided management services to assist in affecting change based on newly created intelligence. Specifically, she established the behavior analytics department for the organization and helped position TPG as an industry leader in internal call monitoring analytics.

Carmit has more than 12 years of experience in the call center industry. She has a Bachelor of Arts with a concentration in Statistics from Villanova University. She also has received an MBA from the University of Phoenix. Additionally, she is completing her Six Sigma Black Belt certification from the American Society for Quality (ASQ). She also is an Adjunct Professor of Statistics and Quantitative Methods at Kaplan University.

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