Customer Service goes social

It always makes for interesting observation when my 18 year old cousin visits. It’s almost as if her iPod touch is surgically attached to her body. She’s in a constant state of giggles over something somebody has ‘liked’ on Facebook or a status update that looks more like alien lingo to me.

“Do you ever use email?” I ask (trying my best to sound like this is casual conversation and not research into channels of customer contact). “Of course not!” comes the curt answer, followed by, “Why do you need email when you have Facebook?”

This short exchange of words got me thinking about how we as customers have changed in a world that is now interconnected via instant messaging, forums and status updates. Where once we only shared with those we knew, we’re now quite happy to do so with people we wouldn’t normally connect with in an offline world.

Personally, I think it’s a tough challenge for any big brand to have a personal, one-to-one relationship with their customers and yet, interestingly, social media has changed that. When we found that social media offered us the opportunity to listen and directly respond (one-to-one) to our customers, we set up our social media service team BTCare.

As a family brand we knew that our customers cover a wide demographic so our strategy had to cater to all needs. “You have to deal with your customers in the way they want to be dealt with,” a customer recently told me, and I agree. We live in a time poor world. So while some people still want to speak to us via traditional methods such as email and phone, others use social media to talk about their experiences.

Often our customers were frustrated with the difficulty in contacting us so we recently changed our BT.com contact us page to make it easier. At other times, they couldn’t find someone to own their problem so, within our social (BTCare) team, we ensured we didn’t fob them off somewhere else. We set up shop in external forums like Moneysaving Expert, Think Broadband, Digital Spy, Twitter and more recently on Facebook – proactively picking up queries and resolving them. We began to use Twitter to keep our customers informed when we had major service outages, a bit like the service status page – and the feedback was that customers really appreciated this.

But our key learning was that social media gave customers something brands didn’t… control of the conversation. We had to question why our customers were driven to vent their frustration on external channels. The answer was staring us in the face. So we launched our BTCare community forums for customers to connect with, and help each other. In the last two years, we have gained over 35,000 registered users and an engaged community with over 600,000 user sessions per week and counting!

Our customers recently voted BTCare to be in the top 100 social brands. But much more important than awards is that we have happier customers. As well as insight to keep improving to give our customers what they all want – better service.