Forbes.com recently featured a discussion article with RightNow Technologies CEO Greg Gianforte about the tools that his company uses to transform customer service. What struck me most about this article was its holistic approach to customer service. In today’s day of marketing, businesses need to look at the full picture of their customer interactions, and how their customer perceptions develop.
With customers today communicating their experiences on twitter and facebook seconds just after they interact with a company, companies don’t always realize what their customers are saying about them. RightNow Technolgies noticed that the solutions to impored customer service cannot stem from one dimension, as talks about the high expectations of customers calling into a business’s call center. The performance of the call center agents and customer accessibility to multiple forms of interaction (email, phone, etc.) may be the first step. But businesses must also realize who they are talking to, and what customers are saying about the company’s products, services, and CRM.
RightNow Technologies uses a new cloud monitor capability to allow companies to ”actually put a listening ear out in the primary networks and connect it with the workflow back to their business, even to the point of measuring how angry someone who’s sending a tweet might be.”
Through a full statistical natural language analysis, RightNow detects emotional content of tweets, facebook updates, blog posts and chat room comments as positive or negative with a 75% success rate. That’s pretty good, considering that the organization can then take that information and react through the appropriate channels.
As I discussed in the previous post “Phone Marketing in Between the Frames: A Lesson From Seth Godin,” marketing is not just about providing customers with a great product or service. To quote Godin’s great examples,
“It’s not marketing when everything goes right on the flight to Chicago. It’s marketing when your people don’t respond after losing the guitar that got checked.
It’s not marketing when I use your product as intended. It’s marketing when my friend and I are talking about how the thing we bought from you changed us.”
Ginaforte actually used the same guitar example in his post “Good from Bad” on his Customer Service Blog last week. As a lasting message in marketing, I’ll share this nice quote from his post,
Every organization occasionally misses customer expectations; however, rapid, sincere intervention often results in higher customer loyalty than if the problem had never occurred in the first place. So when things go wrong, we are really being presented with opportunities to build customer loyalty.
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- Social Media Beyond Discounts
- The Limits of Social Media in Marketing
- How to Social Network with Social Media
- 3 Social Media Success Stories
- Super Bowl, Social Media
