Social Customer Service: How to Care for Customers With Social Media

Does your business have a social customer service plan?

Want to step up your customer service on social media?

To discover how to improve your social customer care, 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, former head of digital customer experience for Discover Card, co-host of the Focus on Customer Service podcast and head of digital marketing for Humana.

Dan will explore how to better serve your customers with social media.

You'll discover what your business needs to respond to on social media.

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 Service
Dan's story

Dan, who has been in marketing or product development most of his career, says he has always been in a service business in some way.

Dan talks about the impact of his first job out of school. He was a marketer at a direct-response company that sold high-end collectibles. One year around Christmas, he got a phone call that should have gone to customer service. A woman was upset because a gift she ordered for Christmas had not yet arrived. Dan shares how he made sure Christmas wasn't going to be ruined on his watch.

Dan says taking an extra moment to think about something from the customer's point of view usually will make you a much better marketer. He talks about his roles at Discover and winning the JD Power Award for best customer experience, taking it away from AmEx.

Listen to the show to hear how Dan got started in social media.

How customer service fits into social media marketing

Studies from Gartner say that as soon as next year, more than 85% of companies will have to compete on customer experience. It's getting too expensive for industries to compete on price, so they need to differentiate themselves by customer experience.

Dan says when you interact with customers on a one-to-one basis on social media, it makes them more loyal. Loyal customers spend more with you, stay with you longer and tell their friends about you.

All of these elements result in improved KPIs (key performance indicators), which is what marketers care about.

Forrester's Customer Service Index is a pretty good indicator of how well large companies are doing, Dan explains. Over the course of many years, Forrester looked at the stock prices of the top- and bottom-performing public companies. The top-performing companies do well in customer experience, while the poor performers in customer experience are at the bottom. There’s a direct link between customer experience and profitability.

Dan shares what happened at Discover when they looked at engagement rates on customer service responses (what happened after they responded to a customer and resolved his or her issue).

Listen to the show to discover the biggest challenge of one-to-one marketing.

Businesses doing customer service well

On Dan's podcast they interview large brands such as Whole Foods, Jet Blue, Chipotle and Hertz, as well as lesser-known companies like Telstra.

Telstra is the largest telecom company in Australia. Unlike most of the telecoms in the United States, they've decided to differentiate based on service. They've managed to connect all of their systems, including social, into a single CRM, so any customers contacting them on any channel can have the same agent help them, as long as that agent is working.

Another recent podcast interview was with Scotty's Brewhouse, an upscale sports bar that has 13 locations in Indiana. Dan shares what business Scott Wise, the founder, president and CEO of Scotty's,