In a couple of weeks time I’m going to an industry conference where I’ll be standing in front of a room of fellow professionals and talking about social media models and the different ways they can be used to create, disseminate, and collect information. Unfortunately last night instead of diligently researching and preparing my presentation I was at the cinema watching Some Like It Hot (yes, the Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, and Jack Lemmon movie). I mention this only as a means to highlight the fact that I am far from being an expert when it comes to how best to use social media.
That said, as we are hurtling forwards with our plans to unleash Ciboodle Crowd within our own developer community website, I guess it’s safe to say that I’m not a beginner either. Hey, if nothing else it’ll give me something to talk about when I’m at the conference.
The crossover of information as part of the customer experience remains an interesting one and with social media driving more and more informal interactions between customers, it’s becoming more prevalent in both my profession (Technical Communications) and the wider Customer Relationship Management industry.
If you provide better information to your customers, does it reduce the number of times they need to call the customer service call centre? Do you have a central place for all of your product or service related information that your customers can search? Is there a way for customers to interact with each other, answering each other’s own questions that you can provide? Is the information you are providing useful?
Research shows that most people are both happy to try to find their own answers to issues, and value the sense of accomplishment that comes with sorting it out themselves. By helping customers achieve that, you build goodwill into your customer experience, regardless of the type and depth of interaction. A customer will be happier with a solution found after a quick search of your website, than with a solution provided at the end of a phone call. It’s a sliding scale: the more opportunities and routes you can provide up front, the more chance your customers have of being successful and the higher the amount of goodwill you will earn.
The roles of both technical communications as an industry, and the aims of Sword Ciboodle as a company, align well. We both want to empower the customer, provide as many routes to answers as possible, and give customers the ability to solve their own issues as quickly and painlessly as possible.
Right, I’m off to try and figure out how I can work some Marilyn Monroe quotes into my conference presentation…