Your key message is useless to me. Your brand values and campaign video add up to nothing when I call to say I need you and your reply is:
‘Your message is very important to us, but all our operators are busy at the time’. Please listen to some free crappy music we downloaded online while you wait for an outsourced operator who has no idea of how to solve your problem.
‘We are a very innovative company, we are thought leaders in our market. Digital is our middle name.’ But it takes us 4 days to answer a request and our Facebook chatbot is actually an automated response to say our customer support is only available during office hours.
I think you got the idea. In B2C brand is useless without customer support backing all the claims creative geniuses and marketing execs flaunt in flashy decks or even wonderfully colored ads on TV or YouTube, on Instagram or Snap.
In a me-too market, customer relationships are more important than ever. Trust was, is and will be gold.
Start by caring about our problems (us, your customers). One fuck-up over the *800 number and you can lose rapport you built over years and years and billed monthly.
You relationship with your client might become the only thing that sets you apart from the herd of existing competitors or up-and-coming wannabes of the industry. Technology? Most likely they got it, too. Design? Please, don’t tell me you’re aiming just for the trendsetters, your shareholders will most likely not want to hear that. Good deals? In this market almost anyone can find cheaper ways to produce, transport or distribute your product. Approachable tone of voice? Might catch our eye, but unless you deliver on your word everything becomes pointless.
Yes, digitization made us, customers, picky. We won’t take lies and we won’t give you (more) time. With so many alternatives, why should we?
Why would we be loyal to you if that is not rewarded? Get back to trust and building relationships/rapport with us, it’s a two-way street. If you lost our trust, you may never get us back. With dozens of other choices at a click away, why should we?
The only thing we really care about is OUR PROBLEM. Can you fix it? Great! Can you do it fast? Awesome, we might renew my subscription. No? We’re already clicking alt-tab and asking friends who they recommend in chat conversations you cannot even track/react to.
Stop counting reach of your branded communication every minute of the day and maybe also think about the reach of negative reviews/comments online.
If you subtract the latter from the first, what’s left? Look at sentiment scores when you assess impact of your brand’s marketing/communication.
Because your campaigns, messages are not the only source of information consumers are influenced by, they do not live in a bubble full of colorful branded promises. Omnichannel. It’s now a marketing buzz word and for good reason. Your customer support should be a cornerstone in your marketing strategy, not just a separate department on another floor/in another city/continent you never talk to. Or talk about.
Omnichannel. Say it again and think about how many channels one dissatisfied customer can use to complain about your services: friends and family (the marketing word you’re looking for is buzz marketing), reviews on retailers sites, social media, blogs, comments, in-store.
Yes, in store, too, they will get back at/to you! Just yesterday one very calm lady was proudly telling us with how much resentment and spite she went back to return a pair of shoes just because they arrived too late (only 3 days later than promised!) and customer support was awful. And with how much determination she made sure every person in that store found out about her story so that they themselves would not trust the brand. She concluded: I wanted them all to know that they did not take care of MY problem!
This article also comes from a place of resentment. I, too, just concluded a 12 year old relationship with a brand over very poor customer support. And I will one day write once more on this issue with what I learned, on how digital can improve the entire process.
For now, I will end with a call-out to all marketers out there: go back to your call center teams, your social care experts, to your product owners and even you board of directors and speak about this. Demand, lobby for the best customer support out there before it kills your brand.
Because it most probably will. A slow, but painful death however engaging/amazing/supercalifragillistic your next GIF campaign might be.
Facebook chat-bots are the new trend in Facebook marketing: for more than a year now players across all industries have invested in their development and promotion. recently Twitter launched a new bot system for support. How does this affect the future of online copywriters and Social Media Community Managers?
Well, for starters I expect all of us, digital marketers, will have to stop pretending our jobs are not subject to automation. Yes, our functions are pretty new on the market — my job title did not even exist 3–4 years ago! — but this is only the beginning of how digitalization is transforming products and services and their communication strategies, respectively. Will chat-bots end up replacing Community Managers? Will copywriters have to focus on getting just the right tone of voice for particular bots? These are all relevant questions. I do not claim to have answers, but I am optimistic when sketching out scenarios on how we could use them to make our jobs easier and more rewarding.
Working with chat-bots and other robots might seem like a scene from the Jetsons, but it’s here. Get ready to meet your new colleagues.
Community Managers Out There, Turn Your Know-how Into Content Marketing
Content was proclaimed king years and years ago, but then a king seldom thinks about his subjects. He rarely thinks of how to administer the kingdom, reply to complaints and grow the entire community. When we think of kings we picture some narcissistic, egocentric, golden-clad Louis in a big throne. Up until now, a lot of brands and services mostly identified content with that: fun pieces of visuals/videos/viral content(!) that engaged users in a relevant manner. I stressed out engaged users because the focus was in every user in the target. Any user. A true Community Manager will come in and want to address the customer — existing and potential. His knowledge of the customer journey, of the real issues customers face while interacting with both the product and the services the company provides are invaluable to a content marketing team.
Community Managers out there will need to step out of their comfort zone and learn a little bit more web analytics, a little bit more on content writing, a little bit more about new technologies and all, yes, about how bots actually work. And they will need to not only be able to brief development teams on how to actually program these bots, monitor them and use all the data/insight they can get out of these bots to instruct teams across all business functions, from marketing teams to traditional customer support teams and product managers.
Copywriters, Unite! We Need You To Make Our Bots Conversational
Chatbots need to…well, chat. And we need to give them the words for that. Copywriters, please step in! You’ll be responsible with providing the conversation scripts. Now turn your creativity into actionable dialogue, but beware, you’ll need to work with Community Managers, customer support, dev teams. And you’ll also need to learn a little bit of what they do and diversify your skills toolkit: how does the bot work? what are the customer concerns? You’ll have o switch from Key Message to Key Problem to Solve. And think about creative uses of bots to speak about your clients identity — how about a bot that teaches you about solar energy for Tesla? How would he talk, what kind of content would he deliver? Or a bot for Discovery Channel that helps children study geography/geology? Or a bot in charge with CV filtering for big players in the recruiting businesses? The startup I work with — Small Academy — has already built its own chatbot with the help of 40 children aged 7–14 year old that attend their courses.
Evolve Or Perish
Ijust talked of chat-bots. But the Internet of Things is upon us. So is VR, AI and other two letters acronyms that already transformed the present. In 5 years time my job might not be spelled out Social Media Analyst, but Social Customer Support Tech Marketer. Your job might be performed by a bot. How about we both learn how to make these new technologies work in our favor and make our professional lives more interesting/challenging?
What do you think? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section below, I’d love to hear what you think about this.
Most of what I was taught in high-school is lost on me (and the majority of Romanian adults older than 24–25). Because some of the math we did looks something like this:
Formula for integral (I knew this by heart, but understood nothing of it)
and some of the coding we learned had this interface (yes, I liked programming far better than Maths!):
Code that brought some algorithms to life
Do You See The Double Trouble Here?
With maths you learned different formulas by heart, with no real connection to their meaning and actual use in real life. In the best case scenario you did get the reasoning behind the formulas, but the sheer repetition of applying them over and over again made you a robot, a slave to endless tests in school that only asked you to apply the right formula. Get it wrong and lose all points.
Programming was a different world. It made sense back then. It was made of small little pieces of algorithms you needed to create just the right jigsaw puzzle. But it was still so disconnected from the real world. You wrote the algorithms and then the code on a piece of paper or a chalkboard. If you were lucky you got to compile and then run the code on a real PC. But that was about it. Code did not turn into reality, you could not touch the result.
We Were The Generation That Had Google And Facebook At Their Fingertips.
We were used to looking up the answers and collaborating online, we loved chatting and the feeling of discovery and empowerment the Internet brought us. We loved the speed, were addicted to it, its victims, we did not have the patience to memorize formulas we could look up online or code that did not turn into a living organism that could join the online network. School failed to keep up. Teachers were immune to us learning history from Wikipedia and YouTube, they resented our results driven approach to school projects, couldn’t understand our need for speed and our easy use of the humongous memory the Internet provided: there were so many fast interactive resources online that the ones in the classroom seemed obsolete.
They could have joined us. They could have used it to their advantage, used it to explain the reason and the beauty behind those disciplines, they could have engaged us in stories of how the integral came to exist and get us to use coding to tell our own stories. They did not. So we forgot the formulas and ignored unfruitful code.
Last week while working on a blog post I discovered Scratch (yes, I know, I am so late for this one!) and imagined using it in the classroom. Oh, the fun we would have had! Days later I learned about Kano-kit and how educators around the world use it to teach kids how hardware works – get this: you get to assemble your own PC! How about that instead of copying the lesson from a school book?
This is why I joined the Small Academy team here in Romania, a start-up that aims to do just that: get Romanian kids to befriend technology and gadgets and use them to learn about real life. And to prepare for real life jobs where there is no formula to passthe test, just questions that need resourceful minds.
You can read more about small.academy and drop us a line at hello@small.academy if you have any questions.
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