Written by Alex Dayon
You don’t need to be a user of social media to know that it’s changed business as we knew it. Companies point customers to their Facebook page. Twitter has become mission control for customer complaints and praise as well as a place to cultivate brands. And engaging with customers has become an entirely different proposition from what it was even five years ago.
That’s because social media has blurred the lines between sales, service and marketing. Consider, for example, the following tweet: “Thinking about adding 10 more tablets for sales team. What’s the best way to share real-time data?” That one tweet could go to sales to follow up a lead, to service for tech support or to marketing to offer incentives and reinforce branding. How does a company effectively handle this overlap? The answer has ramifications that affect customer-facing operations throughout a company: requiring a different blend of skills, greater levels of employee empowerment and shifting organizational structures as enterprises go social.
KLM Royal Dutch Airlines CEO Peter Hartman confronted this challenge in April 2010, when a volcanic ash cloud from Iceland drifted across western Europe. The ash grounded flights for six days, and triggered a deluge of tweets and Facebook posts from stranded travelers asking for help. Like many companies, KLM had dabbled in social media, but hundreds of increasingly frustrated posts from stranded customers tested the company’s nascent social strategy.
Shortly after the ash cloud, Hartman declared social media the center of KLM’s customer service efforts, with the goal of cutting resolution time to one day at the most. Posts on social channels, such as Twitter and Facebook, would be responded to within one hour. Hartman told his social team to do what it thought necessary to resolve complaints.
In the year since the biggest disruption to European air traffic since World War II, KLM has defined new job roles, reorganized its marketing and service functions to support social media and launched a Social Media Hub to handle all incoming requests. The hub brings employees from across the company together, including e-commerce, customer care, in-flight services, IT and marketing. KLM places new emphasis on employees who can react quickly, solve problems independently, and know how to service customers – and do it in a way that plays well in a world where people instantly and publicly update complaints and praise.
When real-time technology demands real-time answers, old-style hierarchies no longer work. Customers want immediate results, and they waste zero time tweeting or posting their frustrations. And that means bureaucratic-fueled delays can hurt your brand and can cut into your company’s top line. In his book The 4-Hour Workweek, Timothy Ferriss described how he authorized customer support workers for his nutritional supplement company to do whatever it took to keep customers happy, as long as it cost no more than $100. The result? Quicker decisions, happier customers – and stronger customer loyalty.
And loyal customers are return customers. Dell is breaking down walls – literally – to get its key customer-facing employees working together over social media and ensure that customers stay loyal to the Dell brand.
The company filters conversations pouring into its new Social Media Listening Command Center to determine the nature of each comment, tweet, or post. The dedicated Social Outreach Services team, working next to the command center, then does what it needs to do to keep customers happy.
So far, Dell’s social media training has reached more than 13,000 attendees from all business units and functions within the company. Now, Dell’s product managers can speak directly with customers, learning their needs and wants. In turn, those customers become advocates for the brand, helping to spread the network and engaging even more customers. The efforts are paying off. Dell was recently declared the No. 1 social brand according to Headstream and became the No. 1 global brand on Renren.
KLM’s and Dell’s experiences illustrate the shift that has turned the traditional notion of sales, service and marketing on its head. To be successful, a company must transform itself into a more social organization that can nurture and defend its brands at the speed of Twitter. The days of separate silos are numbered. Today your sales, service, and marketing departments need to be #onthesamepage.
Alex Dayon is the executive VP of CRM at Salesforce.com.
