The Social Media Manifesto for Customer Success

By altering a single phrase from “assist” to “success” – you’ll be able to change the operational mindset of your organization and the way you work together along with your clients. Relatively than being a reactive mechanism that merely absorbs frustration, you’ll be able to design a tradition of proactive enablement predicated on creating methods in your clients to attain success.

By empowering your crew with the social media instruments, engagement methods, content material manufacturing practices, and (critically) the permission to personal, and supply, genuine experiences – you’ll flip clients into profitable clients – which in flip creates extra advocates in your model.

The Social Media Manifesto for Buyer Success is a framework of easy concepts designed to create your individual success story from the collective wins of your clients – by leveraging the facility, immediacy and transparency afforded by social media communication channels.

Every “rule” within the manifesto gives recommendation or methods to transition from assist to success…

1. Buyer success is a philosophical strategy to shopper engagement with the only real intent of aiding your clients to attain success along with your services or products.
2. Social media enter channels can be utilized as listening posts for buyer dialog to extend response occasions to each constructive and adverse discussions. That is particularly crucial on the subject of main points. You need to all the time be the primary to know when one thing breaks.
   • Twitter Search Tabs: Open a tabs in your browser, load Twitter and seek for your model identify (e.g. “unbounce” vs “@unbounce”) – folks speak about you on Twitter with out understanding or wanting to make use of Twitter conventions. Do that for you, your rivals and associated phrases. Now you will have a reside stream of suggestions to interact with the second it occurs – you’ll see the variety of tweets showing within the tab title in parenthesis (x). The instance beneath exhibits a seek for the time period “twitter” and the ensuing depend of present outcomes which updates reside – alerting to the extent of dialog occurring.
     

     Information: Twitter has now applied a drop-down menu which helps you to select from [Top/All/With Links]. Sadly it defaults to “Prime” which is tremendous lame. For a real realtime search you might want to use “All”. It’s annoying to manually do that each time you wish to arrange your Twitter Search Tab – so to get round this it is best to create a URL string like this: http://twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/unbounce and exchange the phrase “unbounce” along with your search time period. Slap it into your bookmarks or toolbar and you may get real-time search outcomes immediately. Hooray!

   • Google Alerts: Equally, arrange Google Alerts on necessary branded, aggressive and associated phrases to obtain alerts once you get written or talked about. TIP: when establishing the alert – select the “as-it-happens” choice.
     
3. Vital standing updates may be facilitated by way of social media channels when your major services or products channels fail (e.g. downtime). Twitter is changing into the De facto place that individuals flip to when your website is down. Make certain there’s a message there ready for them.
4. Encouraging all staff to create a Twitter presence extends your attain. It additionally provides you a wider spectrum of time protection – totally different folks/roles have totally different hours and totally different workaholic (all the time on-line) tendencies.
5. Jeckyll & Hyde bipolar profiles: It’s okay to point out your human facet – because it pertains to your organization model. Have work and non work components to your profile to set expectations.

   On this instance (from my profile) you’ll be able to see how I cut up the 2 (work and UNwork):

   

6. Firm representatives ought to transparently determine themselves by way of the usage of profile descriptors (this can be a Twitter instance):
   • Avatars: Twitter avatars can embody each a photograph and a brand
   • Deal with: Should you’re establishing a contemporary account for firm use you’ll be able to embody the model identify in your deal with e.g. Unbounce_Oli. That method, once you enter a dialog you received’t seem misplaced.
   • URL: Twitter lets you present a URL in your profile. Add the corporate web site right here, or in case you are utilizing the bipolar strategy not less than embody an @YourCompany reference in your Twitter description (it will likely be became a hyperlink to your predominant firm Twitter account).
   • Description: Set expectations for what you’re going to be tweeting about and embody a couple of key phrases so that you may be discovered through Twitter search.
   • Branded background design: Design a singular background with a sidebar that gives easy bullet level particulars of why your organization is particular.
7. Your final conversion objective is a contented and profitable buyer: This implies sustaining contact after preliminary signup. Once you create helpful content material, share it in your community (GetSatisfaction and different boards, Fb, Twitter). Every time a buyer finds one thing helpful that helps them, you’ve achieved a micro-retention-conversion.
8. Expose your e-mail freely: When participating with clients on Twitter – don’t be afraid of sharing your e-mail. It exhibits openness and transparency and allows you to have a dialog that may in any other case be clumsy cramped into 140 characters.
   
9. Arrange your Twitter account to e-mail you Direct Messages: Many individuals flip this off to keep away from spam, then endure from the inevitable month-late reply syndrome.
10. Depart a breadcrumb path to success: Public engagement creates content material and can assist multiple buyer at a time.
11. Create content material at each level of buyer ache: Over time you’ll spot patterns the place persons are hitting frequent roadblocks. Create and expose helpful content material that addresses these ache factors and make it straightforward to search out. It will end in a gradual lower in assist requests and better ranges of buyer success.
12. Activate reside chat: Use a software like Olark in your web site to offer an additional dialog mechanism (some folks dislike e-mail as they don’t know once they’ll get a reply, whereas others aren’t comfy on the cellphone). A facet profit is the related consolation simply understanding that somebody is there if wanted. TIP: Put it inside your app (when you have a web-based produce or service) – so you’ll be able to assist folks as they encounter usability issues. Most individuals solely use it as a pre-conversion software on their web site.
13. Acquire reward and constructive experiences to make use of as social proof and testimonials. This publish about Twitter testimonials by Social Media Examiner is a superb step-by-step information.
14. Have a good time and showcase your buyer’s successes by way of your community (all the time with permission).

What number of of this stuff are you at present utilizing to assist your clients obtain success?

Obtained any concepts I omitted? Add them to the feedback and in the event that they’re good I’ll add them to the manifesto.

– Oli Gardner