How to use social media to understand and engage your customers

With the role of chief marketing officer evolving, companies can use social media to mobilise customer engagement.

   

 

In the era of the always-on customer, social media is a primary channel for customer engagement. Photograph: Thomas Coex/AFP/Getty Images

Chief marketing officers (CMOs) who fail to realise social media's potential for customer interaction and customer retention are being left behind. On Twitter, Facebook and even on Instagram, brands are now being discussed and dissected; companies' stories are being subverted and inverted.
The reality is, you no longer drive company and brand messaging – your customers do.
Consumers and sales prospects are interacting with your company in myriad ways across multiple touch points in this new interactive economy. Today's customers are empowered: they expect companies to give them what they want, how they want it.
In response, progressive CMOs are doing much more than launching a Twitter feed and a LinkedIn group or two to increase reach. And they are doing more than email marketing and simple data capture. These leaders recognise that the role of the CMO is evolving from an emphasis on acquiring new database contacts to building deep intimacy with customers. It's no longer a matter of who you know, but what you know about them. That means CMOs need to be focused on actively listening, engaging and responding to their customers.
Yet most businesses are missing many opportunities to engage customers. We have found that across social networks and traditional selling channels – email, telephone and storefronts – companies miss or mishandle up to 80% of customer engagement opportunities. And a missed opportunity means lost revenue.
The only way for companies to reverse this trend is to become customer-obsessed from the top down. Customers don't care about internal departments, so internal functions must become invisible. Business processes and systems should be flexible and oriented around the customer, not a role or function. Information should flow freely through departments and hierarchies, and employees need to be enabled to use data to build relationships with their customers and solve their problems.
In the era of the always-on customer, social media is a primary channel for customer engagement. Here are a few principles that can set companies on the right road to customer engagement with social.

Engage and empower your workforce

Good social adoption starts with a focus on people, not the technology. It is important to get your employees engaged because customer engagement is a shared responsibility across the enterprise. It is no longer the sole province of sales, marketing or customer service. Every employee must be empowered to recognise a customer engagement opportunity and act on it.
That means investing in people and processes, as well as technology. Finding ambassadors within your company to champion social media, and selecting tools for your business that your employees use at home, can help to promote social behaviours internally. Gamification principles are a growing way to encourage adoption and social-savviness within your organisation. When implemented correctly, with added consultancy and strategy, it acts as an essential element to ensure adoption at all levels by addressing individual's specific drivers and needs.
Companies typically need to invest a ratio of 2:1 in their people and processes over technology. After all, technology doesn't drive relationships. People do. A free flow of information allows the most customer-obsessed companies to understand not only their own customers, but also their customers' customers – creating differentiation and a competitive advantage.

Get personal with your customers

To maximise customer engagement, it is important to nurture your prospects as individuals, with their own stories, rather than anonymous transactions. Social media channels are a key way to interact with customers and build those human relationships. Sadly, though, 58% of consumers who tweet about a bad customer experience won't receive a reply from the company they have an issue with. Missed opportunities like these cost companies revenue in the short term and damage brands for the long term.

Customers are more informed and have more choice than ever before, so if their expectations aren't met, they'll move on quickly. Engaged customers, however, reward consistently strong service by spending more and becoming influential brand advocates on social channels.

Create advocates

When customers are engaged, you are their default buying choice. They're loyal. They become advocates for your company. With social media, engaged customers can – and do – endorse your company to tens of thousands of people instantly.
By taking the time to listen to your customers across social channels, your organisation can become empowered to turn a customer's negative experience into a positive one. O2's recent use of social media for customer engagement is a perfect example of this. A potential public relations disaster became a positive story for digital marketers as the company responded to customer complaints on Twitter in a light-hearted and personal manner, winning their consumers back.
More than 70% of customers will spend more with a company because of a history of good service. That's where the real upside potential is for companies. And it's why customer engagement is set to overtake productivity as the primary driver of profitable growth.
Social media is a key channel for mobilising customer engagement in this interactive economy. Customers are truly engaged when they feel known and that is what the best use of social media can achieve.