How To Engage Customers Online
 By Brian Solis
I recently hosted a workshos at the Satisfaction event, Customer Service is the New Marketing. The topic I'm focused on was, "How to Listen to the Market and How to Engage Customers Online."
Fellow workshop leaders include Christopher Carfi, Deb Schultz, Chris Heuer, Jeremiah Owyang, Becky Carroll, and Douglas Hanna.
Empowering your customers to become an extension of your marketing and sales forces isn't new, but it isn't widely embraced either. In fact, the function of most customer service has been relegated to overseas companies or even automated as companies seek to reduce the costs of keeping customers happy.
However, in the era of Social Media, simply having a customer service infrastructure is no longer enough. This is about people and engaging them as people, evolving from an approach that connects faceless companies to anonymous customers. Let's humanize the entire process to not just keep customers happy, but also cultivating loyalty along the way.
Technology will always evolve and the tools will continually change.
Customer service, product marketing and marcom must fuse into a living, breathing commitment of inbound and outbound initiatives that not only answers questions when they come in, but also seek them out wherever they seek insight from peers and other experts.
It's a combination of using Social and Traditional tools to discover, listen, learn, and engage directly with customers to help, not market, but help them make decisions and also do things that they couldn't, or didn't know how to do, before today.
And, most importantly, the lessons learned in the field should in turn be fed into the marketing department to create and run more intelligent, experienced, and real world initiatives across all forms of marketing, PR, sales, and advertising.
I know this all sounds wonderful, but where do you even start and who's responsible for what?
Truth is, that it's going to be different within each organization. It all starts with a champion and that person could be an executive, in PR, marcom, customer service, or product marketing or all of the above.
Someone needs to realize that it just can't be an inbound process, as Social Media is not a spectator sport. Those who sit on the sidelines will inevitably fall off the radar screens of their customers, giving way for competition to satisfy their needs.
Speak up. Don't question whose responsibility it is, just present it as an idea along with supporting data (it's out there). It's not only about pulling your company into the online conversations that will help customers, it's also about empowering your customers to help each other.
Delegate the responsibility of listening as well as assigning necessary responses among the most appropriate voices within your organization as well as your champions out in the field. In many cases, businesses are hiring "community managers" to keep the company's ear to the ground and to also act as the hub for coordinating all outbound conversations. The community manager usually works directly with PR, product marketing, customer service, and also the executive team to pull in the right people for the job and to also answer questions in case the CM needs to engage directly.
The best way to start is by setting up Google Alerts for your company, products, key personnel, and also competitors. Every time something comes up, you have an "almost" realtime opportunity to engage.
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