Your Online Personality Matters!

This is my second post of my 3 post series talking about brand perception & complaint resolution. There will be a few topics in here that lead off from the original post found HERE.

In my initial post I mentioned that companies need to focus as much energy as possible on resolving problems / complaints when posted in a social forum. The reason for this is that when in a public forum, businesses have the opportunity to generate a following of brand advocates that will wear your companies brand with pride and evangelise the brand across the social-sphere. In my opinion, this is one of the most effective forms of marketing.

If you go onto a business’s website, you will find them selling themselves as providers of a particular product or service in a manner that makes them attractive to a consumer. They will tell you all sorts of wonderful things and often quote all sorts of success stories. THIS is what sets a level of expectation with the consumer base. If a company advertises themselves as an entity that can be implicitly trusted and this trust is broken through the delivery of product or services that don’t align with what they are selling, consumers log complaints across the multitude of channels available to us.

Random example…If a preowned car dealership (Everyone loves a good old car dealership example) tells us that their cars are “absolutely brilliant, never give the drivers any issues, are well priced and are delivered to the consumer’s door step 2 days after the order being placed”, that’s what we as consumers expect. If this doesn’t happen, then we complain. This business has sold their product and service along those guide lines and we trust them to deliver exactly that. (Totally get that this is super farfetched).

To put a spin on this a bit…what if the dealerships sales guide lines were as transparent as: “Need a temporary, well priced car? Come and check out some of the vehicles in our yard. These preowned cars have been serviced and valeted just for you.” The question is, which of these descriptions / offerings is more likely to get scrutinised on the social-sphere if the offering isn’t completely met?

A really good example of where this transparent approach has been effective is with “WeBuyAnyCar.com”. In summary, they basically say that you will get more money selling your car privately, but why would you want to go through the hassle? These guys are actually selling you your time back. They are selling convenience. You immediately know what you are getting. If I ever logged a complaint here, it would be about the service and not about the price I get for my car. Here is their actual marketing blurb:

 “Do you value your time? We Buy Any Car guarantees a fair price for your car without the hassle of selling it privately. Enter your reg number in the box above and get your instant valuation for free.

Whatever your car, whatever its condition, your valuation is valid for 7 days. If you are happy to sell to us, take your car into your local branch for an appraisal and we can pay the money/cash directly into your bank account. Don't waste your time: join over 1 million customers who have sold their car to We Buy Any Car today.”

Super smart advertising…. But they HAVE to deliver on these terms.

If you look at channels like Twitter and Facebook, you don’t actually have this amount of space to work with. You have 140 characters in a Bio and 2 pictures on Twitter to get peoples interest and a click through to your site. If you sell your business as the amazing, trust worthy and customer focused, and you don’t deliver that, expect to be hung out to dry on social media.

That little blurb is an indication of the businesses online personality. Businesses have the opportunity to create a whole online personality that depicts the companies “Persona”. Companies like Nandos and Sainsbury’s have done this BRILLIANTLY! They are GREAT at resolving complaints and interacting, but in a way that still reflects their brand. As an example ASDA wouldn’t be able to start responding to their customers in the same way Sainsbury’s do because consumers perceive the 2 brands VERY differently on the social-sphere. It’s like having 2 VERY different friends :) I know that, most of the time, if I include Sainsbury’s in a Twitter post, I’m likely to get a funny / sarcastic / witty response, but still get my issue addressed. (No, I don’t work for Sainsbury’s…HAHA)

If a business puts “We offer world class customer service” on their Facebook page and they don’t resolve a complaint or respond to a query posted there, they are advertising themselves incorrectly. Just by putting up a tag line like that, businesses may either set themselves up for failure or allow for an opportunity to prove themselves as being absolutely fantabulous!  

Telling everyone how awesome you are means you have to back it up. As I mentioned in my first post… smart marketing and brand awareness will provide a mechanism to avoid the “Villagers with Pitchforks” scenario…. Which businesses DESPERATELY need to avoid.

It's so important to establish your online personality and engage with your consumer base in a way that reflects the type of company you really are.

In my final post I’ll be talking about the Microsoft tech that businesses can leverage to help improve both customer service and marketing, which in turn provides an opportunity to generate brand advocates.

Driving Brand Advocacy Through Complaint Management

I apologise in advance for the long post, but I’ve been DYING to put this into words! Thanks in advance for following.

We have all been in the situation where we have been served a bad meal at a restaurant, received a broken product in the post, had a rude call centre agent or just received service / product that was not up to scratch in general.

The question is, how do you deal with this as a consumer and what are companies / businesses doing about it? Personally, I’m not one to let things like this slide and if someone is rude to me or treats me badly, I tell them. If it continues to happen, I turn to the complaints department as well as social media. Please note that when I receive fantastic service I ALWAYS leave positive feedback. I’m one of those people that will fill out the survey in hope that the company requesting it will actually work on their customer service. I’m not saying any of you should do this… It’s just what happens in my world ;)

Anyway, after that piece of INCREDIBLY USEFUL information, in certain aspects, I’m not alone… loads of consumers out there do turn to social to voice their opinions in whatever way or form. In many cases, complaints or bad reviews left in a social forum are really taken seriously because these can often lead to huge business losses for various business types. Companies that just shut their eyes, block their ears and hum loudly to avoid certain channels are already feeling the brunt of the consumer community. JUST BECAUSE YOU DON’T SEE IT, DOESN’T MEAN ITS NOT THERE!!! You will ALWAYS see the results of badly managed consumer channels. It’s a bit like the movie “Paranormal Activity” where you see the results of the haunting, but not the haunting its self.

Often companies on certain channels are the target of the “Villager with Pitchfork” scenario. One person, brave enough to post a complaint about a company on a channel, can result in MANY others following suit. Kind of like the villagers chasing Frankenstein into the already flaming windmill (Do what you please with that analogy). Some of them aren’t sure even why they are doing it. If these angry mobs are not kept at bay and these complaints not dealt with, they can devastate a company’s brand VERY FAST. People will nearly always rely on the opinions of others before purchasing products or services from a company. Interesting fact: often companies remove the “Review” capabilities from their pages….#BECAREFUL – This is NOT transparency.

Chapter 2… :D

Some time ago I had a conversation with a person who worked at a fairly large airline company. We got chatting about how complaints are resolved across channels (Yes, I know I’m totally lame) and their response was “Sometimes, every now and then, it’s okay to lose a bag” … ME… “EEERMMM, no its not, that upsets people” (definitely not a direct quote). Person X proceeded to explain to me that loosing said bag was not the issue…. It’s how you RESOLVED the issue. Obviously this couldn’t happen all the time… and yes, frequency is relevant.

LIGHTBULB!!!

Translating that conversation into modern social terminology… Loosing said bag, being honest with the person whose bag has been lost, retrieving said bag and then compensating said person in some manner or form will often turn a massively negative complainant into a brand advocate. Obviously this can’t be a regular thing and companies that do truly have great service and product won’t have to worry about this.

Think about this in the social media sense, you have the ability and OPPORTUNITY to resolve a complaint in a public forum IN FRONT OF EVERYONE and turn groups of people into fans… WOW, that’s an opportunity! Teaching people that they can trust you, as a business to deliver the truth, across the right channel, in a manner that resolves an issue and compensates the complainant is often better than just having general day to day service. People love the “Fighting in the trenches concept” … they want to see companies do what’s right, they want to see businesses getting onto the same level as their consumer base and levelling with them. Another thing that's very important here is the complaint must be solved within the confines of the company brand. The way consumers perceive the brand must align with the complaint resolution process. This will be explained properly in another post.

Personally, I am MORE of a fan of a brand that works alongside me to achieve results. Companies that want to do the right thing and talk to me in the language I understand (demographic) across a channel I prefer. So what if I complain over social… in this day and age, I shouldn’t have to call in and have a whinge, I shouldn’t need to send an email or write a letter. As consumers, it’s our prerogative to communicate in the way that I prefer on the channel I prefer.

Chapter 3…

These days, consumers expect businesses to have the ability to communicate across all channels and manage customer’s interactions and complaints without us having to call in and interact with call centre agents over and over again. We expect an “Omni-channel” (First real Buzz word… yessss) experience.  So what’s the solution here? How can we help companies achieve this for their customer base?

Well, OBVIOUSLY, I’m going to say that Microsoft Dynamics 365 has multiple technical elements that will allow a business the ability to focus their energy on their customer base. BUT… that solves only part of the problem. Look out for my next post on how to achieve this through what’s available within the Microsoft stack. Products such as Microsoft Dynamics Customer Engagement, Microsoft Social Engagement, Adobe, CafeX and even ISV Products such as Click Dimensions can be leveraged to achieve the creation of an Omni-channel customer experience.

For now, the suggestion I’m going to make is that companies place absolute importance on the consumers’ satisfaction as their primary goal. The ability to supply value and cohesive interactions to and with a customer across the preferred channels is of vital importance. The ability to RECOGNISE when a customer is unhappy and change the customers’ opinion can be more valuable than a standard customer experience in some cases. If you take anything away from this long post, that line is the most important. As you change your approach you change your result.

Welcome to the age of the digital consumer!

Standby for the next one :)

Microsoft Teams & Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement - And some other ideas :)

Microsoft Teams & Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement – And some other interesting ideas J

There are so many discussions about Microsoft Teams, how they are being used and how they will work with Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement. If you think about what exactly Microsoft Teams really does it starts to make perfect sense.

GOOGLE TOLD ME THIS: “Microsoft Teams is a chat-based collaboration tool that is part of the Office 365 suite of services. Teams enables local and remote co-workers to work together in real and near-real time.”

AWESOME, sounds very useful, but don’t we have Office 365 groups and Yammer for that? Recently a few enthusiasts and I (One of them being Ken) had a discussion about what works where and how. Rather interesting because the results were quite different. I’m also almost 108.65% certain that various people were asking the same thing when O365 groups were released. “Why can’t we just use Yammer?”….???? Well I’m DEFINITELY not answering that question with this blog post and if you need more information Please look HERE… A really rock solid article that talks about some of the stuff that’s going on. I will take it on properly at some point.

What I am going to answer is how deeply MS Teams works with Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement. At the moment my personal preference is towards MS Teams because I feel as if a lot of the existing O365 collaborative functionality is going to get absorbed by MS Teams. (Personal Opinion).

MS Teams actually has an existing “Integration” (More of a connection) with Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement and will let you surface certain information within a MS Team as well as track certain activities and changes. It’s really simple… Simply follow the instructions below and you are off to a good start:

Get a team up and running and create a channel of your preference.

Once you have done that… jump into the menu and hit connectors.

Filter the connectors menu and select Dynamics 365.

Select the correct instance of Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement. Looks like you need to select an instance within your O365 tenant.

From there select a record you would like to connect with. I only saw the ability to connect with “Accounts”, “Opportunities” and “Leads”. I have a workaround for other records explained at the end of the post for other record (Entity) types.

Once you’ve connected to a record (It seems as if you can only select one at a time), you will see the “1 Configured” link under the Configuration button.

If you select the link you only have the option to remove the record. Nothing else. (YET!!!)

After you have decided not to remove the D365 Customer Engagement records because of its vital importance to your team, you will see an update on your team channel with the records addition details.

I can go into D365 Customer Engagement, search for the record, make my updates and then these will be posted to the Team Channel.

Obvs' you can then click through the Team link through to the Dynamics 365 instance record to review and interact with the record as required.

NOW… That’s the easy part done… Here’s the hard part. There is a lot I / we don’t know. In honesty format here we go:

1.     There are only certain entity types you can connect to out the box.

2.     There are only certain fields and activities that sync through to the Teams channel from the record.

3.     The information displayed is okay, but may not be enough to inform the right team members.

The solution:

I created an MS flow to interact with Teams and D365 Customer Engagement. It solves a lot of the problems that you would generally perceive with the MS Teams and D365 connector. IE… It doesn’t only look at Accounts, Leads and Opportunities. Because flows are pretty easy to create. I reckon this solves a lot of thaw current connector gaps.

Probably another blog post for another time…

If you are serious about using teams, in my opinion, that’s the right route! Have fun and shout if you need help!