By Steve Richards

Social media has fundamentally changed how businesses interact with their customers. We’re often asked whether social media is a risk for companies – all that transparency can be hard to deal with – but more often than not these days the questions should be: “can you afford not to get involved?”

In many ways it is easier for an FMCG brand, for example, to create an online experience around a product launch or a new service, limiting social media contact to what should be a predominantly positive experience. But it takes a certain amount of guts for a service-based company – a utilities company, say - to put itself in the firing line of customers.

Utilities companies will usually only hear from customers when something goes wrong. When was the last time you wrote to your telecoms company? Was it to say how pleased you were that your phone service kept working through the ferocious winter? Or that your latest bill was quite reasonable?

Chances are, you’ll never make contact, other than to pay your bill, or to notify it that a line is down. When it’s working well, you don’t really notice it. When you have an issue, you’re more likely to ask your friends how to fix it, or the best way to speed up an internet connection, or which was the best mobile operator in the winter storms.

So where do these conversations happen? In the pub, in the office, on the train (unless you live in London of course), and over dinner. Oh, and on forums, Twitter, blogs, social networks and online communities.

Before social media, it was pretty much impossible for a normally faceless service company to know what its customers really thought of it. But today, it can listen in to conversations online and learn about what customers want, how to provide a better service (that will increase customer loyalty), and even use customer feedback as part of the R&D process.

eircom, the Irish telecoms company, has gone a step further. It has created a customer service community online – eircom connect - as part of a wider strategy to make customer service as good as it can possibly be. This is a brave, but ultimately smart move on its part. If you follow your customers around their social media – networks, Twitter and so on – you can respond to individual issues effectively, and listen to your customers. But if you bring customers to your own community, you can provide them with the means with which to ‘self-serve’ – to help themselves fix common problems, answer frequently asked questions, help each other with issues in a forum, and find out about product upgrades, new services or bugs that are being fixed. A live chat function direct from the site is a good way of giving the personal touch to a customer with an issue that needs addressing.

There are some ‘golden rules’ to online customer service sites, that apply across the board. These are:

• Put some thought into the design of the community. If you’re going to the trouble of creating a community, make it easy to use. If it isn’t, it will frustrate customers.

• Staff it properly. It takes a certain amount of time and effort – but if you get it right, it will lessen the burden on customer service staff answering individual queries. Respond quickly to questions, moderate responses to keep the site clean and spam-free and feed back regularly to the community.

• Have a crisis plan. If you have an issue such as a product recall, you’ll need to up the service levels.

• Be prepared to listen. Sometimes, your customers will say lovely things about you. But sometimes they won’t. Don’t censor them – address the issues instead.

• Respond quickly. As quickly as you would on the phone, and quicker than email. Put your best customer service people onto the community, and give them the authority to make decisions. No interns, please.

• Reward valuable contributors. There will always be some consumers who get more involved than others, and who help the community. Identify who they are and reward them (that could be as simple as giving them vouchers or points).

• If you get it wrong, apologise and move on. Everyone makes mistakes. It’s how we deal with them that sticks.

• Commit to the long-haul. A customer community shouldn’t be a marketing gimmick.

• Work the community so that it reduces the burden on other customer service operations. This won’t happen overnight, nor should it entirely replace other forms of communication, but if you get it right, it should have a positive impact.

• Integrate your community with other social media tools. Monitor conversations across other channels and give customers the choice how they communicate with you. Some will prefer to ask advice publicly, others will prefer private direct messaging.

• Personalise your responses. Communities engender conversations, rather than formal responses. Conversations are, by their nature, personal. Showing some personality will go a long way to driving loyalty.

Finally – and most importantly – measure the impact that this online community has had on the reputation of your brand. You can measure the impact of the community on your reputation by using a Social Media Reputation Audit, which tracks trends in positive and negative reputation conversations about a brand across social media, and analyses what is driving that sentiment. Our experience shows that creating a social media customer community will improve a brand’s reputation, which in turn leads to a commensurate increase in sales.

It really does pay to get involved in the conversation.

About the author

Steve Richards is managing director of social media agency Yomego; a position he took up in July 2008 to drive the growth of the company’s work across virtual worlds, user generated platforms and social networks. Steve began his career client-side with HSBC before moving on to sales promotion agency, IMC. In 1998, he co-founded award-winning agency, Swordfish, working with clients including BBC, Channel 4, first direct, Reckitt Benckiser, Sony and Warner Bros. Over 50% of Swordfish’s output was across digital media. Since joining Yomego, he has overseen the development of groundbreaking community sites including Ruumz, SoccerRepublic and dPals.