Social Media

National Complaints Day: The need for ‘honest listening’, re-inventing corporations and Club Penguin…

Today, apart from being Friday 13th, is also National Complaints Day. Research conducted by ComplaintCommunity suggests that over the course of today more than one and a half million complaints will be lodged across the UK.

Against this backdrop, I was fortunate enough to bring together a variety of people from the public sector, retail, financial services, customer experience and social media monitoring to discuss the impact of social media on complaints specifically, and customer service more generally. Read more…

This Friday it’s National Complaints Day. A day set aside to celebrate complaints. Who would have thought it?

Up until a few years ago, complaining, if done at all, was a closed interaction between me and a company. I could write a letter, send an email or make a call to let a company know how they had let me down. But there was a disconnect.

Organisations for the most part were not set up to treat complaints as anything other than a commodity or product in itself. The interaction was functional, prescribed, scripted. Whilst my complaint might be acknowledged, the outcome was inevitably ticketed and soulless. Where I might express a whole range of emotions from anger to frustration, to annoyance, to disappointment, even the occasional surprise, organisations for the most part were not geared up to listen, to hear, to empathise. Read more…

As part of the events being held around the UK to mark National Complaints Day on Thursday 12th August, Foviance has organised a roundtable event to discuss the emerging impact of social media on complaints and customer service.

The roundtable brings together senior customer service managers and decision-makers from the world of finance, telecoms, regulatory bodies and travel including BT, Ministry of Justice, Society of Consumer Affairs in Europe, PayPal UK, Thomas Cook, together with Beyond Philosophy, 6Consulting and Foviance.

Some of the themes that will be discussed include:

• Social media is very open and unstructured, how are you dealing with this? What are the challenges, particularly for the more regulated industries?
• Customers are now able to complain literally at the moment when something goes wrong. What are the challenges, risks and opportunities of this with respect to your current ways of working?
• What is your company doing in terms of social media customer service? What’s working, what’s not working?
• The rise of social platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and blogs is resulting in the general drift of the customer relationship from private to public spaces, which often have little to do with a company itself. How do you see this trend playing out? How are you developing your strategy to respond to this?
• Future trends, challenges and next steps?

The findings from the roundtable discussion will be available for download by registering on the National Complaints Day web site from 13th August and further details will be available on the Foviance website.

You can keep informed about the events from the day by following #ncd2010 via Twitter.

If you have any questions please feel free to email info@foviance.com or contact Guy Stephens on 0845 054 6500

OnlineMarketingConnect: Nine social media tips for summer
Posted by Foviance blog, 14 June, 2010

1) Remember to charge up your battery the night before if you’re going to be doing a lot of tweeting the next day, or buy an extra battery (remember to charge that one up too).

2) First ever tweet: it’s okay to tweet ‘hi’ or about the weather. Don’t listen to everyone telling you to be interesting – it’s too difficult. You’ll get the hang of it soon anyway. Remember though that your mother, cousin or friend in Australia, might still like to receive the odd letter now and again. It’s nice to get something apart from bills or credit card applications. Read more…

iStrategy 2010 marks the next step in your digital marketing strategy. Guy Stephens is a keynote panellist at this year’s event covering:

• The biggest trends in consumer spending online
• Innovative technologies for communicating with customers and how to best implement them
• The top 10 most important factors in your social media strategy
• How to measure your social capital and monetize your efforts
• Hot buttons to bring people to your web store front
• How to find your best fit in integrating email and social media
• How to deliver a response-driven, relevant message

I was at Digital Surrey’s monthly networking event last week to listen to @JamesFirth talk about the implications of the recently passed Digital Economy Act. Whilst this should be of interest to all of us, if I’m honest I was somewhat in two minds about going. In the end, I did go and I’m glad I did. And here’s why: Read more…

This article, written by Neil Mason, was originally published on Clickz.com on 07/05/10 and is republished here with permission.

As I write this I’ve just got back to the UK after presenting at the eMetrics Marketing Optimisation Summit in San Jose. As usual I’m trying to process all the input I’ve had over the three day conference and extract some of the key themes. With over 40 sessions running in multiple tracks over the 3 days, it was impossible to cover everything but one of the phrases that kept popping into my head over the duration of the conference was “Signals from Noise”. It’s a phrase that I used in my own presentation to highlight the challenges that we all face as businesses in processing the enormous amount of data that we have available to us at the moment. The web is a very noisy place and the data it generates and the data that we collect is also very noisy. Our role as analysts is extract signals from the noise, to interpret those signals and to produce actionable insights. Read more…