Digital

Social media platforms are growing up. Channels that started off as repositories for ‘look at me’ broadcasting, aimed to appeal to a younger audience, now offer real-time conversations with your most engaged customers.

The most effective social media strategies are built around developing specific content for each individual channel. The overall goal is to reach the right people at the best time with the most insightful content.

But there is a further role for social media: demonstrating excellent customer service.

Social media gives customers an opportunity for a quick resolution of problems: some 81% of Twitter users now expect a same-day response to questions and complaints, according to a recent Oracle survey.

Social customer service can also give companies the best of both worlds: the ability to reach a wide network of customers while providing more personalized responses at the same time.

In order to achieve this, retailers and shopping centres need to listen carefully to social media streams, keep on track with customer opinion and be ready to inform followers about specific products and services that are being discussed or brought into question.

Listening or monitoring?

There’s often confusion around social media listening, a service that can be mixed up with social media monitoring. While they are somewhat similar and work best together, the two shouldn’t be used interchangeably.

Social media listening isn’t as simple as monitoring and replying to incoming questions and comments. It is the process of tracking conversations around a topic, phrase, industry or keywords and leveraging the insight to discover opportunities or create content for those audiences – to keep them engaged, turning clients and customers into brand advocates and ambassadors.

It’s more than merely watching @mentions and comments pour in via a social profile or blog. If you are only counting on the notifications, you are missing out on a vast number of clients and customers who are talking about your brand and your services.

Social media monitoring is a way of computing the popularity of a brand or company by extraction of information from social media channels such as blogs, news sites and video/ photo sharing on websites.

A quicker response

When companies are listening effectively, they can quickly respond to any customer requests and complaints. As many companies have learned the hard way, unanswered complaints can go viral, causing real damage to a company’s brand.

But the opposite can have a positive impact on your brand reputation. A powerful 71% of consumers receiving a quick brand response on social media would be likely to recommend that brand to others, compared to only 19% of customers who received no response.

Many larger corporations have invested in training and hiring extra resource to take care of social listening and customer service because it is crucial to retaining and creating an excellent customer service.

With smaller retail businesses or shopping centres with restrictions on headcount, many owners and managers are turning to agencies to provide this service for them.  This works well as an outsourced service, freeing up the internal workforce to run the business, and relying on the agency to focus on social listening, respond to day to day queries and escalate anything that requires senior management input.

At OnBrand, we monitor your social media channels through your customers’ eyes.  How they would prefer to engage with your brand, how easily they can find answers to their questions, and whether their overall customer journey has been a joined-up experience.

By taking their journey, we can make recommendations on how to simplify the process, build your brand reputation and improve overall customer engagement.  Happy customers spend more and stay longer, so let’s make sure they are being heard.

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If you would like to find out more information visit our website or email us at: sayhello@onbrand.co.uk or give us a call on 03333 220 022 to find out how we could help.

OnBrand | Smart marketing using customer knowledge for Digital, Audio, Social and Events.

Ever noticed that Google has the world’s simplest homepage? Or got lost on a website trying desperately to find a phone number?

Businesses often fall into the trap of supplying too much information.  In their efforts to impress, they don’t realise they are losing customers through information overload. They forget that the goal of a website is to offer a great customer experience that helps make the customer fall in love with the brand or service they are selling.

We’re often told to write more content that contains useful terms for SEO purposes. And that for business efficiency the directors would like their customers to complete complicated purchases online, rather than talk to a human.  But it’s very easy to forget how the customer is feeling in amongst all these business goals and expert recommendations.

So when you land on your home page, ask yourself three simple questions:

1. Is it clear where the customer needs to go?
2. When they get there, is there a simple call to action?
3. And will that help the customer?

Such is the scope of the digital world now that patience wears incredibly thin.

Such is the scope of the digital world now that patience wears incredibly thin. On average, people stay on a web page for an average of between 5-15 seconds, so if it’s not immediately clear where they need to go, you’re either going to lose them, or prompt a frustrated phone call.

When the customer does find the page they need, there is nothing worse than being given too many options for what to do next. In fact, for a best practise customer journey the most efficient call to action is often a single brightly coloured button displaying one or two words, such as ‘buy now’, or ‘read more’, or ‘confirm details’.  The customer can be confident that by clicking on that link they will go to a page they expect: either to complete a sale, find out more details or reaffirm what they are trying to do on that page.

With this in mind, say less and you’ll often find you engage more.

Your choice of call to action can then be adapted to suit your business needs. For example, if the purchase is actually too complex to be completed online, and you have an efficient telephony system, a simple ‘call this number’ will take the customer on to the best next stage in your process.

If, however, this might lead to a lengthy wait listening to on-hold music, then use your website to collect the customer’s query, and manage their expectations for a suitable response time.  A button with ‘Enter your details for a response within 24 hours’ will be a quick and easy way to let your customer know that you’re on it, but that they won’t receive an immediate response.

So why not go onto your website right now and take your own customers’ journey? Does every single word or page need to be there, are your instructions as simple as possible, and does your customer will feel good about your business at the end of their experience?

If you’d like us to audit your website, email sayhello@onbrand.co.uk or give us a call on 03333 220 022 to find out how we could help.

OnBrand | Smart marketing using customer knowledge for digital, audio, social and events

Like or it don’t, your business will become increasingly dependent on bots. But your first step towards making them something customers want to deal with can actually be straightforward.

Let’s start with the simple stuff. What’s the lowest effort change you can make to instil your lifeless bot with some semblance of humanity? Give it a name.

Siri has a name, Alexa has a name, Cortana has a name. But why?

But crucially, a name is also a connection. A name is humanising. Imagine two AI voice services, identical except that one opens every interaction with ‘Hi, my name’s Maria and I’m a robot.’ I’ll bet dollars to donuts that, for CSat at least, she performs better out of the two.

Beyond that, name is brand, and brand is important when you want consumers to value your product over others. Brand is why Microsoft opted for ‘Cortana’, a reference to a futuristic AI in one of their flagship video games.

Key takeaway: draw three dots on a balloon and it has a face.  The change itself isn’t necessarily what matters – it’s the impression it gives your audience.

Let’s stay with the topic of introductions for a moment. Not just for each interaction, but at the macro level – new technology introduced to consumers. At the moment, we’re rarely telling customers how to use it.

Although auto attendants have been kicking around since the 1970s they are still the cause of a lot of aggravation. Why should that be? Why aren’t customers who grew up using IVR more comfortable with it?

There’s a good chance the blame lies with the designers.  Any bot operates within certain conditions. There are inputs it can use, and inputs that won’t trigger a response.

A UK energy provider has one of the easiest to use IVRs. It will ask you a question, but before you reply it clarifies: ‘you can answer using full sentences, or just list some keywords like meter reading, or billing information.’

Our industry should have been doing this kind of leg work over the last 30 years of widespread IVR deployment. Because we haven’t, we’ve added to customer effort. That’s not just extra clicks or transferred calls, but the mental effort of uncertainty. Am I dumb if I explain my situation to this machine? What am I supposed to say?

You’re probably forming this objection right now: ‘If we’re humanising bots, why draw attention to the artificiality?’

Well, because the object isn’t to trick our customers. When we talk about humanising bots, we’re modelling behaviours that fit with how humans really interact. And something humans do well is establishing rapport, which is a sort of ‘best practice guide’ for talking to one other.

The deaf lady working at my local supermarket will ask you to speak clearly and to face her, so she can lip read. To put that another way, she sets the terms for how to communicate with her effectively.

Key takeaway: Humans are already comfortable with other humans. If you want them to get comfortable with bots, give them (simple) instructions.

So far we’ve only made progress on our opening line – maybe we need to paint with a broader brush.

In an earlier post, I talked about this great quote from Shep Hyken: ‘Kindness and courtesy are at the root of a positive customer service experience.’

If you regularly deal with customers, you can’t hear this enough. But what does it mean for AI?

Superficially, it means they need the vocabulary of kindness and courtesy. I can’t count the number of times an automated system has said something like ‘state your name’ instead of ‘can I take your name please?’

(Is it silly to find that rude? Bots doesn’t know what they’re saying. But then, the industry has had decades to test, refine, and deploy these responses…)

It’s certainly worth making sure your bots are polite. A certain credit provider has various automated payment services with responses ranging from ‘too direct’ to ‘starting a fight’.  We can only assume that they’re not interested in impressing customers who are calling to pay bills – although I wonder how many are paying those bills for the last time before jumping ship.

What about beyond the superficial? The kind of AI we’re talking about will probably not be deliberately courteous – not really.

The courtesy is in how you choose to deploy it. Rather than interactions, think about journeys; are bots a resource for guiding staff and aiding customers? Or a way to save a buck and keep some people off the phones?

Key takeaway: Any asset is judged in the context you give it. Be human-centric in your delivery – your AI strategy – and you’re halfway to humanising the resource itself.

When was the last time you went through the same experience you give customers? Does your IVR measure up? When you take our Customer Experience Audit, you’ll find out.

If you didn’t spot this news already, Facebook just changed the game significantly. Underneath an announcement to “make sure the time we all spend on Facebook is time well spent”, Mark Zuckerberg effectively just killed organic reach on Facebook.

From now, Facebook friends and family posts will start to take precedent over public content including posts from businesses, brands, and media – prioritising what it calls ‘posts that spark conversations and meaningful interactions between people’.

Facebook will punish posts that try to click bait their audiences e.g. posts with a ‘Tag a friend/Follow us/Comment Yes” as it will see them as worthless.

As an end user that sounds great, less click bait, spam, unwanted posts – but for marketeers, brands and businesses alike, it’s time to rewrite the strategy. Don’t and you’ll be sending your £££’s into social oblivion. Facebook just set it’s intent to move to an ad platform. Cut through is only going to be achieved going forwards by paid social activity.

How? Consider the typical Facebook journey. Brands get you to like their page once, giving them the opportunity to engage with you when their content appears in your timeline, when they post organically on their page. (although only circa 20% of them will see it currently anyhow). What this means is that it will become irrelevant (to a point) how many people like your page, as unless they actually visit your page they will never see the organic content you post there.

Brands will therefore need to pay to get their content in front of their audience and cannot rely on organic feeds reaching them.

The good news is that paid content can be targeted to reach your desired audience, people who haven’t previously engaged with your brand and who otherwise wouldn’t have seen it.

Hopefully it will also improve the quality of content and creativity coming from the industry as well, as by rewarding creativity, it might strike at the heart of mediocre agencies, and get them off their laurels – thus ending the default social media agency fee justification of a post a day.

At OnBrand, we welcome this further maturing of the Facebook platform, as it reflects our path of travel – know your customer – who they are, where they are, and what they want from you. OnBrand social strategies embrace what we believe are the three pillars of a good social strategy – great content, precise and targeted social reach, and tuned into to what your customers truly want.

In summary:

• Facebook are changing what appears in your news feed
• Organic reach is over, if you want to increase visibility then paid content is the way forwards
• Click bait will be punished
• Engagement and true brand conversations will benefit
• Creativity and relevance will be rewarded – create content that matters.

Everybody loves an offer, so it goes without saying that a shopping centre’s website and social media channels are great places to find the best deals coming up . . . right?

Wrong.

In a recent study, we analysed the digital channels of nearly 400 British shopping centres to see how visible their offers were. We rated these centres, awarding scores between 1 and 5 on the efficiency, quality and quantity of their offers, and the results were definitely a little surprising.

As a rule, the more offers customers see, the more engaged they feel, and the more connected they become to the brand. Yet an incredible 31% of shopping centres in the UK didn’t promote a single offer. 15% of centres ran between 1-4 offers, and only 32% had 5 offers or more visible to their customers.

And the numbers are only part of the problem.

Equally as detrimental as running no offers at all is running them badly, which in itself can lead to a whole host of problems. From our findings, a number of shopping centres had:

• Uninspiring content, turning shoppers off
• Expired offers, revealing the content is unreliable
• Duplicated content, which is penalised by Google
• Mismatched information between their website and social media channels
• Offers pages that didn’t load, displaying a lack of care for the centre’s customers and retailers

We understand how hard it is to get offers right when there’s so little spare time in your day

Because of these issues, which presented themselves repeatedly, there were 26% of shopping centre websites that we weren’t able to award a score at all.

So what does this mean for the state of offers in the UK?

Well, the way we see it, the statistics pose a great opportunity. We understand how hard it is to get offers right when there’s so little spare time in your day, and our solution was to create a tool that ensures all of your retailers’ latest offers feed into your digital channels – either automatically or manually – at the click of a button.

What does OnBrand Offers provide you? We’re glad you asked.

1. Content
Pick and choose from our suggested feed or post your own.

2. Technology
Platform that allows you to schedule and post to multiple channels in one action.

3. Data
Analytics to monitor reach and performance at the click of a button.

In order to show you how much of an impact our Offers product could have on your centre, we’re willing to let you trial it for a period of 14 days – absolutely free!

Got a question? Get in touch by e-mailing sayhello@onbrand.co.uk or give us a call on 03333 220 022 to find out how OnBrand Offers can help your business.