SMC Seattle put on a great event on Tuesday. It was held on the rooftop of the HL2 offices on a perfect sunny evening (pictured to the left). They brought in an excellent panel of top brands to discuss using Twitter and social media for customer service. The panel included Frank Eliason of Comcast (@comcastcares), Elliott Pesut of Alaska Airlines (@alaskaair), Brad Nelson of Starbucks (@starbucks), and Maria Emmer-Annes of Nature’s Path (@naturespath). The panel covered best practices for using social media for customers service and shared some stories from the front line. The first video is embedded below and you can see the others here (it’s broken into 7 parts).
A few things that stood out from the conversation:
- It’s all about the people and the conversation, not the Brand. These Brands had a clear focus on directly engaging with customers, not pushing message.
- Keep it simple – often just ask customers “how can I help?” You can’t solve every customer problem, but you can usually do something simple to improve their experience.
- In large companies, it takes a coordinated effort within the organization to be successful. There are a lot of stakeholders touching the social media strategy – customer service, marketing, PR, sales, HR, investor relations, etc. These Brands have great organizational support and clarify around their social media efforts.
- Social media teams (and I imagine budgets) are meaningful at these companies. Comcast has 10 people working in the space, managing Twitter, Facebook, blogs, forums, and Youtube.
- Interesting note about tools from Frank at Comcast: Salesforce.com is building a Twitter integration in their CRM (Comcast is testing the product). This could be very interesting considering the massive installed base Salesforce has to leverage.
