briansolis: Comcast Cares and Why Your Business Should Too – The Socialization of Service
Kami Huyse
· 1 year ago
Hey Brian, I have added this to my Twitter results tag in delicious. Thanks for asking the questions.
JayVee
· 1 year ago
Hi Brian, glad to see you took the NYT article a bit further for review and discussion. Some really great points throughout your post, but my favorite is "Marketing 'at' people is not the same as responding to them as individuals.
Dealing in PR, especially online communications for a living, it's always a challenge to vocalize that exact point to clients to really get them to understand the value in reaching customers on a personal level. Though some might find it "creepy" as the article noted, I think more times than not a customer will appreciate just having their issue resolved in a timely manner and be more likely to refer your company/brand if there's a personal touch added.
Becky Carroll
· 1 year ago
Customer service has always been the true face of the company to customers, both businesses and consumers. Social media, as Frank said, provides one more tool which can improve the perception of how well this relationship has been established. The ways companies can reach out using social media provide us with a whole new world of customer interaction and engagement, especially in customer service.
This interaction and engagement is critical to build customer retention and loyalty. I am looking forward to the day when the customer service department is viewed as an important player at the table, rather than just a cost center. Perhaps the new generation of community managers will help make it so.
You rock, Brian!
David
· 1 year ago
Brian,
This is a terrific post ... in fact, a much better and more thorough look than the original article.
What's unfortunate about this debate is that the same people who are asking/pushing organizations to comment on blogs and engage their constituents are the ones calling them creepy and/or cowardly. Macro and micromedia allow organizations to communicate with their consumers, prospects, employees, peers, etc. Listening is PR function. Responding is a PR function. However, both represent the major tenets of great customer service. Thanks for expounding on this. Great work.
David Weiner, PR Newswire
P-Air
· 1 year ago
I've said this once and I'll say it again, "Frank Eliason Rocks"...don't believe me, read these two blog posts I did before he helped me and after...
I'm right there with you in terms of using these tools for listening and responding. I also believe that they can be used for promotional purposes if set up correctly. I have no problem seeing companies - like Dell (@DellOutlet) or JetBlue promote deals or make announcements - as long as they're explicit about what they're doing. And if they end up engaging with individuals along the way, interspersing "personal" comments as well as official announcements, it can work.
But if it's bait-and-switch, or a company isn't forthright about its intentions, then we get into a troublesome area where people can feel like they're being hoodwinked or even spammed.
Bottom line: now more than ever, we have an opportunity to do real relationship management with customers. We can reach them 1:1 and help improve their perceptions by listening to their problems, addressing them, and hopefully solving them. In the end, they'll feel much better about the process (and hopefully the outcome) than they would had they gone through a traditional route.
Stan
· 1 year ago
Lots of good, key points in your post. Seems to me the way forward for PR/Marcom hinges on this one sentence: "With marcom and customer service attempting to embrace and participate in conversations, many experts are vocally contemplating whether or not conversations are scalable"
In my view, PR is best suited to deal with social media interactions. It works well for one-to-one relationships, or one-to-few, but it is terrible at handling one-to-many interactions. Digg-likes are a good, geeky way of concentrating comments and feedback through a funnel, but experience shows customers rapidly get frustrated to be 'bundled' together. Twitter does seem to be a good way to entertain personal interactions, but talk about scalability... What's left? Good ol' CRM it seems, badly in need of an upgrade though. Btw, can anyone recommend a few good blogs about crm? I may need to read up on this.
Barry Hurd
· 1 year ago
Great article Brian. I had been watching Comcast for some time from a social media and marketing cost perspective- very enlightening to see another side of the Comcast struggle.
You can read a brief brand issue about Comcast in this article regarding some SEO damage they had on my blog in this article:
Online Reputation Control, branding, insurance, or blind-luck?
Keep up the great coverage.
Paul O'Mahony (Cork)
· 2 months ago
Wonderful article. Found it today via Twitter. I've never heard of Comcast, and still don't know what the company does. That's because I've only skimmed the piece. But I've bookmarked it to read properly later.
All Comments
Dealing in PR, especially online communications for a living, it's always a challenge to vocalize that exact point to clients to really get them to understand the value in reaching customers on a personal level. Though some might find it "creepy" as the article noted, I think more times than not a customer will appreciate just having their issue resolved in a timely manner and be more likely to refer your company/brand if there's a personal touch added.
This interaction and engagement is critical to build customer retention and loyalty. I am looking forward to the day when the customer service department is viewed as an important player at the table, rather than just a cost center. Perhaps the new generation of community managers will help make it so.
You rock, Brian!
This is a terrific post ... in fact, a much better and more thorough look than the original article.
What's unfortunate about this debate is that the same people who are asking/pushing organizations to comment on blogs and engage their constituents are the ones calling them creepy and/or cowardly. Macro and micromedia allow organizations to communicate with their consumers, prospects, employees, peers, etc. Listening is PR function. Responding is a PR function. However, both represent the major tenets of great customer service.
Thanks for expounding on this. Great work.
David Weiner, PR Newswire
http://direwolff.wordpress.com/2008/05/01/frank-eliason-from-comcastcan-you-hear-mehear-mehear-me/
http://direwolff.wordpress.com/2008/05/02/comcast-fucken-rocks/
Note that in the comments, there's at least one other blog post that mirrors my experience.
I'm right there with you in terms of using these tools for listening and responding. I also believe that they can be used for promotional purposes if set up correctly. I have no problem seeing companies - like Dell (@DellOutlet) or JetBlue promote deals or make announcements - as long as they're explicit about what they're doing. And if they end up engaging with individuals along the way, interspersing "personal" comments as well as official announcements, it can work.
But if it's bait-and-switch, or a company isn't forthright about its intentions, then we get into a troublesome area where people can feel like they're being hoodwinked or even spammed.
Bottom line: now more than ever, we have an opportunity to do real relationship management with customers. We can reach them 1:1 and help improve their perceptions by listening to their problems, addressing them, and hopefully solving them. In the end, they'll feel much better about the process (and hopefully the outcome) than they would had they gone through a traditional route.
Seems to me the way forward for PR/Marcom hinges on this one sentence: "With marcom and customer service attempting to embrace and participate in conversations, many experts are vocally contemplating whether or not conversations are scalable"
In my view, PR is best suited to deal with social media interactions. It works well for one-to-one relationships, or one-to-few, but it is terrible at handling one-to-many interactions. Digg-likes are a good, geeky way of concentrating comments and feedback through a funnel, but experience shows customers rapidly get frustrated to be 'bundled' together.
Twitter does seem to be a good way to entertain personal interactions, but talk about scalability...
What's left? Good ol' CRM it seems, badly in need of an upgrade though. Btw, can anyone recommend a few good blogs about crm? I may need to read up on this.
You can read a brief brand issue about Comcast in this article regarding some SEO damage they had on my blog in this article:
Online Reputation Control, branding, insurance, or blind-luck?
Keep up the great coverage.
Thank you very much from Cork Ireland