An early start for me yesterday, catching the train to London to attend The Social Customer 2012 in Borough. Thanks to Luke Brynley-Jones and the team for an excellent day. I noticed that I was the only person in the room wearing a tie! Also noticed the jazz soundtrack during the breaks – wonderful! It was the first conference I have attended where the Twitter feed from the event was displayed on a screen at the front of the room, many of the notes I took were ‘tweet bites’ rather than ‘sound bites’, so thanks to everyone who was tweeting there yesterday, I think I have followed most if not all of you, if I wasn’t already following you. I particularly enjoyed the presentations from Guy Stephens, Bian Salins, Ben Kay, Martin Hill-Wilson and the contributions from Vincent Boon and Frank Eliason, but I took something from every presentation and was very happy to be in a room full of customer service professionals and supporters for the day. Thank you to Derek Williams at The WOW! Awards for suggesting that I attend.
Here, in no particular order, are some of the highlights, all more or less written in 140 character tweet-bites!
‘Social customer service has not worked, companies are afraid of their customers’
‘Conversations within and outside of organisations’
‘We have always wanted to share, now it’s easy’
‘Decision making is changing’
‘The customer is driving the conversation’
‘90% of the data that we have has been generated in the past two years’
‘People are moving faster than you can ever move as an organisation’
‘What are your customers complaining about and are you aware?’
‘Have process but retain pioneering spirit’
‘There are more ways to complain online than there are to say ‘thanks” (The WOW! Awards can help there!)
‘ROI of social media is engaging and listening’
‘Technology won’t make you customer-centric’
‘We all have an answer that someone else might need’
‘Every 30 years we change our thinking’
‘How do you train people in empathy?’
‘Mash up marketing and customer service’
‘Customers don’t care about organisational silos’
‘It’s much easier to know nothing about a customer and just flog’em stuff’
‘Assign each issue to one person until resolved’
‘You cannot effectively manage a group of more than 300 people’
‘Social media needs someone to lead it not someone to own it within an organisation’
‘Guerrilla tacrtics – the way to change things is to light a fire in the basement’
‘Define a process for a listening programme’
‘Person of the Year – The Protester’
‘Social customer is about experience of a brand right from awareness stage – first touching point’
‘What are your customers saying about you> Where is it being said?’
‘They are out there and they are talking about you’
‘If you do nothing else, listen!’
‘Do you want to be the tallest of the dwarves or to stand among the giants?’
‘Implement one idea from your customer community every three days’
‘Are you making the most of the slivers of brilliance within your organisation?’
‘Bring customers and senior managers together’
‘Your customers know more about your product than you do’
‘Are you a customer service evangelist within your business?’
‘Everything must be alright in the customer service departmnt because they have balloons’
‘Customers and employees own the brand’
‘Working in social media requires a culture shift’
‘The change starts at the top’
‘Always Capitalise the word Customer’
‘Different communication channels for different generations/preferences’
‘Saving the world from bad #custserv’
‘Focus on disloyal customers’
‘Customers don’t want a relationship but they do want the benefits a relationship brings’
Spotify mantra: ‘Move fast, break things’
That’s all folks, enjoy, and I’ll see you again soon!