Just a quick note on a blog post I ran across today…..
A gentleman wrote a blog post about loyalty marketing. He had an anecdote regarding a car rental tweet that earned the loyalty of a new customer.
“Chris Brogan, one of the social media mavens that I thoroughly respect and actually like too, told a story on Callie Lewis’s Geekbrief TV the other day about how a car service that that was supposed to pick him up to get him to Microsoft headquarters didn’t show. He tweeted his anger/anguish and a CEO of a national car service sent him a tweet with “here’s my cell.” Call it whenever you need a car and I’ll take care of it for you.” Car came, Brogan happy, loyal customer. As Chris rightfully said, “Yes, you may say its opportunistic, but he listened (to the tweet) and he solved my problem and now I’m loyal to him.”
That’s what I’m talkin’ about!”
Paul Greenberg wrote the post to talk about the emotional needs of the customer. By using social media in the above manner, we can connect to prospective customers in their moment of pain, fix the issue, and win their loyalty. These customers will most likely be far more loyal than those who never had issues in the first place.
Social media provides a new connectivity to customers that we have not previously had. Now, we can delight our customers in real time AND the benefit is that others will see us resolve the issues in the process. As a result, your customer service, satisfaction, and loyalty levels will certainly increase.
ahh…power to the people! I love hearing stories like this. Its reactionary, but its important to note that we’re all going to screw up sometime. If we show a true desire to fix the screw up, that is definitely putting us on the road to stronger customer connections.
SMB’s should take note. In the enterprise world, the challenge will be how to scale social CRM (which is what we’re talking about here) and how do we build a social architecture that allows for sustainable, structural change in business models. If I had the answer to that, I might be bigger than Chirs Brogan 🙂 thanks!