Social Media & Customer Service Lessons from the Cable Giant

Prior to joining SEER, I spent almost six years working for Comcast. The instant anyone found that out, I would be bombarded with questions and (too often) complaints about the service they’d received previously. To this day, I still get calls from friends asking why their DVR no longer records their favorite program. People just want to know that someone’s listening.

When I read about a Comcast employee reaching out to fellow blogger Michael Arrington over the weekend, I thought it was absolutely brilliant. For anyone not familiar with the story, Michael had an outage and started posting about it on Twitter, just to rant about the problems he was dealing with. Imagine his surprise when Comcast actually called him twenty minutes later to help fix the problem he was having. It turns out a manager at Comcast, Frank Eliason aka @comcastcares, has taken to monitoring mentions of Comcast on Twitter and has slowly and quietly been responding to people for the past six months – a revolutionary idea and a brilliant way to actively connect with customers. This was picked up all over the blogosphere, and was even written about in one of my favorite sites - The Consumerist.

I spoke to Frank about the work he was doing and how he was changing the customer service industry. The most amazing thing for me to hear is that he’s manually tracking, reading, and responding to these Twitters on his own, as Comcast didn’t expect this service to become public knowledge for some time. Frank explained that “the challenge to the publicity is that we must be seen, when in the past we were a little more quiet reaching out when we could. We know we need to improve, and this is a small part of that effort.”

So what can you, as a company owner, learn from Comcast’s example?

• Create a Twitter account – Not only can you connect with people quickly, but you may have access to people in your industry that you never expected to get to communicate with.
• Set up Twitter tracking – This can be done in several ways. Through your Twitter account, you can set up tracking on IM or SMS with a simple “track @rachael823” command. You can also use sites like http://www.tweetscan.com to show you history of the term you’re searching for.
• Smart business owners would track their personal name, company name, domains, competitors’ names, and even top keywords for their industry to see who’s talking about anything related to them.
• Do this across all social media sites and blogs.
• Set up Google Alerts to notify you when any of these terms come up.
• If anyone is talking about you, positive or negative, it’s such an easy task to reach out to them, especially on Twitter. How long does it take you to type 140 characters? The effect that effort has on the recipient is well worth it.

Media Bullseye had a great question: Where is everyone else? Is anyone out there already taking action to monitor their reputation online through social media channels?

After years of hearing about how great Rackspace is as a hosting provider, we finally bucked up and paid the big guns the big dollars for their “Fanatical Support”.

I mean, let’s be honest, how many brands accurately reflect who they SAY they are?

So in the early phases, they truly were fanatical & we liked working with them, then BOOM a major outage. After this recent outage at Rackspace, I saw a link to this page that explained a the incident that caused outages. It is still linked from their homepage and outlined what was happening, what they were doing to fix it, and what steps they were putting in place to keep it from happening again.
That prompted this blog post…

These guys put “fanatical support” on everything with their name, and you know what? They lived up to it. While no service business can ever say that they will never have a problem, it is how they REACT to those problems that separates one company that says…”hey we’re great” from their competitor who also says ….guess what… “we’re great too.”

I only hope that this transparency leads to MORE customers for rackspace, not less. Because at least they don’t hide their wounds, they not doing some spin, they took the mistakes on the chin and are looking to improve.
Problems and friction between customer and client are where the rubber meets the road. I come across this every day in our industry. Picking an SEO company is difficult, why? Because we all sound the same, well not all…but most. It is a hard business to differentiate yourself with bullet points and powerpoint slides.

It got me thinking further…about the Jetblue fiasco and how David Needleman reacted sure, there may have been a PR person whispering in his ear a bit, but the company is one of openness in its culture so this response doesn’t surprise me.

So what does all this have to do with SEER? At the end of the day, I want SEER to always be a company that:

• treats each other, our clients, vendors, partners, and friends well
• values and recognizes the contributions everyone makes to our clients successes
• is “fanatical” about ensuring that the budgets invested in us make solid returns for our clients
• does everything we can to help our clients achieve their goals
• has an impact on our community
• attracts great talented people who want to kick ass and make a difference

To steal a line from Rackspace:

Fanatical Support can’t be captured with bullet points or summed up with a simple graphic.
For every customer, it’s an experience that impacts their work and lives in very different and powerful ways.
So we’ll let them speak for themselves and for Fanatical Support.

For those of you who are selecting SEO companies, stop looking for the bullet points!! We SEO types all have access to the same information, we all read the same blogs, yet what makes ones better than the other?? I’ll be discussing that topic in my next post, stay tuned.

BTW - check out how yahoo has responded to an outage on Cyber Monday for its Yahoo! stores, leaving many merchants unable to transact on the busiest day of the online shopping year. how does it compare to Rackspace? As of today 24 hours later, they are not responding on their own blog…does that sound fanatical to you?

Camelbak! That’s the correct answer. Well, it’s the brand I was seeking, and at first I didn’t know the proper name. I knew there was a “camel” in it, so I tried “camel pack.” Here’s what came back:

This was a first search, and you can guess a user may then recognize “Camelbak” as a brand based on these results. But where is Camelbak.com?! If they’re not on page one, the user has already been educated and they have the opportunity to click any of these paid links to purchase.

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Internet retailer recently profiled an amazing tool built by Home Depot to help even the most novice outdoor chef pick the right grill. While I hate the web 2.0 label, this tool is what the web should be about in web 1.0, 2.0, or 3.0…the development of tools that helps to make information retrieval easier. Take a look below…looks easy enough right?

It is helpful (which is somehow web 2.0 now) in assisting people in narrowing down or honing in on the right grill for their needs. It uses a very nice interface to make the process smooth and easy! It combines product information, videos, and more in a very digestible and tastefully done way. See our thoughts on the Nike golf ball selector, who has a similar tool, that at the time was tough to find. Looks like it was a success, not to mention Home Depot has some serious numbers to show the REAL value of this tool. In the article it states:

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