How Dell Tackles Social Customer Service

Giovani Social customer service is becoming more important to a company’s success than ever before. What was once primarily used as an opportunity for good PR and marketing strategies is now an integral piece of the customer service puzzle. When a company publicly engages with their customers via social it shows their followers they are not afraid to openly discuss any issue that may come up and take responsibility for their mistakes. This sort of public interaction creates a deeper sense of trust between a business and their customer. But how do you define where in your company social customer service belongs? Where do you draw the line when it comes to addressing complaints? How do you know if your efforts with social are even making a difference?

Giovanni Tavani has the answers to these questions and then some. At Dell for over 14 years, Giovani currently serves as Global Social Media Manager. In 2010 Giovanni was appointed as leader of the Social Media Support team which is currently up and running in 15 different languages. At present Giovanni leads the Global operations for EMEA, Latin America and APJ and drives the development of customer solutions and digital content through Social Media. I will be talking social customer service with Giovani today at the Customer Service Summit in New York but you can read some of our conversation here:

Drew: Dell was an early adopter of social customer service— how has your approach evolved over the last couple of years?  Then,

Yes, we expanded our team & scope to all global languages, became a central team/organization and developed our approach, no longer “limited” to handling customers` queries but also to build meaningful content for our customers to anticipate their needs.

Drew: Social listening is a big challenge for popular brands — brands like McDonalds get several mentions a minute and of course not all are positive.  How do you decide which complaints to respond to?  Does every complaint warrant are response?  

We do not only receive complaints. In the early days people used social media to complain, now even users consider it as a channel like voice or chat. We respond to all posts except, mostly on forums, where tech savvy users interact with each other with good solutions/suggestions.

Drew: There is some debate in the industry about celebrity complaints.  Some argue these folks warrant special treatment as they have such a large sphere of influence, Others will say that no customer should be more important than another in this arena.  What do you think?

I agree all customers should be treated in the same way, which means….if we know that an exceptional CX can be delivered to celebrities, I don`t see why the same exceptional experience shouldn`t be delivered to all customers!

Drew:  Have their been cases with when social listening identified a product issue or opportunity and if so, how does your team aggregate customer feedback and determine what should be escalated to the product development teams?  

With regards to Win10 upgrade, which went very well, we knew it would be a top social topic, so we built huge campaigns of tips & tricks, how-tos, videos to anticipate all potential questions and to make the Win10 experience even better for our customers. We decided to anticipate rather than suffering from too many queries on the same topic if we didn`t act proactively.

Drew: Can you speak about a particular social customer service success story?  

Every time we give an answer to a customer and we also take the action in an end2end fashion, that`s our success stories every day. We never ask another department to handle and we never ask customers to contact someone else or to change the channel. That`s the successful approach we have and want to keep investing on. In terms of strategy, I am proud of having been the one to have some game changing ideas in the past couple of years: do not limit to customer support but build posts with #DellTips (AKA proactive solutions) in an attractive way, i.e. bring in people with digital marketing skills into customer support rather than “limit” to IT technical profiles. On the video strategy piece, we considered 1. YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine of the web and 2. Videos built through agencies are expensive. So I had the idea to see what universities could do in some kind of R&D environment focused on audio-visual medias. We found the best place in Brazil, in a very well known university campus, where movies and animations are created. We signed a deal with them to exchange skills and internships and build professional videos with animations and talking heads in all the languages we needed while keeping costs under control.

Drew: Does your purview include international social accounts?  If so, what are some of the challenges that you’ve been able to overcome? 

Yes, we cover 18 languages (and many more countries). The biggest challenge I am still dealing with is the huge growth of China on social media. 1 year ago we could handle the volumes with 6 community managers, now we are at 22 and need 20 more. I could imagine China would grow (that was pretty obvious from day 1….) but the growth is more of an explosion now as it`s going so fast. So the challenge is mainly on keeping leadership aware of a fact Vs talking about a forecast and then go hire the best profile and fast. This is still work in progress…..and I guess that is just the beginning of China growth on Social Media, also considering their WeChat platform is really cool and it already works outside of China.

Drew: is there a company out there that you think does a really amazing job with social customer service? If so, why?

I see Emirates airline as a good example. I travel a lot and use them a lot. Their idea of CX is just “excellence” in every part of their customer journey and they always respond in a timely manner with a real solution with professional and empowered agents. There are many other companies like Coca-Cola, Nike, Adidas which are really great on social media but I prefer to look at companies which sell a product that generates a long lasting customer journey Vs a short term product consumption. These other companies can afford having mainly marketing to handle their social presence, while companies like Dell, airlines o car makers must have a social social customer support presence, because the product usage experience is as important as the purchase and unboxing experience.

Drew:  How do evaluate the success of your social customer service program?

Growing volumes year-on-year, similar KPI/metrics as the rest of the company, CX above all, to have the right level of trust and visibility from the leadership team.

Managing Customer Feedback

If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by the volume of your brand’s customer service chatter, listen to this. McDonald’s receives five mentions every second on social media. That’s 300 per minute, 18,000 per hour… you get the idea. How can the company possibly sift through the noise and engage its customers with such a constant barrage of interaction?

Kim Musgrave, Social Media Team Leader at McDonald’s, answered this question and more during our panel together at the Social Media for Customer Service Summit in New York. There we discussed how to best capture, manage and analyze customer feedback to improve business performance and create lasting relationships. Kim shared how McDonald’s tackles customer service via social media and agreed to expound a bit further on their strategy in this interview. I suspect you will find her comments quite enlightening.

Drew: How long have you been in your current role and how long have you been at McDonald’s?
I have been at McDonald’s just over four years, and as the social opportunities evolved, I became the Social Media Manager in Customer Experience & Insights in 2011. In this role, I work closely with the Communication & Marketing teams to drive the social media strategy for customer engagement and insights for the U.S. business. This includes developing processes for targeted engagement to build customer loyalty as well as using social data as a source of customer feedback about products and service.

Drew: The Twitter handle @Reachout_McD is relatively new. Tell me a bit about the thinking behind this particular handle relative to @McDonalds and how it has worked thus far. 
The @McDonalds Twitter handle was born in late 2009 as a way for our customers to follow us for the latest McDonald’s news and promotions. As our follower count grew, so did the opportunity to give our customers a place to share feedback, ask a question, etc.

Drew: @ReachOut_McD Twitter tends to be mainly listening & responding versus creating original content. Just curious, why?
Our social service team responds to @McDonalds customer service issues via the @Reachout_McD dedicated handle. We wanted a place to celebrate our customers who have great experiences at McDonald’s, so we re-tweet those as well.

Drew: There is a lot of chatter on Twitter about McDonald’s every day. What kinds of challenges has this created from a listening standpoint?  
McDonald’s serves over 28 million customers in the U.S. each day. In social media, McDonald’s is currently mentioned every second! While tracking total volume/buzz is one metric, we really want to get to the “meat” of the conversations. Due to the fact that about 80% of our mentions are from Twitter, this context can ben be challenging with slang, sarcasm and profanity. “Just killed this Big Mac,” is that positive or negative? We are currently testing tools to get to the sentiment and emotion behind the mention and are finding only about 10% have this insight.

Drew:  Given all the noise, how do you decide what is worthy of a response? Or said differently, do you have different policies for how you deal with positive feedback from customers vs. how you deal with negative feedback from customers on social media? 
Our cross-functional team focuses on @McDonalds for listening and engagement 7 days a week. This team includes Customer Service (both at home office and call center), Communications, PR, and Agencies. As the volume of mentions has increased, we developed a “Playbook” with guidelines for response and a very simple Red, Yellow, Green light system.

Drew: Everyone talks about social listening but not every brand is doing it. How well do you think your team is listening, and are there any tools that are working particularly well for you?
McDonald’s has been listening in social media since 2008 and the way we report to the business has evolved as we have communicated the value of social data. Sentiment is the most challenging, as I mentioned above, so having a tool that can capture the volume, then break down the context in an accurate way, continues to be an area of opportunity.

Drew: Can you provide an example of social listening that helped inform other business activities (marketing, product dev, etc)?
Improving the restaurant experience is one of the opportunities for McDonald’s customer engagement in social. These engagement insights are combined with the traditional voice of customer insights to identify opportunities: how fast, accurate, and friendly is the service? Trending this over time (ie. monthly) can provide opportunities for operations.

Drew:  If a comment happens to come from a famous person, do you handle the response differently?  
Every customer of McDonald’s is important regardless of Klout, number of followers or celebrity status.  Recently, McDonald’s tweeted Al Roker because he missed his first day of work in 39 years by sleeping in. We thought it would be fun to post about it regarding McCafe and then they mentioned it on Good Morning America.

Drew: Let’s talk about your social team structure.  Do you have a separate group for brand social and service social?
We have a cross-functional team. Social customer service is my area, and I have a dedicated supervisor for Twitter customer service. We are currently working with a few of our call center agents to develop the social care process. Facebook is managed by an agency, but we stay very closely aligned and work on service processes.

Drew: How do you see service via social media evolving over the next 2-3 years? What kinds of things would you like to see improved?  
I see the customer expecting brands to be very responsive (just like calling), but also authentic in social customer service—no auto replies. For brands with increasing mentions in social, having the best social tool for prioritization and routing will be a necessity.