The following post was adapted from Social Media Customer Care National Champion on johnmacdaniel.net.
Congratulations to Duke University. After starting with 68 teams, you clearly are the NCAA 2015 Basketball Champion. However picking a National Champion for Social Customer Care isn’t nearly as objective.
Over the last two blogs, Social Customer Care Sweet Sixteen and Social Customer Care Elite Eight, I have provided 24 tips. For this particular series I’ve decided to select a tip that I see as absolutely essential to providing supreme customer service, regardless of the consumer’s channel of choice.
So without further ado, my 2015 Social Customer Care National Champion is:
Listen/Interpret/Recognize and then Respond to both informational needs (what a customer wants) and emotional needs (how a customer feels).
For the purpose of this post, I define emotional needs as any feeling that a consumer may have felt that is associated with their interpretation of their experience with a brand, and that may require acknowledgement. Informational needs are defined as content (information) that is being requested that will assist the customer.
Before a customer decides to tweet something about your company, or comment on one of your brand properties, they have already had an experience with your product. And every experience has an emotion attached to it. So comments therefore can contain clues as how that customer is feeling and what they desire.
For more information on employing this method, please see the full post, Social Media Customer Care National Champion on johnmacdaniel.net.
If done correctly, the recognition and response to the customer needs will generate a new positive experience for the customer. If botched, the customer may interpret the new experience in a negative light, which could lead to a loss of customer and/or negative word of mouth messaging.
The other social customer care tips from the last two blog posts are important. But in their own unique way, they ultimately are serving my 2015 Social Customer Care Champion, Recognizing and Responding to Informational and Emotional needs. Because ultimately how you listen, interact and respond to your customer is what your customer really cares about.
