In an apparent effort to encourage its users to engage with its platform more freely, Twitter last week announced that it is removing the 140 character limit on Direct Messages.
In many markets, competition is fierce and customer loyalty seems harder and harder to develop.
One of the reasons: consumers are increasingly a sceptical lot.
Following a horrific train derailment, American rail operator Amtrak has come under fire for its handling of the communications related to the tragedy.
Among them, the organization was too slow to provide information and respond to inquiries.
Twitter is one of the most popular social platform for brands and it is being used for everything from mass marketing to customer service.
But some use cases have been easier to deal with than others because of Twitter’s restrictions on Direct Messages (DMs) which require the recipient of a DM to be following the sender.
The banking sector isn’t necessarily front of mind when we think about digital transformation, and in key areas of the digital experience they perform close to the average.
However digital innovation promises to connect and engage with consumers like never before.
Providing a great customer experience (CX) is impossible if you’re not implementing excellent and measurable customer service across every channel on which your customers can be found.
It used to be that a consumer would only come into contact with a single customer service representative in person or on the phone. The overall CX would succeed or fail based on that single interaction, which is a lot of pressure, not just for the agent, but for the entire company.
How does the ‘world’s local bank’ handle global social media?
When I began writing this post, I’d intended to take a quick tour around HSBC’s social channels and look at how one of finance’s (and the world’s) largest brands manages to communicate across so many distinct markets.
While online reviews are a positive thing for businesses today, there can be some downsides.
Discover how to deal with these and turn them into a positive for your company.
Not long ago I interviewed Beverley McIntyre, director of member services and support at News UK.
The extent to which a paywall has changed life at The Sun is quite remarkable. Last weekend, fingering Twitter, I saw that The Times and Sunday Times is offering a free iPad Mini to anyone taking out a premium subscription.
This intrigued me and I looked further at The Times member page, a more advanced product than The Sun when it comes to paywalls at News UK, having been in place for a while longer.
I saw a lot of features that I take to be trends in publishing strategy, customer support and web design.
Here they are…
Delivery and fulfilment methods are an effective way for brands to differentiate themselves from the competition.
ASOS’s success can be attributed in part to its offer of free delivery and returns on all orders, and many retailers are now seeing the benefits of offering a fast click and collect service.
Another fulfilment method I only recently became aware of is try-before-you-buy, which allows customers to test out products for free at home before deciding whether they want to pay for them.
It would appear to be an ill-judged idea for ecommerce retailers as they have to assume all the costs and risk. However there are a number of benefits:
In a continuing series of investigations into how companies use social for customer care, last week I took to Twitter, posed as an innocent customer and asked some of the most popular US retailers the same query.
The query would also test each brand’s true multichannel capabilities: “can I return an item bought online to my nearest branch?”
With this investigation we’ll be testing their response times and ability to satisfyingly bring a resolution to the query.
Other matters taken into consideration are whether the reply was a personal, human response, whether the retailer either operated a separate customer service Twitter account from the main one or whether it stated that the main account was also there for customer enquiries and whether operating hours were clearly stated.
Let’s take a look at the results…
Ongoing profit from a customer’s lifetime value is generally much higher than any one single transaction.
However in order to achieve higher customer lifetime values (CLV) you need to have some strong customer retention strategies.
If you do this, you’ll also find that it’s much cheaper to retain a loyal customer than it is to constantly acquire new ones. 82% of companies asked in our Cross Channel Marketing report agree that customer retention is cheaper than acquisition.
Customer retention is a must for any business where its goals are for long-term success. Here are some of the ways that you can achieve this.