Social Media & Digital Marketing in Singapore

Instead Of ROI, How About Asking What Not Getting Involved In Social Media Is Costing You?

I had to do a marketing case study or “show and tell” in class awhile ago, what else would I use, but social media?

Two bloggers, Pat Law and Steven Hodson from Singapore and Canada, had negative experiences with Challenger (a Singaporean Best Buy alternative) and Tim Hortons (the Canadian alternative for Starbucks) respectively. With Pat, there was a huge mess with getting delivery on time, horrendous customer service and problems all round. With Steven, a Tim Hortons cashier short changed his wife of $20, and despite the fact that it was obvious from the CCTV that there was an error, they were told there was nothing Tim Hortons could do.

Both cases resulted in pretty strong words from the bloggers and the commenters against the companies involved, but also pretty strong statistics. Pat shared with me her blog stats, and there were over 1,000 views in five days, with the average time spent clocking at six and a half minutes.

Think about that. 1,000 people with 6.5 minutes of negative exposure to your brand. You can buy all the ads you want and you probably won’t even get 6.5 minutes of positive brand exposure in a month.

Why is this a problem?

Any Monkey Can Blog

It’s a problem for companies because it’s just too simple for anyone to set up a blog and blog about a negative experience with your company. Why would I bother picking up the phone calling customer service when odds are I’ll get crappy customer service anyway? It’s just easier to “stick it to the man” online.

The Mistake
Companies are mistakenly not monitoring their brands online, thinking “no one” cares. Well, one thousand people at 6.5minutes each suggest otherwise. I think when we’re talking about customer lifetime value and potentially large amounts of revenue being lost (you can rest assured I’m not buying a television from Challenger although I’m in the market for one), someone should at least be attempting to make things right.

So What Then?

I'm Not Listening

Companies need to focus on good customer service and relationships to differentiate themselves. Especially for companies like Challenger and Tim Hortons who are selling fairly homogenous products, it’s just too easy for a consumer to go to another electronics store or somewhere else for coffee. Particularly in this recession economy, excellent customer service both in and outside the store may just be the differentiating factor you need. If you’re going to hire those service staff anyway, you might as well make sure they’re doing a good job of it.

The bottom line is this. Stop asking what positive ROI social media is going to bring you, because it isn’t the most important question. If it manages to bring in some sales/conversions, great. But at the very least, it can be used to negate the effect of such negative word of mouth. From one blog post, Challenger easily lost a $3k purchase from me, and who knows who else? How many people are going to forego that product from your company because of something they read, and your company did not respond to set things right?

How much is not getting involved in the social media space costing you?

[Image credits: Any monkey can blog | I'm not listening]

Tags: bad customer service, best buy, blankanvas, canadian blogger, challenger, crappy customer service, excellent customer service, homogeneous products, marketing case study, pat law, show and tell, singapore blogger, social media, steven hodson, stick it to the man, tim hortons, winextra

Posted in Marketing, Poor Practices, case studies, social media | 7 Comments »

Sony Continues To Impress With Excellent Customer Service

So I chose a Vaio over a Dell a few months back and was suitably impressed with Sony’s excellent customer service.

Recently, my laptop crashed so I had to bring it in to the customer service centre at Wisma Atria. All was good, they told me they’d take my laptop for a week and give me a call. That was on Monday.

Fastforward to Wednesday, I got two missed calls from an unknown number and a third call within an hour. I was all ready for it to be some telemarketer but was pleasantly surprised to find it was Sony. Persistent customer care. It would’ve been so easy for the customer support guy to just hang up and call again tomorrow, after all, they did say a week. But there was effort made to get me on the phone once the job was done.

So after I got on the phone, I was told my hard disk crashed. I told the representative I was greatly disturbed that I had just bought it a couple of months ago and it had already crashed. To this I was given assurance that anomalies happen and he gave me a few tips to take care of my hard drive when I got it back.

Finally, I got the pick up details and needless to say, I was thrilled to get it two days ahead of schedule, and more importantly, Sony continues to impress me with their customer service. If it was just once when I was buying the laptop, I could write it off to a salesman trying to close a deal. But it has been consistent across multiple touchpoints with pre-sale, post-sale, warranty people, the person who helped me deal with my laptop and the tech support guy who called me after to explain the problem.

Normally, if a laptop died on me within three months of purchase, I’d be furious. But through Sony’s customer service and expectation management, it’s turned into an positive advocacy piece on my blog. Well done, Sony.

Tags: excellent customer service, laptop customer service, sony customer service

Posted in Singapore | No Comments »