Getting a Grip on the New Customer Service

Many business gurus posit that customer service is the new marketing. In the age of Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter, your marketing in traditional ways still counts, but more so is your response, your participation, your presence online.

Marsha Collier is one of the leading authors in this new front and has written a new book: The Ultimate Online Customer Service Guide. This book gives you the keys to authentic and engaged service to customers through social media. Using a blend of traditional and social media customer service case studies, and instructions on how to execute quality customer service, this book enables you to access the opportunities that social media presents as a means of serving customers.

Marsha opens the book with a chapter on what I would have called, up to now, wu-wu. That is a highly technical term for the warm and fuzzy stuff of life. She starts with Intuition.

Hang with me, because you'll find it worthwhile. Some tidbits from the opening chapter:

If you look, you'll find plenty of examples of leaders using their intuition. Leading by intuition does not mean making uninformed or sporadic decisions....

This means that by being involved in online outreach you receive constant feeds from your target market and your employees. By tapping into what your customers need and want, and how those demands are or are not being met by those who regularly interact with them, you will be in a stronger position to use your intuition more effectively.

Therein lies the opportunity for your customer service engagement. With your online presence, you are in the position to regularly interact with customers. You have the opportunity to see what works and what doesn't....

The part that I found fascinating was an interview Marsha has with former Forrester analyst, Dr. Natalie Petouhoff (@DrNatalie on Twitter) who covered not only customer service and customer relationship management (CRM), but wrote the world's first social media return on investment (ROI) model. So here we have an expert who has tested and refined a real model for how you can get value out of social media sharing about online customer service. And I'm only in Chapter 1... Bottom line from this chapter one interview: small business has an innate advantage today.

Here are some of the other chapters:

• Quality Real-World, Small-Business Customer Service
• Using Your Web Site to Connect with Your Customer
• Developing a Blog to Engage Customers
• Connecting with Your Customers Where They Play
• Microblogging for Service, Fun, and Profit
• Checking Out Where Customers Review Your Business
• Knowing Your Customers' Expectations: How to Connect

Wallet Pop did a great interview with Marsha called The Customer Bill of Rights and its worth reading if you are selling online or if you have an online presence.

So, how are you using online customer service or traditional customer service to help you sell more? To help you sell more effectively, to nurture a relationship? If you're spending all your marketing budget on brochures or a fancy Facebook landing page (and tab), then you might be missing the opportunity to engage with your most valuable prospects directly.

Let me know in the comments what tools and techniques you find most useful in social media and other ways of engaging a customer.