Facebook & Customer Service

How Carillion has started to use social media to directly engage with its customers

27 July 2011

Jamie McDonald Customer Service Director

Weekly Contact Channels

20,000 email

5,000

2,000

3,000 web hits

10,000 texts

calls

whitemail

Undertaking 300,000 repair jobs annually to 44,000 homes

70% of customers score us at 9/10 or 10/10 for overall service

What Should We Do?

Nothing? Who? PR/Comms or Customer Service? Neutral, active or robust?

Neutral = Thanks for the feedback, Ill pass it to the right person Active = Thanks for the feedback, sorry we failed, well use this to get better Robust = Thanks for the feedback, sorry we have failed, I will sort this for you, give me your details in a PM

How do we handle arguments and untruths, and protect our team? What are other people doing? We didnt engage with these five organisations, but we closely evaluated their facebook sites

The Carillion Facebook Model

Key Tactics Owned by the Customer Service Team Led from the Director initially to help convince our doubters Adopt a proactive robust approach to issues Informal but professional language: different from a complaint letter

The Three Golden Rules Customers who use facebook should receive the same service standard Criticism of named people is deleted with an apology and an explanation, and a request that Private Messages are used instead Criticism of our client or other stakeholders is not allowed as they have no right of reply

Pilot: What We Found

1000

900

800

700

600

500

400

300

200

100

Growth in membership was straight line for the first few thousand

80

70

60

50

40

30

20

10

Weekly member acquisition is irregular, bordering on a random distribution

Our resourcing quotient is about 0.25 FTE for every 1,000 members

Pilot: What We Found

Pilot: Ten Key Findings

Most posts are negative

Most customers who post think its a great idea

Some customers dont always tell the whole truth

Internal doubters outnumber external ones

Customers start to help and support each other

But a lot are positive

But some compliments are very backhanded But about 99% are true

Weve got a whole new dimension of internal 360o feedback

You have to get used to not being in control

Beyond The Pilot

Facebook sub-team established within the Customer Care team

The guys use their first names only, and no photos

My senior team and I still dip in, visibly and frequently

Evolved from Group to Page, and content enrichment underway

Twitter evaluated, but our customers arent there, yet?

Monitoring apps reviewed, but not taken forward, yet?

Facebook will be eclipsed at some point, but we are on the road now

Its become a way of life

Five Final Thoughts

If you dont get into social media, your customers will (are) anyway Getting involved opens a whole new world of pain & pleasure Youll get a wealth of valuable feedback, actions and ideas Youll get credit from customers for doing it, even the unhappy ones Losing control can be really good