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How Customer Services Affects a Brand

customer_service_agentHow do your company’s customer service tactics affect your brand?  Have you researched the relationship between customer service and brand image in your company and with your customers yet?  If not, you need to.  Customer service and brand image change in direct proportion to one another.

In other words, poor customer service (whether it actually is poor or is just perceived as poor doesn’t matter) leads to a negative brand image in consumers’ minds.  Great customer service, on the other hand, can have a significant impact in positive brand perceptions.  The power of social web conversations can boost these perceptions exponentially higher or lower.

How many times have you called a customer service line in need of help and found yourself spending 10 minutes navigating through automated services, desperately trying to connect with a human being.  However, when you finally can connect with a human being, that person provides you with inaccurate information or chooses not to be helpful at all.  Often there is a language barrier that makes it more frustrating for customers.

Sometimes, customer service agents are simply so unfriendly, bored or aloof, that the caller ends up feeling like he did something wrong by seeking help.  I understand that customer service is a thankless job (I’ve gotten on the phones in corporate customer service call centers more than once to get a better understanding of how the process works in order to better market it).  However, as a customer, you still deserve to be treated kindly and as if your call is important.  On more than one occasion, I’ve ended calls with customer service agents who have sounded particularly bored saying to the agent, “You’re getting paid to talk to me, right?”  The agent always answers in the affirmative to which I respond by saying, “Then you should really cheer up.  You are getting paid after all.”  I’m sure it doesn’t make a difference to the agent, but perhaps they’ll try to be a bit friendlier.  I can hope, right?

Of course, companies need to cut costs, and customer service is an easy place to do it.  However, the negative implications to your brand when customer service suffers are far-reaching and long-lasting. That’s damage that can be hard to erase or reverse.

Human nature makes it far more likely for disgruntled customers to tell people about their negative experiences with your company.  Happy customers are usually less likely to go out of their way to tell the world about how great your company is.  It’s important to go the extra mile to build loyal customers, but it’s also important to do the simple things that customers expect — such as giving them an easy way to get effective and friendly help when they need it.  After all, an essential part of brand-building is setting and meeting expectations for your brand.

Bottom-line, make a point to study how customer service affects your brand in the minds of consumers and how consumers react to those perceptions.  It’s more important than you might think.

Image: stock.xchng

Women Spend 30% More Time on Social Network Sites than Men Worldwide

woman_computerComScore released a new report this week called Women on the Web: How Women are Shaping the Internet, which offers enlightening statistics and trends related to how men and women use the Internet around the world.  Considering that women make most purchasing decisions, this is a report that brand managers need to read.

One of the most interesting findings in the comScore report tells us that women spend 30% more time on social networking sites than men do.  Not only do they spend more time on social networking sites each month (5.5 hours per month for women vs. 4 hours per month for men), but more women are using social networking sites then men with 75.8% of women around the world who access the Internet visiting a social networking site compared to 69.7% of men.

Not only do women spend more time on social networking sites across the globe, but the statistic holds true in specific regions as well, as shown below:

  • Latin America: women 94.1%; men 91.9%
  • North America: women 91.0%; men 87.5%
  • Europe: women 85.6%; men 80.6%
  • Asia Pacific: women 54.9%; men 50.7%

Furthermore, women spend more time online overall then men do globally.  In fact, women spend a full 8% more time online than month with an average of 25 hours per month (this includes all Web use, not just social networks use).  Women also spend 20% more time on retail sites than men, and women spend more time on comparison shopping and review sites.

Brands that want to connect with the female audience have a significant opportunity to do so online, particularly through social networking, comparison shopping sites, and review sites.  If your brand isn’t there, you’re missing a huge opportunity and leaving it open for your competitors to leverage making it more difficult for your brand to find space later.

You can follow the link to download a full copy of the Women on the Web: How Women are Shaping the Internet.

Image: stock.xchng

Domino’s Pizza Hopes to Strike Proverbial Gold with New Contest

dominos-pizza-proverbsThis month, Domino’s Pizza launched a campaign in the United States that asks consumers to submit entries into the Domino’s Pizza Proverbs Contest.  The winning proverbs will be printed on Domino’s Pizza boxes in the future.

The contest is fun in and of itself, but Domino’s, whose brand image has been tainted in recent years, is adding a social media element to the campaign that should spread the Domino’s brand love even further.  Not only can people submit their own proverbs, but they can also share their proverbs and the proverbs they like with a simple mouse click via Twitter and Facebook.

Judging will be based on creativity, originality and proper use of grammar.  However, the biggest miss in this contest is not allowing people to vote for the winner.  The prize is small so within a few days since the contest launched, only 535 proverbs had been submitted.  If this contest had a bigger prize and additional social media elements, it could be huge.

A few of the recently submitted proverbs are particularly favorable for the Domino’s brand image, including, “Beauty is only cheese deep, but true deliciousness comes from within.”  Others are simply entertaining, such as, “To leave the last slice is to be loved. To eat the last slice is to be happy.”

The lesson to learn is this: asking consumers to participate in events, activities, campaigns, and contests that can help to build your brand image is a great idea, but don’t be afraid to take the initiative to the next level of social sharing and interaction.

What do you think?

DoubleVerify Aims to Police the Online Advertising World

DoubleVerify is one of the leading online advertising verification companies in the world.  According to the company’s website, DoubleVerify verifies 35 billion advertising impressions per month for a diverse clientele of leading marketers, including hundreds of Fortune 500 companies.

This week, DoubleVerify announced the launch of its Advertising Fraud Detection Lab with the goal of identifying malicious sites, malware, spyware, and other forms of non-compliance that lead to inflated ad impression reporting.  Unfortunately, these activities are not new and they show no signs of going away.  DoubleVerify aims to reduce the amount of money advertisers pay for wasted ad impressions and the legal implications these fraudulent activities can lead to.

DoubleVerify plans to use its own technology combined with a team of experts from security and anti-virus organizations to research the online advertising environment and present their results after three months in the form of a white paper with the intention of helping online advertisers and legitimate publishers identify fraud risks and ensure brands reputations’ aren’t negatively impacted by potentially fraudulent activities.  You can read more in the official DoubleVerify press release.

Few marketers would argue that there is a problem related to online advertising wasted impressions.  The question is whether or not DoubleVerify’s research and resulting report will help the online advertising industry as a whole or simply create more clients for DoubleVerify’s services.  Certainly, this type of research has the potential to help an industry that has struggled against fraudulent activities in the past without the ability to offer proof of such activities.  Let’s hope that DoubleVerify’s Advertising Fraud Detection Lab offers some sort of help, or better yet — a solution.

What do you think?  Is a fraud detection service that can work across the online advertising industry likely to hit the scene anytime soon?  Leave  a comment and share your thoughts and predictions.

Facebook Asks Users to Share Stories about How Facebook Impacted Their Lives

On July 21, 2010, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a post on the Facebook blog that announced the social networking site had officially passed the 500 million global users mark (check out his video message here).

To celebrate, Facebook put together a number of stories about how the site impacted users’ lives.  To take the positive brand images further, Facebook launched an app that will appear on 31 partner sites (including the White House’s Facebook page) that asks Facebook users around the world to share their own stories about how Facebook has affected their lives in positive ways.  The app is called Facebook Stories.


Facebook_stories


This is a clever branding initiative by Facebook that leverages customer testimonials and feel-good messages to present the brand in an extremely positive light.  Following the negative criticism Facebook has faced in recent months related to its lack of privacy with users’ personal information, the Facebook Stories initiative is being launched at the perfect moment.

Having the Facebook Stories app appear in the tabs of 31 partner sites, made up primarily of non-profit organizations like UNICEF and the American Red Cross, is another clever move.

But that’s not all.  Facebook team members will also be hitting the road on a Facebook Stories road trip to visit towns around the United States to meet the people behind the stories.  It’s probably safe to assume that this road trip will lead to a video element for the Facebook Stories initiative, particularly since people can ‘enter’ for a chance to have the Facebook Stories road trip team visit them and learn their story about the impact they made using Facebook.

Will the effort work to restore confidence in the Facebook brand?  That remains to be seen.  It’s unlikely, but it certainly can’t hurt.  What do you think?  Can Facebook Stories have a significant impact on repairing the Facebook brand?