Chobani – A Creamy Example of Customer Service through Social Media
Chobani Greek yogurt is amazing. In the world of Greek yogurt, its high-protein, low-fat deliciousness really is just second to none. But do you know what else is amazing about Chobani? Their customer service.
It all started on a Wednesday. I decided to have a Chobani for an afternoon snack but when I took it out of the fridge the lid felt very taut, like there was a pressure build-up inside. Most cups I’d had didn’t look or feel like this so I tweeted “Is my @Chobani supposed to look like it’s about to explode? Exp. date 2/12/12…”
Within seven minutes (yes, seven!) I had a reply: “Oh no! So sorry about that. Shoot us an email at care[at]chobani dot com & we’ll take care of you.”
I promptly emailed them as requested and got a reply in 22 minutes. Their customer service representative, Ashley, apologized profusely, asked me to tell her a little bit about the Chobani I’d bought, and then asked for my mailing address so she could send me some product coupons. I replied with the information she asked for and voila! Within a few days I received yet another apology letter in the mail along with a few coupons for FREE Chobani. Is that customer service or what? I sure think so. Thanks to Ashley’s quick actions I’ll remain a loyal Chobani customer for a long time to come.
Lessons Learned
What Chobani did in this story, which is 100% true, is nothing short of flawless execution of customer service. They obviously “get it” and have well-established procedures for dealing with customer service complaints over Social Media. Let’s wrap up the story by reviewing how your small business can follow Chobani’s example and turn a dissatisfied customer into a fanatical brand advocate:
- Respond to inquiries as quickly as possible. Customers turn to social media because they want to be heard. Respond quickly and they’ll know you’re actively looking to engage with them, which shows you care about what they have to say.
- Apologize. The customer is always right, even when they’re wrong. While this seems pretty basic, it’s easy to get defensive about your products or your brand. Just take a deep breath, say you’re sorry, and move on.
- Explain what you’re going to do to make things right. In addition to an apology, offer your customer something for their trouble. Offer some free product, a discount on their next monthly bill, or whatever you think they’ll like. Give freely, as the more impressive the gift the more likely the person will tell their friends about it.
- Be personable. When I emailed Chobani I got an answer from a person with a name and a real e-mail address, not a nameless customer agent. The letter I got in the mail was personalized and signed in ink by the same person. Make sure your customers know there are real people behind your brand.
- Have a plan. Work within your organization to develop official best practices that incorporate the previous steps. Train your staff how to find and respond to your customer complaints and establish communications guidelines to make sure they always respond appropriately.
While none of the steps here are all that revolutionary, it takes training and commitment to make sure every customer service incident is dealt with successfully. The real key here is to make it central to your corporate culture for each employee to look at every customer interaction as an opportunity to win a customer for life. This may not happen overnight, but after some time you may find yourself being blogged about for your customer service!
Have you had any recent customer service success stories you can share? As always, we encourage everyone to leave questions and comments in the field below.
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Three Tools to Track your Brand’s Online Engagement
Most small businesses I speak with are wary of trying something as unfamiliar to them as building a website or spending money on social media marketing. Luckily there are plenty of success stories and business cases out there to show them how many other businesses similar to theirs have had wild success with the same strategies I propose. If you’d like to figure out how successful your own online marketing strategy is, here are three free tools we suggest you use to track your results.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics will tell you more than you ever wanted to know about your website’s performance. It is a free service offered by Google that tracks every visitor to your website and records several different sets of data about how each interacts with it. This data includes, but is not limited to how the users found your site, what content they looked at and for how long, where they live, and more.
While that may sound very basic, the correlation and insights of Google Analytics are very powerful. Tracking the source of visitors to your site can help you determine which off-line marketing campaigns are yielding conversions, whether that’s signing up for a newsletter or ordering a product online. Examining the time spent on each page of your site can help you figure out which content may need a little facelift to more effectively present your business. All in all, tracking website traffic is the single most important thing you can do for your business if you care at all about your online presence.
Klout
While Google Analytics is the standard for tracking a website’s performance, it can’t give you any meaningful insights about the success of your social media campaigns, unless all you do with social media is repeatedly link back to your website. Luckily we have Klout, which measures Facebook Likes, Tweets and Retweets, YouTube views and comments, and many more social metrics to construct an overall picture of your brand’s social influence. Once it has an idea of your influence it assigns it a weighted numerical score from 1 to 100. Just for reference, Justin Bieber’s Klout has recently fallen from 100 to 98. President Barack Obama’s Klout Score is steady at 87.
While no one knows exactly how a Klout score is constructed, we know it measures primarily the size of your audience, your influence over it, and your likelihood of having your message to that audience amplified. Additionally, now that Klout has released the “+K” feature, your followers can endorse your brand’s expertise and raise your Klout score simply by clicking a button corresponding to one of the subjects Klout judges you to be influential to.
CrowdBooster
Last, but certainly not least, is CrowdBooster, which analyzes the performance of tweets and Facebook status updates to help you determine the best times for you to post and provide suggestions for who you should engage with. Without measuring the more than dozen social networks of Klout it’s not incredibly comprehensive but the main advantage is that it provides suggestions for improving your engagement on the “Big Two” social networks.
The most helpful feature of CrowdBooster is the graph of all your recent status updates. This allows you to see at a glance each recent Tweet or Facebook post and the impressions and retweets/comments of each, which helps you learn which status updates your audience is most receptive to. Secondly, CrowdBooster will analyze your past updates’ performance and suggest to you which times of day you should be posting updates. Lastly, the service will also tell you who your most influential recent followers are so you can reach out to them and start forming relationships.
Conclusion
Individually, each of these tools offers incredible insight into how online marketing campaigns are performing but when the three are combined together one can really get a great understanding of how to increase brand awareness and hone campaigns with nearly surgical precision. Do you have any tools that are invaluable in your brand management? Leave a comment and let us know!
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How to Add a User to Google Analytics
If you’ve implemented Google Analytics to track your website’s traffic statistics you’ll find that over the course of time you’ll occasionally need to share your data with coworkers, marketing or technology consultants, or others. While Google Analytics does have export and reporting functionalities, sometimes it’s just easier to give people direct access to your Analytics account, and this is exactly what we’ll be teaching you how to do in this video – to enable others to access your Google Analytics data.
- First, go to http://www.google.com/analytics and login.
- Click on the profile name of the site whose data you would like to share.
- Click the gear near the top-right corner of the page.
- Click the “Users” tab.
- On the Users tab, you can see the name, e-mail address, and role of all the users who currently have access to this profile.
- To add a new user click the “Add New User” button.
- Enter the Google e-mail address of the individual you’d like to add to this Analytics profile, then click “Create User”.
- Confirm that the user was successfully added. The default role for a new user is “Collaborator”, which means the user can view all data within this profile but cannot grant new users access as we just did. If you would like make your new user an Administrator you can easily do that.
- First click the “settings” link for that user, to the right of his role.
- On the Profile User Settings screen, click the button next to “Administrator” and then click “Save”.
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How to Sign up for Google Analytics
This video is the first in a series of “How-To” instructional segments. We get many questions about how to sign up for and use Google Analytics so the first few videos will cover Google Analytics and its various features and functionality; however if you have any requests for videos on other subjects please feel free to contact us. Also, as this is our first training video we highly encourage you to comment below and let us know what you think of the video – please be brutally honest!
Written Instructions:
All you need to get started with Google Analytics is a GMail account. If your business uses the Google applications suite and you have a business e-mail address hosted by Google that will work too. To sign up for Google Analytics complete the following steps:
- Go to the Google Analytics home page and login by entering your regular Google (or corporate) credentials and clicking “Sign In”.
- On the next screen, click the “Sign Up” button.
- On the screen after that, enter: 1) The address of the first website you’d like to track with Google Analytics. 2) Under “Account Name” enter a “nickname” that you can use to refer to this site within your Google Analytics dashboard. 3) Your country and 4) Your time zone.
- Then verify that everything is correct, and click “Continue”.
- On the following screen, simply complete the first name, last name, and country fields, and then again click “continue”.
- Read through the Google Analytics Terms of Service.
- If you agree to them, click the checkbox indicating your agreement and then click “Create New Account” button.
- Account setup is complete!
- (Optional) Copy/Paste your custom Google Analytics tracking code for insertion into your website, e-mail the tracking code to someone, or continue on to your Google Analytics dashboard.
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The Great Twitter Experiment – Listening for a Change
Yep, we’re doing an experiment. The Great Twitter experiment. You see, large companies like Coke already had global brand recognition before they engaged in social media so it’s no surprise that they were able to quickly grow to over 26 million Facebook fans and tens of thousands of Twitter followers. But what about the the little guy? How can “Joe the Plumber” or any other small business owner grow their social media following? And more importantly, how can the small business owner grow a quality following? The one word answer is “relationships”. And hopefully we’re going to prove that.
Why relationships? Because that’s what social media is all about. Sure, social media gives anyone a platform from which to spread the gospel of their business or their product, but who’s going to listen? Established brands like Coke have spent billions of dollars to acquire their customer base and build their brand. How can a small business do that on a small business budget? Well, it’s not easy but it’s simple:
- Listen to what people are saying in and around your industry.
- Ask questions.
- Make some new contacts who share some of your interests.
- Grow relationships.
- Share your expertise.
Growing your following is so simple in fact, that for the month of May Denton Business Solutions is going to be listening for a change. Rather than sharing content that we think would be useful to small business owners we’re going to be using the Twitter “Search” feature to actively listen to what people are saying and try to learn more about their technology challenges. We’ll also be actively engaging with other people who work within some of our core competencies such as Google Analytics, Social Media, etc and work on developing some new peer relationships as well.
What we won’t do is self-promote. We won’t post a link to our website or blog unless it’s in direct response to a person’s question. We won’t retweet other people’s posts, and we won’t be tweeting any new content unless it’s in response to another person’s Tweet we found through searching on keywords. We also won’t seek out new followers. We won’t redeem any Twiends seeds or ask anyone to follow us. We will continue to auto follow-back.
In summary, if we knew what the results of our experiment would be we wouldn’t do it. Over the course of The Great Twitter Experiment we’ll be checking several metrics. First off, the rate of Twitter growth, our Klout scores, and website traffic. Secondly, we’ll be tracking other interaction escalation from Twitter to e-mail, phone, RSS, or web traffic. All in all we’re pretty excited about what the month may bring. If you have questions, comments, or predictions let us know. Otherwise let the Great Twitter Experiment begin!
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Putting your Business on the Map with Google Places
A study by Pew Internet reported last year that fifty-eight percent of Americans research products and services online before buying. That means it’s more important than ever to increase your business’ online visibility and the chance that local consumers can find it. One simple way to do this is by maintaining a free Google Places page for your business.
Google Places is like a super-charged version of the Yellow Pages. Integrated into Google Maps (and by extension regular Google search results), it not only contains a business’ name, address, and phone number but also its location on a map, pictures, hours of operation, user reviews, and more.
Where does all this information come from? The reviews are pulled from all over the internet, including popular sites like Yelp.com, UrbanSpoon.com, and CitySearch.com. Some basic information can be filled in by the public but most of the details should come from you – the business owner!
To begin, search Google Maps for your business. Once you find it, click on the the light blue “More Info” link to arrive at your Google Places page. To begin editing, click the “Business Owner” link, follow the prompts, and you’ll be able to begin work on your business’ profile. For maximum visibility, make sure you fill out every section possible, including business hours, payment methods, and the types of services your business offers. Also, don’t forget to upload some pictures related to the products or services you offer.
Once you’ve completed your business’ profile and saved all the changes, Google will mail you a postcard with the steps required to validate the information. But what to do after you’ve setup and validated your site? Here are some ideas to get you started:
- Send your happiest customers a link to your Places page and ask them to review you.
- Run a special promotion on your Places page using the “offer” feature.
- Purchase Google Tags to highlight your business and make it stand out over the competition.
- Monitor your page to see what people are saying about your business.
- Print a QR code to display at your business to help your customers find and rate you online.
- Check your page’s interaction statistics to see how many people have seen and acted on your Places page and offers.
Have we left anything out? Have you found another way to use Google Places to add value to your business? If so, leave a comment here and tell us about it! Otherwise, check out this article by the Google SMB Blog for some more tips on creating an effective presence on Google Places!
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