Don't be afraid to have a tone of voice and show some personality with your engagement!

May 11, 2023

At the CX Excellence Summit in Belgrade, you will talk about how to simplify customer experience and how to deliver a better customer experience. Has CX become too complex in recent years? 

It certainly has become overcomplicated. I blame lots of new technologies and the hype that comes with them for mudding the waters and causing many businesses to lose focus on their specific customer needs.

After 7 years in Twitter, what are your plans for the future? 

In the short term, my alter ego, Mr. SaaS, will be working with start-ups here in Europe helping them take their products to market. Longer term, who knows! I've probably had enough of social media at this point, so will be looking at new horizons.

What are the most common things companies miss when building their social media customer experience? 

They tend to want to focus on every conceivable social channel as opposed to those that their customers actually use. If you are a digitally native, e-commerce platform perhaps TikTok and/or Instagram are the best ways to engage with customers and prospects. If you are an airline, Facebook and Twitter might be more appropriate. The second thing they miss is that they don't staff these channels appropriately and therefore customers get frustrated at slow response times. If you are going to deliver social customer service, it has to be fast, within an hour in most cases.

In your opinion, which are the top 5 things that a company can do to provide a great social media customer experience & build loyalty?

1.    Choose a few social channels to excel at
2.    Staff them appropriately
3.    Don't be afraid to have a tone of voice and show some personality with your engagement
4.    Make social a true resolution channel -- don't push them to another channel like phone or email
5.    Market the hell out of the fact that customers can engage with the brand on social

What about the worst? 

They would be the complete opposites of the five things I mentioned above...
1.    Trying to be all things to all people across all channels
2.    Staffed my marketing/coms teams as opposed to customer service professionals
3.    Very bland copy and paste responses
4.    Telling people to get in touch over another channel such as the phone

What are some of the projects you have worked on & are most proud of? 

While at Twitter I was proud of our work to increase data access and support for academics and researchers studying the global conversation happening on the network. I was an economic development volunteer in Romania for two years where I worked with a city council on ways to improve the local economy and support local businesses

What are your expectations for the future of CX?

First, you'll continue to see more tech emerge to help you manage your CX (sorry!) Some of this, such as the large language models we've been hearing about lately (such as ChatGPT) will be generally helpful and allow more automation of the more laborious tasks such as answering requests for information or account changes. 
Second, customer experience will become the differentiator, especially in highly competitive and commoditised industries.

Joe Rice recently left Twitter after 7.5 years in their Developer Platform team. To hear more from him on simplifying your CX process join us at the CX Excellence Summit in Belgrade on May 25th!

 

 

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#cx #customer #experience #belgrade #cxsummit #serbia #engagment