Last week, I had a Twitter exchange with @prsarahevans & @wilsonellis on how companies could best train and utilize their customer service team. There was talk of getting them off the script all together similar to the approach of Zappos along with having a semi-scripted almost PR-ish speak for the agents. At the end it was a lot of food for thought and got me thinking back on a program that my company ran a few years back called Learn the Customer (story HERE).

The principle was quite simple, a number of people across our organization would be trained and field actual customer service calls from our customers. At first the prospect scared the heck out of me, however it was an invaluable insight into our customers. So for one day (two hours) a week, I was just another agent, albeit one working in the company’s PR team. I dealt with a wide array of customers with emotions ranging from happy-go-lucky to those just wanting help on their order and ones just looking to tell me off. So needless to say it was an experience, one that I took a lot from. The biggest being that the more that I took the calls, the more I learned about what our customers liked, didn’t like and the best way to making them happy and bringing a tighter bond with our company. It was social networking at its best and the root of what PR is in general – making the company look good.

Fast forward a year and a half and I find myself much in the same position interacting with the customer base. Instead of donning a headset and banging away at a service tool box,  I am typing away in an open forum helping our customers attain satisfaction and hopefully building a stronger bond with the company via social media. In the past month alone, I held over 1,000 conversations on Twitter with our customers. While I’d love to say 100 percent were happy, others were less so and some missed the point of the whole social aspect all together and called the Tweets everything from creepy to simply saying fix my problem without giving information to do so.

Any which way, I still have a better understanding of what works and what doesn’t. My fumblings in a public forum although annoying, are something that can be learned from and also serve as an example of the human nature of social media. If it was perfect all of the time, the company account would be nothing but another bot ruining the conversations.

While I’ve learned someting from the experience, I wonder how well do you know your customer base? Granted numbers will tell you a lot about their spending habits and likes and dislikes, but what do you really know about them?

Do a quick Twitter search? Do you like what you see? Has your reputation gone a different route than you thought? Now do the same with a Go0gle Blog Search and Facebook public forum sweep? Take the learnings as you would any other metric and decide whether or not you are ready to join in the conversation.

Last week, I had a Twitter exchange with @prsarahevans & @wilsonellis on how companies could best train and utilize their customer service team. There was talk of getting them off the script all together similar to the approach of Zappos along with having a semi-scripted almost PR-ish speak for the agents. At the end it was a lot of food for thought and got me thinking back on a program that my company ran a few years back called Learn the Customer (story HERE).

The principle was quite simple, a number of people across our organization would be trained and field actual customer service calls from our customers. At first the prospect scared the heck out of me, however it was an invaluable insight into our customers. So for one day (two hours) a week, I was just another agent, albeit one working in the company’s PR team. I dealt with a wide array of customers with emotions ranging from happy-go-lucky to those just wanting help on their order and ones just looking to tell me off. So needless to say it was an experience, one that I took a lot from. The biggest being that the more that I took the calls, the more I learned about what our customers liked, didn’t like and the best way to making them happy and bringing a tighter bond with our company. It was social networking at its best and the root of what PR is in general – making the company look good.

Fast forward a year and a half and I find myself much in the same position interacting with the customer base. Instead of donning a headset and banging away at a service tool box,  I am typing away in an open forum helping our customers attain satisfaction and hopefully building a stronger bond with the company via social media. In the past month alone, I held over 1,000 conversations on Twitter with our customers. While I’d love to say 100 percent were happy, others were less so and some missed the point of the whole social aspect all together and called the Tweets everything from creepy to simply saying fix my problem without giving information to do so.

Any which way, I still have a better understanding of what works and what doesn’t. My fumblings in a public forum although annoying, are something that can be learned from and also serve as an example of the human nature of social media. If it was perfect all of the time, the company account would be nothing but another bot ruining the conversations.

While I’ve learned someting from the experience, I wonder how well do you know your customer base? Granted numbers will tell you a lot about their spending habits and likes and dislikes, but what do you really know about them?

Do a quick Twitter search? Do you like what you see? Has your reputation gone a different route than you thought? Now do the same with a Go0gle Blog Search and Facebook public forum sweep? Take the learnings as you would any other metric and decide whether or not you are ready to join in the conversation.

Last week, I had a Twitter exchange with @prsarahevans & @wilsonellis on how companies could best train and utilize their customer service team. There was talk of getting them off the script all together similar to the approach of Zappos along with having a semi-scripted almost PR-ish speak for the agents. At the end it was a lot of food for thought and got me thinking back on a program that my company ran a few years back called Learn the Customer (story HERE).

The principle was quite simple, a number of people across our organization would be trained and field actual customer service calls from our customers. At first the prospect scared the heck out of me, however it was an invaluable insight into our customers. So for one day (two hours) a week, I was just another agent, albeit one working in the company’s PR team. I dealt with a wide array of customers with emotions ranging from happy-go-lucky to those just wanting help on their order and ones just looking to tell me off. So needless to say it was an experience, one that I took a lot from. The biggest being that the more that I took the calls, the more I learned about what our customers liked, didn’t like and the best way to making them happy and bringing a tighter bond with our company. It was social networking at its best and the root of what PR is in general – making the company look good.

Fast forward a year and a half and I find myself much in the same position interacting with the customer base. Instead of donning a headset and banging away at a service tool box,  I am typing away in an open forum helping our customers attain satisfaction and hopefully building a stronger bond with the company via social media. In the past month alone, I held over 1,000 conversations on Twitter with our customers. While I’d love to say 100 percent were happy, others were less so and some missed the point of the whole social aspect all together and called the Tweets everything from creepy to simply saying fix my problem without giving information to do so.

Any which way, I still have a better understanding of what works and what doesn’t. My fumblings in a public forum although annoying, are something that can be learned from and also serve as an example of the human nature of social media. If it was perfect all of the time, the company account would be nothing but another bot ruining the conversations.

While I’ve learned someting from the experience, I wonder how well do you know your customer base? Granted numbers will tell you a lot about their spending habits and likes and dislikes, but what do you really know about them?

Do a quick Twitter search? Do you like what you see? Has your reputation gone a different route than you thought? Now do the same with a Go0gle Blog Search and Facebook public forum sweep? Take the learnings as you would any other metric and decide whether or not you are ready to join in the conversation.

Last week, I had a Twitter exchange with @prsarahevans & @wilsonellis on how companies could best train and utilize their customer service team. There was talk of getting them off the script all together similar to the approach of Zappos along with having a semi-scripted almost PR-ish speak for the agents. At the end it was a lot of food for thought and got me thinking back on a program that my company ran a few years back called Learn the Customer (story HERE).

The principle was quite simple, a number of people across our organization would be trained and field actual customer service calls from our customers. At first the prospect scared the heck out of me, however it was an invaluable insight into our customers. So for one day (two hours) a week, I was just another agent, albeit one working in the company’s PR team. I dealt with a wide array of customers with emotions ranging from happy-go-lucky to those just wanting help on their order and ones just looking to tell me off. So needless to say it was an experience, one that I took a lot from. The biggest being that the more that I took the calls, the more I learned about what our customers liked, didn’t like and the best way to making them happy and bringing a tighter bond with our company. It was social networking at its best and the root of what PR is in general – making the company look good.

Fast forward a year and a half and I find myself much in the same position interacting with the customer base. Instead of donning a headset and banging away at a service tool box,  I am typing away in an open forum helping our customers attain satisfaction and hopefully building a stronger bond with the company via social media. In the past month alone, I held over 1,000 conversations on Twitter with our customers. While I’d love to say 100 percent were happy, others were less so and some missed the point of the whole social aspect all together and called the Tweets everything from creepy to simply saying fix my problem without giving information to do so.

Any which way, I still have a better understanding of what works and what doesn’t. My fumblings in a public forum although annoying, are something that can be learned from and also serve as an example of the human nature of social media. If it was perfect all of the time, the company account would be nothing but another bot ruining the conversations.

While I’ve learned someting from the experience, I wonder how well do you know your customer base? Granted numbers will tell you a lot about their spending habits and likes and dislikes, but what do you really know about them?

Do a quick Twitter search? Do you like what you see? Has your reputation gone a different route than you thought? Now do the same with a Go0gle Blog Search and Facebook public forum sweep? Take the learnings as you would any other metric and decide whether or not you are ready to join in the conversation.