Social Customer Service: a mindmap of Bill Gerth (Comcast) & Morgan Johnston (JetBlue) presentations to the Burlington VT Social Media Breakfast (#BTVSMB)

[Please welcome a new voice to the Thoughtfaucet blog: Apprentice Entrepreneur Brett Chalupa. He is a freshman college student with exceptional initiative. I hope you value his thoughts and observations as much as I do. –Gahlord]

Social customer service was the topic of the March #BTVSMB (Burlington, VT Social Media Breakfast) this past Monday.

Social media breakfasts are gatherings of people in the area who are interested or work with social media. People from the area purchase tickets and gather at a set place. People socialize and eat a light breakfast before there is a presentation.

The most recent #BTVSMB featured Bill Gerth, who works for Comcast, and Morgan Johnston, who works for JetBlue. They both gave thirty minute presentations on social media and how it is used in their companies–especially customer service delivered via social media and social networking tools.

Here is a mind map I made during both presentations. It also features a few of the questions from the Q&A that followed the presentations:

• Comcast’s Bill Gerth on using social media
  • occupy the social media space
    • got to be there
    • not just once a day, needs to be a constant intetaction
  • support drivers
    • assist
    • be there be everywhere
    • listen…everyone is talking
    • make a difference
      • the little things that make people feel special
      • remember the experience
  • social solutions
    • follower count doesn’t matter
    • reach out and meet the customer on their terms
    • combined people from different areas to have a general expertise in anything needed
  • doing what’s right
    • “doing the right thing for customers ultimately can ‘do right’ for your business, brand, and reputationhelping people, even if it’s not your problemengage
      • go outside your ‘box’
  • what we get from it
    • numbers
    • customer satisfaction
  • presence
  • speed
  • passion
  • emerging platforms to reach out to customers
    • heavy influencers
    • twitter
    • blogs
      • What are people saying?
    • video
      • using facetime for customer service
      • Youtube
      • video is here to stay
    • customer service forums

• JetBlue’s Morgan Johnston
  • social media engagement to build and protect your brand
    • crisis
      • customers want to hear the explanation
      • customers can sense authenticity
      • interaction and transparency build engagement
      • what we thought was immediate, wasn’t
    • how JetBlue does social
      • monitor
      • engage
      • inform
      • humanize
    • first principles
      • know the community
      • manage expectations
      • do your homework
      • engage smart
    • customer service
      • 140 characters aren’t enough for customer service
      • direct customers to most effective way to help
      • use employees as customer service to help and establish brand
    • where is the place if greatest potential?
      • calm the situation and help
      • leverage market research tools for immediate customer satiafaction
    • Importance of social media
      • Getting the good
        • Useful to help see what is being done right
        • Don’t be afraid to ask your customers what they want
      • Getting the bad
        • it is inevitable that there will be negative feedback
          • use it and don’t just ignore it
          • don’t give into “terrorists”
    • humanize
      • when people complain, they expect a response
    • are your policies defendable?
      • be flexible
      • working with humans, more flexible if co-operative
      • willing to quickly change policies with quick customer service
    • pick and choose battles for social media
      • go where the customer’s are
      • it is almost impossible to please everyone
• Q&A
  • how to deal with 24/7 customer support as a single person
    • define times when you will be able to respond
    • it’s definitely okay to not be available 24/7, but customers need to know that
  • passion
    • not something that can be taught
    • crucial to succeeding in the world of social media

The main things I took away from from both presentations are the following:

• Listen. It’s that simple. Just listen to what people have to say.
• Take action.
• Help whoever you can. People will really appreciate it.

Zack Luby has another mind map on the #BTVSMB that contains a lot of little details; it can be found on his blog.

An article on the #BTVSMB that shows how the two speakers are in a different position that VT businesses by Mitch Lieberman can be found here.

If you enjoy this way of presenting notes on an event, you might also like Gahlord’s mindmap of Mitch Joel’s presentation to the Burlington Vermont Social Media Breakfast.