The story that this infographic paints is that customer service using social media works if the company (or association) is willing to put in the effort. The sad thing is that I don’t see very many events and conferences putting in the effort for their attendees.
I have seen industry events where:
- A conference attendee has a registration problem and tells the organization on Facebook… it is ignored
- Conference attendee(s) talk about how hot meeting room is on Twitter… Event staff don’t deal with it until someone walks up and says something.
- Conference attendees talk about how bad a speaker is on Twitter or LinkedIn, that speaker is there year after year.
These are not hard things to deal with and attendees are handing you a win. You just have to pick up the ball and run with it and it seems that no one can be bothered to cross the finish line. Sad.
The fact is, with only a few exceptions, most conferences (even our industry ones) could care less about the social media customer service side of the equation (or even regular customer service for that matter). That is a big blanket statement but for the most part it is true… yeah, yeah, there are exceptions to every rule.
Using social as a customer service tool is not hard, it simply takes an attention span that is just a hair longer than a squirrel’s.
A big part of using social for Customer Service is empowerment. You have to empower the people clicking the keyboard to make decisions that will make it right for the attendee. They can do it, just have a little faith and a lot of training.
Here are some key takeaways from the infographic:
- 71% of online customers want results within 5 minutes of reaching out to you.
- 33% of people would rather contact a company online than on the phone. I think that this is probably higher.
- 71% of people who have a good customer service interaction via social media will recommend you.
Just look at the last bullet point… 71% of the people that have a problem that you fix will turn around and tell their colleagues to attend a conference, buy a t-shirt or buy a book. You ignore this at your own peril but this seems like an easy win to me.
You just have to start
Social media for events is not something that is going away, it is only going to get more intertwined with what we do, especially as more and more events add a hybrid component. You will eventually have an entire class of attendee that you only know online and like any customer or client, they need to be respected and they need to be taken care of so you should start putting policies in place now.
- Get a plan
- Empower your people
- Make attendees happy (or at least address their needs)
I must send a huge thanks to Francisco Rosales of SocialMouths (follow this guy) for sharing. His site covers all things social for business and event marketers can learn a lot by listening to him and what he has to say.
