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Customer Service, Auto Collision Repair and Social Media

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When there was hail damage to my beloved orange Mini Cooper convertible, I was devastated, yet counted our lucky stars kidlet and I survived driving in the tornado. The experience following to get my vehicle repaired was eye-opening and resulted in my blog post and Facebook posting on the “offender’s” fan page.

This is a piece about vehicle collision repair shops or auto body shops or whatever you’d like to call them. The teams in these businesses, often mom-and-pop establishments or franchises or dealerships, have to work daily with customers who have angst, stress, injury, insurance issues, and are expecting to spend dollars to repair their vehicles.

I’ve spoken with many experts of late about the situation that exists in body shops — they are behind the times in how they service customers, how they engage with customers, and how they perfect their own customer service to ensure a new customer returns for future work.

Here’s what I recommend right now for any body shop, collision repair facility, or dealership:

>> Bring in a public relations/marketing practitioner with expertise in social media to meet with your team, observe and analyze how services are rendered.

>> Allow that expert (Hi?!) to conduct a social media analysis to determine your collision repair facility’s brand and influence on social channels. That includes Facebook, Yelp, Twitter, Foursquare/Gowalla, daily deals/Groupon, and others.

>> Select one point of contact from the customer service team in the body shop to get trained in social media. That person can work with the public relations practitioner to learn why social media is critical, how to listen to customers, how to document what they say and follow-up, how to ask for a review on Yelp, and how to keep them coming back for more services (beyond auto body repair).

>> The contact internally becomes basically tied at the hip with the public relations consultant so that content can be delivered across channels within the regional boundaries of that business.

Social Media Campaign

The social media campaign could look like this:

>> Analyze the website and freshen it to be customer centric; write for the customer to entice and convince them that your brand, reputation and service are solid.

>> Establish a Facebook fan page and add the buttons to your facility’s website.

>> Launch a profile on Yelp and ask for reviews from customers you know had a good experience. Put up a coupon on Yelp good for an oil change and tire rotation.

>> Explore a daily deal with the area newspaper or buy a Groupon campaign to bring in new prospects. When they come in for the first time for services other than auto body repair, take them on a tour of your facility and show them the capability you have for detailing and collision repair. (The most fascinating thing about collision repair services or a personal injury law firm, for example, is that you don’t know where your next customer is coming from until there is an accident.)

>>Record the name and email of the prospect in a database you launch and add this to Constant Contact. You’ll launch a newsletter perhaps four to five times annually about collision repair, auto health checklist, and more.

>>On the business website (which should be updated), add a form that says “Register for our Newsletter here.” When you capture names, they get added to the database and they get the email newsletter.

Conclusions

The point I’m making is this:

Customer service begins on the frontlines, but it doesn’t end there.

>>Customer service begins prior to that person ever entering your business.

>>Customer service has to happen during the entire face-to-face experience.

>>Customer service requires “the ask” to invite a post-visit review (either a Yelp rating, or Facebook posting, or register for our newsletter).

>>Customer service is a follow-up phone call or survey to ensure satisfaction, and it is also a real and genuine person concerned that a customer had a good experience while in a place of business.

For years, we’ve all said, “customer service is dead.” Isn’t it high time those charged with customer service in small businesses get a little more creative to earn and keep a customer?

 

 

Google+ Will Social Media Fall?

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This post first appeared July 16, 2010, and what prompted me to head back through the archives to find it again was this post by Antonia Harler about Google — A Successful Road to  Failure. She shares all the write ups about Google + that we all have seen. And, she hit on what I suggested a year ago — no one has more time to develop yet another social network, do we? (Thanks, @GiniDietrich, for the link there.)

See if this resonates from a year ago with you…I felt pretty strongly about developing more networks a year ago; I may be less against it today, but my time is more limited. Share your thoughts!

It’s all about community, connectivity and social networking, and people are joining in droves. Apparently, 96 percent of GenY have joined a social network. The fastest-growing segment on Facebook is women 55 – 65 years old.

The more cool social networks, publishing networks, and professional networks that launch to accompany Stumble, Posterous, YouTube, Friend Feed, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN and the like, the more consumers will weary. No one has time to find friends to add to a network. Do you?

I learned today that Stumble requires a network of Stumblers who share cool sites with one another. I’m always interested in seeing cool sites, but I’ve no time to develop a network of connected Web site lovers. When I launched Friend Feed, I thought I could consolidate my social media into one platform (which I can), but it, too, wants friends to connect on the same platform and be networked. On Twitter,  new followers invite me to join them on Facebook. Why? I don’t even know them.

And, that’s it.

That’s the reason social media will fall flat on its pitoot. People cannot spend eight hours a day creating community and populating it with more and more friends. There are only six degrees of separation from all of us, but seriously, folks, who has that many “friends” for real?

Not I.

Using Social Media to Launch Start-Up JD Match

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This is a brief story about how cool social media is and how it impacts public relations strategy to launch JD Match, a new online recruitment site for second-year law students, large law firms and law schools.

I’ve been working with Bruce MacEwen, Esq., an esteemed lawyer and highly credible legal consultant,  and Janet Stanton, CEO of JD Match, who also are affiliated with Adam Smith, Esq., one of the most-respected online publications in the legal profession.

JD Match is an online recruiting site using a proprietary algorithm that will match second-year law students’ preferred law firms with law firms’ preferred students. The  start-up is designed to address the flawed on-campus interviewing process during which the nation’s largest law firms spend thousands of dollars to recruit the best law students from the best colleges of law.

For several months, Soulati Media has developed the public relations and social media strategy with JD Match. The goal was to earn a story prior to noon on Monday, April 18, 2011 in the Wall Street Journal Law Blog prior to the April 20, 2011 live launch of the new website. Three other tier-one outlets would be called and given the embargoed news release in the afternoon of April 18.

The rest of the strategy for the April 20, 2011 launch of JD Match included:

The primary press release and customer story (K&L Gates, one of the largest law firms in the U.S., is the first charter member to sign with JD Match) would hit PR Newswire on April 20, 2011, and the Internet press release would hit via PR Web once the site went live, approximately 36 hours later.

At the time of this writing (11 p.m. ET, April 21, 2011), JD Match has not gone live. Leading up to today, here’s what’s unfolded since Monday, four days ago:

1. An excellent story appeared in the Wall Street Journal Law Blog via Ashby Jones on April 18, as planned.

2. Above the Law posted a brief mention of the news on April 18 by 5 p.m.

3. The American Lawyer editor-in-chief declined the story only to have his reporting staff contact JD Match for an interview the next day (they had seen the Wall Street Journal Law Blog post).  The result was a wonderful Q&A with Bruce MacEwen you can read here. And, prior to this story running, AmLaw Daily developed a Facebook poll asking whether people think JD Match is going to change the face of associate recruiting.

4. The ABA Journal posted a lengthy story about JD Match on April 19. Its reporter had also read the Wall Street Journal Law Blog.

5. 3 Geeks and a Law Blog published a story and pushed it out on its syndicated service, to Twitter, and subscribers.

6. A student posted a question and blog post on LexisNexis Communities about JD Match.

7. A question was posed and answered by several folks on Quora about JD Match on April 19.

8. There are numerous students posting commentary on forums and blogs.

9. Because the site is not live yet, a contact form was created to capture visitors based on the “early news.” There have been close to 500 people who registered with an email address requesting a note when the site goes live.

10. Many people are communicating and commenting via Twitter and Facebook. My challenge was to tweet under the radar with a profile that said “coming soon.” Soulati Media tweeted that way for two months with the goal of earning 75 legal vertical followers; we succeeded.

Here’s some other interesting tidbits about this story:

*No news release has been distributed on any wire services (traditional or online).

*The exclusive was given to the Wall Street Journal Law Blog, and Bloomberg was disappointed they didn’t get the exclusive.

*From a single blog post in the nation’s top law blog, all the activity above has rolled out.

*Adam Smith Esq. posted a blog thanking its team who helped launch JD Match.

*More stories appear daily, and Google Alerts and Trackur are set up to secure the stories.

The wealth and breadth of exposure for JD Match without issuing a news release to the industry has been fantastic to watch unfold.  We’ve not seen a traditional story appear in a printed outlet; the stories have all been online. Once the news is formally launched on the wire and via online distribution, after the site goes live, we’ll see how we handle the next wave.

Meanwhile, follow JD Match @JDMatch and on Facebook and LinkedIn (still under development). (When you get there, please say hello to yours truly…)

Proving You Can Measure Social Media

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“You can’t really measure the ROI of social media.”

I heard this eye-popping phrase at a local social media panel about “Social Media and the Media.” The panel consisted of an impressively tenured reporter, a multimedia content producer for a local news station and newspaper, a professor of communications, and a recent graduate who was fortunate enough to have landed a marketing job for a digital news purveyor.

All four discussed how social media was transforming journalism and their jobs. (Several people in the audience were pretty unhappy about the “tainting” of journalism, but that’s for another post.) All four panelists were adamant that journalists needed to incorporate social media into their jobs – that it was very important.

Yet when asked about, “How are you measuring success?” not one of them could really answer the question. That was when someone spoke of the inability to measure ROI for social media. I was even so bold to raise my hand and ask, “Do you mean to tell me you don’t have metrics that you report on to your bosses?” and they all assured me quickly that they did, but they didn’t say what they were specifically.

I want to set the record straight. Yes, you can measure the impact of your social media. Yes, you can measure the ROI of social media. A lot has been written about this, so I won’t reinvent the wheel here.

First off, it’s worth mentioning – Olivier Blanchard has written an entire book about this, Social Media ROI . I think it’s safe to say the book came out of this PowerPoint which has been popular with social media people since I’ve been involved (two years ago now), and possibly before. It’s a good place to start if you’re thinking on how you can prove to, say, your CFO that this is something worth doing.

Overwhelmingly, the advice you’ll find when you ask a social media consultant about measurement is “first you have to decide your goals, then you decide what to measure.” Hey, Gini Dietrich says it right here and then tells you how. Here  Mack Collier gives you some specific measurements you can make against specific goals – even if you’ve already gotten started, it’s not too late.

Rebecca Denison blogged here about measuring your personal brand. In this post, Rebecca walks you through how she measured her brand – and you can take her logic and apply it to your business situation, as well.

One of my favorite posts about picking a metric to use is Stanford Smith’s post about Klout and how social media experts are really good at pointing out the problems with certain metrics – and makes the case for the Klout score, something every social media expert should at least be familiar with. There are other influence measurement tools, but I really like the data that underlies the Klout score best.

Brian Solis weighed in on the ROI of social media last year here. It’s a long read, but the payoff is worth it.

Are you a nonprofit? Don’t worry, you can do it, too. Beth Kanter, who is something of a celebrity in the nonprofit and social media space, wrote just recently about this here — within the post is a link to Beth’s recent presentation on social media ROI for nonprofits – a great read.

So, that’s where I’d start. Did I hit the mark with measurement? What information would you share with my fellow audience members about social media measurement?

Image: BlueWaterDirect.com

Twitter Makes You Smarter

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Am doing a bit of cross pollination and promotion today with The SMB Collective blog where I wrote today’s article, “SMB Twitter Insights.” It’s relevant because there is where I culminate the incredible week with the two blog posts right here that got published on Social Media Today.

(If you’re unaware of this community bloggers’ portal for marketing, PR and social media pros, please register and engage.)

If you’re reading here, you’re aware I engaged with David Meerman Scott this week about his 50,000 Twitter followers and suggested why no one needs to reach those heights. In a nutshell, engagement becomes one-way — outbound versus two-way — back and forth.

A series of comments resulted in the second post here called How Do You Twitter Your Business which shares David’s response and Michelle Quillin’s approach as a small-to-medium business owner at New England Multimedia.

So, for the kicker and so you don’t really need to read all these links, Anthony Miyazaki, who is associate professor of marketing at Florida International University, provides some fabulous insight about why/how/when and what for about Twitter. I write about it in full on The SMB Collective blog, link above.

Where I’m so fascinated and delighted is how this interconnectivity in social media works. Those of us who engage have the opportunity to meet people in business and personally with rich perspective. While we’re often thrown into friendships we’d never form without benefit of Twitter, the result is always oriented to knowledge. I’m smarter today than I was two years ago; I can honestly say it’s because of Twitter.