Getting Social: A Customer Service Meetup in NYC

On Wednesday November 28th, I attended the Conversocial Social Customer Service Meetup in New York City. A night to discuss social media and customer service over drinks could definitely not be passed up!

Social media is becoming a HUGE vehicle for customer feedback, with Twitter running in the lead. Many companies have implemented social media into their customer service departments for this very reason. It allows for a quick resolution, public viewing and the opportunity to be known for “making the customer’s day” since everyone can read the posts.

Conversocial, who put on the event, is an amazing company whose focus is to help businesses manage their social customer service. I was lucky enough to meet and talk with the CEO & Co-Founder, Joshua March (@joshuamarch) as well as the Corporate Account Executive, Dan Hesmondhalgh among many others, from the customer service industry.

At the event, we were treated to two speakers:

•Andrey Griorgiev, Social Media Specialist at Hertz, talked about their new direction with social media. They took their top customer service agents and made them into social media customer service experts, answering Twitter and Facebook comments. While they do not run 24/7 just yet and are still learning the ropes, I found it fascinating to hear how successful they have been so far.
•Stella Service, a “mystery shopping” type company measures the levels of customer service by putting themselves in the shoes AS the customer. They create scenarios that could possibly lead to negative situations and rate the companies based on their experience. I recommend checking out their blog: http://happycustomer.stellaservice.com/

I also found it interesting how some very large companies, such as Amazon.com or Victoria’s Secret, do not use Twitter for customer feedback. In fact, it was explained to us that a lot of businesses have monitored others mistakes while jumping on the social media bandwagon and are now slowly beginning to ease into it, after learning from what went wrong.

Overall, the event was a great learning experience about how important social media is to customer service. I can’t wait for the next event!