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Are you in the market for a new car?

Good luck - you may have trouble finding a dealership wanting to sell you one.  Bear with me - this isn’t a post about cars, but about customer service.

This year, the UK’s retail motor industry welcomed, with outstretched arms, a new word into its lexicon - “scrappage”. In the middle of a thumping recession, the Government-funded scheme has helped the car business boost sales with a £2k sweetener for buyers agreeing to scrap their 10-year-old vehicle when buying a new one. Without it, the world of the motor trader in 2009 would have been a very different one.

A world without scrappage was depicted in a recent speech by Joe Greenwell, Ford’s UK chairman and president of the Society of Manufacturers and Motor Traders at its recent annual dinner. He said: “Without scrappage, this year’s total registrations would have been less than 1.7m. Against a high of nearly 2.6 million units in 2003, current expectations are for car registrations to fall to 1.8m in 2010. There is no doubt that..underlying demand remains weak.”

And this is the point. At a time like now, every customer counts.

It was Chris Brogan’s recent blog post on frustration with bricks and mortar retail that came to mind on a weekend trip to several high end car dealerships from which I came away convinced that some dealerships don’t want to sell cars.

First up - VW: we entered an empty showroom where the only person keen to talk was the receptionist. A salesman just about managed to grab some brochures but the car we wanted to see was “being used by a colleague over the weekend”. That’s fine, but did he want to arrange a viewing? No.

Next, BMW: we were sitting ducks, asking to be sold the benefits of a particular model. The salesman - not looking terribly busy - said: “I’ll get you a brochure. It’s all in there.” What about the boot space? The car battery was flat so the boot wouldn’t open. Now there was a veritable crowd of customers awaiting the grand boot opening. Eventually the lid was lifted and off the salesman skipped: “Leave it up, won’t you,” he chirped.

Lastly, Mercedes: best of the lot, but not great. We did get invited to sit down, but for a rather lacklustre chat about the car in question and promises about the great vehicles coming out of that manufacturer in the next couple of years.

For an industry facing a steep incline next year with a spluttering engine, it’s a worrying picture of customer interaction.

One man who knows a bit about car sales is one Derek Clements (disclosure: my father) who spent more than 50 years in the car business and ended his career training dealership staff in customer care. He said: “Getting new customer enquiries is expensive and dealers have to make the most of every one. It’s vital that sales staff make people truly welcome, comfortable and unthreatened before talking to them about what the customer wants or needs and matching that with the features and benefits of a car.

“In other words, make the customer feel important, listen to what they’re saying and start to build their confidence in dealing with you.”

With all this in mind, I asked Letty - a woman of advancing years and 10 years on the local Tesco checkout - what she felt customer service was all about and she said: “It’s just about being friendly. People seem so detached from each other these days and it costs nothing to smile.”

Listen to Letty - you could do much worse.

Companies using social media to become customer service champions seem to be flavour of the month right now.

Econsultancy has carried its fair share of insightful pieces on the topic, and businesses are really beginning to wake up to its benefits.

And not before time. Last December, I wrote about a personal customer service trial I was going through with a mobile phone company, whose name was spared in the hope the sorry mess would be resolved without resorting to name calling.

Needless to say, it wasn’t and - in desperation - I turned to Twitter to try to penetrate what felt like the huge, uncaring behemoth of Carphone Warehouse. And I found Guy Stephens, the company’s Knowledge and Online Help Manager, who appeared to be tackling customer rage in a passionately empathetic way on Twitter. I tweeted him at 8pm; by 8.07pm, I had a reply, rendering me unconditionally blown away. Three months of periodic call centre torture had got me nowhere, but via social media I felt listened to within minutes and my problem solved within a few days. 

True, I was a departing customer, but not before being turned from a ”hater” to a fan of what Carphone Warehouse is doing to improve its customer experience via social media.  You can read the specifics about the company’s approach in Guy’s own words here, and he agreed to field a few questions from PR Media Blog on why embracing social media is important for the company. In customer service? Read and learn…

What prompted CPW to get involved with customer care via social media?

I think it’s more a recognition that our customers are taking part in that space. They’re conversing about us on Twitter, Facebook and the various feedback-type sites such as GetSatisfaction, ComplaintCommunity and Plebble. Regardless of whether we choose to ignore the conversations or take part in them, people are going to continue talking about us.        

How good/bad would you rate CPW’s customer service reputation previously?
Like many companies we’ve got both advocates and detractors. You tend to be more aware of the negative comments, and a company like CPW has no shortage of them on sites such as Twitter and Facebook. But, I see negative comments in a positive way, as it’s the customer telling us directly what we need to change. They’re the ones experiencing or living the process, not us.

How did CPW management deal with accusations of poor customer service online?
I think businesses have shied away from getting involved in this space. However, the landscape has changed so much now, that everything is happening out in the open. Businesses have the choice to take part or ignore it. Either way, customers will do what they want, write what they want, and we’re probably heading to a time when actually customer service may well be co-created or engineered by customers themselves between customers on sites such as Plebble or ComplaintCommunity.        
     
Is the social media customer approach part of an agreed management strategy or a dipping-toe-in experiment?

We weren’t sure what the response would be. We’ve learnt quickly on the job and I would say there’s a definite appetite for it. We recognise that Twitter has a part to play and we’re still defining what that is. New skills are required, or should I say a new mix of skills is required - part customer service, part PR, part maverick. Not a happy combination for any company.

        
How well has the social media activity/customer service activity been received so far?
There is an increasing awareness of the opportunities presented by social media and certainly a momentum for it within CPW. The key is to understand what each channel does well, and then see if it fits together. Social media won’t be for every company and that’s okay; companies shouldn’t feel the pressure of having to integrate it. But they should at the very least do their due diligence to see whether it’s something their customers want and, if so, how to use it.

        
Have you been able to measure the results of your social media activity to date?
We’re still at the early stages of using it and understanding it. However, Twitter is great for a customer to initiate a complaint and a subsequent dialogue with a company, though it’s not a resolution channel. Because of the nature of twitter and Data Protection Act requirements, it does take slightly longer to get to the complaint to deal with it. But that’s simply a process issue to overcome and we’ve simply got to find the best way to deal with it. And what you’ve got to remember with Twitter is that there are entry requirements - knowledge, propensity to tweet, requisite technology, etc. It’s not for everyone; it just gives those who use it another option.

        
How does it compare to what your competitors are doing?
We’re all doing different things but our angle is very much centred on customer service, whereas mydeco, asos or geek squad will be doing their thing.  There’s plenty of room for everyone.

        
What does the future hold for CPW’s social media engagement?

Onwards and upwards, more learning, but always being honest, transparent, open and feeling empathy for the person complaining. Stephen Covey calls it ‘empathetic listening’. It’s also understanding what this new world looks like: customers are setting the agenda almost, and with Twitter we have the possibility for real time customer engagement in both a positive and negative way, and we have the break up of centralised information held by companies. Companies are having to go out to where customers are; in other words, as I read somewhere, fishing where the fish are.

2009 is supposed to be the year more companies finally decide that social media is not just for the kids, but as integral a part of business as having a call centre, buying ad space, sending out news stories, etc.

But how should the bigger companies and brands - often steeped in a particular way of marketing themselves - make best use of the new tools and ways of working?

First things first: while there are new tools (Twitter, Facebook, et al), many of the ways of working are not so new; they are just being delivered in a different way. Listening to customers and meeting their needs - it’s been going on a lot longer than we have.

Valeria Maltoni’s Conversation Age blog gives a good appraisal of how companies should be responding to the “diminishing returns from traditional marketing”.

She talks about being able to read “digital body language” - how consumers behave online - and how business needs to recognise that control of the buying decision is now very much in the hands of the buyer.

Maltoni also highlights the importance of the impression companies make online, creating compelling content, measuring interaction and being willing to give to online communities rather than aspiring to control them.

One of the comments on her post, from social media monitoring firm, Radian6’s David Alston, emphasises that the principles that work online have been present for some time offline. He cites the example of an effective clothes shop salesperson who reads the customer well enough to know when to approach and how to be helpful, so heightening the chance of a sale - or, at very least, a conversation.

In its simplest form, effective online interaction with your audience could be deemed as “kindness”. BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week debated a new book on the subject - “On Kindness” by psychoanalyst, Adam Philips - which suggests that, in our society, being kind has become a sort of guilty pleasure rather than an instinctive response. The book says the preferable route is having a “sympathetic identification” with others.

Without wanting to - heaven forbid - come over all touchy feely, isn’t that the essence of social media? And when companies grasp that, is it not a more commercially beneficial approach to the “non-engagement policy” mentioned in some recent PR Media Blog comments?

Whether you are at the point of unravelling the myths of social media  or not, it’s certainly time to participate.

And so, it’s nearly over. Barring the handover of some details that will set me free to forge a new life with a new partner, a relationship stretching back nearly 10 years draws to a close. Yes, I’m leaving my mobile phone provider.

But it hasn’t been easy: not because of some peculiar affection for a company which enables people to track me down at any time of night or day. No, it’s literally been the most difficult contractural arrangement to extricate myself from, ever.

Up to now, the service given by this household name has been quite acceptable (they let me make and receive phone calls - hard to mess up if you’re a mobile phone operator). I paid my bills on time by direct debit, so it’s the very least you’d expect. But dare to close your account and be prepared for the full force of corporate inertia to be unleashed.

The minutiae of the case is too painful to recount, but when Tory leader David Cameron referred last week to the Government as “Stalinist”, it suggests that he clearly hasn’t tried to swap his mobile phone number between networks.

After two months of endless phone conversations with an array of chirpy call centre staff promising to phone back with answers, trips to one of the company’s high street branches which bears the same name but might as well be a cheese shop for all the help it’s been, the pain should soon be over.

But anyone who lives within a radius of at least five miles will have heard me talking about this company in a way that would make Gordon Ramsay blush. It’s an old adage about the unhappy customer telling hundreds of people, but the level of customer service displayed sometimes by companies hints that they really don’t care. For all the investment they throw at advertising, PR and clever sponsorship deals, they are undoing it all at the point of delivery. 

Astonishing to note, but there is actually a British Standard Code of Practice for Customer Service, which is clearly being used to prop open doors or support coffee mugs across the nation. Elsewhere there is some pretty comprehensive advice to be had for free on the subject.

With the cost of winning new customers far outstripping that to retain existing ones, it’s curious that nobody yet at the mobile phone company has asked me why I wish to leave or what they could do to make me stay. Maybe they were about to dump me, but just got fed up of being put on hold.  

I rarely buy anything on the doorstep so I guess that makes me not target market for BSkyB’s fleet of “Skywalkers”, or door-to-door sales people, flogging the company’s wares including broadband and HD television.

But one by-product of this revived method of direct selling caught my eye and that is in chief exec, Jeremy Darroch’s words “you get the most direct kind of customer feedback”.

In the same way, allowing two-way communication online can provide that customer feedback - good and bad - which is vital to feed back into the R&D and customer service process. And turning that customer feedback into an ongoing discussion shows what the guy on the doorstep should be showing all the time: that the company is listening!