Training Eircom's new online customer support team

I spent some time with Eircom's new online customer support team yesterday and Monday. Yes, that's right, Eircom are heading out into the big bad world of online and "engaging" in "conversations" with their customers on a new site to be launched, on twitter, on Boards.ie and wherever else is appropriate. Eventually.

It's a brave move for the company because let's face it, they're going to open themselves up even more to criticism and venting than they ever have before. It's very "easy" not to answer the phone but this is different. The whole organisation needs to be aware of that and I'm not sure that they are.

Now, when I say I'm "training", I don't mean I'm giving them the top 10 tips to be a customer service ninja or giving handouts drawn on posts by Godin, et al. Nor do I mean I'm advocating high fives when a query is solved, or recruiting advocates to ensure that only good stuff is said about you online. Because that sort of stuff is ultimately bullshit and there's far too much of that going on already.

This is about customer service, pure and simple. In real world terms it's someone coming into your shop with a problem and you solving it with a minimum of fuss and bother. Exciting the customer. One of the best books on customer service I've read was by Feargal Quinn about Superquinn - Crowning the Customer - and even then he just talks about how a good shop is well laid out with staff who are helpful, who anticipate the customer need and ensure it happens. Sounds simple, but a bitch to implement. Every part of the organisation needs to be bought into it.

I'm not saying either though that it's difficult to find the problems. A quick search on twitter yesterday morning brought us to Leo's tweets - and a quick reply and some fortuitous circumstances completely independent of us had the problem for Leo solved - but a valuable lesson taught. This isn't rocket science - it's just saying "Hello, I'm here to help, can I?"

I've really enjoyed watching the evolution of the Boards.ie talk to... forums, especially since Vodafone got involved (0ver 1,500 posts since September 20). Because I get emailed with every post as well as them, I get to see what's coming through. Some of it is quite harsh. Some of it fixable, some not. It is, however, valuable customer advice.

I watch how the feedback we receive on Boards.ie is - or isn't - implemented and I guess I'm lucky to be on at what I consider to be still the start-up stage of this company. Unlike massive companies like Eircom or Vodafone, I don't have a press office, a marketing team or a legal department to get things signed off by - that's me and Tom and Dav doing that between us. If something's wrong, we'll try fix it, if we can and it's fixable. If it's wrong but can't be fixed now, and isn't urgent (which is not the same as isn't "important") it gets added to the (long) list of stuff to be actioned. That's a really good position to be in. Enviable.

Will it be the same in Eircom? I don't really know how it operates at a management level. Do they know what people are complaining about? Do they look at the call centre logs, the emailed queries and say "Okay, we have a problem in this area, this needs to be fixed" and then go and actually use their authority in the company to fix it? My hope is that it's so, my gut feeling is it's not. I think people get tied up in call volumes reached, in tickets closed, in cutting call centre resources, in just answering the call and letting that be. This won't work for Eircom.

The moment someone in there starts looking at this exercise in terms of number of posts answered rather than how long it took to resolve an issue and why; the moment they're talking about standardised, templated answers, quick wins and not telling the whole truth, the whole project might as well be scrapped.

Certainly, if I were part of the management team over this effort, I'd be looking closely at the processes. How is a query received? How is it answered? What steps does someone have to take to get there? Are there unnecessary steps that can be removed? Where are the problems talking longest to resolve? Does my team have the necessary authority and buy in from the organisation to make sure that what they do, they do well, first time and every time?

I'd nearly have the people answering the queries and dealing with them and then one person looking at the issues that caused the query in the first case and how that could be resolved and feeding that back into the system. Would that work? Yes, I believe so. Would a company pay someone to do it? No. Why? Because you'd only get results after a year. That's a pity.

There's no easy win for Eircom. It's going to take a lot of hard work, determination, apologising and trial and error. It's going to cause a lot of disruption internally - if it's done right.

Rather than end on this sort of downer on a blog post, I wanted to just share some thoughts for anyone in Eircom who ends up reading this far:

1. Once you start, there's no going back. No half measures, no shortcuts, no easy answers. DO it right from the beginning. If you can't do it alone, get help. Ask for advice. Get support. This is important and you have a great chance here to do something pretty damn good.
   
   
2. While you're not in "control" of the conversation, you have no influence over what people say and you don't know what someone could come at you with, act like you do. Be calm, be friendly, be honest but above all find out what their problem/issue is and fix that as quickly and as best as possible. Easier than it sounds.
   
   It's the usual yaddah yaddah of how to talk online - don't jump in, listen first, be helpful with the advice, don't pimp your own stuff. Be the experts you are supposed to be - the experts you're paid to be.
   
   
3. Trust the guys you've hired, Eircom. From what I know of them, they seem like decent chaps. They'll need support but ultimately they're the guys you've put on your online frontline. You've hired them to do a job, let them do it.
   
   
4. Be honest. Be transparent. That will stand much better to you than just the brand guidelines. As lovely as your marketing and press people are, their message isn't what I want to hear - it's the truth about my problem and what you're going to do about it.
   
   
5. Realise you're going to learn a lot that you don't know about. Realise you're going to have to change things. Realise that this will be a measure of you as a company.
   
   
6. Don't take negative feedback personally. This is probably the biggest mistake people make online - assuming that what's written about them, their online work or the company they work for reflects on them personally. It doesn't. Not really. Not ultimately. Ignore the trouble-makers. If you can't ignore them, pity them. Their other problems are not yours. Solve what you can, when you can and be happy with the work you've done.
   
   
7. Remember - a little goes a long way. One tweet yesterday, though it didn't solve any problems, didn't fix anything or wasn't really that helpful did cause one person, previously having an awful experience with that company to react favourably to an offer of help. Don't discount that. Build on it.

It's a long road ahead. It's going to be really interesting to watch the journey.

Using simple social media tools to capture an event

(This post is an update to an earlier post I did...)

How could a cultural event, a charity or an organisation get extra free coverage for their event? Very simply it turns out.

I worked/volunteered on this year's St Patrick's Festival parade. I carried a camera and a Nokia N95 and just used twitter and photos to try capture what I was looking at.

Some of the Twitter reactions were

These are great photos - makes me feel like I'm there with you all!!

Thanks for those cool photos - looks excellent and no rain, who knew it could be like this? ;-))

http://twitpic.com/26f7o - Love the accent!! Thanks for posting these pics...I always get a little homesick on this day :( ...

Thanks for those pics Darragh, I'm there in spirit. Enjoy the remainder of the big day.

Doesn't that sound like something you'd like to hear people saying about your event?

The challenge is somehow, using text and images, to convey to someone what's going on from a different angle. While there's great TV coverage and press photographers will capture the spectacular shots, for me it's also about the experience of the people in crowds, the performers and the tourists, so I made an effort to talk to as many as I could yesterday.



Imagine that recent twitter attempts like @MIMA2009 - the Meteor Irish Music Awards and RTE's @IrlTalentShow - All Ireland Talent Show had planned it out so they could do similar, properly? This sort of stuff isn't huge budget expense, it's using simple (free) tools to connect with and engage people in a rather cool way. Those two accounts could have been very very cool but weren't.

Today FM's Ray Foley was twitpiccing like a mad yoke at last night's event which was great, except that because of his seat he looks like he was far back. Imagine someone was given press clearance to do it officially? It's something that event and marketing people need to wake up to - "Oh that looks like fun, I'll go to that when it's on again".

No one is expecting perfection - which is not the same as professionalism anyway - but it is opening the event up to a larger audience and putting a human face/name behind it. That's why I'm really looking forward to the photos from Darren Greene and Hazel Coonagh who were wandering around the route with full access yesterday.

It was brilliant too to see Denise - @stpatricksfest - tweeting and keeping people updated as well. We worked well together, me posting, she retweeting and it helped give people who weren't just following my twitter channel some flavour of the day.



In short, what St Patrick's Festival did this year was, as far as I can see, unique, and their partnership with Pix.ie was something no amount of marketing and advertising through "conventional" channels could equal. There's a record there of how people enjoyed the day, what they saw and how it was received that they can go to their sponsors with and say "Here, this is what your money did." That's different. That's special.



So how can you do that? Whatever your event or charity or organisation or campaign, how do you get people talking about what you do before, during and after the event?

Here's a few suggestions:

• Register a Twitter account. Start tweeting. Follow me - http://twitter.com/darraghdoyle and I'll tell people who you are. Not sure what Twitter is? Check out this video from Niall Harbison.
  
  
• Talk to Pix.ie about creating a group. Here people can upload photos of your event, share what they've seen and you can direct people and sponsors towards it to see what's happening.
  
  
• Get yourself a YouTube channel. For example, mine is here. You can see a wide spectrum of some of my interests and what I like to do. Look at the Performance Corporation's one - they keep a record of what they do that they can share with everyone.
  
  
• Get onto Facebook and create an event page for a date specific event and a group page for an organisation. Here's what the Peacock did for Ages of the Moon. Ben & Jerry's Ireland have 789 people they can message about their Free Cone Day in April. Here's the Independent Youth Theatre group and an event page for their Cooped Up production.
  
  
• Get a blog. Don't DARE tell me that a blog takes too much time and that you couldn't update it. Do you write press releases? Do you email people about what you do? Do you have to give your web designer copy for the website? All these can go on your blog.
  
  It doesn't have to be just written by a marketing person. Get anyone who knows what a blog is to get involved. That's what No Nonsense Insurance did.
  
  The 4DayMovie blog was done in 4 days. Seriously folks, it's easy to do with a little bit of creativity and time. A photo here, a video there, an interview, what's been said about you in the papers, what's happening - it's all there for the taking.
  
  
• Do you need a Bebo and a MySpace just because everyone else has them? Perhaps. If you're going to use them though make sure you have the right resources in place to be able to deal with them - to respond to the questions, to interact with those who follow you and to keep them updated on what's going on. There's no point in having a channel if you're not going to use it and it doesn't give anything to those watching it.
  
  
• Finally, talk to people! The names that spring to mind straight away for me are Niamh, who pretty much manages everything I do, Emily Tully on the PR side, Aisling Ryan on the event management side, Denise Rushe on Arts Management and the superlative Kathy Kinsella for volunteer coordination. Ronan Flynn and Cian McKenna are great designers to work with.
  
  You can connect with people on Twitter, on IGOpeople, LinkedIn and good old fashioned email.
  

Ask for help and advice. People are there and happy to do what they can to help. If you don't take advantage, they'll be happy to oblige.

Think about it - what do you want people saying about your event? What results do you want? Ask St Patrick's Festival who now can go with photos like these to their sponsors and say "This is what you were part of. You can be part of it again." That's worth something, isn't it?


Photo by smugairle