Tara Hunt is our next speaker/panelist from Customer Service is the New Marketing to be interviewed. She is the co-founder of Citizen Agency, a company that helps companies get better at social media.
At Customer Service is the New Marketing, Tara will be on the Customer Service as Community, Community as Customer Service panel.
Customer service ties into marketing because it is much easier to re-sell (or upsell to) an existing customer than to acquire a new one. Having poor customer service is like running your heater on high while leaving your windows wide open. The more money you put into keeping your existing customers happy, the less you will have to put into finding new ones.
Not only are all of your existing customers your most valuable customers, they are your future most valuable customers. Treat them that way and they will not only continue to be your most valuable customers, but they may even help you find many new valuable customers. Good word of mouth is hard to come by, but bad word of mouth is hard to shake.
How community ties into marketing and customer service is also interesting because customers love to share their experiences with one another. If someone has experienced awful customer service, this story will spread like wildfire through various communities through word of mouth. If someone has experienced amazing customer service, this story will also spread like wildfire. Which stories do you want shared in online communities?
The power of community is underestimated because it isn’t as visible or measurable as ’sticky eyeballs’, but it is more real. Social Capital, the value of the relationships one grows, has always been a strong driver of Financial Capital, but it is only recently, through the visibility and influential power of customer communities that companies are seeing the impact of SC on FC. As people move more and more online to do their research when it comes to purchasing decisions, this will impact the bottom line of companies more and more. It is advisable to plan for this growth today.
I get to work with amazingly smart, turned on, passionate, driven people everyday through my community involvement. Even after all of these years, I am constantly amazed and thankful for so many good, giving people, who will do everything they can to make the world a better place to live in. And they do this because it is their community and they know we all benefit from this positive action.
As told to Douglas Hanna.
Remember that today is your last day to take advantage of early bird pricing. If you want to take advantage of the $295 registration price, head over to the web site and register today.
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I found myself using an email address I would not normally use because I didn’t realize that Jottit had decided to use an outsourced tool as a part of its customer satisfaction operation.
I’d be very satisfied to learn that I could purge that email address from that system – it’s the same email address that I’ve used for this post.
Do you have the ability and inclination to do this for me?