Briana Campbell » scommerce

The Problem With Scripted Customer Service

Briana — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 11:45:00 +0000

The other day, I received a phone call from the folks at Time Warner Cable, from whom, unfortunately, I get my internet services. The woman was calling me to offer a “great deal” if I bundled my internet, home phone and TV all to Time Warner.

“We don’t own a television,” I said. “And I have a mobile phone, so thanks for your call, but I’m not in need of these services right now.”

She said, “I see, but should you get a television, you could save …”

I cut her off and said, “Thank you, but I don’t envision running out and getting a TV any time in the near future, so your current great deal will certainly no longer be valid if I ever do. You’re wasting your breath and time with me. Thanks so much. Have a good day.” And I hung up before she could get a word in edgewise.

This woman was only doing her job, but couldn’t it have been so much better?

She was flustered because I didn’t answer in the way she was expecting. She had to keep reading from her script and she wasn’t sure how to do it any longer. When I went off script, she had to stay on it. And that’s her job. But sticking to a script isn’t very useful when it comes to dealing with real life people. Is it?

As we see more and more customer service getting pushed to social platforms – Twitter, and the advent of messages to brands on Facebook Timeline – it’s time to re-examine how those customer service people are dealing with their consumers, users, and customers.

The people on the front lines need to be given leeway to deal with people as real people. To be real people themselves. They can’t be forced to answer from a script.

It’s the only way it’s going to work.

Jason Wu for Target and the Social Shopping Experience

Briana — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 12:45:00 +0000

This weekend, like many in America, I went shopping. And I did it online.

On Sunday morning, a little after midnight, the Jason Wu for Target collection started to roll out. Slowly.

There was no announcement as to what time the sale would start, just announcements of February 5. And, by around 12:15 AM EST, bits and pieces of the collection were being loaded onto the website. Given past problems that Target has had rolling out designer collaboration collections, it makes sense that they wanted to upload slowly and not announce too much before everything was properly loaded. They wanted to avoid a crash. But, even though they didn’t announce an exact time, the night owl fashionistas were watching. And sharing. The site might not have crashed, but the items sold out. And fast.

The people doing community management for the Twitter account and Facebook page did a good job of responding to stressed out customers, even the rude ones, asking how they could help and posting links to items as they went up (this happened more on Twitter).

But what really made me think about the social shopping aspect of this new age was the conversations I saw taking place on the Facebook wall for Target Style.

Women were posting questions about certain items and before there was even a chance for the CM to respond, other women were answering – with links and search tips. In fact, if it wasn’t for the search tips of some of the women, I’m not sure I would have even realized that the items I was searching for had gone on sale. I was struck by how helpful and kind everyone was being to one another. No one was taunting or teasing. A few, sure, were complaining. But, for the most part, the women were just having a fun time shopping together, even though they might not have ever even laid eyes on each other’s avatars before.

The collaborative shopping experience reminded me of shopping with a friend – when you are both searching through the pop-up shop or sample sale room, and exchanging items and sizes with each other. In fact, I did this late night shopping with a friend. My friend Alice and I used to work together, when I worked in the fashion & beauty industry. We sometimes go shopping together and Jason Wu for Target was not something that either of us was going to miss. I was on my laptop, tucked into bed, in Brooklyn. She was working (late) in her office, in Manhattan. Yet we still traded items and encouraged each other to buy (or not buy) certain things and, inevitably, bought one of the same items – which we seem to do from nearly every Target collection we purchase from, whether we plan to or not!

The social shopping experience was not about pictures pinned to a board or posting things to my own Twitter stream or Facebook page and gathering group opinion. This social shopping experience was about being social. With people I know and people I don’t know. This was about people coming together to help each other get what they wanted. And about the company having people on top of things and trying to be as helpful as they possibly could be.
There is a bit of negativity going around the web about the Jason Wu experience. But much of it comes from what happened in some stores (where buying limits were either ignored or not understood by some employees). For my part, though I was not able to get some of the items I was hoping for, it wasn’t a bad experience or a debacle.

And one of my favorite things was watching the positive interactions between consumers on the Facebook wall of Target Style. I believe we’ll see a lot more of that in the future. What do you say?

How Pinteresting…

Briana — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:00:00 +0000

By now you’ve read a slew of articles on how businesses can your (still-invite-only) Pinterest to promote their brands. How people can use it to promote themselves.

Curation is something that’s been called out as missing from e-commerce for a while now. My colleague Dror Liwer wrote about it for MediaPost Marketing Daily as early as December of 2010, and he was certainly ruminating on it for longer than that. And I’m not sure why we haven’t spoken more about this.

I have advised several people whom I know and work with, who work in more visual fields, that Pinterst is a great way to sell themselves and their brands. There’s a shareability and a virality that few other platforms can allow right now, and a user base that is growing at Facebook-like rates. Why wouldn’t you want to get involved? But more importantly, there is a level of curation that’s less noticeable in the hyper-sharing world of Tumblr, say, or in the constant buzz of a Twitter stream.

In my long ago days in the retail world, I worked in a series of beautifully designed and carefully curated shops. When I’d meet with sales people, I’d spend a lot of time thinking about not only my customers and what they might have wanted to buy, but what experience they were hoping to get from us and, more importantly, what experience we were trying to give. The shoe store near a university can be as carefully curated as the French luxury store in the “better” part of town, it’s simply curated for a different audience.

When using Pinterest to promote your personal brand – be it your business, your shop or yourself – it’s important to remember that curation is an important part of what it’s all about. You can’t share every thing that you find pretty or interesting. It’s not all relevant to the story that you are trying to tell. On social networks, you need to remember that each one provides you a different outlet than the others. And on these platforms you’re sharing just bits and pieces – snippets – of your best self.

Join in. But use it wisely. Keep in mind the story you want to tell and stick to it.

hat tip to Mike Fraietta for inspiring the title…