I recently got into a major tangle with Continental Airlines, which, in all fairness, is my favorite airline. However, they have some SERIOUS work to do in improving their customer service response effort. After futile efforts calling their hotline, which averaged about 45 minutes each, I took to email. I sent the same email every day for five days in a row. By the sixth day, I teetered on the edge of defeat, but after unleashing a tapestry of profanity to my devoted audience of one (my husband), was able mustered up enough composure to resolve the issue over the phone. As we most often do after conquering a vexatious adversary, I moved on with my life and forgot all about it. Surely you can empathize with my surprise upon receiving responses to all five of my emails… 27 days later! I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry! We all know that dealing with customer complaints requires an infinite amount of finesse, but if you can’t handle it in a timely manner, you might as well not bother having any customers at all!
These days, restaurant customers—both satisfied and ready-to-rumble—broadcast their comments on places like Twitter, Facebook, and Yelp for the world to read.
So Sandy D’Elosua, national director of communications for Front Burner Brands, has sought to respond to every mention within 24 hours. In doing so, Front Burner’s The Melting Pot fondue chain boosted Facebook “likes” from 4,000 to 148,000 in one year and won praise from loyal customers and complainers alike, who were surprised that their tweets were acknowledged.
All this was done with a staff that started the year at one person: D’Elosua herself. (She now has two others aboard.)
‘You just have to do it smarter’
“Just because you’re small doesn’t mean you can’t do it right,” D’Elosua says. “You just have to do it smarter.”
This policy of engagement contrasts with most brand Twitter users. A recent study indicates that 71 percent of customers who tweeted a gripe never heard back from the company they were complaining about.
Front Burner, too, didn’t pay much attention to Twitter in the past. The new approach began in September 2009, when D’Elosua took over social media for The Melting Pot. At the time, there was a Facebook page, but feedback and complaints tended to be handled through email and phone calls.
“I spent the first three weeks just listening,” D’Elosua says. “I think that the most important thing when you’re coming into any organization or you’re starting to venture into this realm is to slow down before you jump to any conclusions, and listen to where the traffic is coming from.”
D’Elosua’s team used Google Alerts and other methods of monitoring, but she was dissatisfied with off-the-shelf tools like Radian6. So she now uses a social media monitoring tool custom-designed by a vendor.
As D’Elosua listened, she found an extensive fan base eager to tweet and blog about those bubbly pots full of Gruyère cheeses and gooey chocolate. The Twitter feed is full of praise for successful anniversary dinners and tweets from customers who can’t wait for a “Ladies’ Night Bottomless Chocolate Fondue.” (“Y’all know how to lure us ladies in!” one wrote.)
Fans, of course, are the easy part. But every restaurant has its share of people who have had a bad experience—particularly, one gathers, franchises whose dinner fare makes use of technology once used to repel enemies from castle walls: kettles of boiling oil.
Complaints never deleted
The Melting Pot’s social media staffers quickly respond to complaints but take the conversations offline. They never delete negative Facebook posts, D’Elosua says. If someone has been burnt, the local franchise’s insurance company is called in. Sometimes those who allege “food poisoning” vanish when they’re contacted via Twitter.
In addition to beefing up its Twitter and Facebook sites, The Melting Pot created presences on LinkedIn, Wikipedia and YouTube. It posted a series of videos for a Valentine’s Day promotion (linked to last year’s Warner Brothers movie) and launched fondue dinner giveaways for that central event on every family’s calendar, National Cheese Fondue Day.
Like competitors such as Applebee’s and Chick-fil-A, The Melting Pot has created local Facebook pages for its franchises. The biggest challenge of this is messaging. After all, that franchise owner who bought in for the chance to lick out the Flaming Turtle dessert fondue pots may not be especially keen on monitoring Twitter for insults.
At a recent national meeting, D’Elosua told owners she understood. But social media is where the customers are talking, and owners can’t go it alone when customers’ expectations are shaped by national branding. The Melting Pot has created a social media policy and trained owners who would have preferred to delete bad comments as soon as they popped up on Facebook.
Living social media around the clock
D’Elosua and her small team essentially live social media 24 hours a day, she says. This realization offered a rude awakening for recent job-seekers, who came in with a sense of entitlement, high salary demands, and an unwillingness to work late, she says.
“It was a tough, tough pace,” she says. “It was nights and weekends, no vacations. Really sacrificing a lot. But I believed in what we were doing here and the chance we had to be on the cutting edge of where social media needs to be for business. ”
Assessing return on investment is always a challenge, but D’Elosua has derived snapshots from campaigns. The National Cheese Fondue Day campaign spent only $5,000, but it pushed the events through 18 videos featuring its corporate chef. These she pitched to bloggers.
The result was more than 1,000 pieces of publicity in blogs and elsewhere, and it drew 1,500 tweets, she says. The target audience was “never-tries”—people unfamiliar with the brand—and judging by reservations made, it worked. New sales increased by 43 percent, and the company is now looking at reallocating some of its budget from digital advertising to social media.
“It was huge,” she says, “and not only did it validate all of our efforts, it also made us rethink a lot of our strategies.”
By Russell Working
Read more @ Ragan.com
