Email the Editor    Email a Friend    Print this Page 

Today, with consumers shopping less but demanding more value from every dollar spent, the buzz around brand is understandable.

Brand loyalty is crucial to improving sales – and customer satisfaction is the best and fastest way to build such loyalty.

Few things build customer satisfaction as much as quickly addressing their questions and concerns, as Seattle-based Decho Corp. (an EMC company) discovered.

Decho offers online backup products for businesses, its flagship offering being MozyPro for remote data backup.

Rather than just wait for customers to call them – with complaints or queries – Decho says it has adopted a more proactive approach.

The company uses social media tools to actively search for customer queries, and then addresses them.

Decho executives say users are starting to provide comments and feedback about products they buy online in very different ways.

"Increasingly, they are choosing to reach out to the online community and ask questions about our products, rather than contact us directly," said Dave Robinson, vice-president of marketing at Decho.

He said if people are asking questions about Decho products on the Web, it's the company's "responsibility to answer them."

And these answers are often provided in non-conventional ways.

A generally "young" company – with most employees in their 20s and early 30s – Decho has grown up in the world of Twitter, MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Robinson said very early on the firm began realizing the benefits social media could bring to their business.

Through actively engaging on Web 2.0 sites, he said, employees began to see a lot of chatter around their online backup offering, Mozy.

Many customers were initially asking questions about the basics of the product, as well as seeking help with set up or maintenance.

Slowly, and without too much thought, Decho employees began to respond to customers directly via online queries and comments, tweets and other messages as they saw them pop up on blog posts, Twitter or on Facebook.

The results of such informal interaction between employees and customers went beyond what anyone anticipated.

So Decho decided to formalize this interaction, creating the position of "social media evangelist" inside the organization. This person's job is to continuously monitor Web 2.0 sites for queries, criticisms or comments.

"It's amazing how you can transform a bad situation into a positive one by showing you care," Robinson said. "People really appreciate hearing from the company and the worst thing you can do is ignore their questions or comments."

The Decho executive says all businesses – from large firms to startups – should be using the Web to open up two-way communication with customers.

He says social media sites should not just be used as one-way broadcast tools for promos and sales, but also as channels to foster customer-vendor interaction.

Swifter feedback is one positive outcome from proactive use of social media to reach out to customers – rather than waiting on their queries, according to Robinson.

No sooner is there mention of the company's name on a Web 2.0 site, he says, than the Decho evangelist receives that information via RSS feed.

The question may be quick and easy to respond to and capable of being resolved in minutes, rather than a day. What's more, the company is able to monitor the Web outside regular business hours.

Customers also feel social media responses are more personal than e-mail, Robinson said.

And a whack of free publicity is one by-product of such interaction.

Happy with the way they were treated by Decho staff, many users blog about the Decho brand providing free advertising and generating word-of-mouth marketing about the company's products.

Apart from enhancing customer interaction, participation in social media can have a tangible impact on a company's ROI, according to a Canadian analyst.

share: