Rob La Gesse: How to inspire word of mouth with customer service

11:55 — Erin McDaniel introduces Rackspace‘s Director of Social Media, Rob La Gesse.

11:56 — How can you help your customers?

  • You have to know who they are. Not their demographic, but who they personally are.

11:59– Find opportunities to WOW your customers. This creates a chance to create a memorable experience that will help spread WOM.

12:02– Example. Rackspace sent pizzas to someone who was stranded on their way to SXSW. This WOW’ed them and created a great WOM story.

12:05– Rackspace’s social media plan is to…. Be Helpful!

12:08– Customers are humans. You need to humanize them and make them your friends.

  • WOW your customers.
  • Call them on their birthday.
  • Be their friend.

12:10– Great customer service is easy these days, we are used to talking to machines and having poor customer service. So when you WOW them they are blown away.

12:11– You can’t fake customer service, you have to love it!

Q & A

How do you convince your CEO that local customer service support is worth the money.

-Most companies will not see the true value of good customer service if they are already outsourcing it. It has to be in the culture of the business.

How do Net Promoter Scores impact your company?

-It gives us the chance to see where we are doing good or bad as a company. I can then call all the bad reviews and see what we did wrong. This gives us a chance to change our customer service or product.

How do you discover personal traits when talking to customers?

-Customers want to bring their personal lives into a conversation. You can also listen to background noises to see get hits, like a baby crying or a dog barking. Try to learn about their personal life to find opportunities to WOW them.

Do you have any tips for getting positive testimonials? 

You can’t give a customer something for spreading a good review, but you can ask  them to spread the experience.

How can you encourage ground level employees to have great customer service?

Use incentives to encourage employees to care.

 

 

 

About Joseph Holguin

Joseph is an Austin transplant from the dry desert of New Mexico. He spends countless hours on social networks and enjoys helping businesses grow via social media. Offline he enjoys mountain biking and eating tacos, but eventually those experiences are shared online too.

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