Earlier this week we wrote about Thomson Holidays and how a blogger can impact your brand reputation and how with social media, complaints have moved from being a customer service issue to being a branding and corporate reputation one. Earlier this week I was running a ‘masterclass’ in social media and customer service at the Call Centre Focus & Customer Strategy Conference 2009 . Image by JMC Photos via Flickr The session looked first at the different types of social media that businesses use and the reasons for and benefits of

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think you’d have to be really really clear that you are justified in sacking a customer for a Twitter comment before you asked them to move on. How NOT to do Customer Service on Twitter Crucial Paradigm is a post from: Laurel Papworth- Social Network Strategy Technorati Tags: crucial paradigm , customer service , Twitter ...Tags: Sometimes you get frustrated and really let loose. Sometimes you just say WTF and walk away.

Engage and listen to your customers. What we do Since 1999, we have created and managed more than 300 online customer communities to help our clients deeply engage with, and listen to, customers in ways that deliver extraordinary insights, generating phenomenal business results. We enable companies to operationalize what it really means to be close to the customer throughout their organization by offering full service community capabilities--from strategic planning and design to member recruitment to expert facilitation, and customer insights

Zappos is a well-known social media case study. Very impressive statistics, a good business model and a really good example of using social media. For Zappos customer service has always been a critical part of the brand, indeed early on they made the deliberate decision to divert their marketing budget to customer service. They allowed customers Image via CrunchBase The Las Vegas shoe retailer was founded in 1999 selling shoes online.

We wrote last month about the Zappos story , about how they have used customer service to extend and enhance the customer experience and how this has had a positive impact on sales, satisfaction and growth. This example highlights the power of customer service - of listening to and then rewarding customers. We know the real benefit that a brand Image by LiminalMike via Flickr Both in terms of the insights and ideas you can get from them, and also the way you can amplify word-of-mouth and build loyalty with them by listening to what they say and responding.

The Economist on social networking - world of connections This week,  The Economist, every Capatilist’s favourite magazine, has published a special report on on social networking . A World of Connections , provides an excellent overview of the current state of social media for those still trying to get to grips with it. What joy. You can download a free pdf of the report here .

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via: Mobile RSS Email Alerts Bios: Dion’s Bio August 18th, 2009 Using social software to reinvent the customer relationship Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 12:11 pm Categories: Architecture of Participation , Business Models , Business Process Management , Collaboration , Collective Intelligence , Community , Convergence , Cost-effective scalability , Crowdsourcing , Customer Community , Customer Self-Service , Design Patterns , Encouraging Unintended Uses , Enterprise 2.0 , Enterprise Web 2.0 ,

The promise of co-creation is that getting customers involved in the innovation process, and letting them inform the design of new products, will mean that you develop a product that is better suited to their needs and will ultimately perform better in the market. Often customers don’t know what they want. Image by Darren Hester via Flickr Of course, it is not always this simple.