Pampers is defending a product at the expense of the brand.

After reading several articles covering both sides, I would actually tend to side with P&G on this one. And I’m sure after the effort and investment of a product launch of that scale, I’d want to punch any detractors in the face. But even if short-term sales are flat or even up, what long-term damage do you incur when you blame your customers for the problem?

And while yes, Pampers gets fresh new customers every few years as potty training obsoletes diapers and the stork drops new tots from the clouds, brand loyalty still exists in the form of mothers-in-laws, sisters, and friends.

I’ve always said a brand has as much right to defend themselves as a customer has to broadcast a complaint to thousands, but this case has made me revisit my position.

It’s not as simple as The Customer is Always Right. That’s too much of a blanket statement and we know every instance is different. There are times to defend your product if it’s a matter of education or setting the record straight, but at some point as the wave against you gets bigger and bigger, you have to step back and give the customer the benefit of the doubt and say “While we’re confident of no wrongdoing, we’re launching an internal investigation and in the meantime, will honor some restitution.”

A brand has to pick its battles carefully. Choose which hill do die on, and when to run away and live to fight another day. That’s it. I’m out of corporate war cliches. I think Pampers is in danger of dying on this hill. What do you think?

Well first off, they’re clearly pioneers. When so many companies are just now trying to figure out how to handle Social CRM, these folks have a huge lead. In five years time, nerds like me who care about this stuff will look back at companies like Comcast, AT&T and Virgin America (and others) as the founding fathers of digital customer care. These are the companies who didn’t wait to see if Twitter was a passing phase, or worried themselves into inaction over the ramifications of opening up a real dialogue with their customers on the web. So, what did we learn?

The Similarities.
All three were obviously passionate about their missions, evidenced by their openness to talk to me about internal operations. They are all champions of social media within their organizations, with realistic and sober expectations about how their roles work alongside other non-digital departments. They regard every customer equally – no special treatments or biases given to celebrities or influencers. Speed of response is a big priority for everyone, with Frank clocking in Twitter responses under 5 seconds!

They all believe that Social CRM can scale. In fact, they are doing it right now.

The Differences.
The most obvious differences were team-size and organizational approach. Frank leads an internal team of twelve at Comcast, Bowen has a smaller internal team with some pitching in part-time, and Susan works for AT&T’s PR agency, Fleishman Hillard, with customer care and corporate communications teams. Frank and Susan frown upon using the social media channel for promotions while Virgin America shares infrequent promotions on Facebook. Bowen and Frank both monitor and respond in blogs, but Susan feels it’s too invasive, and focuses on Facebook and Twitter.

Here’s a round-up of all the interviews. I had a blast chewing on the nuts and bolts of Social CRM with Susan, Bowen and Frank, and would like to thank them once again for their time and candidness.

The Interviews.
Frank Eliason AKA @ComcastCares – Video Interviews, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.
Bowen Payson of @VirginAmerica – Video Interviews, Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.
Susan Bean of @ATTCustomerCare – Text Interview.

AT&T was in Austin this year in a big way. After last year, they made sure they could handle the additional load and did an amazing job. My iPhone was never without service, nor did I hear any complaints.

@ATTCustomerCare’s Susan Bean couldn’t make the trip, but she graciously agreed to the interview via email. As Sernior VP & Partner at Fleishman Hillard, Susan leads the Consumer Media, Digital, Social Media, Video and Branded Integration teams for AT&T.

She offers great nuggets about responding to angry customers by “being Ghandi” and the groundswell-driven pricing drop on the iPhone 3GS, and while I disagree about not responding to blogs, her reasoning is nonetheless valuable. What do you think? Let me know in the comments.

Here’s the interview (click READ MORE below for the full interview):

Trustworthy: A celebrity with a following tweets dissatisfaction about your brand. How do you respond? Any differently?

Susan: We try to respond to all tweets expressing dissatisfaction with the brand. We have a team of 13 customer care folks who monitor twitter and DM people to find out how they can help. We also monitor on the Corporate Communications side and respond and we watch to see if people are reporting problems with the network. Social media is the canary in the coal mine.

Trustworthy: DM or @reply – How do you balance privacy and the value of a public answer/help?

Susan: If it’s something that can bring value to the Twitter community then we might respond publicly…if it’s a customer care issue, we’ll almost always DM because the first questions we’ll ask will be about the customer’s account information.

Trustworthy: Is DM a sign of fear to the customer?

Susan: We haven’t found that…generally, if someone is having a problem, the first thing that we’re going to ask is for their wireless number…not something most people want to broadcast to the entire Twittersphere…so we think people understand why we DM.

Trustworty: What is your help-to-promo ratio? What is ideal, healthy, etc.?

Susan: The vast majority of what we do on Twitter is help…contacting people who are having a problem and tweeting…or tweeting to us directly. We also use twitter as a way to give people who follow us access to our news, like the release of a new device, first. We don’t really push out marketing messages. We’re considering letting folks on Facebook know about great deals, just as we currently let them know about news before they can find it anywhere else. This is something our fans have been asking for, but even so, we’ll do a status update to ask them how they feel about us letting them know about e-com offers before we do anything recurring.

Trustworthy: Do you respond on blogs or only Twitter and Facebook?

Susan: Interesting question and something we’ve discussed among ourselves. So far we only reach out directly on Twitter and Facebook…we suspect that bloggers don’t really want us invading the comments…. That said, when we see a customer airing an issue with a blogger, we often ask the blogger to connect us so we can correct the issue.

Trustworthy: Should you ever argue/defend your position? If so, how? If not, why not?

Susan: I wouldn’t say we argue…but we definitely convey our point of view…especially on Facebook. We’ve had discussions that go on forever about the network…giving people facts and metrics, explaining a process or a point of view. Our fans mostly appreciate that we’re willing to engage. We pretty much keep answering questions and engaging for as long as people want to keep going. We don’t always see eye to eye with all of our fans, but they seem to appreciate that we’re willing to have the discussion, go track down a fact, find out when they are getting 3G in their area, find out whatever it is that they want to know. Sometimes fans really challenge us to defend our position on something and we’ve responded with a couple of pages addressing their questions point by point. We’ve gotten begrudging respect even from some big time critics that way.

Trustworthy: Does speed matter? Do you respond within 5 minutes? 1 hour? 24 hours?

Susan: Speed totally matters. We have folks across the country monitoring Facebook and Twitter and trying to respond in as close to real time as possible. This is particularly important with customer care. We have customer care managers monitoring Twitter and on Facebook all day long. [Into the night in most time zones] We think if people reach out to us for help that it’s important to help them as quickly as possible.

Trustworthy: How do you respond to praise?

Susan: We love praise. We always say thank you.

Trustworthy: Under what circumstances should you NOT respond?

Susan: If someone asks a question and the community jumps in on FB and provides really helpful answers we will often just leave it at that. Some comments really aren’t asking for a response…although we do tend to err on the side of responding. What we don’t do is ignore people who are really angry. Someone can come on our Facebook page and curse us out and insult both us and our mothers’ and we’ll still ask them if they’re having a problem and whether there’s anything we can do to help. Sometimes we’ll respond with something like “OK…clearly, you are ANGRY. What happened? How can we help?” We call it “being Gandi”.

Trustworthy: What are other ways to respond (Dominoes video response, Zappos sends flowers)?

Susan: I think the most powerful response is action. When we introduced the iPhone 3GS and people on both Facebook and Twitter were really up in arms about the upgrade pricing…and based on the feedback we were seeing in social media we actually changed the policy. That’s not the kind of thing that happens every day, but I think it shows how a company can really listen to consumers and respond.

Trustworthy: Are you basing your answers to the above questions on data or intuition?

Susan: Both.

Trustworthy: How does response scale within your organization?

Susan: We have both corporate communications people and customer care people across time zones to respond from 8am Eastern to 10pm Eastern. As our social media properties have grown we’ve had to bring more and more people into social media to keep up the quality of the conversations and the level of Customer Care.

Trustworthy: How do you train? Do you have your own response flowchart like the Air Force Blog Assessment?

Susan: Train…hmmm. Basically, we show folks how to use the tools and then they do the same jobs they do for AT&T in the brick and mortar world. Our customer care managers essentially operate the same way they do on the phone. The corporate communications people interact on Facebook the same way they do with bloggers or reporters…they’re just doing it directly with the public through social media. We think it’s better to have social media really integrated into the company with people who do their regular jobs using it as another way to talk to consumers. We think it’s important that the way we interact in social media be a reflection of our real relationship with consumers…not a phony overlay. No question we spend a lot of time talking about the need to engage people in a serious and respectful way and at the same time to show a sense of humanity and humor, but that’s more about the ethos of the team than about any formal training.

Trustworthy: Do you study “Twitterstorms” as they come up? What are some lessons you’ve learned?

Susan: Engage, engage engage. If you ignore it, it will not go away. It will get worse. Besides, it’s rude to ignore people…and we try not to be rude.

Trustworthy: How can you turn-around an unhappy person?

Susan: Help him. Engage with him as honestly and transparently as you can. Keep the dialog going for as long as he wants to. Treat his questions or comments with respect. Fix his problem.

Trustworthy: Does monitor/response require 24/7? Or less?

Susan: So far we’re finding 8am to 10pm on weekdays and customer care help on the weekends works. When people ask questions after hours the community tends to jump in and say “the AT&T team is off the page for tonight come back tomorrow morning.” That said, we’ll see how it goes, if the community says the really want us on nights and weekends, we’ll find a way to make it happen. Besides…I sneak onto the page on the weekends and answer questions. I’m trying to stop that. Social media is kind of addictive.

Trustworthy: What tools do you use?

Susan: We monitor twitter through tweet deck and a monitoring tool that pulls everything so that we can respond to anyone complaining about AT&T. We’re working with a variety of app developers on Facebook.

Trustworthy: Have you noticed more people EXPECT a response/less are surprised?

Susan: Yes. We have totally spoiled our Facebook fans…they expect responses right away and if they don’t get it they’re like “Hey AT&T…where are you???” We love that. It really is almost like a real time conversation.

Trustworthy: How are people drawing the line between response and “stalking”?

Susan: I think people expect us to respond on twitter…jumping into blog posts feels like stalking, which is why we don’t do it.

Trustworthy: Do you see a day when the majority of people will associate SM with customer care. Will SM adoption be driven/accelerated as people recognize it’s the best way to get a company’s attention?

Susan: We think in some ways we’re already there with SM and customer care. We still get some people who are surprised when we respond on Twitter…but much less than even a few months ago.  Yes…there’s a definitely a cycle being established where people see that they can get a company’s attention, and companies see how much people love when you respond to them. It feeds on itself. I think companies are also starting to see how much they can learn from their customers in social media. All parts of our business are really interested in what people are saying. I mean you PAY for research like that…and here are all of these people who are just dying to tell us what they think. It would be silly not to listen.

Trustworthy: What do you look for when hiring staff?

Susan: We try to bring people onto the team who are empathetic to the customer, are willing to track down answers for them and are willing to engage in an honest and open conversation. Folks who can only see the company’s point of view aren’t that useful to us. Since its about having a dialog in a real two way conversation, we also look for people who are capable of engaging in a real conversation…not just spitting back messaging. Good judgment and smarts, because we encourage them to understand the company’s point of view and policies and be able to respond in a way that is appropriate for the question being asked. Also,they have to be resourceful. A lot of what we do requires tracking down answers…it’s a big company with a complicated business and it takes some skill to be able to answer everything.

Trustworthy: Can you train good response?

Susan: Yes…by role modeling. We have pretty high level people engaging on both Facebook and Twitter who really lead the way for folks who are new.

Trustworthy: What can you do to avoid the culture/attitude of a phone call center?

Susan: I think all of us feel like we’re doing something really important for our relationship with the consumer. It also helps that executives at the highest levels watch the page and respond to what we’re doing there. Also, our Customer Care people across the business do a really good job. If you don’t really want to help people, you’re in the wrong line of work.

Trustworthy: THANK YOU, SUSAN!!

If you read this blog, Frank Eliason needs no introduction. He’s the force behind @ComcastCares and as Director of Digital Care for Comcast, he leads a team of ~12 passionate responders who monitor social media channels every day.

I tried to avoid the usual social media platitudes and focus on the practical, hands-on insights. Frank graciously delivered the mother lode. Below is Part 1 of a full 20 minutes of his experience and wisdom. I’ll be posting the rest just as fast as I can edit them.

Well, Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management did not disappoint. In fact, we may look back at this as one of the more important manifestos for the future of consumer relations. Hyperbole? Only if ignored by the intended audience: Organizations attempting to brave the new frontier of customer relations management in a social web world.

The report maps out a framework of 18 Use Cases that give brands a comprehensive, laser-focused guide to augmenting current CRM systems with Social CRM. If you’re the CRM Manager burdened with creating a plan for your company’s social strategy, go ahead and take the rest of the year off. Ray and Jeremiah have done all the heavy lifting. All you need to do is adapt for your business, and they’ve even provided a list of vendors to call. Seriously, this is a blueprint of practical, actionable insights that if followed, will immediately give your organization the competitive advantage.

Read it here and then blaze new trails with the Social CRM Pioneers!

Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship ManagementView more documents from Jeremiah Owyang.

And if you’re wondering where we fit in…

Framework of the 18 Use Cases of Social CRM

Flickr Photo: Cayusa

Being an authentic company means being honest about your motives. Being a transparent company means being open and letting customers see you for who you really are. If you’re a business, profits must drive your every move. Revenue is your lifeblood. Bottom line: well, it’s your bottom line.

Social media opens a big barn door letting the sun shine in for all to see. Your razor-sharp instinct tells you to engage with your customers and show how much you care at every turn. Sometimes, even at the expense of your margin. It’s all in the name of transparency and authenticity, right?

Wrong. Being open and honest means telling customers when the decisions you make are for the good of your company. That without revenue and profit, people lose jobs, creditors don’t get paid, banks fail and most importantly to them, you can’t make the product or service they love.

So don’t be afraid to admit you’re in it for the money. Pretend you’re not, and you’ll insult the intelligence of your customers. They’ll respect your honesty and trust you more if your motives are clear: great customer service is good for business.

The Virgin America "Difference" is heart.

Probably the most oft-cited example in recent memory of a company showing a big heart is the woman who, after explaining she had not returned shoes because her mother had passed away, came home to a lush arrangement of flowers from Zappos. The “I Heart Zappos” story reverberated through social media and customer service circles in 2007 and 2008, and helped establish the brand as the gold standard for online customer service.

Other companies took notice. And whether consciously or not, they began making similar promises of unconventional and remarkable service. My recent experience with Virgin America is a great example of this. I put their claims to the test and while I may have had to stir the pot a bit, in the end they proved they had a heart within 24 hours of my blog post.

But should they have? I was admittedly past my expiration. Don’t they have the right to protect their profits with policies and limitations? And if they make an exception for me, what about everyone else? Isn’t it enough for an airline to provide a great flying experience? Why do they have to worry about my problems? Hell, I obviously can’t even follow their rules.

The answer is yes, they should have a heart. It’s simply good business. In my case, Virgin America retained an otherwise loyal customer by simply extending $300 worth of credits I’d already paid for. That’s 100% net gain and it was easy for them. But it meant the world to me, their loyal customer.

The Power of Social Media

From the customer perspective, this is a great case study for getting better customer service through social media channels. My wife got nowhere after an hour on the phone, but thirty minutes blogging, tweeting and posting on Virgin America’s Facebook wall and I got response and resolution. Why? Well, hopefully because they’re living up to the “Our Difference” promise, but possibly because on the phone it is a private, finite conversation while online it is very public and complaints have the potential to escalate into PR nightmares. While the latter is a more cynical view, it is no less important if the end result is retaining a loyal customer. The end justifies the means.

From the company perspective, providing customer service via social media channels is equally rewarding. The most vocal people online are more likely to also be the more passionate and influential people. Whereas a complaint may die in quiet frustration over the phone, the same complaint may be turned into a positive reputation builder for the brand online. That means a company can potentially earn the positive recognition of many, by helping fewer people.

So companies, have a heart. It’s a win-win!

Social Media Response

We’re very excited to take Trustworthy to the SXSW Interactive Conference this year and introduce our brand new company to the digital community in the flesh. I like to call it SXTW because we often abbreviate Trustworthy as “Tw” internally, but no matter what you call it it’s the biggest event in our world all year.

We’ve already gotten a lot of interest, and we thought: what better way to share our ideas and vision while welcoming tons of good feedback, than to get a booth at the Interactive Trade Show. This way you can stumble by, pick up some goodies and listen to how we’re repairing consumer relationships.

So swing by booth 806 (or just look out for the graphic above) and say “hi” – we’re even giving away an iPod Touch. See you there!

SXSW Interactive: March 13-17

We’re finalizing our plans for SXSW this year and looking forward to pressing the flesh with all of our online friends. We’ll post more details as the date approaches. Hope to see you there!