By Liam Dowd - July 14th, 2014
We recently sat down with Toni to get insight on the key drivers behind U-Haul's social customer service strategy
What are the key drivers behind your organization’s use of social media for customer service?
When it comes to our social care efforts we focus on three main areas of service.
- Customer Support: Providing information to support our customers through the use of our products and services. This includes not only responding to customers’ inquiries, but also listening to our customers’ needs and developing relevant content to support more customers over the long term.
- Customer Service: Responding and resolving customer issues brought to our attention through social media.
- Customer Engagement: Interacting with our customers throughout their experiences with our brand. We encourage our customers to share stories and photos of their moving experiences. Moving is often a monumental moment in one’s life, so being a part of that bigger experience is rewarding and exciting for us as a brand. In fact, we have a fun campaign dedicated solely to sharing our customers’ experiences. Our “My U-Haul” campaign encourages fans (customers and team members) to share photos of their U-Haul experiences. We then display their photos on our trucks throughout the U.S and Canada. We have received thousands of photos along with positive feedback regarding the campaign. It’s a great way to give back to the communities we’ve served for almost 70 years.
How is social customer service organized within your company?
Our Social Care Team monitors our brand mentions seven days a week, and sits within the Social Media Team.
Even though they are not organizationally part of the Customer Service Team, we utilize the same processes to address customers’ issues.
This allows us to ensure that our customers get a unified experience across all channels.
How are you tackling the challenge to prove ROI on managing customer service through social media?
Providing excellent customer service has always been a primary objective for us, so the initial push to have a dedicated Social Care Team centered on showing our executives that social media are channels our customers want to use, and that we needed to be there.
It wasn’t until we really started learning from these experiences that the real value started to shine through. I’ll admit, I’m a data junkie… we track everything.
This enables us to not only report on the standard customer service metrics, such as response time, resolution rate and sentiment, but also to analyze customers’ perceptions of our products and services.
This interview is part of the knowledge exchange in the build up to this year's Social Media for Customer Service Summit, New York. Learn from 20+ leading brands including Capital One, Whole Foods and U-Haul. Take a look at the full agenda for yourself with the 2014 summit brochure