Drugstore.com, a leading online retailer of health, beauty, skincare, vision and pharmacy products, has built a brand known for uncommonly superior customer experiences. As the director of customer care, Lisa Larson spends most of her days ensuring customers have fantastic experiences, even if something goes wrong.

Lisa is a truly innovative customer care executive; she and her team embrace new technology as a way to connect with customers and improve experiences. In fact, Lisa is on Twitter regularly, listening to customers, sharing ideas and solving their problems. You can follow her @DirectorsDesk.

Lisa was recently in New York at CRM Evolution where she addressed a packed room of customer experience managers and executives on the topic of customer care in a social environment. She shared many great insights during her presentation (which was more like a conversation since attendees continually peppered her with great questions) and I’ve compiled a list of her best social customer care tips below. I’d love to hear your thoughts and tips as well, so please share some of your suggestions for delivering great customer experiences using Twitter or other social media sites.

Lisa’s Philosophy

“Customers don’t want you to tell them what to buy or do, they want you to educate them and then let them make the decisions; that is being part of a community and that is what social media is all about.”

Lisa’s Social Media Tips

1. Don’t try to solve the entire issue on Twitter. Instead, direct customers to chat live with agents where they can have a conversation.
2. Use social media as an opportunity to educate, send links to help pages where you have more than 140 characters to answer basic questions.
3. Keep customer care and marketing/brand Twitter accounts separate; they each serve a different purpose and the content is distinctly different.
4. Monitor social media sites to hear what is being said about your brand and customer service.
5. Include your Twitter account in outbound agent emails; at drugstore.com every email includes “follow our director on Twitter.” Senior level engagement in social media helps keep agents accountable.
6. Be careful, be smart, be honest – social media is instantaneous and permanent.
7. Have controls in place, such as social media guidelines for employees. Be sure to use only experienced agents to respond to customers on social media sites; you can’t have gun slingers.
8. Treat social media like any other customer care channel; track exchanges on Twitter so they can be captured in your customer experience system just like an email or phone call.

To learn more about drugstore.com’s success, check out this blog post from Lisa.

In a session at IQPC’s Call Center Week recently, Tish Whitcraft, senior vice president of customer experience and operations at MySpace, talked about social media and its impact on customer experience. Her observations in bold below:

#1. Increasingly, users will go to their social network to get help rather than going to the company they bought the product from. My thoughts: This can make it difficult to ensure customers get accurate information about a product or brand. (Shameless plug for RightNow: Cloud Monitor and Customer Portal Syndication Widgets can help with this)

#2 Today, the multi-channel customer experience actually means the online, contact center and social experience; this is in contrast to the old definition of email, phone and chat. My thoughts: Last year I helped write a white paper, titled Harnessing the Consumer Revolution, around this topic. The paper asserts, “…It is these three experiences, when executed well, that drive revenue and sustainable competitive differentiation.”

#3 Consumers want to use the Internet to help themselves. My thoughts: The data proves this to be true. At RightNow we conduct an annual survey with Harris Interactive; according to the 2009 Customer Experience Impact Report:

• 62% of consumers online who have ever had a problem researching a product/service or with the product/service itself go to a company/brand’s website to find information
• 12% of online consumers said they would prefer to interact with an organization in an online forum
• 43% of online consumers use a search engine (e.g., Google, Yahoo!) when they have a problem

#4 You can use the social web to rock your customer’s world. My thoughts:Also from the 2009 Customer Experience Impact Report and reported in USA Today, 58% of consumers said if they had complained about a bad experience with a company on a social networking site, such as Twitter, they would like the company to reach out directly and respond to their comment. This is something we’ve seen Comcast do [see: Social Media, Customer Service & Comcast] and is a tactic Tish says they are using at MySpace.

If you are interested, here are a few highlights from Tish’s presentation at the Las Vegas event.

I’m still here in Las Vegas at IQPC Call Center Week and I was thrilled to see Frank Eliason, Sr. Director of National Customer Operations at Comcast, on the agenda for this morning’s keynote. BusinessWeek has called Eliason “the most famous customer service manager in the U.S., possibly in the world.” Eliason is a pioneer, he was one of the first to use Twitter (and other social media outlets) as a channel for customer service.

As I settled into my seat Eliason asked the audience, do you think social media is a fad? Surprisingly, quite a few people raised their hands. Eliason, of course, disagrees; he claims social media is a fundamental shift in the way we communicate and that Twitter changed the culture of cable giant Comcast. To prove his point he shared one of my favorite YouTube videos: Socialnomics, the Social Media Revolution. The video, set to hip house music, flashes stats that wowed the audience, including:
•    If Facebook was a country, it would be the 4th largest after the US
•    80% of companies are using LinkedIn as their primary tool for recruiting employees
•    25% of search results for the world’s top 20 brands are links to user-generated content
•    34% of bloggers post opinions about products and brands
•    78% of consumers trust peer recommendations; only 14% trust advertisements

Eliason shared a few Comcast anecdotes including a story about a man who started a web site called Comcast Must Die. It was their customer’s use of social media to air grievances that really started to shake up the company and drive change. The first step, Eliason explained, is to actually admit that the customer experience you are currently providing is bad, or at the very least not good. The next step is changing the company culture, a huge endeavor to say the least. Eliason said Comcast focused on human connections, transparency and honesty. As a matter of fact, the Comcast social media policy includes 3 simple principles:
•    Be nice
•    Be honest and transparent
•    Don’t share proprietary information

Monitoring social media allows Comcast to be proactive with its service, but it also gives the company an opportunity to identify problems and fix them before they become monolithic customer disasters and costs thousands and in some cases millions of dollars.

Here are some highlights from Eliason’s keynote; you will hear great examples of transparency and proactive service using social media.

I’m here in Las Vegas at IQPC Call Center Week where I heard Steve Kaay from US Auto Parts delivere an insightful keynote presentation to a room packed full of contact center managers and executives.

Kaay’s presentation focused on customer loyalty and how to get it; his philosophy is to create a candid culture. Check out this clip of his presentation where he talks about being honest and transparent with customers. Kay’s theory is that you need to be forthright with customers, which goes beyond honesty. His assertions – tell the customer everything, don’t just answer their question. Be totally up front when something goes wrong and let the customer know how you are dealing with it. This approach has helped US Auto Parts improve customer satisfaction.

This seems simple and basic, but Kaay shared several stories from the trenches where agents had actually been instructed to withhold the truth. In one instance, he hired an agent who had worked previously in a call center where he wasn’t allowed to divulge the location of the call center. Under Kaay’s direction, this agent now proudly answers the phone, “US Auto Parts, you are talking to Tim in the Philippines.” As a consumer I really like this approach, as a professional working in the customer care industry I applaud it.

Kaay also spent some time talking about engaging with and motivating call center employees. He shared many tips, some I found fantastic and, I think, unique. If you want to know what agents really think, go to the smoking patio during smoke breaks. This is where brutal honesty comes into play, not in formal feedback sessions in conference rooms. Don’t smoke? Kaay offers this piece of advice to call center managers, get a lighter and stand out there lighting your agent’s cigarettes. The information you glean will be invaluable (but, I’m not so sure about the second hand smoke).

Kaay also emphasized developing a culture of positive reinforcement; he suggests supervisors and managers try to catch agents doing something right. I read a lot of parenting books, so this sounds familiar and I know it works with children. Kaay claims that positive reinforcement with agents is the “mother of all power tools” for managing a call center. He takes it a step further and insists you can’t make a positive and emotional connection with customers if management is hard on employees.

Kaay also appears to be a big reader and noted that he and his team often read books together and discuss them. A few suggestions that he made that I plan to check out include:

The Experience Economy by Joseph Pine & James Gilmore
Getting Naked by Patrick Lencioni
The Birth Order Book by Kevin Leman

I’d love to hear any tips from managers and executives who have successfully implemented a candid culture with both customers and employees.

Marco Island, Florida

This post also appears on the RightNow Customer Expereince Blog.

I was in Florida last week at Frost & Sullivan’s Contact Center East event. This event draws about 100 contact center executives and professionals – from companies such as the Ritz-Carlton, MySpace, iRobot, Readers Digest, Aramark, Pitney Bowes, and Travelocity — all gathered to share their experiences, insights, challenges, and best practices around customer experience and the contact center. The beauty of this event (other than being held at the Marco Island Marriott Resort right on the gorgeous Gulf Coast) is that it was highly interactive; every session was a discussion, not a presentation. This made it really easy to hear, straight from the trenches, what is going on in the contact center. There was a lot of discussion about metrics and measurement, the challenges with a blended model (at home agents, outsourced, onshore, offshore…), maximizing a multi-channel strategy, and how best to analyze customer data. But the one topic that bubbled up in nearly every session was social.

I wasn’t surprised social was a hot topic, but I was surprised at the myriad of opinions on the issue. Some execs (like those from MySpace and iRobot) were excited about the impact and opportunity of social networking on the customer experience. In fact, during her keynote, Tish Whitcraft, SVP of Customer Experience and Operations at MySpace, said, “you can rock a customer’s world if you respond to their complaint on Twitter!” There were many who said they knew they needed a social strategy, but didn’t know where to start or what to do (for those of you in this camp, I suggest you start here). Some understood the impact social networking is having on the customer experience but come from such old-school, traditional companies they were struggling with convincing senior management of the critical need to monitor and engage in the social web. And, I was astonished to hear, there were actually some contact center managers that thought social networking was a flash in the pan and there was no need to put resources toward monitoring or participating. Even after I shared Dave Carroll’s story (click here if you aren’t familiar with how United broke his guitar) they didn’t think social networking could negatively impact an organization!

In a closing workshop, Frost & Sullivan analysts Joe Outlaw and Ashwin Iyer tried to dissect the current state of social and help attendees develop a strategy for harnessing the social web for better customer experiences. During this session I heard an interesting stat: 20% of tweets on Twitter have a product or brand reference. This alone makes me wonder how there can still be folks out there that don’t see the current and future impact and opportunity of social networking.

If you are interested, you can read my tweets from this event here.

Working for a software company focused on improving customer experiences, the topic is often top-of-mind for me. I went to an amusement park this summer and was surprisingly disappointed in my customer experience; rides broke down (in once case my 8 year old daughter and I were already mid-ride), computer systems crashed, ticket machines malfunctioned, the list continues. I chalked up my job as the reason I was so hyper-aware of how truly bad my customer experience was.

But then I began to wonder, was it less my pre-occupation with the topic of customer experience and really a case of a bad economy impacting the amusement park’s ability to deliver world-class service? Or was I just making up excuses for my beloved theme park and wasting too much brain power on the idea.

Mid-thought, my husband asked me to join him as we canceled our Bank of America account in favor of banking with Mechanics Bank. As we pulled into the Mechanics Bank parking lot I felt an odd chill, there was a man – a live human, not an ATM – standing in front of the door. He walked out into the parking lot to greet us with a big smile. I gave my husband a shrug and walked into the bank while the man held the door open. What followed blew my mind, my husband and I were treated like honored guests. Everyone was friendly. Each person in the bank was nice. Everyone smiled and competently helped us with our requests.

Strange, I went to a fun-time-destination and had a crappy customer experience. I was unexpectedly dragged to one of the worst places – the bank – and had an exceptional customer experience.