I recently stayed at a wonderful hotel in San Francisco and posted a positive review of my experience on the very popular social networking site, Yelp.
Within minutes I receive a email (via Yelp) from the hotel's customer service representative thanking me for my review and alerting me to other hotel properties they own. The representative also gave me her email address and direct phone line asking me to contact her direct the next time I was interested in staying at one of their hotels.
Wow.
Although I had a great experience I have to assume that if I didn't, this person would have immediately responded to my issue(s) and made things right. Regardless, I was impressed that they actually had someone assigned to reviewing customer feedback on social networking sites. This company gets it!
As social networking sites continue to grow in popularity - especially as they relate to the posting of "reviews" for consumer businesses (e.g., restaurants and hotels) - it's going to become standard business protocol for businesses to monitor the feedback and proactively establish direct contact with customers. What an incredible opportunity for businesses to build the brand and create great customer loyalty. A growing number companies like Comcast, H&R Block, JetBlue, Whole Foods and Ford are even using Twitter now and responding directly to customers (and naysayers).
Maybe the major airlines can learn something here although I doubt anyone at United, American or any other major airline is even beginning to think this way. Although I hope I'm wrong.
This may become increasingly important in the B2B world of HR. At HRmarketer.com we will soon be updating our popular HR Supplier Directory within our HRmarketer Community to allow HR professionals to rate the HR vendors they use. When completed, what a tremendous opportunity for HR suppliers to monitor what people say about their companies and respond accordingly.
Good stuff.Labels: social media, social networking, web 2.0