By Melody Mendoza

The way businesses are using the Internet, specifically social media, is fairly new. There isn’t a how-to book for businesses; it’s sort of developing right in front of us.

As a result, businesses aren’t really sure how to handle customer service online. Call centers are still utilized, which that may be effective for some customers, but is there another way?

“Customer service has degraded over the past few years and doesn’t exist that much in the industry,” said Jacki Halas, director of marketing for Digital Roots. “Social media is an amazing way to bring that back, and social media really gives the voice back to the customer.”

Halas along with Tom Zellman, Digital Roots’ chief technology officer, will be discussing social media as a means of providing customer service in their panel “How to Build Ultimate Surprise & Delight Campaigns” at 9:30 a.m. March 8 at Sheraton Austin, Capitol View South.

Digital Roots has created a software that monitors and sifts through social data and filters down to the 1 percent that is relevant. Then, the software prioritizes the information based on a company’s goals, allowing companies to see the opportunities they have to surprise and delight customers.

“You’re communicating with them in their preferred method of communication,” Halas said. “People spend more time online than they do talking on the phone.”

What is a surprise and delight campaign?

Because customers want convenience, immediacy, and personalization, social media provides a venue to serve customers, begin new customer relationships and maintain current ones.

“Surprise and delight campaign stems from big data and listening to conversations that are happening and jumping in at the opportune time to save or make someone’s day,” Halas said.

For example, if a customer’s car breaks down and they tweet about it, they’re not expecting anyone to respond. So when a company has easy access to this type of data, they can be the one to respond with a solution or a simple response, surprising and delighting that customer.

“Acknowledgement goes so far,” Halas said. “If you’re able to solve someone’s issue in a Tweet, it’s one-to-one, it’s immediate, it’s personalized.”

Halas said that so many businesses and marketers are concerned about the message they’re sending out that they’re not focused as much as they should be with connecting with people who already need their services or product.

She said there’s a huge opportunity to help customers.

“90 percent of customers before they call in to a customer service line look online for an answer,” Halas said. “It’s about $9 industry average for each phone call to customer service. So if you think about the companies who could be putting out a YouTube video… or factsheet on their website or just monitoring via social media, that’s literal money that you could be saving [and] providing a better experience to people because they rather solve it online.”

What are the essentials of a surprise and delight campaign?

• Visualize: listening and monitoring to the conversation

• Mobilize: analyzing those conversations to strategize

• Strategize: jumping in in a creative compelling way to help save a customer’s day

A success story

In monitoring data for an automotive company, Halas said Digital Roots noticed multiple complaints on social media about a smell. All of the complaints were coming from customers who were located in warmer climates.

Digital Roots grouped the complaints together and shared them with the brand, who was able to connect the data from social media back to a defect with the product, Halas said. The glue the company used apparently smelled when it got warm, so the company was able to use a different glue to solve the issue.

“So the instant feedback can really be advantageous to a brand,” Halas said.