Content as a Client Service: it's easier talking to someone you know

 Second only to, "Advertising doesn't work...", "What should I write about?" is a common refrain of attorneys and the death of many a great business development opportunity. One successful technique for turning this question on its' head is to start with who you know and think of content as a service to existing clients rather than an expansion into new relationships. This makes it easier to identify potential topics and less intimidating because you are speaking to a familiar audience.

1. To begin, have your authors identify their best (most lucrative clients) or the areas of practice they are keen to grow. Identify clients based on industry, size, title and any other demographic detail unique to the decision-makers in this target group.

2. Using this list, have them flesh out need to know topics for these clients. This could be new regulations or court decisions that impact their businesses.

3. By subscribing to any combination of news syndication email alerts or following social media feeds, capture news and information related to the topics identified in Step 2.

4. As your attorneys read through the email digests and feeds for these topics, have them capture their reactions and analysis of the news in written format and voila! a client alert is born.

Client alerts take many forms these days (blog posts, articles, LinkedIn Posts,…) but the sentiment is the same: to make certain that you are a valuable source of information and analysis for existing clients. To get your editorial juices flowing, here are examples of news from June that translated into content (and visibility) for JD Supra contributors :

• SCOTUS was busy in June handing down major decisions including the Affordable Care Act Decision and Same-Sex Marriage Decision. Scroll through the preceding topic pages to learn about the impact these decisions will have on employers and families in the U.S.
• Caitlyn Jenner graced the cover of Vanity Fair and trended all over the month of June. Simultaneously, OSHA announced new guidance for employers and transgender rights in the workplace. Contributors responded with both thoughtful analysis and quick updates on what it means to employers and employees alike.
• The Great American Pastime always makes headlines in June. This summer, the Cardinals' made the news for all the wrong reasons: hacking. Check out legal coverage here.

You can subscribe to follow any of these topics from JD Supra here. 

Image Courtesy of "Contre-jour talk" by I, Alvesgaspar. Licensed under CC

Social Media: the New Hold Music of Customer Service

Do you remember the "greatest customer service story ever told"? It happened back in 2011 and involved a long day of flying and meetings, capped-off by a steak dinner hand-delivered to Peter Shankman at Newark Airport by Morton's steakhouse. I've been thinking of that story a lot lately....

Time reports that both Twitter and Facebook are looking at ways to curb the public nature of client service interactions over their platforms. Additionally, Marketing Land reports that Facebook is testing ways to allow companies to save and send canned replies to customers - allowing for quicker, less personal responses.  Adweek reports that customers don’t expect much from social media inquiries anyway: "…social media is a last ditch choice when a customer service issue is urgent, but customers don’t believe it’s a fast way to resolve an issue".

Further to the point, in summarizing an American Express survey that found similar results, Guillaume Seynhaeve, says: "So while 89 percent of companies continue to wrestle with how to engage their audience effectively through social media, many have yet to understand how to deliver superior customer service holistically with social media as one component."

Social media will likely not take the place of direct forms of fast communication like text, phone or email for professional services. If you are considering joining social media with an eye toward client service, consider these case studies.

Image Courtesy of "Dialog gr 1972" by Holger.Ellgaard - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - 

What's up with Client Service this Week? Empathy

Ever try walking a mile wearing a 65 lb. backpack?

Ok, it isn't quite as dramatic as that but USAA's customer service training goes quite a way toward putting their customer representatives in the shoes of their clients (military families). In addition to wearing 65lb backpacks, training includes reviewing deployment instructions, eating MREs and reading letters from deployed soldiers to their families back home to better understand the unique challenges these families face.

USAA's number 1 finish on Nunwood's 2015 USA Customer Experience Excellence Report is one measure of the financial service company's success. You can read more about it in The Golden Rules to The Six Pillars: Empathy. Bonus: check out the Nunwood Customer Experience Excellence Centre which is a goldmine of case studies and research.

USAA is an exception to the financial customer service rule according to a new study reporting global customer satisfaction with banks is only 23%.

In other words, :( for banks: a Penn State study reveals that emoticons in text communication may improve customer satisfaction as they translate empathy. Speed of response also earned high marks.

Zendesk's Q1 2015 Benchmark Report reports that customer satisfaction for live chat is higher than any other channel including email, webform, Facebook and Twitter. But be careful not to discount the public pressure imposed by Twitter: “If you’re not listening in social, it’s like telling your call-center staff to take the next month off,” says Lucas Vandenberg, founder of Fifty & Five, a Redondo Beach, Calif.-based digital marketing agency."

Finally, an indication that customer satisfaction can be just as much art as science, Chili's is spending millions to visually enhance its food and make it more shareable online. The idea: inciting a virtual race to keep up with the Jones' will lead more hungry people to dine at Chili's. Let's just hope they put as much effort into cooking your meal.

Image Courtesy of "Jack purcell" by rando111us

This Week in Customer Service: robots rule

How do you handle an irate customer? Ask a robot, naturally. Touchpoint Group, a New Zealand-based technology firm, is working on a program that will devour several years-worth of actual customer interactions in order to generate "angry-customer" scenarios from which representatives can learn.

Taking the robot idea one step further, Toshiba Corp. unveiled Aiko Chihira at the reception desk of Mitsukoshi department store in Tokyo. "Chihira" is a customer-service robot. On the challenge of creating a successful customer service robot, Hitoshi Tokuda, Toshiba's head of new business development said, "Eighty percent humanlike is very scary. So it has to be 90 percent or close, or very close to perfect".

Nordstrom is experimenting with ways to create a holistic customer experience across physical and digital domains. The retailer, traditionally known for exceptional in-person customer service, is diligently testing the line between knowing their customer and making customers feel invaded through the use of data and location services.

Forbes published an interview with Nate Rosenthal, Director of Customer Support at Square, on the six-year-old company's customer support transformation over the last few months (during which they've doubled their CSAT). In Rosenthal's words, "The key is finding the right balance between the support our customers want and the support they need. That’s why we’ve worked hard to pair phone support with predictive support. If we can push an answer to a customers before they reach out, that’s a win-win."

J.D. Power’s latest North America Airline Satisfaction Survey is out and the results aren't surprising: if airlines were students they wouldn't be making the honor roll. Charlie Leocha, president of Travelers United, an advocacy organization for air travelers says, "… investing in customer service doesn’t have to be expensive. A simple smile from flight attendants or gate agents, waiving a standby fee to get on an earlier flight with empty seats, allowing families to sit together without paying more, all make the travel experience far more pleasant."

Finally, here's a quick refresher on best practices for using social media to engage with customers. Quicker hint: just remember everyone is watching!

Image Courtesy of  D J Shin via Wikimedia Commons

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's content marketing.

"Think about who you want to reach. Now write to that person." While countless anecdotes of this content marketing mantra have come to life, it isn't often they fall out of the sky and hit you.

Walking along the ridge of my typical hike today, a sudden whirring shot up 20 yards ahead toward my left. I spotted the source: a drone just climbing to the peak. As I turned around and from side to side trying to spot the pilot, the drone lost control and took a steep, erratic dive crashing into a bush about 10 yards away.

My first thought? Man, if Six Feet Under was still in production….what an excellent opening sequence! Second thought: That's gotta be a green field for some personal injury firm.

Third thought (yes, I can think that high occasionally): Great example of content marketing in action. If that drone had knocked me for a loop, what query would I use upon regaining consciousness?

"Personal Injury Drone" was my first guess and sure enough of the first page search results:

                70% are U.S. personal injury law firms

                10% are Forensic Engineering & Investigations services

                20% are publications including Risk & Insurance

Sometimes you need the answers to fall from the sky. To be safe, however, try visualizing your best client, think of a search they might perform that connects directly with the services you provide and get to work.

Dumb as a Rock: My Path to Understanding Emoticons.

s continue to rear their cute little faces. This article, on the science of emoticons, lead  to reading a 2011 NYT story on emoticons in the workplace. Today, as I used Slack for the first time, it was surprising to discover emoticons embedded in the ecosystem. This revelation lead to an Emoji Cheat Sheet  for enterprise tools including Github, Basecamp and others. Facebook added them back in 2013 in an effort to, "...bring more ways for users to express themselves through small pictures" according to Adweek. Though friends and connections have been using emoticons for years, I'm an emoticon.  I thought their use degraded the written word, especially in a professional setting. Call me a curmudgeon. (Yes, as a matter of fact, I do believe people drive too fast these days).

Then it hit me. Nestled just off 101, right over the Golden Gate Bridge you'll find Ring Mountain: a Marin County Parks Open-Space Preserve and my favorite refuge. The area was home to Coastal Miwok Indians who carved petroglyphs into the mountain's boulders  more than 2,400 years ago. You can just make them out in this image (oval shapes in the center).


Zooming out from Petroglyph Rock and shifting slightly to the right, you'll see San Francisco's skyline. The view changes daily as sky-scrapers continue to sprout. These buildings house tech boomers, like Twitter, that specialize in brief, rapid communication. So it's full-circle, from carving images in rocks to inserting digital faces. Each medium is a shade on the palette of self-expression. To downplay or ignore new colors is a limitation, not a better path.

Long live .

If Ellen DeGeneres was a lawyer...

The spark for this post was something like, “Want a master class in new media? Follow Ellen DeGeneres.” But it’s not a level playing field. As an entertainer, with a television show in daily syndication by NBC Universal throughout the US and Canada you’d anticipate a large fan base.

85,832,900 subscribers though? It’s a ridiculous number. To put it in context, Oprah Winfrey has about half of Ellen’s subscribers (+10M likes on Facebook, +27M followers on Twitter, 435,000 subscribers on YouTube, +3.7M on Instagram). Jimmy Fallon also has about half with +24M followers on Twitter, almost 7M subscribers on YouTube, nearly 5M likes on Facebook, 3.2M on Instagram, and over 300,000 followers on Google+.

Ellen DeGeneres doesn't wait for people to come watch her show, or hope they record it, rather her brand constantly adapts to new tools and places content where people spend time. She inserts her daytime talk show in different locations online throughout the day, reaching people who have regular 9 to 5’s and allowing those who do catch or record her show to share their favorite clips with their communities online.

But it’s not just thatshe uses new media tools, it’s howshe uses them. Bouncing them off of each other….from games that started on her syndicated television show to an app for one and a syndicated spin-off television show for another.

Peruse her pages and, as you do, think to yourself, “If Ellen DeGeneres was a lawyer or insurance agent instead of a comedian, what kind of thought-leadership-empire would she build?”.

P.S. Shhhh! Don’t share the answer, go out and do it for yourself!

Ellentv.com

Wikipedia Page

TheEllenShow - YouTube (+ 11.5M subscribers)

Ellen DeGeneres - IMDb

Ellen DeGeneres (@TheEllenShow) | Twitter (+ 42M followers)

The Ellen DeGeneres Show | Facebook (+ 17.8M likes)

Ellen DeGeneres on Pinterest (425,000 followers)

Instagram (@theellenshow) (+11.3M followers)

Good Things by Ellen on Tumblr

Ellen only has 2 connections on LinkedIn but 7,900 followers on The Ellen DeGeneres Show Company Page.

Ellen on Vine  (+ 2.8M followers)

Ellen has an App

Ellen has one of the highest RTs ever – 3.5M

Ellen is on Snapchat.