分类： digital marketing

“We responded very openly to every email, tweet and Facebook post. And personally, especially not with the same text cut and pasted. And we sent a gift to the customer in question. But it wasn’t over yet: the next day dozens of people repeated the same complaint on the chat. Of course, we found out about that quickly. All agents then explained very kindly what was going on.

We learned a lot from this situation. It was quite intense, but also very good to see that the personal approach we use resulted in so many positive reactions morocco phone number list. I can only recommend to just respond, even if your answer is ‘sorry, I still have to figure it out’. Open communication works best.” How did you ac

What are you really proud of?

“The Mashable Award, that was so unexpected. And the daily flow of compliments continues to amaze me positively. I still find it bizarre that messaging etiquette to follow  people thank us when we have followed up on their anger about a complaint and made them happy. That to me is a sign that we are doing well. Many people do not expect that and compliment us on how open and transparent we are in public communication.”

And what do you see as a challenge in the growth of webcare, social media and customer service?

“Even without webcare, Eurail would still exist. The brand itself is very offline and old, we are on many bucket lists and we have a great name recognition. But if  caseno email list we look at ourselves as a sales company (in addition to Eurail.com, there are several providers of international train travel, ed.), then we can no longer do without webcare. It makes more money than it costs. In the high season, five percent of our sales come via Facebook and Twitter . You don’t want to miss that.”

What does your process look like and how does.
“A local agent answers a question about the product himself. I look at status updates about marketing. For specific complaints, the agents contact a select group of specially trained employees. At the very least, we tell people that we have forwarded their email or post and that we will come back to it later. Marisa also manually checks  morocco phone number list Facebook every morning to see if there are any posts that have accidentally not been answered or have slipped through the system.

We track all links that we email with

UTM codes via Google Analytics . This allows us to see at a personal level whether our webcare contributes to sales. We can then adjust accordingly. We only started doing this three years ago. Before that, the goal was to process as many emails as possible, and we had targets such as ‘answer twenty per hour’. Customer service was something we did on the side, now it is more integrated and serious business .

We don’t use links with UTM

codes on Facebook yet. Facebook is more of a social channel. Apart from that, our fans already ask for specific sales, so we don’t have to promote much there. But one of the most important reasons: you can’t create hyperlinks on Facebook and such a URL with tags doesn’t look professional and reliable. Appearance always wins!”

I’m sure there’s been a time when something has gone completely wrong as a company that has grown up in public with social caseno email list media. Do you have an example of that?
“Something went wrong in a chat about a difficult question. The chat was accidentally closed, but the customer thought we were deliberately leaving the conversation. Extra painful: the error message from the system indicated that ‘agent closed this session’. The customer posted this as a screenshot on Reddit , at a time that was the middle of the night for us in the Netherlands. The Reddit users then called on each other to bombard us with tweets and emails about our poor service every hour. The  how to use reactivate dormant customers agents who were awake then responded without management permission. In retrospect, we are very happy about that, we prevented an international online crisis.”

“As a customer service employee, if you are good enough in e-mail care, you can go to a Facebook training. Social is public, so you have to be very careful. Everyone is very friendly and nice to you, but you have to remain professional in tone. As we call it: engaged , but businesslike. In the training you will also learn our tone of voice , product  morocco phone number list knowledge, rules of conduct and the technology of Facebook. After that, you can respond on Facebook for three weeks under supervision. If that goes completely according to plan, you will be part of the team – a prestigious position. People fight to be allowed to go to a training.”

What else do you need to be a good webcareer?

“Product knowledge, language skills and enthusiasm are essential. You have to be very flexible with your working hours and willing to make last- why is a phone number list important minute changes to your work schedule. You also have to take it seriously as a job, no matter how many hours you work. We see that in how you answer emails and whether you take the time to do research before you answer. We are actually a bunch of softies: we know the customers by name and sometimes discuss cases in the team meetings. Our webcarers really love helping customers.”what will be covered

What tools do you use and how much does it cost?

“For Facebook, we use iMail. It receives emails and we can chat live with it. In iMail, we receive and answer questions, which you can then see on our wall. How much  caseno email list does it cost? We’d rather not say. We work with service levels and response times, so that we can track whether questions have been answered on time. And of course with a shared Outlook calendar, in which we can see who is working when within the team. For Twitter, we simply use the free version of Hootsuite . And we are always connected to each other via Skype .”

Especially for the Asian market, social lends itself well. It is very focused on the collective, people always make decisions in consultation. The opinion  morocco phone number list of your friends counts much more than corporate information. Very different from our American customers. At the moment we have one Facebook page , but we are thinking about using Global Pages with landing pages per country. A separate version already exists for Korea, a significant growth market.”

How many people work on webcare?

“In total, it concerns five FTEs. A number of full-time employees, some of whom have both e-mail and Facebook in their job description. Many team members work part-time, often because they are studying.”

Does everyone sit in a fixed office location, or

EUrail team on the road

EUrail.com team on the road, which as a by-product produces content for FacebookI do people work

“Nobody is in the office all the time. People work from home, from Korea, Peru or Mexico – even at our head office there are only a few. The nice thing  caseno email list about this job is of course that you can travel a lot and a lot of people take their laptops with them. Once a year we all go on a trip. In the evenings we just update all the international tweets and Facebook messages – very hard. But at that time we learn a lot from each other.

Normally you can’t do that, going on the road with your entire company. But we’re only human. When we travel,  using phone number leads in omnichannel we put that on Facebook. And we indicate that we might respond a little later than usual. In exchange for nice travel photos of our team. Our customers like that too – inspiring even.”

“Our webcare has been professionalized in over five years. In 2008, I set up our social channels myself. Our growth in the use of social media went hand in hand with that of our customers. In the meantime, there are structures and rules that help our process. And we have a full-time internal trainer, Marisa Villarejo.

For us, webcare is all online interaction with the customer. In all our interactions, care is paramount. A personal relationship. We are where the customer expects us, which happens to be on the web. You can include e-mail in this, along with Facebook, Twitter and Instagram . We use Twitter more to monitor, which we use marginally compared to Facebook. We mainly use Instagram reactively. The personal relationship that we understand by care, we see on Facebook, our showpiece . You have to meet many requirements to be allowed to work in that team.”
logo EUrail

What is so special about your web care team?

“We get a lot of compliments about the personal element. We have been promising customers to answer within eight hours for years,  morocco phone number listalso on Facebook. KLM is faster, but customers ask us very complex questions. To plan their entire trip, across all kinds of countries, for example. We think a personal answer is important. That takes time. The quality would suffer if we were to promise a faster response time. But we now have guidelines for a number of difficult questions.” Chantal since when do

Who determined the guidelines that all web carers must work with?

“I, Marisa and customer service manager Janice Jie have made an attempt to put the intangible knowledge on paper caseno email list in a reference book. But actually we are looking for people who do not need the rules, because the customer-oriented attitude we are looking for cannot be learned.”

Is that your secret ingredient? Genuinely thinking along with customers and a personal touch?
EUrail won the 2011 Mashable Award for “Best Social Media Customer Service”
EUrail.com won the 2011 Mashable Award for Best Social Media Customer Service

“We don’t believe in secrets, mind you. But we don’t mind a bit of pioneering. We follow our intuition and do things based on trial and error . That worked out well: in 2011 we won a Mashable Award. Because we don’t make it more difficult than it is, the jury thought. We just did what the customer  how can i improve my phone number list accuracy? wanted us to do. Without strategic documents. The award showed us that what we do is special. And important in the customer experience.

LinkedIn sends out a huge amount of emails and the content is generally good. The integration of their email marketing program with the LinkedIn platform is special, which allows for some really great content.

What they do not do well is the frequency and the permission. The attention that I personally have for emails from LinkedIn is low.  morocco phone number list They send everything they think of with the idea that the recipient can turn it off if he does not like it. Also a new title (new type of email) as the influencer email is just sent, without you having given permission for it in advance. Legally it may be correct, because you are allowed to inform about similar products and services. Intuitively it does not feel right to me as a recipient. The mail pressure becomes very high and the attention decreases.

LinkedIn has a large and complex

The content of the e-mailings is well thought out. You can have your doubts about the frequency and permission, but I think the smart people at  caseno email list LinkedIn are also thinking about that. It would be nice to take a look behind the scenes at LinkedIn to see what the results of the e-mailings are. If anyone from LinkedIn Netherlands is reading along, I would be happy to do so.

On my journey to organizations that explain the practical side of webcare, I visit Eurail.com . They sell train passes for European routes, and mainly to non-Europeans. How do you set up webcare in dozens of languages, what exactly do the local agents do and how do they keep an overview from Utrecht?

“ It’s Tuesday, so this must be Brussels !

That is the image that many people have of American tourists in particular: people who see Europe as a kind of amusement park, with stops at Frontierland, Adventureland and Fantasyland in the capitals. With one of Eurail ‘s products , explorers have been able to travel through 24 countries for over fifty years and get off wherever they want. The rail pass as a replacement passport, in other words. A concept from the time when there were still borders and you needed multiple travel documents to get around.

Eurail.com has an annual turnover of €50 million with train passes. This makes the organisation one of the largest how to create trust through phone number  e-commerce companies in the Netherlands. How does Eurail.com deal with webcare? I speak to Chantal Sukel , customer engagement manager and Marisa Villarejo, customer service trainer.

But also emails with tips to improve your company pages. The email below is an example of the latter type and immediately shows a nice best practice. “Think from the recipient” or what’s in it for them. The title is “Improve engagement with your company status updates: Include links ”.

Company pages

A very clear tip, followed by a very short message that you will definitely read. The message is simple and there is a clear call to action: morocco phone number list  post an update. The secondary call to action helps you when you are lacking knowledge or inspiration. Look at how other companies do this. Finally, in the small print, a link to a guide with best practices.

The length of the message is very nice, the call(s)-to-action are very clear and the message is very relevant. After all, it is about the success of your company page. A nice email that helps users to use the LinkedIn product better. Want to know more about company pages? Here is a nice article by Martine Meijburg.

Key lesson from this email

Think about how your organization could use email to help customers use your products. Especially when you have a large customer base, it pays to do this with automated email messages.

PromotionalKey lesson from
The next group of emails are promotional emails. The goal of all these emails is to get you to upgrade to a premium LinkedIn account. The email starts off very well with the word “free” in the call-to-action. In addition, you are immediately triggered by the words “only 2 days left!” With an exclamation mark, of course. The introduction is  caseno email list personal and starts with a thank you for your loyal membership. Great! Then a list of what you get when you upgrade and a nice button that catches the eye and repeats the call-to-action.

Promotional

The only weak thing about these emails

A is that they keep coming, without any real change in the offer. Every time there is the urgency, which of course how do i organize my phone number list efficiently?  you don’t believe after the second time. And the third time it detracts from the LinkedIn brand. Yes, of course, only two more days and then I HAVE to decide. The premium account is also a bit too meager for the price you pay for it. But that is my personal opinion. I don’t have a premium account but I am happy to be convinced if you think I should consider it. A fine email, but the offer is a bit one-sided.

A clear call to action with urgency will only remain valid if it is indeed as urgent as you as a company have indicated.

The email is beautifully designed with nice photos and little text. The title is “What’s on Richards Branson’s desk?”. With a direct call-to-action in the familiar yellow. The email also shows three big names, including Arianna Huffington and Deepak Chopra. What’s on their desk, well that certainly tempts to click through.

Key lesson from this email

Not only LinkedIn, but all organizations are increasingly becoming a publisher. Think about what content is valuable within your  morocco phone number list organization. How can you help people with your content? How can you involve parties more in your organization with good content? Try to draw up an editorial plan with that.

Vacancies for your profile  has about you is the dream of every recruitment organization. Your age, education, function are all characteristics on the basis of which they can make great matches. The simple, but sleek layout of the e-mail invites you to click through. And you do that quickly if you are not completely happy in your current function.

Jobs

The email is simple and the message

A very relevant, because it is completely focused on your situation. LinkedIn makes a nice  unlocking the power of your phone number list combination of the data they have about you and the vacancies on recruitment pages of organizations.

Company pages
Company pages, the so-called company pages , play an increasingly important role on LinkedIn. Especially now that it has caseno email list been possible since October 2012 to send status updates to those who follow your company page. When you have created a company page, LinkedIn naturally wants that page to yield as much as possible for your organization. So you receive status updates about the number of followers, your reach and other statistics.

The number of paying subscribers is an important number for LinkedIn. As we will see in other emails, this is a recurring call to action. And very understandable, considering the amount of revenue involved.

Key lesson from this email
Look at what information you have in your databases of customers and prospects. How could you use that information to send more relevant, perhaps even provocative, emails?

Connection Update

The next type of emails are the connection emails. As soon as you are connected to a new person, you will receive a message about this. Another moment of attention in your inbox for LinkedIn. LinkedIn’s choice of words is special. Congratulations? Why congratulations? You do that with a birthday, a wedding or something else festive, right? Not when you connect on a social network. But the choice of words does give you a good feeling. As if something has been achieved.

Connection Update

A good move is to add some of the connections of the person you just connected to. And not just people, but also companies or  morocco phone number listgroups that the person in question follows. That of course makes you look if there is someone among them who might be interesting in your network. And if so, then you just send them an invitation. The rapid growth of LinkedIn, and all other social networks, is increasingly understandable in this way.

Key lesson from this email

What moments do you have with customers where it is worth thanking them, congratulating them, complimenting them? caseno email list See if you can use these moments to make people feel good.

With these emails, LinkedIn is increasingly becoming a publisher. And where does a publisher get a lot unlocking the power of your phone number list  of its traffic from? Right, email. Because that’s how you often end up on sites like this.

Influencer email

LinkedIn is one of the largest social networks in the world with over 200 million users. But how did this network become such a success? Of course by delivering a great product, but that’s not all. LinkedIn also became popular, like many social networks, by means of a sophisticated e-mail marketing morocco phone number list  program. Consisting of a large variety of e-mails, in which you will always find something of value.

Examples of emails
First, let’s take a look at the different emails sent by LinkedIn . A quick summary before we dive into the details:

You’ve been viewed : who viewed your profile

Connection update : the email you receive when you are linked to someone;Generally for a premium
Thought leaders / influencers : the world’s top performers in the spotlight;
Vacancies for you : overview of vacancies tailored to your profile;
Company pages : information and tips for improvements;

You have been watched
Humans are naturally quite curious creatures. That alone makes LinkedIn popular. Because we all look up a person before we pick up the phone, to know who we will get when we call. LinkedIn plays on that very cleverly, by showing via e-mail who has looked at your profile. And that arouses the ultimate guide to phone number list your interest.

You have been watched

In the email they show some of these people and you get a very clear call to action, “See more”. Two words you can hardly refuse. The content of the message is, in my opinion, personalization of the highest level. Name, photo and function of people who have viewed you are clear at a glance. And caseno email list of course you can nitpick that LinkedIn has it ‘easy’. That these possibilities are only present because of their product and no one else can do this, but that is nonsense.

LinkedIn simply understands the email marketing game very well. They know better than anyone that relevant and personal messages lead to more conversions. The product LinkedIn IS their CRM system , but the effort they have to put in to get the content out of their CRM system and into emails is no easier than for other parties.

And there is nothing wrong with the landing page either. You see which people have looked at your profile, without them telling you everything and you get insight into how you are viewed over time. At the same time, the actual call-to-action is communicated: “Get a premium account”. In other words: become a paying customer. At that moment you realize that you are indeed still just a prospect of LinkedIn. Their goal is ultimately to add you as a paying customer.