Digital Marketing | Digital Strategy | This Digital World

LinkedIn Could do Better on Customer Empathy

Businesses that truly understand the needs of the customer tend to do well.  It's not a pre-requisite for success but it certainly helps.

I was recently left with a not so sweet taste in my mouth, when I tried to downgrade my premium LinkedIn account to a basic account.

For starters, if you allow customers to upgrade your account online then you should also allow them to downgrade their account.  Unless you are desperately concerned about the revenue risk (in which case you've got bigger problems), it is simply good practice. LinkedIn does a great job of telling you the benefits of a premium account and makes the sign up process simple, but if the customer tries the account and for whatever reason decides it's not for them, show some customer empathy and make it simple to downgrade!

For those of you that have premium accounts and have spent far too long trying to figure out how to do it, here is the link.  As far as I can see, it is only available in the help section when you do a search for 'downgrade'.  If you go into account settings you will see upgrade links but no downgrade links.

The actual process for completing the downgrade is here (from Linkedin's website):

To downgrade to a lower-level premium account: 
Click Contact us.
Complete the form.
In the "Question" field, tell us which premium account level you'd like to downgrade to (e.g. "I'd like to change to a Business account.")
We'll contact you after your request has been completed. You can still upgrade to a higher subscription level at any time.

All in all, quite a lot of hassle.

It took about 5 days before I got a reply.  It was a very nice email, although they refunded my last payment and changed my account immediately, whereas I actually wanted to keep my premium account until the end of the billing cycle and then downgrade. Meh. At least they came close but in my book, could do much much better.

 

Facebook Fan Growth for RealPlayer

This is an article I wrote for the RealNetworks intranet this week - highlighting the growth to 100,000 plus Facebook fans:

We hit a new milestone this week with our RealPlayer social media efforts – over 100,000 Facebook fans!

The graph below shows the growth in fans/likes since we launched the RealPlayer Facebook page in November 2009.  The spike that you see in March 2010 coincides with us encouraging users to become a fan on Facebook after they had installed the RealPlayer.

 
 

Facebook has been an important tool in our customer communication strategy over the past 12 months. Earlier this year, we moved some our customer support team to active Facebook duty  and encouraged our RealPlayer users to post questions, issues or general rants about the product on the RealPlayer page. 

With 24/7 monitoring, we are able to respond quickly to posts and point users to the appropriate help sections on our website.  It has done wonders for our transparency as a business, since everyone can see how well we are dealing with customer comments, both good and bad.

We also use the Facebook page to poll fans about new feature ideas and gauge their feedback on existing features.  Our Facebook fans even got a taste of the new RealPlayer via a special download link two days before we released the product to the public.

You can see from the graph below that the fan base is more heavily male, in line with our overall RealPlayer user base and is much younger than our traditional RealPlayer user.  This is important as we continue to extend our user base to younger audiences that have never previously needed or wanted to download RealPlayer.

 

Growing our Facebook users will continue to be a focus as we develop deeper relationships with our customers and engage them across many different platforms.  If you like RealPlayer but haven’t yet ‘liked’ our RealPlayer Facebook page, then please visit the page and join the 100,000+ strong community already there.

Facebook is just part of a larger social media presence that includes our RealNetworks blog, our YouTube channel and Twitter presence.

Facebook is a Great Customer Support Tool

 

 

Many businesses are now using Facebook as a valuable way to solve their customers' product questions and problems.

RealNetworks's flagship application, RealPlayer, is a great example of how the company interacts with its users from all over the world, solving problems and saving money into the bargain.

Every time someone picks up the phone and speaks to an advisor, it costs the business money.  By directing users of its free RealPlayer application to the Facebook page, Real has been able to save tens of thousands of dollars and provide feedback and support in an environment that the user is comfortable with.

Customer support on Facebook also provides a level of transparency that has helped bolster the brand value.  A problem shared is a problem solved, so the saying goes. Well by posting a problem, which others may have, and seeing the company respond quickly and (usually) to the satisfaction of the user, does wonders for reputation.

Of course it still costs money to provide 24/7 support via Facebook, but online responses are more cost effective, more transparent and often faster, so it ends up being a win win for both the business and the customer.