SaaS Companies Using Social Media to Take Care of Customers

Software as a Service (SaaS) is a great way to get powerful software solutions for your company.  Companies like Salesforce and Right Now Technologies have pioneered this type of solution.  But what many companies fail to realize is that the key to SaaS is the last “S” – service.  Service means taking care of customers.  Our highlighted start-ups for today’s study of social media use in customer care are doing a great job of using the tools to deliver the final “S”.

Profile #1 – iContact

iContact allows businesses, non-profit organizations, and associations to easily create, send, and track email newsletters, surveys, and autoresponders.  Look at our interaction with Chuck Hester from iContact about how they are delivering service with the use of social media tools:

Q:   What is your role at iContactCorp, and how long have you been there?
A:  Communications Director.  I have been with iContact for 3 years.

Q:   Which social media tools do you use for customer service?
A:   Twitter.  We utilize Facebook and LinkedIn to reach our customers but find Twitter has the most “immediate” impact for customer service.

Q:   Of the tools that you use, which one do you find to be the most effective and why?
A:  All three tools we use – LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are effective for different reasons.  But the one that works best is Twitter.  It allows us to connect with our customers, engage them on Twitter and then in other ways, solve their problems and help them quickly.

Q:  What is the best success story that you can share about where social media directly helped you with a particular customer?
A:  Recently our application – www.icontact.com experienced an outage.  Our normal way of letting our customers know was through our online blog.  Unfortunately it was tied to the app and down, too.  We went out on Twitter, tweeted that the app was down, we were aware and were working on the problem.  Within 30 minutes we were back up and running and tweeted that we had fixed the issue.  Several of our customers tweeted that they appreciated our responsiveness and transparency and sung our praises as a result.

Q:  What is the single biggest key to successful social media tool usage for customer service?
A: Being part of the community and part of the conversation. If you only use social media tools to sell your services and don’t LISTEN to what your customers and potential customers are saying, and what their concerns are, then you’re missing the point of social media and will be ignored – or worse – by the community.

Profile #2 – PBworks

Our second profile is one of our portfolio companies, PBworks, the leader in online collaboration solutions for businesses, law firms, non-profits, and creative firms.  We sat down and had a conversation with Rachel Pennig, their Director of Support & Services:

Q:  Which social media tools do you use for customer service?
A: Based on the industry we’re in, we try to match the tools our user base uses in an effort to reach out to them. We constantly monitor Twitter, Get Satisfaction, Google Blog Search, forums, and our Meebo chat widgets.

Q: Of the tools that you use, which one do you find to be the most effective and why?
A: While the majority of our support incidents are handled through our ticketing queue, I find Twitter to be effective for several reasons. First, Twitter tends to catch the spur of the moment emotion of a user, so by responding quickly we can help a user before a small problem turns into full-blown panic. Second, Twitter is great at capturing the user sentiment about a product. I love seeing the tweets recommending our product over others, and why. It’s especially rewarding to see a tweet that mentions our customer support as being the reason to choose us over a competitor. When we release a new product or feature, Twitter gives us near instant feedback about what our users think about the feature. Finally, I enjoy using Twitter because it gives us a great presence on the web. Google searches for our company name will show people our tweets, and let them know we have fast, responsive, professional support.

Q: What is the best success story that you can share about where social media directly helped you with a particular customer?
A: Well, a bit of a reversal, but we had a particular customer who used social media to talk about their success story with support. An educator in China wanted a particular wiki name that was already taken but inactive. We got in touch with that wiki owner and asked if they would be willing to transfer ownership of the wiki. That wiki owner was a teacher in Mexico. Because of this interaction, the two teachers started a dialogue, and now their students use the wiki to learn about the cultures in their different countries and connect with one another. The customer then went to write about this on his blog, which showed many other educators how flexible our tools is and how it can be used to connect people all over the world.

Q: What is the single biggest key to successful social media tool usage for customer service?
A: Responsiveness. Social media is all about instant communication. You have to be monitoring your feeds, checking your forums, reading the blogs. If you don’t respond quickly, not only will that single user notice it, but the rest of the web will as well.