“Customer service is more marketing than marketing is marketing.”

By Nazli Ekim

“Stop. Collaborate. And listen.”

According to Chris Brogan, who was one of the panelists this morning at the Trust Summit hosted at the Harvard Club in Manhattan, these four short words that Vanilla Ice uttered during early 90’s actually relate to today’s marketing strategies. The summit was full of bloggers and social media enthusiasts who wanted to explore tips about becoming trusted within their communities and ways of going about gaining that trust.

It was an interesting debate where panelists discussed what corporations can do to build trust and, I believe, it was finally agreed that marketing efforts help but, in the end, you really have to build up trust by continuously delivering results to your clients (or just show them that you’re trying very hard).

Charlie Green, the author of Trusted Advisor Associates, brought up a great point that, up until a few years ago, corporations thrived in a competitive marketplace. They wouldn’t stop to think that they should collaborate. But, as we saw with the fall of Wall Street and the Detroit car industry, now it seems as if they are leaning towards working together and building partnerships because they are realizing that competition is not the answer we were all hoping for. Another insight from him was that profit needs to be a sideways outcome and not the objective. If the world were run according to Mr. Green, it would be a much better place to live.

Every day, we see examples of large corporations reaching out to their customers via social media. I recently experienced this with the Amex twitter team. A few months ago, a woman from Seattle gave my phone and home address to Amex while applying for a credit card. She hasn’t been paying the bills so for the past 3 months so I’ve been receiving her bills along with the collection calls. I subsequently tweeted my level of aggravation with American Express customer service because no matter how many times I called I got the same reply, “we’ll look into it.” They didn’t take care of this issue and the collection calls along with nasty letters kept coming.  About a month ago, I realized that Rachel from “Ask Amex” (American Express’s Twitter team) replied to my tweet. “Yikes! I will be more than happy to look into this for you. This is Rachel from Amex. Let me know if I can help.”

What seemed like such a small effort made a big difference for me. I am not sure if Rachel could have fixed this issue, but just the fact that I got noticed made me feel like I was a valued customer.

This is just one simple example of how large corporations are trying to reach out to the consumer one person at a time. They are finally realizing that every customer counts and it’s better late than never.

Do you think social media has made an impact on customer service?