SITUATION

An East Coast drug manufacturer had avoided engaging with customers in online channels for years. Concerns about lawsuits, consumer misunderstandings, and regulatory violations held them back until they began to saw their competitors making the leap into the murky waters of customer engagement.

My team and I were hired to work with corporate executives and their existing consultants to create an engagement capability. Our recommendation: a Digital Center of Excellence (COE).

OUR APPROACH

We started with an audit of leaders from Corporate Communications, IT, Legal, Regulatory, and individual brand managers for key product lines. The resulting benchmark provided us with a better understanding of which projects were in flight, how confident various departments felt about engagement, and the expectations key players had around benefits and opportunities. We also examined how cross-functional teams had fared in the past.

My team also did a deep dive around the competitive set to assess where the company fell amongst competitors. From this data, we created a scorecard for both parent companies and “child” brands — enabling us to identify opportunities for significant competitive advantage.

OUR RECOMMENDATIONS

Our first step was to help align the organization around the benefits of customer intel, engagement and connection through online efforts. This included more efficient models for customer care, issues identification and handling.

Next, we created a set of recommendatios around how patient experience could provide insights that would drive a more effective marketing spend for the individual brands. This allowed brand owners to go to market faster with products they knew would be a hit – and shared by patients online.

From an organizational design perspective, the company fulfilled our recommendation to create a social leadership council, who would drive the need and desire to help the organization become more engaged. A second team focused on governance, policies, and best practices made enterprise-wide decisions about how to engage and where.

RESULTS

From our work, the company now had a framework for identifying opportunities to enable them to increase brand love and advocacy. These included leveraging the loyalty of managed communities, which would improve long-term revenue lift; improving service efficiencies of customer care, which would reduce expenses in the short and medium terms; and managing risk and innovation efforts through customer intel, which would reduce expenses over a longer term.

SITUATION

These days, no one trusts corporations, and social media is the vehicle for sharing outrage, both real and perceived.

A self-described “social media consultant” had visited the drive-through window of a national quick-service restaurant chain. Asking for a discount and not getting one from the local franchise owner, the customer turned to social media to accuse the company of “disrespecting the US military.” Just another day in the life of a large food brand — until the customer got a national news network involved, amplifying the misperception.

OUR APPROACH

We began the project with an audit of social channels and efforts, and sitting in on calls to the Customer Care call center to understand the types of complaints, requests and challenges facing a large restaurant chain. Then, working with the CMO, we went about creating a social media crisis comms plan, to help the client understand the real threat of a social crises, knowing the signs that can lead to both online and offline crises, determining who should respond to the incident, and rethinking crisis workflows to resolve the crises more quickly and efficiently.

Companies often think of crises in two forms: a “five-alarm fire” and “we’re totally safe.” In reality, effective crisis comms planning is grouped into four phases: Preparation, Analysis/Response, Recovery, and Prevention.

Additionally, crises fall into five levels, ranging from a very limited business impact and limited audience, to an extreme business impact to a national or global audience. The response for each level engages different teams, different spokespeople, and different approaches.

OUR RECOMMENDATIONS

We created a crisis workflow that began with a marketing team using social listening tools to monitor online chatter. We also recommended a cross-functional “tiger team” made up of key players in Marketing, PR, Investor Relations, Guest Relations, Franchise and Ops, who would assess the impact of a crisis, respond according to a RACI, and alert and escalate the rest of the organization as required.

We helped the management team visualize crises categories, which included potential incidents such as a pest infestation, a threat of an activist campaign, an active shooter, a customer complaint, a natural disaster, food poisoning, and a myriad of other crises that might occur.

The team also worked with Customer Care to develop new case codes for incidents bleeding over from social media, as well as a “social complaint process” that gave customers a voice and shifted more negative chatter into a more productive and effective channel.

Our team conducted training for Marketing, PR and Customer Care, practicing crisis drills to help the teams understand roles, responsibilities, and establish response benchmarks.

RESULTS

Whether dealing with a factual error, a negative rant, an offensive comment on social channels, a PR issue, or a threat of violence, the organization now had a framework and workflow to address online crises early on. Incidents like the partisan news piece could be quickly identified, categorized, and an appropriate response could be crafted — helping prevent similar incidents from becoming full-blown impacts to the brand.

Header photo by FL Photography. Source: Unsplash.com. Licensed under Creative Commons CC0.