Last week, I moderated another great webinar from the Social Media Today Best Thinker webinar series, this time on the topic of Who is the Modern Customer and How Do They Want You to Talk to Them?, sponsored by Act-On. The webinar included a fabulous mix of speakers on this topic: Paige Musto, the Director of Communications at Act-On Software; Stephanie Scott, the Social Media Specialist at American Airlines; and Andrew Ashton the Social Media Analyst for Yum! Brands.
Paige started us off with research on the modern customer. Today's modern customer spends on average 5 hours a day online, 78% start their buying process with a web search, 50% actively seek referrals from their network, and most interestingly, 60% expect access to customer service within 60 seconds! Further to that point, 55% of customer expect to get support via social channels, and failure to respond via social increases the churn rate for existing customers by 15%.
Then Stephanie gave us an overview of her social media team at American Airlines and what it means to do social media at scale at a large enterprise like American Airlines. Most interesting to the audience was the mix of social channels which included all the usual suspects but the audience really picked on Vine and how that worked with the American Airlines strategy. Stephanie was very forthcoming and the audience really piled on the questions!
Andrew talked about social media at scale across the Yum! Brands portfolio of companies (KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell) and how it works in his organization on a global basis. As you can imagine speaking to the modern customer of Yum! Brands is not easy and each brand needs to develop its own voice. The audience really got some great insights into how it works for Yum! and hopefully some great ideas on how to make it work in their own company.
If you have ever been on a Social Media Today webinar before, you know they are very "participant-driven" and we love to ask your questions of our panelists. Many of the questions from our audience revolved around topics such as: How can you identify the best channels and platforms for your company to connect with customers? Whats the best way to win a customer back after a bad/poor customer experience and Whats the right protocol when you have a really upset customer?
If that piqued your interest and you want to hear the replay of this webinar, please check out this link. Otherwise we hope you will join us on another SocialMediaToday webinar! The next webinar is on It's All One Big Bucket: Paid, Earned and Owned signup for it on the SMT website or just view the schedule of upcoming webinars here.
(The Modern Customer / shutterstock)