Online Customer Chatter: Marketing Ally or Enemy?

If customer buzz about your services as a travel agent can go viral in an instant – and it can – then you’d better be extra certain that you treat your most-connected customers with extreme care.

After all, today’s customers have unprecedented power, says Josh Bernoff, senior vice president of idea development for Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass. “What people say about you is what matters. For that reason, getting them the best possible service is likely to generate the success you’re looking for – more than advertising.”

In his latest book, Empowered: Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers, and Transform Your Business (Harvard Business Press, 2010) Bernoff and co-author Ted Schadler explore how and why businesses should encourage employees to connect with customers using mobile and social technologies.

Travel Market Report asked Bernoff to expand on the ideas behind that idea – why agents should think of customers as a marketing channel and why they should pay special attention to customers who talk a lot.

What do you mean when you say customers are a marketing channel?

Bernoff:  Once someone becomes a customer, they talk. This is especially true in travel. We have estimated that when people talk to one another in online social environments, they generate 500 billion impressions on one another about products and services every year – that’s all the instances in which one person creates an impression on another.

For comparison, the total number of advertising impressions in the same time period is about 2 trillion, according to Nielsen Online. So people make one-quarter the impressions on each other of all online advertising. The difference is those [non-advertising] impressions are likely to be believed.

What are the implications for travel sellers?
Bernoff: You need to focus part of your marketing on listening to your customers, on amplifying the things they say – the positive things – and on giving them chances to share. This is intimately associated with mobile applications, because the people with the most influence and the most followers are far more likely to be online mobile users.

You outline a four-step process for turning customers into marketing channels.
Bernoff:  IDEA is the acronym. First is I, identify mass influencers – the people in your market who have the most influence on others. It turns out that less than 20% of the consumers generate 80% of the influence.

Who might those influencers be for a travel agent?
Bernoff: One is individuals. There are people in your market that have a lot of clout. We call them mass influencers. It’s much more important to go to the places they go and reach out to them demographically. So, for example, you better be paying attention to [the online community] FlyerTalk, because there are people in there who have a lot of influence. It might be only 3% of your audience goes to FlyerTalk, but they might be the people who have most influence.

The people with the most influence tend to be younger and connected on mobile. You might say, ‘The people we work with are in their 40s and 50s; they’re most important.’ But if 20% of your customers are in their 30s and they’re generating most of the chatter, you better pay attention to them. That gets into the D.

What’s the D in IDEA?
Bernoff:  Develop groundswell customer service. You need to be aware of what customers are saying, to be listening and responding. Things like United Airlines Breaks Guitars [2009 hit video on YouTube]: United didn’t acknowledge that there might be someone in their market who, if abused, could get 10 million people to believe they suck – and in a persuasive way I might add.

That is true for anybody in a service industry. You need to be aware of any commentary that’s happening and provide an extra layer of service to people communicating in social environments, because they have followers; they have influence.

Listening is not expensive. TweetDeck is free. There are tools people can use to monitor and respond to Twitter. Part of what you need to know is when is something catching fire.

So the customer service piece is that you’d better treat your influencers well?
Bernoff: That’s exactly what we’re talking about. You have to treat your influencers well, and you need to listen to find out who they are. You need to look at where all the chatter is coming from.

The typical way to value customers is based on how much business you get from them. The whole point of this is that you need to value customers based on how much they talk.

What about the E in your four-step process?
Bernoff: The E is empower customers with mobile information. Large agencies need to have their own apps and online environments people can use. For smaller ones, it would be using some sort of system. The other thing is to have a mobile-friendly website and to allow people to text message your agents.

People who are traveling are sufficiently affluent and they are mobile. So if you’re not connecting with them on mobile devices, you’re missing out. Somebody who needs help because they’re stuck somewhere, they’re right at a decision point. If you help them you become, ‘I need this travel agent, I can’t live without them.’

And the A in IDEA?
Bernoff: The A is amplify fan activity. This means that when people are saying positive things, you give them ways to spread that word more broadly – things like Facebook pages, videos they can share, sites that show all the kudos you’ve gotten. It’s finding ways to take the positive stuff and concentrate it where it’s visible to other people.

At Microsoft they took all the people saying positive things about Windows 7 and put it all into one portal. If you go there, you get the impression, ‘Gosh, look at all these people saying positive things about Windows 7.’