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Answering Questions: A PR 2.0 Discipline
By Justin Goldsborough | March 9th, 2010
If you’ve read this blog in the past, you’ve probably heard me talk about the self test. I’m a huge fan. To briefly review, the self test is the idea that before a company implements any initiative, it’s wise to step away from the concept for a second and look at it through the customers’ eyes. Does this make sense to “Joe and Jane Consumer,” who never sat in any of the planning meetings, who have 1,000 things going on each day and therefore are just in search of solutions when interacting with our brand.
Despite our best efforts in self testing, no company ever launches a program that is perfect or makes complete sense to every customer. Never happened. Never will happen. Isn’t that why we have customer service departments? Absolutely. But the evolution of social media has done something very interesting — it’s made it easier then ever before for customer service to directly impact the public’s perception of your brand. You may read that last sentence and say, “Duh!” But how are you preparing yourself and your clients to deal with the this transition?
Today, customer service and PR have become symbiotic. Because when you do the customer self test on customer service itself, the customer usually could care less who works in PR and who works in Customer Care. They do not care about your silos, they only care about solutions.
You’ve seen this principal in action before. My favorite example was one that happened when I was at Sprint that we found out about via an employee blog on the internal social network, Sprint Space. A lady had an issue with her phone and needed to get it fixed. She had purchased a warranty plan, so no worries. Easy deal, right? Wrong. She took her phone to the closest Sprint store. When she walked in and explained the situation, the rep told her they couldn’t fix her phone. She needed to take it to a “service and repair” Sprint Store. As one employee who commented on the post pointed out, the customer didn’t know to look for a service and repair store. She just figured any store with the Sprint logo on it could help her out. Not that unreasonable a request if you do the self test from her point of view.
So what does this all mean for PR in today’s 2.0 world? Well, it means a lot of things, way too many to cover in just one blog post. But for starters, it means PR needs to be thinking about adding one very important capability to its already fully loaded, understaffed plate — answering questions.
How often do you spend time with your clients working on programs to answer their customers’ questions? Better yet, like social media should be, do you work with clients to ensure “question answering” is a part of every PR program you implement, whether it takes place on a microsite, Twitter, Facebook, etc?
Just like companies need to understand that they can’t keep their employees from using social media and they actually need to prepare their employees so they can serve as brand ambassadors, companies also need their customers telling the right stories to influence brand perception. How do customers’ get those stories from a brand? A big part of it is getting their questions answered in a timely manner.
Pull out the self test. When you last had a question about a brand you use, how long did it take you to get an answer? Did that length of time affect the story you told? Let’s put “question answering” to the test. Try carving out 30 minutes a week to solely spend answering questions online about your brand. Or make the suggestion to your clients. Then after a month, come back here and share the results. Here are some questions to consider as you give question answering a try:
- Do you notice a change in the way your brand is being talked about online?
- Is this more/less effective than other PR activities you do (e.g. press release)? Or are some activities mutually exclusive?
- Are you able to track any change in how question answering impacts customer service efforts? Would it make sense for the PR team train customer service to answer brand questions in the online space?
- How much time should any one PR rep spend a day answering questions? Is question answering PR’s job?
This is a major transition in PR philosophy we’re talking about and I look forward to your perspectives. Let’s continue the conversation and help each other do the self test on the scenarios and ideas we’re sharing.
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