H&R Block’s Jennifer Love joined us at BlogWell to share how they’re using a wide range of channels and content to get back to basics: improving the customer experience.
Love focused on how they’ve moved away from the “coolness factor” strategies — things such as Second Life and viral videos — to content and timely communications that actually help the customer during tax season.
A few of her great takeaways:
- Making customers happy in social media pays off. In one example Love shared, a happy customer who posted a picture with their favorite H&R Block tax rep on Facebook along with a nice thank you led to 25 tax returns from other customers.
- Listen at the end of the customer service experience, not just the beginning. At H&R Block, not only are they listening for the initial issues customers have, but they’re also listening to customers after they’ve helped them. Because they’re dealing with complex issues, they want to make sure the customer has a good experience throughout the tax return process.
- Use a mix of bandwidth strategies. Love’s team takes advantage of one-to-one communication channels (with their Get It Right Community), one-to-many channels (such as Twitter, Facebook, and their blog), and sharable content for their talkers (such as research and YouTube content for bloggers and journalists to post).
Watch Love’s case study:
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I think all businesses can learn something from your post and H&R Block's social media marketing strategy. People use the internet and social media platforms to find information. Businesses need to stop spamming their followers with useless information and start providing valuable information and beneficial links. Great customer service keeps people coming back and brings in more business.
Of course they've come to this conclusion. They're helping people with accounting and taxes which has no affinity with "cool". One of the main reasons people will connect with businesses on social mediums is to showcase their own identity.
No viral video will make people want to add H&R Block to their social graph as way to exclaim to the world, "I'm a fan of H&R BLock, see how cool I am".
While this statement may be true for H&R, this does not mean it's true for other businesses.
It's cool to see a company like H&R Block being so progressive with social media. I recently noticed an ad in our local paper for H&R block that was using a QR code. Cool, but the implementation was a little weak.
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