SmartBlogs on Social Media

When you deliver more than 15 million packages a day to more than 6 million customers, you need to have a great customer-support system.

To better help customers, UPS is doing a pretty amazing thing: It’s using customer-support channels in social media to proactively and reactively offer support in real time.

In her BlogWell presentation, UPS’ Debbie Curtis-Magley explained how the company started the program and a bunch of lessons learned along the way. A few of her big ideas:

• Create a single place for customers to go. Early on, UPS had multiple personalized Twitter handles, but this didn’t scale. The company launched @UPSHelp to streamline everything.
• Making customers happy through social media gets amplified. When customers come back and thank UPS for its customer service, that adds up to great exposure. Since the company launched the program, UPS has accumulated more than 1 million positive impressions from grateful replies.
• Let experts lead the way. Remember that just because you’re an expert in social media doesn’t mean you’re an expert in customer service. This program required a strong partnership between the public relations team and the customer-service team.

Watch Curtis-Magley’s case study. Slides are available.