Case study: CitizenM hotels’ un-social customer relationship management

Please vote now: Social Media Marketing 2012: ‘Mid-Year’ Update – Biggest Challenges (grösste Herausforderungen)

4 Lessons from this case study – why sCRM (social customer relationship management) is difficult

citizenM hotels is trying hard to come across as hip and cool using social media. But does it work in practice? How usable is the website and how quickly does the customer get a reply?

After doing a quick check, survey says…

A German version of this post is also available – Tourismus Marketing: Was macht citizenM besser?

Lesson 1: Differentiate or die

CitizenM hotels try not to focus too much on ‘efficiency’, but instead be a bit unique, cheeky in their advertising and offer clients something new to try.

Not easy to do when uniformity in hotel rooms is stiffles innovation, making things less unqiue – or as some might suggest, making consumers number and dumber.

By the way, please sign up for our blog – get the trends that affect your business FIRST!

What do you think, does citizenM differentiate beyond a slick advertising campaign? How good is it at using social media to help improve customer service? We recount our experience below.

Lesson 2: Usability – why graphic designers must speak with customers

Research says using dark letters on a light background helps people retain and better recall information. In this case it could be that the company decided to get our attention. What do you think? Is this easy to read… sure, it grabs our attention, but will we remember the message?

Click for more info - CitizenM is cheeky, but being useful AND engaging is tough to do right.

Lesson 3: Different service levels are BAD

I have pointed out elsewhere that customers do not understand why they get an answer faster on Twitter than by leaving a comment on the company’s blog, customer forum or Facebook page (see My bank loves me! …Or not).

For the customer, which channel they use is completely irrelevant. Whether given the option to fill in a form, send an email or tweet to a service account, the customer wants their problem resolved competently and quickly.

Click for more info - CitizenM - when you make a mistake by being late, say sorry - it works!

Lesson 4: Does this social media activity improve customer service?

Sometimes I feel having a team of people worrying about Twitter or Facebook status updates to push traffic to the core website of the brand is a waste. Why not use these people by adding them to customer service, focusing on fine-tuning the level of service that you need in order to excel?

Put differently, how can you measure that your tweets or the various ‘conversations’ your team has with Twitter followers, or Facebook fans help to:

1. Improve customer services.
2. Stay innovative in order to differentiate your product/service from me-too copy-cats.
3. Help clients resolve their concerns or cries for help and support better than if they had used the phone or email instead?

If your actionable metrics do not show a link between the above and social media activities, how can you know it is worth it? Neither Like impressions nor pageviews will provide you with this information.

By the way, the company’s social media officer cannot be engaging with clients on all social networks. Nevertheless, better not to be on Xing than have an incomplete profile with no activity.

Bottom line: THREE questions for YOU

The real issue hotel chains or managers face is differentiation of their product and making it less uniform and similar to others while offering good service, clean rooms and attractive locations at a fair price.

Great branding, good customer service and comparatively great value for money are all factors that get people to book a room with you. To make sure that social media helps you achieve these laudable objectives and improve the bottom line, three questions warrant careful attention:

1. Which target audience(s) do we want to reach?

2. What kind of content represents added value for our target audience(s) on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blog, podcast channel, etc.?

3. How do you know you are doing things right – audit your performance to improve.

If you cannot document the above so your boss sees the value you are producing, you are in trouble. Check out the free download if you want to know more:

Download case study – CitizenM Hotels – Engagement – Customer Service

What do you think?

Tip: Search for more ComMetrics and CyTRAP sources on ROI, KPIs, sCRM, Twitter, Facebook and ‘customer service’ (click to query).

The author: This post was written by social media marketing and strategy expert Urs E. Gattiker, who also writes about issues that connect social media with compliance, and thrives on the challenge of measuring how it all affects your bottom line.

His latest book, Social Media Audit: Measure for Impact, will appear in September, 2012 from Springer Science Publishers.

Connect with ComMetrics on Google+ or the author using: Email | Twitter | Google+ | Xing

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Tagged as: best approach, best practice, best solution, buzz marketing, case study, citizenM, KPI, measure for impact, measurement, ROI, sCRM, social media audit, social media marketing, social media monitoring, social media ROI, social networking, un-social social media, word of mouth marketing

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lennert de jong

Hi Urs,

Thanks for the article and pointing out a weak spot. citizenM in its totality has been designed to save unnecessary costs and give that back to the traveler in a luxury packaged smart offering. Something we do not have is a callcenter where costly people answer costly phonecalls. All bookings are done online. We do have a small support team but one of the struggles when you grow is the balance between resources to answer people while staying true to your tagline and pass cost savings on to those . In your case, it seems as if you submitted your question on the 26th of June, right during our London opening and preparations for a couple of turbulent days of opening events.

Although we try to get back, and hit 90% in this, within 24 hours, it is simply very difficult to get this done for all questions submitted. Especially when you, as very small organization also need to weed out the spam from the real customer question. You would not believe how much traffic is generated which can just be dismissed.

Moral of my answer: yes, it is difficult, we do our best and it is too easy to just say “add this guy to the support team”. Diego has enough on his plate as it is, answering tweets, facebook posts and tripadvisor/booking.com comments for 4 hotels.

Best,

Lennert de Jong
citizenM hotels
- http://commetrics.drkpi.ch/articles/what-they-do-not-teach-you-at-lady-gaga-university/ Urs E. Gattiker
  
  @lennertdejong:disqus thanks so much for replying.
  
  Second, I apologise for replying so late, somehow I missed this thoughtfull comment.
  
  Now to what you mention these facts it becomes obvious that we agree even more than I thought. Such as:
  
  a – social media is not scalable – meaning there is usually not enough resources to go around to satisfy people’s greater demand for better and faster service…. hence priorities must be made.
  see also What is Facebook good for? (click on text)
  b – design the process so it meets your standards while assessing it regularly in order to improve accordingly (your comment about the 90% above).
  
  Where we might slightly disagree is probably that I find the following
  
  – citizenM hotels’ website makes it unreasonably difficult to find the contact form for asking a question.
  
  There might be a misunderstanding but I did not recommend to add more staff…. instead to maybe refrain from giving your clients a reason for having too great an expectation to get replies quickly. Nevertheless, if one goes public and raises these expectations (print and online), the result is that potential clients like me are puzzled when things do not work.
  
  Finally, I congratulate you @citizenlennert:twitter and your team for doing with so few resources so well in the social media space…. chapeau!
  
  Respectfully
  Urs E. Gattiker
  @ComMetrics:twitter
  
  Where we maybe
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