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Unit 8: Managing Customer Relations

service agent productivity, a shortened product problem-resolution cycle and an increase Notes
their Net Promoter Scores. The net-net is a reduction in customer service support costs and
an increase in sales!
Why did they decide on social media? The cost of providing customer service for digital
lifestyle products is on the rise. As margins on these types of products decrease and their
complexity requires more in-depth customer service, a couple of customer service calls
eats away at the already thin profit. Lenovo knew that social media could help them learn,
from the customer’s point-of-view, the top issues with service, product features, functions,
delays in shipments— and all from a global perspective.

Lenovo Created Powerful Partnerships and Shared the Responsibility of Social Media
across Departments
In looking at best practices, Lenovo excelled at them. In particular, they determined all the
stakeholders and invited them to participate in the customer service social media initiative.
They invited the Legal Department to participate from the very beginning. The legal
group helped determine the terms of service for the community, reviewed the rules of
engagement, the moderation policies as well as the management principle of the
community. And they provided the disclaimers for the liability of the information posted
to the site. And community executives collaborated with public relations and corporate
communications to align all the communication strategies.
Lenovo also created powerful partnerships with marketing, sales, product development
and engineering. They made interdepartmental collaboration “the way we do business
around here.” This is unusual as in most companies these functional departments are
silo’d entities that don’t always get along well. However, Lenovo’s executive management
provided the leadership and guided the partnership between marketing and service.
Marketing owned the sales part of the website and the corporate blogs. The World Wide
Service Organization “owned” the technical support website and the customer service
online community. And all departments were considered an integral part of the community
and asked to provide insights into how their department’s operations not only affected
the customer experience, but how they could make it better.
What was great was that they looked at the top call drivers in customer service. A good
percentage of them were, “My lap top is broken. How do I fix it?” By providing that
feedback from customer service to product development and engineering, Lenovo was
able to reduce the volume of “its broken/fix it” calls. This contributed not only to contact
centre cost savings, but also to an enhanced customer perception of the product and higher
customer satisfaction. Customers felt respected and listened to. Their feedback was used
by the company to make better products, which reduces calls to the contact centre!
Questions
1. How Lenovo did utilized social media in their business development?

2. What are your observations about the situation in the case?

Source: http://blogs.forrester.com/business_process/2010/01/how-lenovo-implemented-customer-service-social-media-best-
practices.html

8.4 Summary

 Marketing and PR are supposed to help you build connections, manage relationships and
inspire loyalty in your customers. But many businesses seem to be limiting themselves to
advertising their low prices, top quality and some vague “commitment to customer
service”.

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