Social Lessons Learned from drugstore.com

Drugstore.com, a leading online retailer of health, beauty, skincare, vision and pharmacy products, has built a brand known for uncommonly superior customer experiences. As the director of customer care, Lisa Larson spends most of her days ensuring customers have fantastic experiences, even if something goes wrong.

Lisa is a truly innovative customer care executive; she and her team embrace new technology as a way to connect with customers and improve experiences. In fact, Lisa is on Twitter regularly, listening to customers, sharing ideas and solving their problems. You can follow her @DirectorsDesk.

Lisa was recently in New York at CRM Evolution where she addressed a packed room of customer experience managers and executives on the topic of customer care in a social environment. She shared many great insights during her presentation (which was more like a conversation since attendees continually peppered her with great questions) and I’ve compiled a list of her best social customer care tips below. I’d love to hear your thoughts and tips as well, so please share some of your suggestions for delivering great customer experiences using Twitter or other social media sites.

Lisa’s Philosophy

“Customers don’t want you to tell them what to buy or do, they want you to educate them and then let them make the decisions; that is being part of a community and that is what social media is all about.”

Lisa’s Social Media Tips

1. Don’t try to solve the entire issue on Twitter. Instead, direct customers to chat live with agents where they can have a conversation.
2. Use social media as an opportunity to educate, send links to help pages where you have more than 140 characters to answer basic questions.
3. Keep customer care and marketing/brand Twitter accounts separate; they each serve a different purpose and the content is distinctly different.
4. Monitor social media sites to hear what is being said about your brand and customer service.
5. Include your Twitter account in outbound agent emails; at drugstore.com every email includes “follow our director on Twitter.” Senior level engagement in social media helps keep agents accountable.
6. Be careful, be smart, be honest – social media is instantaneous and permanent.
7. Have controls in place, such as social media guidelines for employees. Be sure to use only experienced agents to respond to customers on social media sites; you can’t have gun slingers.
8. Treat social media like any other customer care channel; track exchanges on Twitter so they can be captured in your customer experience system just like an email or phone call.

To learn more about drugstore.com’s success, check out this blog post from Lisa.