Customer-Conscious GM Shows Its Social Side

LOS ANGELES – A Chevrolet Cruze owner using Facebook to contact General Motors expresses concern that a vehicle recall modification might hurt his car’s fuel economy.

A GM Social Media Customer Care employee fields his complaint and shares it with others within the organization. An engineer ends up telling the customer how and why the recall work won’t lower Cruze fuel mileage.

“The result is a happy customer,” says Melody Blumenschein, GM’s social media manager-customer and relationship services.

GM sold about 2.8 million vehicles in the U.S. last year, including 248,224 Cruzes, according to WardsAuto data. With a buyer base like that, interacting with customers voicing and posting issues (and bringing engineers into it no less), may seem potentially overwhelming.

“But it’s worth doing that for a customer,” Blumenschein says. Especially in the world of social media where word, good and bad, can get around fast.

GM wants to make a good impression one customer at a time, because someone like the concerned Cruze owner “potentially would share his experience with other customers online.”

Operating a customer-care center is hardly a new endeavor for automakers, and, really, social media such as Facebook and Twitter provides just another channel for that.

But today it’s a vital one, as evidenced by GM’s increased social-network involvement, Bluemenschein says. “Why are we there? Because our customers are. Before, we weren’t close enough to them. So we took layers out, first with social media. We did too much outsourcing.”

Among other things, GM hired 25 social-media supervisors who oversee 20 Facebook pages, 15 Twitter handles and 120 online forums and feedback sites.

Spelling Counts

Online communications often are lively back-and-forth discussions with their own set of quirky terms, abbreviations and grammatical casualness.

GM doesn’t want to come across as overly formal, but Bluemenschein says “it is different when you are writing for one of the largest companies in the world.”

For one thing, you better know something about spelling and noun-verb agreement.

Then there’s the politeness factor. Some Facebook users rant. GM customer-care workers can’t. Courteousness is a full-time job requirement.

“I can teach social, but I can’t teach them to be nice,” Bluemenschein says at the 2014 Automotive Social Media Summit here. “That’s something they bring in.”

Many customers use Facebook to communicate with GM because “they know they can get help there,” she says. “Social is a different set of customers. One in three social media users prefer social care to contacting a company by phone.” 

Some customer-care center callers and Internet users who bang away on their keyboards can get carried away.

But Bluemenschein says, “The vast majority of people we deal with are reasonable. If I get a few unreasonable ones among them, it’s worth it. I’d rather deal with three of those to help 50 others.”   

Through its expanded social-network setup, GM gets plenty of online customer feedback, some of it potentially helpful for improving future product features.

For example, a Chevrolet Silverado owner in Texas wanted to know why the pickup’s steering wheel included aluminum trim. He said it got too hot to the touch during summer scorchers in his state.

Some buyers of the ’14 Chevrolet Corvette complained on Facebook about a noise emanating from the car’s navigation screen. “We went to designers with that,” Bluemenschein says. “A fix is coming through dealers in February.”

During a Q&A after her presentation, “The Evolution of Social-Media Customer Care at GM,” she is asked if social networking could serve as an early warning system that might mitigate or avert the likes of GM’s ignition-system recall debacle.

“It is important to have a process under way and understand how to interact with customers and do everything to help them,” she says. “That’s about all I want to say about that.”

But she adds, “Every auto company has had recalls. We need to make sure we’re taking care of customers throughout this one.”

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