“Fine is the f-bomb of customer service.”
Shep Hyken

The numbers don’t lie: poor customer service costs businesses more than $75 billion a year according to a recent report. That’s up $13 billion since 2016. Moreover, 3. 82% of consumers prefer whenever a brand engages with them on social media.

Long story short: if your social media customer care game is off, you’re likely to feel it directly on your balance sheet.

In this week’s podcast, we sit down with Danielle Owings, Insight Marketing Group’s social media strategy specialist, for a break down of the most powerful trends in social media today as revealed at this year’s Social Media Marketing World Annual Conference in San Diego, CA.

Danielle shares key insights from the world’s top social media authorities including Mari Smith, “the Queen of Facebook” and Michael Stelzner, the founder of Social Media Examiner. She also explains how medical practices can leverage current social media trends to improve customer care and ultimately, the patient experience.

Tune in to discover:

• How marketers now measure success on social media
• Why video content is your #1 tool for online patient engagement and the emergence of live stories and watch parties
• The continued importance of proactive social customer service to enhancing your patients’ overall experience
• How you can leverage and incorporate upcoming trends into the social media marketing of your medical practice
• What’s on the horizon for social media in 2019 and beyond

Transcription

Dr Marketing Tips, paging Dr Marketing Tips. Dr Marketing Tips, you’re needed in the marketing department. Welcome to the Dr Marketing Tips podcast, your prescription to the answers you seek to grow your medical practice easier, better, and faster. This show is all about connecting practice administrators and medical marketing professionals with peers working in practices, learning from experiences, making mistakes, and sharing successes. Let’s get started.

Jennifer: Hey there. Welcome to the Dr Marketing Tips podcast. I’m Jennifer.

Danielle: And I’m Danielle.

Jennifer: And we are here today to do a recap of some of the key takeaways of kind of what’s going on in the world of social media. Danielle has been over in San Diego the last week at the Social Media Marketing World Annual Conference and I thought we’d invite Danielle onto this week’s Dr Marketing Tips podcast to kind of share with us kind of what she heard, what she saw, and what are the trends that are coming up around the corner that you can incorporate into your social media marketing for your medical practice.
With that, Danielle, what would you consider to be kind of the overarching theme at this year’s Social Media World?

Danielle: Yeah. One of the biggest themes was kind of changing how marketers measure their success on social media. For a lot of digital marketers, it’s easy to get caught up in a lot of the vanity metrics like having the most likes or the most followers, but something that Michael Stelzner emphasized in his keynote was that better is greater than bigger. You want to focus on your core audience, your true fans. He gave a really good example of a video that he posted for Social Media Examiner where it said 20,000 people read this video, but when he looked deeper into the metrics, only 19 people actually watched the entirety of the video. It’s just really important to focus on your true fans, the ones that are really gonna rally for you when you need them, and don’t get caught up in all those vanity metrics, I have the most followers or the most likes.
It kind of all ties into having a larger impact on a smaller number of people versus no impact on a large number of people and it kind of drives back to that human connection that you want the people that actually connect with your brand.

Jennifer: Yeah. I think more and more, especially over the last couple years, we’ve been talking more about those human connection and creating the human connection and I feel like this is one of those things that we are consistently having to talk to certain positions that have been doing social media for a long time. They’re very focused on that fan number or that number of Twitter followers, when in fact it’s about engagement and it’s why internally we’ve changed a lot of our goals and our metrics to looking at engagement and creating those really sticky stories, especially on Instagram. It’s nice to hear that we’ve kind of been ahead of that curve but to hear industry experts kind of reinforcing that human to human connection.

Danielle: Absolutely.

Jennifer: So kind of with that, Danielle, what actually … because you were at Social Media Marketing World last year and then had a last minute opportunity to attend this year. What has changed since last year when you were at the conference?

Danielle: Yeah, what I thought was interesting is that of course social media changes every day, every second but there are also some things that kind of stayed the same. Video is still number one for engagement. I know last year it was kind of the new thing, hey, if you’re not doing video you need to be doing it. But the way that video has changed for 2019 is more pushing toward vertical videos. The main reason for that is because people are interacting with brands through stories more than in the newsfeed. Actually there was a great statistic that stories are growing 15 times faster than the feed content. There’s 500 million daily active users on Instagram stories versus only 300 million active users on Facebook. There’s this focus on less permanence and more ephemeral. So things that you have to be there when it’s happening to see it and so that’s kind of how video is still very relevant, but it is changing how we’re using video.
There’s still this push for the personal connection, as we’ve talked about the last couple years. Last year it was about going live and doing a selfie video. This year Mari Smith, the queen of Facebook, mentioned that watching parties are gonna be kind of a big part of marketing this year, so that kind of ties more into the human connection, people watching something together.
They also mentioned connecting with private groups. It’s something that I think we’ll look into, but it might be more relevant for industries that don’t necessarily have to adhere to a HIPAA compliance. I don’t think you can necessarily have a private group of knee pain or something like that.
So a lot of new things, but a lot of things that have also kind of stayed the same.

Jennifer: If you like what you’re hearing and need some help marketing your medical practice this year, be sure and check us out at insightmg.com. That’s insight, M, as in marketing, G, as in group, dot com. Don’t think you’ve got a budget for this kind of stuff? Think again. We’ve got you covered. Make sure you schedule a free consult today.
Yeah it’s interesting because we’ve got, as you talk about those live stories and watch parties, we’ve got a new orthopedic surgeon who you’re familiar with that … he’s in, maybe he’s in his fourth year or something like that coming out and we’re going to launch him with a … He wants to do a launch in The Villages, which is one of the largest retirement communities in the United States, but we’re about an hour out of The Villages in Orlando, and so he’s gonna launch with a watch party live event with individuals in The Villages on Facebook, and we’re gonna do a big talk and do a live Q&A with the physician. It’s interesting to hear that they were talking about that since we’ve already got that in the pipeline to test it out with this particular surgeon.

Danielle: Yeah. They said it should be a big part of your marketing this year, so …

Jennifer: Hey, there you go.

Danielle: We’ll see how that goes.

Jennifer: We’ll see. Yeah, we’ll see how that goes. Let’s put that one on our radar screen, but we’ll actually see what happens there. All right, so this next thing is one that I’m actually really super excited about and that is let’s talk about customer service, and social customer service is actually something we’ve been focusing on, as you know, these last couple of years. In fact, in a couple weeks I’m actually at the Medical Group Managers Association, the MGMA national conference, delivering a talk on social customer service. Then I’ll be actually in San Diego in a couple weeks at the ophthalmology conference, the international conference, delivering the same talk on social customer service. So it’s something we’ve been focused on, like hyper focused in the last couple years. What were the updates? What did you hear about from a social customer service standpoint at the conference this year?

Danielle: Yeah, so a really big number that was thrown out was that there was 75 billion, with a B, loss in customer service … or due to customer service from people switching to another company. Potential revenue that was lost because of bad customer service.
I think one of the biggest kind of explanations of it was that customer service is reactive. Somebody … something bad happened and you’re having to react to try to fix it, while social care is being proactive so you’re already listening and paying attention before something goes wrong.
Another thing that I thought was really interesting was that you don’t necessarily compare to the customer service of your competitor. You might think like, “Oh, this doctor’s office is known for great customer service and maybe we need to work on that.” It’s not just your direct competitors. It’s the best service that they’ve had anywhere. So they had a great experience at Chick-Fil-A and they expect to also have a great experience at the doctor’s office. That’s important to think about as well.
Something else that I like that one of the speakers said that loyalty is an emotion where as satisfaction is just a rating, that they were just satisfied. One of the speakers actually quoted Horst Schulze, who’s the president of Ritz-Carlton which Jennifer and I actually had the opportunity to see him speak a couple weeks ago at a leadership conference in Lakeland and it was that you only have to do 10% better than your competition to impress your customers. I thought that was cool, to kind of have that shout out of another speaker that we just heard from to kind of reiterate that point.
One of my favorite quotes in the customer service workshop was fine is the F-bomb of customer service. So how was your experience? It was fine, it was fine. So the F-bomb of customer service is something that we want to avoid and it’s just important, it kind of reiterates what we’ve been working on the last couple years, that it’s a team sport. Your team has to be in the moment and ready to address these concerns. Of course, the best companies in the world are still gonna have issues, but the main thing is how it’s handled and the biggest part of social customer care is the convenience of it. People are gonna message you on Facebook or Instagram or whichever avenue they choose and they expect the urgency and the convenience that comes with social media.

Jennifer: Danielle, in your listening in on those talks about customer service, did any of the speakers give any clues to what some of the bigger companies out there might be doing to address poor customer service at the core?

Danielle: Not specifically. It’s more just kind of I guess reiterating that every interaction affects the overall experience for the customer, but no specific practice or tools that they were using.

Jennifer: That’s really interesting.

Danielle: If only there was something. Yeah.

Jennifer: Yeah. Well, because our training … as you know, the customer service training that we have put into place, or really patient experience training that we’ve put into place for medical practices as I’m looking at your list and listening to you, we talk about pretty extensively this whole reactive versus proactive and social … kind of the web that gets created from a customer service standpoint, we really harp on the whole marketing is now a team sport and delivering excellent customer service is the key. It would have been nice to have had some examples, but sometimes I find that when you go to conferences that they don’t get the examples … that you don’t walk away with those real world examples that you’re wanting.

Danielle: Right.

Jennifer: Unless they come to our … unless they come to any of my talks where I give more examples sometimes than I should and we go all the way against the time clock there. Okay, so with that said, you got a lot out of this conference. You always do. Even if it’s a little repetitive, but what is it that you think is kind of on the horizon or around the corner next that our medical practice listeners can take and start thinking about to implement in 2019 and beyond?

Danielle: Yeah. I’m pretty sure most people will remember the day that the world almost stopped turning was March 13. Facebook and Instagram were down for 14 hours, but we all got through it. But something that was interesting, after that happened there were two executives from Facebook that resigned as well as one from WhatsApp which is owned by Facebook as well. Apparently there’s some internal disagreement on privacy encryptions and these big changes that they’re making so we don’t have anything specific on what this means, but it’s something to pay attention to because if the executives are leaving, things are changing internally for Facebook so that could drastically change how us as businesses and just regular people use social media. It’s something to pay attention to.
Another thing they highlighted was China has this amazing app called WeChat where it is everything in one. It’s your Facebook, it’s your Uber, it’s your doctor, it’s your bank, it’s everything in one. So it’s kind of seeing if the United States comes up with its own version of that app, so that’s something to pay attention to. There’s a very interesting video on China WeChat that you can see everything that’s incorporated into this one super app basically.
Another thing to pay attention to, so video and stories and then messaging are still big parts of social media, but it was mentioned that Facebook’s Messenger apps will most likely be merging into one in the next year. That’s Instagram direct message, Facebook messenger, and WhatsApp. We’ll see kind of what happens there.
And, I think another just a big thing that kind of ties into that is things change so quickly, we’re always right on to the next thing. So making sure we take time to reflect on all these crazy changes that are always happening on social.

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Yeah, I think you just hit the nail on the head. There’s always so much going on that it’s important to take time to reflect. So with that, anything else that you want to add that you took away from the Social Media Marketing World Conference this year?

Danielle: Yeah. Something that I … one of the workshops that I really enjoyed was talking about how of course social in the last 10 years has just completely consumed our lives. It was just a really good reminder to enjoy the moment that you’re in. With social there’s this FOMO, fear of missing out, you gotta be on social all the time and make sure that you see everything and you don’t miss anything and these social platforms are designed to be addictive. It was a really good reminder that while we’re so consumed with it to kind of take a step back and give your brain that opportunity to recharge.
There was a very interesting quote, it was that Netflix’s biggest competitor is sleep. So obviously if you’re sleeping, you’re not watching their content. So some things that kind of affected I guess this kind of social shift. People used to change tasks that they’re working on every three minutes and now people are switching between tasks every 45 seconds. It takes 23 minutes for you to get back on track after just 15 seconds of distraction. Then when you’re moving so quickly you’re not going as deep and allowing yourself to really understand what you’re doing.
Really, just that kind of … yes, it’s our job and it’s our lives, but to take a step back and kind of give your brain that opportunity to recharge, put your phone down, turn the laptop off was just a really good reminder.

Jennifer: That’s a great reminder. If I had to sum up this conversation today, I’m gonna sum it up with that people are changing the way that they’re using social and I’m hearing it from my friends and colleagues even more and more these days that they’re actually removing the app from their phone for either short periods of time or from a permanent standpoint. I think that there’s some really interesting technology in other parts of the world that maybe have a leg up on us right now and the way that we’re using social media and that social will continue to change based on these new products that are coming out that may not be products that we’re really adept at using right now.
And then if I hear anything it’s that social customer service is going to continue to be a key player. What that tells me is that possibly there is a shift from just using social media to kind of waste time and catch up on things and feel like you’re part of it to a more intentional I’m gonna use social media almost as a search engine that provides instant feedback and from a customer service standpoint things are about to get real. That’s my summary, but I’m really glad that you were able to go this year, Danielle, because I think overall it was very beneficial and it’s better at the end of the day. It helps us be better for our clients.
So thank you for joining me today and with that, I’m Jennifer.

Danielle: And I’m Danielle.

Jennifer: We’ll see you next time on the Dr Marketing Tips podcast.

Thanks for listening to the drmarketingtips.com podcast. If there’s anything from today’s show you want to learn more about, check out drmarketingtips.com for our podcast resource center with all the notes, links, and goodies we mentioned during the show. If you’re not already a subscriber to our show, please consider pressing the subscribe button on your podcast player so you never miss one of our future episodes, and if you haven’t given us a rating or review yet on iTunes, please find a spare minute and help us reach and educate even more of our medical practice peers. Thanks again for listening and we’ll catch you next time. Doctor’s orders.

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