MARKETING CHALLENGE:
Increase sales of exam gloves and meet sales quotas
Launch a new product and create buzz to boost the brand image at the same time.

PRODUCT LINE:

Medical Examination Gloves
(yawn)

BACKGROUND:
Medline is the leading provider of healthcare supplies and equipment to the long term care market. One of their product lines is gloves. They had already delivered latex gloves to the market for 40+ years, added a strong and durable line to deal with high-risk and high-stress settings, expanded with vinyl for the low cost market and the latex intolerant and even added aloe to the inner coating to soothe and moisturize. Management was struggling to come up with an innovative product that could both enhance the line and draw more attention to their brand.

CONCEPT:
Support a charity.

Get one or more Customers to participate and produce a viral video.
The charity: The National Breast Cancer Foundation
The product: http://www.medline.com/breast-cancer-awareness/pink-glove.asp
The Customer: Providence St. Vincent Medical Center in Portland, OR USA
The video: (see below)

THE GIVING:
Medline has donated almost a half million dollars to the National Breast Cancer Foundation to provide education and free mammograms to those in need.

THE EARLY RESULTS:
The Charity: Thanks to the increased exposure and awareness, donations increased by 9% during the past  month period not including those donations made by Medline.

The product: According to internal sources, sales quotas have been exceeded for the quarter but exact numbers were not yet available.

The Customer: More than 200 employees of Providence St. Vincent Medical Center took part in the team building event which strengthened moral and brought many diverse groups together to support the project.

The Pink Glove Dance video has been viewed more than 8 million times on You Tube!

We love to give really good Customer support. Let’s face it, good Customer support rewards your company with repeat business. Great Customer support turns a potentially sensitive issue into a viral sales tool.

Since we want our own Customers to walk away feeling so good about their experience with us that they just can’t wait to tell others, we need to be sure that we empower the right people closest to our Customers, that they have an appropriate level of authority and that they have the right tools supporting the entire process.

If you deal with Customer service issues on a daily basis then you need a set of tools that help make your job easier. Customer service is a process that can be a pleasure for all involved if you know what to do next, have the appropriate tools working for you and are able to deliver satisfaction to your Customers effectively in both written and verbal form.

Now, don’t get me wrong, not everyone is cut out to be a Customer service rep – it takes a special person to do well with this kind of challenge. In our experience, those who excel in such a role are the type of individuals convinced that their Customer is King. For these lovely people, I’d like to extend a personal thank you as both a business owner and as one of your Customers – you folks are the reason that I recommend your products and services to my list without hesitation.

Who are we to recommend something in the Customer support space? Well, over the past 10 years BoxOnline’s b6group consultants have implemented more than 60 Customer service solutions for our Clients and from that experience across a broad install base, I’d like to share some tips on improving your Customer service processes so that you too can focus on delivering world-class Customer service instead of fighting with technology that was not designed to treat Customers as King or to make your life any easier.

Let’s try to tackle these items one at a time with the objective of satisfying more Customers, following up with each issue in a professional, organized and sequential manner and also allowing these Customers to walk away feeling so good about their experience with you and your company that they just can’t wait to tell others about the great experience.

To deliver world-class Customer service you are going to need three things.
1. A ticketing system
2. An issue tracker
3. A platform for Customer service

While most software used to be installed directly on your computer or server, today there is a web application service model rapidly gaining acceptance. Three superb examples of such systems are Zendesk, JIRA and Get Satisfaction. I list these Apps specifically because they are not only three of the best Customer service web-based applications we have implemented in the past but also because they are now well integrated to provide a best of breed complete CS solution. Ticketing system Zendesk, issue tracker JIRA, and Customer service platform Get Satisfaction can now communicate seamlessly with each other.

Though much of this functionality was created independently by each of the three vendors, the result is a smooth connection between a public support tool, an enterprise issue tracker and a customizable help desk. Together, the trio delivers a powerful set of tools for responding to Customers in either a public or private forum.

The basic process outline is that CS issues and bug reports get submitted into the system by your Customer service reps (or your own Customers) then a ticketing system handles each request, humans prioritize and delegate the tasks and decisions if needed and then resolutions are shared and resolved via Customer dialog.

Get Satisfaction provides a friendly front door for Customers to enter into a dialog with your team plus optional access to positive communities where they can interact with others.

Ticketing systems are an enormously helpful way for a company to prioritize support issues, but for Customers it can be frustrating to report a problem and then be given a really long string of numbers and letters as proof that they submitted a problem to your team. But what happens then? If companies do the follow-up steps of ticketing poorly, they end up making Customers feel like they’ve been swindled. The exact opposite is what we refer to as Customer Zen and a company called Zendesk has tackled this issue superbly with an elegant and simple solution. They offer a great ticketing and tracking system.

To take this example one step further, let’s say that your business has a technical side to it and you have a software development team who need to identify and kill bugs regularly as they improve your software. Well, Zendesk has a plugin for JIRA (one of the best bug and issue trackers ever invented). This plugin allows anyone to draw tickets into the tracker, while any updates within JIRA are automatically mirrored in your Zendesk. This means that a developer can continue to use JIRA to resolve the bug while your support staff can use Zendesk to keep your Customer informed and both platforms are updated simultaneously and seamlessly.

Tying It All Together
The final piece of the puzzle is the Zendesk and Get Satisfaction integration. This is direct fusing of the two apps. Today you can send and edit Zendesk support tickets without ever leaving your Get Satisfaction interface.

So what this all means is that Get Satisfaction has evolved into a superb Customer Service tool that makes your Customers feel special while giving them the support that they need to resolve each and every one of their issues with your company, your products, your services and your staff. So if you are in need of a powerful viral marketing weapon – try giving great Customer service and then power it with both Get Satisfaction and Zendesk.