
And when they want to contact you – you can’t be invisible. Large company or small. They don’t want to fill out a contact us form that goes to an anonymous place. They want to talk (figuratively or literally) to the right person. Go to your website – right now. Can someone figure out how to get to the person most responsible for customer satisfaction and interaction? Can they even figure out who that person is?
Here’s a short personal experience. I’m not an millennial, but I work with so many of them, and have adopted so many of their traits, I might as well be. I had a really difficult experience with a big-box home improvement retailer. I wanted to let them know about my experience, but on their website is just a fill-in-the-blank form. One that I am pretty sure sails into never-never land. So rather than leave it at that, I searched their corporate hierarchy and found an individual with an appropriate title for my issue. No email for him to be found anywhere. So, I looked him up on LinkedIn and then used the LinkedIn in-mail feature to send him a long note detailing my experiences.
I haven’t gotten a response yet, but I am quite sure that this retailer never anticipated that a customer would reach out in this manner. Are the executives using social media? Well I hope so, so that I get a response. But the very fact that I took this path to contact him means others will as well.
So should your marketing strategy involve being active on social – absolutely. Your customers will find you (and you want them to) and your prospects will check up on you – it just may not be who you expected.