The face-to-face customer care and the personal touch that Joie de Vivre exhibits so brilliantly at their hotels extends to their online presence. Joie de Vivre developed Yvette, the industry’s first online matchmaking service, to help travelers choose which of its diverse hotels will provide them with the most satisfying “identity refreshment,” as Conley calls it. Each of its thirty-four hotels has a distinct personality, and based on your answers to five easy questions, Yvette can recommend the one that most reflects your own. An urbane traveler might be guided toward the glamorous Galleria Park, while someone with a yen for tea-pots might love to stay at the B&B-style White Swan Inn. There’s something for everyone. Along with a suggested list of hotels, Yvette makes an introduction, photo included, to a few locals who have provided tips on things to do and places to go for travelers seeking a truly off-the-tourist-track experience. Chip Conley happens to be one of them. That’s right—the company’s founder wants to show you around town. Pretty cool.
Ann Nadeau, Joie de Vivre’s corporate director of marketing, has a funny reply to the question of what percentage of their marketing budget is allocated to creating word of mouth: “How can I put HUGE in a percentage? Our marketing budget is so tiny we depend on word of ‘mouse.’” Staging incredible customer experiences at the hotels and on their website is one way to get people talking, but the effort to engage with customers is equally impressive behind the scenes.
There is a four-person social media team based in the company’s home office that is dedicated to branding efforts. Along with each hotel’s general manager, they engage and respond to customers on Yelp, Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Yahoo Travel, and other social networking channels. In addition, they are responsible for coordinating with every hotel’s dedicated Social Media Champions, of which there are one or two responsible for daily postings on Twitter and Facebook. These Champions also participate in company-wide “social media summits,” where they can share best practices and ideas with each other so that each hotel maximizes its one-on-one reach.
To keep tabs on how well its social media efforts are working, the company relies upon daily updates and a scorecard system from Revinate, which monitors and manages online reviews and social media sites exclusively for hotels. It also pays close attention to TripAdvisor consumer reviews and ratings. It should come as no surprise that as of the first quarter of 2010, two-thirds of the Joie de Vivre hotels were listed in TripAdvisor’s top ten for their geographical area.
The company offers social media classes to all interested employees through their in-house professional development program called JdV University. Presentations on social media are regularly made at general manager meetings.
Like other companies we examined that are heavily invested in and benefit hugely from social media, Joie de Vivre used it to help weather the recent severe economic downturn, which devastated much of the hospitality industry. In summer 2009, Joie de Vivre started offering exclusive deals on hotel rooms to Twitter followers on Tuesdays, and Facebook fans on Fridays. The first season the Twitter Tuesdays and Facebook Fridays were launched, the company booked over a thousand rooms that otherwise would have remained empty. With very little investment, the program continues to provide a steady stream of revenue that goes straight to the bottom line.
What Joie de Vivre Does Right
THE MESSAGE COMES FROM THE TOP. Setting the tone and establishing a cultural foundation of empathy and excellence is essential to success in the Thank You Economy. The message that one-on-one engagement and customer service is a top priority has to originate from the very top of the company. Chip Conley gives his employees ample training opportunities, the freedom to think creatively and from the heart, and continually demonstrates and reinforces his commitment to providing a personalized, one-on-one experience with as many guests as possible.
ITS INTENT COMES FROM THE RIGHT PLACE. The company seems to work extremely hard to balance its business intent—to grow a profitable business—with intent from the heart—to provide travelers with a unique, customized, memorable hotel experience. For example, while any staff member can select any visitor to be a candidate for the DreamMaker program, employees are encouraged to target loyal customers or individuals who might have a lot of word-of-mouth potential.
IT HIRES CULTURALLY COMPATIBLE DNA. Providing these word-of-mouth–worthy experiences on a regular basis is possible only when a company can tap extremely rich reserves of creativity, care, and empathy. That’s why any leaders or managers determined to excel at customer service have to make sure their employees share the same DNA that they do, and believe in the company’s mission down to their bones. If they don’t, they should be replaced when the opportunity arises. The difference between the performance of a company populated by people who really care and one populated by people who care because they’re paid to is the difference between Bruce Springsteen and Milli Vanilli.
IT USES “PULL TACTICS.” A strategy of caring usually out-shines tactics, but when they’re used with the right intent, tactics can help a brand achieve greatness. Joie de Vivre uses tactics in a specific and brilliant way. The intent of most tactics, and advertising campaigns as well, is to entertain, inform, or scare the consumer enough that he or she pays attention. Overall, Joie de Vivre’s tactics are designed to remind consumers why they should care about the brand and amplify their positive feelings toward it. The individual tactics that are truly deal-oriented benefit people who have already publicly expressed an affinity for the brand. Many are also designed to get people who work for the company at every level to think with their hearts as well as their heads. To work for this company is to be challenged on a daily basis to be the best human being one can be.
Now, I’m a huge fan of Joie de Vivre hotels, but in mid-September 2010, I noticed they were “pushing” a little more than I’d like to see. In fact, for three days straight in early September, they tweeted only four times, and each tweet was about pushing room deals instead of creating dialogue with customers. They’re usually so good at connecting emotionally with customers; I hope that in the future we see fewer push tactics and more tweets that pull their guests in so they can experience the Thank You Economy the Joie de Vivre way.
Joie de Vivre has figured out that it’s the big and the little stuff that matter most to building a brand’s identity. The stuff in the middle is important for a company’s survival, of course, but it’s the one-on-one initiatives that lie at either extreme—the nit-picky details and the big, grand gestures—that make an impact, and make people talk.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Irena Vaksman, DDS: A Small Practice Cuts Its Teeth on Social Media
There are a lot of people who list going to the dentist as one of the most frightening, unpleasant experiences they can imagine, but I’m betting that few of them are patients of Dr. Irena Vaksman, a dentist with close to a decade of experience who recently opened a private practice in San Francisco. I’ve never met Dr. Vaksman, and as far as I’m aware no one I know has ever had her poke at his or her molars. But I know that Dr. Vaksman’s patients love her, and her staff, and her spa-like office, and the amazing “movie goggles” they can wear to distract them during procedures, because they tell me so—on Yelp and on Facebook.
Some people might still think it’s a little jarring to see medical practitioners marketing themselves on social networking sites, but Dr. Vaksman is simply trailblazing where other doctors are eventually going to follow. When over half the adult population of online users are at least occasionally turning to online reviews and commentary to inform their health care decisions, it makes sense that the professionals providing health care should be there, ready to talk to them as well. According to a 2009 Pew Research Center report, 61 percent of adults look online for health information. Of those, 59 percent have done at least one of the following activities:
Read someone else’s commentary or experience about health or medical issues on an online news group, website, or blog
Consulted rankings or reviews online of doctors or other providers
Consulted rankings or reviews online of hospitals or other medical facilities
Signed up to receive updates about health or medical issues
Listened to a podcast about health or medical issues
Besides her information on Facebook, you can also find Dr. Vaksman on Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn. She uses all of these channels to share information, educate the public, and make herself available to her clientele whenever they have a question, comment, or concern.
The Ideal Intent
According to Robert Vaksman, Dr. Vaksman’s husband, a lawyer who is also the business’s social media manager, his wife opened her practice with one clear goal: to provide the ideal patient experience. That experience would necessarily involve providing the most knowledgeable, current, and technologically up-to-date standards of dental care. It was also contingent on her ability to establish strong one-on-one relationships, possible only by taking enough time during every visit to build rapport, by getting to know her patients well, and by proving that she cared not just about their teeth but about their overall well-being. Yet in order to provide that outstanding care, she first had to get new patients in the door.
Using Social Media to Differentiate
As it so happened, social media, which provides the perfect platform for establishing close business-to-consumer relationships, was also the platform that would help Dr. Vaksman differentiate herself from the thousands of other already well-established dentists in the dense San Francisco urban area (as well as in the high-rise medical building where her practice is located). Besides establishing a presence on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn, she became the first dentist in the city to offer a Groupon, and the experiment brought new patients to the five-month-old practice in droves. Unfortunately, the response was a little too good; Robert compares trying to handle the overwhelming flow of patients to drinking out of a hose. The practice was inundated with calls for appointments, and some patients who didn’t get the exceptional customer service that Dr. Vaksman intended to provide posted their frustration online. As Robert explained, “The significant volume immediately exposed our weakness on the front desk, which is a very critical point in our relationship with our patients, as we only have one shot at our first impression.” Yet what some businesses might have perceived as a negative social media experience, Dr. Vaksman and Robert saw as a fortuitous one; it gave them a way to quickly pinpoint where they needed to make adjustments to their staff and their appointment procedures. Small businesses often have an easier time reacting and adapting than big ones, but more and more it is becoming crucial for big businesses and brands to improve their response times and adapt quickly, too.
Handling Criticism, and Converting It
How a business or brand handles criticism in a public forum is more important than how it handles praise.
Dr. Vaksman seems to understand something that I brought up in the early chapters of this book—the complaining customer who uses social media is a better customer to have than a silent one. You can talk to a customer who bothers to complain. If you think it’s warranted, you can apologize. If you wish, you can explain yourself or ask for a second chance. At the very least, you can make it public record that you do not take anyone’s dissatisfaction lightly. The platform that gives consumers such tremendous power in the Thank You Economy also gives brands the chance to save customer relationships. You can see the end results of Dr. Vaksman’s engagement with dissatisfied patients on Yelp. Twice, people who complained about their experience posted updates announcing that Dr. Vaksman’s staff had worked to resolve their issues. The fate of Dr. Vaksman’s business rests on her ability to do a stellar job and to earn people’s trust. Based on the primarily glowing online reviews, and the evidence that she is successfully converting disappointed customers into happy ones, it looks as though she is doing both.
Often, there are two kinds of consumer reviewers—the ones consumers write when they have a terrific experience and the ones they write when they have a terrible one. Any doctor who isn’t supremely confident that he or she is offering the best care available has no business on Facebook or Yelp, or even Citysearch or Angie’s List. Any bad service or mediocrity is asking to be exposed on those sites. And though some patrons might agree with reviewers that a restaurant serves lousy food, but return anyway because it’s cheap and the one most conveniently located for office happy hours, very, very few patients are going to put themselves in a doctor’s hands if the testimonials they read aren’t overwhelmingly positive, as they are for Dr. Vaksman. Social media is a perfect environment for medical practitioners smart enough, and good enough, to leverage what its platforms have to offer.
The Power of First to Market
How do I know about Dr. Vaksman, anyway? We live on opposite sides of the country, and I’ve never needed a dentist (knock on wood) during any of my trips to the West Coast. The national awareness her young business has attracted is a result of two important Thank You Economy truths that I frequently talk about: 1) the earned media value of being first to market is priceless, and 2) the quality of your fans and followers is vastly more important than the quantity.
It Takes Just One Customer
If Irena Vaksman had not established herself on all of those social media sites, Loïc Le Meur probably would never have mentioned her unless someone he knew asked him to recommend a dentist. But Loïc Le Meur is very interested in social media—he is an internationally known entrepreneur, the developer of the social software app Seesmic, and was ranked by BusinessWeek as one of 2008’s twenty-five most influential people on the Web. So when Le Meur found out that his new dentist had a social media presence, he thought that was worth writing about, and he posted some thoughts about it on his blog. Like most of Dr. Vaksman’s other patients, he was complimentary and pleased with the thorough care he received and with the office’s use of sophisticated, state-of-the-art technology. He did question, however, whether Dr. Vaksman was using her social networking sites properly, and whether she even needed them at all. After all, it’s not easy to keep up with multiple Web presences, and Le Meur wondered how much a dentist could find to talk about. Once again, when faced with criticism, the Vaksmans took the opportunity to open up a dialogue, and wrote in to explain their social media strategy and their plans for the future. The resulting conversation gave readers incredible insight into Dr. Vaksman as an entrepreneur and a medical professional. You can see the whole exchange at Loïc Le Meur’s website.
From there, TechCrunch picked up the story, and decided to feature Dr. Vaksman in an article about how small businesses are using social media. In addition, Robert Vaksman was invited to participate in the TechCrunch Social Currency CrunchUp later that month. All of that exposure happened because the Vaksmans weren’t afraid to try something new; they didn’t draw any lines in the sand.
It should be noted that being an early social media adopter isn’t the only reason Dr. Vaksman is getting so much attention. No one would have paid her any mind if the majority of the comments left on her sites weren’t incredibly positive. But they are, praising everything from the courtesy of her staff to the thoroughness of her cleanings and exams to her caring manner. Such good reviews probably explain why Facebook users make up approximately 19 percent of Dr. Vaksman’s website traffic. The combination of an unbelievable customer experience plus the power of word of mouth has led to what appears to be a very solid beginning for this young business.
Crawling Before You Run Is Okay
Looking over Dr. Vaksman’s sites, I’m in agreement with Loïc Le Meur—she could do more: offer more engaging, more creative content and add to the conversations about toothbrushes, toothpaste, cavities, root canals, braces, bad breath, oral cancer, tooth whiteners, and other dental topics that must be being discussed somewhere in the social media space. In his response to Le Meur’s post, Robert Vaksman says, “We fully intend to be more vocal on Faceb
ook—and our other venues. Perhaps we should have done so sooner, but we wanted to first focus on building a great-looking, branded and conversion-friendly online presence.” I think walking before you run is a great strategy, but I look forward to seeing what happens for the business when the Vaksmans intensify the pace of their social media campaigns.
What Dr. Vaksman Is Doing Right
She launched with good intent. Dr. Vaksman started her business with the express goal of providing the most personal, thorough, and technologically advanced care possible.
Shock and awe. Patients rave about the movie goggles they can wear. They rave about the soothing, spa-like atmosphere of the office. They rave about the twenty-third-floor view out the window. They rave about the tooth-by-tooth consultation they get from the dentist. There seems to be a lot to rave about.
Setting the culture. When the Groupon deluge of new patients revealed that some of the front-desk staff didn’t quite get how high her standards of service were, she replaced them.
If You’re Small, Play Like You’re Big
Dr. Vaksman is showing the marketing world that what works for the big boys like Best Buy can scale down to the little guys, too. Maybe your significant other isn’t your business partner and can’t devote his or her time to managing your social media so you can focus on what you do best. No matter—hire someone who can. It’s not too soon for small businesses to start hiring social media managers (or community managers, as I like to call them). My dad thought I was nuts in 1999 when I insisted that we needed to hire a Web developer; nothing in his experience told him that it would be prudent for a local liquor store to prepare for online commerce. Luckily, I didn’t have to pull my last card—the “We-just-went-from-three-to-ten-in-a-year, how-can-you-not-let-me-take-this-chance?” plea—because I was blessed with a father who trusted me and gave me an enormous amount of freedom to do what I thought was right as long as I could explain my reasoning. I think a lot of small businesses are having conversations like that right now. If you’re not going to be your own community manager, yes, it will cost you to get one. But you’re going to have to do it eventually, so you might as well start figuring out how to budget for it now. If you have ten or more employees, you might be able to save some money if you can figure out whose time would be better spent on social media. Look for the new angles, and find new ways to approach your marketing strategies. Innovate or die.
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