How Freshbooks Built an Army of Passionate Evangelists on Twitter. How are YOU doing so?
This is Part 2 of Creating Tangible Results With Twitter (Part 1 here)
Update: Within a very short time, 3 comments from their fans came in to reinforce the point. Included these points at the bottom of the post!
This series is created by Erica OGrady (@ericaogrady), where she explores creating tangible results with Twitter. She is currently the Chief Experience Officer at Peanut Butter Media, and On the Road Correspondent for The Business Maker’s Radio Show heard on Talk Radio 950.
Differentiating from The Crowd With Twitter
The Web Application world is an extremely competitive space, which is why FreshBooks (an online invoicing and time-tracking service) had to find a way to distinguish themselves from their competition. “For us - it’s always been about great customer service and giving people the best experience possible” says Saul Colt, Head of Magic at FreshBooks.
With over 600,000 customers world wide, and growing - FreshBooks like most big companies, is very active in the Social Media space. In fact, they were one of the first companies to really use Twitter as a Customer Service Platform.
For FreshBooks - it was a simple 140 character message on Twitter that solidified their reputation as a company that truly cares about their customers.
Listen to what your users are Tweeting about, because each Tweet is an opportunity for a lasting relationship!
On May 29th, 2008 they saw a message from one of their users @chelpixie on Twitter. Michelle Wolverton (@chelpixie) is a Boston Based Virtual Assistant who’d been using the FreshBooks online invoicing service for just a few months.
That night, Michelle had been stood up by her date. FreshBooks was following her stream of tweets and responded with the following:
Responding to Chelpixie’s Tweet that she had been stood up by a date
Sweet - and maybe even remarkable. But it’s what they did next that earned FreshBooks the love of users everywhere.
Concretizing Relationships with… Flowers and T-Shirts!
Since @chelpixie was a client - they looked up her address and the next day - they sent her flowers. Now, when was the last time you received flowers from a service provider after being stood up?
When was the last time your web app sent you flowers after you got stood up?
Besides this one special incident, it’s also clear that they live up to these values every single day on Twitter, listening closely, and grabbing every chance to build a relationship with their customers.
“Sometimes we’ll see a tweet from someone saying they like our shirts - a week later they’ll find a FreshBooks T-shirt in their mailbox” says Colt.
Where else can you stay on such close terms with the customer?
Creating Measurable Results With Twitter
FreshBooks core values are Fun, Professionalism, and Simplicity. But it’s not all fun and games. Twitter has made a tangible difference to FreshBooks bottom line. Measuring direct and quantifiable ROI in Social Media can be difficult. As Jason Falls, Director of Social Media for Doe-Anderson says: “The problem with trying to determine ROI for social media is you are trying to put numeric quantities around human interactions and conversations, which are not quantifiable.”
In the case of FreshBooks, the results are definitely measurable. According to Colt, “Customer service calls have gone down considerably since we started using Twitter. We used to respond to every single tweet that mentioned us. But now - we’re finding we don’t have to. Most of the time our users beat us to the punch”.
Twitter is not only saving FreshBooks time. It’s saving them money too. By mining customer feedback to see which features should be added or improved they can find out what’s most important to their users before spending time and money developing needless features.
Giving Users Easy Way of Channeling Requests and Feedback
Investment Needed? Definitely.
Results Acquired? An Army of Brand Evangelists
The level of engagement and camaraderie that surrounds the FreshBooks Brand can be expressed as nothing short of fascinating, with 5 pages worth of tweets about the company in a single day.
One user Tweeted: “The support crew at @freshbooks just blew my mind. I just sent them a really low priority request and got a response/fix back in 10 minutes.” (via @jeremysanchez)
And another: “@rlangdon last night I sent my first invoice using @freshbooks and loved it :)” (via @CRschilliger)
The goal of a great Social Media Campaign is to delight your users and create evangelists for your product, service, or brand. In Saul’s words…
This makes Twitter “the absolute best, simplest, and easiest way to connect with your customers all over the world. It’s the greatest Market Research out there - and it’s FREE!”
Saul’s Colt, Head of Magic at Freshbooks
Photo by @wmmarc
Additional Validation By Their Fans Via Comments
Jessica Routier, IAC-EZ
Great article! The team at FreshBooks is great! If Twitter is not a good enough example (even though I think it is a GREAT example), just post a message on their forum sometime and see the response that you get!
chelpixie
I was a bit floored when I received the flowers. Saul’s right, they’ve never stood me up, always kept their word and made my billing life so much easier. It was a great gesture and it won me totally over (even more!) as a customer.
<3 Freshbooks.
Amy
I am a Freshbooks Evangelist, and if it wasn’t for Twitter, I would have left them a while ago. There was one or two features that they didn’t have at the time of starting my company. I found another provider and was discussing it via Twitter. Freshbooks immediately sent me a reply saying “are you breaking up with us?”
That stood out to me, and I found a reason to stay with them. I also met two fantastic Freshbooks employees during a Barcamp, and am now hooked to their service and recommend it to anyone looking for online invoicing.
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Category: Unique Insights