At fresh&easy, we have made it our mission to proactively engage with our customers on a daily basis. We have seen the trend that analysts have been pointing toward, where customers move to ‘alternative’ methods of reaching their favorite brands. For this reason, it has become a strategic initiative of our company to innovate our communication and enter the next evolution of customer engagement by offering customers the ability to engage online with us through Facebook, Twitter, discussion forums, blogs, and an array of other social media channels. In 2 months since launching our official Listening Team presence with support from our partners at Dialogue Marketing, we have engaged over 1,300 customers in conversation and resolved over 300 concerns. fresh&easy’s Facebook and Twitter pages are not the only channels we monitor and engage on. Our goal is to ensure that our customers are truly WOWed with every interaction with the fresh&easy brand, whether that’s in store or online. Fresh&easy deserves to win the social media customer service category for simply one main reason: we focus on providing the ultimate customer experience online. Customer loyalty is a core value we live and breathe at fresh&easy. We’ve learned in order to build customer loyalty and earn trust we must proactively find customers who blogged or posted about their bad experience, apologize, display empathy and work to resolve the issue so it doesn’t happen again. It took a lot of strategizing to design the right way to execute our social media customer service initiative. Our team had to find the right monitoring tools; map out the right engagement process and workflow; install a quality assurance procedure; create and analyze reports to trend conversations; and finally, identify every opportunity to WOW customers. • Monitoring Tool To help uncover customers who mention “fresh&easy" online, our team uses the Visible Intelligence social media monitoring platform to proactively search over 250 million blogs, 6 million discussion forums, photo sharing, video sharing, wikis, Q&A, and review sites. • Reporting Using our social media monitoring platform, we have created a customized, real-time dashboard to monitor key performance indicators such as top influencers, top detractors, top site mentions, top keywords used in conversations, and sentiment broken down by channel. • Identifying Opportunities to WOW As our team is reading posts from Fresh&easy customers, we are constantly looking for opportunities to WOW the customers in ways they weren’t expecting. In one outreach effort, we’ve reached out to our Foursquare mayors and have rewarded them with gift cards as a thank you for being a loyal customer to fresh&easy. These WOW opportunities are WIN-WINs. They help us build customer loyalty, and customers appreciate the amazing experience they have with the fresh&easy brand. One prime example would be when a particular influential blogger used his blog to express his distaste for a particular promotion of ours. He wrote a lengthy blog post and we proactively reached out to him. We expressed our sympathy for the situation he had to endure and offered him some compensation without him asking. In return, he reached back out via his blog and Twitter to express how swiftly and quickly we handled the situation and we turned him into a positive brand advocate once again.