Social Media @ Lenovo - Customer Service to improved presence on Social Media sites

Lenovo social media engagement started post their acquisition of IBM PC business in 2005 when Lenovo found that there is lot of discussion happening on various online discussion forums & blogs and customers were actively engaging and discussing the various product offerings and Lenovo decided that they should take control and own the responsibility for responding to customer queries and feedback which is critical for future business growth and improve the reputation of the company. Lenovo was a small Chinese player and with IBM PC business acquisition they became a global player with significant market share. Not only they felt the need to respond to customers but also thought that the social media customer engagement strategy will help them in making Lenovo brand a global brand. Within Lenovo all the departments from legal to marketing were assigned responsibility of interacting and managing social media presence. Legal department framed policy and guidelines for social media engagement, marketing and sales have launched specific campaigns targeting customers on various social media platforms, Customer service was provided not only by company’s employees but Lenovo also engaged peer-to-peer customer service communities for interacting with the customers and solving their problems and technical issues.

Customer Service Success - Lenovo created interdepartmental collaboration and powerful partnerships within the organization between the marketing, sales, product development and engineering teams for tackling the customer services issues. Lenovo realized in 2005 that social media could help them understand the customer's point-of-view, the major issues with service, product features, functions, delays in shipments and their impact on the global customers. According to Forrester Case Study “How Lenovo Implemented Customer Service Social Media Best Practices” social media alignment of marketing, sales, service and other departments to accelerate changes and improvements to the customer experience has led to a 20% decrease in laptop service call volumes, an increase in customer service agent productivity, a shortened product problem-resolution cycle and an increase their Net Promoter Scores. The net-net is a reduction in customer service support costs and an increase in sales. Social media engagement with customer was even more necessitated due to the fact that customer service costs for personal computing products was rising constantly, putting pressure on margins and since products were becoming complex, the level of expertise for the customer service representatives also had to be improved by constant training which was adding to the costs and effecting margins.

Social Presence on various sites - Lenovo social media program moved from customer service to a larger program where along with customer service the company used the various social media platforms for marketing its products, new launches, and enhance brand reputation. Lenovo’s has an internal social media team which works round the clock to not only develop but also constantly refresh content (text, images and videos) for all of Lenovo social media pages which include Lenovo Vision YouTube Channel ( Around 9000 subscribers & 14 million video views), official Lenovo Facebook page ( Around 10,000 people talking about Lenovo on Facebook & 350,000 Likes), Flickr stream, Lenovo Blog, Lenovo Twitter feed (not to mention various regional feeds & around 5000 tweets & 22,000 followers) and it’s customized social media website, Lenovo Social which  aggregates all the content from different social media sites in one central location to provide an easy and complete view of all things social wise. Lenovo launched its Community forums in 2007 and it has more than 15,000 volunteers and the forum site is visited by millions of users every month. Till early 2012 Lenovo had pursued multiple blogs strategy by publishing many blogs on various topics but the blogging strategy was changed and redesigned to centralize Lenovo's existing blogs and social media in an engaging, navigable, and branded way, using one easily maintainable CMS.

Social Media use at CES 2012 - During International Consumer Electronics Show or CES 2012 held at Las Vegas, Lenovo used various social media tools and its presence on various social media platforms to reach its targeted audience effectively. Gavin O’Hara, Lenovo’s social media editorial lead, gave Text100.com an in-depth overview of Lenovo’s social numbers as well as measurement tools from CES and a snapshot of the outcome of Lenovo’s social activities during CES, both online and offline were as follows:

• Twitter: Lenovo CES tweets reached a potential audience of 17 million people
• Facebook: Lenovo posts reached an audience of 250,000 people while generating more than 1.3 million impressions. For the week, the Lenovo Facebook page received 3,000 likes, 800 comments & 300 “shares” 
• Flickr: Photos of products, parties and people got more than 25,000 views on the Lenovo photo library
• Lenovo Blogs: The behind-the-scenes blog posts got more than 25,000 page views
• YouTube: Lenovo CES-focused videos were watched by more than 50,000 people in a week. An astonishing 25,000 alone watched the Yoga “Hands On” interview. 

Lenovo Social site which aggregates content from the various social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, blogs, YouTube, Flickr etc. into one place and also helps customers, volunteers and Lenovo teams effectively navigate and manage the back-end of the site to manage blog content, and each contributing author gets his own account with necessary controls to access the content areas relevant to him. Another unique feature of the site is a new tagging schema that de-compartmentalizes blog topics so that users can find content easily, filter by topics, products, recent, or popularity and users can click through all blog posts in one place. Lenovo had set up a digital & social hub in Singapore in 2011 that centralized digital thinking and strategy planning to support marketing plans in various regions and also execute marketing campaigns, monitor buzz, and form support teams dedicated to answer technical questions on social channels. Lenovo social media strategy is all about engaging with customers, informing them about various products & services, solving customer issues and technical problems, and company is effectively using various social media platforms and has achieved its target of being the Global brand. The recently launched “The Do Network”, a new social media-fueled brand engagement highlights the importance of social media presence and engagement in overall Lenovo future growth strategy.