How Comcast Interacts With Customers on Social Media 6 Million Times Each Year

How Comcast Interacts With Customers on Social Media 6 Million Times Each Year

Lisa Blackshear (Sr. Vice President of Communications, Digital Media at Comcast) joins the Social Pros Podcast to discuss managing a social care team.

In This Episode:

Lisa Blackshear

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Full Episode Details

The Future of the Social Care Team

It is definitely not a secret to consumers that social media can be a powerful way to engage with their favorite brands. Be it through comments, reviews, tagging, or direct messaging, customers are able to rave about their favorite products, discuss problems they’re having, and ultimately, get the attention of businesses. It is this dynamic that has led to the rise of the social care team.

Much like the traditional customer care or customer service teams, the social care team is in place to engage with, help, and resolve issues for customers through social. What Lisa Blackshear and the social care team at Comcast have figured out is that when it comes to these interactions, the same premise applies that governs all good interactions on social: customers want genuine, human interactions.

For Comcast, this means giving their agents license to break the script and match the conversational tone of the customer they are dealing with. This is within reason, of course, but if a customer is using very casual or emotional language, they certainly don’t want to experience dry, all-business responses. By meeting your customers where they are and engaging with them on their terms, you can foster better connections and build greater trust in your brand, even when you’re discussing a problem.

In This Episode

  • 06:29 – How Comcast scaled up its social care team to over 400 agents.
  • 10:26 – How customer expectations have evolved with social engagement.
  • 16:09 – How the social care team at Comcast adapts to their customer’s tone to interact on a more personal level.
  • 21:49 – How to coordinate multiple touchpoints with customers from a customer care standpoint.
  • 30:14 – How to utilize insights gained from customer interactions.
  • 33:51 – How to coordinate between the social care team, communications/PR, and branding.

Quotes From This Episode

“We’re still tweaking and refining every day because you have to have a stomach for change.” — Lisa Blackshear

“The stress of knowing that you’re speaking out loud in front of everybody takes a different kind of skill.” — Lisa Blackshear

Resources

See you next week!

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Episode Transcript

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Jay Baer: 00:00 Wow, Adam, I tell you what, if you've ever had ... Look, guys, listen up. If you have ever responded to a customer in social media, you need to reserve the next however many minutes this show is and listen very closely. Adam Brown: 00:13 Jay, I love doing the show each and every week. Certainly, want so many of our guests to go longer than the 30, 45 minutes that we have. This is a guest that I wish we could have on for an afternoon binge. Lisa Blackshear. Jay Baer: 00:28 She is running what may be the largest social media customer care program that I'm familiar with. There's more than 400 agents out there interacting with customers every single day in just about every conceivable channel. Adam Brown: 00:38 So brilliant in growing a social customer care organization to the size and the success that they've had. Success not just from a business standpoint, from an operational efficiency standpoint, but from a net promoter score, which goes directly to the customers like it better and their perception of the Comcast brand is impacted because of Lisa's work. Jay Baer: 01:02 You're exactly right. Adam and I are both nerds for social media customer care. Obviously, we talk about social media marketing a lot on this show as well. But we could have done a whole day just keep on talking to Lisa. So, you guys are going to love this show. I'm going to get to the sponsors real quick so you can get into the program because it's that good. As always, the show is brought to you by our friends at Salesforce Marketing Cloud who employee my special Texas friend Adam Brown. They have an unbelievable report that Adam and his team put out called the State of Marketing. They interviewed 4,100 marketing leaders all around the world to look at what matters in marketing today. You can learn about the impact of customer experience and marketing, which is massive, how the role of social media is changing. We certainly will talk about that in this episode, how critical artificial intelligence is in 2019 and beyond. It is a barn burner. You have to download it. It won't cost you a thing. Go to Bitly/Jaysays. Bitly/J-A-Y-S-A-Y-S to download the Salesforce State of Marketing report. It's the fifth edition. Do it right now. Also, the show is brought to you by our benefactors at socialmedia.org, which is by far the leading organization for big company social media managers. Adam has been in the organization not just once, but twice, once while he ran Social at Dell, once while he ran Social at Coca Cola. If you are struggling as you probably are, as everybody is, with some of the things that are important and impactful to big brands, and social as Lisa talks about with Social Care for Comcast, socialmedia.org is an organization that you positively must join. It is a non-optional exercise in my estimation. Adam, I suspect you agree. Adam Brown: 02:43 Completely agree. In fact, being a member of socialmedia.org gave me the opportunity to meet with Lisa's predecessor, Frank Eliason, who Jay, you mentioned on this particular podcast. And the opportunity, as I can remember, at Dell as we were working on our social media protocol and social media standards in working with Frank and working with the leaders of other large organizations that had a larger volume of customer service experiences and interactions. Again, bounce ideas off of them, kick ideas, deal with crises. These are the types of things that you can do when you have an organization like socialmedia.org. Jay Baer: 03:18 They don't take just anybody. You have to be the number one social media person in your organization. You have to be a medium sized or large brand. But if you fit that bill, and I know many of you who listen to Social Pros do fit that category, here's what I want you to do, go to socialmedia.org/social pros. Socialmedia.org/social pros. Apply right there and they'll let you know whether it makes sense for you. You will really benefit from it both in your career and in your business. I think, Adam, we should get into the show because Lisa dropped some serious science on this week's episode of the Social Pros Podcast. Lisa Blackshear, Senior Vice President, Communications Digital Media Strategy and Operations for Comcast is our guest this week on the Social Pros Podcast. Lisa, thanks so much for taking the time. We appreciate it. Lisa Blackshear: 04:12 Yes, thank you for having me. Jay Baer: 04:13 Lisa, tell everybody a little bit about your role at Comcast because it's not really on the marketing side, it's really more on the social care side. But it is all encompassing. Maybe give people a little taste because they're not going to believe how much stuff you do, and how big your team is. Lisa Blackshear: 04:29 Yeah, thank you for having me. Happy morning to everybody, and thanks for giving us an opportunity to talk a little bit about what we're doing at Comcast from a social media customer service standpoint. Essentially what we've done is we've built out a team that we call Digital Care, where we assist customers online across multiple social platforms 24/7, 365. We have teams in pretty much all over the country to handle various time zones. As you know, the internet does not turn off. We are basically available to our customers at all times. That is fixing, meaning like anything that could possibly happen with the customer's products and services, we're there a team of 400 plus individuals who handle really anything that a customer service agent on a phone can handle. We can schedule an appointment if it's needed, we can troubleshoot, we can help you reach a build, we can help you with all of our products, whether they're expanding home Internet, TV, X1 any of our products and so we're just there. Basically, as you know, customers times are valuable, we get that. This is us really being where customers are and certainly we want to give them exactly the information that they need, when they need it and where they want it. That can be really just across multiple platforms. I have the pleasure of leading this team, which is really just our social media care arm for our customers who are on social media, is literally one of our many channels and many ways to reach customers. So customers can still reach us on the phone if they want, they can chat with us, can walk in one of our service centers. You can certainly talk to our technicians when they're in the home. But if you on Twitter on Facebook and Instagram wherever you are, we pretty much essentially have a team of people that can assist you there as well. Jay Baer: 06:29 Now, for those of you who've been listening to the Social Pros for a long time or sort of oh geez in social, Lisa's team is now the modern representation of what started off as @Comcastcares on Twitter long time ago. Frank Eliason friend of the program started that pilot program many, many years ago, inside Comcast with just a handful of agents. Now, I just want to re-emphasize what Lisa said a moment ago, she has more than 400 people doing social media and digital customer care, 400 people. Lisa, I suspect the growth from a handful to more than 400 is a response to customers wanting to use these channels, to communicate to Comcast about Xfinity or internet et cetera, as opposed to phone or email or some other form or fashion? How did that scaling process work, and how do you decide when to add even more agents to your team? Lisa Blackshear: 07:28 Yeah. Really, in 2013, we had about 13 people. You mentioned some of the folks who were on the origin of that, Frank and others who I really essentially started with at Comcast Cares. And then obviously, as you know, things come on to the social media world and fall off. We've certainly seen where we're like, hey, we need to gear up for this channel and then that channel went away. It just depends. What we do is from a forecasting standpoint, we take a look at just really through technology that we use, with one of our technology partners, we can see across really the world where customers are. When we talk about that, I think, Jay, I shared with you one of our dashboards that allows us to really look across anywhere, and especially with us now having partners in Europe, we can see when customers are pretty much anywhere reaching out to us. We have software that helps us with targeting and understanding where those customers are. Specifically what we've done is really just we've looked at the growth model and anticipated some of the growth that has happened. Obviously, we all have, if you think about 10 years ago where you were as an individual, were you on some of these platforms, it probably because we're social geeks, but the average American person probably had not engaged from a service standpoint of hey, let me fix something by going on Twitter. Let me stick something by going on Facebook. That was one of the things that we saw and really just had insights into that this was going to be the wave of the future in terms of that. When you really think about, I think it's 68 of all Americans and 88% of Americans under the age of 30 use social media. People are already there, it's about us being where people are and helping them in those locations. One of the things that we talk about that you just stand by and ignore that this is happening, probably not a good strategy. People are there, people are going to essentially use those channels and what we've done is we really have the expansion of not just social, but dot com and all kinds of technology, whether it's Facebook Messenger, my account apps, we use basically the [inaudible 00:09:50] as well. We use a plethora of technologies to help us get to those places that most of us, I think 92% of people have said, who are already engaged in some sort of social media platform, I think it's 92% of folks who are already there have said yes, I have used this channel to fix an issue that was a customer service need. Whether it was Comcast or BestBuy or whomever, utility company. People are there, it's about gauging forecasting and leveraging that as a viable channel in order to meet customers where they are. Adam Brown: 10:26 Lisa, I want to echo what Jay said and just thank you for coming on the show today and also just how impressed I am at what you're doing and have done. Back when I was at Dell, we used to look at Comcast. I think a lot of people in our industry really looked at Comcast and Comcast Cares as being that beacon on the hill that we all aspired to. I think that puts you in a such a unique position because you're doing it at scale, and you've been doing it for so long. My question for you is because of that, because of the success that you've had, the success that you've had operationally, which I hope we'll talk a little bit about, success you've had with net promoter score and customer satisfaction. But are you seeing any changes in your customers and their expectations of what Comcast Cares can do or can't do? Even their temperament and how they're approaching and engaging with your brand online? Any changes or shifts in the past year or two? Lisa Blackshear: 11:24 I certainly think that we have some quantifiable reasons to believe that is the case because we do have one of the highest NPS scores in the company from this channel. Customers who use this channel have certainly, number one, it's an immediate way to get your issue fixed. People recognize very quickly that if they sound this alarm that there are folks that are there, what we've been able to do is use this as an early warning system is what we call it. For those customers who have leverage using the service centers of calling us, recognize that, hey, if I say something on Twitter, most companies nowadays can't afford to just sit and watch the shot clock and not do anything. What we've been aggressively pursuing really is really creating what we call the digital machine. The whole point of it is to really just, and I've said this multiple times about being where customers are, but also being best in class in terms of responding within 30 minutes to customers, which feels like a really, really long time. If you post something and walk away and essentially you go probably cook a couple of eggs or something and come back. Is not in terms of when you really aggregate the entire universe of social. What we did though, is we made sure that not only will we just stack, we made sure when we talk about coverage, we're talking about 24 by seven by 365 days. This is for our residential customers, our business customers, our extending mobile customers, we have bilingual opportunity, we are by bi-coastal. Again one of the things that has happened is we've hired a unique set of individuals as well. We have millennials, we also have baby boomers, we have traditional people who came from our call centers who could basically bring a history around, here's what customers have set, and marry that up with a lot of our millennials and it's a great marriage of ... Because most people think all we have is millennials. We don't, we have everybody. Folks who've been with the company for years who actually train probably the new hires, the new millennials and bring them in to help them understand the history of this turnaround that we've been on from a customer service standpoint, which has been no secret. We have certainly used this as an opportunity to show a different face for Comcast, that shows that we are there, respecting our customer's time, we're trying to simplify their experience and we try to make things right when we do fall short. When they come to this channel, we've seen just from a JD Power standpoint and from our NPS scores that customers seemed happier when they used this channel because of the faster turnaround. We're talking about no small number. We're talking about in 2017, we handled 2.6 million interactions. Last year we handled 5.8 million. People were there. Thankfully, we've had to really beef our teams up to be where they are. We appreciate being the beacon on the hill. We're still tweaking, refining every day because you have to be able to have a swivel chair's mind. You have to have a stomach for change. Because I never know when we're going to have to pivot to go to some new channel, hire different people, skill various agents to be able to do multiple things, which I think we mentioned earlier that we may talk about the differences that Adam brought up around the five different types of agents that we have. It's not just about hey, being here, and hey, go fix this. We're people who we consider engagement agents. We've got triage, we've got the quality, we've got escalations and we've got incident analysts. We've got five different groups of people serving customer's needs based on how they are. We've tried to tweak the model and thankfully, it's really been a partnership. [inaudible 00:15:30] who is our head of corporate communications for this channel, has been really a remarkable advocate for us, in seeing the future of this years ago and saying, we have to have people in this channel. If we're going to really just really see the future and move at the speed of business, business was trending towards this channel. Trust me, we did not have early adoption. A lot of our leaders were trying to ... When it's not tangible, you're like, well, where are these people? What's happening? Especially if you don't engage in social media. It's this thing that you don't deal with- Adam Brown: 16:07 Yeah, [inaudible 00:16:08] what are you talking about? Lisa Blackshear: 16:09 Yeah. A customer's coming here. So, we were able to prove that out and thankfully she was able to really sell this to the organization and now from a progress standpoint our targets training and tools in a way that we tell the story it is purposeful, we match the tone of the customers. The customer comes to us. By that I mean, we're all different people. We have customers who are like hey, yo, what's happening? My internet sell. While we're not speaking probably to that casual, we don't speak very formally back to them. Our agents are trained say hey, how are you today? What's going on? What are you seeing? Versus someone who is, with a very conservative tone, we match that tone as well. So, we- Jay Baer: 16:56 The agent you're saying will change the language and how they approach a customer based on how the customer uses language? Lisa Blackshear: 17:05 Absolutely. Sometimes customers will literally just send a frowny face. Like something's wrong. The same way you may do that in a text message to a family member, and just go urgh and the person is like, well, what happened? Clearly, we're not going to be like, hi, I'm from Comcast, how can I assist you today? Our agents are empowered to be able to basically send an emoji back to them, or, hey, what's going on? What happened? How can I turn this frown into a smile? We match the tone and we try to make sure that we're engaging in the way that the customer is engaging with us. What that means is, this is a very different agent that has been empowered to do a little more than some of our agents in the call center. We've had to change the model, break the model, fix the model, be very flexible with our leadership teams around, hey, now we need to do this, hey, we did this. But a lot of it is based in what we call social quality. 40% of our agents scorecard is baked into quality. It's not about how fast you responded to the customer, it's about what did you do to handle it? We're not really measuring how long that took, we just want you to fix the problem. Jay Baer: 18:25 One of the things that I see with our clients at Convince & Convert, and I'm sure Adam does as well with their clients at Salesforce Marketing Cloud is that when companies want to operationalize and scale social care, there's a lot of concern around consistency and tone and making sure that we have a messaging playbook or something along those lines so that as much as possible agents have, maybe it's not copy and paste but have designated responses, things like that that they can use. What I hear you saying Lisa, is that you probably have as big of a social care team as anybody in the world, and you're not doing that. You're saying, let's get agents who actually have the mindset and the skill set to just treat people like humans and trust that they will interact with customers in a way that customers actually like. Instead of trying to script them, just hire the right people and let them script themselves. Am I misinterpreting what you're saying? Lisa Blackshear: 19:22 Yes, a little bit of both. With every situation we certainly have talking points for ... The same talking points that an agent would use to troubleshoot something that you called us about or that you had a chat with us about, or you met with a Xfinity retail agent. All of our frontline customer facing employees have the same information for how to program your remote, or how to take the closed captions off of your TV or turn it on. What is different in this channel is having a sense of the humanization piece of sensing how the customer is engaging with you is still no different. I think what I'm saying though, is when you're on the phone and a customer is laughing and joking with you, our phone agents are going to match that tone as well. If I'm standing face to face with you in a center, and I see that you're obviously upset. I'm taking it really, really seriously and making sure that I am getting straight to the point to handle. But if a person is also in a different mindset, in terms of hey, in a casual tone, it's one of those things where you feel the customer out. I will say that from a social standpoint, you get to do that in front of everybody. That's the difference. The phone call is not an exchange in front of the entire world. But when you're in a service center, the customers who are visiting the center obviously will see you. But the whole world is not seeing it. One of the things that you do have to scale and hire a different type of person who can handle, some would call it the stress of knowing that you're speaking out loud in front of everybody, it does require a different skill. We are hiring a different skilled agent to be able to have a little bit of calmness in them, some communication skills, good writing skills, a techie type person as well. But also a person who has a passion for service. Customer obsessed type people, human social agents as we call them, where you can look at and engage with and really make a call on how I'm going to engage with this person. They follow the directions obviously. The directions for how to take off closed caption is the same no matter where we see you. How I have that conversation with you, this is where they've been afforded a little bit of leeway to go up and down based on the customer's tonality. Jay Baer: 21:49 You said your goal in digital is a 30 minute response time. Is that the same goal as you have on phone, email or some other formats? The other question I have is, it's of course, not atypical for customers, especially if they're like, hey, my TV doesn't work, my internet doesn't work to call and email and use social. They're like, I'm just going to spray and pray here, and I'm going to complain in every place I can find and whoever gets back to me first, that's a win. How do you coordinate with multiple places on the back end when you have one customer interacting with the company in multiple touch points? Lisa Blackshear: 22:30 That can happen, and that's where we have to have harmony in our systems, and technology allows us to do that. Thankfully, our technology can let us know if we can see that Jay called us. We can see that Jay has posted. We have technology that allows us to see your experience for that reason, so that when we're engaging with you, you're not starting from scratch in every one of these channels. It's not like oh, I called. Oh, you did? We shouldn't be being surprised by the many times that you've tried to reach out to us. We have technology that allows us to have insights around how you've tried to contact us and that does happen. As you said, spray and pray that you get everybody. But the 30 minutes is not necessarily ... The best in class we've seen this shared really around the social world, best in class, I will say most times we are way better than that. I'm just being conservative in our output. Sometimes it's one minute, sometimes it's two minutes, sometimes it's 15 minutes. You think about when you are talking about over 5 million interactions in a year, we land really south of 30, but I don't want to get too ahead of myself saying that and we have an incident and that's not true after I get off this call. But the other piece that you talked about is how do we look at that and see the customer's entire world? This is something we struggle with. Because you can do those things pretty quickly, and we may not know it. You could have just literally tweet it and then get on the phone and we would not have had time to see it. But the point is, is that customers get that if you use these channels, I'm going to get somebody. Most times, most of us our lives are not set up for this stopping what you're doing and getting on an 800 number to do something. It is a way for you to multitask this and finish an issue. Usually, what we're trying to do is if the customer's publicly tweeting, we will say, can we have a DM with you? Most times, a large percentage of those end up in a phone call because by the time ... Sometimes the text message exchange can go on for 15 minutes, but on a phone call it could have been 30 seconds and you're drive them right by each other because you're not getting. Sometimes the customer says, can you call me right quick. This is what I'm trying to do, no problem, and then it's resolved right there. A lot of the social exchanges still end up being a phone call. Again, this agent has to be highly skilled to be able to engage in social. But if the customer says I want to talk to you, I want to text with you, I want to email, that person is able to do all of those things and pull the lever and be able to deal with you in the manner in which you prefer. Jay Baer: 25:23 Lisa Blackshear, Senior Vice President of Digital Marketing Strategy and Operations for Comcast. Great to have you on the show. One of the things you told us Lisa before the show was we were talking a little bit about multiple channels. You shared with us with a document that your social team is currently working and interacting with nearly a dozen different social media channels, which at first glance seems overwhelming. One of the things I know our readers are very interested in, probably would appreciate your insight on is which channels are you seeing trending? Where you're seeing more activity and more action? Facebook Messenger, I know is something that you're implementing right now. But as you look at that horizon, 12, 16 months out, any channels that you see, you're okay, we're going to double down or any channels you're saying, listen, activity and actions are waning on this one. We need to focus more efforts in another area? Lisa Blackshear: 26:23 Yeah. Oddly enough, initially it was predominantly Twitter. Obviously, we started out at Comcast Cares. But what we certainly learned is that when we turned on the Facebook Messenger channel, a lot of customers are just there to engage. Essentially, that's just texting. You can leave the Facebook social platform and you engage in text messages via Facebook Messenger. We've seen that happen and trend right where we thought disruption benchmarking from some of my peers who also turn those channels on. We leveraged a really competitive analysis to gain insights around what that would look like in the future. But what we're seeing is an interesting trend in that wherever we advertise is pretty even. If we do marketing campaigns and TV spots and really gear up and say, hey, we're on Twitter, we see Twitter's volume go up. If we say, hey, we're on Facebook, we see the volumes go up. What we're seeing is right now, wherever we advertise, it just goes up and one is not doing any better than the other. They both are [inaudible 00:27:34] Where we are now is trying to figure that out. Also, you have to think about customer demographics. Who is the Comcast customer? It has to be a person who actually has an address unless you're using some of our digital on the go programs where you just have service on the go, Netflix ... People who have homes ... Or an address. In order to have X1, you need an address, which means a lot of college students, or people who are living at home or someone who does not have an address yet likely aren't our customers. We know older customers seem to be more so on Facebook than Twitter. What we're saying is a mix of both. There are some demographics that trend the forecast and volume in terms of what we're seeing. But what we've seen over the past two years is just wherever we advertise, customers come. One is not out doing the other right now. It'll be interesting because we get a lot of questions about YouTube. While we are there, we answer and we pivot customers from there. So, we'll get you from any channel that you're in, but it hasn't been this large explosion yet, but as more people graduate from college, more people livelihood changes, and they obtain more and more products, they're reversing the trend towards all of our channels. We see a lot of text messaging. Some customers like to text. Some customers like to email. We still have a large amount of customers who call because there's still a lot you can do from an automated standpoint even when you call. Without talking to us, you can send a signal to your home even when you call and basically restart everything in the home. There's some really quick things people can do by calling that they're just used to that channel. Some people don't want to discuss those things out loud. Keep in mind from a privacy standpoint, we have to authenticate that you're actually our customer. We don't want to do that out loud on any public forum, which is why we're saying DMs us. When you're on a phone call, these things are you can quickly automate with those things that identify you as a customer. There are benefits to both. But from a volume perspective, what we're saying is wherever we advertise, customers seem to just trend to where that is. That'll be interesting if that phase gets away. Jay Baer: 30:14 Lisa, you've got 5.8 million customer interactions a year, which produces a tremendous amount of data and insights in terms of what customers like, dislike, what they think about the brand. How do you and your team take the insights derived from those interactions and put them back into the larger Comcast organization? Is there a voice of the customer, an insights report? How do you go through that sea of interaction and say, oh, here's something that we really ought to be paying attention to? Lisa Blackshear: 30:46 Yeah, that's a great question. That falls outside of the service area in which I'm leading. From an enterprise perspective, I'm a part of a trilogy. We have social media service, we have social media from a brand perspective, and we have social media from a marketing perspective. There are two other versions of me. Folks who take those insights and really just deep dive into those factors and look at what our customers are saying, obviously, from a marketing perspective, that's very important in terms of what our customers want. Also from a brand perspective, we learn a lot around what we're doing. Because obviously, when these conversations are happening, customers are telling us things. They're like, hey, if I could do X, this problem would not have occurred, which is like, okay, well, maybe customers should be able to do X. From a product development standpoint, we're learning and listening to those conversations, because the conversation is always and usually trends more than just the service call. Those insights, yeah, if you got 5 million people talking to you, and you're listening, you're certainly going to be able to aggregate a large amount of data and insights that you can use in multiple avenues. Whether that is in brand, improving our services, or also customers saying, I want more digital options, I want to be able to do X. We have certainly learned a lot. We're taking that learning. Again, still very new in some of this because again, the team is ... Again, we started with 13 and I think in 2014 it was still only 24. It was only into 2018 that we got to 400. The growth has been just an explosion really within the last year. We're still now in this new world of having enough people to manage this volume. Even with what we're doing today, we're not believe advertising this channel. Most of these customers have found us without a lot of big advertising campaigns. We know that if we turn that on, we're going to see an explosion of even more customers. What we're doing, I think you asked earlier around the expansion and forecasting. We're being calculated and very specific around what we're doing. Because what we don't want to do is over index and go do this large campaign, and then we don't have enough agents to actually handle the volume. What we're doing is I call it a drip drop strategy. We're just turning things on here and there to see, okay, when we did this, we saw a 10% increase in volume per day. We're really being very careful around what we're doing. But I can tell you, based on our early insight, if we turn the spigot on, customers are going to come and we can very, very easily grow this channel to thousands of agents. Adam Brown: 33:51 Lisa, I have one last question before I hand it back over to Jay. I want to ask you one more question about that trilogy, because I think that trilogy is important of your team, of the communications/PR team, and the branding team. You mentioned also [inaudible 00:34:06] a little bit earlier. Recognize how important that is. When you have issues in crisis, whether you have an outage or you have an issue with a cable network that's up in the rights and you're in negotiations, whether it's ESPN or Tribune or some of the others that we've seen. As of late, how do you work with your colleagues in communications and in branding? And are you coming to the table with data in terms of sentiment analysis, what people are saying in social, are you being asked and tasked with giving them that real time radar, that early warning radar that you mentioned? Lisa Blackshear: 34:42 Well, it is definitely real time, and we're a team that works very closely together because you can imagine when something happens, all those things are impacted. We had an issue just recently where one of our third party vendors, there was an issue that impacted not just, it impacted Horizon, it impacted Time Warner, pretty much everybody who is in the business that we're in, we were all impacted by this. Initially, we started seeing on social media customers saying, hey, what's going on? I can't look in my account and I can't do X, Y, Z. Initially, you look internally, we see, is this something that our engineers can handle? There's something on our end, and we found out that, okay, this is an issue across the board. When that happens, immediately we go into a war room, where I'm there, the brand team is there, our marketing teams, the operational folks, everybody who should be speaking to customers, and we immediately have to message all of our agents so they have an answer. To say, here's what has happened. We are aware, we know that X, Y, Z has happened. We're working as quickly to get this resolved. We're all literally one group of people that manage the outcome of what is being said to customers, what's being said to the media, to the public. We definitely use our sentiment analysis, and literally, we have daily reports that go out every day when things are even going like they're supposed to be, and it's beautiful, we will share that X every day, we talk about we saw X number of customers today. This is what customers talked about the most today. Here's what we saw trending today. Literally, we have a communications that we send out called the Pulse. The Pulse basically lets everyone in the company know how many customers reached out, here's how many customers we help. Here's how many people came in and just said hey, great job Comcast. We actually have a complements area as well where people can come in and say, hey, I just want to say hey, I love the X1 remote. Or this happened, so it's not always the sentiment is that something is wrong. They just talk to us about everything. But yes, that group of us we're very locked at the hip in terms of anything that is happening. Because obviously, even if it's a service issue, others will want to know what happened? How did you handle this? Sentiment analysis it's critical, and we're all over that. From a technology standpoint, the technology that we use literally in real time, we have the capability to, the moment that the name Comcast is mentioned five times in a row, I get alerts that tell me someone's talking about you, and here's what they're talking about. We can very easily see almost like a thermometer or heat rises, we can tell when something is trending towards this being a thing. Whether that's good, better and different. No matter the sentiment, we can tell pretty much instantly when something is happening. This channel has certainly helped us tamp down things that I would say five years ago would have been the V word. It certainly would have been a viral situation. We were able to capture it, see what happened and really mitigate the issue with the customer or with the media or whatever [inaudible 00:38:13] Obviously, we have a broad company. Comcast NBCU, there's a fair amount of dialogue. When I talk about the brand piece, NBC is something runs on Saturday Night Live and it's a show that somebody didn't like, we hear from various people in the media around this. Whether that's the president, whether it's politicians, various people will reach out to us and then that [inaudible 00:38:38] then that's our brand team that will speak on behalf of that. Our agents know if it's not a product service issue, do not engage. You don't get into a, why did you air this show? I didn't like- Jay Baer: 38:52 [inaudible 00:38:52] for not defending Michael Che Comedic bits. Thankfully, you don't have to quite to get into that. Lisa Blackshear: 38:58 Well, exactly. Something comes on any NBC show they let us know as well as they liked it or they didn't like it and we shouldn't be doing this, or we should be saying more about gun control, and we shouldn't talk about gun control, and we should be doing this and why are you paying people when the shutdown happened? We afforded our customers. Basically, we just paused their account. Any government employees, we allowed them to be able to have [inaudible 00:39:26] during this time. Some people like that, some people didn't. We see everything from service to every kind of issue that you can think about, people are talking about it. Adam Brown: 39:36 Lisa, so great to have you on the show. Thank you for your participation. Congratulations on all of your success. I am going to ask you the two questions that Jay and I have asked every single one of our guests over the past decade or so. Question number one, Lisa, are you ready? Lisa Blackshear: 39:56 I'm as ready as I can be. Adam Brown: 39:59 Lisa, what is one tip that you would give someone to become a social pro? Lisa Blackshear: 40:05 I would say you have to have a stomach for change and chaos. By that I mean you have to be a person who is calm enough to know that nothing is ever going to be the same. Probably I would even say from hour to hour, sometimes minute to minute. You have to have a swivel chair mentality and be able to be okay with doing multiple things all throughout the day and being able to just be calm when the storm happens and then be very secure in the playbook that you have set to trust your team that they're doing the right things and working with the right groups of people that are in place that when these things happen, almost like the fire drill everybody read the instructions. Tell you not to go into the elevator, tell you to go to the stairs, and tell you not to run. But then when it happens, people run, people go to the elevator and they just break all the rules. You have to trust that process that you've put in place that when these things break, you follow the process and you get in your swivel chair and you work with all the people that you know are part of your warm strategy to run in their lanes to do their job. That's what I would say any social person certainly has to have the ability to do that. Adam Brown: 41:24 Such great advice I think for anybody in social media, anybody in marketing communications, customer service or anybody wanting to become a leader in their respective organization? Lisa, last question, if you could have a video chat with any living person, who would it be and why? Lisa Blackshear: 41:41 That's a good one. For me ... You said living, right? Adam Brown: 41:46 Yes, it's the one qualifier. Lisa Blackshear: 41:50 One qualifier, got to be living. I think that will be Michelle Obama for me. The reason I say that is just from a crisis communications background that I have, for me just really, I would really want to pick her brain around what tactics, what advice would she give as well when things go south and don't end up being what you thought they were going to be? How do you handle the good, the bad and ugly in front of the entire world? Because it's one thing to be able to do it privately at home, but when you have to do it on display, in front of everybody, just some of those insights around how does one maintain everything and say the right thing, do the right thing and do it with a smile in front of the entire world. Adam Brown: 42:42 Michelle Obama, very popular response on our show. Lisa, what I most appreciate is I think the alignment of your two answers there. If you want to talk about poise and confidence and coolness under pressure, Mrs. Obama definitely shows all those attributions. Lisa, thank you, again for being on the show. For all of our listeners, Jay and I so appreciate you listening to Social Pros each and every week. We couldn't do this show, we wouldn't do this show without you. We hope you will join us next week for Social Pros. This is Adam Brown with Salesforce Marketing Cloud on behalf of Jay Baer with Convince & Convert. Thank you. Lisa Blackshear: 43:25 Thank you.  
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