Macy's

Situation

The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday fall within a five-day span and for many consumers, that weekend officially kicks off the holiday shopping season. Macy’s first-ever midnight Black Friday opening, combined with the 24/7 availability of social media meant that M80 needed to help Macy’s provide a higher level of customer service than ever before throughout the entire week of Thanksgiving.

Insight

Today’s consumers know that they can contact a brand any time of the day or night through social media. It is becoming increasingly more common for consumers to tweet directly at a brand, since it’s easier than the traditional phone or email channels. For a brand that has a significant volume of customer service issues, ensuring a quick response can turn a negative experience into a positive one.

Strategy

To protect the brand’s integrity during its most important weekend of the year, M80 developed a moderation matrix, which ensured owned social channels would be continuously monitored for five days. M80 doubled down on community management resources and trained them on Macy’s customer service knowledge, providing sample responses for more than three-dozen possible crises and questions. Together with Macy’s, a Social Media Alert System was implemented. Spanning five different levels – from Severe to Neutral – the Alert System easily helps all stakeholders identify the severity of a social media issue and the required response time.

Results

During Thanksgiving weekend, M80 leveraged its resources and provided unprecedented support on Macy’s social channels. From 7AM Thursday morning until 1AM Saturday morning, social channels were monitored every 20 minutes, including overnight hours. Moderation continued Saturday through Monday, with each day being monitored for 16 hours a day.

Through aggressive preparation and planning, M80 successfully handled and moderated nearly 700 fan wall posts on Facebook and more than 4,000 @Macys Twitter mentions during the week of Thanksgiving. This was the highest volume of mentions and wall posts on Macy’s owned channels in 2011. All responses fell within a 60-minute window, and more than two dozen fans thanked Macy’s community managers for their timeliness.

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