Imagine this: a customer walks into your national retail clothing store looking for a particular pair of shoes. Your salesclerk realizes the store doesn’t have them, and neither do any of your satellite stores. Your competitor, however, does. So, she purchases them for her customer, and has them delivered to her house on your dime.

Or this: a customer has scoured most of North America for an Armani tux to no avail. Your salesman sources said suit within a day, dispatches someone to haul it off a delivery truck, and even has it altered for the understandably elated customer. The kicker? While you are a high end clothing store, you don’t sell Armani.

The company we’re talking about actually exists – the American clothing store Nordstrom’s. It’s well known in the business world that Nordstrom’s employs some killer customer service, and has for decades, including thank you cards (before anyone else was doing it) and free home delivery. These anecdotes about Nordstrom’s are legendary, and since the company prides itself on discretion, we’ll never *really* know for sure if they actually occurred. What we do know however, is that over the years the chain has become 100% synonymous with customer service. And most of that reputation has been built through word of mouth.

Top notch customer service is rapidly becoming the key thing that separates the men from the boys in organizations large and small. And with social media platforms playing a key role these days in every aspect of marketing, sales, customer service and community growth, it pays to remember that customers are individuals. So how do you scale the power of the social web to ensure better results and a more ‘human’ response that reflects the people who make up your community?

At Radian6‘s inaugural user conference, Social 2011, the panel How to Scale ‘A Person like Me’ will explore just that. Featuring Brent Leary, co-founder and partner at CRM Essentials; Tara Roberts, Vice President, Social CRM Applications at Oracle; Esteban Kolsky, Principal and Founder of ThinkJar LLC; and Tom Divittorio, Director, Platform Solutions Architecture with Salesforce, these four customer service leaders are going to address some simple yet important ways your company can be a good citizen of your community, such as:

• How to really listen to your customers and quickly address problems while providing feedback.
• Why hiring the best people or sourcing those within your company with the appropriate skill set for social media is so vitally important.
• And what you can do to keep engagement natural and effective, even while employing the latest in social media analysis technology.

Umair Haque at Harvard Business Review might have said it best, “…companies who can build authentic, honest, open, collaborative relationships with consumers are significantly more profitable (and sustainably profitable) than companies who treat consumers deceptively, antagonistically, and manipulatively.”

What do you think? Are you making your online community a key facet of your business strategy? What questions would you like to ask our panelists? As always, we value your contributions.

Tags: customer engagement, Customer service, Radian6 Social 2011, Social Media