Episode 23 - Berrybenka (Indonesia)

Quick quiz: What country has the 3rd largest Twitter population in the world, and the 4th largest Facebook population? If you guessed Indonesia, then you’ve been paying close attention to the exploding popularity of social media there. Its capital, Jakarta has more people tweeting daily than Tokyo, London, or New York. In fact, Indonesia has even been called the “social media capital of the world”.

The leading online fashion website in Indonesia is called Berrybenka, and it sells a variety of clothing shoes, bags, and beauty products to a mostly-female audience. With only single-digit percentage credit card penetration in the country, most merchandise is sold C.O.D., or cash on delivery, even if it’s ordered online.

Danu Wicaksana (pronounced “Dah-noo Wih-chak-san-ah”) is a managing director at Berrybenka, overseeing a customer service team that manages nearly 5,000 daily inquiries from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Line (a Japanese social media platform), plus SMS, email and live chat. His team takes a unique approach to servicing customers on Twitter, where many responses begin with a traditional greeting and then the customer’s handle – meaning every customer service response is tweeted out to all of Berrybenka’s 15,000 Twitter followers.

“If there is a similar problem, then hopefully other people can see what has been answered before,” Danu says.

A separate team of agents manages Hijabenka.com, Berrybenka’s sister site which sells Muslim fashion items. Though separate, the sites take the same approach to customer service. Agents should be “making emotional connections with the customers” and feeling “like they own the company,” Danu says, and the strategy is to understand the customer’s preferences in social media and be willing to open up new channels if there is demand.

Danu was kind enough to take some time out of his morning (evening in the U.S.) to talk to us about his organization’s philosophy and tactics in the “social media capital of the world”. Below are some key moments in Episode 23 of the Focus on Customer Service Podcast, and where to find them:

1:00 What is Berrybenka.com?

1:53 A primer on the state of social media in Indonesia

3:45 How Berrybenka is set up to handle thousands of daily inquiries, and what the shopping experience looks like in Indonesia

7:25 The kinds of questions that Berrybenka handles in social media

8:34 How Berrybenka’s agents are cross-trained on multiple platforms

10:00 A multi-lingual approach to customer service

11:21 How Berrybenka and Hijabenka operate together under one corporate entity

13:27 Berrybenka’s unique approach to answering inquiries in Twitter

15:47 How Berrybenka uses Instagram for both marketing and service

17:30 Danu shares some particularly memorable customer interactions

20:15 Danu’s advice to companies getting started in social customer care

Thanks to Nick Ogle for recommending Berrybenka as a unique international example of excellent social care. If you’ve like to nominate a brand to appear on the podcast, please tweet us directly at @dgingiss and @iamdanmoriarty, or use the hashtag #FOCS.