Nissan's Mike Disser brings passion for customer service to social media

Mike Disser has been with Nissan North America for 16 years. Today, he manages the social media customer experience (SMCX) team for Nissan and INFINITI. Mike’s passion for customer service began in college, when he had an epiphany while working as a department store associate. 

“Something happened, and it just kind of clicked that I could be the person who went out of their way for someone else,” says Disser. “And I never lost that sense of treating the customer right, talking to the customer, and finding out what their needs are.”  

Over the past four years at Nissan, Disser has been on a quest to do things differently — to question everything and to totally reinvent the company’s social media strategy. He’s grown the team from seven to 13 full-time associates. And while he credits all his teammates, including previous leadership, for the team’s success, Disser’s own hard work is inarguable: in 2012, the social media team was essentially a call center for social. They responded to customers with complaints as quickly as possible, but did very little proactive engagement. Their goal was simply to respond to customers who were unhappy or in distress and move on to the next customer. 

When Disser came into the role, he brought a different approach that included a sales and marketing mindset. This is when the social team went from simply responding to customers to engaging with them. 

The team completely rebranded, which included changing its name from “CRM” to “Customer Experience.” In the process of doing that, they also did a bunch of cool, new things powered by a new partnership with Sprinklr. This has allowed Disser and his team to better listen to and engage with customers on social channels. 

“I’m kind of crazy for customers,” Disser explains. “I’ve always been crazy for customers. Even when I worked at a department store in college, I saw the opportunity to make an impression.”

Here are three main ways Disser’s team leverages Sprinklr to make an impression on Nissan and INFINITI customers: 

Engage customers who love your brand

Many companies are forced to do the best they can with what they’ve got, which means their social strategy is more of a fire-fighting strategy: they only have enough bandwidth to respond to unhappy customers who have a problem with the product or service they’ve received. Using Sprinklr Social Sales & Engagement together with Modern Research has enabled Nissan’s social team to do much more: not only can they identify and help customers who need it, but they can also engage with customers who love the brand — and have a lot of fun doing it. “I’m kind of crazy for customers. I’ve always been crazy for customers. Even when I worked at a department store in college, I saw the opportunity to make an impression” Disser says.

Surprise and delight customers with free merch

Part of Nissan’s social strategy is to surprise and delight its customers with company swag. If a customer posts about how they hit a mileage milestone on their INFINITI, for example, they just might receive an INFINITI milestone sticker and hat in the mail. “It's a physical connection, and the team really, really loves doing it,” says Disser.

Follow up with customers you left hanging

Sprinklr enables Disser’s team to tag responses to be followed up at a later date. If a customer asks when a new car model comes out, but Nissan doesn’t have the answer yet (or can’t share at that time), the team can tag the comment and follow up later, once they can provide more details. “​​We had thousands of customers asking us about the Z, and we didn't have any information to share with them other than to stay tuned and keep following,” explains Disser. “So we started applying the re-engagement tag to those comments, and we would reach back out to them with more information when we had it. Customers were just absolutely blown away that we remembered their question.”

“We really leaned on Sprinklr to help us with our evolution, and Sprinklr has delivered,” Disser says. Efficiency has been a key component to meeting and exceeding Nissan customers’ and potential customers’ expectations. Reducing response times by 12 percent since 2019 has been a huge win for the team, as has migrating to Care Cloud, which has greatly reduced agent fatigue. With Care Cloud, the team is able to see historical conversation information to make new interactions streamlined and smooth. And as part of Disser’s mission to reinvent the team’s social media strategy, Nissan North America has been at the forefront of trying Sprinklr products like Visual Insights, Guided Paths, Care Cloud, Sandbox, and more.

“One of the main advantages that you guys have is your people. You take the time to learn our business, find out what our challenges are, and help us solve for them. 

We think the world of the Sprinklr team and the technology.”  

How does the team share all of the amazing news with their Nissan colleagues? Mike created an internal newsletter called Feel Good Friday that he sends out each week to showcase good news. In it, he highlights a handful of examples of positive engagement from users on social media on Nissan accounts. He started the newsletter back in 2020 when everyone was just starting to work from home. “We felt so disconnected to everybody,” Disser says, and this was a good way to send some fun updates. It has grown from 20 recipients to nearly 600 now!”

“This year we’re honored to celebrate our 10-year partnership milestone with Nissan North America, as we continue to support their focus on proactive customer experience management,” said Ragy Thomas, Founder and CEO, Sprinklr.“Our strong relationship over the past 10 years reflects our shared commitment to provide seamless and unified experiences on whatever channel customers choose. Congratulations to Mike Disser and the entire Nissan North America SMCX team for outstanding customer experience success. We look forward to what we’ll accomplish together for our next milestone.”