How is your company handling customer service in our ‘brave new world’ of social media?
Consumers certainly are looking for help on Twitter. In one recent survey, 58% of respondents said if they had tweeted about a bad experience, they would like the company to respond to their comment. (Source: Twitter Can Help With Customer Service, CRM Daily)
Hopefully those turning to Twitter are in the single digits because finding them so you can respond is going to be expensive.
Michael Brito, who left Intel as director of social media this month to take a similar job at Edelman Digital, acknowledges it is “impossible to respond to everyone on the social Web unless you have an army of thousands of people on your staff.” (Source: Twitter Can Help With Customer Service, CRM Daily)
Obviously your success will be driven by limiting unhappy customers. But you aren’t going to be able to make everyone happy every single time, so the next step would be making sure that when you fail, the customer understands how to escalate the matter in order to increase their chances of being satisfied. (Yes, I realize that’s work for the customer – but the alternative is they leave, unsatisfied, and bitch to everyone. Isn’t it better to have them ask for a supervisor?)
Does your company tell customers what to do if you happen to prove you are human and fail to satisfy their needs on the first attempt? Do you have a simple escalation process that responds in a timely fashion? Or do you let them go away mad? Or, worse yet, do you give them a stack of paperwork to complete and submit?!
Most people want hassle-free (or low hassle) relationships. So why not be open and honest and clearly explain to your customers that you are there to help and that the process for making that happen is…
Instead, too many companies make customer service difficult. (Hello, Technorati!) They toss FAQs and Knowledgebases and lots of self-help information onto the customer – but the assumption is that all customers want to solve their own problems and that’s a dangerous assumption.
Take a moment. Pretend to be a customer. Shop your business. Buy something. Then try to get help. And try to return it.
Let me know what you discover – and what that discovery leads to at your business.
