Good Customer Service is Not Enabling
Social media and customer service, are they an effective mix? Its a fine balance but my feeling is that social media can and should be used as a tool for enabling customer service. People are talking about you and your company and you need to be where the conversations is happening.
When it comes to customer service, ignorance is not bliss. Online feedback about your business can be positive or negative. It is important to take the good with the bad and to use negative comments as an opportunity to turn unhappy customers into evangelists through timely issue resolution or simply by listening. Twitter is rapidly becoming the most popular online medium for customer service.
Engaging with customers in public forums brings about its own issues. Companies are faced with the challenge of effectively helping to solve customer problems without encouraging more people to post public complaints as a means of receiving better service. Furthermore, companies must be very mindful of how their action in resolving conflicts will be viewed by the public at large, one does not want to appear to give preferential treatment to individuals with larger greater influence. Companies also need to avoid enlarging an issue or complaint with continuing conversations in a public space. It is often in the best interest of the company to move the conversation on to the phone, email, or direct message until the problem is resolved.
Many start-ups are emerging to meet the growing demand for social media aggregation and management. PostRank is an interesting tool that allows companies to see where their content is being republished throughout the ‘social web’. Other players in this space include social media management tools such as HootSuite and TweetDeck which have been rapidly popularized as solutions for businesses and individuals looking to manage their image and following online. These tools allow small business owners or marketing companies to track their following and view what is being said about them. In addition to allowing managers to track mentions, post messages, and view their follower count, many of these services also collect key metrics relating to performance.
Dell was one of the first large corporations to fully embrace social media as a medium for customer service. The company is know for its extensive presence on Twitter in particular. Check out all of their Twitter accounts here. Zappos, another company known for its customer service, has also been quick to embrace to benefits of social media as a means of managing their image through customer service. The company encourages all of its employees to use Twitter and publishes all of their user names online. Just the other day I found this article on how Twitter is being used by Dominos Pizza franchises in Chicago, its awesome story! The bottom line is that while Twitter and other social media platforms may help to enable customer service activities, they should be viewed as a complement to offline customer service not a replacement.
