Social bullying is a serious matter, whether it happens in-person or online. For business-to-consumer (B2C) relations, the unprecedented reach and visibility of social online communities and networks have introduced an ugly dimension to this phenomenon.
Customers are the reason why businesses exist. However, some consumers don't play fair and use their social clout and the visibility of social networks to extract better deals from the business ─ whether it's free product replacement, free shipping, unwarranted discounts, or rapid service levels. Can companies deal effectively with this type of "social bullying" without hurting the business, their brands, and their relationship with other customers? How can they formulate standardized practices for customer service in the social cloud, consistent with those for their website and traditional touch points like the phone, retail store, or a branch office?
We want to preface this article by saying that we don't encourage businesses to cut corners in customer service. That said, here are some tips to handle "C2B (consumer-to-business) social bullying" in a constructive way:
- Staff for social IQ: Hire agents and community managers with "social intelligence", i.e. prudent extroverts who are also emotionally intelligent.
- Monitor for bully talk: Monitor social networking sites and communities on an ongoing basis for mentions of your business so you can spot social bullying (as well as positive mentions), as it occurs.
- Identify: You need to be able to quickly identify the person by mapping their social IDs and social media influence (provided by most social software solutions through standard measures) to their enterprise IDs and past transactions with your business. Some of the bully talk may, in fact, be legitimate gripes from frustrated customers and should be addressed quickly. Social venting is often the result of poor service offered through traditional interaction channels.
- Apply the same "substance": The policies for social bullies should be the same as for any other "traditional" bully. Make sure that answers to customer queries are provided from a common knowledge base unified across traditional and social channels. If bullies sense that policies are more lenient or the quality of answers better on social channels, they will go social first, setting off a stampede, where everyone - bullies and non-bullies alike - will go social to get the best service, best terms, and best deals.
- But with a polite yet firm "social face": Being snarky or impatient with bullies is likely to trigger a social storm.
- Align with your brand: Make sure you align your policies with your brand and business strategy. If your brand has been built on "no questions asked service" at your retail stores or website, your social policies shouldn't be any different. That's where a common multichannel policy hub, explained later in this article, will help.
- Take them private: Acknowledge the complaint publicly and then, where possible, take the bully private for discreet handling. However, don't lose context in the transition - this will aggravate the situation further. This best practice calls for a "360Plus" view of all customer interactions across traditional and social channels. Bring back happy endings to the social cloud for everyone to see.
- Happiness is not universal: Accept the fact that you cannot make everyone happy - bullies or even non-bullies.
- Capture and disseminate best practices: Best-practice bully handling processes and content (e.g. clarifying questions to ask, what the answers should be, when to escalate to a supervisor, when to end the conversation, etc.) can be captured from the best agents and community managers, and disseminated at the "point of bullying" to all agents through interactive process guidance systems like CBR (Case-Based Reasoning). CBR systems layered on a unified multichannel knowledge base ensure answer and process consistency.
- Tear down silos: Implementing a Customer Interaction Hub (CIH) breaks down communication silos. A concept originally advocated by Gartner many years ago, a multichannel CIH consolidates customer interactions, business rules, policies, knowledge bases, workflow, and analytics in a common cross-channel platform. The CIH allows businesses to present a single face across customer touch points, dramatically improving customer experience while driving down costs, and can be extended to social channels or any emerging communication model of the future.
- With social, the customer is an "emperor", not just a "king": Online communities and social networks will ultimately drive most businesses to become more customer-centric.
"Social" presents a great opportunity for service-based differentiation and brand building. Businesses can stay ahead of the curve and attain a competitive edge by using these tips for customer service excellence across traditional and social media.