Are customers getting better service and faster response when they Tweet out their frustrations and concerns than they would by calling or emailing a company? Some people used to advise customers to call the office of the president or to contact the Better Business Bureau if they were not getting satisfaction. While traditional customer service via phone, email, chat, or self-service options is still available at companies, many organizations are often responding to customers faster when the complaint comes in via a social media site. As a result, are we teaching customers to use social media as their customer service escalation path?
Customers use social media as a channel to obtain customer service for various reasons. For some, social media is their preferred method of interaction, and they want to do their business with a company where it is most convenient for them. For others, they use social media because they are not satisfied with the results they have received from traditional customer service channels. They feel that companies are more likely to respond via social media because it is such a public medium. And perhaps they are right. Dave Carroll's United Breaks Guitars YouTube video about his poor customer service experience with the airline has nearly 10 million views. Eventually, customers may decide they can get a faster response via their favorite social network and will give up on traditional customer service all together. Social media will become their main place to complain.
What Behaviors Are We Encouraging?
By creating the social media escalation path, companies are discounting their existing customer service channels and training customers not to use them. Any shortcomings of those channels may be even more visible as customers use social media to loudly complain about the lack of great customer service. In some cases, the existing customer service channels are indeed broken and need an overhaul.
In other cases, the customer experience needs to be unified for consistent treatment across all interaction touch points, including social media, phone, chat, email, in-person, and a company's channel partners. Fast responses on social media are raising the expectations for customer service in those other company channels. These channels may be operating very efficiently and effectively, but if the service levels are not meeting newly-formed customer expectations, they will need to be reviewed and most likely improved.
Part of the issue may be that social media responses are not necessarily in-sync with the customer service organization. Social media is often managed by other departments (PR, marketing) with a third-party (agency) taking responsibility for Tweeting or posting responses on Facebook. These teams don't always have access to the right internal resources at the company, so they can't see information about that customer (assuming a company is even linking a customer's social media profiles to their customer database or using SCRM tools). The company responses on social media may not be added to a customer's history, so if a sales person or customer service rep interacts with that customer in the future, they may not have any idea that the customer vented on social media (and perhaps got something for free as a result).
Should companies be responding quickly via social media, even if it causes some of the above issues? Absolutely. The world is watching, and it is critical to not only respond quickly for the sake of resolving a customer issue but also for the sake of the brand's reputation.
What's the Strategy?
What we really should be asking is how we want to treat our customers overall. What is the customer strategy? Most companies don't have one, so they use whatever is easiest and cheapest (read: most convenient for them) to interact with customers. Should better, faster service be provided via certain channels? This is a good approach if a company wants to reward customers for using those channels, which in many cases are less expensive to operate. Should better, faster service be reserved for a company's "best customers", those who do the most business with a company, make the most referrals, or possibly are the biggest influencers? Treating different customers differently is a great strategy, and one that we used with our clients when I worked for Peppers and Rogers Group (1 to 1 Marketing approach).
Social media should not be viewed more favorably because it is the shiny new object with all the attention. As I have said both in my blog and to my social media students at UC San Diego, social media is only one channel of interaction. Encouraging and rewarding customers to use a channel that is more cost efficient is a fine strategy - if that is indeed the strategy. If we are interacting with customers via social media just because it is what everyone else is doing, how will that ultimately affect the customer experience?
What Customers Want
We need to determine where our customers want to interact with us. Social media should be used as an interaction channel for customer service because it is what customers prefer, not because it is cheap or cool. Best Buy does a good job of meeting their customers where they want to interact through their forums and Twelpforce offerings. Companies should use whichever channels customers prefer to use to answer their questions, solve their problems, and ultimately reward them for their business and for referrals. Thank them for being a part of your organization. Intentionally create a great customer experience. When companies do this, whether those interactions were by phone, mail, or online, the word of mouth will spread!
