Social Media: Changing The Face of Customer Service

Something very powerful happened to me today in the world of social media and it made me marvel at how fast word spreads in this online age and how important it is for businesses, or anyone who has a brand, to be aware of what is being said about them so that they can take quick action.  Here’s a real life example of the power of social media in action.

There’s a company that I’m signed up with for services and I’d been having issues with their site for over a week.  It wouldn’t have been so bad … if I’d been able to get through on their phone line to get it straightened out.  I sat on hold today determined to get through to a live person.  I sat on hold patiently listening to the robot say repeatedly that they valued my call and appreciated my patience, that I was being held in priority sequence.  After an hour on hold, I decided to vent a little on Twitter about how frustrating the situation was and I mentioned the company name.  How our world has changed right?  Within 10 minutes people were tweeting back about how it just wasn’t right and that this was a perfect example of how “not” to do customer service.  After 1.5 hours on hold, I hung up.  You could say I was a bit disgruntled.  You could also say that my tweets had created some negative publicity for this company (they were clean tweets — remember never tweet anything you’d be embarrassed to have your grandmother or your friends’ parents see — but negative nonetheless) .

Now here’s the amazing part! This company actually has a Twitter account and they’re doing social media right.  They were actively “listening” to what was being said about them, so within a couple of hours, I got a tweet from their customer service person on Twitter duty asking if they could help me. They asked for my information and then they called me.  No really, they actually called me.  Pretty sweet, right?  Within 10 minutes, my account issues were mostly fixed and what couldn’t be fixed immediately will be fixed in a couple of days.  So what did I do after they resolved everything?  I sent a tweet saying thank you for the great support of course! It’s only fair and definitely the right thing to do.

Do you see the power of what happened here?  I had turned into an unhappy customer and was spreading bad publicity for this company.  If this company hadn’t been “listening”, the negative publicity would have remained floating out there or even gotten worse, but because they were “listening” they could jump on it quickly and resolve it.  End result?  Their reply tweets to me are public so they’ve counteracted the negative publicity by showing that they handled the situation quickly.  I’m a happy customer again with stronger loyalty because they came through and I said so publicly in a tweet.

So, the questions for you are:  Are you building customer satisfaction and loyalty through social media like this company is?  Are you “listening” to your customers and audience online?

If you don’t know what your customers are saying, you could be losing them right now.  If you don’t have a social media presence, maybe it’s time to get one.

Leigh Carter

http://www.SocialLeighOnline.com