Social Media is the New Customer Service

Volume 24 / Number 8

Facebook. Twitter.  Blogs.  If you feel like these words have materialized — uninvited — into your job description, you’re right.  You have a million-dollar CRM, but it’s the customers that seem to be managing the relationship.  Social media is the new customer service … and your customers are, in effect, the new media that can help or hinder your company or product’s reputation.

This change is shattering the wall between the Customer Service and Public Relations departments.  And when every customer has the potential reach of a TV reporter via YouTube, or a newspaper journalist via RSS, it’s a wonder that bits of the wall remain at all.  It’s a situation that requires Customer Care departments to adopt public relations skills.  And it’s a situation that will be very hard to swallow for your colleagues over in Marketing. 

The year 2010 marked the first time that members of Generation Y outnumbered Baby Boomers.  And Gen Y’s approach to communication has staggering implications for the customer service function. Approximately 93 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds are online and 89 percent consume user-generated content, such as blogs.  Nearly 9 in 10 have joined a social network, half regularly make comments on blogs and under articles, and nearly half have created their own social media channel, such as a Twitter, Flickr or YouTube feed.

Before the rise of social media, customer service and public relations people were defined by different goals, audiences and channels.

But with social media, putting journalists and customers with journalistic reach into separate categories is like making a distinction without a difference.  The only important question is, “how do we deal with it?”  The process starts with customer service adopting two skills from the public relations domain that address two new parts of customer service’s job description: Stopping complaints from going viral and — for those that break through — stopping complaints from re-emerging once you think they’ve been quelled.

Stopping complaints from going viral

In the good old days of 2008, an upset customer would wait until after a call with customer service to write a negative blog post.  Today, that upset consumer is tweeting the call as it happens live!  And those tweets and status updates can — but not necessarily always — overflow into the worlds of investors, media, regulators and other key audiences.

Step one to managing this situation is for the customer service representative to assess the potential for the situation to go viral and act, or elevate the issue.  Here are four litmus tests:
 

• Who would care about this situation happening on the phone (or email exchange, IM or live streaming post) right now?
• How many people may be interested in this issue? A thousand?  Just one?
• How many could find out about it? There used to be a threshold before the mainstream media would be interested in tackling and reporting on a customer service problem. With Twitter, even one such problem can raise havoc for a company.
• If this information was to spread, what level of damage would it do?  Could it merely embarrass the company? Perhaps reinforce a reputation of poor customer service? Could it affect sales, like the fraudulent claims of a Wendy’s customer who said she found a finger in her chili?  Further up the scale, is it a question of whether lives are at stake, as with Toyota’s recent issues?  Could it threaten the company’s very existence, as with Arthur Andersen, whose involvement in the Enron scandal led to the accounting firm’s demise?

Knowing the potential for damage, additional resources can be brought to bear to mitigate the situation.  The tools to defuse the situation — refunds, senior attention, apologies, and even public mea culpas — don’t change.  Just the ability to deploy them more effectively.
 

Managing a long-tailed crisis

But what about when a customer’s complaint does spill over in the social medium, leaving reputational demerits all over the web?  In pre-web times, a bad situation would inflict damage, get resolved, and eventually be forgotten.  But when old complaints — even those that were fixed — come up front and center in response to certain Google searches, the wounds appear as fresh as the day they were suffered.  Here’s how to deal with a “long-tailed crisis:”
 

• Find them before they find you.  Monitor and seek out situations with the potential to escalate into full-blown crises. 
• Salt the ground.  Once the bad stuff is out there, you need to take steps to ensure it won’t be ignited anew when someone else finds it. Provide responses in the original posting and add links to your own resources.
• Respond with proof.  It’s not enough to say “we take the problem very seriously.”  If there’s a problem, fix it.  And be prepared to demonstrate how.
• Be human.  Speak like a person, not in the jargon of a corporate lawyer.  Be emotive and empathetic.

While the threats above are real and the steps to solve them will work, companies will still struggle to confront them given often-siloed corporate structures.  The best starting point for overcoming these issues is to recognize that social media is a unique phenomenon that requires equally unique responses, structures and methodologies.  The good news is that the desire for good customer service is shared equally by company and consumer alike.  If that’s the starting point for how you address these new challenges, then nothing but success lies ahead.

Sidebar:

Two Companies That Do It Right

Beauty that’s more than skin deep
Kim’s Beauty.com order was supposed to be eligible for a free gift with purchase, but the premiums ran out before her order was processed and so she lodged a complaint on the company’s Facebook page.  A company rep named Kathleen reached out with an offer to send a new free gift.  That rep turned out to be Kathleen McNeill, the company’s president.

JetBlue goes above and beyond
Dave, a blogger, was at the gate waiting for his plane to board, when he realized he’d left his sunglasses behind at security.  He mentioned it in a tweet, which was seen by someone at JetBlue who undertook a search for them.  While, sadly, there was no trace of the glasses, a JetBlue rep went to the gate to provide the grateful Dave with an update. 

These mini case studies were reported by Consumerist.com.

• 93 percent of Americans say a company should have a presence in social media.   

• 56 percent say they feel better served by companies that interact with them via social media.

• 43 percent say companies should use social networks to solve customer problems.

• 41 percent say companies should use social media to solicit feedback about products/services.¹ 

    ¹SOURCE:  Cone, 2008 Cone Business in Social Media Study, at http://www.coneinc.com/content1182.