Don’t Hide Your Customer Support
In the information age, proprietary secrets don’t last long. Best practices are quickly spread throughout the market. Improvements in production and process become common knowledge very quickly. Because advantages in efficiency and production will be so fleeting, every other element of quality management becomes even more vital. One important way to stay ahead of the competition is to focus on your relationships; particularly in the area of customer service. The Internet, and particularly social networking, offers you new tools to help.
Since the onset of the social networking revolution, suits in the top floor corner offices have either ignored the social media as useless pop culture, or demanded instant measureable return for time invested online. Despite that resistance, visionary PR and management leadership insisted a presence in the burgeoning world of Facebook, Twitter, You-Tube, and the rest was not optional. They began pioneering creative uses for social networks. Some of the most interesting applications of social media can be found in its use in customer service.
Raise your hand if you’ve ever found yourself lost on some company’s customer support phone tree. After interminable waits, and no fewer than three or four menu’s, you think you’ve finally arrived where you can be helped…and are disconnected. I know phone trees are supposed to be efficient and cheap. Here’s the truth though: everybody, and I do mean everybody, hates them. They are impersonal, inflexible and unfriendly. Customers believe, rightly or wrongly, that businesses hide behind a labyrinthine phone tree. They feel abused.
Stop hiding. Put a face on your company and add a personal touch to the customer service experience by building relationships in new ways, using social media. Several forward thinking companies are already showing the path out of the phone tree forest. Best Buy has been a leader in developing Twitter as a customer service environment. Hundreds of their employees are online offering customer support and complaint resolution through Twitter. In this program Best Buy answers questions and addresses problems directly with the clients involved; and they do it in a way that publicly broadcasts a message of commitment to customer service. And the Twitter environment has an added advantage. It’s very cheap.
Zappos, an online apparel retailer, has more than 400 employees with Twitter accounts. With this program, Zappos moves customer support to the front line, makes it a direct relationship-building communication, and offers real time assistance. It’s a win win…for everybody.
Social Media can make you fast, flexible, and friendly. And there, ladies and gentlemen, is the ideal application to make senior executives finally take notice.
