Lots of companies now employ people to regularly monitor the major social media sites for complaints. I know a few months ago when I tweeted something on Twitter (where else does one tweet) about the poor service I had received from my cell phone carrier, a support representative from the carrier tweeted me back within minutes offering to help. This surprised me at the time, since it hadn’t occurred to me that companies were actually paying any attention to rants on Twitter (or any other social media sites, for that matter) looking for opportunities to provide support.
I had another opportunity to interact with a social media customer support representative recently, and was left both pleased and disappointed with the experience. Allow me to explain: Like so many people in the last few months, my wife’s email account (which she’s had for over a decade) was hacked. The hacker registered a name very similar to hers, and started by sending all of her contacts the now-infamous “I’m stuck in London after losing my wallet please send me money” scam (an approach generically known as a 419 scam). Since most of her friends (and I) knew she wasn’t in London and wouldn’t have sent such an email even if she had lost her wallet, I wasn’t too concerned when I first got the email. But the hacker had not only broken into her account, he/she/it had also changed her password, so she could no longer even log in. A big problem, needless to say. So we searched through the “what to do if you can’t get into your account” links at the provider’s site looking for an email address or a phone number to contact. Nada. Zip. Nothing. Instead, we could only find a “fill out this form and we’ll get back to you in 24 hours,” which was not at all what we were hoping to find. So without any other recourse we filled out the form, and almost exactly 24 hours later got the password reset and she got back into her account. End of story, or so I thought.
When it happened again two weeks later, I was determined to get a more timely response out of the email provider. So instead of filling out a “we’ll get back to you with an automated response within 24 hours” form, I fired up Twitter and started to tweet one or two reasonably snarky (I know you are shocked…me?? Snarky??) remarks hoping to draw out a customer support representative from the company (and yes, I tried searching for the handle of a Twitter representative before I ever started ranting). No response whatsoever from the Twitterverse until the next morning, when a random follower suggested a handle I could try to contact the company. So I tried that, also apparently without any luck.
However, the handle I tried turned out to be one that apparently was being looked at (occasionally) by a Twitter customer service representative for the company, who upon noticing it contacted me asking for relevant details. Details were provided, and an actual human person made an actual telephone call to my wife the next day to straighten out the problem.
So the whole experience was very much a good news/bad news affair. On the bad news side, the provider’s website was totally useless with respect to customer service: no email, no phone, no way at all (other than a form) to contact someone at the company who might be able to solve the problem. One would think if a company is going to go the social media customer support route, they might even have a “contact us via Twitter or Facebook” button, but no. If I hadn’t gone to Twitter and started ranting about the lack of service, I’m sure I’d still be exchanging form-based trouble tickets with someone or live-chatting with a person who isn’t authorized to help. On the good news side, once the right support person got involved the problem was resolved quite quickly.
So kudos to the company for providing support via Twitter; boos to the company for not making easier for someone who *isn’t* on Twitter to get support. I think there’s a lesson here: If you are going to provide customer support by monitoring a social media venue, you might want to make it easier to find your CSR there. Otherwise, the CSR is probably going to be dealing with angry and frustrated customers, who have probably already publicly bashed your company.
No comments:
Post a Comment