Twitter, Facebook, Customer Service and Surgery

26 Replies to “Twitter, Facebook, Customer Service and Surgery”

1. I’m pretty torn by this post.

   On the one hand, it’s absolutely clear common sense, and what I’ve been advising people for years.

   On the other hand, it seems like a dangerous game to tell your customers why their expectations are wrong, especially in a B2C world. This is especially true when companies persist in handling escalations through social — Comcast can’t roll their trucks on time, but @ComcastCares fixes it all up.

   I don’t know. Maybe after a certain number of bust appendixes (appendices?), customers will go back to using channels that are designed for the work of service and support. But that’s seeming like a risky bet right now.

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   1. David,

      First, thanks for coming by and commenting – much appreciated given you have spent considerable time thinking about this and working in the industry.

      Second, you make a very interesting point – something I have been thinking about since I read your comment in my phone yesterday (sorry for the lag, but there is only so much you can type on a phone): am I telling customers what their expectations are?

      I am going to say no. I don’t think I am saying don’t expect excellent service – to the contrary, demand it. However, be cognizant (as a customer) that to get what you want (an honest, accurate, simple answer delivered fast) takes good circumstances – most of which don’t change because you scream loud. Going to Twitter and expecting a perfect answer (in 140 characters) to *any* inquiry at any time is not reasonable. To go back to the analogy, what if you tell your surgeon that he has to get your appendix out in five minutes bursts? or 30 seconds bursts (which is closer to what Twitter gives you to conduct business – comparatively).

      Takes more than wanting to punish companies (which, as a lot of them have shown online, don’t care or suffer as a result of the beating) to get good service. If the expectation of service is there, choose the right channel and get an answer. If the expectation is to punish the company — well, I am sure that as a customer you don’t want to punish the company you are doing business with — you still just want an answer.

      We should stop listening to those with a vested interest tell us how “brands must engage in all social channels or lose customers and go out of business” until they actually prove that is the case. Who has gone out of business or lost significant business as a result of poor service and lack of attention to Social channels? United Airlines? AT&T Wireless? Nestle?

      Let’s be honest with ourselves and our providers here. If the expectation is to get service, screaming you want it won’t change anything… it takes two to tango, and two to participate in an interaction: companies should make it perfectly clear to customers what they can and cannot do i each channel to get excellent service (we have been saying that since we started doing customer service via multiple channels) and there is no shame in saying “this channel is not for me”.

      Same applies to social channels…

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      1. I look forward to the day when the dialog about delivering customer care in social channels is not driven by people pushing hype to sell products or build new empires in their organizations.

         Even the most commonly referred to successful social customer care delivery by @comcastcares has never demonstrated more than PR value. Esteban, your readers might enjoy your comments on this subject here: http://www.enterpriseirregulars.com/51077/why-companies-are-using-social-software/#comment-24355

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2. I think you miss a serious point though – for most companies, standard customer service channels have been failing their customers for years. The invisibile nature of customer service has led companies to treat it as unfortunate requirement, and something to squeeze as much as possible. The systems and processes in place usually aren’t there to make a better customer experience; they are there to reduce costs.

   The public nature of social forces companies to up their game. Companies can’t afford to be so publicly slow, so they respond on Facebook and Twitter within an hour – even though they take two days to respond to an email.

   Their phone and email agents struggle through strict processes which make it hard to be flexible or just get on and fix issues for their customers. Their social agents are given the leeway and flexibility to do whatever it takes to ensure the customer is taken care of.

   The public nature of social customer service forces companies to deliver good customer service, designed to ensure a good customer experience – not designed to just minimise internal costs and headaches.

   Should a hospital focus on maximizing patient survival and health, or on minimizing cost? I know what I would choose.

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   1. Joshua,

      I am not sure where you are getting a lot of the information in your response – but that is not the customer service i see delivered. My stats, from organizations doing it, show over 40% of Twitter started service request go unanswered, and over 65% of Facebook started service requests go unaswered. The rest take far longer than email and phone to be fulfilled (thus my stats in the early part of the post): 48 hours is average time to resolve a Twitter started transaction (which, BTW, applies to only 98% of them – the rest get escalated to another channel), and 72 hours for Facebook started transactions.

      Email response, by contrast, stands around 4 hours average (which accounts as well for the 2-day long wait for some providers and even the 28-day SLA that Virgin Atlantic promises – but under-delivers on – for email started transactions).

      You are over-glorifying what Social can deliver based on a few select case studies versus what it is reality for most organizations. This is the danger I see — companies that took to Twitter and Facebook, broke their processes for delivering quality results, and ended up upsetting customers even more as a result. Not many interactions can be replied to in 140 characters, or in a public forum. Using channels for escalation purposes is not good for organizations (or for customers for that matter, as they overwhelm providers who lack the proper infrastructure and delay the answers they might’ve gotten faster via other channels).

      But that was not the intent of my post: I am not judging social channels – I am judging vendors that push social channels as a panacea, customers that buy into that bogus concept without understanding what is behind those claims, and companies that rush to do it simply because “someone said they should”. We learned in over 20 years of doing multi-channel customer service that channels should be deployed, used, and managed in certain ways – and we are ignoring that in favor of shiny-new-objects. Not a good business (or customer service) move.

      Let’s go back to the board, figure out where and how Twitter and Facebook and other social channels can be used best, how to automate them properly, how to track and monitor them, how to figure out what is success – then communicate that in SLAs and deliver against them. Same thing we have done before. That is all I am asking…

      BTW, if you are going to make the blanket statement that companies cannot afford to ignore the social noise — please bring case studies with numbers. I have not seen any in spite of the years of advertising how they will fail and collapse. If that was the case, and the same was said for email and chat and messaging and every other channel when they first came out, we would certainly have examples by now – no?

      Thanks for the read and the provocative comment – I am not passing judgment, I am asking for common sense.

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3. Joshua: Banks with 1 percent car loans and 2 percent deposit rates and companies responding to customers using megaphones rather than waiting in line would certainly have some happy customers, but they would not be in business long enough for it to matter.

   Providing customer care is not just about making customers happy. It’s about making customers happy in a way that balances their needs with what allows creation of a profitable and sustainable business. Service levels for how quickly companies respond to questions on any given day or hour must be defined based on what makes good business sense and never can be dictated by the customer or the channel. I also have to say that comparing decisions involving saving human lives with customer care is really pretty lame.

   For many organizations it makes perfect sense to extend easy access to core support infrastructure from social networks, but rarely does it make sense to use the social network systems as a communications channel, which is not optimized for providing support and lacks any way to differentiate service based on the value of the customer relationship, among other things. I have talked in more specifics on this in a liveops blog and encourage you to add your opinions. http://blogs.liveops.com/2012/08/07/how-to-empower-customer-service-to-get-social-3/#comment-7354

   Esteban: Thanks for making this post. I hope people get into the mud on this one!
   I would extend your analogy to ask the question: when does it make sense for a surgeon to perform surgery remotely if the customer could just push a button and be immediately transported to the surgery room? Oh, I know when, when the patient isn’t paying for the surgery and wants it now regardless if it will take you longer to complete the surgery and of course will sue you if the surgery is compromised any due to the surgery being done remotely.

   This unconditional “customer is in charge” mantra only works for the people not responsible for building sustainable business models and is especially great for those people making money by getting businesses to think the customer is in charge and using their systems, services or staff will enable the business to let them be in charge.

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   1. Thanks for coming in and commenting – we already discussed all this, and most of what we discussed is reflected in your comments — so will just say “thanks”.

      🙂

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4. While you are right that reaching out via social media does not get a quick fix, typically people have already tried the traditional channels. It might be more cumbersome for companies to monitor and address these unhappy customers. But they should welcome the chance to know what their customer’s pain is and show publicly that it is being addressed.

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   1. Mary,

      Simple question – why should a company welcome that? Why shouldn’t they welcome the opportunity to deliver excellent service via established, proven channels and used the savings in time, resources, people, etc. to improve that even further?

      Why would anyone want to go against common sense and air their dirty laundry instead of washing it and putting it away?

      This is what baffles me about social (and the same was true about email and others) — we expect companies to do something without even figuring it if it works for them or not, simply in exchange for not embarrassing them?

      That is not how relationships work, that is blackmail – no?

      I think you have a fair point – people could not get a fix via traditional channels – but I would welcome the continuation of a single-channel or multi-channel excellence model as we have been proposing for about 10 years versus a “throw the baby out with the bath water and do it all over again – wrong”.

      Thanks for the read and comment,

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5. Chuck –

   “rarely does it make sense to use the social network systems as a communications channel, which is not optimized for providing support and lacks any way to differentiate service based on the value of the customer relationship”

   This could equally have been said for email at one point, or even phone. No channel by itself is optimized for providing support. You need the right systems and processes behind it.

   We live in a competitive marketplace. The customer IS in charge. If a company is ignoring their upset customers because they’re not contacting them ‘in the right channel’ – despite the fact that they’ve just spent millions encouraging their customers to communicate with them over social – then they will quickly lose out to the companies who are providing good service through social channels. It’s public for all to see, and ignoring your customers in public is a recipe for brand damage and potential crisis situations.

   Social is a two way communication channel. This has been known for years. If you stand up and say ‘here we are’ on platforms like Facebook and Twitter, you have to accept that you can’t just blast out one way marketing messages – customers can talk back, and they expect a response (rightly so).

   The solution isn’t to stick your head in the sand – it’s to work out what you need to do in order to ensure you can deliver great social service.

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   1. The solution is actually to figure out if delivering social service is for you and your company – not to simply deliver it.

      I like this comment of yours more than the one before – but you are still rushing to adopt social channels just because they are there.

      That is wrong and that is what is failing us today.

      Thanks for remaining engaged.

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   2. Joshua:

      You must not have read what I said here and in the referenced link. I never said to ignore social channels or to ignore complaints posted in social channels.

      I said more than once that organizations (as appropriate for their customers) need to look at social networks as access points to their support infrastructure rather than as communications channels to provide support.

      Deal with complaints on your FB wall? Absolutely. Extend your FB wall as a place to ask questions and get answers rather than clicking on a tab in FB to get support? Rarely makes sense and once you start you really can’t stop.

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6. Sounds like there is opportunity in first responder, EMT work and housecalls. 😉

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7. A thought-provoking post here, Esteban, and what a robust comment thread, too!

   Esteban, you’re quite right that organizations are often slow to respond to customer service issues in social channels. One recent study that I read found that 56% of top brands didn’t respond to a *single* customer comment on their Facebook pages during the survey period. That was less likely a willful ignoring of their customers and more a case that they’re still building out teams, processes, and best practices for being in position to respond.

   But the fact is, there is a growing consumer expectation that companies *will* respond to their customer service needs in Social. This is where consumers are spending a lot of their time, and this is where they’re seeing those same brands post marketing and promotional messages in their streams and news feeds.

   By 2014 — that’s not very far away! — Gartner predicts that companies who ignore customer service issues in social media will “face the same level of wrath from customers as those that ignore today’s basic expectation that they will respond to emails and phone calls.”

   As businesses and brands entered Social over the last few years, Marketing tended to out in front. Now Customer Service is working to catch up, and I’m confident they will!

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   1. Bryan,

      I am not going to attack or dismiss Gartner, but I sincerely doubt that in simply 16-28 months we will have that level of adoption for social media in business. Once you leave the little cocoon in which we inhabit (I include myself in it) and notice that there are fewer than 60 million people active on Twitter (out of a total of close to 6.5 billion in the world, right?), add to that the statistics about not replying to social requests on a timely manner, and the results we are starting to see — I have a hard time reconciling the data with that prediction.

      Businesses will figure it out, eventually. It is not going to be in the next 2 years, and likely not in the next 3 or 4 either. I see a horizon of 5-7 years before we understand it well enough to enjoy mainstream adoption. Of course, early adopters and innovators (all 20 of them, just kidding) will get there earlier — but there are so many more people in other groups, as a vendor you cannot survive on 20 or 200 early adopters or innovators only.

      Thanks for reading and commenting – I am looking forward to the next 3-5 years as we see the results of all this disagreement come to fruition.

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      1. Fair points, Esteban. I don’t think that Gartner is suggesting that businesses will have fully incorporated social CRM into their operations by 2014, but that their customers will be expecting it!

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         1. I expect my next wife to be a stunning super-model who thinks no one in the world is better than me (think Will Farrell in that comedy he did with Markie Mark) —

            Alas, in both cases maybe we should adjust our expectations… 😉

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8. When was the last time a customer got fired for getting a company to do things that do not create sustainable and scalable models best able to help all customers? The customer is king, but the customer is not in charge of how smart businesses operate. Enough of this “the customer is in charge” hooey.

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9. Esteban,

   I read this a couple of time in an effort to unwind a couple of themes that you are conflating, but first let me say that if customer service conformed to the strict requirements that, using your example, a surgeon requires then even commodity household items would have price tags attached to them far in excess of what anyone would call reasonable. If my cell phone is acting wonky no one is going to die of a staph infection or my liver being removed instead of my appendix. Let’s continue this discussion with some appropriate extremes on the spectrum.

   The entire point of customer service is to satisfy an expressed or unmet need, and for the most part companies do a good job at this while balancing the financial demands it imposes and how best to drive the customer lifecycle with support. There is another dimension of customer support that is not often talked about and that is the degree to which the providing organization provides succinct and complete support in a manner that intersects with the values of their customers.

   Apple sets a bar on this point, the retail experience that the majority of customers experience is excellent and reflects an organizational approach to customer service that values transparency and employee empowerment… the ability to punch out of the defined business process and deliver a positive customer result.

   This is where customer service has gone off the tracks, by bowing at the alter of business process at the expense of customer experience. Call centers are a way for companies to control customer interaction, bucket it into a defined mode which has a predictable time to process and attendant managed cost associated with. Companies that view the call center as the beginning and end of customer experience pay lip service to customer satisfaction and that’s about it.

   Customer service is not a zero sum game when it comes to the channels through which you provide it. Companies did not shut down their phone systems when they got email and self-service through the web did not cause them to close down their contact centers (although it does feel that way sometimes). You meet your customer where they are and deliver a customer service experience that is commensurate with the channel you are providing it through.

   Facebook and Twitter are poor channels to deliver customer support through but they are excellent for catching customer support issues as they are emerging. One-to-one channels (phone, email) are completely unsuited for peer-to-peer support and customer advocacy that we see emerging in the social web, and this is where your argument falls flat for me. You are laying a foundation that is explicitly focused on doing what we do today, not how the evolution of customer engagement will drive what we do tomorrow.

   Specific to Facebook and Twitter, the single biggest problem that support organizations face is how to scale their use of these channels so that they get the benefits of reusable content, search discovery, and explicit customer resolution in the absence of creating yet another ticket that has significant cost associated with it.

   [begin shameless plug]

   With Get Satisfaction today you can use our community platform as a hub through which these social interactions take place. FB Wall posts and Tweets can be directed to the community assets that are relevant (we do intercept searches on social activity stream items to map to existing topics in the community, if none exist they can be created and linked to in the reply post), as well as into your case management/ticketing system. What this means is that your build and maintain a common corpus of customer support content, mapped to customer records in your CRM system for a complete view of your customer activity, and have the added benefit of being discoverable in search engines as well as using our widgets to surface user generated content for use in your web assets.

   The point about search is incredibly important. The customer support behavior that has overtaken all others is using google when you have a problem… where is my Pampers coupon code? is Mindjet for the Mac available? This is how customers discover company resources in customer support situations today and if your solution doesn’t provide out-of-the-box SEO then you simply won’t make the grade.

   [end shameless plug]

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   1. Jeff: Good to see you join in.

      Are you saying that you believe that most companies should directly utilize social network’s infrastructure as a communications channel rather than as an access point? As I have called out in my previous comments in this blog post, this differentiation is not semantics and its impact is far reaching and consequential.

      Businesses have very different choices for how they elect to support customers in relevant social networks and to best aid decision makers in this decision the conversation really needs to be at a level that deals with specific implementation options.

      It’s time for more of these discussions about social support to get out of the clouds and onto the ground where specific, real-world decisions have to be made. Far too many times readers are left with the thought “now, what can I do with that.” My many years as a CIO has made me know this feeling all too well.

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10. the analogy was apt and hilarious. thanks for the laugh.

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11. When I see communities where almost all the questions are answered by staff, I fail to see how this “community powered” support is really community powered and provides much benefit over “creating yet another ticket that has significant cost associated with it.”

    Sure the answer provided in the community is publicly visible and will deflect some redundant questions, but how is this approach any better than what even a traditional knowledge base, which does not suffer from the common problem support people point to in these support communities where the same questions get answered again and again, wasting resources and diluting search results with redundant content?

    Here is an example of one the the much-hyped “community-powered” communities with thousands of questions answered, but I can’t find a single one that was not provided by staff. http://community.kiddicare.com/kiddicare/questions/answered In fact, I will pay $100 to the first person that points to two questions answered by other customers in this community.

    What am I missing? Why are my conclusions unfair? What are the benefits of this model over even what a traditional knowledge base provides?

    It’s time to get into the mud and have detailed discussions at a level that is based on reality and not controlled by marketing messaging.

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12. Ah the much maligned “it’s all marketing” critique… We get that a lot from competitors, and then they try to draft on our marketing by buying the “Get Satisfaction” keywords in search engines. Wink.

    You are highlighting the Kiddicare community, which you know is powered by Get Satisfaction, yet you fail to acknowledge that the agent provided support model is exactly what they intended, so their TTR is very quick. Get Satisfaction is extremely successful for Kiddicare, by their own account. First call resolution has shot up to 98% and 97% of their customers would recommend them.

    In addition to the customer support they provide in the open public community, Kiddicare has been using community content on product pages to go beyond what ratings/reviews can do. Every product page has a Get Satisfaction widget that loads by default with topics relevant to that specific product, such as:
    Hauck Eagle 2 in 1 Pushchair

    Where this is incredibly useful is when a question about fit/sizing/color/whatever is made available to someone who has yet to purchase the product, such as:
    “Can the Hauck Eagle 2 in 1 Pushchair – Lolli Turquoise be used parent facing even with an older child?”

    By providing customer generated content in the product pages Kiddicare has been extremely successful keeping people on their site and purchasing, rather than jumping off to do additional research.

    Another customer worth highlighting is Ustream, which not only handles a wide range of traditional customer support through their community but also deals with complex AV setup and configuration issues that are customer specific, quite often with customers helping other customers.

    What are recommended cameras for broadcasting with Ustream

    Popular questions are surfaced which in effect become dynamic FAQs for other community members and visitors to take advantage of. This is a not insignificant point, the old way to do FAQ/KB content was to have a customer support agent of technical writer compile, publish, and maintain, but with product cycles being what they are and the increasing technical complexity of even ordinary products this is no longer feasible as a single strategy.

    Sonos is a great example of a company using Get Satisfaction for dynamic FAQ content paired against traditional FAQ content (powered by RightNow).
    Sonos Support

    You have said at multiple points in this thread that it’s time to get beyond marketing…. I have provided several customer examples that make the point for us, when it comes to providing scalable, successful customer communities that facilitate the basic requirements of answering questions, solving problems, and capturing product ideas, we deliver the goods and then some. Furthermore, companies are building strategies around using our widgets to deliver content and application services at the point of intersection with the customer, whether on their web assets, mobile, search, or in a social network by capturing a stream, wall post or utilizing an app inside their brand page.

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    1. Greetings Jeff:

       I do not have time to really think about your comments and respond for a couple days, but I wanted to thank you for taking the time to respond and for providing some details. I also wanted to say that I believe GetSatisfaction has a very good offering, but also believe some of the marketing (like for all firms) is not as accurate a reflection of what people actually realize as it could be. It’s just not “community powered support” when all the questions are answered by support staff. Nonetheless, your offering clearly provides material value.

       Chuck

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    2. Hello Jeff:

       Let me start by reminding everyone that this forum is not intended to provide a place for vendors like us to sell our stuff.

       In response to your “wink”: Yes, like most every other vendor out there, we do have Google ads that use competitor names as keywords. However, I think the real question you should be asking is why your partner (Zendesk) is doing the same thing.

       Now, moving on to the two questions I posed. The intention of the questions is not to call your firm or anyone else out on the carpet, but rather it is to get dialog going on specific implementation options faced by companies when deciding how best to provide support to customers and all stakeholders relevant to their ecosystem. I must say that I find it ironic that just about all the vendors in our space profess how consumers absolutely expect organizations to be transparent to their customers, but refuse to do so themselves and rather choose to drive the conversations using their carefully crafted messaging aimed to sell product and not to inform and educate.

       The first question I posed asked when it really makes good business sense for a company to utilize social network software as a communications channel or as an access point. You had no response to the question, but no one else did either. Esteban alluded to generally considering them access points into support infrastructure optimized for providing support, but he did not take a definitive position in response to my question.

       My second question asked how an online community that had almost all questions answered by staff was beneficial, at least more beneficial than even a traditional knowledge base, and constituted being legitimately marketed as “community powered?” To provide an example of such a community I referenced one of your communities, but my question pertains to any community where almost all questions are answered by support staff and is not unique to your offering.

       Although your response included many details to demonstrate the effectiveness of your offering, I do not believe it answered my question.

       I totally agree with you that today’s world requires content that answers customers’ and other stakeholders’ questions, and that it must be created and published more quickly than is commonly done using knowledge bases or any other system managing such content. I also totally agree that stakeholders must be able to quickly get to content that is contextually relevant to where they are on a Web page. However, these two requirements are not uniquely delivered by online communities or your offering and in fact could be delivered by many traditional knowledge bases.

       However, what cannot be delivered by a traditional knowledge base is the broad insights of all the stakeholders using the content to make a purchasing decision or effectively use a product or service. Gaining this insight is what “community powered” support is all about and is not accomplished when people are invited to ask the community, but in reality almost all the questions are answered by a few support staff. Maybe the illusion of asking the community a question is currently enough for some, but I seriously doubt this will last.

       Your reference to Sonus using your online community offering in conjunction with a traditional knowledge base is an interesting one. I am having a hard time understanding the value since the content for both systems is very likely to be created by the same people and the extent of change control required before the content is released and the ability to make the content contextually accessible in Web pages is not a function of the software, but rather defined by the staff using the software. What’s more, I would think that using two different systems to extend content to fulfill the same need is likely to result in duplicate and conflicting content and causes the consumer to be unsure where they should be looking for their answers, the one labeled “community” answered by support staff or the one labeled “knowledge base” answered by support staff.

       At the end of the day, people just want to get their questions answered quickly, accurately and completely. Our job as vendors in this space is to provide the tools that enable them to effectively and efficiently support this need with careful and realistic consideration for their absolute requirement to build business models that are profitable and sustainable. This whole “social” dimension is vital for all organizations to incorporate into their tactical plans to provide support and more open discussion sans the marketing mantras need to occur to help us all provide truly effective deliveries.

       One last thing to mention that is also very important for all business decision makers: When hearing metrics of great successes achieved using a particular technology, be sure to understand what was used before this technology was implemented. You would be surprised how many times the success was primarily achieved because no technology capable of quickly getting people to quality answers was previously used.

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13. Esteban,

    To answer your original question, “Why do we expect different from businesses and customer service?”

    Because your analogy is logical and customers react emotionally.

    Glenn

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