Cus­tomer Ser­vice and Social Media

Social media is get­ting to be an ever more pop­u­lar tool for con­nect­ing with cus­tomers and pro­vid­ing cus­tomer ser­vice. On the plus side, it can be a pos­i­tive gen­er­a­tor of cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion and sales. For exam­ple @DellOutlet has gen­er­ated over 1.5 mil­lion fol­low­ers and $6.5 M in sales on Twit­ter since they first launched in June, 2007. Why? Twit­ter pro­vides an easy and quick way to for cus­tomers to get ser­vice … and they save money by being alerted to the lat­est sales!

On the other side of such good news, we've been hear­ing for years that unhappy cus­tomers tell 10 peo­ple about a bad expe­ri­ence with a com­pany. Not any­more! Today that same unhappy cus­tomer is liable to write about it in his or her blog, tweet to hun­dreds of friends (which of course gets retweeted to hun­dreds of their friends) or, heaven for­bid, cre­ate a video to post on YouTube.  If you're United Air­lines and break someone's gui­tar, for­get 10 friends. Three mil­lion peo­ple will hear about it within ten days via YouTube!

Remem­ber those 2500 peo­ple trapped overnight in the Chan­nel Tun­nel when four Eurostar trains broke down due to freez­ing weather? One per­son in Eng­land reported hear­ing about poor cus­tomer ser­vice from 5 stranded friends via text mes­sages. Imag­ine how many other peo­ple heard from those same 5 trav­el­ers! Videos posted on YouTube were watched over 7,000 times. And Twit­ter was all a-tweet over the whole thing.

The Pre­emp­tive Strike of Great Cus­tomer Service

Don't wait until you have to mount a PR cam­paign to out­weigh bad press. Launch a pre­emp­tive strike and call us now. We'll have your employ­ees offer­ing the best cus­tomer ser­vice you can imag­ine.  And guess what? We're cheaper than the PR effort it would take to clean up the mess.

Peggy Car­law is the founder of Impact Learn­ing Sys­tems, a lead­ing train­ing com­pany spe­cial­iz­ing in improv­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions between front-line employ­ees and cus­tomers. Peggy is co-author of sev­eral books pub­lished by McGraw-Hill, includ­ing Man­ag­ing and Moti­vat­ing Con­tact Cen­ter Employ­ees and The Big Book of Sales Train­ing Games.

Peggy Carlaw

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