Another customer service story where twitter helped in complaint resolution.
As I have mentioned in an earlier post, twitter is an excellent customer service tool and usually, the response is prompt. A major reason for this is that the organizations fear that bad word of mouth will spread faster as followers tend to spread news faster than expected.
Another reason is that it is being used as a new medium for interacting with customers and hence, top honchos are monitoring its regular performance. Spotlight is on experiments happening via social media tools. Some companies have integrated these with their overall marketing strategy but most of the organizations are still experimenting with these new found toys.
Twitter is also cheaper to implement as service is free and all you need is someone who can monitor it regularly. But the big question is, whether the person monitoring servetweets (my short for customer service tweets) is trying to know about customers. Is he trying to strike meaningful conversation with customer? Is he trying enough to engage with customer so that a long lasting relationship can be build? Or he is just trying to maintain his SLAs of answering maximum tweets in a minute?
Call centers also failed to engage with customers. Initially, call centers had fair amount of success in resolving customer complaints and reducing costs. But it failed where it mattered most. Building relationships. Moreover, once processes set in and call centers become a 'customer service must' for every organization, they were the biggest reason for dissatisfied customers.
As I have argued earlier, once process sets in, servetweets will also stop bearing satisfactory results. One should also understand that as expectations from servetweets are growing, it will be hard for teams managing servetweets to fulfill expectations. They are bound to feel the pressure and lets hope they do not crumble under pressure.
It is a matter of time before we start hearing complaints via twitter going unanswered as well.
Anyways, just remember you heard this first over here.
As I have mentioned in an earlier post, twitter is an excellent customer service tool and usually, the response is prompt. A major reason for this is that the organizations fear that bad word of mouth will spread faster as followers tend to spread news faster than expected.
Another reason is that it is being used as a new medium for interacting with customers and hence, top honchos are monitoring its regular performance. Spotlight is on experiments happening via social media tools. Some companies have integrated these with their overall marketing strategy but most of the organizations are still experimenting with these new found toys.
Twitter is also cheaper to implement as service is free and all you need is someone who can monitor it regularly. But the big question is, whether the person monitoring servetweets (my short for customer service tweets) is trying to know about customers. Is he trying to strike meaningful conversation with customer? Is he trying enough to engage with customer so that a long lasting relationship can be build? Or he is just trying to maintain his SLAs of answering maximum tweets in a minute?
Call centers also failed to engage with customers. Initially, call centers had fair amount of success in resolving customer complaints and reducing costs. But it failed where it mattered most. Building relationships. Moreover, once processes set in and call centers become a 'customer service must' for every organization, they were the biggest reason for dissatisfied customers.
As I have argued earlier, once process sets in, servetweets will also stop bearing satisfactory results. One should also understand that as expectations from servetweets are growing, it will be hard for teams managing servetweets to fulfill expectations. They are bound to feel the pressure and lets hope they do not crumble under pressure.
It is a matter of time before we start hearing complaints via twitter going unanswered as well.
Anyways, just remember you heard this first over here.
by Sid 'Ravan' Kabe , on October 29, 2009 12:40 AM
dude remember i had told u??? d future of service??? merging twitter, facebook into crm???
google service cloud 2...
also...coming up
marketing cloud 2...marketing on twitter...:D
by Ramesh , on October 29, 2009 7:33 AM
Yes Adesh, you said it first. I am still struggling with the relevanc eof Twitter in business. I can understand the point about bad news of a company spreading like a virus on Twitter, but what else ?? If its just that, companies need a defensive strategy around Twitter.