Tag: customer support

Honesty goes both ways

Dave

I posted last week about the doublespeak I hear on airplanes, and how refreshing it would be if companies would say what they mean in social media. I got some great comments on my post from Sara Livingston and DJ Waldow and AnnMaria De Mars that got me thinking.

Yes, we all want companies to be more honest and transparent. We would all love it if a company said, “I’m sorry. That sucks. We screwed up. Let us fix it.” Some companies do, but a lot of companies are scared.

Why?

Well, let’s look at the current situation with BP. They’ve taken a tremendous amount of flak for the work of their flacks, and it’s arguable whether or not there is anything they could say at this point that would make the situation any better. But what would happen if they said, “It’s our fault. We screwed up and we’re sorry”?

It would be used against them in court.

In many ways the traditional customer service model, especially consumer interactions with merchants, is adversarial in nature.

Consumer: “You took my money and you screwed up and now you should pay.”
Company: “You gave us your money and we aren’t sure we can trust what you’re saying and so we won’t pay unless you make us.”

Social media does create a pathway to make customer relationships more human, and allow everyone involved to see the people on the other side as people.

But if that’s going to work, we as consumers have to accept that companies are made up of people and people make mistakes. That means dropping the self-righteous indignation. Lots of people seem to deal with the powerlessness they feel in their everyday lives by exploiting their power as a customer. And lots of people are constantly on the lookout for a reason to sue.

That doesn’t work if you want openness and authenticity on both sides. The only way companies — and their legal departments — will become comfortable with acting and talking like humans is if consumers avoid the temptation to use it against them.

photo by Kyle MacKenzie

Little lies we tell our customers

Dave

I’m flying home from Ragan Communications’ excellent Social Media Summit, held at Cisco’s HQ in San Jose. It was my first trip to Silicon Valley, and it was both impressive and a little disorienting to see all the well-known company names. Of course I knew that eBay must have a physical presence, but there’s still something slightly odd about seeing the physical manifestation of something that has such a large presence on the Web.

It was a bit like the time recently that I saw Elizabeth Edwards in the snack bar of our local Target. Yes, she’s famous and presumably still wealthy, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t shop, or eat.

Even I’m a little confused by that simile.

As I always do immediately after a conference, I’m running nearly everything through my newly-energized social media filter. So my ears perked up when I heard the flight attendant say, “We’ll do everything we can to make your flight as enjoyable as possible.”

Really? How about a foot massage?

What would happen if they said, “Folks, there’s a whole lot of you and only two of us. If you need something special, feel free to ask, but we probably won’t be able to get to it right away, if at all. Also, it’s really tight up here, so we’d appreciate it if you’d stay out of our way as much as possible.”

Wouldn’t that blow your mind? But why not? We all know that’s what they mean.

Lots of companies say they put customer satisfaction first. Do they really? If companies truly put customer satisfaction first, they’d give their stuff away for free for as long as the money held out, then go out of business.

“Our top priority at XYZ Corporation is to make as much money as possible so that our owners, shareholders and, to a lesser extent, our employees can buy more and/or better stuff, travel to nicer places, find more attractive mates and drink higher-grade booze. We can only do that if you keep buying our stuff, so we’ll do what we can within reason to keep a lot of you happy.”

I would be a customer for life.

We all tell well-intentioned lies every day, of course. When the woman in the terminal who sold me a bottle of aspirin asked me how I was, I said, “Fine.” Should I have said, “Obviously I have a headache. Did you think this was a souvenir?”

But we need to be careful not to carry these empty platitudes over to our social media communications. It’s one thing to have them in the boilerplate on our websites. But if you respond to someone on Twitter and say, “We’ll do everything we can to fix your problem,” you’d better mean it.

Look at the Twitter streams of companies that do a good job of social media customer service, like Comcast or Zappos. They are responsive and helpful, but they’re also realistic.

“Guy Kawasaki told a great story at the Ragan Cisco conference about testing Virgin Airlines’ responsiveness by tweeting, “I’m in seat 2A. Can someone get me a Coke?” Virgin responded, “Why don’t you ask the flight attendant?””

Social media is forever changing our customer interactions. It’s making them more immediate and, in many cases, more raw – on both sides. Between the expectation of an instant response and the brevity required by platforms like Twitter, every word must count.

Don’t waste them on things you don’t mean.

::UPDATE:: I was paraphrasing Guy’s Virgin story. I found it in Guy’s own words on the WebEx blog.