ORGANIZATIONS WOW CUSTOMERS WITH SOCIAL CUSTOMER SERVICE

Organizations have come a long way since the musician named Dave Carroll once launched an online media attack on United Airlines, Inc. (UAL) which had damaged his expensive guitar during a layover at the Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. Dave was convinced that UAL was not interested in settling the claims and was instead trying to wear the customers down. He uploaded YouTube videos which was shared across multiple online media platforms and hence went viral. Millions of viewers watched these videos and thus generating blog spots, new stories and even a business case was done on this phenomenon by the Harvard School of Business. This eventually forced UAL to settle the claims with Dave. This is just an instance of how the companies can make or break depending on the online presence and the feedback from these social media outlets.

                Thanks to the fear of the backlash and to have a bigger online presence, organizations are now investing in better customer service and are taking the consumer feedback seriously. The use of social technologies has gone beyond marketing and is now used in the customer service domain and the companies have realized that the cost of retaining the customer is lesser than bringing one onboard. Before the age of social media, most consumer feedback was through phone and e-mail, however now the consumers can directly provide their feedback on the official company sites and the companies will try and address it as best as they can. The feedback is taken very seriously by most companies because traditionally a negative feedback would be shared with just a handful of people, but after the advent of social media it can now be shared with tens of hundreds of people effectively discrediting the company and causing a bad reputation.

                Zappos is an organization which has used the social media outlet to its benefit and has changed the face of the customer service industry. Zappos is an online shoe retailer and it employs a highly trained 10 member customer service specialist after a careful screening and interview process. The company does not use an automated script to help customers and instead the customer service representative will be a real person at the other end to help the customers. These representatives are highly trained in addressing the issues of the customers patiently. The customers also reach out to the Zappos team on Twitter and the representatives have even helped them find the products with the competing retailers. This culture at Zappos has helped it maintain a very positive and customer friendly approach. We have examples of other corporates who take customer service seriously, like in the case of Comcast which has a bad reputation of dealing with the customers, however the company did a complete turnaround under the leadership of Frank Eliason. Comcast realized the potential of social media and proceeded to address the concerns of people who had mentioned Comcast in their complaints on Twitter and this was going beyond their official complaint channels. The customers received surprise calls from Comcast inquiring about the issues and also these innovations helped it mend the reputation online. There are still a few frustrated customers but this is natural for a company providing services to millions of people. The good thing is that the company has acknowledged the value of social media and are heading in the right direction.

                Cisco is one of the pioneers in the field of networking products and also has a huge online presence using social channels. Cisco uses social channels to interact and help its own customers and also using this expertise have developed a service application called the SocialMiner which helps companies monitor the blogs, and social medias like Twitter, Facebook etc. and then provide data to the service agents who can fix the issue as they emerge. This is considered a very important innovation since the issues can be proactively identified based on the trends in the conversation of the social media. Also this app allows the conversations to be archived for analysis at a later point to prevent service disruptions and problems in the system.