Today’s Wall Street Journal published another article about how customers who tweet gets their way with vendors. Titled “The Airlines’ Squeaky Wheels Turn to Twitter” the article describes the ways Delta Airlines and others respond to angry customers who tweet. The sad part is that the customers mentioned in the article called the transitional contact center and were rebuffed. Only when they posted their complaint on Tweeter, did they receive and expedited and satisfactory response.
Sorry for not being impressed. This is behavior will simply teach customers to take their grievances out to the web. This is not what airlines or any other vendor wants to see happening. Why can’t companies simply empower the contact center or retail branches employees to deliver such performance. Why is it that only the employees who sit in a fancy “social media war room” with high end monitoring tools can get things done? Companies should do a root cause analysis to examine why their employees cannot get first call resolution BEFORE the customer go to Twitter. A Twitter complaint should be considered a failure. Either because the customer called and received an unsatisfactory response or because they did not bother to call at all. Either way, the company failed its customers, either through lack of performance or lack of trust.
If companies will continue this dichotomy of performance between social media monitors and other employees, they will raise a monster. Customers will have no reason to try to solve their issues through quite traditional channels. They will turn every complaint from a one to one interaction to a one to many interactions with all the shame that comes with it. The cost of such behavior will by far outweigh the potential goodwill associated with resolving those publicly shared complaints.
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