Customer service queries and comments on Facebook are being ignored by businesses! A new report by STELLAService, which rates the customer service of retail websites highlights how they recently posted general service questions on 20 top retailers’ Facebook pages to test how they conduct customer service on the social network.
Five of them failed to answer a customer question on their Facebook wall within two days, and even fewer replied to inquiries asked as comments on their posts. Seven of them actually deleted the question from their wall erasing any record of the customer enquiry!
Whether it’s on-line or off-line, ‘Being easy to deal with’ and ‘Dealing with disappointment’ are fundamental ingredients of customer focused businesses, and clearly some aren’t delivering in these areas.
OK, so Facebook might not be for you personally, but if it’s what your customers use, and you are ignoring them, then you could be in trouble – the big difference between ‘social media’ customer comments is that everyone else can see that your doing so!
So, Face Up to it! Are you listening to your customers – online and offline?
Hi Andy
I think there’s a couple of interesting points about your post that warrant further discussion.
Firstly, why is there such a dearth of add-on apps that provide true enterprise-scalable customer service functionality within the platform? It’s all well and good to test how companies respond to a comment or wall post – but why can’t we have better service/case functionality so that users and brands can better manage a need to achieve an outcome. It’s like saying Twitter is great for customer service – hardly…
Secondly, who exactly are running these pages? Are they the bright young thing marcom types who wouldn’t know the first thing about resolving a customer issue? Or are they employees who have been educated into a service ethos?
One of the great challenges companies face is that there are millions of Facebook and social media experts out there screaming at organisations to embrace Facebook – it’s about connecting with your fans – but where’s the debate about what to do when they talk back?
Ultimately, both Facebook, developers, and companies need to realise that if you go where the customers are they’ll share what they think – so why do we continue to view Facebook as a marcom-owned platform?
Technology is really poor at solving human problems, organizational problems, and even economically based problems.
But more to the point, social media customer support doesn’t scale, and it only adds overhead for companies who have to maintain even more customer contact channels.
And, to boot, customers do NOT need to contact companies through their own choice of platform…it’s economic suicide to think there’s a point on supporting customers on the hundreds of social media platforms.
There is simply almost NO possibility of economic payoff for businesses to allocate money to support customers in social media. It’s a misinterpretation of how customers REALLY behave. And what customers really want, rather than what they say they want.
Key to successfully engaging in Facebook customer service is to integrate with the rest of your service channels – a great example of this is Air Asia, which uses the same technology for Facebook, web and contact centre service – more at http://eptica.wordpress.com/2012/01/20/major-award-recognises-airasias-customer-service-innovation/
Good article and I wholeheartedly agree with the issues caused and expectations set when customer service issues are raised on the primary social media platforms. Ignoring customers on Facebook and Twitter was also an issue identified by Conversocial last year, results of that research can be downloaded from http://www.conversocial.com/resources
It is fair to say that some companies are responding. Several major retailers have dedicated Social Customer Service agents specifically to handle Facebook and Twitter interactions and are using Conversocial’s SaaS solution to increase their service levels and ensure that relevant comments and tweets are identified and prioritised for response.
Retailers may get thousands of social interactions daily, including in-store Tweets about poor service. Expecting the contact center to deal with these as just another channel I think fails to recognise the public nature of social conversations and the need to deal with issues rapidly.