Social media is getting to be an ever more popular tool for connecting with customers and providing customer service. On the plus side, it can be a positive generator of customer satisfaction and sales. For example @DellOutlet has generated over 1.5 million followers and $6.5 M in sales on Twitter since they first launched in June, 2007. Why? Twitter provides an easy and quick way to for customers to get service . . . and they save money by being alerted to the latest sales!
On the other side of such good news, we’ve been hearing for years that unhappy customers tell 10 people about a bad experience with a company. Not anymore! Today that same unhappy customer is liable to write about it in his or her blog, tweet to hundreds of friends (which of course gets retweeted to hundreds of their friends) or, heaven forbid, create a video to post on YouTube. If you’re United Airlines and break someone’s guitar, forget 10 friends. Three million people will hear about it within ten days via YouTube!
Remember those 2500 people trapped overnight in the Channel Tunnel when four Eurostar trains broke down due to freezing weather? One person in England reported hearing about poor customer service from 5 stranded friends via text messages. Imagine how many other people heard from those same 5 travelers! Videos posted on YouTube were watched over 7,000 times. And Twitter was all a-tweet over the whole thing.
The Preemptive Strike of Great Customer Service
Don’t wait until you have to mount a PR campaign to outweigh bad press. Launch a preemptive strike and call us now. We’ll have your employees offering the best customer service you can imagine. And guess what? We’re cheaper than the PR effort it would take to clean up the mess.
