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Customer Service on Social Media

What do you do when your flight is cancelled at midnight and the airline insists on rebooking you and your spouse on two separate flights? Or when you are watching the last few minutes of your favourite television show and the cable goes black for the twentieth time this month? If you are like millions of consumers around the globe, you log onto Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or a blog, and complain to friends, family, followers and the world about the lousy service you are experiencing. Will people there answer? How quickly? Will they actually help? And will you go back on social media and report you are now a satisfied customer?

When companies today try to meet their customers where they live, they increasingly find that it is on social media. Now that such sites are an integral part of the culture, using them for customer care is moving from cutting-edge concept to business necessity. A few years ago, when consumers received a social media response from a brand on a customer care issue, they were pleasantly surprised. Today, however, we have got to a point that if companies don’t respond, they will have a black mark against them.

Many companies have set up Twitter handles and, in some cases, a second handle dedicated solely to customer support. “A lot of people think that Twitter is a fad and you can’t really use it effectively to talk to customers,” says Bianca Buckridee, vice president of social media operations for the JPMorgan Chase bank. But that hasn’t been her experience. One advantage she sees in social care is that customers can go to Chase’s Twitter page and actually see the individual with whom they are talking, which she feels restores some of the intimacy and comfort that is lost in a phone conversation.

Another advantage is that for the first time, Chase has a customer service team that crosses its lines of business. It’s great that customers can tweet one handle and get help for a litany of things. A retail account, a credit card, a mortgage, an auto loan, a student loan, investment questions…. One team now can allocate those questions and get an answer to the customer in real time. There is no more need to press 1, then 5, then 3, then hold for fifteen minutes before speaking to a customer service representative.

American Airlines has 17 employees dedicated to social customer service, four to brand engagement and one to social media measurement and reporting. They spend a lot of effort on protecting their brand reputation online in order to build and consolidate customer loyalty.

After reading those examples, it may come as a surprise that approximately 70% of customer service complaints made on Twitter go unanswered. Monitoring social networks and the sheer volume of messages to locate relevant discussions and respond to them can be a daunting task. It takes many employees, which may not be viable for small or midsized businesses. Responses must be personal, and it’s essential to strike the right tone. But how personal? And what’s the “right tone?” Some companies even look at a customer’s Facebook page, timeline or Pinterest pinboard before crafting a response and reaching out.

Even with its challenges, social media customer care clearly represents a tremendous and growing opportunity for businesses to build and foster strong customer relationships.