Shifting perceptions
It's funny how perceptions evolve.
At this precise moment it's still considered a bit odd for an ordinary, regular business to have a Facebook Fan page. Just it was considered a bit odd back in 1994 for an ordinary, regular business to have it's own website.
On Tuesday, after falling out with BT on account them demonstrating to me just how good a job they can do when it comes to delivering bad customer service, I asked Twitter to recommend an alternative. The @BTCare account noticed and offered to help, but I declined, calculating that it was a hollow gesture and I'd wasted enough time trying to count the ways they had failed me to four individual BT representatives to no avail.
Then yesterday my mobile rang and it was a very apologetic woman from BT, informing me that they'd reviewed my case, were gobsmacked at how they'd messed me around, apologised profusely and totally resolved my complaint. So, now I'm not cancelling my account.
At first I thought, possibly naively, that my expressions of profound displeasure over four phone calls had somehow meant my case had been flagged for review. Then I concluded that the @BTCare account might have escalated it after spotting my tweet.
Besides being pleased with my final if belated resolution, my instinctive initial response was that it was sad that it's only the people who complain on Twitter who bounce organisations into fixing things out of fear of public shame.
Then I changed my mind.
Large organisational hierarchies and the people in them passively conspire against taking and correctly processing negative feedback. They don't mean to ignore your protests, in many cases the individuals are mostly helpless and even if you do have the time and motivation to sit down and write a letter of complaint - which, frankly, most people don't - the point is often moot by the time acknowledgement of liability arrives. It's easier just to cancel your account and walk away in disgust.
But real time complaints on Twitter provide these organisations with a final chance at saving the day and overcoming their organisational dysfunctions. In that sense it's not actually the case that they are being publicly or pathetically shamed into finally doing something they should have done sooner.
Twitter customer care isn't about moving quickly to silence noisy complainers to protect the brand (however desirable a parallel by-product that may be), it's actually a critical, last chance to finally save an organisation from itself.
Reader Comments (2)
Welcome to my world :) I take the mostly good with the bad and when it's bad I'm less about silencing and more about getting the story to find out what really went or is going wrong. I'm an air traffic controller - waving my orange glow sticks in the direction of the best person internally or externally whether or not the aircraft is a little Cessna of praise or a big plowing Boeing of dissatisfaction.
The shift in understanding for me was the notion that large organisations put what were really marketing teams on twitter as kinda fake customer care.
I didn't get that realtime complaint handling is actually high value, high definition insight that traditional customer service structures are inefficient and recognising and handling effectively. It's like winning back a lost customer before the traditional organisation even knows the customer is lost.