pic by Harlequeen via Flickr
Here’s the scenario: you’re a disgruntled customer, you call the company in question in the hope of getting your issue resolved with customer service. But guess what? You can’t get through to customer service. So you jump on to Twitter and you ask others if they’ve had the same experience – more out of frustration than anything else.
And that’s the way of it today. If you upset a customer they will talk about it online. And you need to deal with this. Silence is your enemy. I’ve posted before about ways to handle negative feedback in customer service and want to share an experience I had today with retail giant John Lewis. Did they get it right? Well, yes and no.
The issue
I wasn’t going to be available to take delivery of a John Lewis order so I called them to rearrange. Cue a 1 hour wait on the phone trying to get through to their despatch department – before being cut off. Tsk.
The social media action
I had been tweeting my disappointment with my long wait on the phone and enquiring as to whether JL has an online facility for changing my delivery date before I was about to give up (even struggling to find a John Lewis Twitter account – more of that later) but then @JLcustserv jumped in with this tweet.
@alexhardie80 Hi There, I’m afraid we don’t have an on line facility for this. email_us@johnlewis.co.uk if you don’t eventually get through
Excellent. Somebody was listening to me: the first step on the road to getting me satisfaction. I had contact with someone from John Lewis. If I’d been hooked up to the meter you’d have seen my blood pressure drop. This is a priceless tool in the customer service arsenal.
So, I emailed the customer service department and within half an hour I had a reply saying if I hadn’t heard from despatch by 2pm I was to email the lady (who’d taken ownership of my issue) to let them know so they could do something about it. Excellent.
None of this would have been possible without social media. OK, so I could have gone to the website and found the email address there. But I am the customer and what I’d wanted to do was speak to somebody to sort it. That was my choice.
So what did they do well and what might they have done better? The following offers some best practice for using social media as a customer service tool.
ID the issue
This is crucial sometimes people have a point, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they have a point but it’s not a great one. You need to identify this and see what the appropriate course of action is
What John Lewis did: they quickly addressed my tweet and offered me an email to get in touch with them. They then responded extremely quickly to the email and quickly resolved the issue. Excellent.
Optimise your Twitter handle
A fully optimised Twitter handle is very important. Ideally you’d want your Twitter to be the full name of your company. Due to Twitter’s character limitations this isn’t always possible. Plus, if you’re a big company, you might have various departments tweeting with completely different goals and objectives.
What John Lewis does: I tried in vein to find John Lewis’ Twitter this morning until they jumped in via their @JLcustserv account. That’s a pretty awful Twitter handle as far as finding them is concerned. Sure I can use the search function to try and find them, but I was unsuccessful. Not the easiest to find.
Integrate your web properties
There’s no excuse for not having your social profiles right there on your website homepage. If people want to engage with you, for goodness sake let them. Don’t shy away from it.
What John Lewis does: or rather, what John Lewis doesn’t do. They really need to get their Twitter and other social profiles on their homepage. Strategically there’s probably a reason for this: namely they don’t want you to do anything other than browse or buy once you hit their site. But that’s pretty short sighted. What if I’m not ready to buy but I want to engage and be updated. I’m going to be a customer for much longer if I can interact with them on a daily basis if I want to, on the platforms I want to.
Respond quickly
It’s imperative that once you identify the issue you jump in to try and resolve it. The only exception to this are spammers and complaints without substance – you can ignore those. But if someone has a genuine issue respond quickly and offer up a solution or route to a solution as soon as possible.
What John Lewis did: they responded very quickly and offered me a solution – to email them for a resolution.
Respond publically
Critical. If someone’s got a real gripe, respond publically, that way they’ll see you’re taking it seriously and you want to do something about it. This kind of transparency is essential. Of course if it gets ugly, take it off line, pick up the phone and resolve it that way. This is especially important if you’ve really screwed up.
Integrate the instore/online experience
We’re moving slightly off point here as we’re coming back more to the nub of my issue which was: why do I have to wait on the phone to give you my order number and resolve my issue, why can’t I just do it online? The answer is there isn’t a reason – JL need to look at this
Don’t ignore me
When you’ve begun to resolve an issue, if the customer is still tweeting other beefs they have – address them, if they’re valid. Offer to put them forward as ways to improve the customer experience. Show them that you’re listening.
What John Lewis did: I ventured that my experience had been pretty bad. I also offered a solution, namely that JL should have the facility for me to rearrange my appointment online. This was ignored – they’d have been better to say thank you and we’ll take that on board.
The result? John Lewis did well – it was social media to the rescue.
Interesting stuff. I recently wrote this trying to formalise my views of the issue from a brand’s perspective rather than the customer: http://aslongasitsblack.wordpress.com/2011/01/05/the-joy-of-social/ – whether a brand ideally wants social networks to become a customer service channel is largely irrelevant, so they had better do a good job of it. The customer will drive use of the social network – they *are* the network after all – the technology is the facilitator, and the brand is simply the common thread that holds that network together – but not the owner or leader of that group.
Customers expect these brands to give good service and so they receive it..Nonetheless theres no real substitute for a strong basic philosophy for good service at ground-level as Victoria Simpson development manager for customer service at John Lewis confirms..She explained the retailers reputation for good customer service is built on the concept being a core part of its corporate culture. They are encouraged to come up with ideas to improve customer service which are fed back up to managers..Crucially John Lewis is also known for its employee satisfaction as well and Simpson explains this goes hand-in-hand with the service partners JLP does not use the words staff or employees.
Very good point and definitely agree with the argument about a good Twitter handle – sounds like John Lewis have got theirs all wrong. As you say – who’s going to find them as @JLcustserv?
I had a similar experience with Vodafone. I’d called them up a few times about them overcharging me on my final bill and, although they’d answered quickly, I was being pushed from pillar to post and nobody I spoke to seemed to have the foggiest idea what to do.
I went on the rant on Twitter and was quickly got back to from an official Vodafone account who asked me to DM them some contact details. They phoned me straight away and got it sorted out within a couple of days.
A week or two later, I had a call from the customer services department saying that they’d been able to sort out my account, to which I could say it was already done.
So is this the way of the 21st century? Is it only the publically noisy that can get the service they deserve?
It’s important for companies to manage their brand online with social media and respond to complaints, but it’s even more important to just give good customer service in the first place. People still talk to people – even if they’re not doing it on Twitter and Facebook.
Really great value add Todd, thank you. Sounds like Vodaphone had a little trouble joining the dots. But great to hear these kind of experiences are positive and that social media is assisting – if many cases leading – the customer service support process
All great input guys and many thanks