Tweet Me Maybe (And Don't Present Customer Service Failure as Success)

Social is putting your brand at risk…and not just due to customer complaints. The quality of your organization’s social customer service can irreparably damage the brand reputation, and if you are like most brands, it already is. Learn how to build a valuable social customer experience in our free, virtual 4^thSocial Media for Customer Management Summit.

Embedded within an astute analysis of a recent customer service study is an absolutely baffling line about a business’ duty to provide a quality customer experience.

Addressing a new study on Twitter customer service, a popular marketing website writes, "It’s not feasible to expect them to respond to everything – some receive thousands of messages each day."

Since when? Many call centers receive thousands of phone inquiries a day. Is it appropriate to ignore most of them as well?

For some reason, a logical lapse persists when it comes to social customer service. Even though this is a multi-channel world in which the customer—not the brand—chooses his preferred channel for support, most still treat social as an optional value add. If the brand can occasionally provide some nice Tweets to customers, fine, but by no means is social customer service an obligation.

Worse, there is actually a community of analysts that criticizes social support on the grounds that it is too resource-hungry and insufficiently scalable. This logic, of course, hinges on the archaic conception of customer service as a pure business "cost" rather than as the lucrative pathway to customer loyalty that today’s most successful business leaders increasingly recognize it to be.

And, again, if one were to dismiss social customer service on the grounds that it is too resource-intensive, he must also dismiss phone support (and, really, customer care in general). Call centers require immense spending on staff and technology, and their efficiency is often undermined by "difficult" calls.

But brands accept call center costs as necessary entries for doing business—and for building the customer satisfaction that drives revenue. If customers would rather access support via social, brands must endure those costs to the same end.

It is for that reason that customers should not have to approach brands as meekly as Carly Rae Jepsen approaches cute guys. Rather than asking brands to maybe Tweet them back, customers should feel confident questioning why brands are not responding more quickly.

Reality, unfortunately, does not allow for that confidence.

The recent Software Advice study into Twitter response reveals an across-the-board failure when it comes to how major brands respond to customers on Twitter. The experiment, designed to test how well the world’s fourteen biggest brands respond to a variety of prototypical customer Tweets, demonstrates that customers are simply not getting the service they expect, let alone deserve.

The average Twitter response rate was an embarrassing fourteen percent, and several of the brands—including the notoriously-customer-centric Apple and Starbucks—did not respond to a single Tweet. Bank of America, in possession of the best response rate, addressed only 35% of customer inquiries. That is a failing grade in any conventional classroom, and it is simply intolerable in the so-called "age of the customer."

Removing response rate from the equation does not notably change the game. Response times were similarly disappointing.

Of the fourteen brands examined, only five responded within the two-hour timeframe (and remember, none responded to more than 35% of customer inquiries) that customers deemed the standard in a recent Oracle study. Hewlett-Packard and McDonald’s took more than a full day on average to respond. Two hours is lackadaisical enough, but can you imagine waiting more than 24 hours to have a support inquiry answered? In today’s instant, socially-connected, on-the-go world?

And it is not as if customers had reason to believe the support representatives were working around the clock to gather the relevant information. Coca-Cola, for example, took four days to respond to a question about whether it tests its products on animals. Should that information not be readily available for an instantaneous response?

The beauty of this study is its emphasis on relevant Tweets for which a brand response is appropriate. While many would tolerate a less-than-perfect response rate on the ground that some social comments might be spam or nonsense generated by bots, all of the inquiries in this case were "legitimate." If organizations feel no compulsion to respond to even half of these, one can only imagine how many "lesser" (yet still real) customer comments are being ignored.

Brands’ universal failure to deliver a quality online customer experience is exacerbated by the very premise of social media. Since the inefficient, ineffective, inconsistent responses are publicly accessible, evidence of the organizations’ lack of customer-centricity is on display for millions of existing and potential customers.

But even if one ignores those viral implications, he cannot possibly ignore the singular impact on relationships with those customers who have decided Twitter is their channel of choice. When a brand takes days to respond—and ignores the customer more often than it responds—it is not showing its allegiance to the customer. It is not living up to its role in the relationship. It is not giving that customer a reason to be loyal.

Customers are already embracing social media as a customer support channel, and as that adoption increases, so too will expectations for the experience. If you do not Tweet them—definitely—you will soon find those customers singing love songs about your more adept and determined competitors.

Here are some simple steps for optimally approaching customer care on social media:

Monitor, Monitor, Monitor – Social is a far more scattered, open channel than the telephone contact center, and your organization cannot simply wait for inquiries to come in directly. Your brand must monitor not simply for Twitter @ mentions and hash tags but for contextual dialogue that relates to your brand. In order to properly serve customers, you must know what customers are saying and demanding.

Measure, Measure, Measure – Blind social advocates say it is too soon to think about "ROI." Blind social opponents dismiss Twitter care as an optional service of inherent burden to the business. Both are wrong. Social customer service needs to be measured—and managed—in accordance with the performance indicators that matter to the customer and to the business. Just like contact center metrics, social customer care needs to be evaluated based on its ability to achieve objectives.

Build Knowledgebases Around Social – Social culture is different, and so too are the types of inquiries you will receive and the types of responses that are efficient, effective and appropriate. Intimacy is often the key to successfully social interactions, but that does not mean your agents should not be armed with a clear, accessible database of common inquiries and the appropriate responses.

Leverage Your Staff– One of social’s greatest "ROI" opportunities is its ability to reduce call center volume (and cost). If practiced correctly, social customer service is an alternative—rather than a supplement—to traditional live phone service.

That renders concerns about needing to drastically invest in a new social staff baffling. While it is true that there will be a need to build a socially-savvy agent force that can efficiently handle Tweets the way they need to be Tweeted, much of this support can be leveraged from the existing agent pool. Agents are accomplishing just as much by Tweeting (perhaps more, to the extent that their public response can solve others’ issues) and therefore are best serving the business when they can seamlessly move between channels to support customers (especially since high-level, experienced phone agents will know their business and its customers very well).

Customer demand—not business skepticism—drives investment in support, and there will obviously be costs associated with delivering true Twitter customer service. But that does not mean businesses need to eliminate their commitment to efficiency and practicality along the way.