July 31, 2009

Breaking the customer service mold

Jul. 31, 2009 at 04:08 PM | By Dan Obregon | Comment Count

Stories of social media gone wrong, especially in relation to college admissions and job interviews abound. We’ve all heard of the perfect candidate getting rejected because of questionable photos on Facebook or a political scandal of the day resulting from a controversial online post. These incidents, no doubt cause a lot of embarrassment, but rarely result in anything more than a slap on the wrist. So I was surprised the other day, when I heard on the radio, that a woman was being sued over aTwitter post. Her property management company was suing her for libel over the following tweet: “Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks it’s okay.”

Not only is this a ridiculous lawsuit, it’s bad for their image and customer service. This incident is giving the property management company infinitely more press than it would have gotten if they had just addressed the issue privately with the complainer. Now, the company is forever linked with complaints of mold (whether or not the complaint is valid is irrelevant) and they come off as a humorless rigid company.

A very similar event happened to United Airlines- a man’s guitar was damaged during his flight and he had trouble getting compensation. He wrote a song called “United Breaks Guitars” and posted it on YouTube.Four and a half million views later, United issued an apology over its Twitter channel. A spokeswoman from the company says the video will be used for training purposes. Obivously bad news travels faster than good, and unfortunately the apology reached far fewer people than the video did, but it seems like a much tighter handling of the situation than the Horizon case. Answering the complaint through social media helped the message get dispersed as widely and possible and showed that the company is putting customer service first.

Ultimately, that’s what companies and institutions should be using social media for: customer service. It seems like a simple concept, but one that is hard for many businesses to put into practice. As I’ve been working on this blog, I’ve been finding more and more articles and anecdotes on this topic through major news sources- indicating to me that this is an increasing concern. The message of these people’s stories is the importance of responding to complaints in a measured and reasonable way. Often, one time complainers become major supporters of companies they once angrily blogged/Tweeted/Facebooked about.

As an analyst from Forrester said in regards to the United case, “Every mistake as well as every success is going to be Facebooked or Twittered.”