Comments on: Why Social Media is Not Customer Service

By: Jason Scott

Jason Scott — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 14:49:09 +0000

Great article, I agree with the fact that 140 characters simply isn’t enough to answer the majority of customer queries.

By: Maisie Kersch

Maisie Kersch — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 02:29:06 +0000

Thanks for the excellent writing. It is nice to finally read someone that can entertain with words.

By: Vernon

Vernon — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 22:58:54 +0000

I agree wholeheartedly with this post. While social media is great, it is certainly not a replacement for customer service. I think when social media is used properly, it can enhance the overall customer service experience. Having a plan in place on how utilize the social media tools available is the best bet.

Great Post!

By: brian

brian — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 22:38:12 +0000

I find it hard to gain lots of traffic from social site. I guess there good for backling as well

By: Jimmy

Jimmy — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 13:23:21 +0000

my hosting server site does not provide much support from twitter or facebook account but there complaint cell phone is very efficient and works actively even without receiving a message from someone’s twitter account.

By: Austin

Austin — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 16:39:01 +0000

Social media is a great marketing tool, but I think people put too much importance in it. Some people live on social media sites, but many people haven’t even been on one. You have to tailor your services to your target market, not just focus on a small portion of it.

By: Lindsey Sulley

Lindsey Sulley — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 12:11:03 +0000

Great post Rhea, lots to think about! Thanks for the link to crazy egg, i’m going to give it a try later.

By: Elyse DeVries

Elyse DeVries — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 22:14:24 +0000

Hi Rhea,

Great post! To spring-board off of Ross’s comment about his blog post, I actually had an interesting social media customer service experience recently. After trying unsuccessfully for a couple of weeks to fix a problem via the Comcast phone trees, I finally looked up @comcastcares and sent a message to the email listed on their account. Wow, what a difference. The attention I received was phenomenal… I couldn’t believe the speed and the thoroughness of the response. I don’t think I’m going to go the phone-tree route again.

To be fair, I did tweet about the problem initially and did not receive a response from Comcast, but frankly I was just happy that social media led me to another, more efficient way to solve the problem. However, my experience would have been better if I hadn’t had to waste all that time trying to get help via the phones. So I second your point here: “Social media cannot replace this pillar of good business, but it can complement it.”

Using social media and social media monitoring to manage customer service is definitely tough, but some companies ARE improving their customer’s experience through social media. Hopefully, they will also use this opportunity to listen to their customer’s frustrations and improve their processes.

Incidentally, my company is currently running an ROI of Social Media series right now and our topic for May is Social Customer Service. We are hosting a free webinar on social media customer service next week – in case anyone here interested in further exploration of the topic.

http://www.alterian-social-media.com/learn-more/Events/social-cust-service-webinar

Elyse DeVries
Marketing Specialist, Alterian

By: Claudia Guzman

Claudia Guzman — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 17:21:29 +0000

Great article. I totally agree also with the article. Thanks for sharing this!

By: Stephen Hyder

Stephen Hyder — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 16:22:10 +0000

I have worked in the customer service field for over twenty years now. It always saddens me when a company won’t provide good customer service until a public spotlight is shined on them. Even though I think it’s sad that it works this way, I am excited, as a customer service enthusiast, that social media is forcing companies to ramp up their customer service responses and practices.

It’s frustrating when your job is to provide issue resolution for your customers, but resources and training aren’t provided to make sure you can do it properly. Many companies see customer service as a low end, or low skill, job that can be done well by anyone that has at least a semi-decent grasp of speaking in whole sentences. Therefore, they hire just about anybody thinking that anyone can be trained to do the job. This just isn’t true.

I worked in a major call center for a large bank. I cringed almost daily at the way in which many of the reps communicated with the customers. Even if the original issue was resolved, the bad interactions with the reps had impact on customer loyalty. It would have been better for the company, in the long run, to set the bar higher and pay a little more for quality reps. Good customer service reps do impact future company earnings as they show the customer that they are valued by quick and proper resolution of issues.

If Twitter can help consumers receive better customer service by always keeping the spotlight on these companies, that’s great! We’ll eventually know which companies have responded the best by how little we here about their issues on the web :)