Reinventing customer experience in the legal sector – Interview with Karl Chapman of Riverview Law
June 15, 2012Customer loyalty comes from loving your business and having pride in doing the best that you can
June 22, 2012
I read an article recently on TechRadar’s site (70% of customer complaints on social media ignored: Marketing ignores 70% of social media complaints). Now, if you go to the article you’ll find some really interesting data from some recent research. Here’s the points that stood out to me:
- 36% of UK customers are using social media to try and contact and talk to businesses, up from 19% eight months ago.
- 65% prefer to contact companies on social media rather than via a call centre.
- Between 5% and 20% of all complaints to many organisations are made through social media.
- However, 70% of complaints made on social media are going un-answered.
The last point, for me, is the most shocking particularly when you take into account much of the noise that is being made about making our businesses more social and the strategic importance of building better relationships with customers. I wrote about this last point before in Small business can and will win the race to focus on the customer.
What is happening? Well, the article goes on to explain that much of the lack of response is to do with the fact that the social media channels are being used for marketing (Read: one-way, broadcast marketing) and are not connected to the customer service teams.
Who’s fault is that? And, when did it become acceptable to ignore a complaint?
Companies may be using social media channels primarily as a broadcast marketing one-way channel. However, just because you designate the channel as such doesn’t mean that your customers will pay heed or attention to that.
The article goes on to quote Jim Close, managing director of Datapoint who says that:
“The delay in the use of social media in the contact centre is understandable, but this must now be rectified if many companies are to protect their reputations and keep their competitive edge.
I’m not sure the customer gets the ‘understandable’ bit. The customer doesn’t care about big data, social CRM systems, integration, etc etc. All they care about is having their query or complaint handled.
Now, I am not saying that businesses, where appropriate, should not look to capture the benefits of integrating social media data about customers into their CRM and customer service systems. Not at all.
But as I said before. The customer doesn’t want to wait and doesn’t care about your data, technology and inter-departmental, collaboration issues.
So, what to do?
Respond to the complaints as quickly.
How?
Well, while you are figuring out some of the bigger issues, how about this:
- Create a new team or borrow a couple of people (2 people – one from marketing and one from customer service, say)
- Ask them to write some simple social media guidelines (not too complicated just a working set of Do’s and Don’ts)
- Pick the monitoring tools that you are going to use (Free ones should suffice to start with); and
- Then, let them get stuck in to the messages and complaints from customers
It’s a simple and, possibly, temporary solution. But, it’ll start to manage the complaints from your customers on social media and it’ll help manage your reputation whilst you are wrestling with bigger data and tech issues.
Otherwise, your absence from being social to complaints on social media may be deafening for your customers.
Thanks to woodleywonderworks for the image.
26 Comments
Hello Adrian
In this case I am not in agreement with you. If I was running the show I would focus the people on figuring out what is getting in the way of doing it right the first time so that customers don’t go on to social media and complain.
And yes, I might add use one person to man social media, engage customers to figure out what is not working – kind of like quality control through the customer eyes and use this to drive improvements in marketing/sales communications (expectation setting) and operations (delivery of the promise implied in the communications).
all the best
Maz
Hi Maz,
That’s a fair point and something that should definitely be added into the mix. No point in papering over the cracks.
Thanks for that,
Adrian
Adrian,
I agree that companies should pay attention to there customers complaints.
But I think the issue is a symptom not a cause. How good at these companies at dealing with any sort of complaint? Not just the social media ones.
I’d lay a bet that they are poor, and they certainly don’t do what Maz suggests, stop them happening in the first place.
James
Hi James,
I think you are both right and we should find and treat the cause and not just the symptom.
However, as you know from your experience in larger organisations, fixing the cause can be a much longer, harder and more painful process.
Don’t you think that there may be an opportunity to learn and create some small change and momentum but focusing some effort on the symptoms?
Adrian
It is a bad idea to ignore consumer complaints. I suggest handling it with prudence and diligence.
Agreed, Ron.
Thanks for dropping by and commenting.
All the best.
Hi Adrian,
An interesting article. Having been a customer whose sought out a company (after getting no where with their call centre) to solve a problem I can understand the importance of immediately responding to a problem. It would be wise for companies to put up the hours in which they respond to social media comments.
Another important aspect would be to follow up the conversation and to actually provide useful help where possible.
One of the problems with social media is that people expect an immediate response (even if it has been posted at 10pm). Social CRM can be used to track these interactions, particularly when the conversation has started after hours. Social CRM allows the marketing and customer service team share information on how they responded with the customer, as well as any follow up conversations.
Hi Matilda,
Thanks for your comment. I couldn’t agree more that customers like you resort to social media often because they get frustrated with the phone channels that companies offer. However, that frustration breeds impatience and I think you are right again when you say that companies need to publish when they are manning their social media accounts (their digital opening hours as it were) in order to manage expectations around the speed of response.
The thing that troubles me is how many companies are not responding to their customers. So, me, I’d be happier if we did know when companies were likely to respond but also if more of them would start responding to customer queries, complaints, questions etc.
Wouldn’t you?
Adrian
Well informative blog. It is true that most of the enterprises are using the social media as a one-to-one means of communication. They just use it to market their products and concepts. Customer interaction has become very less and the least thing.