chapter 12
social service
principles for social media customer service
i’m going to start this chapter with a vote of support for my geekier friends, a concession, really: It’s crucial to have technologically savvy people supporting your social media customer service work. These are in many ways revolutionary times, and the value of technical knowledge and aptitude can’t be discounted. But while your tech wizards should be interacting with and involved in the team that handles your social media support, the people actually helming the operation and responding to customers need to be the same people who are involved in your day-to-day customer service operations and who are responsible for interacting with your customers.
While it’s categorically untrue that being great at one thing (for example, working with technology) necessarily makes you poor at something else (e.g., interpersonal communication), there is, conversely, no reason to expect that a digitally brilliant person will necessarily have an affinity for customer support. Yet company after company I work with has tended by default to put these people at the head of their social media teams.
Your customer service experts need to know the new principles of social media, however. So hand them this chapter and let them flesh out their years or decades of customer know-how with these simple principles. This will go a long way toward creating the perfect combination.
principle #1: avoid the fiasco formula: a digital stitch in time saves nine (million)
Can you spell F-I-A-S-C-O? The formula is:
Small Error + Slow Response Time = Colossal PR Disaster
That is, the magnitude of a social media uproar increases disproportionately with the length of your response time. Be aware that a negative event in the online world can gather social steam with such speed that your delay itself can become more of a problem than the initial incident. A day’s lag in responding can be too much.
principle #2: lie back and think of england: digital arguments with customers are an exponentially losing proposition
It’s an ancient and immutable law: You can’t win an argument with a customer. If you lose, you lose directly; if you win, you still lose—by losing the customer. But online, the rule is multiplied manifold because of all the additional customers you’ll lose if they catch sight of the argument. So, you need to learn to lie back and think of the future of your company, as Victorian women were told to “lie back and think of England” to help them endure their marital duties. (There is a lot of lying back and thinking of England involved in doing your social media duties.)
If it helps you psychologically to get through it, try to remember that the people slamming your face in the social medialand toilet—the folks I call “Click Puppies”—are doing it off the cuff. On the fly. Unlike your staff and yourself, they’re simply not acting like professional people at that moment when they mouth off in outrage. In fact, in many cases, after they’ve trashed you publicly online, they’re off to something else, to their next nasty little 140-character haiku, with no memory of what they’ve done and how it may have affected you. Keep this in mind and try to move on to the next thing yourself as best you can.
principle #3: turn twankers into thankers: reach out directly to online complainers
Okay, now that you’re lying back, thinking your selflessly patriotic thoughts, fully restrained from flying off the handle, you can respond in a considered, positive manner. Principle #3 is a finesse move, so let’s go through it step by step. Say you’ve spotted an outrageous tweet about your firm:
Company X double-bills all customers—Must Think We R Suckrs—#FAIL
How should you respond? If this twanker follows you on Twitter, that enables you to send him a direct message—so do it. Include a direct email address and direct phone number. If, however, said twanker isn’t one of your followers, you’ll need to figure out another way to reach him. How about replying publicly, on Twitter, listing your email address and expressing your chagrin and concern. (In an online forum such as a blog, TripAdvisor, or Facebook, you can respond in a similar manner, but through the comment mechanisms available there.)
In a scenario involving an upset customer, your ideal outcome, as I mentioned in the previous chapter, is to move the discussion out of a public venue and into a one-on-one situation, where you can work directly with your antagonist without thousands of eyes dissecting every move or, worse, catching bits and pieces as things progress, without ever grasping the whole story. This dispute resolution approach is like an in-store situation where you take an irate customer aside, perhaps into your office, to privately discuss the matter, giving you both a chance to work together to arrive at a resolution.
You don’t ever want to appear to be cyber-stalking your customer, though. After a reasonable attempt at contact, leave the ball in the court of the posting customer. If he does return contact, this is your chance to make it clear to the customer right away that you’re on his side. What’s sure to be a failure is a courtroom approach, showing how much proof you have that you’re right and he’s wrong. Apologize and accept fault—immediately and fully. Satisfy the customer plus do something extra. Only then ask the customer—as a favor, not as a demand—to amend or even withdraw those original ugly comments.
SLAPP-Happy: How Not to Respond
to a Social Media Twanker
When someone attacks your business online, you may be tempted to call your lawyer. My field is business, not law—I don’t even play a lawyer on Hulu—so I’m not technically qualified to dissuade you. But from what I’ve seen, legally threatening the twanker who made you feel so bad is going to fail as a strategy for addressing customer complaints, for two reasons.
First, it may be illegal. A “SLAPP” lawsuit is a “strategic lawsuit against public participation.” “Strategic” in that you don’t expect to go to court; you intend to silence your critic and discourage other critics. But this strategy is illegal, as far as I can determine, in twenty-six U.S. states, and in several other countries. Now, I know this is frustrating when your business has been unfairly slammed, and I agree that it’s an open question whether these laws are working as intended. Anti-SLAPP legislation is designed to protect the free speech of “little guys,” but it does nothing to defend the actual little guys in business against what can be the devastating consequences of treatment in the hands of heavy hitters like Yelp and Google Places.
Still, I suggest you hold your fire. Even if threatening your customer doesn’t land you in legal hot water or with daunting bills for court costs, the entire approach is likely to end up SLAPPing you in the face. The reason? Your reaction tends to bring excessive publicity to the issue. There’s even a term for this: the Streisand Effect, named after Barbra Streisand, who sued a photographer in a failed attempt to remove a photo of the singer’s mansion from the California Coastal Records Project,1 a strategic misstep that resulted in the infuriated photographer going out of his way to give the photo wide distribution that it would never have received before.
At the very least, the threat of legal action does nothing to reduce the damage. You don’t have to be Streisand and your SLAPP-ee doesn’t have to be a tenacious photographer for such a lawsuit or threatened lawsuit to end up backfiring. Look at the following hilariously written backhanded “retraction” by a restaurant guest under legal threat, and think if coercing a customer into such a response really serves your business. (I’ve renamed the restaurant and changed some culinary details below. Yelp, however, has shown no such compassion.)
On March 3, I posted a review on this website and seven days later I was threatened with a lawsuit by an attorney representing “Serenity Café” for two unverified statements that I made … In order to peacefully resolve this matter I am following the course of action the attorney has requested in the letter:
1. I will retract my posting—Below is my written retraction
2. I will remove the posting—the posting is hereby replaced by this retraction
3. I will not make libelous statements about “Serenity Café.”
Retraction of my July 6th posting pertaining to “Serenity Café”:
I had no malicious intentions when writing this review … Nonetheless, in retrospect I really should have said “To me, the line-caught rainbow trout tasted like farmed fish because it was almost flavorless and it looked like farmed fish because it was the wrong color and crumbly. Perhaps it was indeed wild trout that just spent too long in the freezer …” and I should also have said pertaining to the chicken that …” this chicken seemed to me like frozen tenders because it was the size, shape and texture of large pieces of solid plastic.”2
It’s hard for me to add much to that “retraction” in words of warning or counsel. The message is clear: SLAPP-er beware.
principle #4: consider getting a complainer on the telephone (with permission)—even if the relationship started in social media land
First a caution: Mostly, people expect to be contacted only through the channel in which they first made themselves known—especially if their relationship to your brand is new or superficial. A small-time Amazon Marketplace merchant who somehow obtains a customer’s phone number, for example, will mightily surprise that customer with even the friendliest of telephone follow-ups regarding the discount camera battery she bought.
However, if you’re a company that has a multichannel (email, phone, in-person) relationship with a customer but the relationship has constricted over time to email or social only, or if you’re able to ask your customer in an email or via a Twitter DM (direct message) for permission to call, it can work well to jump on the phone to defuse tensions that were first voiced in a social media posting. The telephone has emotionally instructive cues (timbre, tempo, inflection) that are missing from anything keyboarded. Plus, many times a customer will be as grateful as you are to have the cycle of postings ended by an old-fashioned two-voices-on-the-phone exchange. Never discount the power of the simple telephone: Perhaps no piece of technology works better for helping you make a direct person-to-person connection and privately resolving a dispute with a customer. Once you’ve resolved the issue to your customer’s satisfaction, with any luck, you can return to the much broader forum of social media to broadcast the happy outcome.
principle #5: get happy outcomes into the public eye
Once you’ve worked things out directly with your complainant (and I mean really worked them out), then ask in a nondemanding way if she would consider deleting the tweet. Or, in a forum where deletion is not an option, you might ask the person to post the satisfactory results of your intervention. Often, the complaining customer will be quite willing to do that, although this may require you to engage in some follow-up; after you’ve made a good attempt at reconciliation or problem resolution, she’ll welcome the opportunity to bury the hatchet. But don’t ask too soon, and don’t be too demanding about it. Persistent, yes; demanding, no. Appeal to the higher nature of your now-pleased customer.
principle #6: use social media and personal email to make your customers feel important
As with nearly all things in customer service, making a customer feel important is key in social media. Here are some tips:
If someone follows you on Twitter, “likes” your company on Facebook, adds you to a circle on Google +, or does the equivalent in another forum, thank her. And, depending on your company policy, follow/like the person or entity back. So that this approach doesn’t get too unwieldy, you can filter people you follow using your Twitter client (the most popular Twitter clients are TweetDeck, now owned by Twitter itself, and Hootsuite); some filtering functionality is built right into Google + ’s “circles.”
If someone says something nice about you online, thank her for that publicly and privately. The public thank-you is partly for your benefit (it gets the positive comment out there again); the private thank-you is to show additional gratitude to the positive poster.
More generally, use Twitter, Facebook, Google +, and email to thank your customers for their business, with relative frequency. This improves your customer service through the act of communicating your gratitude and also by offering you a chance to improve based on the feedback you may receive when you reach out one on one.
Don’t demand that customers think about you all the time. Customer attention wanders. While you wish you could always bring the focus back to you, it’s not realistic to bombard a customer or prospect with your messages. Doing so is your most direct route to an “unfollow,” “unlike,” or “unsubscribe.”
principle #7: monitor
It’s no use being poised to properly address customer service issues if you never hear about them in the first place. Here are some ways to ensure you hear everything that’s being said about your company:
Set up a wide range of Google Alerts to get your attention when any discussion of your company happens (google.com/alerts). Monitor not only your company name but also any conceivable misspellings, abbreviations, and slang versions of it, as well as the names and misspelled names of prominent people at your company. Set your Google Alerts to come at rapid intervals (termed “as it happens”), rather than once a day. While good work habits would suggest you set them for “once a day” to avoid interruptions, to avoid a fiasco (see Rule #1), you sometimes need to get on issues faster than after up to a full day’s lapse.
Search Twitter. You can do this in real time through your Twitter client (TweetDeck or Hootsuite). Set up columns for your @ handle, your company name, any prominent people at your company, typical misspellings, hashtags that interest you (#mycompanyfail, or #ourcoolconference2013, for example), and so on, and monitor them frequently. You should also do a retrospective search on a regular basis at whatever the best Twitter search engine happens to be when this book is published. (Currently, it’s a Google beta engine with an endlessly long and involved URL; find it by searching in Google for “Twitter search.” The official Twitter search engine is limited but has a clean interface and is available at search.twitter.com.)
principle #8: if your social responses are inferior to—or not integrated with—your other channels, they’re hurting your brand
If you set up an expectation that you will assist, interact with, and engage customers through social media, then you need to do that, and do it fabulously. If you’re not up for it, then don’t. I could blow your mind by recounting the legions of immensely famous companies that don’t understand this, from high-end department stores to airlines to manufacturing and other B2B operations. Just as your brand is only as good as its weakest employee, customer service is only as good as your weakest channel of customer communication. This involves Rule #7: Monitor—and most of all, it involves committed follow-through and upholding of standards. For example, making sure all departments in your company know of your social media forays firsthand and in detail (rather than hearing about them first from a customer) and making sure that spelling and language use and other niceties are heeded online as well as off, to keep them consistent with your brand as it’s laid out in other channels.
“and your point is?”
You need technologically savvy people supporting your social media customer service work, but the people actually helming the operation and responding to customers need to be the same ones who are expert at day-to-day customer service operations and are responsible for interacting with your customers.
When a concern is voiced online, the magnitude of a social media uproar increases exponentially with the length of the company response time.
Of course, it’s always been true that you can’t win an argument with a customer. But online, the rule is multiplied manifold because of all the additional customers you’ll lose if they catch sight of the argument.
If it helps you to get through it, try to remember that those slamming you in social media–land (whom I term “click puppies”) are doing so off the cuff. In many cases, after they’ve trashed you publicly online, they’re off to something else.
In a scenario involving an upset customer, your goal is ideally to move the discussion out of a public venue and into a one-on-one situation, where you can work directly with your antagonist without thousands of eyes watching every move.
You don’t ever want to appear to be cyber-stalking your customer. After a reasonable attempt at contact, leave the ball in the customer’s court.
Mostly, people expect to be contacted only through the channel in which they first made themselves known—especially if their relationship to your brand is new or superficial. However, jumping on the phone to defuse tensions first voiced in a social media posting can work great if you have a relationship with a customer that is multichannel (email, phone, in-person) but has become constricted over time to email or social only, or if you’re able to ask in an email for permission to call.
Only once you’ve worked things out directly with your complainant should you ever ask the customer (in a non-demanding way) to consider deleting the offending posting. (Or in a public forum where deletion is not an option, you might at that point ask the person to post the satisfactory results of your intervention.)
Don’t demand that customers think about you all the time. It’s not realistic to bombard customers or prospects frequently with your messages unless you want them to unsubscribe from your emails or “unlike” you.
Set up a wide range of Google Alerts, set to be delivered in real time, to get your attention when any discussion about or relevant to your company or its brands is going on.
If your social media responses are inferior to—or not integrated with—your other channels, you’re hurting your brand.