Customer Service Millenium Style
I wanted to take a moment to talk about something that has been batted around over at OpenSourceCU and a few other marketing sites that I visit. It is the power of what we have been calling”Social Media”.
Another favorite website is The Consumerist. This site gives tips to the regular guy from industry “insiders”. Typically these are disgruntled ex-employees that let you know all the dirty secrets that their old employers don’t want the unwashed masses to know. Their tagline is “Where Shoppers Bite Back”. The Consumerist website has a Google pagerank of 6/10 and an Alexa rating of 3,912. They also get about 183,000 unique visitors a day.
So whats all the hullabaloo? Well, see, this site is one of many. The world has gotten a lot smaller in the past 10 years. To give you an example, Ian had a SNAFU with Comcast Cable. See Comcast cut Ians DSL line while installing cable to another tenant. Then they made a bunch of bizarre excuses that frustrated Ian to the point where he went down to their local office and grabbed a salesperson off the sidewalk to help him. All of this chronicled on “The Consumerist” website.
Another example is Mike’s story of dining at his local Chili’s and receiving a less than appetizing meal. Afraid of what might happen if he tried to send the food back or complain - he sucked up his meal and left to complain later, on the consumerist.
In both cases, the victim of the story felt that their treatment or service was so egregious that they needed to share it with someone. This is as old as time. The difference now is impact.
Five years ago, the rule of thumb was that an unhappy customer will likely tell 8 people about bad service or bad food. Today, it is one person using a camera phone on the spot can tell over 180,000 people in a day. And because the story doesnt go away, it is 180,000 the next day and the day after that.
There is another thing in common with these two stories. Both instances had to do with a low level employee putting forth minimal effort in representing their respective companies. It was the CEO of Chili’s or Comcast that caused these errors (directly anyway), it was the entry level or sub-management positions.
You can buy into branding all you want. You can issue memos and letters about member service. You can walk the branch floors and talk to the members personally, but when you walk away, that member has to deal with your front line - your tellers. You may understand how important it is, but if you cant sell it to your tellers and MSRs - then it is only a matter of time before you end up with a picture and unflattering letter to The Consumerist.
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Comments
Paula,
Absolutely! That is what is so great yet so dangerous about the Internet. It gives instant gratification to those who feel their story “needs to be heard” as well a “hammer” to motivate those of us in customer service, to be honest and diligent.
Thanks for participating 
It really is amazing how quickly bad (and good) stories can travel through this medium - I’ve been astounded by the number of people who have blogged about, or linked to, my outstanding customer service story from CUCBC.
http://mummymusings.wordpress.com/2007/07/01/humble-pie/