Rejoice with caution
by asi
In the past 2 weeks I’ve had this weird feeling of deja-vu from reading bloggers and twitterers getting all excited about brands that ‘listen to the conversation’ (especially the Twittersphere), replying immediately to people’s rants and solving customer service issues.
Sounds perfect, you say, why are you spoiling the party?
Well, let me take you couple of years back to Iain’s unpleasant experience with Virgin Media. He described in details his ordeal and, surprise surprise, someone from virgin contacted him and solved his problems. That was just one story of that increasing trend of companies staying tuned to the blogosphere and replying to people rants – and we all blogged about these cases and how wonderful and advance these companies are and how the ‘get it’.
And now the story repeats itself on the twitter platform. Excuse my cynicism but I’d be a bit more critical and less hasty in heaping praises all over the place. Since Iain’s case I’ve only heard more horror stories on Virgin Media CS, most recently Dave’s ordeal. And I say, don’t hurry to make an invaluable PR service for companies with bad CS reputation.
They are smart and cynical. They learned that satisfying a couple of angry Tweets is the easiest and cheapest PR trick as the public rant turns into a public praise and gives the false impression that this company has a great customer services.
Do you honestly believe that Comcast really changes their ways?
Mind you, for every one satisfying tweet there are probably hundreds of angry customers that don’t blog or tweet. They do it the old fashion way by talking to their friends down at the pub – and their problems don’t get solved that way. Their problem meet layers of poorly designed pre-recorded menus and canned responses that don’t actually help them.
Only time will tell if the sea change we crave for will come and businesses will (truly and deeply) change their ways and invest in their most valuable brand building scheme – customer service – or will they simply employ 2-3 people to make sure that they satisfy social media rants and that would be the end of it.
Rejoice with cautious.
Preach it Asi!
I’m supporting you by waving my fist in the air in a very futile, British way.
You’re absolutely right about the cynicism of these companies. Virgin especially. Now that their crack team of online eavesdroppers have fixed the one big problem for me, I’m having difficulty dealing with their dreadful CS team in an attempt to solve another problem.
Bah!
Good point about easy PR Asi. The larger point of my recent post was less about how effective or genuine the efforts is from these brands and more about how there does to seem to be a desire for this kind of direct connection.
Time will tell if it ends up a something more than PR. I hope so, but good point about being cautious.
PS, Am I a blogger, twitterer, marketer or designer. I forget.