Marketers already know that good customer service will aid in the success of your brand, while bad customer service will ruin your company.
Online and offline or anywhere your company interacts with the public, your brand is being impacted by these interactions. With the onset of electronic communications and the advent of social media in particular, it only takes seconds for your sales and stock price to drop as a result of bad customer service.
We often see how this fear permeates among corporate executives who regrettably select to keep their companies away from the Web 2.0 world.
On the flip side, social media can also help your company to improve customer service and recover from potential brand management or reputation management disasters. They can serve as tools that drive interest in your company, increase sales, and raise stock prices.
For instance, customers of Comcast had been displeased with the quality of cable and internet service in their homes, and poor customer service. A frustrated advertising executive went as far as to create a blog called http://www.comcastsucks.org .
The creation of the site continued to foster negative customer sentiment and therefore forced Comcast to react in a variety of positive ways including a Twitter account for National Customer Service Manager Frank Eliason (@ComcastCares) and 8 other consumer service reps who are happy to tweet with Comcast customers to resolve service issues.
Comcast understands that part of customer service is listening and used social media to listen to customer sentiment in order to improve customer service. Comcast is now seen as a model for how social networking can improve customer service.
According to a Business Week article, “Eliason discovered that by doing a search for the word ‘Comcast’ (and occasionally ‘Comcrap’), he could find tweeters who just happened to mention service complaints he could address. In December 2008, he celebrated the handling of his 22,000th tweet.”
Some companies have been late to implement a Web 2.0 strategy and have therefore suffered.
Just this Summer, United Airlines neglected to compensate a passenger to his satisfaction after breaking his guitar during travel. To the airline’s dismay, the passenger, David Carroll, created a YouTube video entitled United Breaks Guitars, that was seen over 5,456,000 times and became a national news story online and throughout more traditional mediums to the airline’s dismay.
It took several days for United Airlines to respond in a meaningful manner, but it was already too late; the airline’s brand was damaged and it was reported to have caused a 10% drop in the stock price as well as a $180 Million loss to shareholders. Unlike Southwest Airlines who actively participates in social media, United Airlines neglected to have staff monitoring it and therefore was unaware that they were under attack by customers.
Unfortunately, Comcast and United Airlines aren’t the only companies to receive negative feedback through social media that lead to change. When Billy Mays passed away recently, several companies for which Mays acted as a televisions pitchman, received feedback from customers via Twitter and other social networks for not acting fast enough to stop airing television ads that had been broadcasted for months throughout multiple media markets.
Many of these companies saw the feedback and responded appropriately (albeit days later), but unlike what happens online, they had to inform the public that it takes longer to pull a national television spot than it does to reply to a tweet.
If these companies had Brand Monitoring Alerts, they could have responded faster to customer sentiment and protected their brands in a timelier manner. These are lessons to be learned for many corporate executives.
In our next blog entry, we’ll explore in more detail, the benefits of listening to customer sentiment in a Web 2.0 world. To ensure you receive all blog entries, subscribe to our email newsletter or RSS feed.