I was recently talking with a group of people who are beginning to develop strategies for using social networking to gain improvements in customer service. It's a hot topic in the industry at the moment, and people are keen to learn from others on the ups and downs of integrating this approach. More importantly, they were looking for pitfalls, and there are plenty of them!
The pitfall I want to talk about today is that of "replying in kind". It's best described in this scenario: if I send a "tweet" to a company asking a question about their products or services, generally, it's perfectly fine for them to "reply in kind" by sending me back a tweet. It makes sense because it's leveraging the benefits of the technology such as rapid response, resource optimization, and multi-tasking. Where this becomes a potential pitfall is when these immediate benefits are outweighed by a major negative for non-voice/non-video electronic communication - "miscommunication".
We discovered the plights of this pitfall when email hit offices en masse in the 80s and 90s, around the time local area networking boomed; and it's still being felt today by anyone who makes the social faux pas of misinterpreting a single sentence in an email, and then blasting off a furious response, only to discover they had misread the intention of the sentence altogether.
Electronic communication misses out on the regular social cues inherent with face to face or even verbal communication, and makes it extremely difficult to build a fundamental aspect of social interaction - rapport. It also tends to make more complex transaction times longer because it's harder to get your exact message across to the other party.
Replying in kind without detecting the point at which the conversation should switch to a voice/video medium can turn loving customers into critics and cynics, and can even trigger a shift away from using the social networking channels altogether, based on these potentially negative experiences. In the end, you lose all the benefits you were chasing by using social networking in the first place.
I tend to go for the "rule of three" when trying to decide when it's time to shift to a phone call. That's three transactions from either party. This includes the customer's original query, your reply, and a possible follow up by the customer. Unless that third transaction is a "thank you" because the issue is resolved, then, pick up the phone and start dialing.
For certain industries, this is going to be a real challenge; particularly, those which involve customer identification and confidential information. Due to restrictions placed on the verification process for a customer's identity, quite often email and social networking mediums simply aren't robust enough to deal with what can quite often be a lengthy process. If certain inquiries will require such steps, it's best to warn customers upfront and then switch to voice communication where possible, or incorporate the steps into a web form where it can be done securely online rather than through Facebook, Twitter, or even email.
A few things to remember:
1. The aim of the game is speedy resolution of the customer's issue - nothing else matters.
2. If the technology is hindering you from achieving that aim, then it's time to shift back to normal communications for that transaction.
3. The primary benefit of these social networking tools is that it makes it simpler and easier for your customers to get in touch with you, not necessarily easier for you to deal with them.
It'd be a great shame to see the uptrend in social media usage wither away, just because companies start to use technology as a tactic to deal with customers "at arms length".
As a customer service representative, you need to make sure you do your part in detecting that point in time when you should switch, and do it promptly unless you have the express permission or insistence from the customer.
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