According to studies published by marketing research groups Maritz and Econsultancy this week, big companies excel at ignoring complaints fired at them over social media. Maritz found that of nearly 1300 consumers who used Twitter to lodge a complaint, 71% never heard back – while over on Facebook, Econsultancy discovered an apparent relationship between the size of a company and its response rate to inquiries.
Surprising? Not terribly – but it does raise an interesting question about corporate social media savvy. It’s not hard to imagine the larger, pre-internet companies being new to social media and regarding it as nothing more than a form of advertising, too unwieldy and too easily bottlenecked to maintain as a line of communication. And it’s equally easy to imagine the opportunities they’re missing for winning over the online crowd (in Maritz’s study, 83.5% of people who had their complaints answered expressed either approval or delight towards the companies replying to them). By basing their social media presence on a massively-followed, anonymously-updated single corporate page that never replies to queries, are companies missing a lot of good PR?
Take the case of travel blogger Ayngelina Brogan (@Ayngelina) of Bacon Is Magic. Facing being stranded in Chile because her flight was cancelled due to volcanic ash, she turned to Twitter to get herself on the next flight out. Tweeting at @AirCanada from her own account elicited no response – so she enlisted the help of her Twitter friends (myself included) and 45 minutes later, Air Canada had received 77 retweets of Ayngelina’s plea. Shortly afterwards, the airline finally replied, telling her she was now booked to fly out the following day. What did she do next? Blogged about it, of course. If Air Canada had been quicker on the ball, they’d have had a glowing writeup in an influential travel blog – an advertisement surely far more effective than the average “sponsored post” (and you’d think they’d be a little quicker to respond after this last year).
Twitter is growing, and with it, the need for large-scale companies to use it effectively. So should they be looking to individuals, the real Twitter experts (the ones who don’t call themselves gurus) for guidance here – and should they be working harder to open a social media dialogue with their customers?
Image: G0SUB
Post Revisions:
- 18 October, 2011 @ 22:53 [Current Revision] by Mike Sowden
- 18 October, 2011 @ 21:40 by Mike Sowden
It’s such a big mistake that companies don’t react to social media posts. Do they really think it get better that way? People don’t stop tweeting or writing posts because nobody responds!
I hope that someone of Malaysian Airlines reads this post! They sell you deals via Twitter, but their way how to treat passengers sucks big time. I speak of experience: http://www.traveldudes.org/travel-diaries/instead-getting-bali-we-are-now-slovenia-and-heading-towards-croatia/3393
Great point! I remember helping Ayngelina as well and had a similar bad experience with an airline when Southwest Airlines failed to honor the airfare sale they had online. I wrote them an email as well and got no response. I then wrote the blog post on why the Southwest Airlines 40th anniversary sale was a complete failure (http://www.budgettraveladventures.com/blog/why-the-southwest-airlines-40th-anniversary-airfare-sale-was-a-complete-failure/) I followed that up with a post on 4 ways the airline needs to improve. Right after that, I got a call from a sales rep apologizing and saying they would honor the fare sale for me even though it had expired. Too little, too late at that point as I made other plans.
Another side to this is customer service itself – beyond the social media aspect. While social media presents more opportunities to provide and give immediate feedback, I think the bigger problem is customer service as a whole. And for many of the airlines, it’s only getting worse – social media or not.
I think there are three components to this:
1.) Companies perceive social media as a separate marketing / P.R. channel rather than a part of their mainline customer service “nervous system”;
2.) These days, larger companies rarely empower their frontline customer service people to create a good outcome for their customers;
3.) The speed at which your complaint arrives does not always accelerate the speed of the solution.
Using social media to get a company to pay attention has always reminded me a bit of the crosswalk buttons here in New York City: It’s an open secret that, in many cases, the buttons aren’t *actually hooked up to anything*. You can push the button as many times as you want, but it’s really only a mechanical placebo that has no bearing on when the light changes for you. Unless you are perceived as an influential person — or unless your complaint is truly a public relations disaster (or at least phased in the form of a catchy tune, a la “United Breaks Guitars”) — you’re probably taking a number just like everyone else.
Jeremy’s comment is on point, I think: Social Media is really just another manifestation of a company’s overall customer service ethos — And customer service is, as each of us know, something that few companies have figured out how to do well at larger scales. In smaller companies, the people that are able to make the decisions which actually resolve customer complaints are usually also the same people who are monitoring the Twitter feed. My observation is that, in a larger company such as an airline or a hotel group, the people watching social media will make some sort of pro-forma response quickly — but often have a very limited ability to resolve an issue independently.
You can “keep hitting the button” as Ayngelina Brogan did, hoping that the negative buzz gets the complaint in front of a person that can help faster… but at that point, it’s probably faster to just pick up the phone and do it the old school way! As it happens, I had a chance to meet with some Air Canada execs last month. They couldn’t have been nicer, travel-loving people and they seemed totally committed to making their customers happy. If they had been personally aware of what Ayngelina’s situation was, I’m almost positive that it would have been handled immediately.
But they’re not the one’s in the trenches. It’s the underpaid CSR who is being told not to waive a change fee until they get approval from Management (especially in this day and age where fees are a bigger part of an airline’s bottom line). It’s the Operations people who are trying to figure out how to get a plane and a rested crew to Chile when vast swaths of airspace are shut down. Stuff like this takes time to sort out and, in an age of instant communication, I think it’s harder to wait for an answer when you know that you “pushed the complaint button” hours ago. ;)
That’s where good-old-fashion customer service can take a lesson from the new technology. How hard would it be to flag someone’s “complaint ticket” for review by a CSR every hour (or something) and for them to send a quick “We haven’t forgotten about your issue… we’re still working on it!” message via social media?
It could be a real step forward but, until more companies figure it out, I fear it’ll be more like their customers are tapping a microphone and saying “Is this thing on?”
I would like to see more brands somehow visualize the digital messages as though they are coming from the moving lips of a face-to-face customer across a counter or on a phone. Just because people speak differently online (ie need to squeeze lots into 140 characters or less), does not mean that the comment/concern/complaint does not come attached to a breathing, feeling human being. In return, that breathing being just wants to *feel* as though another life form connects with them. It’s really not difficult. There are many talented community managers and social media teams who exceed customer service expectations via social means.
Excellent post!
Jenn Seeley
Community Engagement, Radian6