I was just struck by an offhand comment during audience Q&A following a panel discussion of social media and media planning here at MediaPost's fabulous (free!) OMMA Global
conference in San Francisco: "You're not going to resolve customer service issues through Twitter. The best you can do is direct someone to a customer service phone number or something like that."
This simple observation summarizes one of the potential pitfalls of social media in general, and Twitter in particular: if you aren't fully equipped and staffed to handle customer complaints
immediately -- and effectively -- the whole thing can blow up in your face.
Before, brands had to worry about unhappy customers making negative comments in the blogosphere -- which at least
afforded a certain (virtual) distance between the brand and the forum where trash was being talked. This gave brands a certain latitude in when, where, and how they chose to respond to the complaints
(if at all). But Twitter can bring the complaints, and the brand's response, much closer to the brand's official online presence, in a potentially more visible way -- leaving much less flexibility in
terms of redress.
Basically, the hyper-public nature of the forum demands a response right away. But, Twitter is actually quite limited in terms of customer service: you really can't resolve a
complex customer service issue in one 140-character post, or even a series of 140-character posts. So the other customer service channels -- here I'm thinking of customer service reps at call centers
-- have to be revved up and ready to move quickly, with speed matching the Internet, to resolve the complaint.
Of course, this is easier said than done: how many times have you been passed
around between call centers for an hour, as none of the call service reps seem quite sure how to resolve your problem, or even who is supposed to handle it? Now throw Twitter into the equation: if
these other channels aren't fired up and ready to go, you get a situation in which each new travail and brand failure in an on-going complaint can be published, instantly, by the disgruntled customer
on a high-visibility online platform -- while the other channels slowly go through the paces, probably unaware of the damage resulting from their business-as-usual approach. Any attempt to mitigate
the damage via Twitter would just make the situation worse, highlighting the fact that the brand's left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing (unless the customer service rep is the same
person handling the Twitter presence).