Are Your Customers Pushing Your Buttons?

Social Media offers immediacy for fatigued or frustrated customers.

It’s commonplace across all businesses and industries. Press 1 for sales, 2 for customer service, 3 for shipping, 4 to be placed on hold for a human interaction, all other calls press 5. It’s become so well known, in fact, that many an astute customer has learned the bypass option of pressing zero.

This is clearly not a consumer-centric approach.

Although many jokes are in circulation about “tech support from India,” at least those calls get answered in a timely fashion, 24/7 by a friendly, helpful person albeit one with a strong accent.

Not all small or mid-size companies audit the “on-hold” time their customers spend awaiting a human interaction; if they did they would probably be appalled.

Given this fact, customers are choosing to utilize social media channels as the most expeditious opportunity to address their service and merchandising requests.  In this very public forum, companies who are not responsive are at serious risk for negative messaging and potential lost sales.

Social media has been touted as the “end all” channel for third party endorsements, as people trust recommendations from friends for products or services.  But that’s a double edged sword when it comes to customer service and merchandising.  If companies are not timely with their responses, and genuine and authentic in their language, customers will tend to vent across social medial channels.

There are a number of third party applications that have been developed to address social media customer service inquiries, and these are worth a look. However, much like the automated email responses nearly all companies now use to provide immediate feedback to inquiries, the time period indicated must absolutely be met.  Many a customer has been frustrated by waiting the 24-48 hours promised for a response, hearing nothing, and then not being able to reconnect with that company because of the “no-reply” email format. No-reply means no human attached. That’s not good.

Ideally, Facebook and Twitter inquiries, regardless of the nature, should receive a response within 2 hours and an answer within 4-8 hours or at the very least the same day. This holds particularly true for weekend inquires, as they tend to be the most active times for these channels.

As companies map out their strategy for ongoing daily maintenance of social media, they need to establish a response tree for the team managing the effort.  While it is best to have one voice responding across social media platforms to maintain the proper brand voice, the communications team must have clear “go to” personnel for sales, customer service and merchandising, as well as general inquiries.

Customers are tired of pushing buttons. They want answers. Social Media provides an excellent opportunity to be responsive and build loyalty if properly implemented. With timely, human response, not only will you be a hero in your customer’s eyes, but also with the 130+ friends who are watching. The potential that lies within that audience represents a much better “button” to press than zero.