Social media has become a force to be reckoned with in the customer service industry. Customers today have more power than ever before, thanks to both the immediacy and reach of social media outlets like Twitter (News - Alert) and Facebook. A majority of companies, however, are still slow to respond, missing the boat on the opportunities that social media presents and failing to engage in effective damage control when the posts and shares are negative.
Low-cost European carrier EasyJet is the latest example of a company to experience a catastrophic fail with social media. This week, an EasyJet passenger, Mark Leiser, tweeted that a flight delay was about to cause a soldier to miss his connection and leave him stranded.
“Soldier going to miss last connection & @easyjet refusing to help pay for him to get to Portsmouth. Get right into em!,” tweeted Leiser.
The incident might have ended there but for the actions allegedly taken by EasyJet staff based on Leiser’s actions. A few minutes later, Leiser tweeted, “Manager from easyjet just said I couldn’t board flight because I criticized @easyjet on Twitter before boarding the flight.”
According to Leiser, the airline’s staff, aware that Leiser had made a negative tweet about the company, prevented him from boarding his flight. While EasyJet is denying this version of events, Leiser’s experience has taken social media by storm and turned into a searchable hashtag on Twitter (#easyjetgate). Regardless of whether it’s true, it has become a black eye for EasyJet.
Carolyn Blunt, co-author of the book “How to Deliver Effective Social Customer Service,” says this is a great example of how not to cope with negative social media postings.
“This story raises a lot of interesting legal questions about freedom of speech and violation of contracts, but the top and bottom of it is this: if you want to draw more attention to negative customer feedback then this is the perfect way to do it!” said Blunt. “Every time a customer tweets at your brand, whether their sentiment is positive or negative, how you respond to it is critical. This feels like a textbook case of control-freak syndrome on behalf of EasyJet,” she added.
While many companies are understandably spooked by social media – it puts a lot of power into the hands of customers – ignoring social media or fighting negative posts is not the way to manage it. What customer-facing companies need is a way to monitor social media, integrate it into the overall customer relationship and build a “damage control” process. Smart companies can also use it to their advantage for promotion and outreach.
For many companies, the answer has been to choose a multichannel contact center solution that builds in social media monitoring and management. Multichannel contact center solutions, such as VoltDelta’s OnDemand Solutions, consistently deliver positive and valuable experiences across all interaction channels, including social and mobile channels. They allow companies to pull social media into the broader customer relationship, monitor posts both good and bad, enabling them to take action to mitigate problems or grab opportunities with full knowledge of the existing customer relationship thanks to data sharing between the channels.
Too many companies today leave social media monitoring and response in the hand of marketing or public relations. While it was an easy mistake to make in the early days of social media, there is ample evidence today that social media is simply another channel for customers, and as a result, it belongs in the place best equipped to handle it: the contact center.
Edited by Blaise McNamee