Blogging and Customer Service

Customer Service Exposed!

One of the benefits of blogging is an opportunity to share personal experiences with a company's customer service. As a community of blog monitoring and measurement providers, we talk about how blogs provide insight into consumer opinion, trends and issues that matter, and protecting your brand. Monitoring blog conversations also offers a significant opportunity to audit the quality of your customer service and it's impact on your brand. Here are several key stories.

I recently had a conversation with Shel Israel where he subsequently blogged about Why Support Matters? Great conversation. You can see by reading his postings his experiences with Lenovo, washers & dryers, and most recently United Airlines/United Vacations. In his brief discussion regarding United on the blog, he didn't point out one of the most important points about his experience. While United Vacations is not a part of United Airlines, they do leverage the United brand. Consumers experience, both positive and negative, with United Vacations will reflect on the United brand. Consumers don't care about the organization structure, they care about the ability to meet their needs. Shel's run around United Vacations uncovered the disconnect between them and United Airlines (not the same company). It doesn't matter, he will likely avoid United anything in the future. Now that he has also blogged about it, what will this cost United in loyalty?

I also ran across a posting from Tim Dyson where he refers to the recent AOL service incident that a consumer recorded, posted on the Internet and subsequently ended up on CNBC. The customer service agent was fired, but what damage did AOL suffer by the publicity of this one individual? How many other consumers called to cancel their AOL subscriptions as a result of reading the blog or watching the segment on CNBC?

In a recent ClickZ article from Peter Blackshaw, he describes what he would do if he was asked to take over the call center. A veteran marketer and leading promoter of Consumer Generated Media, Consumer Affairs: The New Advertising Department, lays out a compelling story about how the customer service department should move beyond being a cost center to providing more strategic value in market research, advertising and word of mouth marketing.

Consumer generated media, blogging, social media, whatever you want to call it, provides an outstanding opportunity for customer service professionals to collect feedback on their service. After all, how many of those after the call surveys have been sent and what is your response rate?

While I don't think we will change the corporate structure to put call centers in the hands of the CMO, I do think marketing professionals have an opportunity to audit their organizations customer service quality and better understand the consumers total experience with your brand.

I will say again, it's the customers experience of your ability to live up to your brand promise that will determine success. In this age of consumer connectivity, word of mouth travels fast and far. What will your customers say about your brand? Are you listening?

P.S. Peter Blackshaw, if you are listening, please remove that obnoxious pink poodle from your ClickZ site. It's distracting and annoying. You have great insight to share and the poodle does not properly reflect your brand =)