Why you should not use Twitter for corporate customer service
theawl.com
theawl.com
Even if they were pressured in to that delivery by some contract or power-play, it's not her fault that she demanded quality service. Twitter et al are making companies accountable for their shortcomings. As a result, the treatment of customers is improving steadily across many industries. Like with anything, sometimes you need to break a few eggs to make an omelet.
I'd guess that late-night delivery is not part of the standard service, and they only did for the fear of upheaval on twitter.
Anyway, the blame is not on the customer, the company could have scheduled delivery for early next morning and that would be absolutely reasonable.
What the author experienced is something a lot of the tech community seems to lack: empathy. She realized that an elderly couple went far out of their way to deliver a heavy AC unit to a person who might not ever come back to their store. She realized the only reason they were out there was because of her, because she didn't want to wait two weeks.
Any normal person would feel like crap.
It doesn't sound like her job was at risk if she said "no", so if it wasn't worth it: she shouldn't have done it.
I'd consider myself a normal person. Hell, I think I have more sympathy, if not empathy, than the average patron. However, if you choose to do something shitty, you have no one to blame but yourself. If you're forced to do something shitty, then that's a different matter. In this case, it sounds like the people who made the delivery were either A) not all that inconvenienced B) inconvenienced by their own inability to say "no" or C) inconvenienced by an ignorant parent company who chose to chase after a social-media "WOW" story at the expense of their personel.
At most, the author of this post should have said "Oh, if I had realized it was this much trouble, I'd have waited a few extra days." Being deeply upset by something so trivial seems like unnecessarily sweating the small stuff. It's particularly silly because she had absolutely no reason to think that Home Depot couldn't find a strong day laborer on short notice.
You know, I'm trying really hard not to flame you, I really am. It comes off as extremely douchey to tell people whose problems are much harder than yours -- and if you have time to comment on HN, this is true -- that they can always say no.
It's extremely presumptuous, to say the least, to enumerate someone else's life options and then write off their current difficulties as a matter of choice. Why don't these old people just go to college so they can get a professional job? Completely incompatible with the idea of being empathetic, which implies understanding of someone's situation on an emotional level, not just a rational level.
You've identified the difference between sympathy and empathy. OK, fine. I have plenty of sympathy, but no empathy in this situation. I deeply understand that this must suck for people who don't have a choice.
All I'm saying is that it's absolutely ridiculous to cry over the fact that somebody else's superior forced them to work late/hard one night. The original author should not feel any culpability for that. If there's any emotion I'd share here, it would be anger at those superiors, not a sense of guilt.
"It comes off as extremely douchey to tell people [...] that they can always say no."
The person I replied to was talking about a different person and suggested that person went the extra mile, hoping for some repeat business. That is absolutely optional. I have no idea if the delivery people in the original story had a choice, but I wasn't speaking about them.
If they really were in store management, they would be salaried workers, and therefore not paid for overtime. They would likely have been compensated for mileage and tolls during the delivery.
If it was some young guy (preferably with tattoos) on minimum wage, she'd probably have been a lot less upset.
Seeing people doing jobs that aren't stereotypical can trigger cognitive dissonance (is that the right term?). Some people justify "demeaning" jobs because only certain people (men, women, young people, old people, poor people, immigrants) do them. When someone who doesn't fit the stereotype does the job, it creates dissonance.
Resources management is a company problem. They could have proposed another time for her that wouldn't imply extra hours
They (the company) chose to go the extra mile and should be commanded. That extra mile between employers and the company should be settled between themselves.
Well, if my employer makes me do night deliveries without compensation of any sort I start to look at other options.
I actually expected to see that at the end of the story
No, it didn't, and it shouldn't. The company chose to have cheap but shitty service and give unsustainable special treatment to irate customers who might create PR problems, while service for those without a Twitter account and entitlement issues remains shitty.
Actually everytime I hear a story like this, my opinion of the company in question goes down a lot. Good customer service doesn't mean having a separate department that can order around the peons to work overtime handling special cases. It means fixing processes so that those special cases don't occur.
The foolish response of relying on non-sustainable heroic efforts by employees to provide customer service is feeble. But the customer is not responsible for stupid management actions. Now customers can be unreasonable and if you are doing that it makes sense to me to feel some culpability for the outcome of your bad behavior (even if others had to enable the bad outcome too). Just based on the post it does seem to me the request was unreasonable.
It is true, sadly, both customers and employees suffer from very bad systems management has put in place for customer support.
It's very simple: regular frontline workers represent a large chunk of the total costs of the company (let's say 30%, so you keep them underpaid and overworked to keep profits high. But social media is the domain of PR - much fewer people, much better paid, much more visible to management, and able to order around even middle management when it's for the good of the company's image.
"Wait your turn, like everybody else, like we all learned in elementary school. It's much more satisfying in the end.
Unless the corporation you're going after is Time Warner Cable, in which case you should use every tool available to you to take those f-ing mobsters down."
Not everything can fit in 140 characters; and you can bet this gets wider readership than a tweet.
Agreed. The crying bit was particularly bad. For an article that could have focused on how far some individuals will go to respond to their customers, she some how managed to turn the focus onto her "plight" for actually getting what she damn well intended in the first place (albeit not from the stereotyped deliverers she'd expected).
This whole article says more about her than anything else.
"Make their employees do that"
It seems the company is damned if they do and damned if they don't. Damned if they don't respond to her tweet. Damned if they do, because then they'd be slave drivers pushing themselves or their employees to provide great service without taking into account work-life balance, etc.
Do you agree those two things are opposed? Why can't she just be grateful these people (in this case unnecessarily) pushed to go the extra mile for her, rather than encouraging her to attack them again for doing so?
She should get their names and encourage people to buy Home Depot if she really felt bad for them.
Handling individual contacts is a practice only marketing guys like I think. You can create temporary appearance of good service that way (if you are lucky), but not build a solid reputation for good service - you run into the problems others have pointed out below, selection bias, neglecting your more effective support channels etc.
This looks like a company misunderstanding how to use social media to me - someone created a social media team and gave them free reign to "solve problems via social media".
It reminds me of a time I attended a sales presentation of a CRM with the sales guy bragging how a company used their twitter contact routing to identify the guy as a top influencer (via Klout or something) and had the chairman of their multi-billion company call back some celebrity who was complaining about the service he received with about some standard problem he was having with their service (it was something very commoditized, broadband I think). The customer service guys attending the presentation didn't understand why they thought it was a good use of technology or time - that isnt the way to build customer trust, making sure the problem was fixed by the first guy the celebrity contacted is how you build trust.
It's one of the few ways that new social media is actually providing value for me.
Some specific examples where I can recall using it: (1) Engaging the Microsoft developer team to fix up an issue with my account (2) Engaging Air Canada to ask about using my Aeroplan points (3) Engaging Commonwealth Bank to say thanks for great customer service and recommending someone I did deal with in person at a branch (to which they replied they would pass along the commendation).
All times I had a faster and more satisfactory engagement than if I had used phone, email, etc (as I'm reminded when I have to revert to these methods)...
Nearly every time I tweet at a company they either don't reply, or ask that I call them instead.... WHY YOU DO YOU EVEN HAVE A TWITTER ACCOUNT?
It's only if you have 100+ followers, that companies are more likely to go out of the way to help, in my experience.
My guess is that they were losing a lot of money doing this. (Back story) I've had an on-going problem for about 2 years about slow speeds and contacted the BBB because nothing was being done after numerous complaints over the phone. They did a fix and the problem still continued. I've posted on DSLReports and my ISP's Social Media team helped me out so I continued to use them. I've received numerous credits to my account by just complaining to the SM team, which I think is more than fair--even though I didn't specifically ask for credits.
That said, while I understand her emotional perspective, I tentatively disagree with the sentiment. If the use of social media does produce efficiency gains that would otherwise have been difficult or impossible to attain, then everyone benefits, including the company gaining a competitive advantage, perhaps ala Theory of Constraints.
Of course, there is more than one way to use social media. The company could have used it only for information broadcasts. I presume if they set it up to actively seek to improve their customer service, then they are happy to accept all the consequences for it too.
It's not a problem with twitter, it's a problem with the store you're buying from. Next time buy your ac unit from a place that treats their employees right. If you want to take an even longer view of this, you'll probably run smack into the economy at large and the desperate situation that minimum wage big box stores can force upon their employees as a result of the unemployment rate. They treat you like dirt and hold you responsible for failing to meet goals that were never possible in the first place.
An alternate view TFA could take would be that since you've discovered that public complaining via irascible tweet seems to be effective--tweet again about your horror regarding their treatment of their employees. There's no reason they shouldn't have some sort of infrastructure in place to deal with this sort of thing if they are going to attempt immediate reparations brought to their attention via twitter.
The store could have offered over time pay to stronger employees willing to volunteer the next day, perhaps; the salaried managers likely didn't receive any compensation for their after hours efforts. I'm sure the AC unit could have waited another 24-48 hours.
It's a pretty sorry state where the only way to be taken seriously is to make a public fuss rather than just having a quiet chat like two grown up human beings. Every time I'm forced to do it I feel like the kid throwing a tantrum in the snack aisle.
Hell, it gets results, but it degrades all involved.
But the point the author makes is great: Think about the price of the customer service you receive. You're getting that service for free, so someone else has to pay for it.
Why didn't they wait for delivering it next (early) morning? Would that make a huge difference?
Sad, but human cost is dirt cheap. I'd hate to think human cost really means, "my" people's human cost, but the cost to "those" people is irrelevant.