Great Customer Service is Really a Tweet!

There is an interesting customer service story making the rounds these days, on CNN, WOMMA and elsewhere. Jessica Gottlieb was an active blogger on her iPhone. She watched helplessly as her children sat for 60 minutes on the tarmac at JFK, waiting to take off. Jessica immediately got on her iPhone and twittered about her problem to Virgin Air.

In 140 characters, she indicated her situation to Virgin Air: plane delayed, kids onboard, waiting for an hour, her gate at JFK, asking her followers to "retweet" her message to Virgin Air and/or their networks of followers.

She had nearly 10,000 followers. Who knows how many followers they had! Within minutes, Virgin Air called Gottlieb to reassure her that her kids would be OK. They contacted the gate agent and explained the weather problem, indicating that this information should be shared with Gottlieb. Within 20 minutes, the plane took off.

How does this scenario compare with customer service at your company? Are you listening that well, so you would know within minutes if an individual problem had occured and be able to generate a cogent and meaningful response? This is not the customer service challenge of tomorrow, but today!

As "The Listening Coach," I cannot encourage you enough to embrace the new technologies and be prepared to listen and respond. Your competition will do that, if they have not done so already.

The listening technologies have changed. There used to be just a few ways to report a problem: telephones, face-to-face and US Mail, pre-Internet. Social networks came along, but American businesses were not responding to them, not quickly, if at all. Now, Facebook and Twitter are everywhere. Many companies have thousands of followers. JetBlue, for example, has 700,000+ followers. Social networking is rapidly becoming a business necessity, at least for customer service, if not market research.

Are you listening? What is being "tweeted" about your company? How quickly can you respond? Are your customer service agents equipped and authorized to respond? What's next? Google Wave will allow text, photos and other information to be shared in real time later this year. Are you ready for that? Is your customer service organization ready? What will the marketing research issues be? Is marketing ready?

What are your thoughts? If we can help you understand your customers' needs or your own with respect to any of these issues, please call (619-516-2864).