Using Social Media to Recover After Cust Svc FAIL

There are a few universal truths in life. Everyone will die, you have to pay taxes and if you sell a product/service – your organization will fail the customer.

But customer service failure doesn’t have to necessarily be a bad thing. These moments of truth can be an opportunity to strengthen your relationship with the customer and in our hyper-connected world, even create some good marketing.

As you can see from the pic above, DirectTV recently failed me. I wanted to upgrade my receiver and couldn’t figure out how much it would cost. I’m not a huge fan of their website, have always found it confusing…but that is another post. So I did what most folks would do – I emailed customer service and asked how much it would cost to upgrade and what the processes was to do it. The pic above is the email they sent back. This was a total fail. They didn’t address my question or help me in any way.

So I sent out this tweet on Twitter:

I did it for one and only one reason. I figured DirectTV was monitoring Twitter, much as I figure any smart brand is. So while I was publicly chastising DirectTV, I wasn’t really all that peeved – yet – which meant they still had a chance to recover.

Which they did via this tweet:

Shortly after sending me this tweet my office phone rang. It was DirectTV calling. I didn’t answer so they tried my home phone. My wife didn’t answer so they sent me this email:

Now that is a recovery. Like yesterday’s post suggested, DirectTV made it very clear they were on the case. Just as Entergy sent 10 trucks, DirectTV used every communication channel I gave them access to in my life. They didn’t just call my office and say they were sorry they missed me and that I could call a 1-800 #. They made it very clear they were sorry for the email I received and that they wanted to make it right. Bingo – they recovered. Which led me to share this tweet in response:

Companies ask me all the time, “Why should I be on Twitter or Facebook, etc.?” The truth is there are lots of reasons to be in the Social Media space. But the number one reason, because your customers are there AND they expect you to be too.

When there is a problem, customers don’t want to sit on hold or work their way through voicemail prompts. They want instant gratification. They want to be able to tweet a problem and have you fix it. That is the new expectation in customer service.

Are you ready? Did I miss anything? Do you have other examples of companies using Social Media to correct a product/customer service failure? Let me know. Join in on the conversation.