Socialware
Customer service tips – what not to do
Financial Professionals, Marketing, Social Middleware — By Chad Bockius on December 21, 2009 10:04 am
There are a lot of stories out there about companies successfully using new technologies to deliver great customer service. I wanted to take a different approach and tell you about a disappointing experience with Fisher-Price, a $6 billion dollar corporation (Mattel is the parent). My hope is that companies will learn as much from my experience as they will from the high profile successes like Comcast and Dell.
This all started with the purchase of a new video monitor. Because of all the electronics in my home – wireless routers, cordless phones, AppleTV, etc. there was constant interference with my old video monitor. There was no way I was going to live through 3 more years of static (our second child was on the way at the time). I’m sure many parents have experienced this same problem.
So after a little research I was excited to find the Fisher-Price Mom Response Video Baby Monitor. It had just come out so unfortunately there were no consumer reviews. I decided it was worth the risk so I went ahead and bought it. Thanks to Amazon Prime (which is awesome) we got the product in two days. Sure enough, the product was great. It delivered good video without any interference. Finally, I’d be able to get some sleep without listening to all that static.
Then the problems started. We unplugged the monitor and took it into the living room. Literally after 30 minutes the battery was dead. Fast forward a few months and the unit would only hold a charge for 10 minutes. I started doing some research and discovered that we weren’t the only ones with this problem. Every one of the sites below have customer reviews calling out the battery life issue:
- Amazon
- Toys-R-Us
- Fisher-Price
Naturally, I headed over to the Fisher-Price site to e-mail customer service. That’s when the problems started. There was no e-mail listed anywhere! Are you serious? In this day and age I can’t send a customer service email to a $6 billion dollar corporation? I don’t know about you, but my life is busy enough with work and two kids that I have no intentions of dialing a 1-800 number and sitting on hold for 10 minutes.
I was frustrated but didn’t give up. I did a search to see if they had a Twitter account. That would satisfy my needs. Not surprisingly, they didn’t. How about a Facebook page? Maybe I could post something there to see if other Fisher-Price customers had found a solution. What was I thinking? Of course they didn’t have a page. Now I was really getting frustrated.
So next I took matters into my own hands. I went out and bought a replacement battery for the unit. Even though this cost me another $15 bucks (not to mention the time and energy researching the battery and buying it) it was worth it to have a monitor that would actually hold a charge.
Needless to say Fisher-Price has one frustrated customer. And believe me, I have a ton of Fisher-Price products in my house. With two kids under 3, there are more plastic products in my house than I have friends on Facebook! But how will this impact my loyalty to the brand? How would it impact you? If you believe the research it will be huge.
Harris Interactive found that 80% of adults polled vowed never to buy from a company after a negative experience. This was up from 68% the year before. A survey by Accenture found that 52% of those polled said that their expectations for service had increased over the past five years. This research is all pointing to the same thing. Customer service is becoming the main reason people switch brands.
Consumers are busy. Life is moving by faster and faster. There is a reason why people are embracing real-time streams of information from Twitter to Facebook. People don’t have time to wait any more. As a result companies need to communicate with customers on their terms. At the very least, offer an e-mail address!
I’ve heard all the arguments about adopting these technologies. The biggest one is that customer service is viewed as a cost center. This couldn’t be further from the truth. In the book, The Next Evolution of Marketing, they point out that customer service is marketing. Look at the research above. If someone has a poor experience (and it isn’t remedied) they aren’t going to be a customer for very long. Worse, they are going to tell their friends about it – or in this case: post a blog.
Customer service also becomes your new research department. Everyone that reaches out via phone, email, on Twitter or on Facebook provides an immediate and invaluable source of feedback. While the feedback can sometimes be negative, the information is invaluable and should be embraced.
Of course, sometimes customers post to their own Twitter feed or blog about a brand or product experience (either positive or negative). Smart companies are deploying listening tools to monitor this flow of information and the good ones are acting on it. I personally have a laundry list of Google Alerts set up on key terms like Socialware, Social Middleware, etc. So the second something gets published, I find out about it. I wonder if Fisher-Price will hear about this blog post? I wonder how long it will take?
Don’t let poor customer service kill your profits and customer loyalty. Benchmark yourself against the best and put in place a plan to start implementing the right customer service tools for your customers. They will thank you with their words and their loyalty.
PS: Let’s run a little experiment. Share this article to see if it makes its way to Fisher-Price. I will post a follow-up if they respond.
Tags: Brand Monitoring, Comcast, Customer Reviews, Customer Service, Dell, Facebook, Fisher-Price, Mattel, Negative Experience, Socialware, Top Tips for Customer Service, Twitter
5 Comments
Not having called Fisher-Price, I’m curious if your assumption that you would have had to waste 10 minutes on the phone is correct, or whether your issue might have been resolved in less time than it took you to research all these methods if you’d simply picked up the phone.
I agree that it’s best to provide as many support channels as possible and allow the customer to choose the one that best fits their needs, but there are huge costs involved in doing so and it’s not always as simple as “do it all and let everyone choose”.
Email has significant hurdles to overcome in the customer service field, and Twitter and Facebook are entirely new entities. While untold millions of dollars have been spent by companies to create and refine queuing strategies and technologies to handle customer support for telephone, chat, and even email, there are none as of yet for Twitter or Facebook.
Perhaps if some enterprising company undertook the type of work that Genesys does in the telephony space towards Facebook, Twitter, or other media, things would be different…
The interesting thing about the various channels of customer service is that unlike phone, email, chat and snail mail, channels like Facebook and Twitter live on publicly for everyone to benefit from. In this case with Fisher-Price I was not the only one to have an issue with the battery. Supporting these other forms of communication, while potentially costly initially, will likely be cheaper in the end because customers will be able to get answers without ever involving a customer service rep. Or better yet because companies can recruit their employees to jump in and help deliver great customers service. Just look at what Best Buy did with Twelpforce.
And let’s face it. In today’s competitive market companies need to continue to differentiate on service not just products. Viewing customer service as purely a cost center doesn’t work in today’s economy. In fact, some companies have turned truly great customer service into a revenue generator and a differentiator. Look at the Apple Genius Bar. They create a one-of-a-kind experience, customers leave happy and they made a little money in the process.
They say that 2010 will be the year of collaboration in the enterprise. Shouldn’t it also be the year of collaboration and conversation with customers?
And stay tuned for “enterprising companies” to come on the scene and fully integrate customer service across these social networks. It will be here before you know it.
Great point about the “one to many” nature of those particular channels. Many companies already do this in a more controlled fashion with support discussion boards.
You’re absolutely right about the ability of those conversations to live on, though companies will need assurances or reasons not to be concerned about their content living in a space where a third-party like Facebook or Twitter would then own their Intellectual Property (in the terms of customer responses) moving forward. There are also sometimes legal implications to the handling of certain types of support events – setting precedents of service for particular issues, for example and whether there is a formal Repair Extension Program, a Recall, or some other event. These are all complicated when a public communication takes place, but you’re right that the “genie is out of the bottle” when an issue is publicly known and it’s usually better for a company to take control and get in front of the message by doing the right thing for their customers.
I never mentioned viewing customer service purely as a cost center and I’d agree with you that the companies that are successful don’t do that – Apple (both the Genius Bar and AppleCare’s Advisors are a great example) is certainly one of them.
Apple also has one-to-many support in the form of Discussion Boards as well as multiple channels: email support, chat support, scheduled and immediate outbound support via Apple Expert.
I’m totally with you in terms of looking forward to seeing what folks come up with next!
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