The Syracuse, NY area got an interesting lesson on the power of social media when a bad bit of customer service ended up becoming a tidal wave of negativity against a major grocery chain in the area.
What happened is someone went to the store and saw something they didn't feel was appropriate. Instead of complaining to management, the person took a picture of it with his Smartphone and sent it to Twitter, and went about his business. The next thing he knows, he's being called into his manager's office at work and is told that someone from the store had contacted the manager and stated that his customer service employee was causing all kinds of problems and that the company should do something about this person.
The person was stunned and called a friend of his for advice. Turns out this friend is a college professor at Syracuse University on social media. Suffice it to say, he wrote about it in his blog, it hit Twitter, and the locals went crazy with all sorts of negativity against the company. After almost 2 hours a representative from the company contacted this professor saying they had no idea what was going on, then went to the blog and wrote that they were investigating things to try to track down what was going on.
They eventually discovered that the person who had taken the action not only didn't have the authority to take the action she did, but she didn't even work in the department that was responsible for scanning Twitter looking for customer issues. The company went back to the blog to announce their findings, and even the customer service employee went to the blog to apologize for overstepping her authority.
The day after that the incident became the main topic of conversation during the professor's class, and it was broadcast on Twitter. It made not only the local newspaper but other newspapers across the state, and it was discovered that this same woman had harassed a writer for a newspaper in another city over a similar issue.
This story highlights a big problem with customer service initiatives at some companies. They teach people how to address specific issues, but they don't often teach people how to think outside the box. They may not have continuing education on customer service processes, and they might not be set up to reinforce the goal of trying to fix the issues of the customer, but to fix the publicity of the company. They forget that the best way to address publicity issues is to try to rectify customer issues rather than go after the customer.
This grocery chain is lucky to be large enough to weather one weeks' worth of bad publicity. But how many businesses aren't so lucky? Customer service training needs to be comprehensive enough to remove the possibility that any of their customer service employees will exhibit uncommon sense in representing their organizations. They need to stress the importance of trying to work with consumers on issues they have with the organization, not try to get even because a consumer didn't like something. Sure, no one has to put up with abusive behavior from a customer. But every customer service employee needs to learn how to take the initiative to help, not to hurt.
Customer service training shouldn't be a one and done routine. It should be continuing education, so that no one else will have to learn the power of social media and how it could harm their company.
