Social media is seen by many as a panacea to the challenges of “good” customer service; a direct interaction with their customers. Don’t get me wrong, when it is done well, it is an excellent tool to support the organisation, however, on three separate occasions in the last 12 months or so, I have seen some spectacular failures!
As a small organisation, we know what is being said to and by us at anytime, as the organisation grows, the greater the need for external communication to also be disseminated internally. Failure to to so, is actually counterproductive for organisation concerned. Let me demonstrate, by way of example, how not thinking through the communication flow fully, an organisation un-intentionally feeds their most valuable asset, customer facing staff to the hordes!
December 2010, Europe saw some pretty spectacular snow-falls, depending on your age! Most of the continents major airports were shut, for varying periods, days if you were in the UK! I was travelling back from a week in France and Germany, intending to take the first flight out of the local airport, with a major flag carrier, into the UK, with the intention of flying out again on the Monday. Early alarm call and off to the airport, not a lot was moving but they were de-icing our aircraft. A delay was then announced, due to the late inbound arrival of the aircraft the night before, crew duty time. Spending the time catching up on e-mail etc, it became clear that we would not be going anywhere fast. Twitter feeds from the both the destination airport and the Airline, all stated nobody was getting home that day, the local staff and the crew all said we would be boarding in an hour! This confusion, between the centre and front-line staff, was beginning to generate a certain amount of friction between passengers and staff! The staff remained professional and extremely helpful, in the face of some fairly severe questioning. I eventually flew direct to my next assignment, if you are interested.
Recently, Tuesday, in fact returning home from a night out in London, with my family, a meal and show. We were on the train home, arrived Cambridge no issues, with half the Christmas refuse attacking the rail lines, if all the tweets were to be believed! Our train was 45 minutes late leaving for our final destination. There was no solid information from the train crew, just telling us that they hadn’t been advised on reasons behind the delay! The Train Operating Company (TOC) were tweeting that there were signal issues due to the high winds, then we were advised that the train would terminate three stops early due a tree hitting a train. Replacement buses would be provided, however, there was no estimate of their arrival. How was this information presented by the TOC’s staff; they had not a clue! They resorted to patronising the passengers and essentially shrugging their shoulders.
These two incidents were generated by mass transport providers, granted, a TOC will move more people than an airline, at any point in time! I suspect that this market is not alone! What lessons should be learned, here are my thoughts:
- Always ensure that customer facing staff have the same information, that technology aware customers will have access to; you only have to see the number of smart phones, tablets and mobile enabled laptops to see this is essential.
- Ensure that staff have access to modern devices, who uses a pager in 2012? Obviously, the TOCs do!
- Ensure that customer facing staff have the right attitude, nothing is more certain to further erode a companies image than less than professional staff!
The solution is not really rocket science, it requires a combination of:
- Appropriate and adequate processes, that are reviewed regularly.
- Regular refresher training, addressing both soft people skills and hard technology updates.
- A budget for technology, this is not a carte blanche recommendation to invest in several hundred of world’s most popular tablet, there are a range of options to suit all organisations.
What is important is recognition that an organisation is not a series of “silos”, policy decisions need to be reviewed by all operational divisions. Social media is not the exclusive plaything of the marketers as it appears in a lot of organisations. The agreed policy must ensure that internal and external communication will be matched, otherwise we will see, repeated, at points where the organisation meets the customer the sort of friction described above. It will be happening everyday in every walk of life!
