Friday, December 23, 2011

How not to use social media for customer service...

I saw this series of tweets by chance this morning...


Now, as I did... I'm sure you can see that a quick response was needed.  It would have been the right thing to do.  It would have been the humane thing to do.  You only have to read the tweets to see how urgent things were... to find out more... following a link or two would have given you a deeper glimpse of the story behind it.  A wife with her husband (and father of her two small children) dying in hospital just before Christmas.

You know what the response was from Vodafone?  Silence.  When pushed by another person... what was their response?

This:


'We answer our tweets in a chronological order'

And it took them 6 hours to make that response.  The same generic response they gave to someone else in their very next tweet.  They still haven't responded to @rachelacj as of 8 hours after her original tweets.  An opportunity to do the right thing and offer true customer service at a time where it would have made a big difference?  Missed completely. 

The lessons from this:

1.  Be a human being if you're providing a human service on Twitter
2.  Prioritise using whatever method you want... but be flexible when appropriate
3.  Remember the world is watching
4.  Make a difference where it matters.

Sad, sad bit of customer service on the day before Christmas Eve.

Thoughts are with rachelacj.  For some reason, though I brushed up against these tweets by chance this morning they've lodged themselves in my head.
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