A Dirty Word
Customer + Service used to be dirty words didn’t they? The term conjures up long lines, impolite service, outsourced call centers. Anything but actually being served.
I wonder if that isn’t all changing because of social media. Now that customer service is public, can brands and businesses really afford to fall flat on customer service? Can they afford to fail when everyone, potentially, is watching?
Of course not.
For many years, we got the customer service we deserved. It started in the 90′s as corporations and businesses realized that their customer service just wasn’t that important. After all, as companies got larger and larger, it didn’t make economic sense to devote resources to customer service. The number of people who had problems with products or services was low enough that the bean counters’ arguments against improving customer service won the day. What happened when we received poor customer service? We kicked ourselves for wasting the time and money, got a little more disheartened by the experience, but basically we kept mum. More importantly, customers had no way to express or publicize their dissatisfaction.
Well, now we do. We have that platform. Platforms really. We have social media, where we can broadcast our experiences as warning signs to others. We have the voice now.
Of course that comes with added responsibilities, but isn’t it time we had some of those anyway? These responsibilities include not complaining about every little thing, not griping about every minor infraction. And one has to be credible. If all you do is criticize, no one is going to listen. You have to praise as well. I go out looking for companies and brands to praise so that when I feel the need to criticize, I have a credibility base.
Cinchcast Gets It Right
How about an example of really great customer service? I’ve been toying around with Cinchcast, a new iphone app and social streaming application that allows one to record and stream audio recordings, straight from my iPhone, to Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, etc..I really like the idea of being able to capture short blog posts in audio format and immediately publish them. I find myself putting down more thoughts instead of the occasionally unenviable task of sitting down to a proper blog post.
What I have found is that my Cinchcast recordings are aiding my thinking, by allowing me to flush out ideas as they pop into to the old knowledge engine. By having a forum to get those ideas out quickly and painlessly, I can create more room for larger ideas to marinate and become fully formed. It’s how my process works and I am really excited to be using Cinch. If my recent past is any experience, my use of Cinch is going to mature quickly.
But Cinch was having problems, serious problems with authenticating my logins. The app allows you to login with your Twitter or Facebook credentials, or register with cinch. But the authorization process was buggy. I would frequently be unable to login with either twitter or facebook or both. I had cinches saved under different accounts and my accounts weren’t integrated.
So I sent a quick email to their feedback department just before I went to sleep. And I woke up to find a wonderful email in my inbox:
Hi Zachary,
Thanks for your support of Cinch. You’ll be happy to know that we have changes in QA that will address all of these concerns. There is a bug in the IPhone app with twitter logins that we are testing a hot fix for now. We will be releasing not only the ability to get embed code for a single cinch but also a multiplayer shortly. I combined the accounts for you. You can login with either fb or twitter to the same account.
Boom! Done! Problem fixed and I’ve now been informed of where Cinch stands on other issues. How easy was that? And beyond just getting an answer and having my issues dealt with in a timely, responsive and polite manner, I woke up feeling motivated to write about the experience. This blog is new, so the traffic is still small. But I have a fairly large megaphone on Twitter and Facebook and now I’m going to send out this post to those streams.
A customer service success turns into something bigger than just that one experience. This is why customer service stands to encounter a massive evolution for the better. We are all about to be much better served.
