This week, we’re running a series of articles and features looking at customer service and the role social media has to play for small businesses. We are running this in conjunction with @verygoodserviceand, each day, we’ll be asking the guys there a question on the topic.
The latest one is below and you can catch up on the rest of the series here.
Does the personal touch help deliver good customer service?
The answer is definitely yes.
By essence, customers interacting with companies on social media channels want the personal touch, they want the freedom to interact as and when fits in a relatively open format. “I have a problem, please fix it and by the way I do not want to press 2 then 4 then 7 on my phone touch pad!”
Whilst small businesses are extremely well placed to do this, we believe that the larger operators will meet very significant challenges in the relatively short term. Just to name a couple of examples, a large mobile phone operator and a large credit card operator offer a very good service through Twitter where they handle customer service queries. Named individuals handle the accounts, they sign in and out (yet another procedure!), are well trained and very personable.
But their bandwidth is limited and if these communication channels take off companies will have to rethink. Some are already moving ahead, like a large UK retailer which has set up a dedicated Twitter account exclusively to handle delivery issues – but then, does that defeat the whole purpose.
If I cannot interact freely with one person to handle all my queries but must first identify the relevant Twitter account and enter my reference number, I might as well press 2, 4 and 7.
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