You may know the online shoe retailer Zappos.com – they make a big deal out of using technology to give customers what they want and need 24 x 7. This is NOT because Zappos thinks that technology is cool. Their culture is totally built around superior customer service. Check it out here. Here’s an example of their twitter feed…
“Oh whoa! Truly sorry about that. We will try not to let that happen again. We had some slight hiccups in out Tweets today. ”
Check out Zappos employees communicating here. And they are not alone. Check out this tweet from a satisfied Southwest Airlines customer: “Southwest completed my name change within 2 hours of my faxing them the info! #customerservice #newlywedtweet”
What about when an employee goes on Glassdoor, Facebook or twitter to complain about your company, whose responsibility is it to monitor and follow up? HR? Marketing?
When things go wrong with a sale, who hears about it? The sales person? Customer service? Marketing? Maybe the IT department if it’s a web sale? Is response via social sites in your organization’s workflow?
Is a company’s Facebook or Twitter pages the responsibility of marketing, advertising, customer service or public relations? Smart companies are actually co-creating products with customers in real time. So now do the product development folks need to monitor twitter too?
What if I need to download a 3rd party app to my desktop and cell phone to monitor twitter for my job… Does IT support that? Across which platforms (Apple, Blackberry, Droid or tablets?)
If you manage marketing, sales, customer services, human resources, IT or finance; are you paying attention? The head in the sand thing isn’t going to work any more.
Image Credit: All News Wire
What do you think?