Dear Citizens of the Internet: If you’re having trouble with your gizmo and are not pleased with the doohickey’s performance, taking your gripes to Twitter and Facebook doesn’t guarantee your issue will be resolved.
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There’s a misconception about the effectiveness of this social-media tactic. Here’s the real story: An increase in cursing and jeering about a company does not correlate to an increase in compensation from the company, nor does it result in faster response. And sometimes those gripes go unheard altogether.
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Perhaps this misconception is a result of journalists like me jumping on Twitter trend stories like the one about some companies using it for customer service. Allow me to take one for the team and clear things up.
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Few companies have the resources to flawlessly manage social-media complaints. Most can’t check Twitter 24/7. And sometimes, the person managing the Twitter account doesn’t have the same problem-solving authority as a customer call center, so it takes extra time to find a fix.
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Fortune magazine recently tested eight companies that offer help on Twitter and found that it wasn’t necessarily more helpful than other communication channels.
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In most cases, Fortune reported, the old-fashioned, often infuriating, customer service hotline was actually the fastest and most thorough means of solving a problem.
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It can take longer to get a response on Twitter since it requires a human to be monitoring any mention of the company’s name. And it’s hard for employees to distinguish between noise and real problems, according to Ashu Roy, CEO of eGain, a California-based software company with tools for managing online customer-service requests.
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As we got into the social channel, we found customers were struggling not just with the volume of response, but the notion that the clients have existing tools or teams to respond to customers putting comments on the social channels, Roy said.
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When you…