Smart Customer Service Lessons: Responding Faster To Complaints About Your Competitors
from the lessons-learned dept
I had an interesting experience recently with customer service, that seemed worth expanding a bit into a post. On Thursday morning, I noticed that rather than the 200 or so Twitter updates I would see in my regular Twitter client, Tweetdeck, there were only about 15 messages. Something seemed wrong. I checked Twitter (to see if it was down), but it seemed to be showing all of the “missing” messages. I did a search, and lots of others were complaining about missing messages in Tweetdeck as well. I checked Tweetdeck’s website and Twitter feed, and neither said anything about problems, so I put up a message on Twitter noting the problems, and wondering if I should check out Seesmic, a Tweetdeck competitor I had tested a long time ago.
Here’s where things got interesting. There was no response at all from Tweetdeck, but within a few minutes, I actually received a reply from Seesmic. There were two things that struck me as quite interesting about the reply:
- I had directed my original comment at Tweetdeck, but it was the competitor Seesmic that was first to reply. Think about that from a competitive standpoint, and how that changes the way competition can work. In the past, if I had a complaint about one company, it would be more difficult for a competitor to swoop in and offer an alternative. But, with Twitter, it’s easy.
- The part that’s more impressive. Seesmic didn’t slam Tweetdeck, or push me to move to its own product. Instead, it pointed out that the real problem might not have been with Tweetdeck, but with Twitter. In other words, it defended its competitor, and did a better job explaining the problem to me than Tweetdeck itself did.
That second point is, in some ways, mindblowing. And, even though the “problem” may not have been Tweetdeck’s at all, I’m now trying out Seesmic much more seriously, because of the way they handled this “customer service issue,” even though it was on someone else’s product.
Filed Under: customer service
Companies: seesmic, tweetdeck, twitter
Comments on “Smart Customer Service Lessons: Responding Faster To Complaints About Your Competitors”
Wow, nice customer service… I know in my experience the small companies still give a crap about the customer and general experience.. in this case they dont want you to pull out of Twitter, which hurts both of them. But still bravo…
Re: Re:
Yeah. Sounds a bit like Zappos customer service. You can call Zappos and ask them for help getting a taxi sent to pick you up…and they’ll do it.
It’s a “help the customer in any way you can, if at all possible, and we’ll bank on the relationship at some point in the future” strategy. CwF + RtB?
For those who don’t know, Zappos sells shoes online, which has nothing to do with taxis.
Simply put: brilliant.
Twitter problems.
It seems that Seesmic has done the right thing here. They not only have shown me that they exist, but they’ve shown that they’re good a customer service. I may check them out latter.
I’ve been having a lot of problems with Twitter as well. They seem to be having server issues, they can’t take the load. I heard just today that it seems to be fixed for some people, but I haven’t been able to test it yet.
I’ve also heard that Twitter got hacked yesterday. The entire website was replaced. Don’t know how true that was. May have been part of the problem.
Re: Twitter problems.
Actually, it was a DNS poisoning. (Lying to the DNS servers concerning the IP address of a specific website.)
Whatever happened to “Customer Service: We’re not happy until you’re not happy.”? ; )
Re: Re: Twitter problems.
Sometimes the customer just doesn’t want to be happy though. Sometimes they just want someone to yell at because they’re jerks…
Re: Re: Re: Twitter problems.
Amen to that!!!
I like Seesmic’s desktop app but it has a couple of dealbreaker problems that keep me with Tweetdeck. If they’d fix these, I’d definitely switch.
1) The font is too small, you can’t resize it and my eyes suck.
2) It burns up too much bandwidth. Tweetdeck uses no more than 1 or 2 MB per hour while nearly every other app uses 10-20MB. I have Hughesnet, which has an absurd bandwidth limit. This would put me over that limit.
Dime a Dozen
Twitter clients are a dime a dozen. No ability to differentiate the offering and Twitter is eating their lunch with every new feature.
Is all good.
But a bit creepy to realize that actually someone bothered to respond.
I once posted a link to a research paper about ants and the guy came to my blog 🙂
WTF! Never in a million years I was expecting someone to bother reading what I write and there it was the author of the research paper asking if it was that cool.
Turns out I almost DDoSed his website with the traffic, I had no idea people were reading what I wrote so I never bothered to monitor traffic or read any logs. People flocked to the site and he came looking for the referer LoL
Technique actually goes back to BBSs, CompuServe/AOL, and Usenet… puts the emphasis on the person trying to get their work done, rather than just the currently-used product.
jd/adobe
Hmmm
You actually mentioned “seesmic” in the post itself, which most likely tripped their filters. Now, if they responded to you without that trigger, just by seeing you mention “tweetdeck”, THAT would be impressive.
Re: Hmmm
You actually mentioned “seesmic” in the post itself, which most likely tripped their filters. Now, if they responded to you without that trigger, just by seeing you mention “tweetdeck”, THAT would be impressive.
True, true. Though, it wouldn’t be hard for them to monitor the term “tweetdeck” too.
You know what’s disappointing though? It’s now been four days, and despite the tweet and this blog post, not a word from Tweetdeck.
I did hear from another competitor as well, though. This does not bode well for Tweetdeck.
conducting customer support in public - risks and rewards
I’ve had some interesting experiences recently where great support via Twitter has impressed me. HP and Polar Fitness have both responded to tweets not directed to them (but about their products) to see if they could help.
Interestingly though when I ended up working with HP traditional support they’ve rather dropped the ball, but Polar have handled the transfer pretty seamlessly.
http://bit.ly/5ryydD
I think as there are more open and public communications channels open with customers the companies that make it are going to be the ones who “get” social media and the fact that it’s not just about deflecting a complaint it’s about engaging with your existing and potential clients in a much more genuine fashion
Isn’t tweetdeck a free service?
Comment
Excellent approach! Something to add to the company mantra…
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Great customer service experience!
This is a great example of real time customer service. Thank to social media website such as Twitter, Facebook and Youtube, now any company is potentially able to answer to any customer’s complaints on-line, basically REAL TIME!
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