Web 2.0 is Bringing Back Intimacy to Customer Service – Heather Johnson

The following post was written by Heather Johnson who asked to be a guest writer on this blog. I gave her a topic and appreciate her efforts. You can find more about Heather at the end of this post.

If there’s one thing that occupies a higher rung than product quality, it’s customer service. Organizations are scrambling to even retain existing customers, let alone gain new ones, amidst a fierce battle for a better share of revenue in an extremely crowded marketplace. And with today’s instant grapevine – Web 2.0 – there’s all the more reason for businesses to take their customer service operations seriously or end up having to close shop in the near future.

Web 2.0, filled with social networking sites, blogs, and instant update applications like Twitter, has given birth to what is now being touted as the innovative next generation marketing tool – interactive marketing, a process where the message in the advertisement is communicated directly to a potential customer. Besides this, this new avatar of the Internet has spawned a revolution in the way customers and their grouses are handled by company staff.

From unanswered phones and emails to unsatisfactory and automated responses, the regular customer has seen it all – the nonchalant attitude of the customer service employee has irked almost all of us at some time or the other. Well, thanks to Web 2.0, this situation has already begun to change. Enterprises are beginning to wake up to the fact that word-of-mouth notoriety spreads like bushfire, more so when it’s done using a medium as powerful as the Internet. One negative review on a blog, one bad experience posted on a forum or one angry customer venting his rage in an email – that’s all it takes to build a domino effect of negative reviews pouring in from all corners of the globe.

Cable provider Comcast recently learned the hard way that they could use this publicity to their benefit; by responding almost immediately to a post on a continuous outage, the company earned itself a few brownie points in the customer service department. And to make sure they have their fingers on the pulse of things, they’ve set up the Comcast Cares program to monitor Twitter, blogs and other social networking sites and take care of customer complaints posted on them.

Others are setting up their own forums for customers to air their grievances and seek remedies. Most organizations are also offering customers a common platform to ask questions and have their doubts cleared by either company employees or other customers who subscribe to the same product or service. A greater number of companies are taking suggestions from customers seriously and basing new products or services on what the customer wants, rather than pushing on to the customer what the company wants to sell. A significant change indeed in the attitude towards dealing with customers from just the recent past to the days that followed Web 2.0!

This article is contributed by Heather Johnson, who regularly writes on best travel rewards credit cards. She invites your questions and writing job opportunities at her personal email address: heatherjohnson2323 at gmail dot com.

Comments

[Martin MB]

Bill,
Heather makes some great points, which chime strongly with the messages coming out of 'Groundswell', the book published by Forrester research and authored by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff (http://www.forrester.com/Groundswell/index.html - my copy is on a train, somewhere between London and Bristol, if anyone finds it!). The Comcast story is a great one, for which there are many comparitive disasters as companies fail to 'get it'. I guess it takes a certain courage, insight, leadership and imagination to succeed in this 'new economy'...

[Bill Ives]

Martin

Thanks for your comment. I agree also. It is nice to see the current wave of technologies actually helping customer service after the last wave of technology - automated voice response - made customer service an oxymoron. I hope you find your book. It is interesting that Twitter is coming more into play. Bill