A Rant On Social Support: If You Are Doing This - Stop!

  I am going to make this a brief one today.  Just venting really.  In my very first blog post on Multi-Channel CX (see it here) I talked about how companies can leverage multi-channel CX as a kind of force-multiplier; especially important if you are an underdog in your market and do not have deep pockets for a large contact center or a loyal user base willing to do half the work for you (crowd sourcing).

 Without naming names I would like to talk about one company that is violating the first rule of CX:  Do Not Make It Difficult For Your Customers To Get Support!

  Making it difficult to find your phone number is a bad practice.  Do not do it.  Sure if you have a phone number people will call you and that costs money.  You know what is worse?  When no one is calling you!  And that is the exact situation you will find yourself in if you force your customers down a prescribed support path not of their choosing - especially when that support path is ill-suited for their contact type.

  Take, for example, a technical trouble shooting call.  This kind of call is a dynamic human-to-human interaction with intense two-way communication.  "Please power the device off and back on.  Did you do it?  Great!  On to step two" etc. It should come as no surprise that this interaction would be best handled on a telephone call (I am excluding software support from this example where there is a well-established mode of handling technical support via email).  Forcing a customer to do this kind of trouble-shooting over chat is less than ideal.  Some may choose to take this path but it should not be your only available channel.  Making this your only option is also a bad practice.

  Why then would this company offer support (including technical troubleshooting) over Twitter where character limitations make for an even more disjointed customer experience?  Perhaps I am showing my age but when I use Twitter I do not expect rapid responses - at least not fast enough to handle a troubleshooting interaction.  I have observed the absolute worst use of social media for technical support with an average response time of 4 DAYS per tweet!  What should have been a 10 minute call has dragged on for more than 3 weeks.  Needless to say I have given up on this product and moved to a competitor.  This support experience tells me everything I need to know about where this company is focused - and it's not on the customer.

  In my earlier blog post I talked briefly about the Enterprise-as-Contact-Center concept which is a fantastic idea for the right companies.  This concept works well with the Social Channel as long as the requests are not as time sensitive as technical support.  By allowing your best and brightest to check-in to social queues one or two hours per day to share their energy and passion with your customers your company could truly differentiate themselves.  But using Twitter to deflect calls from a grossly understaffed support group is a recipe for disaster, lost customers, and lost revenue.

Multi-Channel CX Gets You In The Fight: A Word of Encouragement for Underdogs

In my inaugural blog post I wanted to write about a subject with which I am currently wrestling.

  How do small companies, upstarts, or those with less market share, compete with their larger rivals when it comes to the customer journey?

Since you cannot compete on price, brand recognition, media saturation, or anything else it would seem the only answer is to offer a better customer experience - one that is more personal (I'm excluding the other obvious answer of higher quality because without that what's the point?).  But what if you do not own the point of sale?  What if every direct customer interaction is with a distributor or big box retailer?  It takes an army of channel sales reps to reign in that beast, often with poor results (I say that as a former retail sales person who had constant interaction with channel managers).

  If a brand finds itself in this predicament the only option left to them are traditional channels (voice, email) and social channels.  But even with social channels, the big guy has the advantage because they have an army of enthusiasts who are more than willing to answer each and every question about your product - FOR FREE!

This is an opportunity for the underdog to leverage multi-channel CX technology and one that I think is overlooked.

  When we think about companies with great customer experiences we tend to gravitate to big logos who have spent years refining their image and experience.  Many of these big brands had the luxury of defining that experience prior to the emergence of technologies that level the playing field like Twitter and Facebook.  I know, I know - I just said that big brand evangelists are legion - this is true.  There is no silver bullet for the underdog.  The reason that multi-channel CX favors the underdog is that it costs less for them to deploy it, without the albatross of old, inflexible legacy systems weighing them down.  With cloud technology it is even faster and easier.  In a matter of weeks or months, the underdog can be directly engaged with their new customers and building that next generation of evangelists for themselves.

  One last thing that occurred to me as I debated this in my head (something I do a lot) is the cost of human capital associated with this strategy.  Let's face it, big brands take advantage of the fact that their crowd-sourced support strategy is nearly free.  The underdog has to carry the burden of a costly contact center to compete, right?  I suppose it depends on their culture.  As evidenced by last week's epic Twitter battle between T-Mobile and AT&T even CEOs are willing to login and join the fight.  With the flexibility of cloud-based multi-channel CX anyone can be an agent - anywhere.  CXOs can create a fun and rewarding culture by encouraging staff to check-in to a social queue for a couple of hours per day to respond to customer inquiries.  Bonuses or rewards like an extra day off might just be enough to get those employees who are already passionate about their product to share that passion via Twitter or Facebook.  That's one way for an underdog to kick start a multi-channel initiative.


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