Why blogging and moaning works
I’ve been on a bit of a roll this year, blogging about mistakes organisations have made and having senior, effective people get in touch as a result (including BT, Virgin Media and the Independent Safeguarding Authority).
At one level, this is simply a reflection of how some organisations understand their reputations can be made or broken online and that therefore they should pay attention to what is being said and so need to respond effectively.
But there is a more general trend I’ve seen across many of my cases, and also that of other people I know. It’s that if a blog post is seen as bad publicity and therefore dealt with by an organisation’s press team, the issue is then in the hands of a team who are used to getting a query about a problem and having to find an answer to it without relapsing to “it’s not our department guv”. You can’t get away with saying that when talking to a journalist, so even a deeply mediocre press team is well used to having to hunt around between different departments to get an answer.
Yet when it comes to customer service teams, it’s usually only the really good who are able to cope well with issues that don’t fit with normal procedures or fall between different teams.
So on reflection, it is not a surprise that the press team therefore so often ends up dealing better with a customer service issue than the customer service specialists.
Hi Mark,
Interesting post, it actually relates quite closely to a point I made yesterday on my blog about how people are now more aware of their social media footprints and that brands monitor this space, so, as such may behave differently online…(http://tomsideas.wordpress.com/2010/02/08/personal-brands-and-the-observer-effect/) It is actually an interesting question for the organisation, we all know that, as customers, we should recieve excellent service no matter if we are online, in store or on the phone but if we know, through experience, that we will recieve better service from the brand if we complain online then what is that going to do to that brand’s image? Does it imply that they only care about us when we flame them publicly? Or does it show that their customer service is incompitent (as you mention) so we have to go to PR to get things done? – Either way that is a problem…
cheers,
Tom
The point you make in your own blog post about people holding back because you never quite know when business paths will cross is a good one. Though if it makes people comment in a less angry and more “here’s how you can fix it” way, I think that’s probably for the good – and actually does future business prospects no harm.
That is true, maybe this will ultimatley lead to a more constructive online dialouge. However, it will be interesting to see how PR departments evolve to meet these needs, at the moment you state that the success of online customer service comes from the fact it is managed by the press team, will this continue in the future and how will press teams cope?