Customer Services - two (very different) recent experiences
In the course of using twitter, I occasionally moan about brands and life. Bad things happen and everyone likes a moan now and again. Below is a swift comparison of two of my most recent experiences.
Expedia bad - My friend had an issue with expedia where they made a mistake with his booking. Essentially they lost his and his friends money to the tune of about £3,000. Not only were they not very sorry, but they told him it wasn’t their fault and they wouldn’t hold the price of the flights. This was their position even though he provided them with evidence from HSBC. So after this, we tried to tweet directly at
@expedia. We did this a number of times but with no response. Looking through their twitter feed you realise that they only like to tweet promotions or RT people saying positive things. This means that they do read what people are saying, they just choose to ignore customers who don’t say what they want to hear.
BT business good - In contrast, last week our BT business lines just stopped working. Literally half way through a call. I called them and the automated response was no help whatsoever and actually hung up on me in the end. As this was an obvious example of poor customer service I decided to have a moan on twitter, not even directly at BT. The difference here was a splendid chap from BT business called Rob tweeted at me, from their account
@btbusiness, DM’d me and then called me on my mobile. Eventually all he could do was explain the problem and tell me that they did actually care, which is pretty much all you want from an individual. So my point is this - it’s not hard for businesses to ask one person to talk to people about their concerns on Twitter, the phone, email, whatever. The important thing about social media and customer services in particular is surely to be a person and talk to people. Bad things happen, that’s a given. It can’t be in anyone’s interest, especially the brand’s, to just ignore issues. We’ll be sticking with BT business and ignoring Expedia.
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