A few weeks ago, I received my fitbit. I saw this health startup pitch at TechCrunch50 in San Francisco and a few years later, finally had one of my own. I eagerly unpacked it, examining every piece of packaging as I pulled out my new little bite-sized gadget, excited to try it out. fitbit features a great online dashboard that displays your exercise and sleep data among many other fantastic features available online, once you’ve created your online profile. I had one minor issue and one more important issue right off the bat. The first issue: I couldn’t upload a profile photo to my account despite the fact it met all of the upload file criteria. The second issue: I wanted to add food I had eaten into their dashboard to calculate how many calories I had consumed and ran into aggravation finding what I needed in their database.
How did I handle this? Did I think to submit a support ticket? Nope. I complained about it on Twitter.
fitbit’s Vice President of Interactive reached out to me on Twitter (see screenshot above) asking if I had contacted support about my issues. What an idea! It had not even occurred to me. Why would I fill out a generic form about my issues that would be emailed/queued up for a support team to acknowledge, assign then respond to me when I could just shout about it on Twitter and get an immediate response? I was immediately shamed and responded that I would send my issue to their support team.
It took a week for me to finally get a response from fitbit but the interchange brought back to life the idea that our social media “customer service” is conditioning consumers to complain as loud as they can within their social media channels. We have become the toddlers of the internet, stamping our feet and raising our arms over our heads, crying out loud until mediated by our cable company, favorite online retailer or bank. Brands must find a way to strengthen and grow their customer service offering outside of these channels so consumers don’t run straight to them in order to find their immediate gratification lollipop. It’s inefficient for brands, annoying to the ether and can still leave consumers unsatisfied with the resolution, assuming one is met. Their complaints remain visible online, are buried or searched, and web conversation a little messier than needed. It’s time for a diaper change.
I actually think there’s something to be said for *public* support like that – but like you said, not having to feel like going to those channels.
GetSatisfaction [ http://getsatisfaction.com ] *can* be a good public solution for this, when companies actually commit time to using it and being real-time responsive.
And frankly, from personal experience, my biggest recent (and responsive) victories with getting things fixed by W3C and Microsoft happened due only to very loud very public complaining and shaming. To be clear, I’ve put enough years into “the right channels” with both of them that I’m done with using such channels and patiently waiting. They’re going to get public critiques (and praise when they fix stuff).
The issue with GetSatisfaction is visibility that the resource exists, if not fully integrated with the company’s website. If it requires work to find, complaining consumers will continue to rant in their pre-established public channels.
Even as you note in your recent personal experience, you have been conditioned to learn that public shaming is the only way to get things handled in your situation. Instead, what is actually needed is a second look at why you don’t use traditional channels. Because they’re slow. What will make them faster? More resources, better management, possibly a different tool.
Let’s handle issues at the root instead of using community managers to bandaid them.
Agreed that if it requires work to find, consumers will continue to use pre-established public channels.
To be fair to GS, I went to getsatisfaction.com, clicked “Help”, and reasonably prominently in the lower right was a “Integration Options” link to http://getsatisfaction.com/help/integrating-community-your-website – that seemed fairly discoverable (at least for companies). How good those options are, I can’t say because I haven’t tried any of them myself. They sound decent. Could use a few exemplars to check out (irony: here I am “complaining” about GS on *your* blog).
Re: handle issues at the root – that’s a tough but likely worthwhile approach deserving of thoughtful consideration.
There’s definitely some big challenges there, e.g. the gap between the hierarchical/risk-averse culture of companies vs. the flat/responsive culture of social media. I’m not sure anyone has figured out how to bridge that gap, much less resequence corporate DNA to behave less like an org chart, and more like the web. I’d like to see that happen.
Fascinating. Clearly you’re proposing some kind of cultural solution to move the pendulum, but I have to wonder what kind of code might facilitate this ongoing discussion.
First thing that comes to mind is that your tweet could have been flagged, embedded into its own page in Fitbits support system, and then the link to that page tweeted back to you for additional feedback/conversation.
Which could lead to the collection of realtime customer service analytics shareable at every level within an organization’s hierarchy.
While this might decrease the friction a bit, fixing the root of the problem remains culturally the biggest challenge of operating within the environment of instantly gratifying communications.
Oi, I just remembered that it’s exactly this problem area that lead me to stop consulting. Evolving a corporate culture is like herding lionesses!
Great point. I’ve seen people use Twitter to take a company’s reputation hostage and threaten to murder it if they didn’t get what they wanted. If the company’s customer service channels are easy to find, easy to use and quick to respond then I think this “toddler” attitude can be avoided for the most part.
http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2011/technology/1102/gallery.twitter_service.fortune/index.html