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Halloween movie reruns aren’t the only scary thing I’ve seen recently
By Justin Goldsborough | November 6th, 2008
Justin case you were wondering…I know Halloween has come and gone, but I heard a scary story the other day that has nothing to do with Freddy Krueger or Michael Myers and I thought you might find it interesting.
I was chatting with a new “friend” on Twitter last week and he told me a story about his company that gave me the shivers. Seems he had been monitoring an online message board, tried to help some customers who were asking questions about his company and got put on a “performance improvement plan” since he failed to follow the rules and interacted with customers online.
I won’t reveal the name of this friend or the company he works for — don’t want to get anyone in trouble. But I guarantee you this…I’d never work for that company or any brand for that matter that penalizes its employees for trying to help customers. Are you kidding me? Just typing the details of that situation makes me shake my head.
I wish I could call this mentality “old school” (great movie) but it’s not. In fact it’s prevalent in many companies today. The problem is people are control freaks. We can’t let John Doe say whatever he wants to our customers. Who knows what he might say or what wrong information he might give them? Better let our customer service SMEs handle all those types of issue.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one — I know I’ve said it a few times — customers are talking about your company all over the Internet all the time. And I know it’s crazy (sarcasm intended :) ), but your employees actually want to help these people and provide them the right information. If you’re worried about what employees might tell a customer, help them out. Give them a program like our Employees Helping Customers so all they have to do is refer the customer to a group that can solve the problem. That way employees can still offer to help and they won’t unintentionally provide a customer the wrong information.
Social media has made everyone a journalist, and it’s made every employee a PR rep. Word of mouth has always been the strongest marketing tool out there and employees who are engaging customers online are helping to spread that word. Companies constantly estimate the return on national advertising, product placement and PR campaigns. But I’ve yet to see anyone attempt to quantify the ROI for a company when an employee’s “word of mouth” online conversation changes a customer’s story from a negative to a positive. How many people would that customer have told that he/she “hates Sprint?” In turn, how many will he/she tell about the employee who helped solve a problem? Better yet, how much money does that conversation save Sprint? (Look for more on this topic in a later post).
Back to my friend and his employer who’s so worried about him helping a customer out on a message board. What that company should really be worried about is how the story that they don’t let their employees help customers will spread via “word of mouth.” Hmm, talk about scary…
“The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent the positions, strategies or opinions of Sprint.”
November 6th, 2008 at 9:44 am
Great post, Justin. I couldn’t agree with you more. But if customers are having troubles accessing help, it wouldn’t surprise me if the offending company didn’t offer help to associates.
November 8th, 2008 at 10:41 am
I just came across this blog thanks to Zena on Twitter. Great post. Especially interesting for me as I explore social media opportunities with Upromise. Just like many other companies we have forums for asking and answering questions so it certainly becomes a place not only to share, discuss and meet, but absolutely for customer service as well. Sometimes we answer the questions and other times the questions are resolved by other members of the community. I think it’s important to have that mixture.
Thanks for writing about this.
Jeff
November 11th, 2008 at 6:35 am
Hi Justin,
I can tell you this now, and you can tell Sprint, that if you hadn’t been monitoring twitter yesterday you would have lost me as a customer for sure. I won’t go into the details publicly, but in this case social media was the last line of defense. I was ready to switch. I may still want to switch, but at least you gave your company a fighting chance.
For those of you reading, I am an actual Sprint customer, and my first contact with Justin was yesterday on twitter.
Thanks again for swooping in and attempting to fix the situation.
November 11th, 2008 at 7:20 am
Hey, Sara. Good point. If the company isn’t helping employees help customers, it’s that much harder for the employees to be true brand ambassadors.
Jeff, thx for your observations. Would love to hear more about Upromise. SM has made every employee a customer service rep. Now the next step is helping employees see this as part of their job.
Holly, glad we could help you out and sorry it took so long to get resolution to your issue. Please feel free to come to me when you have a service issue in the future and I’d be happy to help.
For anyone else reading this, if you ever have Sprint customer service issues, just contact me on Twitter (@JGoldsborough) and I can help.