We’ve all experienced it. After 30 min. of waiting for your meal the server admits they forgot to give it to the kitchen. You call your cable/phone/internet/credit card/whatever company and they not only don’t help you, they manage to offend you or tick you off in the process. You need help in a store and no matter what, nobody is there to help you or whoever is there is clueless and couldn’t help themselves out of a box.
Lousy customer service.
I was speaking at a conference recently and I was on a panel of ‘experts’ who were there to help provide direction and insight for those attending the conference. The topic turned to the subject of ‘what can you do to give yourself the edge over your competitors?’. My first thought went to social media because I talk about that alot. In fact, that day I was the resident social media expert (which makes me cringe at the thought, but that’s another story for another day!). So I was expounding on how you could do this or that using this or that social media tool and how great it could be… blah blah blah.
Then another person on the panel, an actual business owner by the way, said something profound. “Provide good customer service. Most people don’t do that nowadays.” As heads shook around the room, the light bulb went off in my head. He was right. And all those instances in my own life of experiencing lousy customer service came flooding back to my mind.
I mean, I could show you a hundred ways to reach out to your customers and constituents using social media and all the fantastic tools available today that didn’t even exist just a few short years ago. Using some of these tools will set you apart from your competitors so fast it will make your head spin. After all, as I have talked about before, most small businesses aren’t doing much of anything when it comes to social media and technology. But if you suck at meeting the needs of your customers, then social media probably isn’t going to be the magic bullet for you.
In fact, if your customer service sucks, then your social media outreach is probably gonna suck too. So before you hatch any grand social media plans, make sure you solve any suckage problems you may have. Nobody likes suckage. Trust me.
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Perhaps the best and most honest article on social media to date!