I hear a lot of people gripe about companies and how lousy customer service is when something goes wrong. I have some personal experience with that myself. Just search my blog for the word “fail”. It seems that calling or emailing customer support nowadays isn’t getting you anywhere. So what is a person to do about it? Well, I have found that for whatever reason the whole “social media” thing is apparently more important now to companies than good old complaints by email.
So lately I have been tweeting my gripes. And it has proven to be more effective than emailing.
Yes if you have a problem and no one seems to be helping you: tweet it! I have had a few problems and as soon as I tweeted about the companies that were not responding to my emails and presto: I got tweets back and actually getting things in gear.
Two examples: I had a problem with a car dealer taking a long time to fix a problem with my leased car. As soon as I tweeted negative about it, I received a tweet and 30 minutes later a phone call from customer service telling me they were on the problem and would let me know asap what they could do about it.
Another example: a knife I bought a year ago (SOG Knives) malfunctioned. I wrote their warranty department and they said they fix the problem for me and would send me the spare part I needed. Well, after a month it still wasn’t fixed. I wrote them again, still a month later: nothing.
Today I tweeted about it and low and behold: within 30 minutes someone from marketing tweeted back and emailed me that they thought this was “embarrassing” and they would get on it and personally see to it that my problem gets fixed.
The lesson here seems to be that if you complain in the privacy of an email nothing gets done, but if you complain publicly – as Twitter is – companies suddenly do seem to care about their public image.
Sad but true.
I guess it’s Twitter Power!