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Home > Binnion Blogs > Business education > Are your customer care systems letting your social media team down?
two-left-hand-cushions

November 8, 2017

Are your customer care systems letting your social media team down?

I started  this blog a couple of weeks ago in praise of the Argos social media team’s friendly and efficient customer care.

Smart companies now know that clients seek support via social media rather than holding on the phone for 20 minutes (and then being told “it’s not us”). So when I had an issue with my brand new sofa I was impressed to see that Argos positively encourages customers to tweet their queries.

So I did…

Hi @ArgosHelpers my new sofa bed came today and it’s lovely – but as you can see it has 2 left hand cushions. What do we do? pic.twitter.com/zxeNkWiJld

They responded very quickly and asked me to send them a direct message. Below is how it panned out…

argos-tweets

Argos customer care on twitter

All sorted in less than an hour.

Impressive right?

It was refreshing to experience an empowered social media team working as part of a joined up customer care process. Well done Argos.

But then… on the 12th I had a phone call to say that my cushion was not in stock and so could not be delivered.  And….no more information!

Having heard no more two weeks later I tweeted Argos helpers for an update and was told:

“Hi Jane we have attempted to call you on the 12th an answer message was leave to advise of non delivery due to a quality control issues, the earliest date we are able to do the exchange where you will receive the correct cushion is Friday 24/11 7am-11am, As we are now waiting for a new delivery from the manufacturers I am sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused – Sonia”

Hmm, not quite the care that was promised.

But  of course this is not about Argos. The same happened with BT,  TPE and probably many others too.  The social media teams are on it, absolutely, but they are let down by the rest of the company processes which are still all clunky.

Then this was brought into sharp contrast when dealing with DFS for my mum after the mechanism on her sofa stopped working.

Now my mum saves every single bit of paper ever given to her, but not her warranty for the sofa.  So I called the shop we got it from for advice and within 10 minutes the woman dealing with me had found her records and booked an engineer to come out two days later.  All so simple – and that was on a Sunday.

What is the learning here?

It is absolutely brilliant when a company has a  social media team delivering great customer care.  And believe me that is not always the case,  I was told by one company that the twitter team were just for marketing and customer care could only be accessed by email. But that’s another story.

Companies that use social media for customer care understand that, increasingly, this is how customers want to communicate with them.

But… if  the rest of the systems are not in place to back up promises made, then, quite simply, your customers end up as disappointed as ever, if not more so.

And we all know what disappointed customers do.

Over to you … Have you had any experiences of great customer care via a company’s social media team?

Drop me a comment below and let’s share the good practice.

Filed Under: Business education, Customer care

Jane Binnion is an ethical business trainer based in Lancashire UK. To contact Jane, email jane@janebinnion.com

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