Darius has a cool job. He’s the marketing manager for a rapidly growing logistics company that serves the food industry. Since he joined two years ago, Darius has updated all the collateral, made some nifty sales tools, cleaned up the web site and put the company on the map with its own Facebook page and Twitter account.
With a little help from Hootsuite, Darius Tweets his arse off from 8:30 to 4:30 Monday to Friday and shares some swell links to interesting content about the art and science of moving low sodium chicken stock and hand sanitizer.
A couple of weekends ago, poor Darius was happily watching some playoff baseball when a fearsome creature shattered his groove. That’s right, my friends, he had a Porcupine in his social feeds. Those of you who have been bored enough to follow me for any length of time know that Porcupines are customers who have become angry, demanding and rude. See the related links below for more than you really want to know about Porcupines.
It would seem that one of Darius’s restaurant customers did not receive some expected shipment and was unable to serve a house specialty that weekend. Weekends are when restaurants make money; the rest of the week, they make leftovers, so this was a big deal. The customer, unable to reach anyone on the now closed customer service line, did the only thing he could think of and took to Twitter.
It started out with some mild sarcasm and genuine pleas for help by the restaurateur, but with each hour that passed without a response, the tone got pointier until, presto, Darius had a Porcupine loose on Twitter. But the dude didn’t stop there. When Twitter didn’t elicit any help, he went to Facebook.
Poor Darius set up the Facebook page as a way to do some community outreach and post about the food drive, the United Way campaign and the time the accounting department went tree planting. He hadn’t posted anything in months, yet the feed was filling up with terrible words from the restaurant owner and sympathetic responses from his many hundreds of customers.
Thank goodness for a rain delay or Darius might never have glanced at his work Twitter at all.
It gets worse.
Darius works in marketing. Darius only slightly knows a couple of people in customer service, and he’s not entirely sure what they do. Darius has no idea how to reach anyone useful outside of business hours. He fires off a few notes on Saturday afternoon, hoping someone, somewhere is checking email.
Meanwhile, he’s stuck with a Porcupine who’s about to go Super Nova as the Saturday dinner service approaches, still missing the shipment. Darius knows, with a gnawing dread, that he needs to publicly engage the Porcupine and get him off a social feed and into a safe and private conversation. But Darius also knows that anything short of actually delivering the missing ingredients, followed by a giant truckload of apologies, refunds and vital organs, will only serve to make the whole thing immeasurably worse.
The deity in charge of poorly planned marketing, fortunately, intervened here and Darius’s email was picked up by someone who knew someone who knew another guy who knew how to escalate the thing to the Porcupine Subduing Department.
So let’s review why Darius had a terrible weekend:
- He was caught off-guard by a Porcupine
- He was late to an established public discussion about his brand’s terrible customer service
- He had no idea what to do next
- His boss is going to want to have a chat on Monday
We have discussed in this space how marketers can chuck their colleagues in customer service under the bus by setting all kinds of unrealistic expectations about products and services. In this instance, customer service gets its own back by letting the marketing department deal with a Porcupine on its own. As much fun as this is to watch, it’s really not a great business model.
Here’s what needs to happen:
- It needs to be someone’s job to look at your social feeds:
Social media is open 24/7. Your call centre not so much. Just because the marketing department is the primary supplier of Twitter Twaddle, doesn’t make it the best group to keep an eye on things. You need a cross-functional team that watches your feeds pretty much constantly. Even at night and even on the weekends. These need to be people who know what constitutes an emergency and who can spot a potential Porcupine at 100 paces. - It needs to be someone’s job to watch for your name on other people’s social feeds:
A few months ago I ordered some shoes from Nine West. They were to be shipped to my home in two weeks. Two weeks turned into a month and then into two months and not a peep. I got a pretty royal run-around and while I was waiting for a resolution, I was calling them out on their Facebook feed. No reply — at least not from Nine West. I did have a fabulous and funny conversation with another Nine West customer who was having a similar problem. We traded stories, unnoticed (or at least unacknowledged) for several days in front of the whole of both of our Facebook contacts. This is why I recommend you find a bit of budget and hire a social monitoring service to keep an eye out for people like me and my new friend with no shoes. We’re having conversations that you need to know about. - It needs to be someone’s job to respond to Porcupines
Long before someone is getting ugly on your social feeds (or their own), you need to have a strategy for who is going to respond. Marketers are terrific at thanking people for retweets and also telling them to download the latest discount code or white paper. We are not who you want in front of your Porcupines. Just like Darius’s beloved White Sox, too many companies watch the ball fall between the outfielders when it comes to social. Here’s a good, basic overview of how this ought to work. - Social needs an escalation path, just like in the real world
Any customer service department worth its headsets has a bunch of escalation paths depending on the type and severity of the problem they’re dealing with. Yet when an unhappy customer is freaking out on social media, most of them are a bit stuck about what to do (see White Sox above). Darius and his social monitoring team and third party watcher should have known just what to do and where to send the customer long before he started growing quills. - You need to be tracking how many service interactions you’re getting on social
It’s never fun meeting with the boss after a cluster f*ck like the one Darius presided over, but we can be pretty sure that while Darius removed Porcupine quills from his rear end, his boss was asking how many customers have taken to Twitter and Instagram to voice their comments. What percentage of customer interactions happen on social? What is the resolution rate? Which types of customers use social? Is it a platform of last resort or first resort? What is the cost of responding to a social query versus a phone or email interaction? The list goes on, and Darius, like most of us, has no idea how to answer that. Folks, we should get on that. - If all else fails, remember that social is optional.
I don’t know a lot about food logistics, but I would seriously question the wisdom of the Facebook page for Darius’s company. Not that it isn’t sweet and well-intentioned, but it probably serves only to open up a new front for Porcupines while delivering relatively little in the way of goodwill or brand equity. The same may be true of Twitter for some companies. The point is, marketers and customer service need to resist the pressure to be on all platforms all the time unless they are able to put great monitoring, responsive staff and clear escalation rules in place across the board.
Darius is shutting down Facebook next week.
Related Posts
Porcupines Part II: How Can I Ignore You When You Keep Going Away?
Porcupines Part III: Nobody Puts Bunny in a Corner
Porcupines Part IV: A Jack Russell Betrayed
Interesting Things I Found This Week
If the disgusting price games perpetrated by Martin Shrleki and Turing Pharmaceuritcals has you looking at hermit caves and little brass bells as a retirement lifestyle, Imprimis Pharmaceuticals is here to restore your faith. Where Turing jacked the cost of the anti-parasitic drug, Daraprim, from $13.50 to $750 a pill, Imprimis is charging just 99 cents a piece. And guess what? They’re making a nice profit.
Poor old McDonald’s finally had a decent quarter, they announced the other day. Personally, I think they are still in a drive-thru of doom, but they were pioneers in brand journalism and this article from Matt Pigott at Incite Group is a great look at how the Hamburgler fought back against Hollywood and all those damn vegans.
BizMarketer is Elizabeth Williams
You can reach me at escwilliams@gmail.com
or follow me on Twitter @bizmkter
jcobden2009 says
Another great post, Elizabeth. I agree with all of your recommendations — you can’t “set it and forget it” when it comes to your social feeds. And should you even have them in some cases? (no). On that point, I would add that if your Operations department is dropping the ball consistently, no amount of social engagement is going to put an end to the horror and it might be time to fix the plumbing. Instead, you will have just created a set of channels for people to watch your car accidents occur again and again and again…