Category Archives: Twitter for Customer Service

Twitter Customer Care Channel: Eurostar

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Eurostar, British Rail Class 373 at St Pancras...

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I recently travelled to Paris to consult with a client on best practice use of social media for reputation & SERPs management, & decided to travel by Eurostar for the first time. The experience started out well with a much smoother checkin than the usual mess at Birmingham Airport. One of the big sells of Eurostar for me was the chance to get some work done in much more pleasant & relaxed environment, so I was disappointed to find out there wasn’t any WiFi on the train & amazed to find there were no power sockets to charge the laptop, it’s an electric train after all!

Things got worse when a fault with the radio on our train meant a 30min delay while the engineer tried to fix the problem, eventually resulting in us changing trains, followed by another 30min delay while the food from the original train was transferred to the new train – only to find once we got going that there wasn’t any food available because the mircowave on the new train wasn’t working – perhaps for the best anyway.

Twitter Customer Complaints

Still had 3G to fall back on, for a short while before we hit the chunnel anyway, so I thought I’d tweet the experience & see if Eurostars customer service teams were monitoring the tweet channel for moaning people like me. They came back to me with a reply within the hour, they were open & asked for more information about the problems we’d been having.

Clearly the Customer Care service at Eurostar is running a monitoring service, at least bewteen the hours of 9-5, & I’d #Eurostar to make it nice & easy for them to pick me up in the stream. The Customer Care representative replying to me was responsive & gave me some good information relating to my gripes (upgrade plans for the trains on WiFi & power sockets) & they gave me an email address for their Travel Care team (who they said they’d spoken to) & asked if I could email my ticket info & they’d pick the case up directly with me.

@Eurostar Customer Care Channel

Great Customer Care service, right? I’d give it a 7/10, because although it was all very responsive, it was also very public. As you can see from the screen shots below, the back & forth dialogue we had about my moaning turned one short tweet from me into a nice big conversation describing in full detail the list of problems we encountered on the journey to Paris. Of course the Customer Care channel needs to publically broadcast service updates as well as send out crisis information where lots of people are affected (like French strikes, or the recent train breakdown), but individual problems are best delt with 121. In my opinion a more effective way of dealing with this kind of problem is to direct message the customer with a ref ID, telephone number or email address & take the conversation offline as soon as possible. Yes you need to respond via the same channel, but really all I’m looking for is some attention & for someone to help out with my problem – I don’t need to have a public conversation about it & it’s not in the brands best interest to do this, either for brand reputation or search engine results.

Eurostar Customer Care Twitter

All the customer wants is for someone to listen & address the problem. You need to pick up & respond to complaints quickly, then take them out of the stream & importantly resolve the problem offline. If you can do this more often than not the customer will come back online at some point & praise the brand for putting things right – without airing the dirty laundry in public. See my experience with TNT from summer 2010 as a good example.

The meeting in Paris went well, but unfortunately for me I got food poisoning (karma for causing a fuss on the journey out?) so the return journey wasn’t a great experience either. No delays this time, but an overflowing toilet behind my seat wasn’t what I needed really. Ah well sh@t happens I guess!

Eurostar Customer Care Twitter

I do have to say that as an alternative to flying the Eurostar experience wasn’t at all bad, it was certainly cheaper than flying & without the delays would have taken about the same time, taking into account the lengthy checkin at most international airports. The Eurostar is also around 10 times greener than flying, so you can feel a bit better about it as well, just charge your laptop before you get on the train & don’t expect to get online before 2012!
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TNT using Social Media for Customer Service on Apple contract

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Social Media: Listen to your customers!

No business gets it right 100% of the time, but when things do go wrong, the most important thing is: how will you respond to put things right? This can make all the difference to the future reputation of your brand & the likelihood of getting repeat business.

Community Management: what’s going on?

My work with brands like TNT, has a strong element of Community Management at its core. This involves  monitoring the social media landscape using a combination of automated keyword software, & the old fashioned MK1 human eyeball. We work closely with the Customer Service department as well as the Press Office, Sales & Marketing to understand the campaigns & events likely to drive the online discussion topics relevant to the brand.

Online Customer Service via social media

In the case of a recent global delivery contract for iPhone 4 & iPad managed by TNT on behalf of their customer we were able to track & report on topics and trends developing in online forums on an hour by hour basis.

These online conversations were invaluable early warning tools indicating pressure on digital infrastructures & Customer Service Contact Centres we saw a few days later.  Crucially, our social media monitoring allowed us to plan the social media & staffing resource TNT needed to effectively service their customers.  In addition, our mutual collaboration with the marcomms team gave TNT insight allowing them to future plan areas of their online PR, online reputatation management (ORM), and business continuity & social media crisis management.

Alongside directly engaging with customers, we were able to plan marketing and PR messages in the run up to TNT’s peak delivery period (a 48 hour period spread across several continents), & to push these messages out through the social media networks & forums to promote positive messages, pre-empt negative inquiries & address customers directly with help and advice.

Twitter Engagement

The majority of our customer service conversations for TNT were handled through Twitter. By picking up conversations that were already taking place through Tweets, we were able to engage with the customer using the channel chosen by them.

Twitter works wonderfully well for customers in this situation. They send a message in their own time, get a reply directly, and see an instant audit trail for their customers service inquiry as it progresses.

It’s also good news for TNT too, removing strain on the customer service call centres, TNT’s website parcel tracking website & with a very real potential to remove operating overhead from traditional telephone infrastructure

 

Twitter Customer Service

 

Positive customer feedback = good search engine results!

It really does go to show that all customers really want is to be treated like people. If there’s a problem, fine, as long as you acknowledge me, deal with the issue one to one and show that you’re sorting it out, 99% of the time I won’t hold a grudge.

In fact, done right, customer service issues can be turned into an opportunity to positively influence brand perception – a chance to shine, to show you really do care!

As the hours passed and the customer engagements were managed, we were able to track the change of topics, trends and sentiment through page one of Google’s search results & online forums. What started as an uneasy scepticism, & in some cases an excited or outraged cry for help, quickly evolved into a cautious relief & final acknowledgement for the brand of a job well done.

Great news for the people whose issues were sorted & great to have a bunch of satisfied customers, especially when the search engines were singing praise for the brand on excellent customer service & delivery through Twitter.  Straight from the horses’ mouth!

Social Media for Customer Service